Jimmy See
1
Avid Coin
Forum Replies Created
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I really have no idea whether the card in this system is a cheapo or something that should be better. Ultimately though, it seems to have been the case in my (admittedly quite limited) number of different experiences that USB 3 cards added to a system that doesn’t already have USB 3 on the motherboard from the get-go seems to be a problem and always seems to be this kind of a problem where you’ll never see the issue until you’ve used it for a long time in a number of different circumstances and chanced on the one combination of steps that causes the card to crap itself. It’s near impossible to test for because it’s always some situation you couldn’t predict finding yourself in until you’re in it. If you’re looking to buy one and see reviews or comments online saying “I’ve had lots of problems with this” you’ll see a hundred more from well meaning people saying “I don’t know what happened with that guy’s setup but this has worked fine for me for years” but almost certainly, they’re using it mostly for simple file copying and wouldn’t encounter the circumstances that trigger the issues which seems to happen more often to people in video production.
I’ve seen USB 3 cards that work fine (as far as can be established) all of the time, until you plug in any kind of hard drive from the Lacie brand, I’ve seen cards that are very cheap which use generic open source drivers which seem to work in all circumstances except webcams (bizarre, but actually thankfully I’m aware of this because it was actually documented and something you’re warned of ahead of time), I’ve cards where, if one plugs in any kind of storage in to the ports during system startup, the startup is delayed by several minutes (even though Boot priority sets the system drive as default), I’ve seen cards that work fine until you plug in a hub and attempt to plug in additional devices sharing the bandwidth of one port – in which case it crashes the system, I’ve seen cards for mac pros which work fine until apple updates OSx and then it starts working totally unexpectedly in random scenarios.
Godamn, now that I’m putting it altogether like this, I trust them even less than I used to. Stupid USB 3 cards, damn things just sitting there in the back of your machine waiting for the moment to pounce and screw up your project.
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Actually, thanks for the suggestions, but I had a thought as to the cause that actually would be easier to test quickly and with minimal disruption so I thought I’d give that a shot before diving in to your suggestions. It turns out to have been down to a PCI usb 3.0 card we’re using. Explanation below for interest.
I recalled that the machine I’m using, an HPz800 that we’re renting and which has had a few customisation since it was originally purchased by the owner, has always had a few issues with USB 3.0 ports which weren’t part of the original machine and are add-ons in the form of a PCI USB3.0 card. Though I’m forced to use it everyday, I’ve always directed some suspicion toward it, which looks like it might have been well founded now.
I figured that that error, mentioning ‘async file system error’ taken literally did imply some kind of issue to do with two things that should be in sync with each other, but weren’t. I’d also experience issues in other circumstances with similarly cryptic error messages for which I could find no relevant info but which also mentioned things relating to streams, and mentioning the words ‘sync’ and many of them talking about audio strangely enough. These error messages sound from their wording like they’re describing the types of issues I’d be more familiar with seeing related to networked storage but as this is local it sounded like similar problems occurring between the computer and the local storage with regard to pulling data across in a manner where timing and synchronisation streams was important and was going awry. I don’t really understand why it would apply to consolidating as that seems to be a process of copying files one stream at a time linearly from one location to another but I just ignored that. I knew the USB 3 connection was iffy, so I just tried to plugging the the drive in to the USB 2.0 slots, which would be connected to the machine’s motherboard directly, not any 3rd party cards and lo and behold, it consolidated a large batch of media just fine (but of course, real slow).
This appears to be the result of some sort of obscure incompatibility or compromised functionality of that particular usb 3 card and the machine in to which it’s installed. I would mention what manufacturer it is but I can’t seem to find that information in the device manager. I’m fairly sure this is the issue, but wouldn’t be able to pin that down very thoroughly since the card seems to work fine in other circumstances, file copying using the OS is fine, as is most situations using drives plugged in to this USB 3.0 card for pretty much any task. It seems however that the consolidate process in Avid, though essentially a file copy operation, uses USB 3.0 in a very specific way that isn’t working here with this add-on card. That’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility or a big surprise to me, I’ve found nebulous issues like these crop up on machines with USB 3 cards added in by PCI and which originally had only usb 2.0 ports. Strange problems manifest in in very specific instances that 99% of users wouldn’t come across using the card. Sucks I can’t use USB 3 for consolidating now because USB 2 is damn slow, but at least that seems to have nixed the issue, and the actual consolidating of finished sequences stage would likely not be done on this machine anyway.
