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Subclips not pointing to correct media
OK so heres a real nut to crack.
I recently received a feature project in final stages of editing. It has been moved from a different edit house to mine. I logged the project a few months ago and set it up but its been a few months since I last saw it and of course alot of changes has happened.
I set up the project on machine one. Things are working. But I started having problems when setting up the project to be edited on a second machine via Editshare. The audio wouldnt turn up. I realized this had to do with Editshare not really liking anything not wrapped in mxf, and since the audio was located in the omfi files folder I started transcoding through the consolidate (everything is done on machine one%)function to move it into the Avid Media Files folder. And lo and behold. Stuff started to come online.
Everything except for 4 days of material. These 4 days were material re-shot after wrap and so has been added after the initial logging of project. I assume it has also been exported to sound in AAF at some point, because there are .new files strewn all over the place.
So I start investigating. As with all big projects where something has gone awry its a mess. And it is not consistent in its faultiness either so troubleshooting has been a headache.
What I am finding is that the subclips in the sequences pertaining to the 4 days of material not coming online on second machine, is not pointing back to the correct media files. They are i.e. pointing to a .new file that no longer can be found in the appropriate folder. And I cannot for the love of me find the correct file. No audio master clips are highlighted when I use select media relatives from the subclip. The weird thing is the clips are playing on the timeline even though it cannot find the master clip it is playing from…
I have found some master clips with corresponding names but they are linked to media on a drive at the old location… Happy birthday me!
Im assuming the .new files they are pointing to has been created while exporting the new material to sound via aaf. Maybe they have been mistakenly deleted somewhere along the way.
So my questions are as follows…
– Is there any way to manage what master clips and subsequently what media files a subclip points back to?
– Can I change what master clip and media file a subclip points to without having the current master clip it is pointing to in the project? (Because I cant find it)
– Why or how on earth is the subclip playing on the sequence if the master clip it is pointing to is no longer there? Is it even possible for a subclip to play if the master clip (not the media files) has been deleted? Is it because a subclip can point to several master clips at once? Only displaying one as reference when match framing? Im clinging to straws here…Any sort of enlightening info would be much appreciated. Have at this point no idea what to do and all avenues of testing has been explored. Im not the most skilled media composer guru. Know the basics and what not to do and so on but when faced with complicated problem solving such as this Im falling a bit short. Heres to learning tho.
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4 Replies
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If you do a “set bin display” for the bin with just the sequence in it, and then “show reference clips” you will see all the master clips that made up the sequence from subclips or not. Maybe that will help get you back on track for finding stuff.
Also, open the Media Tool and do a “seek media relatives” from the sublcip and it should highlight the master clip there. It is possible to delete the master clip pointer to the media without deleting the media but if was ever edited into a sequence or has a subclip you can retrieve the master clip from whence it came. Once found in the Media Tool, drag the clip to a bin and you now have the master clip.
Michael
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Here’s my understanding of the relationships:
Masterclips can represent tape captures, file imports, AMA sources and rendered media.
The Masterclip contains metadataata about the media it’s linked to (if it is linked to any, master clips can have no media link and show offline media) the drive they last had media linked to as well as the tracks related to the master clip etc.Much of this metadata can’t be changed if linked to media but unlink the master clip (ctrl shift and the re-link command becomes an unlink command) and you can modify tracks and other metadata you couldn’t normally.
When you re-link a master clip it looks for media that matches the clip. The re-link dialog offers control over this re-link as you can easily multiple media matches to a master clip. (If you transcode a clip to a new resolution you now have 2 sets of media valid for the original master clip. the thing thing that keeps the original clip linked and the new transcoded clip linked to the transcoded media is that they remember that relationship)
For MC to show you media and allow you to manipulate it you need Master clips in bins, so the media tool creates virtual masterclips that represent the media found on all the drives MC can see at that moment. Drag one of those media tool mastercips to a bin and it makes a real masterclip.
Confusingly masterclips can be duplicated and behave independently or cloned in which case changes to one masterclip ripple to the other one. (that makes a very powerful workflow but with some serious pitfalls)
Subclips point to a masterclip or more accuratley to the media related to that masterclip so can be re-link just like a masterclip and would then show as related to potentially a different masterclip.
Subclips don’t need the masterclip to exists so if you make a subclip you can delete the masterclip. However if media exists for that subclip a virtual masterclip will be created in the media tool and you could you open the media tool and dragged it back to the project.If you consolidate or transcode a subclip you will find new master clips created that represent the new media created including any handles specified. These can be deleted if not needed.
The most common issues with linking are related to poor naming of clips or tapes allowing media to be made that can potentially relate to more than one master clip. For example capturing tapes with repeat timecode under the same tape name (to avoid this you’d be sure to creante dummy tape neame for each timecode repeat) or importing clips with the same filenames and timecodes.
The initial ingest of all this will create media correctly associated with their original master clips.
But should the project be opened with the media drive disconnected the masterclips loose their links and show offline media.Reconnect the media drive and now MC will try and relink each master clip based on the metadata and wrongly can find the wrong media and create the wrong linkings (well actually the right linking but not to the media it was liked to before)
Hopefully this makes things a bit clearer. Not easy in a webpost and it’s much clearer when I cover it in my VET media management course
Pat Horridge
Technical Director, Trainer, Avid Certified Instructor
VET
Production Editing Digital Media Design DVD
T +44 (0)20 7505 4701 | F +44 (0)20 7505 4800 | E pat@vet.co.uk |
http://www.vet.co.uk | Lux Building 2-4 Hoxton Square London N1 6US -
To fill in some other detail, at a guess, the media is being stored in AvidMXF media spaces, which have the property that MXF files (in the “Avid MediaFiles -> MXF -> #num” folders) are visible to all, but it is specifically not possible to share media in the OMFI MediaFiles folder. You can write files there, because Avid doesn’t work properly if it doesn’t have read/write access to that folder, but we specifically recommend that all media in AvidMXF spaces needs to be in MXF files, not OMF.
EditShare 6 also offers AvidStyle spaces, which do allow for hybrid MXF/OMF workflows, and also allow for project files to be stored in the same volume as media files. This emulates many aspects of the Avid Unity workflow that you may already be familiar with.
For the other questions, it sounds like you’re finding help here, but if the server has a support contract, we’d be happy to chat about it as well. Our contact information is at https://www.editshare.com/support
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Chris Devers
EditShare Tech Support
support ( at ) editshare • com
https://editshare.com
Twitter: @EditShare & @ESLightWorks -
Thanks guys! All of you gave me a little piece of the info I needed to solve the problem. And I even learnt a couple of things on the way. Stuff is up and running.
You deserve flowers! @}-.-`-Now, I need to snap on the database cleaning gloves. Ridiculous amount of duplicates.
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