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Working with External FW Drives in a College Mac Lab with Avid MC 7
Hello,
I am working in Media Composer 6.5 or 7 in a college Mac Lab. The computers are designed to erase anything that is put on the Mac HD after the students log out. All of the students bring their own External Firewire Drives and save everything on those so their work will not get erased.
The students open up Media Composer for the 1st time and set the software to go their own external drives. At the end of their editing session they eject their drives and bring them home with them.
When they come back the next day or the day after or even go home to continue to work on their projects, how can they get right back to where they left off? Can they just open up Avid, set their drive to their own external drive and start working? Will everything link up perfectly?
Thanks in advance
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6 Replies
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When you plug the external drive in, Avid will read the database that is with the media on the drive, and will repopulate your bins with media. You shouldn’t have to “set up” anything. The Drive letter assigned by your home computer will probably be different than the one assigned by the school…this should be irrelevant to Avid, as long as the database is contained in the MXF/1 folder…which unless you do something manually to alter it, it will be.
If you are AMA linking to footage on the external drive, then a database will not be built, and you may have to point avid to the footage again, doing a re-link to ama operation. But again, if you do a straight import or digitize to create avid media, you should be good. Just be aware of the differences if using MC 7 at school, and and older version at home. Check Avids compatibility specs about this. (you’ll want to make sure you are on the most up to date legacy version possible)
Glenn
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It will probably be AMA linked footage at first, but then transcoding will take place.
So, if it’s AMA, once they plug their FireWire Drive into the computer, they would open Avid, when the opening screen comes on, all they would do is point to their hard drive and when Avid opens the media should be all linked up and ready to edit? Am I right about that?
Thanks
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Where is the project file with the bins? If they erase the main drives, then you should also have your project folder (with Avid bins) on that drive as well.
Michael
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Hi,
The project file and the bins and all of the media will be on the external drives.
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I have the same question! We are running MC7 on Macs with 10.8.4 and it seems that the admin user must AMA link to the external drive and specific folder before a standard user can AMA link to this drive & folder. When I create a new folder on the external drive, footage in this new folder can not be AMA linked! Any help here would be awesome!
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Just got the solution from Avid! In case you find yourself in the same boat some day here is the solution…
“Please set the permission on userssharedavidmediacomposerama management folder and all the files inside it to read and write. ”
When you perform a Repair Permissions through Disk Utility it is changing the permissions inside the AMA Management folder so not everything inside the folder has read/write permission, hence the AMA link errors. Just remember to set the AMA Management folder and all enclosed items to read/write after running Permission repairs!
Patrice Scanlon
Technical Director
Video/Audio/Electronic Music/Dance/Interactive Performance
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