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Showing posts from June, 2016

Avid Behaving Badly #16: AMA linked clips reference the wrong AMA linked clips

Dealt with this years ago, but it's come up again for a friend on Avid 8.x.x so I figured I'd write it out.  This is so stupid.  When you AMA link clips, avid generates a pointer hash that tells the bin which clip file is being referenced.  Unfortunately, whatever algorithm generates this hash is totally stupid and frequently creates duplicate hashes.  The result is that clip AH010602A01.04 suddenly has a tape source of AH010602F03.  Fucking Avid. It doesn't matter if the clips are different lengths, have different TCs, or are even in the same format.  If you have AMA linked clips, you can have bad reference pointers.  The problem isn't super common (maybe 1 clip in every 50), but if you're working on a real show, it'll pop up daily.  Yes, before you ask, dear reader, this will happen with quick ingest XDCam stations since they AMA link to the MPEG reference files for copyover. So how do you prevent this nonsense? Well, you can't.  Not really.  The bes