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How to deal with old Avid Projects
I left Avid about 7 years ago. The problem now is I have quite a bit of footage captured with Avid that I need access to. Most was done with Avid Xpress Pro with a mixture of OMF (primarily DV) and MXF (primarily HDV). What are my options to be able to access the media?
What I’ve done so far –
MXF4Mac Player – will not access most of my MXF files – I get an error message. will not play associated audio. Won’t even look at OMF.
Media Composer version 4 – this is the last Avid program we purchased. I cannot launch it on any of my computers. Even on an old school Mac Pro with the correct OS and correct Quicktime version, the thing won’t even launch.
Do I have any other options than buying the latest version of Media Composer? I’m a bit remiss to plunk down that kind of money just to have access to the media. But I don’t see any other way at this point. If I could get my hands on a older version of Avid that will actually launch that would be an option, but I don’t think I can do that.
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8 Replies
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It would probably be easier just to recapture from the camera originals into your new NLE.
If that’s not an option you could download the trial of Avid 8.x. You’d have 30 days to export files of all of your media before the trial expires. You could export standalone quicktime files of every piece of media. It would be time consuming but, depending on how much media you have, you may be able to get it done in the 30 day window.
Otherwise, try bringing them into Premiere Pro. It kind of supports Avid .mxf files. But realize that the video and audio streams will all be separate .mxf or .omf files so you’ll have to create merge clips for every piece of video that has matching audio tracks. Honestly – it would be faster/cheaper just to download the trial and if you need more time rent Avid on a monthly basis. I think it’s $75/month without a contract.
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Michael Hancock
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Resolve will read your mxf files, but I think you are going to need avid for the OMF media.
Odd that you can’t install the old version. Something funky going on there.
Glenn
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[Glenn Sakatch] ”
Odd that you can’t install the old version. Something funky going on there.”Yeah I tried multiple 4.x versions with the required OS and Quicktime versions. Nothing worked. My guess is that MC4 was not a very solid piece of programming on the Mac at least. At that time Avid had a way of breaking the rules for programming on the Mac.
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The problem is hardware. The MacPro is Intel and Avid XPress Pro 4.x is PowerPC. You would need a G5 or G4 for run it. Not sure if Avid ever made a Universal Binary of XPress Pro before discontinuing the product.
You might get it to launch if you install Rosetta (Apple’s PPC emulator) on the old version of MacOSX, but I don’t think Avid ever approved that. -
Yeah but it’s Media Composer V4 that I have, so theoretically it should work. In fact it ran at one point on the exact system. But it just isn’t working. I’ve installed the OS from scratch, upgraded to the exact version of the OS required, installed the exact version of Quicktime and it just won’t load.
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Ah. Somehow I thought you said Xpress Pro 4. Sorry
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This might be a dumb suggestion but what if you dragged and dropped the DB file from that OMF folder into an OMF set-up project bin?
Will it auto upload and refresh DB to recent Avid software?
Im tempted to find some old Avid MediaFiles folder from OMF days to test this theory. -
The newer versions of Avid will still read and write OMF media. It is a setting in your media creation tab.
I think the problem is he doesn’t have a version of Avid to use, although he could always download the trial and go for 30 days worth of outputs.
Glenn
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