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Proxy workflow for Avid
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Oh, I’ve kicked everything around. And I’ll tell you calling something an extension of FCP isn’t really a compliment. I’ve used it for years and was never really happy with it. It tried to do too much all at once and wasn’t great at any of them. Still, it worked, after a fashion. You have to understand that after years of online tape editing I bought my non-linear first system in 1989. I have the scars from arrows on my back. I’ve worked on just about every system ever made (except Edius, actually) and not for short periods, but for years at a time. I’ve been through the wringer with all of them. Someday maybe I’ll write the long list of complaints . Very few of them, if any, have measured up. Oh well, it is what it is. From my perspective right now the most important things for me are robustness and stability. As extensive as my complaints have been about Avid over the decades the one thing I’ve always given them has been how solid they’ve been in stability. Adobe has come a very long way indeed, but I wouldn’t call it terribly stable. And where Premiere shines, well, I’m not all that interested. You see, I live in a very nice little walled garden. I get to control the footage, even shooting much of it myself, as it comes it. Since I stopped being a standalone post house years ago, I really don’t have to deal with all sorts of mixed formats coming in the door. I capture my footage just the way I want it: ProRes. It’s been cut that way and output that way for quite a long time, now. Switching to DNxHD? Ok, no big deal. Everything coming in new now will be captured native Avid. I want to work native to the editing system: it’s faster, easier, more stable. I’m not that interested in AMA or Premiere’s ability to deal with all sorts of formats more or less natively. Of course I’ll use both AMA and Premiere when I really need them, but it will be on very isolated occasions. (Notice that all the recommendations are to transcode your AMA footage to Avid native anyway.) One upcoming acquisition is a Pix240. We’ll hang that off a camera and record directly into DNxHD. Creative suite will be here for all its other reasons, so I’m sure Premiere will be used for some odd things. But it just doesn’t have the hard core, banging on the keyboard tools I used day in and day out on longer form documentaries. And I’m looking forward to Avid’s media management (as opposed to AMA) just to help me corral thousands of clips.
I’ll be playing with some Red footage in Adobe and some Canon 300 clips from a friend of mine. But I really see Avid being more useful for all my HDCam tapes that I’ve been shooting since 2001 on a Sony 700 and then 750. It’s getting more interesting with file-based only. I’ve been doing that for several years, now, capturing complete shoots in ProRes 422 and then archiving the footage. Getting all the cross linking to work with proxies and such is what’s getting interesting with Avid. CatDV made it a lot easier with FCP and Premiere.Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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I’ve been taking a look at MME. It seems like it might have some possibilities. The web site needs to have more information about CatDV integration, however. For someone like me, going between FCP and Avid holds little interest. Plus I have plenty of tools for doing that as it is.
I’m mostly interested in the creation of low resolution proxies from Avid managed DNxHD files. They need to be portable so they can be viewed on any system. So no odd codecs like DNx or ProRes. They need to be small and lightweight so we can have thousands of hours online and/or packed onto a pocket-sized firewire drive to hang off a laptop. He have to be able to link back to master footage sitting on the editing system, and do it without creating lots of extra or intermediary files. Fun, isn’t it?Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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it’s really the “rough” cut (I NEVER do rough work, dammit). It’s also been the ability to work in the FCP timeline using the proxy footage and switch to master files later. Tape has always been nice because it’s just been a matter of recapturing at full resolution. Going all file-based for footage gets a little “hinky.” AMA seems to work a lot better going back and forth between offline and full rez files better than footage captured off tape into full quality DNxHD and then saved as files. Trying to link those files to proxies in CatDV is where the breakdown seems to be. It might be a weird combination of Avid managed media and AMA to CatDV. Or something.
The drag and drop from CatDV to a bin is sweet, but not the be all and end all. And I’m not particularly worried about getting metadata added in CatDV into the files on the editing system. All that information is what CatDV is for. And that’s why we have a workgroup server so we can share fully updated information. Saying that, it seems crucial that some specific metadata goes back and forth, disk label, tape ID, those sorts of things that aide in linking files to other copies.Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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Robb your post reminds me of something a customer said to me recently… “I have been screwed by Apple, Adobe and Avid at some point over the years so I will just own all three and use which ever one I feel like that day”
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you left out discreet and the people who bought EMC
LOL
Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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Rob, as you read about MME, just replace FCP with CatDV, as they share the XML and all, it’s really the same thing in a way.
