why is avid media management the best?

[Hector Berrebi]

hey Matt

this became a quite a long answer… didn’t have time to write a short one

i use both avid and FCP for many years, and teach both systems in several colleges and schools.

the FCP inferior media management issue has been around for a long time and in part is related to how different both systems are in dealing with media.

however accusations like that don’t just appear without a reason.
this is what think.

1. Media Path. FCP remembers where your media is, ANYWHERE, which means that if you’re messy (and a lot of post people are) you might disconnect a drive, a flash drive or even eject a CD which had on it media you used and now is offline. if you’re not that messy, you might rearrange a large project and misplace stuff, put folders in new folders, change their names or, by accident, delete them and media becomes offline. FCP remembers a path, any path, and allocates it to media, break or change the path – media offline. its a lot more frequent to get offline files when opening a project in FCP then in AVID, true, its not too hard to reconnect, but it can be a hassle. i’ve often had to handle large projects for conform or online and depending on how messy the offline people work, i did pull out my hair in anguish several times. Once, on a feature that came in for re-editing of a few scenes the audio was all wrong once we reconnected, and as it was several months after the last person worked on it, and the project was transferred to a few hard drives, it took hell to realize eventually that somewhere in the HD’s there was another folder with the correct audio files.
Avid (pre AMA) remembers one path only – the Avid Mediafiles folder. it has to be on top level of your drive and it can’t be renamed. very hard to lose a path this way, even if you are a very messy person.

FCP stores the file’s path in the clips properties, if this path is not there anymore, you have to manually point FCP to the new path to reconnect. in most cases (all cases?) you don’t have to point avid anywhere to find anything. closest to that is refreshing media directories, or forcing AVID to re-scan media folder by trashing msm files.

2. media management tools. FCP had a decent set of tools to find, reconnect, move, or recompress media. however, recently i discovered a bug that really pissed me on a tight project. i was onlining a project, and in media manager tool, i chose to recompress the sequence to Prores. i gave it a new destination and started the 22 hour process (40 minute sequence). 2 hours before it ended, a cable was accidently disconnected and the process stopped, unfinished. now, in Avid, you would start it again, telling Avid to “ignore media already on target drive” and that’s what Avid will do. FCP does not have this feature, furthermore, as FCP only creates the new project/sequence at the end of the process and then associates the new media with it, i couldn’t automatically reconnect the sequence to the new media in order to check what was missing and only recompress what i needed (instead of 22 hours again). i had to manually reconnect 160 or so clips in order to determine what wasn’t recompressed before i could start the process again… hassle.

its not that the FCP tools are all bad. i like how media management works most of the time. once in a while, i really hate them though.

now that MC5 is so strong on AMA, avid users will soon find out how organized they must be when working, or encounter some media pain.

yet, in AMA, if you move a QT file out of its directory, it becomes offline, move it back in, and its on line again… no repointing to the file. do the same in FCP, and you’ll have to reopen the project for the file to be back online on its own, or manually reconnect.

in one aspect i think FCP is better than Avid in media handling and management. the Log and Transfer tool is a nifty piece of work, and i miss it when i’m in Avid. counting out XDCAM and P2, tapeless workflows in Avid are still not quite there. its getting close with AMA, but still some way to go. i think a the transcode process in Avid should be put in a new tool for logging and inputing media from cards.

there’s probably more, but i must get back to work 🙂

hope this helps

hector

Hector Berrebi
Schibber Group
prePost Consulting

[Matt Stoltz]

Hey Hector

Whew -yeah that was a lot but I did understand your point- No one really explained it to me like that but I do get it.

Although -with Avid Ive never worked on super big projects so I never saw the point -I always did 30 commercial spots -so I never had a lot of media to deal with –

thanks for all your info though.

Matt

[Kris Anderson]

Great reply Hector.

I find similar things with FCP over Avid.

What I also find is that most Avid editors I know have come from the old school linear suites etc and have been educated from the beginning about session management. When moving into the non-linear world they carried these work practices with them. Because the buy-in price for AVID used to be so high, only ‘high end’ facilities could afford to set up Avid suites. FCP, on the other hand, has always been cost effective which allows anyone to buy in, regardless of their training or experience levels. Some of them understand managment, most don’t. I see it a lot. It’s very frustrating.

That’s just an opinion, though. But one that’s been formed after editing on Avid for 16 years and FCP for the last 3 or 4.

[Michael Phillips]

An example of a large project was Alice in Wonderland 3D that had over 5000 bins in a single project… not to mention how many clip in each bin and how many columns of metadata on each clip.

Michael

Michael Phillips

[Matt Stoltz]

Hey Mike

Ummm yeah Id say that is a HUGE project

5000 bins –really ? thats nuts

matt

[Lindsay Simpson]

Hi,

I enjoyed your description of the two media management systems. I have just started recently working with Avid primarily MC 5 Nitris DX after years of working with FCP. One of hte biggest humps I’ve hit comes down to these system differences. I liked the user control allowed by FCP, and being an organized person was able to develop an almost foolproof system to avoid media offline. Reaching this organized state took many early mistakes though!

I have been wondering if there was any way in Avid to import tapeless media and name the clips along the way, like Log and Transfer. Am I correct in thinking this isn’t possible, at least not yet?

I find it perpetually frustrating that all of my clips are imported with generic ‘MyClip000#’ etc. This is especially challenging as we anticipate development of a HUGE stock footage library which will need to be carefully and effectively organized. While I understand taht I am able to rename a clip in a bin once it is imported and off AMA, since the original master clip retains the generic title it seems impossible to catalogue using somethign like CatDV in an effective, efficient manner. I am in the process of tyring to establish our new Cache-A archive system, which uses data tapes to store media and has its own manager. Ever heard of it?

Does anyone have any suggestions for an efficient, effective way to catalogue large amounts of footage with Avid?

Lindsay