AMA offline just after linking volume

[a_lara]

I do know I want to transcode from the start.
And through a lot of trial and error (and pain) I think I am achieving some results.

I posted that I was getting many errors trough AMA and Cinered. That is true but as I understand now, there are not so many bad clips. The problem is that when I encountered one of them the applications can not recover. Sometimes they unexpectedly quit. However, other times they continue running, but they were giving errors even when trying to play or transcode clips that were ok. That behavior made me believe that there were many more bad clips than they really were.

It is a very long job, but I am isolating the bad ones, and transcoding only the good ones. Later on I will try to find a way for them. I went along with Cinered to be able to continue working with the avid (with the sound) to gain some time. But now I have another problem. When I import the ALE file into the avid bin (with the merge option activated) I do not get all the metadata I expected. Specifically, the name of the file gets truncated (to only the first 16 digits) and I do not get the complete name of the original R3D file name (20 digits + .R3D sufix) in any column (apart from the UNC path). There is no information in the "original filename" which was used by the avid. And the "labroll" use the 8digit form. The "camroll " is identical to the clip name (16 digits). Is this normal? I can not see anywhere into the CINERED to change what kind of information is output into the ALE. I have attached a sample one.

Perhaps I am getting a bit paranoid and this is not something I should worry about. But I want to do some edl test and do not know how to. In the webinar you were so kind to point to me it is suggested to use "labroll" as a Reel Id type, at least when you are trying to go the final cut route, which may be my way. But as the labroll column does not contain the whole name, the people who are going to conform told me they could not automatize the process. Is there a trick?

I hope I was able to explain myself correctly.
Again I want to thank you for your patience.
A Lara

 

[a_lara]

I have tried to manually introduce the whole file name in the avid, and it has let me. If I create a script, it should not be very difficult to change every name in the "camroll" column to reflect the complete 20 digits R3D file name in every clip of the project.
Am I going crazy?
A Lara

 

[MichaelP]

The full filename is in both the NAME and the TAPE column which I see in the first two columns of the file. When generating an EDL from files created in REDCINE X, just use TAPE as the source and you are good to go with the 16Char EDL template. The Camroll has the truncated 8 characters to allow for workflow compatibility with Apple products since they don't support the full 16 characters in the TAPE field, only as a comment.

Michael

 

[a_lara]

As I said a few days ago, after a long way of pain I am now sure that we did have a bunch of corrupt RED files that were giving trouble, as Michael suggested. They are about the 10% of the total. The main problem to get to this conclusion is that, when the software (may that be Avid or cinered, or even Metafuze) finds one of them:

... the applications can not recover. Sometimes they unexpectedly quit. However, other times they continue running, but they were giving errors even when trying to play or transcode clips that were ok. That behavior made me believe that there were many more bad clips than they really were.
It is a very long job, but I am isolating the bad ones, and transcoding only the good ones.

I post this only to let others now what happened. There is no workaround, apart from the long way of trial and error. But at least, I now can confirm, that my editing station is ok.
Thank you for your help.
A Lara

 

[Jason Diamond]

Having the proper QT components installed is def a necessity but beyond that:

We had a similar problem where the files would load via AMA but show up as Media Offline.

the problem was the file path name. The drive and subsequent folders cannot have any spaces or slashes or any characters like that. Should just be letters/numbers/underscores(if you need spaces)

That should potentially solve your issue.

interested if that helps you.

Jason

 

[Rainer Fritz]

Hi Michael !

I onlined today a 110 minute feature in MC5 with AMA because they used DNxHD36 and we thought it will be better to online it to 175 (24p) because we made a screening in HD on a large screen that the director can see his edit in a proper way and getting an idea how it will be later on, on the big screen. We made after onlining and transcoding to DNxHD175 an export to an uncompressed QT file and made a
BluRay of it. The picture Quality on the screen was extreme good

It worked, but with some troubles.... Rocket Acceleration seems to be same fast as a half debayer premium (about 6x realtime). More render speed would be highly welcome with rocket support. So the rendering of 110 minutes took about 12 hours...
To online via AMA needs at a such big, but normal project, a lot of RAM. It was not possible to online it in one sequence with 12GB RAM. So I added another 4 and divided the sequence in two pieces.
Even then the system is running on high RAM usage even when everything is closed only the sequence is left open.
The next bigger problem is, that I don't get a video preview with the R3Ds connected.
It says video buffer overflow and similiar error messages in the preview window, but
black screen.
For clarification: I got a bin with the sequence and a stereo sound file. I have the R3Ds on my storage away from their editing place. I made a new
1080p24 project and imported the bin with the sequence and imported the sound file. After that (the R3Ds are seperated in folders per shootingday on my storage) I mounted via AMA link to volume to every single folder. So then I had linked to all R3Ds. I then splitted the sequence offline in two pieces. Then I relinked with the relink option pointing to the storage with the R3Ds on it. One hit and it worked, but with the above described problems.
Nevertheless it reconnected fine and I did a transcode to DNxHD175 and the result ended with a proper sequence in 175 reconnected files with all filters and transitions kept. The only thing is, that I was not able to see if it has reconnected proper to the R3Ds before transcoding the sequence because of the black screen, but it worked.
Improving this workflow in lower RAM usage and higher render speed with rocket would be great and to get a picture after relinking to R3Ds....

I love Mediacomposer !!!! really... It is lightyears better then final cut and all the other stuff....

 

[a_lara]

Thanks jason. And yes, that was the key to that particular problem. Unfortunately, later came much more and difficult to solve ones.
A Lara