Avid 4.0 P2 Workflow, Part 1: Importing
Saturday, January 16, 2010 at 11:34AM My current project is a feature documentary with about one hundred hours of footage, all completely tapeless. We have P2 media from hard-drives, originally shot on the HVX-200A and HPX-500, along with quicktime files shot on the Canon 5D. It sucked, not because the hardware and software couldn't handle it, but because no one on the project (including me) knew how to adjust our tape-based sensibilities into a tapeless environment.
Most P2 guides I've found are limited to small projects, whose sources are manageable enough to keep in your head or in a speadsheet. Larger projects need a system in place, so you don't have to track source media, but you can find it by moving through the system you've set up.
1. Familiarize Yourself With the Process
Avid has a really helpful PDF file on their site, called the "P2 & Avid AMA Workflow Guide" that covers the bare-bones basics. It will get you started, but there are a few details that I'm going to get into that are beyond the scope of that document.
2. Organize Your Source Media Beforehand
On this job, the P2 media was brought into the system before I arrived on the job, and it was brought in from an extremely disorganized Firewire drive. It might not matter on small projects, but on big ones, importing from disorganized sources will come back to bite you. Organizing your P2 sources is the same as keeping an organized shelf of tapes, or numbering the still photos you import. Here is an example of my ideal folder structure (click to enlarge):
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Going from left to right (which goes deeper into each folder), we start with the shoot date, followed by the camera, followed by a folder for each card that was used, and in each card folder we have the actual dump of the footage from the card.
3. Link to an Entire Camera's Worth of Footage At Once
Most (if not all) P2 cameras support something called "clip spanning". Clip spanning allows you to load two cards into a camera at once, and if the first card fills up, the recording continues uninterrupted on the second card. What this means for post-production is that if you were to import Card 1 but not Card 2, and a scene spanned both those cards, the part of that scene that lived on Card 2 would appear offline.
For this reason, you should import an entire camera folder at a time. Avid will read the spanned clips properly and you won't get mysterious partially-offline clips.
4. Save Your Source Folder as a Custom Column
If you weren't already aware of this, here's a fun tip: You know all those bin columns like "Start", "Duration", "Modified Date", etc.? Scroll all the way to the right of your bin, move your mouse to the right of the current headings until your mouse arrow turns into a text-entry cursor, and click. You now get to type in a custom heading.
I used "AMA VOLUME" as my heading, but yours belong to you; you get to use whatever you want. Now, click the "Drive" column heading to highlight that entire column, and hid Command-D on a Mac, or Control-D on Windows to duplicate this entire "Drive" column into your new custom heading. You'll eventually consolidate these clips to your Avid Mediafiles folder, and Media Composer doesn't seem to save the source location in any place you can see it. If you need to go back to the source for any reason, having this saved custom heading will save you a lot of time.
5. Consolidate, and Keep Your Old Clips
You can watch footage that's linked to as an AMA Volume, but if you're going to cut with it long-term, you're going to need to consolidate this media to your Avid Mediafiles folder. Select your linked clips, and Consolidate, linking your master clips to the new drive.
When it's complete, copy your master clips that are linked to your new drive to new bins, and work out of those new bins. I separated out "tape bins" by date, camera and load, so that it would look like the tape-based projects my editor and I were used to. Take your original bin, which has clips linking to the AMA Volume and the new drive, and tuck away in a safe place. You'll need it to recover if something goes wrong down the line.
6. Cut, Mix, and Be Merry
Now you're ready to make the magic happen! My next entry in this series will be about recovering media that gets knocked offline, which turned out the be trickier than expected.