I’m curious about your mention of capturing Avid media. What are you using to do that? I know BlackMagic and others say they can but it’s really .mov wrapper, not true Avid MXF you can drop into the “1” folder. Is that what you’re talking about or are you doing a fast import? From what I know, only a few expensive devices can actually make Avid MXF media you can edit without import or transcode.
The things that make Avid more stable (the db and its own MXF format) are what frustrates outside developers. Once you are away from paths, no one else can play. The online/offline relinks you talk about are done in their db, not in the filesystem. Wonderful but not very open.
I’m hoping AMA gives us the hooks and it looks like, for certain workflows, it will. But I’ve been burnt for 4 years on the promise of Media Composer. I’m staying with what I know for now. Oh and then there’s that little bit about Avid bleeding money every quarter… How long do you get to do that before the doors close? I refuse to even consider what would happen to us all. Hey Adobe, wanna buy a company cheap?
Let me know on that media, but I’m guessing you’re still importing, yes?
bryson
bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com
northshoreautomation.com
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Using a Kona 3 card in an older 8 core Mac Pro. MC 6 and then 6.5 and the ability to use the Kona card is what’s prompting the exploration.
I’m capturing as DNxHD 145. Weird seeing three files (again) instead of a single ProRes MOV file. I can import directly from the “1” directory into CatDV. Sending over an ALE isn’t always as reliable. The MXF option and Calibrated plugin seem to be working. I can play the MXF files just fine in CatDV. (Quicktime will play them, but as individual steams and not as combined audio and video. In and out of FCP is fine, of course. My first experiments going back to MC, not so hot. I can send an XML to FCP which opens and plays it just fine. Automatic Duck formats it to an Avid compatible AFF and the media doesn’t link. 🙁
Like I said, it’s an exploration. I think Avid’s in better shape than it was a couple years ago. The last time I was at NAB I couldn’t even get someone to sell me anything. The change to a more open architecture in 6/6.5 and new pricing means a great deal. The pre-production model offered to me in ’89 was $85,000 without a media drive and had a service contract costing, oh, I don’t remember, $10,000-$20,000 a year.
I suppose I can always dig up an old RM-440 controller. And if worse comes to worst, I have a 16mm six-plate flat bed sitting in the corner.
Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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I bet it still works!
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Not right now. Speed control servo died and we never had it fixed. Only a couple reels of 16 laying around here and maybe one reel of mag stripe.
🙁Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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I’m narrowing down the process. It’s starting to look like the approach is to have the three sets of footage: one full rez, one low rez MXF, and a third set small proxies for CatDV away from the editing systems. The full rez will be captured through the Kona 3 card (working on my non-64 bit kernel Mac Pro) in DNxHD MXF onto “archive drives. Then I’ll transcode to low rez MXF files that will live for long periods on the system’s raid. This will give me full time access of lots of footage for long periods. (linking back and forth has been just fine). A separate set of CatDV proxies live on a separate drive hanging off my network. That’s connected to the one other person viewing footage, and anyone else needing to look around from time to time. A copy of these CatDV also lives on a portable firewire drive that goes into my bag, so I can go home (every couple of weeks, anyway).
At first it was difficult getting low resolution mxf files that were small enough to be worthwhile. It’s reall about storage and the solid connections to the database. Turns out that I have an interesting wrinkle in that our footage is 1080i. From the beginning we’ve had HDCam oriented toward broadcast. Once I figured out the trick of switching the project format to NTSC 30i I was able to pick 20:1 mxf and away I went.
Still have issues getting data into CatDV. It works just fine if I scan the entire Avid MXF/1 directory structure. But that doesn’t really give me the bin structure I’m looking for, just the project name (and a production if I want it) But if I capture to bins in the Avid and then export them to CatDV using ALE, the data comes in but there’s no link to the footage. I’m guessing that’s because these are tape captures. I can work around this for now: even the way we’re setup now in FCP, each shoot is a “project.” I can live with that for now. But it will get a lot harder when there are lots of clips within the Avid Media files structure. I suspect that it will work a little differently when I start testing the AMA files. That’s what I’ll do with my existing ProRes footage. I plan on transcoding then to mxf so the original high rez files can go away.
I still have to fool with MME to see if it makes life easier.
Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.
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