Think of AMA as a sort of remote control of your actual media. It's not in the Avid project yet, because you have not imported it, or consolidated a sequence, or transcoded, any of which will create actual MXF associated media files linked to your pointers. So it seems to me lifting and extracting must be a far more processor intensive task when working AMA then with actual Avid media. You could test my theory with a half a dozen or so clips that you import directly. I'm curious what your task manager shows for CPU usage.  

I´ve got the same thing. AMA on, partly dead slow. AMA off, screaming fast.

I did watch my CPU tonight when I made edits to the timeline. I have a Quad Core 2.8GHz system with 3G RAM. When I make a change, and the system hangs for a few seconds, a single CPU core hits the roof; 100%.  2.6GB total RAM in use. The other three cores aren't doing much at all. Total CPU usage is about 30%. Perhaps there's a way to get Avid to usa all 4 cores?

I think in the meantime it would be much better to convert the files to a MC friendly format. I need to find a way to convert them inline, without undoing everything I've already done. (Or since I'm almost done with this project, perhaps I'll just wait until next project and start by importing all media. I'm not saving any time this way.

I am a new MC user, coming from Liquid.

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Hi guys,

We are experiencing the same issues on AMA as this post and I hope some of you can help.

We are running esata 3x 1TB seagate drives (sonnet e4p esata card)

This is my first project using AMA and we have encountered surprisingly slow performance for very basic operations (opening bins, adding locators, etc). The project just started a week or two ago, on a new OS and Avid install.. The Avid doesn't crash but is terribly slow while doing very simple actions with these medias and I'm at a lost why this is happening. Also I notice the CPU usage is only on one core when performing these actions. I have checked the boards and this seems to be a problem with the AMA tool.

Shot on: xdcam ex-3

About 50 hours of material (30hrs mov xdcam ex 1080 30p, 10hrs mov xdcam ex 1080 30i, 10hrs mov transcoding to prores 1080 30i)

I decided to use xdcam transfer to wrap BPAV folders in MOV. You might ask why! Well, the idea was to use the same medias to work on both offline (Avid) and online (Apple Color) platforms. Using the AMA function, I could easily work MOV xdcam footage on the Avid then send an EDL to relink on the same MOV for finishing in Color. I don't know if this is a transgression to the way AMA works. From my research, i understood that Avid MC5 has no problems dealing with xdcam ex footage in a BPAV folder structure and most type of quicktime files in popular codecs (xdcam prores, red, h264. Etc.) provided you have the right machine and storage to ensure performance and stability. All i can say is that it does work in terms of importing and playback. Yet the performance issue i'm getting (laying a clip on a timeline with multiple locators take forever!!) tells me there is something wrong.

Anyway, hope someone can help!

Mac os 10.6.4, Macpro 3.1 dual 2.8, 12gb ram, geforce 8800, sonnet e4p esata card.

Just for the record, at Marianna's request, I escalated this issue about one month ago. It has been logged as a bug and it is being worked on.

We are experiencing the same problem with MC 5.0.3.5 on our Z800 with Prores files.

I have a bin with about 40 AMA prores files, overall maybe 20 hours of video.

1 - the prores files (1080 59.94) will not playback smoothly.

2- The slightest manipulation on the bin (sort, select...) takes minutes and more minutes !

3- I decided to consolidate the files to DNxHD 145. I have to consolidate the bigger files (one hour video) one by one, otherwise Avid does not respond at all.

I may have found some things and workarounds that can help with this problem and wanted to post them here.  They work most of the time but not always... and in some cases it just reduces the delay length instead of getting rid of it all together.

1) Close all the bins that were open except for the one containing the sequence you are working on.  Of course this isn't always possible depending on your workflow and what stage of the editing you are at, but I've found that by closing all bins, and then opening just the one containing the sequence I'm working on really helps.  I can usually open up one more bin (or sometimes more) after doing this as closing everything seems to clear the memory in some way and make the problem go away.  Additionally if you can only work with bins that have fewer AMA linked clips in them that helps vs having a bin open with lots of AMA linked clips in it.  I should note too that my sequences are all stored in a bin that contains no AMA linked clips... just sequences... so that may be part of the solution for some people if you store clips and sequences in the same bin.

2) Clear the "monitor" and "menu" for both the source window and record windows.  This is the history list of what's been loaded into both monitors and can be done by clicking on the title of the clip or sequence in the top left (source) or top right (record) window and choosing the option to clear these 2 separate items.  This seems to help to free up some memory and/or help get rid of the long delays.

