Being a student, I'm working off my macbook pro and I am running out of internal hard drive space because of avid.  I want to move my avid projects and files to an external.  I know there a lot of avid folders everywhere on my hard drive, I'm wondering if this is a good idea?  Moving my projects, omfi, mediafiles, and whatever else I can move so I can run Avid completely off my external hard drive besides the program itself.

You're on the right track Andrew. You want to keep the Avid program and your project files on the system drive, but store all of your media files to a separate drive, either internal, external, or a RAID array. Specifically, you'll want to move the entire folders named "OMFI MediaFiles" and "Avid MediaFiles" to a separate drive. Leave everything else where it is. Now first, the ground rules for media folder management:

1) The "Avid MediaFiles" folder (for MXF media) and the "OMFI MediaFiles" folder (for OMF media) MUST reside at the root level of the media drive, never inside any other folders or the system will not find the media.

2) The folder names must always be the factory default names listed above (minus the quotes) or the system will not find the media.

3) There can be only one of each folder type on any given media drive.

After moving the media folders to their correct locations, you will need to rebuild the Media Database files so the system will see them in their new place. To do this, Quit the application. Then, from each numerical folder inside the MXF folder inside the Avid MediaFiles folder, delete the two files that identify by type as "MSM Media Database". Sorting by date usually brings those files right to the top. If you have an OMFI MediaFiles folder, delete the same two files. On re-launch, the system will detect the missing files and build new ones at the "Initializing Media Streams Manager" stage. You will see the system go into a scanning and indexing mode at this point.

Thats all I need to know I guess, thanks a lot!

You're quite welcome. Always glad to help out.

Just to add to Larry's sound advice, after you have copied your media files to your new drive, I suggest leaving the old ones on you internal drive where they are, but rename them (maybe just add "_OLD" to the name, i.e. Avid MediaFiles_OLD).

This will effectively hide them from the Avid software, but you can keep them till you're happy that all the media is working off the new external drive.

Once you're happy with how the system is running and sure that all your media is present on the new drive, then delete those old folders of media.

Another check you can do is select the media folder and press Command-I to see the size of the data and number of files. Then compare that with the copied foler. They should be (almost) identical in size. (There can be a slight variation because of how the files are spread on the drive.)

cheers

Campbell

That's an excellent idea, Campbell, and I fully endorse it.

I like to add an "x", you know, just so I can call them the X-Files. 

That would be been a smart idea, i lost a few files overwriting some things, but no big deal.  Will renaming the old folder stop Avid from recreating one/or how do I reset my scratch disk?

Andrew Glenn Miller:

Will renaming the old folder stop Avid from recreating one/or how do I reset my scratch disk?

Let's use MXF media as an example. If you rename "Avid MediaFiles" to something like "xAvid MediaFiles", the system will hide that folder from Avid, and Avid will create a new "Avid MediaFiles" folder on the next import or capture. If you were to then remove the "x" from the name of the original folder, you would now have two "Avid MediaFiles" folders on the same media drive, which you do not want. You would need to combine the contents of the two folders into a single one and delete the now empty folder. This renaming technique is often used when hunting down corrupted files using the "divide and conquer" method.

If i wanted to have the system recreating avid mediafiles on my external drive instead of my internal however, because I moved my Media files to my external, how would I approach it?

In the media creation area of your Avid user settings, you can set the drive destination for all functions. You would make sure your external drive is the one selected for all functions. And activate filter out the system and launch drives in the "drive filtering and indexing" tab.

Hi, good info!

Just a follow up: What is proper manual way of moving MXF files?

I want to combine MXF files from one drive to another exsisting media drive. I know about Avid's consolidate process but sometimes it's just quicker if you can simply do it in the Finder!

ideas?

Thanks!

You can just copy the numbered folders inside the MXF folder from one drive to the other. But you should rename them first starting at the next number. So if the target drive has media folders 1, 2 and 3, then on the drive you're moving from rename the folders 4, 5, etc. Then just copy them across.

You may need to delete the msm* files inside the folders so that Avid recreates the media database, but probably not.

Once they've copied then don't forget to do a "Get properties" and compare the folder size and number of files in each of the folders between the source and target drives. If you want to keep the old media until you're sure it's there, just rename the Avid Media Files folder as Avid Media Files_XXX or something, so that Avid doesn't see it when it starts up.

cheers

Campbell

Thanks!

What about renaming hard drives? what's Avid's rule on it?

No problem there. Avid doesn't use a drive path name for the media (except for AMA media).

When Avid starts it checks all the Avid Media Files folders on the drive and loads up the databases from them (or scans and creates a database file if it's missing or you've deleted it) and then all your media will be available. Even if you've moved it from one drive to another it should still be online in your sequence.

That's a big part of why Avid's media management is so great. The database keeps your media connected and lets you search all the media you have stored on the drives.

cheers