Continued AMA Woes

[Glenn Sakatch]

Hi Dan.

All i can suggest is some basic troubleshooting at this point.

Do you have access to any other c300 footage? (Are you sure there isn’t a problem with the file structure that has been provided to you with this footage?)

Anyone else around with an Avid that can try to load the footage to see if it works for them?
If you have a small enough folder of shots, and can upload it, i’d be happy to try to load a batch and see if I can get it to go. (We can talk off list if you want to about this)

It is not uncommon for user settings to go corrupt. Doesn’t happen as often as it did on final cut, but it happens. Delete your main user settings. Start a new one, or just use the new one you’ve already built.

Perhaps your state settings are corrupt? Under applications, media composer, settings MCState settings. I have deleted this in the past to fix some oddities. This will clean out a lot of your basic settings for the program. It will rebuild itself after a launch and save of settings.

Personally, when stuff goes this wonky, i don’t think twice about uninstalling the program and doing a fresh install. This will force you to re-install all your ama plugins. A lot of people shudder at the thought of an install, but i would rather spend 10 to 15 mins doing that, than hours trying to figure out if the problem may or may not be somewhere else. In 15 mins i can assure myself that the program itself is good.

Double check permissions on all your drives, make sure everybody can access everything.

Never seen this happen, but maybe after the re-install, just start with your mxf and canon plugins, to ensure nothing else is conflicting or corrupting the process.

Sorry, not a “oh, push that red button” answer, but maybe something will work.

Glenn

[Daniel Schultz]

Hi Glenn.

I really appreciate the time you took.

I will look over all your thoughtful answers and give them a try.

Thanks,

Dan S.

[Daniel Schultz]

Okay, here’s an interesting twist.

I just filmed some more with the c300—new footage.

Connect the CF card reader and—boom—all the AMAs automatically populate a bin without me doing anything.

So, I tried going to another hard drive with different raw c300 footage (all folders intact starting with “Contents). It didn’t let me link to the folder when I try to do it manually.

So I tried “tricking” it. I copied one of the contents folders from the hard drive (with the old footage) onto a canon-formatted CF card. Plug the card and card reader in and—boom—all the AMAs automatically load into a bin that, once again, gets automatically created.

Then the weird thing is if I create my own bin and try to navigate to the CF card, and point to in manually with the AMA link, I’m back to square one…it doesn’t work.

So the temporary fix seems to be to copy the files I need onto a CF card when I need to link to them via AMA (and consequently transcode).

But it’s not a good permanent solution.

I don’t know anyone else with AVID.

Glenn, if you give me your info, I can send you one of my c300 contents folders with a small amount of footage for you to test? (if you happen to have time).

Thoughts???

Thanks again,

Dan

Dan S.

[James Beattie]

What about formatting?

What format is your media drive? If it is really wrong, this could cause problems similar to this. For example, if you have files that are over 2GB in size. I think it is possible you have formatted your media drive improperly.

On a mac, your media Drive should be Mac OS Extended with Journaling enabled.

James Beattie
ACSR Elite/Avid ACI, Apple Certified Technician

Consulting for Workflow and Digital Technologies at Comprehensive Technical Group

[Daniel Schultz]

The drives are both OWC Guardian Maximus RAID drives.
I believe they’re pre-formatted for Mac OS Extended out of the box.
But this problem seems to happen with any of the files, not just larger than 2gb files.

Is there a quick way to double check the formatting without reformatting?

Dan S.

[Glenn Sakatch]

Sorry Daniel, looks like my last reply didn’t go through.

If you want to send some files, i’d be happy to see if they work on my systems.

gsakatch@gmail.com

Glenn

Glenn