[Pat Horridge]

If you need to pass a videomixdown or similar. Then in Avid export it as a file and either re-import or AMA it.
But as said the grade should be Raw elements not titles or effects.

Pat Horridge
Technical Director, Trainer, Avid Certified Instructor
VET
Production Editing Digital Media Design DVD
T +44 (0)20 7505 4701 | F +44 (0)20 7505 4800 | E pat@vet.co.uk |
http://www.vet.co.uk | Lux Building 2-4 Hoxton Square London N1 6US

[Pat Horridge]

The other trick if MC is happy with the files and scans them ok and creates the media databases. Drag the larger media database from finder/explorer and drop into an open MC bin and MC will populate the bin with all the clips in that folder.
Its an unsupported method but has worked fine for me and others.

Pat Horridge
Technical Director, Trainer, Avid Certified Instructor
VET
Production Editing Digital Media Design DVD
T +44 (0)20 7505 4701 | F +44 (0)20 7505 4800 | E pat@vet.co.uk |
http://www.vet.co.uk | Lux Building 2-4 Hoxton Square London N1 6US

[Pat Horridge]

Here’s my understanding of the relationships:

Masterclips can represent tape captures, file imports, AMA sources and rendered media.
The Masterclip contains metadataata about the media it’s linked to (if it is linked to any, master clips can have no media link and show offline media) the drive they last had media linked to as well as the tracks related to the master clip etc.

Much of this metadata can’t be changed if linked to media but unlink the master clip (ctrl shift and the re-link command becomes an unlink command) and you can modify tracks and other metadata you couldn’t normally.

When you re-link a master clip it looks for media that matches the clip. The re-link dialog offers control over this re-link as you can easily multiple media matches to a master clip. (If you transcode a clip to a new resolution you now have 2 sets of media valid for the original master clip. the thing thing that keeps the original clip linked and the new transcoded clip linked to the transcoded media is that they remember that relationship)

For MC to show you media and allow you to manipulate it you need Master clips in bins, so the media tool creates virtual masterclips that represent the media found on all the drives MC can see at that moment. Drag one of those media tool mastercips to a bin and it makes a real masterclip.

Confusingly masterclips can be duplicated and behave independently or cloned in which case changes to one masterclip ripple to the other one. (that makes a very powerful workflow but with some serious pitfalls)

Subclips point to a masterclip or more accuratley to the media related to that masterclip so can be re-link just like a masterclip and would then show as related to potentially a different masterclip.
Subclips don’t need the masterclip to exists so if you make a subclip you can delete the masterclip. However if media exists for that subclip a virtual masterclip will be created in the media tool and you could you open the media tool and dragged it back to the project.

If you consolidate or transcode a subclip you will find new master clips created that represent the new media created including any handles specified. These can be deleted if not needed.

The most common issues with linking are related to poor naming of clips or tapes allowing media to be made that can potentially relate to more than one master clip. For example capturing tapes with repeat timecode under the same tape name (to avoid this you’d be sure to creante dummy tape neame for each timecode repeat) or importing clips with the same filenames and timecodes.

The initial ingest of all this will create media correctly associated with their original master clips.
But should the project be opened with the media drive disconnected the masterclips loose their links and show offline media.

Reconnect the media drive and now MC will try and relink each master clip based on the metadata and wrongly can find the wrong media and create the wrong linkings (well actually the right linking but not to the media it was liked to before)

Hopefully this makes things a bit clearer. Not easy in a webpost and it’s much clearer when I cover it in my VET media management course

https://www.vet.co.uk/site/training/scheduled_courses/avid_media_management_for_media_composer_vet_short_courses

Pat Horridge
Technical Director, Trainer, Avid Certified Instructor
VET
Production Editing Digital Media Design DVD
T +44 (0)20 7505 4701 | F +44 (0)20 7505 4800 | E pat@vet.co.uk |
http://www.vet.co.uk | Lux Building 2-4 Hoxton Square London N1 6US

[Pat Horridge]

We got our StorageDNA setup just after xmas and it took us a day to set it up. We went with the 8 tape library setup.
So we have a 1U rack mont unit that houses the LTO-% drive and 2 magazines that hold 4 tapes each.
This connects via a 6Gb SAS to an HP server (dedicated runing a version of linux) that acts as the StorageDNA server and controller.
Took a few hours to get setup and configured.
Via the network you can web access it and install client drivers on your wqorkstations (Mac and PC) and they then let you setup archive and restore jobs.
It’s really slick and fast and the integration with CATDV (the server version of which we are setting up now) looks to be really good.
Bt for us it’s the additional Storage DNA features like the ability to archive an Avid Project and media and restore media for a sequence via an EDL of the timeline that attracted us.

