Pinnacle Systems Media Director - 1.1 User’s Guide

Media | Director

User’s Guide

Version 1.1

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Avid Media | Director User’s Guide • Created 12/11/14 • This document is distributed by Avid in online (electronic) form only, and is not available for purchase in printed form.

Using This Guide. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Symbols and Conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Avid Training Services . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Chapter 1 Media | Director Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

New for Media | Director v1.1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Media | Director Components . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

The Media | Director Engine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

The Media | Director Drop Utility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Media | Director Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

File Based Workflow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

About Media | Director Workflows and Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Media | Director Process Detail Descriptions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19

Chapter 2 Using the Media | Director Drop Utility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24

The Drop Utility User Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26

Typical Media | Director Users . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Accessing the Drop Utility Installers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

Configuring the Drop Utility Application. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Viewing or Changing the Connection to the Media | Director Engine . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Setting the Login Behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

Rearranging the Panes on the Drop Utility Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

Using the Job Builder Pane. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

Setting the Queue Priority for a Job . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42

Using the Progress Pane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43

Displaying the Remaining Time for a Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

Using the Profile Builder Pane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

Using a Watch Folder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

Copy Provider Service - WAN Support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

Installing the Copy Provider Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47

Configuring the Remote Parking Storage Base Path . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

Using the Remote Parking Storage Base Path in the Drop Utility Application . . . . . 49

Chapter 3 Working with Media | Director Profiles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

Profile Options. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

Using the Profile Builder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

Editing the Display Tab for a Profile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54

Editing the Rules Tab for a Profile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57

Entering Token Values. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

Creating Folder Structures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

Token Value Reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63

Park and Register Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

Defining the Interplay Folder Structure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70

Defining the Parking Storage Folder Structure. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

Defining the Clip Names in the Interplay Database . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74

Using Token Functions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75

Token Functions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

Entering Token Functions in the Profile Builder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78

Chapter 4 Modifying the Media | Director Engine Configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80

Modifying the Interplay Production Configuration Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

Modifying the Workflow Foundation Parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86

Modifying the Watch Folder Parameters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

Changing the Profile Associated with the Watch Folder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

Using This Guide

Congratulations on your purchase of Media | Director, an optional service for Interplay Production that allows workgroups to capture field footage shot in various formats quickly by processing it against user-definable profiles.

This guide is intended for all users of Media | Director. For additional information, see “Typical

Media | Director Users” on page 27.

Revision date Comments

12/12/2014 Updated for v1.1.

The documentation describes the features and hardware of all models. Therefore, your system

might not contain certain features and hardware that are covered in the documentation.

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1 Media | Director Overview

Media | Director is an optional service for Interplay Production that allows workgroups to capture field footage shot in various formats quickly by processing it against user-definable profiles that orchestrate copy, naming and transcode processes via a powerful rules system.

With this option workgroups can dramatically reduce the time spent performing the following tasks:

• Capturing media from a wide variety of file based cameras

• Normalizing various formats to create an efficient production workflow

• Migrating multi-resolution media to make cost efficient use of tiered storage environments

• Making the material available quickly to multiple editors within the Interplay environment.

The following sections describe the benefits of using Media | Director.

Provide an efficient and consistent method for ingesting file-based material

Media | Director has a powerful template-based rules system that allows you to define the copy, transcode, and naming portions of the ingest workflow. You can use standard templates and define your own variations. This eliminates the need for remembering and repeating known ingest policies and ensures that ingest tasks are handled accurately across staff (for example, in-house vs. freelance, different training levels, different locations).

Media | Director provides a central server that can process ingest jobs. Individual jobs can be initiated from client machines with LAN access to the server. This frees up valuable editing systems and allows staff to use older client machines to initiate ingest jobs. Operators can prioritize jobs by assigning priorities to a job.

Protect camera originals and save storage space on the production ISIS

Camera originals represent a production investment (talent, travel, etc.) and long-term monetizing opportunities. Media | Director can be configured to automatically copy camera originals to a central parking storage such as an ISIS 2500 or licensed third-party storage. Media | Director allows you to transcode the camera source material to a low-bit-rate proxy format, such as 2Mb H.264 video and MPEG-1 Layer II audio. This allows you to work with the proxy version on the main Interplay Production ISIS and keep the camera sources on the parking ISIS. This saves storage on the production ISIS and reduces network bandwidth requirements.

You can use Media | Director to transcode to HD resolutions as well. You can also use a qualified version of an Avid editing application or Interplay Transcode service to consolidate from the camera sources to the production ISIS at full resolution.

You can also use the Media | Director to consolidate an entire volume of AMA material to your

production ISIS.

