Today I'm re-exporting a series from 3 years ago using a back up drive. I'm finding a handful of clips, roughly 15, are offline on each episode, I locate the offline clips and try to relink the master clips to the back up drive but they just don't want to relink. I have different volumes for each episode so in the first two episodes with this issues I mounted the volumes they were pointing to and those clips came online. I then consolidate the supposedly missing or unlinkable media to the main volume for that episode. This all worked but when I got episode 3 I stumbled on to a different approach that worked.
As I said I have a media volume for each episode so I was surprised when I had to mount other volumes to find the offline media. When I online a series I keep tight media management and clip naming to facilitate Symphony's relational color correction. Typically the last episode of a series will use footage from all the previous episodes so for the last episode the first thing I do is mount all the previous episodes media one at a time and relink the final show to a previous episode and consolidate the media from that show to the final shows dedicated volume. This allows me to merge color correction from each episode and this usually gets close to 200 clips color corrected which is why it's worth the time.
The other part of my workflow that seems pertinent is for each episode I go through the clips and add suffixes to the clip names to allow for more efficient relational color correction. This way if a particular Clip has 20 .new decomposed clips and it covers multiple setups some of which have similar or the same color needs I can add a suffix to the clip name thereby grouping the clips for color correction by source clip name. After I do this I then create a separate bin that I copy all the renamed clips to and I close it. This is sort of an archive to protect the clip renaming. I've found that sometimes when other stations open up the project and don't have my dedicated media mounted sometimes the clip names will revert to their original names. When this happens the sequences will no longer have clips named the way I want them to and it makes the relational color corrector become unreliable. When this happens I've found that if I open the archived clips bin while the main decompose bin is open it often overwrites the soft meta data of the clip names back to what I had originally renamed them to.
So when I got to the third episode with 15ish clips offline I tried to manually relink them to the archived media volume but most didn't relink. I then reopened my archived bin and voila the clips popped online. Clearly when I did my end of season color merging various clips in the main decompose bin got relinked to other episode volumes and for some reason even though the media exists on the dedicated back up volume the offline clips won't relink manually but will inherit the properties of the archived bin, which was never opened during the season finale color merge, and the offline clips magically relink.
I know this isn't magic but I'd sure like to understand why a manual relink doesn't work but opening the archive bin does. I tried deselecting all the usual suspects in the relink window and made sure it would relink to media outside the project and also that it would relink to any video format. I tried the same for the sequence itself. Only opening the archive bin made them come online. Strange. I have done a lot of media management with Avid and tons of relinking but I still find quirks like this that make me wonder if I really understand what is really going on under the hood. Some things fall in the category of .mob conflict, so I have been told, and that seems to relate to a lot of "soft metadata" like clip names. Relinking still seems like voodoo science sometimes like today.
At least I have a fighting chance with Avid. I'm not looking forward to tackling these type of issues in Adobe or Resolve but I guess it's all just a matter of time.
If anyone can shed some light on what's really going on when relinking doesn't work but opening an archive bin does I'd sure like to learn something new.
John Moore Barking Trout Productions Studio City, CA bigfish@pacbell.net
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Posted by: John Moore <bigfish@pacbell.net>
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