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I should say ‘for initial testing’, that is the first batch of tests I did prior to project start, the machine I’m now using was not available. I’m now doing further testing with this machine and have run in to the issue decribed. Hope that clears it up.
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Thanks Brent, I actually am intending to consolidate specifically, not transcode. These are finished sequences cut in this codec using Avid media brought in to the project via AMA linking then consolidating. This workflow was tested prior to project start. The idea is to transfer all materials from a cut to a separate drive.
I’m discovering the problem now a couple of months ahead of online by doing some more small scale tests to look for hiccups prior to the actual online beginning. For testing, the machine I’d actually be using for this task was not available so unfortunately this issue, which seems to be restricted only to my machine only, is affecting the plan because consolidation won’t work reliably, so I’m trying to sort it out now. Ultimately we should be okay because the consolidation stage doesn’t actually need to happen on this machine, but it is very confusing why this is happening and I’d prefer to try and sort it out just in case.
The plugin was the latest available at project start in June and used for bringing the media in to the project via consolidation. The issue interestingly enough doesn’t occur in that context, only when attempting to use consolidate for the purposes of moving Avid media from drive to drive.
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Yeh this type of decision seems to be like Avid’s speciality.
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The decision of which platform often comes down to much more mundane factors than actual ability of one or the other to edit the type of creative project you’re embarking on well because there’s not much on the market that can’t handle the type of sorting and cutting that you’re looking at with aplomb (there’s always technical advantages in the form of one or two specific quirks but speaking generally here). Most often the choice will come down to things like:
- Who you think will be working on the project and if they have a preference,
- If you’re working with other teams or production houses that use one or the other
- whether you have existing workflows and investment built around them that depend on one particular platform
- What you’re used to and how much hassle you can stand learning something new while on the job.
That means that the answers to your specifics could seem wishy-washy but that’s because there’s very little that can be held up as ‘better’ in one particular regard or another, that an enthusiastic fan of the ‘inferior’ platform couldn’t refute or challenge. Here’s my best shot though.
- 1. In my personal experience, Avid has made this part of post production (which has always been a nuisance at best and nightmare at worst) harder than it seems it should be when it comes tapeless workflows. When you read up on best practice for relinking and hear that people have run afoul of it, it’s usually revealed that they failed to take some steps at the start of the process that they should have done regarding metadata and especially tape names (even when there’s no tapes involved). While it’s fair enough that you should research what to do first and make sure you take all reasonable steps that can help make sure the process is smooth at the end, it has always seemed that the number of ‘gotchas’ and pitfalls that you can run in to unless you’re exceptionally careful when trying to conform tapeless media in Avid surprisingly large and while I’ve not scientifically compared it against Premiere, it certainly feels like one runs in to more issues with Avid because of missing or not knowing about some obscure step you were supposed to do at the start that is now not rectifiable at the end. I am far from a fan of conforming processes in Avid. There’s something else which I’ve put at the bottom of the post which may be a killer feature for Premiere that’s important here regarding proxies. It’s a new feature, but if it works well at scale as it does at small scale, it can really help you out.
- 2. Both of these pieces of software allow significant freedom in how you structure the project once you’ve started it and hence they’re both more than capable of facilitating best practice so long as you know what that is. The differences here are pretty slight and mostly down to a question of preference, however, by a nose I’d say Avid wins out. This isn’t because it necessarily does anything you can’t do in Premiere, or even does it better per-se, it’s more that it’s easier to implement a significant degree of organisational structure in Avid. As an example, metadata entry on individual clips is way better in Avid merely because of how the interface is organised. In Premiere this is hidden away as a kind of extra feature you could use if so inclined and you don’t have as much latitude in deciding how the metadata is presented in bins. With Avid, they know that you’re going to want to use metadata because it’s usually the platform of choice for large scale projects so rather than being treated as an extra feature, metadata entry, presentation and sorting is always easily visible and accessible. It’s also easier to export data for use in things like spreadsheets for example. I also found that the ability to sift through metadata is superior in Avid than Premiere, but i don’t know if it’s because it’s really better or I’ve not yet explored this in-depth enough in Premiere.
