Doing a very large infomercial - AVID MC 5.5 on HPZ400 6 core. I have all the files on a GRAID 8TB 4 x 2TB Raid attached via eSata. Windows 7 (please no MAC comments - thanks!)

Came in Monday morning and EVERYTHING was no longer attached via AMA. And not just this project. Every project. Through the advice on this board much of it has come back. However, some files just refuse to come back. The names have been changed to mark take numbers, testimonials, etc. and while that's "not supposed to matter", who knows, maybe it does. A lot of work has gone into getting things ready and we were about to put the show together.

Tried creating new project, relinking via AMA everything in a single bin, then opening in old project, and opening the reinked bin from the new project. Didn't work.

Opened a new bin in current project and relinked via AMA everything  - most stuff came back. One group of green screen footage did not. We can go back and manually relink each file (get file info, match up the "old" file name and relink manually). 

Also, because I shot with a D5 we had to sync up the audio on the testimonials and created group clips of each person. Seems those files won't open at all - getting "serious error, shut down application immediately"

Any ideas? I know I can get back to square one, but I am afraid it might happen again. If anyone has gone through a similar path please advise.

Ernie

This will not help you right now.

AMA is excellent but it's not guranteed that you won't loose something if you don't backup.

And to do so you want to transcode the most serious project so you could back up.

You mean you sync up and created group clips based on H264 by AMA?

The canon 5D footage and others of that elk are always more of problem. Most tapeless formats like P2 and xdcam have a unique ID created by the camera fro every clip created and MC can use that to relink and track the original AMA to Avid clips.

However the Canon footgae doesn't. it doesn't even have real timecode (video Tool shed helpes here!)

So the naming of the clips and the file paths become critical.

I assume you made sure all the drives used had their windows drive letters marked on them so you could ensure they always mount on those drive letters. (this is resolved in MC6)

I'm no fan of AMA in large and complex edits. As you've found it's just too risky if you have to turn around jobs in short time frames with little margin.

I'd be using one machine to AMA and make selects and then transcode to Avid media and move that media to the edit machine.

But for you right now I can't see any other solution but to continueto manually re-link stuff.

The serious errors you are getting are an unfortunate sie effect of Avid not yet managing to cope with AMA content that can't be found. Rather than just ignoring missing media or using a special AMA offline slate it throws MC into a spin and wrongly advises you to restart. You need to clear the source and record monitor of any AMA content that is offline to stop the warnings.

http://community.avid.com/forums/p/88785/587728.aspx#587728

see if this link helps

Joe