It’s early days for us but I’m glad we didn’t go the Cache-A route

Pat Horridge
Technical Director, Trainer, Avid Certified Instructor
VET
Production Editing Digital Media Design DVD
T +44 (0)20 7505 4701 | F +44 (0)20 7505 4800 | E pat@vet.co.uk |
http://www.vet.co.uk | Lux Building 2-4 Hoxton Square London N1 6US

[Pat Horridge]

The issue with using 3rd party solution (especially ones no longer supported) is you can’t be sure of the result and any issues generated won’t be easy to get support for later.
So where possible I suggest solutions that use the tool itself if possible (hence my suggestion to use consolidate)

But yes there are many many ways to achieve it using external tools.

Pat Horridge
Technical Director, Trainer, Avid Certified Instructor
VET
Production Editing Digital Media Design DVD
T +44 (0)20 7505 4701 | F +44 (0)20 7505 4800 | E pat@vet.co.uk |
http://www.vet.co.uk | Lux Building 2-4 Hoxton Square London N1 6US

[Pat Horridge]

There are a number of great tools for maanaging projects and media look at Project Parking for one.
And i think that’s why Avid has stuck with such weak internal media management.

You can work Avid never interfacing with the MXF folders if you live with the consolidate function and media tool to delete unwanted media (or by reverse selection keep wanted media)

But I don’t know of anyone seriously doing post who isn’t managing media at the folder level to really lever the flexibility that offers.

Pat Horridge
Technical Director, Trainer, Avid Certified Instructor
VET
Production Editing Digital Media Design DVD
T +44 (0)20 7505 4701 | F +44 (0)20 7505 4800 | E pat@vet.co.uk |
http://www.vet.co.uk | Lux Building 2-4 Hoxton Square London N1 6US

[Pat Horridge]

Unfortunately the media tool in media Composer is very weak in terms of copying media, It’s only useful for identifying media to create clips in bins or deleting media.
If your on a PC there is Avid_MDV that is more powerful but at the raw MXF level the most you can really see if what Project the media is associated with.

My advice would be to create a new project with a project name that’s helpful (like Stillmedia) copy your bins into that project.
Consolidate those clips with no handles to new fresh drive (or use the MXF sub folder re-numbering trick.

Of the original media you should then (making sure you have a backup first) be able to select all the stills and delete the media (but leave the master clips) then copy the consolidated media back and the master clips should re-link to that media.

Pat Horridge
Technical Director, Trainer, Avid Certified Instructor
VET
Production Editing Digital Media Design DVD
T +44 (0)20 7505 4701 | F +44 (0)20 7505 4800 | E pat@vet.co.uk |
http://www.vet.co.uk | Lux Building 2-4 Hoxton Square London N1 6US

[Pat Horridge]

The Z820s have PCIe 3 buses presumably if you can get a PCIe 3 GPU card(s) that will have an impact on throughput?

Pat Horridge
Technical Director, Trainer, Avid Certified Instructor
VET
Production Editing Digital Media Design DVD
T +44 (0)20 7505 4701 | F +44 (0)20 7505 4800 | E pat@vet.co.uk |
http://www.vet.co.uk | Lux Building 2-4 Hoxton Square London N1 6US

[Pat Horridge]

That’s great Peter.
Do you have any idea how those Macs performed with Resolve compared to a topend HP Z820 setup?
Thanks

Pat Horridge
Technical Director, Trainer, Avid Certified Instructor
VET
Production Editing Digital Media Design DVD
T +44 (0)20 7505 4701 | F +44 (0)20 7505 4800 | E pat@vet.co.uk |
http://www.vet.co.uk | Lux Building 2-4 Hoxton Square London N1 6US

[Pat Horridge]

The h264 export from Avid uses the generic QT and that’s not that quick or that adjustable so it makes medioca results at best.

The issue with the change in look is related to the factt at Avid works at TV video levels with black at value 16 and white at value 235 which is fine for display on devices that are setup for that like TV equipment is.
But convert that signal to a QT file that you play in QT player and you aren’t compensating and will see the blacks look grey and the whites look low level.
To solve this export from Avid at RGB levels ideally same as source.
Then take this (large file) in to sorenson squeeze and use squeeze to make you H264 whoch gives you much more control and can run in the background while you go back to Avid to edit.
There are other encoding tools as well but squeeze isn’t bad.

Pat Horridge
Technical Director, Trainer, Avid Certified Instructor
VET
Production Editing Digital Media Design DVD
T +44 (0)20 7505 4701 | F +44 (0)20 7505 4800 | E pat@vet.co.uk |
http://www.vet.co.uk | Lux Building 2-4 Hoxton Square London N1 6US