media tool scares the bejesus out of me

[Christy Denes]

The media tool should indeed be approached with a certain amount of trepidation and great care! Are you being careful about selecting only the current project when you run the media tool?

Also, you can set the clips to sort by column like Tape which helps make sure you don’t accidentally delete the wrong thing.

Are you running out of drive space? why are you doing this anyway? I generally try to avoid it at all costs.

[Jon Zanone]

When you start media tool, there are 3 little check boxes – one for master clips, one for precomputes and the media files. If you don’t want to see precomputes, uncheck that box. Make sure you only have the project you are working with selected, and check only the drives you want to see. The file system of the Avid may not make sense to you, but it allows you to name clips anything you want with no penalty (even naming your clips the same thing).

Media tool is very powerful, but there is no need to be scared of it. Just curl up with the manual and get to know it a little better.

Jon

“Jamming our heads full of figures and angles
And telling us stuff that we already know”

Willie The Wandering Gypsy & Me
Billy Joe Shaver

[Dave Rumbelow]

ok, thanks everyone
I can confirm that I was very sure to only select the drives and projects I needed when searching using the tool
I have opened a project today to find media offline that is not offline, that is to say that when I right click, reveal source file avid points me at mxf data, however when I load the clip into the source monitor or timeline it reads as offline,
wtf!!!

[Christy Denes]

You may have some corruption somewhere. But before panicking, go to File menu and reload media database, and refresh media files. You may also want to rebuild your media databases by going into the OMFI MediaFiles folder(s) on your drive(s) and throwing away the 2 database files (they will be the most recent files if you sort by modified date). Make sure Media Composer is quit, then throw all the media database files in the trash, and relaunch Media Composer. It will take a bit of time to rebuild all the media databases but it is a great thing to do.

[Dave Rumbelow]

OK, the plot thickens
It is not the media, it’s a matte. The missing clip is built from a png sequence with alpha and sits in the bin as a matte key effect.
so the transparency and everything is gone but the alphaless animation is still there.
Is it possible that the matte and the media are on different drives as I have refreshed the database files for the drive the media lives on but no others.
Has anyone experienced this, loosing just part of a piece of media?
do you reccomend rebuilding all my databases?
is there anything destructive about deleting database files? I really dont want to get myself in any deeper water than I’m already in.

[Job Ter burg]

A few things.

In your bin or in the Media Tool, you can choose to display headings, one of them is labeled “Offline”, and it will tell you which of tracks of the clip are offline. So you might have a clip that still has sound, but offline video. Reveal File will bring you to the audiofile(s), but the video will be offline.

Whenever you are deleting stuff from the Media Tool, make sure to have the ‘Project’ heading visible.

There is nothing actually destructive about rebuilding the media databases, but you need to take some precautions: Whenever you have huge amounts of files in a folder, rebuilding media databases may take a long time. Also, rebuilding the media databases eats RAM, so if you are rebuilding huge partitions or lots of folders, do them one by one. You can hide mediafiles folders by renaming them, prior to launching the Avid.

OMFI MediaFiles folders can get really big, try to keep less than 5000 files in a folder an any time (although I have used 15000 files in a folder, but things get really slow). MXF folders automatically max out at 5000 files, and a new folder gets created.