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Opening .avb and reconnecting with AMA
I’ll preface this by saying I’m primarily a Premiere/FCP editor who’s seriously rusty with Avid. Please be gentle…
I’ve got a promo to cut, based on another editor’s subdown of an enormous amount of material. He’s done a loose cut with Avid offline files he’s created, and send me a .avb file, suggesting I relink it with AMA to continue on with.
I’ve taken the .avb into Avid 7.0.4. Of course everything is offline, and the filenames have .new.0x appended. I can’t for the life of me work out how to AMA link these to the original media files I have.
I should mention that he’s working on PC, me on Mac, so our hard drive names are different. It’s also possible he’s got a different organisation of the original media, compared to what I’ve been given by the producer.
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3 Replies
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Who did the initial AMA link? Where are the files that were linked to? Do you have the bins for the AMA linked files?
AMA link and relink works best when you AMA link to the files on one computer…to a drive that has the raw media. AND DO NOT CHANGE THAT DIRECTORY. Then transcode…edit…and then when done, connect the drive with the raw camera files, open all the AMA bins…make sure they link and can be seen. Then open the sequence and relink to AMA…all the open bins.
If you both have copies of the camera masters, but the file directory is different…even the names of the drive different…and you try to link, there will be issues. You also need the AMA bins…and you might have to try to link those to your camera masters first (which can be tricky if the directory is different than the first time they were linked)….and then relink the sequence. The “.new” doesn’t interfere with this…Avid ignores that. But the direct path to the originals is essential.
Shane
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Because your drive names can’t match, going from Mac to Win, you will have the tougher path to a relink.
If you have the original link bins, even though they are offline, you can simply reactivate those links by ALT dragging from your explorer into those bins. (Card 1 to card 1 etc) This will refresh your original links with the new path.
If you don’t have the original link bins, or there are waaaaaay too many of them to spend the time doing 1 bin at a time, you can simply make a new bin called AMA links new, and follow the same procedure.
go card by card, or folder by folder, depending on the type of media it is, and alt drag from your explorer window to your new bin. You have to release the mouse button before the alt button, or it will start importing instead of linking…also you will see the icon change to a curved arrow I think when it is about to link.
I’ve done what you are about to do on a project that had 100 Tbs of raw 4K footage from a 8 month shoot…it wasn’t fun, and I had to end up creating a couple of new ama link bins, just because they were getting too big, and taking forever to save…but it will work.
From there open all your new ama link bins, select all the clips in those bins, and right click on your sequence and relink using the “reling to selected clips in all open selected bins. You may have to adjust the tape id, source id settings, but it should work.
You may also find that once you bring in new ama links, that the old ones start working again.
Glenn
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Thanks Shane and Glenn. In the end I left Avid on this. I got an AAF (linking to the original media into Resolve and reconnected the media m manually from there, before carrying on in Premiere. I wasn’t 100% confident that the folder structure I had was the same as what the other editor had (another post house had been involved at some point as well)
I think the editor who sent me the .avb files and myself have learned something the hard way here. An AAF with truncated media probably would have been easier, but you get there in the end.
Again, thanks both for your help.
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