So, I've just ruined a project I've been working on for the past year due to the Consolidate feature. Perhaps someone here can tell me what I can do to prevent this in the future.

I first went through the project, selected "media relatives", and reversed the selection to lose un-needed stuff.

Then, I consolidated to an external drive.

I played through the new sequences to be sure there was no "media offline" messages - and there were none that I saw, so I was confident it worked fine. So, I deleted all the other bins except the one containing my sequences and consolidated media.

Then, I copied over my project folder to my external drive, and disconnected that drive.

Then, on my AVID, I deleted the project.

Then, I decided to restore that project right away - just to be sure.

Now, the project LOOKS fine - I can scrub through the timeline and it looks okay, but lots of media is actually gone. If I play from the top layer, it looks normal, but if I go down a layer, under the titles and such, the actual media is not there. It looks like Consolidate actually just kept the top-level renderings, but did not actually consolidate much of the media. Some actual media is there, but in other places it is not. It appears truly random. Also some audio is gone too, for no apparent reason at random.

I really need help - this is a killer for me.

Is "Consolidate" really not a good feature at all, or is it realy buggy? Or is there some key step that isn't documented?

Help?

Have you tried relinking the consolidated sequence, targeting ONLY the external drive? When you look in the media files folder on the external drive, do you see the media files?

To further Larry's question, did you choose to create a new sequence when you consolidated? If so then the media is linked there. A relink should bring things back on the original sequence.

What I'm doing to rebuild the sequence, is to take my Media Folder that was created during the Consolidation process (a folder titled 1 on my external drive), and dragging everything from that "1" folder into my main "1" drive on my editing machine. I'm bringing all the media from the Consolidation into my AVID "1" folder. Then, when I restart AVID, it searches the media folder, and it should see all of it I believe. Currently, some media is there, while many other clips are not. I cannot see any difference as to why some clips exist while others do not. The steps I'm taking is the exact method suggested on the forum here.

thouhts?

I would recommend that you rebuild the media database files by deleting the two files with extensions .pmr and .mdb from the Avid "1" folder on the drive containing the consolidated media. On re-launch, you'll see the rebuild occur at the "Initializing Media Streams Manager" stage of the boot up.

Atomike:

What I'm doing to rebuild the sequence, is to take my Media Folder that was created during the Consolidation process (a folder titled 1 on my external drive), and dragging everything from that "1" folder into my main "1" drive on my editing machine

A quicker approach would be to just rename the Avid MediaFiles folder on your editing machine to "xAvid MediaFiles" - thus making sure that the only media visible to Avid is the ones on your External that you just backed up to.  

If your Consolidated sequence appears 100% online in that scenario, then you are safe.

You sequence may be getting confused between the Consolidated media and the original media now that you're dumping it all back into the same folder.  

Atomike:

I played through the new sequences to be sure there was no "media offline" messages

When consolidating put the sequence in a new "consolidate" bin and set bin display to show everything.

I am not a great fan of media relatives for choosing what to delete. I consolidate to a different drive. As Kenton suggests then rename the Avid MediaFiles folder to xAvid Mediafiles on all drives except the one I have just consolidated to. Check the new consolidated sequence is complete (never by playing a sequence looking at a top layer)

Then rename all the Avid MediaFiles folders back to standard and either

Use the media tool sorted by date to delete all files before the start time of the consolidate or

Rename the Avid MediaFiles folder on the consolidated drive and use the media tool to delete all of this projects media or MDV and delete the projects media files that way.

Life has gotten a little more complicated since file based media has come along as it seems easy for Avid to miss a project association from imports

The Media relatives step probably deleted the material for whatever reason. Consolidate should be performed before any deleting as a precaution.

I really appreciate all these ideas and tips. I'm currently re-copying the media into "1" from the removable drive, just to see what happens. Tomorrow, I'll try some of these other ideas, but at least now I have a few good suggestions on how to avoid these problems. I especially like the re-naming media drive idea before deleting - that is a great way to ensure a complete Consolidate.

I concur that the media relative step may actually be the culprit... so I probably shouldn't blame Consolidate too harshly.

You guys rule.

MikeD