media management and multiple workspaces/MXF folders

[Andrew Kimery]

Why not use consolidate as that’s what it’s there for? Unless there are extenuating circumstances all media management should be done within Avid, not manually dragging around files in Finder.

[Kathryn Cates]

Hi Andrew – thanks for advice. Agreed – consolidate seems ideal, but to be honest I haven’t had much occasion to need to consolidate media in the past, so it makes me a little nervous (perhaps irrationally so) – especially as there are a) other editors working in the project and b) subclips involved.

The extenuating circumstances in question, such as they are, are that the consolidated audio .mxf files have new names (obviously) and the initial .mxf files I was given were named so elegantly and obviously that I don’t want to change the names if I can avoid it. And I have my doubts that replacing the new consolidated media with the old (better-named) audio .mxf files in the audio workspace would result in a successful relink. (This is where my knowledge of how Avid understands relationships between media and master clips begins to fail me.)

[Glenn Sakatch]

Perhaps i’m not totally understanding your workflow, or at what stage you are at in the project, but why would you consolidate your media before you are done editing. Don’t you want access to everything during the edit?

If you want some organization, i would perhaps break your media up by day shot, or week shot, or something like that. I personally wouldn’t break up the audio and video.

Also at dnx36, you must have tons of media before it becomes taxing on your system drives…especially on a unity style system.

Glenn

[Kathryn Cates]

Thanks, Glenn. Yes, definitely want to access the media! Just trying to find a way to move media to another workspace and have Avid recognize it and not sure why it’s not happening. And yes, the level of hangup I am getting from the drive at this stage is starting to feel like a problem as well…

[Kathryn Cates]

So it turns out that the entire problem was actually an exceedingly basic issue of corrupt database files. Deleting those files on the source and target drives not only sped everything up, but automatically relinked the master clips to the (moved) audio files. Frankly, probably should have tried that first.

Am curious about Andrew’s suggestion, though, that working at the Finder level is a bad idea. Do I really have to go through Media Mover just to move media files to a new location without consolidating?

[Andrew Kimery]

[Kathryn Cates] “Am curious about Andrew’s suggestion, though, that working at the Finder level is a bad idea. Do I really have to go through Media Mover just to move media files to a new location without consolidating?”

I’m glad the problem was a simple fix though I’m confused by the reluctance to use the consolidate function. I use it all the time to move media between different workspaces on the ISIS, to and from external hard drives, etc.,. It’s very straight forward and I find it to be much quicker and more reliable than manually moving MXF files and then doing a relink (I never used Media Mover).

Doing a consolidate and selecting “delete original media files when done” will move data from Point A to Point B (as opposed to copying data) but sometimes I’m skittish so I uncheck that box. With that box unchecked a “copying media files” dialog box pops up and I’ll select “relink master clips to media on the target drive” and that will have my master clips link to the media at Point B and it will create another set of master clips ending in “.old” that will link to the media at Point A. When the consolidate is complete and I’ve verified that everything went okay I’ll delete the “.old” master clips plus all the associated media and that will get rid of the media at Point A (so I don’t have unwanted duplicate media taking up space).