-
MC 5 — Devising a strong AMA online / offline workflow for feature documentary ~80hrs footage. Related to P2 media, proper codecs, and relinking
Sorry in advance for the long post. Didn’t mean to write a treatise — just wanted to be thorough.
I’ve lurked a bit on this forum and have learned a lot along the way and now it’s come time to get some specific advice on a project that I’m starting.
I’m a relative newcomer to Avid. The last version I worked with was 3.5, but this project will be edited on (as of now) MC v5.02, which as I understand, has come a long with AMA and tapeless workflows, which is where the bulk on my questions lie.
The project is a long-format documentary with about 80 hours of footage total. A majority of that footage is P2 media — mostly interviews shot on the HVX plus a second soud unit. The rest of the footage is comprised of archival footage from home movies, DVDs, and an assortment of Canon 5D and Flip camera footage. There is also a good amount of still photos. (Think history documentary.)
The P2 media was copied to hard drives by shot date. The main “if” here is how to deal with a workflow that ensures a smooth edit from the initial phases of logging, subclipping, and up to the creative edit, and all the steps at the end and in between: creating outputs for screeners, DVDs, and, ultimately, the final color correct, online, and sound edit. The finished piece will be about 90 minutes long. We are editing using attached hard drives, and not with a shared storage setup. We are on a Mac.
As I understand it, there are two approaches:
A) I can link to the AMA-capable media (the P2 and Canon 5D footage), and transcode only that media that needs to be transcoded, such as the archival footage;
or
B) Transcode everything — P2 media, Canon 5D footage, and all archival material — from the get-go to a format such as DNxHD 115.
For the time being, we’ve been proceeding with option A, but I’ve been reading about drawbacks to this approach, particularly with outputting Quicktime movies for screeners. From experience so far, we’ve been encountering problems with the AMA periodically (and randomly) going offline, even though the drives containing the AMA footage is still online. Opening a bin with the AMA media brings back the media, solving the problem, but it’s still worrisome. I wonder if this is a bug in MC 5.02.
Before we get too far along in the edit, I wanted to hear feedback on the benefits or problems with the two approaches listed above, and I’d welcome any advice.
If it matters at all, there are other considerations:
1) There are multiple editors on the project. Ideally, we’d like to be able to hand off portions of the project so that editors could independently work on separate pieces of the project simultaneously, joining together the work every few days. I don’t know if this is easy to do. (My background is mostly in Final Cut Pro, and this sort of thing is quite easy to do.)
2) Some of the AMA-linked media has already been subclipped and binned into selects. If we change gears and switch to approach B, will this work have been lost? Or is there a way to point the media on the work already done to the new transcoded footage?
On a related note to #1 above: we handed off copies of the P2 media on “shuttle drives” to be logged, subclipped, and transcribed. When we brought in the bins containing this work, there seemed to be no easy way to relink to the original P2 media on our drives. It seems that merely changing the name of the volume storing the P2 media breaks the link to that media entirely — and this would make sense, but to workaround this issue, I’d think that simply relinking to our copies of the P2 media would be enough. But that doesn’t seem to be the case — we always have to re-import the media, effectively losing the work that was done. (Again, I’m coming from Final Cut Pro, and re-linking to a different set of media is just a matter of that the original media offline and then pointing it to the new set of footage. Is there an Avid equivalent to this?)
Thanks in advance for any help!
John
-
2 Replies
-
Beautifully written/explained and I will be watching closely for responses. My only experience has been the same for the specific issues of exporting QT for approvals from a seq. that contains AMA linked files, usually to QT files, which makes it very starnge that my export reveals those QT, AMA linked files as saying “wrong format” (similar to “offline”) – this is strange because the original file (that is AMA linked) plays in QT and is not a wrong format. My work around has been solved because we must,”transcode” anyway … meaning this crazy world in which I edit mostly, being interlaced SD, 4×3 or 16×9 – we must video mixdown our final, add on top video track, add timewarp and render that as progressive output, then export the file to be played properly in the computers/web world. I really wish Avid would allow one to export (and render as necessary) to a truly progressive/de-interlaced file.
Thanks for this post as it is a growing workflow that will be the future, at least for us!
Ricky
-
Was there ever an answer to this one?
I’ve just gone through a similar thought process the end result to me seems it’s best to initially Transcode everything to .mxf and then Consolidate it all at the end of the job onto an external drive and backup to LT0-4 tape.
Does that sound right?
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up