Cannot Transcode/Consolidate

[Glenn Sakatch]

you say you “imported”…do you mean you AMA linked? If so, yes, transcode.

If the clip is greyed out, perhaps you are not selecting the clips properly. select 1 clip and right click on it.
consolodate/transcode should be available.

Some of the settings you are worried about (frame length 30s) are not relevant to what you are doing.
that setting is for bringing in stills, and how long of a clip the still should be.

Some of the other settings could affect how the picture looks, but shouldn’t have too much bearing on its ability to play back.

Play back is mostly connected to your drive speed, and other system specs.
What are your project settings, what drives are you using, what kind of computer. More information is usually better for people to lend opinions.

Even your camera model may help us understand what is going on.

Glenn

[Mynor Rodriguez]

Thank you Glenn or your help, I did not AMA link, I imported from the camera itself. It is a small Samsung HD camcorder H200 series.

The clip itself is not grayed out, it is the button on the bottom when I go to the transcode/consolidate window. I though Avid needed the format converted so it can read it/play it properly before i begin editing, I tried doing this one clip at at time and it does not give me the option.

As far as the system specs I was using FC Pro X and playback was not an issue. My computer is a 27 inch iMac bought January 2013, 3Tb memory, 3.4GHz Quad Core Intel Core i7, Graphics NVIDIAGeFrc GTX 675MX…

I do not have an external hard drive because I figured 3 Tbytes is enough for an 18 min short film. My only drive is my camera where the clips are saved…i did however use my hard disk to save my clips a week ago, then I had sound sync issues when i used the AMA link, which i don’t use anymore and it was resolved, Now my only problem is the image playback that seems to lag and look slow.

My project settings are as mentioned on the first post, nothing was changed anywhere else.

What should I do?

Mynor

Mynor

[Glenn Sakatch]

Sounds like you may have a drive issue. You say you are new to 6.5. Have you used this system successfully for any other projects yet?

Part of the problem may be that you are using the system drive for all your work. This is not the recommended path. Ideally you should have a small raid setup or at the very least an external firewire drive to handle your video. 3 tbs probably is enough for your short film, but there is more to it than
drive size. Drive speed trumps drive size every day. It is possible your internal drive isn’t fast enough.

You say the button is greyed out. Have you selected the drive for it to transcode to? Just because you see your local drive in the window isn’t enough, you have to click on it to tell Avid what the destination is. The Transcode button at the bottom will be greyed out until you do this.

couple of other things you could try.
Go to your format tab (up in the settings area) and switch your project settings to a “lighter” workload. Switch down to 720 or
even NTSC 30 and see if that helps your playback.
Remember to set this back to 1080 whenever you want to import new footage or do any transcoding, as it will affect your compression options.
Check your quality settings at the bottom of your timeline. (the square that is either yellow, green/yellow, green or green with a 10 in it. This affects your how much juice the box is needing to playback files at a high quality. You can work at an easier quality setting, but still make your final output high quality.

Glenn

[William Busby]

Not that this is the source of your problem but for the record, since your camera shoots HDV your project settings should be thin raster (1440×1080).

[William Busby]

btw… out of curiosity I googled your camera model and it’s NOT HDV so disregard my previous post 🙂

[Mynor Rodriguez]

Thanks Glenn, I have never used 6.5 for any projects before. You have confirmed what I suspected and I guess i will have to purchase an external drive now, thanks for clearing that up.

Actually I do not see my local drive in the window, might this be because I have no external hard drive?

I did try switching down to 720 and NTSC 30 but to no avail. About the box at the bottom of the timeline, i will have to play around with that, lets see what happens.

Im gonna try and see if a new drive works out for me here, crossing my fingers!

Thanks a lot for the pointers,

Mynor

[Glenn Sakatch]

check your media creation settings, you may be filtering out your system drive…which is usually a good thing. That could be preventing it from showing up in your transcode window.

Obviously you have an internal drive, or the program wouldn’t run at all…the computer wouldn’t boot up either 😉

Glenn

[Mynor Rodriguez]

Thanks William, but if its not HDV, then what is it? haha

Mynor