• Avid Media Composer

  batch imported master clips linking to wrong media! WHY?

  Posted by Laura Mulligan on April 17, 2011 at 7:35 am

  I had a super weird problem at work yesterday. As part of a Unity music library cleanup, I batch imported about 30 master clips of music on Wednesday. Played them back and they were fine. Opened the bin on Friday morning and about 10 clips were offline.

  I could see by the file names that the bay folder on the media drive contained the right number of files for that bin, and it had all worked fine when I imported it initially, so I did a relink to the music media drive to which I wrote the media on Wednesday.

  The clips relinked – but to media in an entirely different bay folder. Once I noticed that, I did “reveal file” on each clip in the bin, and found that 3 clips that hadn’t even been offline on Friday morning were somehow linking to a single pair of media files in yet ANOTHER bay folder.

  I was able to relink all the clips to the correct media files eventually by hiding the two bay folders that the bad clips kept trying to link to…but then I put all the bay folders back to being readable, reindexed the drive (from a different bay, in case the bay was the culprit) and the problem clips went right back to crazy town.

  This is an astoundingly stupid and dangerous thing to have happen to a music library on a Unity…I have a plan to fix it (1. trash all the media for the music library and batch import it fresh from the raw files, so I know that at least at the moment of import, all clips link to correct media, 2. modify the tape names so they’re bin-specific, since right now they’re composer names that are common across bins, & maybe start timecode & tape names being identical is part of why Avid is relinking in such a wily-nily fashion)

  BUT what I don’t understand is how it lost the links to the media in the first place. I am the ONLY person with access to the project and media drives in question, and I definitely did not unlink anything, so it’s not human intervention.

  The only other variable I can think of here is that the master clips in question went with MXF media on the Unity where they were created, but on this Unity I’m trying to integrate them with a music library that is all OMF media, so I set my media creation & audio project settings to make OMF media just for the sake of uniformity. Was that a bad idea? Does it matter in the slightest?

  I have never seen such anarchy on a media drive…

  Laura Mulligan replied 15 years, 5 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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