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AvidMediaComposer “Media Offline” Student Edition
Hey Professional People of Avid,
I’m just starting Media Composer since the use of FCP is dead so I’ve switched editing platforms. I do both the editing on my laptop and at college. I’m constantly copying the files from one end to another. My professor who works in the commercial industry won’t help me and blames me because I’m only learning it now. For now, I’m editing at the college lab.
Anyways, My Avid Media is offline but I know its on the local drive. I’m also practicing on my laptop just in case I reach this problem again and I want to try out various scenarios from mild to very severe. I’m running 5.5.3 on my laptop and at the college, they’re running 6.5.3 – 7.0.3 on both Mac/PCs
One of the students did something wicked and got back my project in a matter of seconds. She understood my frustration and nicely got my project back up and running. However, it did it again and its driving me crazy!
I just got a glimpse of what she did: She highlighted the offline clip in the timeline and went to the top of the viewer, clicked the dropdown and selected timecode and then found the footage, marked IN/OUT, and then it showed up (like I said “only a glimpse”). She added and told me its one of the secrets she knew.
I was wondering if anyone knows what I’m talking about and can give me various steps/workarounds from easy to hard and can give me advice what can I do to transport my Avid Media from one computer to another without having to see the dreadful “MEDIA OFFLINE” headline
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5 Replies
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There’s a variety of things that could be causing this. Coming from FCP, I empathize, I started on FCP. First things first. Avid handles media very differently from FCP. FCP can store media anywhere.
On Avid, it will always be on the root of your drive in a folder called (Hard Drive)>Avid MediaFiles>MXF>1 (If if you’re on a Unity or ISIS It will be (Workspace)>Avid MediaFilves>MXF>(ComputerName).1
In the 1 (or computer_name.1) there will be a folder called “Creating”, your mxf media, a pmr file and an mdb file. The PMR and MDB files index the media and tell tell Avid what’s there. Sometimes those files get corrupted. The first step I’d take is, delete those files. You can even do this while Avid is currently open. The Avid should immediately notice this and start rebuilding those files. If your media immediately comes online, you’re done! If not, next paragraph.
If the Avid does not start immediately rebuilding those databases, you have might be having write permission issues with that folder. Try checking the drive and folder permissions. Also, sometimes simply restarting the Avids software will make it database those files.
If those two steps didn’t work, before you try relinking, go to File>Load Media Database
If that doesn’t work, you might need to relink your files.
Select your master clips, right click or go to Clip>Relink. Is your media captured from tape or tapeless? I’m guessing most likely tapeless. You probably want to uncheck “Match case when comparing tape and source file names” and check “Allow relinking of import/AMA clips by Source File Name”
Clearly, there’s a lot to check and try, but see if this gets you on your feet.
Richard Sanchez
Los Angeles, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks
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Were not doing “tape” yet, but we’re doing tapeless for now. Can you explain the different procedures for tape & tapeless. Thanks 🙂
The professor couldn’t get the relink function to work. So we’re skipping that. What is he doing differently? He’s going to be jealous that I got it to work.
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Let’s just get you up and running. Going over tape (and the many varieties of tape formats) and tapeless (and the infinitely vaster varieties) would take a long time (and quite frankly it would encompass more time than I can offer on a forum)
I’m assuming you tried what I wrote in the last post and it didn’t work?
When you transcoded your footage, you selected your system drive? (Or an external) We need to make sure the media is on a drive, and if the issue is that the Avid can’t see it, we need to make it see it. Otherwise, if the footage is simply not there, we need to track down what drive the footage is on. There’s a collumn in your bin, when you set it to “Text” view called “Drive”. That will show you what drive the Avid expects to see the footage on. Are you maybe missing an external drive that should be there?
Richard Sanchez
Los Angeles, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks
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Mr. Sanchez-
I’m having the same issue and am working from the same version of AMC. In the drive column in my clips bin, it says “ET31B (Z:)” because we’d been working off of ISIS. I’ve tried all the methods you mentioned and none of them are working. Is there a way to go in and redirect the path manually? In other words, is it possible for me to re-map the contents of the clip bin under the Drive column?
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It’s looking for the media on ET31B (Z:), but did you copy the media to separate drive? A great tool to make sure you have the media copied is “Media Copy” from Automatic Duck. https://www.automaticduck.com/products/mc/
The tricky thing with tracking were your media is, I’d need to know how you setup your project, what drives you were originally using, what is the situation now and what drives are removed from the equation to track your media. Very very hard to do without seeing your setup.
If you’re positive the media is there, first step is always to rebuild your database files and then move to relinking.
Richard Sanchez
Los Angeles, CA“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks
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