Using AMA the Media Composer will relink to footage if the media is transcoded, deleted or the project is moved to a different system and it needs to be recreated.

Each P2 clip has an UMID (Unique Material Identifier). The UMID is being read by AMA and it along with the timecode is being used to relink the clips.

So at any point the P2 folder can be reindexed using the Link to AMA command and the media will be online.

thanks Bob.  So by movng the project file over to my laptop and attaching the FW drive with the exact copy of the P2, the Link to AMA command will bring everything back up...good stuff.

Hi Bob - I'm just starting a 13 part show, shot AVC intra 100. Getting rushes already, so doing tests with the offline / online workflow.

Is it a good idea to assign each folder a tape name? I've read conflicting ideas about this.  I'm getting bare drives every day which I'm copying to a external raid enclosure, then linking via AMA, then transcoding to 10:1.

I did a test, after assigning tape names, and relinking didn't work. Then I did 'Link to AMA' again, despite the fact that the AMA bins were already online. Then relink worked on some clips but not others! Very odd.

Incidentally, the link at the bottom of the Avid Resources page here is broken.

http://www.avid.com/p2/

Ollie

Doing this on 4.02 by the way. Am also noticing slightly odd behaviour with AMA that I never noticed on the PC. Perhaps it's normal, but clips appear in Media Tool the first time you link to them, then after a subsequent close / open of project, they do not. They do however appear in their bins.

Wel I've done some more tests, and it seems like you have to 'Link to AMA Volume' for all the media your relinked sequence will be referencing. I think this has been mentioned before, but it doesn't seem an obvious step when all the AMA media appears already to be online, as it was for me. The giveaway is it whether it appears in Media Tool or not. Tape name does not seem to make a difference, though I'm sure some have said it is essential.

So if you have gonna have at least 17 days of four to five 32GB P2 cards as I will on this project, there is still some thinking to do on how to organise your cards at the volume that AMA will reference. I have been putting each day's cards in its own folder, then telling AMA to point to that and create subfolders, which works fine. But to do my relink to the HD media, I will first have to tell AMA to link 17 times.

Added to that, memory is up to about 35% with 16 cards I have indexed so far...so I wonder, will I have enough RAM to enable all the cards to be referenced?

This is on a dual quad 2.66 Nehalem Mac Pro with 6GB ram.

Couldn't you at the end of the edit day, Consolidate the media onto one (or a few) of your storage drives? 

In my mind, AMA works best for those times when you want to start going through the footage right away, either because you're on a short deadline, or have a lot of material.  If you're on a short deadline you're likely starting and finishing the job in one edit session which AMA would make total sense.  But, if you're just cutting it as normal and are looking at a couple of days/weeks/months of post-production, then it would make sense to me if you were to use AMA to quickly scan and organize the footage, then categorize it within the project.  Then you could Consolidate the media and you wouldn't have to worry about linking to the AMA volume each time.  It would just be part of your normal storage.

Of course, you would keep you AMA volume in tact as your source Masters, but to have to deal with linking every day for a week to few months seems a bit cumbersome.

Thanks, Kenton, those are all very sensible and valid points. The problem we have on this job is that we are very limited in storage due to small budget. We have a 10TB external raid enclosure, and 2TB Editshare, to serve two suites. This limited shared storage means we need to transcode to a offline res (we're going with 10:1) and so I figured the simplest way was to bring everything in via AMA, and transcode.

Given that we have to transcode to 185x prior to export to VFX when the cut is locked, it would probably make more sense to transcode everything to that res first. However our limited storage means we wouldn't have space for that without getting rid of the original P2 media, which we're not keen to do.

You certainly don't want to get rid of your original P2 media (one of my biggest complaints with P2 is that there really is no "permanent" solution for storing the media - it feels to me like placing it on a drive is still a bit precarious) 

Storage is fairly cheap and by my calculation you'd only need roughly 80-100GB/hr to store DNx185.  (I don't have a calculator for 185x, but it shouldn't too far off that mark). 

Weigh the cost of adding extra storage (a G-RAID @ 4TB would be about $650USD) vs. spending a large chunk of your edit time dealing with linking to the AMA volumes. 

You could dump all the 185x onto the G-RAID, then Transcode that and store the low-res on your EditShare.  Then when the time comes to up-res it, it should just be a simple matter of "hiding" the low-res media and doing a relink on your final sequence with the 185x storage connected.

This worked for me.  Client walks in with 800GBsof P2 media on mini personal FW 800 hardrive. He tells me he has the original copy and backup safely stored on harddrives elsewhere . (in all 3 harddrives for $600)

I connect the drive via FW 800 to MC 4.02 and link to the media with AMA. The edit is spread over 4 days working with the full res clips. The client takes his drive home with him each night. During the edit I use local storage for all renders as  there is not that free space on the clients drive.

The finished project is mixed down to DNxHD on clients drive. A DNxHD Quicktime is exported to the clients drive for ongoing compression formats he may want. I use a QT ref file from the mixed down sequence to make DVD via Compressor.

Really could not be much easier.  No offlining so relinking was never cosidered. Great first experience with larger ongoing project using AMA.

As much as it amazes me, I agree with "andrew" (alert the media)!  :-)

I just finished a PSA that was shot P2.  We offloaded all the cards into one folder on a FW 800 dirve.  I then made a copy of this folder onto the internal media drive on my MacPro (now the FW drive served as a backup), pointed AMA to that drive and I was off to the races.  No need to ever relink.  I did do an offline, so I sent the FW drive to a shop with a DS where they converted the P2 to DNxHD.  I sent an .AFE of my project and the "online" in DS was pretty instant, and we focused on color and graphics.  Dead on nuts, as it were.   AMA has become part of my standard operating procedure and has already brought back projects to Avid that I would have done on FCP.

Between Avid's AMA architecture and Calibrated's P2 QT codec, my P2 media is instantly accessible across my production pipeline. A great coup for Avid and for my shop!