- 3. Both handle markers more or less identically. Metadata, in terms of metadata recorded in the media at capture as opposed to that which you enter, again it’s close but Avid is maybe slightly better in certain circumstances that mainly revolve around synchronising disparate timecodes and dealing with multicam shot in uncontrolled environments with each camera switching on and off at unpredictable intervals
Premiere’s enable/disable proxy function
These days, Premiere has included very good functionality for switching between proxy and online versions of media with a single click. The newest versions allow you to import online media in to the project, then tell it to create proxies (for which it will leverage the very capable and flexible Adobe Media encoder software) which can be switched on and off at will, when this has been done correctly, there’s no relink process or any traditional conforming, you simply enable or disable proxy clips. The real beauty of this is that you began by importing the online media in to the project, which creates master clips and then had the proxy generating process done from there. The implication of that is that the same Master clip is both the online and offline version, you’re not dealing with two sets of clips in the project, even though it is two different clips on disk. That alone makes things much easier, and means less to keep a track of. However, lest I sound like an Adobe Shill, I’ve only tested this feature in small scale projects. Initial outlook, very positive but at scale great features or seemingly stable software has a habit of falling apart.
Other considerations:
- Subclips in Premiere suck! If you make a subclip in Premiere, it considers it to be basically a separate master, you can’t matchframe it back to the original master which is a huge issue if you realise that there is more at the head or tail of the subclip that you didn’t include when you made it, but you now need. I believe it also has implications for conform but can’t confirm
- Multicamera clips are WAY better in Premiere, not least because you can adjust them after you’ve made them.
They’re treated like special timelines that can behave as source clips or timelines when it suits you. They’re very powerful- If you intend to send the edit to other software packages for different stages of Post Production, Avid is surprisingly unfriendly with many of them (except Pro Tools where it tends to be better). The lack of XML exporting support can be surprisingly disadvantageous despite the fairly wide support for AAF
- Avid has some performance advantages of lower powered systems in some cases, I’m not sure, but I think it has something to do with the unique way in which it treats ‘avid media’
- Avid remains indisputably the best option for collaborative editing with large numbers of people, especially in networked environments with Shared Storage. Honestly it doesn’t seem like it does anything all that much here, it’s just that all the competition seems to do it so poorly that it’s just streets ahead. Trying share sequences or bins, or clips (project master clips as opposed to media on disk is irritatingly difficult and cumbersome in Premiere by comparison)
- The general consensus, and one I largely agree with is that if you don’t have much editing experience, Avid is harder to learn initially. (I’m not assuming you are or aren’t experienced, just leaving it for consideration one way or the other)
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The LUTs are installed on a per project basis or shared for all projects on a system. To remove them form the list of available LUTs it should just be a matter of deleting them form the respective LUTs folders from either the shared or project LUT directories.
The shared LUTs are located at
C:\Users\Public\Documents\Shared LUTs
On a windows machine. I don’t know where the equivelant path would be on a mac, however it would be the same directory as the shared Avid projects, which you can have revealed in finder at the project selection stage on opening Avid.
The per-project LUTs I read are given their own directory, in the project directory for a given project. I could not confirm this as I see no such folder in my project, however I don’t have any installed LUTs anyway so it’s probably there.
So it should just be a matter of finding the LUTs in those locations on disk using Finder of Explorer and then deleting them. I would assume the next time you launched Avid they were then absent from the list.
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I’m trying to figure this out on my end but am testing with source material that isn’t similar to yours at all and am just having to pretend that it is, so sorry if this is incorrect.
I think I know what you should do to have the footage display as you want, however it would display that way on BOTH the client monitor and your computer monitors. Don’t know if you specifically needed to look at the material unsqueezed or if you just didn’t mind it.
If you want this to apply to all the clips in your project, you can load them all up in to the media tool, drag them to a bin and take the below steps, but I’d suggest maybe doing it small scale first, you could do it with the reference clips of a sequence for example.
- Select all the clips you want to view in this manner in a bin.
