Hello-
Running MC 5.03 on a couple of Nehalem duo quad core Mac Pros, 10.6.5 OS. Media stored on FW800 connected G-tech external drives.
I'm responsible for post workflow on a long form documentary project. 100+ hours of footage, primarily tape-based 1080 60i DVCPro HD footage (dumped to DVcam for capturing purposes), but with growing minority of 1080 60i DVCPro HD P2 & XDcam EX 35 mpbs stuff as well. Gets whittled down to 4 total hours of broadcast programming. Upgraded to MC 5 last Fall and was very excited about possibilities of AMA for the tapeless workflow.
So brought in the DVcam downconverts as DV25 MXF media - traditional tape capture - and all the tapeless as AMA volume link from external drives. No consolidating, no transcoding (we do a later out of house online conform/upres - more on that later.) Nice and easy.
But editors have finally come in and we're beginning to see serious peformance issues with extended AMA-linked media sequences (by the end of the project we'll have at least 4 hour long pic lock sequences that'll be a mix of tape capture and tapeless.) And after reading further on this forum, realize I need to at least consolidate if not transcode the AMA linked material if I don't want to drive the editors and myself crazy by the end of the offline.
So my big question is - should I consolidate or transcode? Consolidation is attractive bec/ it's really just an in-Avid version of what I'm doing anyway at the finder level, ie transfering media from original cam cards or field drives to Avid-connected "working" drives. And I assume it'll take the same amount of time as a finder level transfer (BTW - currently for any shoot I have the media on 3 separate drives, one being a directly mounted "working" drive, the drive from which we do the AMA volume linking.) And it seems like it's Avidifying the media in a way that will help with the perf slow downs and crashes. My question is - what is actually happening to that media when it's being consolidated? It's still the original P2 or XDcam EX material, just dropped in a new Avid-created folder structure? And since it's not transcoded, since it's still in its native state, presumably it still needs to be tanscoded to some kind of Avid media codec in order to be exported from var rough and fine cut sequences we'll be making along the way (not a small deal since we'll be doing a lot of exports thru the course of the offline)?
Transcode is less attractive since I assume it'll take more time (since the big bulk of footage is DV25 MXF, assuming I'd transcode everything to that and made all media one codec), and I'll lose the option of viewing media as HD, but seems like the most rock solid way of managing media. And I won't have to transcoded when exporting from sequences.
Also, curious if 5.5 makes any of the above easier?
Other factor is that we'll be later up-res.ing at our online house. Presumably consolidating makes that a non-issue - since media is already full-res. But if I transcode then I'll need to re-link. Been reading a lot of related posts in the forum and think I have a handle on what to do and not to for re-link, particularly re both drive level and in-Avid naming/labeling and how that's going to effect re-linking. If I transcode, one excellent suggestion I read was that I create a new bin column specifically to indicate exactly where the original/up res.ed media lives.
Thanks,
Nick.
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