MC 10.x OMF export to PT.... PAUL G... please HELP!!!!!

[Pat Lee]

We have a client who has been trying to export an OMF for us. Audio only. But has been unsuccessful as of late.
They are using a Media Composer 10.x.x on Mac platform.
Only once, out of numerous tries, has an export worked.
We have come up with various download procedures for the other previous versions of MC and Symphony that seem to work fine when we give them to our clients and/ or use them in house... (our company has a few flavors of AVID products as well)
However we do not own MC vers 10.x.x on Mac platform so our experience is limited to whatever contact we have thru our clients.

Being very familiar with the do's and don'ts and how to's in regards to exporting OMFs from AVIDs, we are at a loss as to why this won't work.

But what really p***es me off is that calls to both Digidesign AND to AVID seem to be unfruitful. Neither company's tech support... which WE PAY FOR!!!!... cannot provide adequate info as to the probable cause of our/ our clients problem nor can they provide a decisive procedure to export an OMF from the most recent version of Media Composer....

Paul G.-
I see that you are very attentive to this message board and seem to be up on all the particulars from other past topics.
I hope you can respond to this.

[Pat Lee]

Paul-

what I am asking for is:
a definitive OMF export procedure for an AVID MC 10.1.1 on Mac platform (G4) for ProTools 5.0.1 and 5.1.1.

It seems that our client even has a hard time re-importing their own .omf file(s)... embedded and/ or non-embedded-separate OMFI MediaFiles folder to their own system.

When we get the file(s), Digitranslator seems to go thru the entire import/ conversion process fine... even taking the ample amount of time importing all the MediaFiles.
But when we open the session, no audio files can be found... even though they have been'converted'.
Navigating to the file(s) does not work.

Clue:
In DT (vers. cs3), the .omf file the application sees and displays info in the upper left part of the window says the file-type is sd2. But all the files in the MediaFiles folder have a .aif suffix.

Thanks
P

[Paul Greyson]

What do you mean navigating to the files "doesn't work."

wrt a "definitive" procedure, there are a number of ways to do it.

[DaveP]

I can help you here. On the Avid they have set up their system to use AIFF files. There are now three options Avid can use AIFF files WAV or sd2. When they have been doing the omf's they have been selecting sd2 as the format. This makes an omf that nothing can open. If they simply select aif as the media type when doing the omf's you should be fine.

However, PT5.1 has no problems with using aif files. PT 5.01 will recreate the waveform overviews EVERY time you open the session.

Good Luck.

Dave P

[Paul Greyson]

Pat, I'm going to need some details to help you with this.

[Pat Lee]

I appreciate everyone's help and at the risk of sounding redundant...
trust me when I say that my experience in the 'art' of OMF exporting/ importing is very extensive.

Paul-
To answer your question(s)...
When opening the ProTools sessions created by DT (originally coming from MC 10.1.1/ Mac G4), a prompt comes up asking for "XXXXXX" type file (an audio file). I can direct the program to look directly at the file and it still will not recognize it... even though it has the exact name it is asking for.

I realize there are a number of procedures for exporting. AVID once released an informative document that described the the various ways without getting too specific since each system would obviously have a differnet configuration (CPU, peripherals, drives etc...).
This document was from MC vers 7.x was already out for almost a year but 8.x was not yet available.
I am wondering if any such document exists AND if there is a document that lists some do's and don'ts...(ie... iomega formatted disks can possibly corrupt media etc...)...
I realize that is a tall order and more of an AVID question... but since you guys are in cahoots....

I am sure there is a drove of users out there who would appreciate it.

Thanks


Dave P.-
Thanks but I know about the file format options in the AVIDs and have tried many many permutations... all with unsuccessful results.

The better news is that the system in question is not actually ours but a clients'....and they rented it!!!
But this is about trying to keep the job going. We even went to client's system to do the exporting ourselves.
We followed the basic parameters we always follow with any other AVID Mac or NT.

So...

My last ditch effort was to import one the many attempted OMF files into a MC 10.5 on an NT system.
That worked somewhat.
The sequence shows up with all appropriate media in the timeline BUT when I try to play it... an error pops up saying that "this (NT) system is unable to play SDII files..."
I know NT's cannot play SD2 files but the strange part is that the omf file/ sequence we imported was originally exported to recognize AIFF files. Even all the files in the OMFI MediaFiles folder have .aif tags.
Strange, right?
If you look at my second reply in this post, there is a similar problem when DT looked at this (these) omfs.

Luckily, the MC 10.5/NT still recognized the sequence AND the media.
I re-exported the sequence... just the sequence... and checked off all possible settings for AIFF.
I brought that sequence over to my DT with the original OMFI MediaFiles folder.

Digitranslator saw the omf.
The file type listed in the upper left hand window said 'AIFF'not SD2 as was the original problem.
Everything worked perfectly!!!!

We do enough omf importing/ exporting on a daily basis to realize that this is not the norm.
I am also 99.9% sure the problem is with the client's MediaComposer.

I would just like to resolve this since we have at least 12 more half-hour shows to deal with... this season alone.

Any ideas?

thanks