AMA PRORES 444 workflow….WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

[Andrew Sableton]

Can you describe the process from avid to davinci to avid in a step by step?

Thx
AS

[Paul Provost]

1. Pick up phone
2. Hire workflow consultant
3. Proceed with grade

http://www.4Kfinish.com | owner-colorist | Hollywood, CA
http://www.facebook.com/4kFinish

[Chris Martin]

1. Using Avid EDL Manager, open the Avid Bin containing sequence you are to conform and color. Confirm project’s working fps.

2. Generate an EDL food each video layer. For multi layer sequences all you have to do is change V1 to V2, etc. We like to use file 16 or file 32 format for file based workflows such as Red or Alexa as the entire file name is included for reel ID. Using standard CMX 3600 format for example limits you to 8 digit reel ID. Under settings in EDL manager always a good ideas to turn on source file in comments. Nice to see this and Resolve can be set to find reel ID here as well as backup.

3. Use EDLs to import select media only into media pool. As I mentioned you can also then use media page copy media to your local drives with clip manager. If you do this once you have copied selects over I find it easiest to just remove all the clips from media pool if they referencing from extertnal drive and then just add all folders and subfolders back into media pool. Much quicker than changing parent directory.

4. Then conform with same EDLs. Easy cheesy. If you had a lot of repos you were hoping to porter over with an AAF you won’t get those but otherwise EDLs still way more stabile than AAF with an Avid AMA workflow. When I’ve had a lot of repos, especially asnimated, I’ve done the same workflow above but I have to force conform clips to the AAF in conform. But if you have used the EDL to bring in selects it is pretty easy to sort and may be faster than manually rebuilding each repo.

[Paul Provost]

+1 on edl spy

http://www.4Kfinish.com | owner-colorist | Hollywood, CA
http://www.facebook.com/4kFinish

[Neil Sadwelkar]

Didn’t know you could use EDLSpy to consolidate with handles. I’ve always used it to ‘pull’ entire clips.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Andrew Sableton]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone but in the end I went with my “thought experiment” version, essentially using DAVINCI to do the consolidation to PRORES 444 MOV, while using the AAF protocol for the timeline management.

Guess I should pay myself a workflow consultancy fee…

I got it to work like this:

1. Transcode and consolidate the sequence with handles in AVID to PRORES 444 MXF. (I never use this media but it seems to be a necessary intermediate step to get the AAF to work right in the round trip)

2. Export AAF

3. In DAVINCI ADD THE camera original PRORES 444 files to the media pool.

4. Import the AAF. Do not automatically import media files. Also in conform options do not assist using reel number.

5. The AAF correctly linked to the camera original media.

6. Render out my timeline in DAVINCI as PRORES 444 QUICKTIMES. Need to use “Easy setup” None. Render each clip with unique filename.

7. Export AAF from DAVINCI.

8. Import AAF into DAVINCI. Media was offline. Used AMA linking to relink to new timeline in AVID. This worked perfectly – all relinked to my new consolidated PRORES 444 movies.

9. Export AAF from AVID.

10. Import AAF into DAVINCI. Now I have my sequence in DAVINCI linked to my consolidated clips.

Note – when I compare the consolidated PRO RES 444 QTS with the camera originals in my broadcast monitor and scopes I cannot detect any difference at all. If I went back and forth hundreds of times I don’t know if there would be any difference or not. I don’t know how a DAVINCI render with no grades on it and using the same codec differs from a straight DATA transfer. Perhaps it does. On the Deliver page I chose “Set to video or data level – unscaled full range data”.

Anyway, maybe this will be useful to someone out there – in this case this workflow solved my problems , in particular the fact that AVID would not consolidate AMA PRORES MOVIES without changing them to MXF and DAVINCI cannot read MXF PRORES 444 media.

Phew…

[David Yardley]

Thank you for posting your (somewhat complicated!) solution, as we have just discovered the same problem.
It seems surprising that there are virtually no systems that are capable of directly reading Prores MXF wrapped media, or for that matter Avid 444 media.
A quicktime reference of the same media seems to be universally readable.