Consolidating

S

sean90291

Veteran
I'm missing a piece of the puzzle. I understand the principle behind consolidating a sequence: you want to eliminate all the extraneous files to save space on the hard-drive. But I am not sure what's happening when I click on "consolidate" for a sequence.

For example, a new "sequence" appears after selecting "consolidate." But the previous one is still there. As are all the unused captured clips in other bins in the project file. I thought everything would get duplicated into a new folder/bin (all rendered effects, clips, titles, etc.) so that I could safely delete everthing in all the other bins in the project. This does not seem to be the case. And so I'm not sure then what consolidate actually does for me.

Last but not least, even if I go through and delete all the unused bins and clips manually (one by one), there are still a lot of files left over in the OMFI folder.

So...I think I'm doing something wrong. Any advice would be much appreciated!
 
I don't understand why you'd want to necessarily trash the bins and sequences/clips inside the bins... these take up minimal amounts of space (I'm talking maybe a couple kb for a big bin). Master clips and sequences use ZERO space because they are not real files, they only exist as pointers and references... if you tried to search your hard drive for your "sequence" then you would only find maybe the bin file (.avb) that contained the sequence.

I don't think you have your head around the media management part of Avid quite yet, so I'll try to explain:

When you finish a project, you can keep everything relating to the project (bins, clips, sequences etc) so that you can go back to it in the future and batch capture or batch import everything back into the sequence from the original raw source material.

To Consolidate your sequence, you've got it down pretty good, but to help clarify things for you what I would do is BEFORE you Consolidate, create a new bin (name it Consolidate), then take your final sequence and duplicate it into the Consolidate bin. Now when you choose Consolidate it will put everything nice and tidy into that one single bin for you.

But, I still wouldn't go deleting the "old" stuff out of the project because if you ever have to go back to it you would have nothing to go back to except the one final sequence and it's used clips. No other clips would be saved.

To rid yourself of the unused media in the OMFI folder, you have a few options:

1) When Consolidating you can choose to "delete original media"
2) You can Consolidate to an empty drive, then using the Media Tool you can manually delete any old and unused material.

There are some other ways, but it's after 5AM here and I need some sleep, so I'll leave it at that... perhaps someone else can chime in with a few other ways.
 
Ah, you have clarified a couple of key points I wasn't gleaning from the Avid manuals/books that I have. Thank you very much. I think there are a few things I'm still not "getting" regarding media management, you're right! Because if my original media is one loooooooong, original captured clip (because I tend to capture by playing the entire MiniDV tape at a time and then selecting sub-clips from that), I assumed that consolidating would cut that original media down to only the clips that I used in my sequence. Because, obviously, the bins and sub-clips and sequences are tiny files. It's the original media that takes up my hard-drive (good to remind me of that, however, because I'd sort of lost track of that fact!).
 
Consolidating should do just what you want, it essentially will create new media (unless you specify not to in the options) that represent the clips used.

I often Cons to a seperate hard drive when the project is finished so that I have a new OMFI folder representing all the clips/media for that finished project... usually the result is much smaller than the original project OMFI folder. I just recently Consolidated nearly 2 hrs of finished program down from over 500GB to about 45GB.

One thing to note about capturing one long clip and subclipping it:

.omf files are limited to 2GB each (approx 9 mins 30 secs of DV), so if you capture a clip that is over 9:30 it will actually exist on the hard drive as two files, though you'll only see the one Master Clip.
 
Thanks. You know your stuff. So I gather you're saying Avid will shorten my looooong original media clip into only the original media segments used in my consolidated sequence? That would be perfect. I do get the impression everything gets saved in my one OMFI folder however. Would be nice if there was an OMFI folder for that specific project separate from the rest, so I could delete the original media from the main OMFI folder. But I'm sure I'll figure this out with some more time.
 
In a sense you've got it. It won't shorten the looooong clip per se, what it does is creates new media from the master clips that are being consolidated. Those new media files will likely be smaller, but it does nothing to the original media clip (unless you set it to delete original media), so in essence, you end up using more drive space. That's where knowing the Media Tool inside and out is handy, so you can clean up afterwards.

Everything does get saved into the OMFI MediaFiles folder (Avid scans the hard drives and will only "see" omf files that are in that folder... and that folder must be at the root level of the drive. (ie D:\OMFI MediaFiles)

There are a couple things/tricks you can use to organize your stuff by project

1) Before you start a new project, rename all the existing OMFI folders (*just enough to change the name to prevent Avid from scanning them) I commonly use "xOMFI MediaFiles"
2) Now when you start a new project and begin capturing Avid will create more OMFI folders on your hard drives. Anything you capture will go into that folder, when you want to work on another project, just rename your OMFI folders again and so on. I like to rename them based on project... when I want to work on an old project, I just have to rename again and voila! Back in business.

Going back to what I said above about Consolidating to an empty drive, When I've Consolidated the sequence, I then rename that OMFI folder so that I know that is the final Consolidated media folder. I've got one 250GB external drive that I use exclusively for Consolidated versions of projects. When that fills up, I get another and start over.

It's a great way to archive a project and have all the media organized at the same time, plus if I ever have to work on an old project on another Avid, I take my project folder and the archive drive and can be up and running in minutes.
 
Brilliant! Now that is a very good answer. Everyone should use that trick. I just have to learn how to use the Media Tool now.

Thanks!
 
Is timecode a factor in consolidating? For example, when you consolidate a project and the media that is not part of your final sequence is deleted, does Avid use the timecode to determine what to delete?
 
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