3) Defrag your hard drive.  I recently (on PC) downloaded the free program "DeFraggler" and ran that on my hard drives and that also has helped boost performance.  I do this about once a month or more as needed.

4) Work with as little clips in a sequence as you are able.  For me, I will sometimes dump in 2 hours of footage into a timeline containing anywhere from 50 to 250 clips or more, and I'll cut down the footage within a sequence.  I know there may be better ways to edit, but in my business (weddings) part of my workflow involves doing a few passes on all the footage I've shot to edit it down in pass 1, and then use the edited down version from which to edit my final video... so editing in the timeline is just something I prefer to to for my workflow ... at least one pass 1.  Anyway, I've found that its helped to only put into a sequence the clips I know I'm going to be working on immediately and then bring in more later.  Additionally when I am working on a final film which may be getting long or contain an increasingly large sequence (i.e. 20+ minutes with 250+ shots ore more) and I "NEED" to continue to add more to my film.... I'll often create a temporary sequence to edit the next section (usually 2 to 5 minutes worth) of my larger movie and then splice it in after its been completed from the temp sequence.  This too has really helped.

Typically if I do the above 4 items that the long delay problems don't seem to plague me nearly as often.  This error is still annoying and I don't know why they haven't addressed it (to date I'm not aware of it being fixed at least), but the above items have really helped me, and I hope it will help anyone who reads this.  Best of luck!

John

jpottenger:

I may have found some things and workarounds that can help with this problem

John,

I've also run into this problem with AMA linked video time lags while editing. For me it got worse as I added more fx and the timeline was only about 28 minutes long. I was seeing delays ranging from 10-30 seconds upon executing some functions, like lifting/extracting/moving a clip/trimming a clip. Very frustrating. I've posted previously about it (MC5 "not responding" time lags).

Now I'm no longer trying to do entire projects with AMA linked clips. I'll start by transcoding my AVCHD footage with Panasonic's free program into P2 volumes. Then I'll AMA link in MC5. Next I'll do all of my "rough edits" to get the footage I want in the sequence or sequences. Then I'll use MC's consolidate function to keep only that footage and nothing more. Last step is to delete the AMA links and the original sequences from the bins. So far this has worked great and the consolidate function runs quite fast in my experience.

The first time I tried using the consolidate function I had already done a bunch of color corrections, transitions, and a couple of time warps so I had to render the timeline first. But then I was pleasantly surprised to see that consolidate carried over all of the fx to the clips and they were all already rendered since they apparently share the same pre-computes with the original sequence. But to save time I now only do a rough edit and then consolidate before applying any fx.

I am also having this although it can even freeze when just trying to overwirte a clip to the timeline.

System is MC 3.0.5.7 software only, canon xf footage, 6gb ram, 3tb sata raid internal, 6tb esata external, windows 7.

Would really love to see this sorted out. Current workflow is to transcode everything to SD 3:1 for edit and SD mastering and then relink to HD AMA clips.

Is improving performance/responsiveness with large AMA clips (when I do, I usually use 1 hour long DNxHD mov clips linked via AMA) something that is being worked on for future releases, or is it just impossible to improve ?

Don't know if it's being worked on or not (no speculating).  I do know that you get better AMA performance with a faster processor.

BenoitM:

Is improving performance/responsiveness with large AMA clips (when I do, I usually use 1 hour long DNxHD mov clips linked via AMA) something that is being worked on for future releases, or is it just impossible to improve ?

I'll defer to Bob Russo to answer that question.

We too are experiencing the performance slowdown with large AMA clips.

We were working with multiple 90-minutes long AMA clips. You can play the clip allright, but as soon as you edit the sequence it becomes so slow that you cannot edit at all.

In fact we stopped using AMA at all except for P2 media. P2 media is packaged as numerous short media files and Avid seems to like that. You can suspect that it is not the lenght of the clip that matters, it is the lenght of the individual media files.

And even DNxHD media files linked as AMA dont playback correctly if they are longer that 10-15 minutes.

And now that I am bitching, another question: why do h264 files take forever to import ? It takes 3 times longer for Avid to ingest an h264 file than it does with TMPGenc.

corbeilproduction:

why do h264 files take forever to import ? It takes 3 times longer for Avid to ingest an h264 file than it does with TMPGenc.

Depending on what version you're running (your specs say Media Composer Adrenaline HD), you may be able to AMA link to h264 Quicktimes and then transcode them.  In my experience, it's faster than importing.

Oh I see that my specs are not up to date. We are running MC 6.0.1 on two stations. I will try your transcode suggestion the next time I can.

MC 6 has certainly improved the performance in AMA files, but we are still far from perfection !