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Archiving/Consolidating
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[Brett Sherman] “It should also be said even if you have Media Composer, if you don’t have your Avid Project or it got corrupted, you are SOL for accessing the media.”
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you are saying, but you can playback, edit, etc., Avid media in MC projects that didn’t originally create said media.
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I agree that this would be great to have for grading in another app, but I don’t know how useful it would be for me in archiving a doc. In my doc the largest files were the interviews. I interviewed people for hours and I would want access to everything they said (even though I only used bits). I like how I can save only the people who were in the film because I really don’t need people who weren’t. After keeping my interviews of interest, my Library would be smaller but not to the extreme that yours was. In your case Shane it’s a game changer.
When I looked at the youtube clip for Worx4 X it had 1369 views and 6 comments after being up there for 2 years. I wonder how many they sold and if they made enough money for it to payoff.
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Thank you for this thread. It seems amazing that a feature that has been around for so many years in Avid is still nowhere near ready for prime time in most other NLE’s. Premiere is also horribly inadequate for creating a consolidated archive.
Why is this feature so hard to duplicate in any other system?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tmprods
tallmanproductions.net -
Can you natively use h264 media in Avid now or do you have to compress it to an Avid codec?
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[Bret Williams] “Can you natively use h264 media in Avid now or do you have to compress it to an Avid codec?”
I think AMA (Avid Media Access), which allows you to work with files in their native format, as opposed to ingesting and transcoding into an Avid codec, came out about 10yrs ago.
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My Avid days are even before that! ☺ And yep, we were consolidating with handles back then in 1997. Back then everything that came in had to be converted of course. FCP 2.x I think added the feature in 2001. So with AMA, I assume it has to transcode like premiere to make handles. Which of course increases the file size ten fold, so if you’re using 10 seconds of a 60 second clip, you’d actually be better off keeping the 60 second clip. It’d be cool if it could be smart enough to discern which would be the smaller file and determine whether to trim it or not based on that.
So has Avid added in blend modes yet?
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[Brett Sherman] “That you can’t access the media itself without the software? No that’s largely only true of Avid.”
Incorrect. You can edit Avid media in Premiere Pro, Resolve…you can play back that footage with VLC player.
[Brett Sherman] “Are there cases with FCP? Apparently, I’ve just never run into those. Maybe I’m lucky with the codecs I used.”
As I mentioned earlier, OLDER codecs from FCP Legacy says…DVCPRO HD and HDV….two of the most common codec in the early days of HD video (lucky you missed out). If you captured those codecs in FCP, they ONLY WORKED in FCP…or rather, if you had FCP installed on your system. You had to have it in order to have the decoder for those formats.
Shane
Little Frog Post
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
[Bret Williams] “So with AMA, I assume it has to transcode like premiere to make handles.”
AFAIK all inter-frame codecs have to be transcoded in order to trim them because of how the compression works. The size of the transcoded files will of course depend on what codec you transcode them into.
Inter-frame codecs store incomplete frame data and rely on the previous and upcoming frame’s information to rebuild/interpolate the missing data. That’s why the file sizes for inter-frame codecs are so small compared to intra-frame codecs (where each frame is a stored as a compete image). Inter-frame is also called GOP (Group Of Pictures) because it requires the information from an entire group of pictures in order to rebuild each individual frame.
This is an oversimplification, but It’s kinda the difference between counting by counting every number vs counting by skipping numbers.
Intra-frame: 0,1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20
vs
Inter-frame: 0, 5, 10, 15, 20
If I want to trim Intra-frame down to just 0-13 the NLE can literally just copy frames 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 and put them into a new file. If I want to do the same with inter-frame the file has to be re-encoded because frames 11, 12, and 13 don’t exist as discreet images. When you put your playhead on frame 13 the playback software creates frame 13 on the fly by interpolating the changes in image data between frame 10 and frame 15. This is why inter-frame codecs are much more CPU intensive than intra-frame codecs (trade off between storage requirements and CPU requirements).
In the old FCP one of my favorite tools to use was Reference Movies (files that didn’t contain media, but just ‘pointed’ to where the media you wanted to reference was stored), but if you were working with an inter-frame codec like HDV and made a Reference Movie you actually created new media (for the same reason you can’t ‘trim’ inter-frame codecs).
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[greg janza] “Thank you for this thread. It seems amazing that a feature that has been around for so many years in Avid is still nowhere near ready for prime time in most other NLE’s. Premiere is also horribly inadequate for creating a consolidated archive.
Why is this feature so hard to duplicate in any other system?”
It’s hard, it’s not a ‘sexy’ feature, and it inherently puts restrictions on how media is managed/accessed which might annoy end users. For example, back in the day, one of the most common complaints from FCPs editors about Avid was about media management. “Why can’t I just drag and drop media from any Finder window into Avid MC like I can in FCP? Why does Avid rename my files and put them all into one, big folder?”
Yet being able to drag and drop media into a FCP project willy-nilly (and FCP not really having any inherent internal asset management) is a big reason why FCP’s Media Manager was nicknamed the Media Mangler (though to be fair, it got better over the years).
A still ongoing problem with PPro is the creation of duplicate media when you are swapping timelines between projects even if both projects contain identical media. In defense of PPro, how is it supposed to know if the file AppleBanna_1.mov that already resides inside of Project A and the file AppleBanna_1.mov, which is contained in a timeline being imported from Project B, is the exact same file or two different files that just have the same name?
PPro gives you the option to add unique meta data to each clip upon ingest to help combat this problem, that requires a more organized approach to media ingestion and dissemination which may/may not sit will with users. As they say, you can’t have your cake and eat it too, and there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Even with Avid’s AMA you give up the robustness of having Avid MC manage the media in it’s database in exchange for the convenience of managing it (or not managing it) yourself outside of Avid.
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Yes very familiar. Here’s a new one though. I’m able to trim an h264 clip in Quicktime Player (everybody knows you can trim and edit in QT Player, right? ) and paste it to a new player and it seems I now have a standalone trimmed h264 clip. No transcoding seems to have occurred.
Worx4x will trim most media but as pointed out earlier some mxf formats can’t be trimmed. I assume they’re transcoding the others, even if to the same format, but odd they couldn’t do it for others then.
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