The drive is pre-loaded with Avid formatted music bins, fully searchable and categorised by genre and programme type. Connect the drive to your Media Composer, allowing you to drag the music directly into your timeline without conversion.
Bin Ingestion
The easiest way to use the Avid Music Drive is to import your chosen Genre Bins directly into your project. This way, you can browse our catalogue within Media Composer without copying tracks over to your local device.
Please watch the following video on importing Genre Bins into your project.
Advanced Search
By default, the Bin search function in Media Composer only searches the first column of metadata associated with the media.
Please watch the following video on enabling advanced search to search all available columns in Media Composer.
Consolidation and Transcoding
If you use the Genre Bins directly from the Avid Music Drive, Media Composer creates ‘links’ between your local repository and the hard drive.
If you wish to have certain Bins or Tracks on your local storage, Media Composer allows you to ‘consolidate’ and move media files from the Avid Music Drive to a different hard drive. You can either ‘keep’ or ‘relink’ original master clips. This choice controls how the original master clips are linked.
You can make new media and new master clips linked to that media. So, the transcoded master clips receive the ‘.new’, or the original source master clips receive the ‘.old’ extension and still link to the original source files. This is a personal preference in most cases, so choose whichever option suits your needs.
Alternatively, ‘transcode’ allows you to change the current media from one format into another. Use this option if you wish to change file types, extensions, codecs, etc., based on the needs of your project. Please watch the following video on consolidating and transcoding tracks on the Avid Media Drive.
Offline clips
There are several possible reasons why the ‘link’ between media files and your project may break, and this will likely mean that the clips will go offline and be unusable in your project. For this reason, we suggest frequent backups and exercising caution when trying any of the following suggestions – we have put these options together based on our experience. Still, we aren’t able to take responsibility for any associated data loss if these steps don’t work in your setup.
1. The Avid Media Drive is not connected to your machine, or your device is not reading the hard drive correctly.
- If so, please try disconnecting and reconnecting the hard drive and restarting Media Composer.
2. The Avid Media Files folder is not in the root of your directory.
- Media Composer, by default, looks at the root of any chosen hard drive to find the Avid Media Files folder.
- Please ensure the media you are trying to access is at the root of your C: drive or hard drive.
- This issue could arise if you copied the contents of the Avid Media Drive and your destination was not the root of the chosen hard drive, so please ensure that when you are making copies, either use a fresh hard drive/network drive or copy into your existing Avid Media Files folder.
3. Relink media.
- Please select your offline clips and right-click to choose the ‘relink’ option.
- Select the location of the offline media and relink
4. There are broken media database files.
- Exit Media Composer
- Go to Avid MediaFiles > MXF
- Inside every numbered folder inside MXF, there will be two database files called msmFMID.pmr and the msmMMOB.mdb
- Delete all the database files you find
- Restart Media Composer
- During startup, Media Composer will rescan all your hard drives looking for media, hopefully fixing your project’s broken links.
If none of these options solves your issue, don’t hesitate to contact Avid Support for further help.
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