While on this project, which is shot 100% with P2, BTW, I have encountered a couple issues.

#1 – Occasionally media files go missing.  This was a big issue that kept happening before I came on board.  The company was running Avid Media Composer 2.7.7 and using the IMPORT P2 option.  But on occasion media would just go offline, and they’d have to reimport.  When I got the job I recommended that they upgrade to MC 4.0…because I saw that they had an Intel Mac, and from experience I knew that their Adrenaline would still work with 4.0…and MC 4.0 has a more robust P2 workflow. They did upgrade, and so far things have been going smoothly, until yesterday, when media went offline.  TO be fair, this was media imported with the old version, only a couple cards have been imported with the new version, and those are still present. But it is maddening to have media just go offline.  So, without my assistant at hand, who knows what media came from what card, I was going to import the footage myself.  BUT….now onto issue #2…

#2 – Avid MC doesn’t have any way for the user to see where the media came from, at least none that I can see.  I’m darn sure that it knows where it came from, but it just isn’t sharing.  In Final Cut Pro, the REEL number is the name of the P2 backup folder that contains the card dumps.  So when you look at a clip, you see that it came from the LAX_033010_01 card.  No so with Avid MC.  The REEL number is blank, and when I looked at all the other columns, I don’t see anything relating to that.  And, to top it off, the file only shows the USER CLIP NAME for one camera.  This is the handy thing where you can create scene files and set them in camera so that the clips have names relating to what you are shooting.  Handy, in some ways.  Better than that 0004GH name that Panasonic assigns…in some ways.  It allows you to know right away where that footage came from and what it is for.  But unlike the 0004GH name, I can’t search for that in Spotlight or just the Finder to find the card that contains the missing shot.  That name is buried in the metadata.

So, I just have to wait for my ever vigilant assistant to come in and reimport the footage.  Hopefully this will stop happening   I blame it on the old MC causing issues.  Like I had some issues with the first version of FCP that supported P2, 5.0.4.  Things improve with time.  I am reporting this tracking issue to the people I know, and I hope that either I get an answer on how to find this footage, or they will institute some fix in a new version of MC.  Which MUST be around the corner, as their record for update releases of late have meant new updates every 2 weeks!  OK, I kid…every 6 months/year.

And I guess the solution for knowing which P2 dump folder the footage came from, is to make one bin per card, and then manually add the dump folder name to a custom field in that bin.  Perhaps the reel?  Or will that mess things up?  Just in case, we’ll make it a different column.