- right-click and select ‘source settings’
- click on the ‘FrameFlex’ tab
- I assume with your project the raster dimension is 2048×1536, and that the images look squashed horizontally
- Select the ‘image aspect ratio’ of 2:1
- Set the ‘frame aspect ratio’ to 2:1
- Set reformat to Pillarbox/letterbox
- Click Apply to all
Admittedly I don’t have any anamorphic footage to test with, but I took some 16:9 stuff and re-encoded to those dimensions so it looked squashed and then tested this in a 2048×1536 avid project and it works on the computer monitors. I also don’t have a client monitor to test with now either, however my understanding is it should output to a 16:9 screen with letterboxing slightly thinner than what you see on your own source and program windows. The nice thing about this is it’s all reversible, if you don’t want to remember to go through every bin and remove the frame flex changes you made, you can just do it at the picture lock stage to all the clips in the sequence. You can just select all the reference clips in lock picture bin, go to the frame flex settings again, click the little two lines icon next the ‘image size’ drop down list and click it to reset the image settings back to what they were, and then click on the ‘reset’ button in the bordered box of settings under ‘FrameFlex’ and then ‘apply to all’.
Sorry I can’t be more definitive, but I’m not currently setup to properly test this. If this doesn’t output to the client monitor the way you want after that I would suggest ditching all the frameflex changes and looking at the I/O card’s own configuration software which depending on the card may allow you to do things like set the display aspect ratio and image processing settings to accommodate it.
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Hi Ryan
Let me start by saying I feel your pain after many years now I’ve finally reached something kind of like peace with Avid, and begrudging acceptance that since it still hasn’t been dethroned and had not in all the many years previous to my starting, I will have to assume it’s going to stick around. Honestly though, I still hold hope someone will offer something better that gets as much adoption, because the ‘industry standard’ moniker has allowed this software to get away with a LOT which is less easily forgiven of competitors. That said, part of the reason it’s the industry standard is that it is the industry standard and standardisation in whatever form, even byzantine and unforgiving can be very beneficial. Everyone uses it, which has allowed the software to include abilities and features that would only have been heard of or conceived of by people doing things industrially and in response to user confusion and a lack of any real care for user experience Avid is allowed to simply demand greater skill in the user. That second point is both a strength and weakness, if you don’t know how to use a feature in an iphone because it’s confusing you don’t get people saying it’s because you’re not ‘professional’ enough to know how to use an iphone properly and you should go read the manual. By that same token though, in an industrial setting it’s more reasonable to ask that users be required to master often obtuse and impenetrable procedures and terminology because to an extent such mastery is required to actually be operating in that industry and certain things at that level are complex enough that they can’t be made intuitive or easy and the software engineers are just better assuming the clients will have a certain level of training. They also use that as an excuse for just about everything.
Anyway diatribe over, while I’m not sure how to help much with where you’re at since your update, if I read right your original problem was the inability to efficiently move media from one specific project on to a drive for an editor to work on externally. I assume that you have multiple projects using the same storage and that the media then is all jumbled together in to the Avid MediaFiles folder as avid likes to do. If that’s not the case and you just have one project you could just copy and paste the Avid MediaFiles folder on to the external drive (just putting that out there just in case it’s a nice easy fix like that I’m sure that’s not the case for you though).
Moving the media from one project, to another drive using Avid
You seemed to be on the right track initially, I think you gave up too soon though. You mentioned you used the media tool, and presumably loaded all the media from your project and hoped you’d be able to select it all and consolidate to the desired drive. A reasonable assumption. In fact you actually can do it like that with only one more step. The media tool doesn’t let you consolidate the clips you’re right, but you don’t have to go bin by bin either.
- just make a new bin, call it consolidate or something meaningful to you
- drag all the clips from the media tool in to that bin.
- consolidate all the clips from that bin on to the desired drive
Don’t worry, this doesn’t move the clips out of their existing bins, they’ll all stay there these are duplicates but still linkable to the original source when it’s time for online and still referencing the exact same proxy media on disk. If you give the editor a copy of the Avid project, you don’t even need to give them this bin, the clips in the existing bins will be online and linking to the consolidated media on the editor’s drive. The only thing I’m not sure about is if the editor opens another editor’s timeline, and attempts to find the bin a clip is stored in, whether it will find it, or whether it will attempt to look for the duplicate instead. That could be frustrating, you might want to test that. This at least avoids the need for additional software and is quite straightforward to do as it works pretty much like how you thought it would.
Avoid playing Avid’s way if it gets your way
Interestingly, I didn’t know this not able to consolidate quirk about the media tool until answering this, I’d always assumed I could just consolidate from there if I needed to but I haven’t yet needed to, so that’s something I’ll file away for later. I point that out, and the fact that I’m unsure about what happens when you want to match frame a clip back to it’s original bin if you use this method because I work in a way that circumvents the need to do that anyway.
