Hi all, I'm working on an AMA plug-in involving in-progress video clips. While the manual states to use the 'Refresh In-Progress AMA clips' button in the Bin Menu to update the in-progress clips, I'm getting different results from using that button. Sometimes, the button will simply update the in-progress file in the bin - i.e., it will replace the old clip (showing old duration) with the current clip. However, sometimes instead of replacing the clip, it simply adds another one to the bin - i.e., the old clip and current clip are both shown in the bin. I'm not able to get consistent results, and was wondering if there's something that determines how the button treats the in-progress files, or some other reason why I'm seeing these results?

Thanks,

Alex

Hi Alex,

If you are seeing a new clip created when you 'Refresh In-Progress AMA clips', your AMA plug-in may be returning  different mob-ids than it originally did.  A clip's mob-ids shouldn't change.

- Don

Hi Don, thanks for your reply. I've been looking more into this possibility, and it seems like that may indeed be the problem. The plug-in calls the following function in order to assing mob id's:

AMAUTILLIB_API ACFRESULT GenerateUMIDFromFileContent(IACFString *pathToDataFile, aafUID_t *pUMID);

I don't know how this function works, but while the comments indicate that it will generate "a predictable UMID from the given data file," the UMID is always different. I don't know if "predictable" here means reliable or consistent. It seems that, every time the function is called, it generates a different aafUID_t, which is then returned - hence the stacking files. 

Is there a way to get a consistent aafUID_t from a given file? This function is being passed the same file path every time, so I'm not exactly sure why it's not returning a consistent aafUID_t.

Thanks,

Alex

Hi Don, we managed to fix the problem of the stacking clips via the method you suggested. However, now we're having a problem of getting the actual 'Refresh In-Progress Clips' button to appear in NewsCutter and MediaComposer. On some machines, we can reliably get this button to show up, and on others we can't. Do you know what we need to have the button show up? Currently we can use the "AMA Link" option from the context menu to update our clips, but the 'Refresh' button has more functionality - ie it updates files both in the bin and in the actual editor. Is there a plug-in or something else we need to have enabled or installed?

Thanks,

Alex