Provide support for post-production workflows

Some post-production work flows, such as reality TV, often capture a large ratio of raw footage compared to the size of the final show. Shooting ratios can be up to and in excess of 200:1. This creates a large amount of camera source material. Editors need access to the sources but you don’t want to copy them all onto your production ISIS system. The concepts of parking storage and dual res work flows works well in a post-production workflow. Your camera sources are stored in their unchanged/native form in a storage area that is easily searchable and you edit with the proxy versions. You can consolidate the material for the final sequences at full resolution to the production ISIS when it’s time to create final masters. This workflow keeps the camera sources in an area that is protected but still easily accessible by qualified users.

New for Media | Director v1.1

The following features are added in Media | Director v1.1:

• A new Register workflow that allows you to register or re-register volumes that are already on Parked Storage. See “Media | Director Process Detail Descriptions” on page 19.

• Configurable default resolution for consolidate jobs. See “Media | Director Process Detail

Descriptions” on page 19 and “Modifying the Workflow Foundation Parameters” on page 86.

• Dual Resolution support to allow you to create two resolutions from the same workflow. For example, high res and low res, two different high res resolutions, etc. See “Editing the Rules

Tab for a Profile” on page 57.

• Multiple Watch folders and additional profile support for Watch folders. See “Using a Watch

Folder” on page 45 and “Modifying the Watch Folder Parameters” on page 88.

• Token functions that allow you to extract information from values such as volume name or date and make use of the elements. See “Using Token Functions” on page 75.

• WAN support using a Copy Provider service to copy to remote workgroups. See “Copy

Provider Service - WAN Support” on page 46.

• The following improvements are added to the Drop Utility:

- A user management login function that allows you to determine whether the Profile

Builder is available to users. See “Setting the Login Behavior” on page 33.

- Job priority. See “Setting the Queue Priority for a Job” on page 42.

- Job process time calculation. See “Displaying the Remaining Time for a Process” on

page 44.

Media | Director Components

Media | Director consists of the following components:

• Media | Director Engine: provides workflow orchestration and media processing services. The Media | Director Engine hosts AMA plug-ins and provides the ability to ingest AMA material, register new clips with the Interplay database, and perform proxy transcode and full-resolution consolidate operations.

• Media | Director Drop Utility: provides the user interface for starting and configuring Media | Director Engine jobs and for building profiles.

Media | Director Components

Note that Media | Director relies on a new generation of AMA plugins that is compatible with the

latest versions of the Avid editing applications.

The Media | Director Engine

Media | Director supports Avid’s Media Access plug in technology (AMA) and provides flexible acquisition format support via qualified AMA plug ins.

The Media | Director Engine is a self-contained device based on Avid or customer provided standard hardware. Its main functions are to execute automatic workflows that register camera native media volumes as AMA assets in an Interplay Production; to create a choice of Avid Production native editing resolutions for these assets from the source media, and to consolidate high resolution material to the Avid production storage.

The Media | Director Engine connects Avid’s storage and asset management solutions with external sources of media and metadata such as camera storage media or video servers, and offers a choice of automated workflows to move media from those sources into an Avid production environment in a highly automated way.

Media | Director Engine includes a workflow engine that drives a scalable number of media processing services with built-in proxy generation through a predefined set of workflows. It also contains adapters that can orchestrate Interplay Production operations such as checking files into Interplay. Built-in MediaCentral | UX technology provides status information through any HTML-5 capable web browser.

Media | Director Components

The Media | Director Drop Utility

Media | Director Engine ships with an OS-native client application for Windows and Mac OS X, the Media | Director Drop Utility. The Drop Utility displays a user interface based on the MediaCentral | UX interface.

The Drop Utility is the user interface for the Media | Director engine. Its main functions are as follows:

• Start Media | Director jobs based on a selectable profile and optional additional parameters

• Create and work with profiles

• Provide feedback about job status and progress

Media | Director Components

The Drop Utility application has two main sections, the Job Builder and the Profile Builder, as shown in the following illustration.

For a description of how different users interact with the interface, see “Typical Media | Director

Users” on page 27.

Media | Director Environment

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The Media | Director Engine is part of an Avid Interplay Production environment as shown in the following illustration.

Media | Director Environment

The Media | Director Engines’ AMA registration and multi resolution capabilities require the following infrastructure to fully leverage the functionality:

• Interplay Production 3.1.x or higher (Interplay Engine and Media Indexer with updated Avid editing applications) for full functionality.

• Direct ingest only functionality is available in pre-3.0 environments

• ISIS 7500 or 5500 production shared storage for Avid-native media and proxies

• ISIS 2000 storage for camera-native media (7500 and 5500 are also supported)

• Enterprise-class networking; fully Avid-qualified 10G infrastructure between Media | Director Engine and ISIS 7500/2500.

• Note that 10G client connectivity is optional.

File Based Workflow

ISIS 2000

Parking Storage

Avid ISIS 5500/7500

Interplay

Engine

AMA Register

Proxy Generation

HiRes Consolidate

Park

AMA Access

Proxy Playback

MediaCentral | UX

Media Composer

Interplay Access

Interplay Admin

The following illustration shows the basic AMA workflow.

File Based Workflow

The basic workflow for the Media | Director process named Park, