[Jimmy See]

Depending on the complexity of your requirements and reasons for doing this move there can be some other techniques you can employ to help manage the migration and also for general media management besides just copying everything from one drive to another and renaming the number sequences.

Is the media all from one project? Or lots of different projects?

If it’s from a few different projects you CAN keep it all in the one Avid MediaFiles in the volume root directory but it gets difficult for moving stuff around later except through Avid, that mightn’t be an issue but sometimes it’s preferable to be able to move things around and organise them at the level of finder or explorer.

There’s lots of different tricks to enforce some kind of separation depending on what your objective is. One of the simplest ones is to have on your drive root, a folder called ‘Avid MediaFiles’ and in that a subfolder called ‘MXF’ as you always would, but to also have multiple other subfolders for each project inside the Avid MediaFiles folder as well. The MXF directory will have your usual, numbered, Avid folders inside it and inside the other directories are the numbered Avid folders that formerly resided inside their own ‘MXF’ directory but now reside inside a folder with a name of your choosing. With this method, Avid will only recognise media inside an ‘MXF’ folder that is inside an ‘Avid MediaFiles’ folder and will ignore all media inside the other folders. If you want to work on a different project, you rename the ‘MXF’ directory of the current project into a name of your own choosing (this means Avid can no longer see this media and this media is ‘inactive’) and then rename the folder with the media for the project you want to work on next, in to ‘MXF’ (this means avid can see this media and it’s now ‘active’). It’s a reasonably simple though slightly basic form of media management external to the Avid software. It’s limited by Avid only being able to access media for one project at a time though, unless the other media you want is on a physically separate drive.

There’s other things you can do too and ways of accessing media from multiple projects at once, all on one volume, whilst still maintaining some folder separation and there’s also third party software designed exclusively for reading avid media databases to help you identify media and then move it around on disk. A lot of the 3rd party software options are getting out of date though or are pc only but some people like them.

If your requirements are complicated or if you’d like to be able to separate stuff let me know and I’ll walk you through it.

Otherwise, just moving it through finder/explorer as you plan to will work, as you guessed you’ll need to rename the numbered folders so you don’t get naming conflicts, Avid will actually read media database files and media inside folders in an MXF directory that are named using a different convention than just the numerals, but it won’t write to any such folders so you can’t create or rescan database files in directories named that way but you can read them. Therefore you’ll have to remember to rename the folders as sequential numbers without leading zeroes or any alphabetical or punctuation characters. You shouldn’t need to delete the database files and rescan them using the array volume unless there is anything apparently wrong with those files, otherwise they should work no matter what storage or machine they came from originally. That means if you have very full directories you can avoid waiting for re-scans unless you see some stuff offline.

[Jimmy See]

Huh.. didn’t know there was more than one way to auto sequence. I’ll try this out the next time I need to do this.

Since that pretty much solves it it’s academic now but, any idea WHY it would swap the channels around like that? Specifically when you place one clip down and then load another in to the source monitor to place next, why would it swap the position of the last two tracks with the first two tracks from whatever the previous patching setup was? That’s so specific and weird.

[Jimmy See]

Alternatively, if you’re archivist didn’t have MC you could do this using show reference clips. This allows you to export every clip used in a sequence and to choose a format that you think will be friendlier to a wider range of systems including those that don’t have editing software.

A major downside of this method is that you’d need to export the full master of every clip rather than just the portions used in your edit otherwise you’ll only have one instance of a clip used in your timeline exported and if a clip had been used more than once in your sequence, you’d only have an export of the most recent use in the timeline. With that in mind, if it’s the only way, here’s how you’d do it.

[Jimmy See]

Right, well I guess that would explain why I was never able to successfully import more than one entry myself.

The comments are long because they were never intended for an edit system but are the descriptions given by the archive suppliers in their catalogues. That’s unfortunate because though they are unnecessarily verbose for the purposes of logging in Avid and for an editor’s eye quickly scanning, the idea was that they still contained the essential information about any given image to make them searchable and reasonably assist with some extra context when viewing the images with thumbnails in the bin. Since all the information already existed I thought it’d be much more efficient if I simply copied it in verbatim.

Guess it wasn’t to be. Honestly though since the documents exists and the data refers to the same clip names I guess I can just distribute the spreadsheet to editors and they can search outside of avid for keywords and then search in avid for clip names.

Thanks very much for the help, I think I at least learned some things and maybe in future if I’m in this situation and the data I want to copy isn’t so verbose I can successfully import it in to my bins.

[Jimmy See]

Oh, that’s not a good start.

