AMA vs IMPORT

[Shane Ross]

[Kenneth Maultsby] “I use a lot of AVCHD footage what our the advantages and dis-advantages in workflow between the two?”

Main thing is, if you want to relink to the original masters at any point in the future, it’s best to use AMA to access the footage, then convert. The advantage is better relinking.

Importing, the advantage is that it is typically faster (slightly) and is better at retaining alpha channel information.

With AVCHD…you need to use AMA to access the footage, as Avid cannot “import” AVCHD’s .MTS file format. That requires AMA

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Danielle Warren]

Right, so I’ve started a new project with some footage I had lying around. It was all Prores as I had worked with it first in FCP.

I had about 12 clips all 1920×1080, some at 23.98 and some at 29.97. I set my settings to transcode/import at 1080 23.98. I used “link to AMA” to bring all the files into the Avid project. Then I selected them all and transcoded them. (I chose to convert the ones that weren’t 23.98 as that’s what I have in my settings. I’m assuming that’s ok and the best option so all the footage is 23.98)

When it comes to those settings, I wasn’t really sure what my target video resolution should be, so I just used what came up first “DNxHD 115 MXF”. (Can anyone help explain the difference between all the resolutions they offer or why you would choose one over another?)

I then chose the drive I wanted to save the transcoded footage on and hit transcode. Took roughly 20 minutes.

So now my bin has the original files and all those files with the .new01 on the end. Can/should I delete the original ones from the bin and just use use the .new01 ones to edit with? It seems very cluttered, and I don’t think I need the original linked files in the bin to work with, correct? But deleting them from the Avid bin won’t have any effect on the original files on my drive, right?

Thanks guys! I’m getting there a bit at a time!

[Mike Jeffs]

Yes you can just delete the original AMA linked clips. It won’t effect you new media or new media.

Mike Jeffs
Video Coordinator
BYU-Idaho

[Michael Phillips]

I just move them to their own bin and put all “AMA” bins in their own folder.

Michael

[Shane Ross]

[Danielle Warren] “(Can anyone help explain the difference between all the resolutions they offer or why you would choose one over another?)”

Some are high res…some are low res. And the ones you choose depend on the frame size and frame rate.

Here’s a great mouse pad that Keycode media makes…

Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Mike Jeffs]

I just ran into a quirky issue

I looks like to me no matter what when you AMA link in a Clip that has stereo audio, Avid does not preserve it. It brings in the Audio as center panned mono files. even if you Consolidate or transcode

The only way I have found to preserve the true stereo audio is to do a import and in the options make sure and pair A1 and A2 as stereo

for you gurus out there is this true or did I miss something.

Mike Jeffs
Video Coordinator
BYU-Idaho