I Use a method Shane was referring to earlier which considering how commonly it’s used makes me think it’s an example of something Avid should really just allow to happen as a user choice in their interface rather than a commonly known ‘trick’ that everyone uses. Anyway, what I do is to – at the ingest stage –
- import/consolidate/transcode the footage thus creating an MXF folder ‘1’
- Rename that folder when the process is finished
- When I need to give the media to others, I choose the folders I want based on their names and copy and paste it in explorer/finder to the desired drive
This method essentially ‘freezes’ an MXF folder once it’s renamed. It means that the database file Avid created on ingest is readable by Avid, but no longer writeable, which means you can segregate the media however you like, as any further media created by rendering or ingesting, will go in to it’s own ‘1’ folder by default and leave your existing footage in its renamed folders alone. I tend to do my import batches by shoot date, but you can use any distinction you like, you might also want to add the project name to the folder name. A handy side-effect of this is that it also by default separates out media created during edit from media created at ingest because any editor you hand the media to will have an MXF folder full of folders whose names aren’t numbers and so when their Avid has to create media (like when it renders), it’ll create a ‘1’ folder and so that folder will always be editor media, that can be handy too because if you want to, you can rename it something like ‘EditorName_Renders’ and give it to other editors to pick up where the other editor left off.
Relinking stuff in Avid (try not to do it)
Also, regarding your troubles with relinking back to online. I also empathise, Avid seems to enjoy making this process as difficult as possible and when it doesn’t work it’s always your fault for something you should have done. While again it’s reasonable to expect professionalism and best practice of professional operators, this just doesn’t seem to be nearly such a pain in competing software so frankly, it could be better, the problems seem as far as I can tell to in some way or another all stem back to the core nature of how to software works that is a hangover of the 1980s. They’re unwilling to re-engineer the entire product and also while it does cause pain for many of us at this stage, some of how it operates still makes sense for a lot of tape or film based situations and Avid won’t want to break how it’s working for them.
However I typically don’t have to worry about this too much (though recently I’ve been given a nice reminder of how annoying conforming is in Avid) for several reasons.
- For HD projects for broadcast, most of the time it’s possible to simply use the camera original codec if it’s supported or transcode to a codec of high enough quality that it isn’t necessary to re-conform later. Of course this is a problem depending on the source footage, or for VFX work, or for multicam as you’re experiencing (although recently I’ve been finding that for 2-3 camera groups the camera original codec’s working fine
- When there is conforming work to do, quite often I find it better to simply do it in DaVinci Resolve. Resolve is really good at conforming and easier to manually fix if it gets things wrong than Avid is. Since a lot of the things I’ve worked on have ended up being graded there too, the picture lock edits were often already destined to go there anyway. A lot of the time the mastering can be done there as well. This leaves Avid to be mainly just used for editing which it’s actually good at
- If there is no tape data or any additional data added by a user, you do face relinking issues as people are describing to you and that’s why they say to properly log footage at ingest with appropriate metadata like tape names, however if you didn’t do any of that, there are circumstances where the relinking can still work depending on some factors. If your production’s cameras produce unique filenames across clips and cards and also recorded free-run timecode there’s often enough there already to successfully relink even without a tape source, it’s just more error prone.
- I tend to do any transcoding that’s necessary using DaVinci Resolve which is one of the few programs out there that actually is capable of producing Avid media that works directly in Avid, this has many benefits not least including metadata. You can set it to include the name of the clip as the ‘reel’ name for every clip it transcodes, Avid interprets those ‘reel’ names as tape names, thus avoiding manual entry of tape names in to every clip, it also does this way faster than Avid and it’s easier to monitor progress and you can specify the output directories so you can set off multiple batches overnight and be confident they’ll be sorted and separated when done rather than jumbled in to one folder. The big limitation is that you can’t do 4K output from Resolve unless you buy the studio version, but for HD you’re golden, and hey, if your facility uses Resolve for grading it’s probably worth getting the studio version anyway
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Thanks mate, good to know. Incidentally, when you talk about keeping your mxf folders organised by starting at 10, is that something you do in order to sort them alphabetically, so that you don’t have 1,10,2,3,4,5 etc? Otherwise what does the 10,20,30 naming system do to help keep it organised?