[Ray Kowalchuk]

Yeah, Todd, we’ve never used any custom metadata before, and it’s a dodgy prospect to expect every new shooter to know our preferences should we decide to make it part of our workflow. Yet we do have asset management servers in our post facility and spend a lot of time logging information that could be preset to be “preloaded” into the clip — the shooter, the location…there’s even GPS geotagging should anybody wonder where on earth (literally) that shot was taken. It seems like there’s potential, yet the rope bridge between camera feature developers, SMPTE establishers of UDIM, camera operators, editing ingest engines and NLEs has too many slats, and maybe too many crocodiles down below.

I think there’s a paradigm shift for MAM in the future that may connect these dots. You knew where your tapes were stored. In this file based world, do you know where your files are? There’s a new one every time you hit the record button…

[Ray Kowalchuk]

Any Teranex users? Who needs to archive their SD tapes? I’ve got a demo unit and I’m looking for best practices to present to my group.

[Ray Kowalchuk]

Our five-Avid post facility for one television program has been using CatDV for a few years now. I saw CatDV, a product with a long history serving Final Cut Pro users, demonstrate an Avid workflow at NAB 2011. CatDV worked the way it always has, managing MOV media, or MXF media with the CatDV MXF option and Calibrated {Q} MXF codec loaded. Footage browsing is largely an off-Avid process, so it was a viable tool for producers that would ultimately identify their shot selections into a script or paper edit to bring to an Avid edit session. What was different was the “last step” of exporting logged clips from CatDV catalogs into Avid bins. This was accomplished with the MME widget which allowed the FCP XML export of CatDV to be converted to an Avid AAF. Now Avid editors could have the same clip names in their bins that the producers were seeing in their CatDV catalogs. mme.tv

To compare with Avid Interplay you are going to want to have a look at CatDV Pegasus, which has the MME widget incorporated to create a legitimate Avid compatible product. More than just saving a few steps of processing, Pegasus provides a “round trip” approach to asset management — clips that end up being logged, or corrected, or subclipped in Avid can be exported back to CatDV catalogs and MAM database. You can also export an AAF of a sequence or binful of clips to Pegasus to be archived; this is handy if you need to archive and retrieve Avid projects but still need your MAM to know where the media has gone after it disappears from your online storage.

Now, your workflow is your own — each one as unique as a snowflake, so it is important to look at what all the different parts of Interplay can do for you. It’s been designed, tested and tried in the crucible of big production houses that demand a no nonsense PAM, MAM, project management, archive and collaboration environment. Serious media workflow products, like storageDNA, develop integration for Interplay first (though they also have come to support CatDV). If CatDV can cover all of your needs, you’re probably gonna like the price. But download the demo and test your workflow — CatDV has nowhere near the track record and range of use that Interplay has covered with their own NLE.

I’m testing Pegasus right now, seeing what has been improved over the MME workflow.

[Ray Kowalchuk]

“There seems merging option in XF Utility when exporting to MXF.”

There is? Where? It merges media into virtual volumes, yes, but spanned clips?

I’m pulling out my hair trying to append my longer-than-5-minutes-13-second MXF files together before they cause problems in my MAM workflow.

[Ray Kowalchuk]

They’re Avid media, Op-Atom MXF, separate video and audio files, all with “.mxf” suffix. CatDV doesn’t mind; there’s some metadata that allows them to automatically create a new clip that *works* like a Quicktime movie, but actually has a different icon, a blue folder with “MXF” on it. (Unfortunately, subclips of a metaclip also have the same icon, unlike the little green subclip of a Quicktime.)

The new, CatDV-created clip is what gets logged and sent back to Avid via the MME widget, to great video joy and great audio weeping. There must be a glitch in the new Avid clip’s audio-recognition, but whether this was introduced by the CatDV metaclip, the MME translation to AAF or Avid’s reading of the AAF, the jury is out.

“non-existent track” indeed. Kinda like when you KNEW the next mouse click was going to give you yet another “Unexpected error.” No it wasn’t!

[Ray Kowalchuk]

Sorry, Robb, it’s in Avid the relinking isn’t happening properly. I’m not having any trouble with linking the Avid media in CatDV; it recognizes which audio MXF belongs with the video MXF and creates new clips (“metaclips,” with a blue MXF folder icon) and treats it like any other Quicktime file that might be in a CatDV catalong.

MME is a standalone widget that runs separate from CatDV to which you can export an FCP XML and it converts it to an Avid AAF. (There’s also a java plugin for CatDV that lets you skip a step and right-click “Send to MME.”) The AAF you can drop into a bin and voila — your CatDV clips are now Avid clips and should relink to the original Avid media. Most often, video does, you see the “MEDIA OFFLINE” replaced with video, you think the world is swell, then when you try to play it winges about the audio tracks not existing (not offline, or not linking; it insists they DON’T EXIST. But they do…).

Of course, FCP has it a lot easier back and forth because if it’s Quicktime, everything is compliant. For those that are migrating from FCP to Avid, it might be worthwhile to get MME working in all cases (or even integrate it into CatDV).

[Ray Kowalchuk]

Hi Robb,

by “CatDV log reference” I guess you mean the CatDV clip that has automatically linked to the video and is rejecting the audio.” I don’t know what you mean by ‘manually “attaching”‘ (but it sounds kind of, um, manual, and undesirable for a workflow).

After modifying the clip to be video only it was happy as a solo video file. I just tried to modify it back to include the two audio tracks and I was denied: “Exception: CM_NO_SOURCE”, meaning, I guess, that once the audio is unlinked from the source you can’t put back track references and browse to them (again, way too manual for a workflow, but may lead to some clues as to why it works so intermittently).

It also seems all or nothing (all clips or no clips, of a particular format), depending on who’s standing in the room when I say, “See, it doesn’t work!” (and it does work. I see myself adding that to the workflow chart — Step 7. bring a stranger into the room, point at import process and say, “See, it doesn’t work!”)

MME users, show yourselves!

[Ray Kowalchuk]

This solution is Mac only; is it possible to create proxies with timecode track with the Matrox Compress HD in a Windows environment? I guess the Matrox MAX H.264 acceleration only works in Adobe Encoder on a PC, but the proxy creation can be externalized.

Matt, by “not so much the speed” do you mean that it’s not much faster?