[Olaf Steel]

Thanks Eric!

I did end up reinstalling the OS. This time I did not restore my backup, just did a clean reinstall. And Avid appears to be working as normal!
While I’m absolutely delighted Avid now works, and I’ve isolated the issue to be caused by software in my backup, I would love to get my stuff back from my backup, so I’m wondering if anyone has any ideas what could have caused the issue in the first place?
Ideally I would restore my backup and then fix whatever software issue was plaguing Avid.

Thanks again for any help here!

Olaf

[Olaf Steel]

Thanks for taking a look.
I believe the shutter was set at 1/60.

Yeah, you could be right, it could definitely be motion blur. It just looks like there is a double image at a lot of points.

[Olaf Steel]

Here’s a clip from the raw footage. If you look at pretty much any frame when they’re walking towards the camera, you can see the interlacing-like or ghosting artifacts really well.
10683_00099.mts.zip

[Olaf Steel]

Thanks John, I know that I can rename the clips in Avid, I just thought doing it in batches of clips for each card shot in FCP would save me time going in and editing each individual clip. Maybe there is a batch name edit mode in Avid I don’t know about.
Either way, this interlacing issue is very worrying. I have looked through several forums, but so far not come up with an answer. I really hope there is a fix for this that looks better than the frame blending fix usually used for interlacing.

[Olaf Steel]

Shaun,

I found this XF plugin on the Canon Japan website. It’s worked for me on Avid MC 8.4. It might also work on 8.3 – give it a go.
Hope this link works: 10168_xpmm300a89l.dmg.zip

[Olaf Steel]

The folder structure should be fine – it was copied directly from the CF card.
In Avid I’m selecting the folder above the CONTENTS folder as usual when I try to AMA link.
The mxf plugin that installs with Avid is AMA linking to the individual mxf files when I drill down through the card’s folders, but the plugins from Canon are not installing so I can’t AMA link to the whole card at once.
Hope that makes sense! And thanks for your continued help.

[Olaf Steel]

Thanks for the response, Shane.
I already have all the compatible plugins installed – see the full list below. The Canon ones are the only ones that won’t install. I’ve done this before on another computer and it all worked fine. Not sure why it won’t work in this instance. I no longer have access to the previous computer.

I can AMA link to the individual MXF files if I dig into the footage folders, but to do that for each individual shot when there are 1000s would take me longer than it would to edit the damn thing, so that’s not going to work – and also a lot of the clips are spanned, so that adds even more work. There HAS to be a way to get the AMA linking to work for the full volume.

[Olaf Steel]

OK, here’s an update:
I followed Pat’s method as outlined in his post above. I was able to relink most of my sequence and I’ve transcoded it to Avid DNx 175x. I’m now working to track down the raw footage that I have not yet linked to the project. Things went really well until this point. But now I’m getting constant beach balls for several minutes, leaving Avid completely unresponsive.

I deleted the AMA bin, thinking it was constantly try to scan that, thus giving me the beach ball, but that hasn’t helped. The way things are, this is going to take me a very long time to get everything relinked and online.

I’ve made a new project which contains only the sequence I’m working with and the folders containing the master clips linking to the DNx 80 low res media. Still having the same issue.

I’m working on a new Mac Pro with a 3.5 GHz 6-core processor and 64GB of memory, so the machine should be able to handle this work.

If anyone has any thoughts on the issue, I’d love to hear them. Thanks!

[Olaf Steel]

I figured it out. There has to be enough free space on ALL drives, including the SOURCE drives, which are used to cache the files as Avid makes the AAF file.
I was originally only thinking Avid was referring to the destination drive, so it took a lot of trial and error to figure that one out. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but there it is. In this case I had to free up 8GB on all drives containing Avid media used in the sequence I was making an AAF from.

[Olaf Steel]

Thanks everyone for your help. I’m going to embark on this mission today, using the method Pat Horridge suggested – I tried my original plan yesterday and ran into all sorts of problems. Those problems included Avid not batch importing spanned clips – I’d get an error message saying that that clip could not be imported to a bin, a lot of clips were coming in at different formats, like XDCAM and MPEG2, even though I those to transcode to DNx 175x. And it just seems like a long drawn-out process, especially when dealing with thousands of clips coming from several drives. I was expecting the relink to be closer to FCP, where it automatically links to all clips coming from the same source, once the path has been pointed out.

Pat’s workflow seems like a solid one, so I’ll give it a go and report back with any issues.

Thanks again everyone, truly appreciated!