Well I zipped everything together so it’s faster to just send the link I should have sent to begin with. My bad, sorry.

here’s the link:
8620_aledatatoavbcolumnstests.zip

The files are all clearly marked so it should be easy to spot whichever one you need. Thank you very much for your help.

[Jimmy See]

Wow Michael thanks.

Here’s a link to the relevant files.

I guess I’ll send you a vanilla ALE straight from Avid, untouched by Excel or anything. In addition to a plaintext tab delimited export of that same ALE file after it has been opened in excel and had data added to it.

If you felt so inclined you could make the latter file importable in to Avid and hopefully I could learn what it is you’re doing right. Thanks mate. Not sure what time difference we’re working on. I’m at home now and the work day has been over for a few hours but hopefully some time tomorrow we’ll overlap or I can keep testing form home.

Now that you mention timecode that reminds me of one of my other results which was this it warned something about the end timecode not being good, but it did this for specific “Events” and you could skip past them. This outcome involved a good 3-4 extra rows of correct data being imported after skipping through the bits it didn’t like but it quickly crashed before anything could be saved once you skip past the last event it has trouble with.

Unfortunately, given I’m now using my home equipment there may be subtle differences in the conditions so it’d be hard to pinpoint what has changed if the outcome is different. I don’t know if it makes any difference at all but I use office 2011 for mac and at work it’s office 2008.

As you can see in the files, for testing purposes I’m only introducing data in to one column, the ‘comments’ column and I’ve only added a few rows rather than all of them.

[Jimmy See]

Well if you like being frustrated, you could try doing what this guy described

https://www.reddit.com/r/editing/comments/2pn4do/how_to_closed_and_open_captioning_its_harder_than/

[Jimmy See]

Hey mate, I downloaded that software but by that time I was finished doing it all manually over the course of a very boring day and I just didn’t have the strength to make myself dive back in to that any further than just the downloading of the software so I never saw what it was like or how I would use it to achieve what I was describing.

However for posterity, I have now, while using Avid on a different project discovered that this can be done automatically with no additional software. In Avid they call it auto-sequence. While when I researched this problem for FCP 7 using all kinds of keywords similar to what I used as the title for this post, I never found a solution but funnily enough if you look for ‘auto-sequence equivalent’ it’s actually answered right here on creative cow forums.

The very thing I was attempting to do exactly, is a usable function native to FCP 7 called ‘MAKE MULTICLIP SEQUENCE.’ If you select all the clips you want placed on a timeline in the manner I describe you select them all in the bin, and from the modify menu you should see the ‘make multiclip sequence’ option. You’ll be presented with a dialogue box asking about starting timecode for the sequence and about thresholds for what conditions it will also make multi clips from the clips you selected. If you set it to use source timecode for your sequence, your clips will be placed with gaps between them corresponding to the time between recording of each clip. FCP will also make multi clips for you where video sources have overlapped, and based on the values you set earlier, but in my circumstance I didn’t need that anyway because I was trying to sync sound. You can just throw those away if you don’t need them, the sequence is the important bit.

[Jimmy See]

I realise this was a long time ago but I imagine many FCP 7 editors will want to know this as few other platforms seem to do it and everyone loves it. It actually is possible in Premiere, and can be made to function identically to FCP 7 which is really great.

Ann, I believe the ‘muting’ that Zoe is referring to is actually not related to sound, though it uses the term ‘mute’. This is just Final Cut parlance, you’re actually muting video, not sound, that is basically switching on or off the visibility of particular video clip rather than the entire track the clip resides on. You can also use this technique to mute audio too, or both at once with linked selection, but primarily it’s usefulness is with video. It’s just an on off switch for clips on a timeline.

I’m using Premiere Pro CC, and I have my keyboard mapped to FCP 7 so I don’t know if this doesn’t work in previous versions, or if certain key commands are in use on the standard Premiere Keyboard that aren’t on mine. That said, here’s what you do:

The ‘muting’ we’re referring to as FCP users is actually much more logically named as ‘enable/disable’ a clip. You can access this via right clicking on a clip in the timeline. It’s also mappable to the keyboard. Change your keyboard preferences and search ‘enable’ you’ll find a setting for enabling or disabling clips on the timeline. Map this to ctrl + b and it’ll but just like the good old days again for FCP 7 users. Or map it to whatever you want, but I’m set in my ways so I like the familiar keyboard shortcuts.

[Jimmy See]

Oh yeah, I read as much in a similar thread somewhere out there on the interwebs. So then is this essentially like creating proxy media for video but in an audio context and this process presumably makes things faster to deal with later?

Why does it need to do this with audio then and not Video? Just because video would take so long, it eliminates the convenience offered by the mercury engine but audio is fast enough that the potential benefits in processor load outweigh the inconvenience of a minor waiting time?