OMF and Symphony 3.6

[Barnaby Bristol]

Huh. Symphony to Symphony (same machine) as embedded AIF media did not work. Without media,, composition only with the intent of loading, conforming did work.

[Toadfish]

I use this method as follows after I got the following messages:1. Media consolidated onto a HFS drive (not HFS+) through mac drive or macopener could not be imported into Pro Tools 5.13. Messages such as "where is ??filename??" , "VideoMedia:OMFI_ERR:Bento container error;In omfsOpenFile", "Invalid File" etc.

2. If you managed to get a decent omf then you had to click on each and every file to relink the media.

Well it turns out this is a workflow problem from the Avid side and can be fixed by doing the export process correctly. It is as follows:

First MacDrive or MacOpener:

On the NT Avid, ensure that MacDrive 2000 or MacOpener2000 is installed.
Mac Drive- You must make sure that File Name Compatibility - Preserve Mac names is set in the MacDrive control panel.
Mac Opener- You must make the Append the PC extension to the end of the Mac file name is set in the MacOpener control panel.

If you don't set this correctly then the file extensions won't be kept and so Pro Tools has a problem seeing it.

Avid Export Procedure :

- Make sure there are no unrendered stills/effects in any video track in the sequence that is to be exported.
- Make a new bin
- Duplicate the sequence, and place this duplicate in the bin you just created.
- Delete unwanted elements (you can only have one video track for export)
- Go to the Consolidation option (in clip menu) and deselect "Skip media files that already on target disk." in the dialog box.- Important.

- Consolidate whats left of the sequence to the internal NTFS Volume OMFI Mediafiles Folder (NOT MAC PARTITION) - ie. the same partition that the
media is originally coming from. This will mean that the consolidated media is mixed with the original files, but, it is easy enough to separate them out if you view the file column information (in Windows Explorer) by date. They will be the only ones that were created in the last 5 minutes!

- Load this newly consolidated sequence into the timeline.
- Go the file menu select Save or Save Bin. VERY IMPORTANT.
- Make sure you are viewing the duplicated and newly consolidated sequence. All the file names should be suffixed with .new at the end of the file name.
- If the media is coming up as offline in the play out window then it hasn't done it properly. Go back to the begining again.
- Make sure your consolidated sequence is the only thing highlighted in the bin and then, in the file menu select Export or Avid Links.
- If you use Export, select Options and then --> OMF 2.0 -->link to all external (video and audio). Save OMF composition to the same NTFS Volume.
- If you use Avid Links just choose Pro Tools as the option and save the OMF composition file to the same NTFS volume.

- If after you have done the export you get "Fatal_exception errors" in the bottom left hand corner of the playout window then the export hasn't worked and isn't linking to the new media. Go back and try again.

At Desktop level:

- Now mount your mac drive on the system - you will probably need to reboot at this point. (Now is a good time to double check your options are correct for MacDrive).
- Then copy all of the newly consolidated media to your OMFI Mediafiles folder on the Mac volume, and then OMF composition to the root of the drive (or somewhere easy to find).

Back in the Avid:

- Just to test, delete the consolidated media from the NTFS Volume, launch MC / Symphony and open the sequence from the HFS volume. This should load the media. If it is offline it hasn't worked. Double check this by highlighting the clips in the bin in stats view ('S' in the bin), and scrolling along to determine which physical drive they reside on. This should be your mac drive. If it's referencing you NTFS volume then start again.

In Pro Tools:

- Open the OMF through 5.13 or through DigiTranslator 1.0.
- When Pro Tools boots it will ask you for the first file of video, and then of audio, search for it and open it.
- It will then take you to the OMFI Mediafile folder on the HFS drive.
- If the file names appear correctly with their .xxx suffixes intact (omf, wav, aif, sd2 etc.) Pro Tools should automatically find all the files itself without prompting for each one. As long as the HFS mounter app is setup correctly (see above).