Question on AMA and long duration clips

[Ricky Barrow]

AMA is very processor intensive. You are correct in that Avid likes Avid media. I would just set to import and go fishing then return to edit. A lot less frustration with something you have no control over. Sorry I can’t be of real help, others may comfort you more with some real solid advice. 🙂

Ricky

[Michael Phillips]

It’s in the way the AMA plug-in reads certain media – QuickTime H.264 for example, the longer the file, the slower the process. I have found that anything over 10-15 minutes long on sources loses the responsiveness I expect while editing. It becomes a transcode. I have used MPEG Streamclip in the past open long files, mark IN-OUT and create new media of just the spanned section needed.

Michael

Michael Phillips

[Ed Cilley]

I agree with Ricky – go fishing. Even ice fishing.

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Anything worth doing at all, is worth doing well.
– Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield

[Mike Jeffs]

I am working with XDcam 50mbit MOV files, they are muliple angles of a concert. so i cant go the stream clip route to shorten them as i need the whole concert 🙂 it just seems a pain to have to import them. I’m doing this now and with all 6 angles my editor has been importing since 2:00pm yesterday, still have 6 hours to go. this work flow is a little be to get use to coming from FCP7.

thanks for the import, Looks like fishing here i come 🙂

Mike Jeffs
Video Coordinator
BYU-Idaho

[Richard Sanchez]

That’s strange. I’m currently working on a show shot XDCAM 50Mbs and we haven’t experienced that issue. We’re mixing framerates at 59.94i ad 23.976p. I have noticed that the 59.94i clips take significantly longer to transcode than the 23.976, but haven’t noticed any issues outside of that.

We’re using U1 and U2 drives, and strangely enough have noticed that transcodes go much faster on the U1s than on the U2s, despite them being marketed to read faster. I’m assuming part of that is due to the fact that the U2 is USB3 based, but has to conform to the Mac Pros USB2 ports.

Are you using a U1, U2, or a 1600 deck? Also, what version of Avid?

Richard Sanchez
Los Angeles, CA

“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks

[Mike Jeffs]

[Richard Sanchez] “Are you using a U1, U2, or a 1600 deck? Also, what version of Avid?”

I’m using MC 6 on Mac pro Quad core 2.26Ghz 6Gbram OS 10.6.8

The files are created from a 6 Channel Omneon Specturm set to XDcam 50mbit 422 self containted MOVs

Mike Jeffs
Video Coordinator
BYU-Idaho

[Michael Phillips]

if they were MXF wrapped XDCAM it would be an easy AMA and real performance. The QT wrapper must be killing the performance.

Michael

Michael Phillips

[Richard Sanchez]

Do you plan to do an offline at low res? If so, then the transcode will take time. In general, I find it’s faster to link to AMA and transcode than it is to import. However, if you plan to edit high res, you might try setting your format tab to HD. Are you 23.976 or 59.94i? In any event, make sure your format tab matches both raster size and frame rate, and set your import media creation settings to XDCAM 50Mbs, and you might be able to fast import.

Richard Sanchez
Los Angeles, CA

“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks

[Mike Jeffs]

[Richard Sanchez] “Do you plan to do an offline at low res? If so, then”

Yes I fact that is what I’m doing right now, I AMA the clips in to Avid, and then selected all the clips and went to transcode, I’m transcoding them to a low res 17.5 Mbit XDcam resolution. (not sure if thats the best option or not) This is what started my initial post, just to select all the clips and go to consolated/transcode i would get the spinning beach ball for a couple of minutes.

Mike Jeffs
Video Coordinator
BYU-Idaho

[Richard Sanchez]

When going low res, I usually offline at 15:1s, or in the case of our show our 59.94i material is coming in at 10:1m and our 23.976 is coming in at 8:1m. The m resolutions are very low resolutions originally made for multicam. They’re very blocky, but require very little drive space and bandwidth. If you’re in an HD project, you won’t see them available, but as soon as you switch the format tab to SD you’ll see them come available to you. The quality is very low, but we’re shooting about 400 discs an episode, so we need to preserve storage space. If you have the space, good ole’ DV wouldn’t be a bad way to offline as well.

Richard Sanchez
Los Angeles, CA

“We are the facilitators of our own creative evolution.” – Bill Hicks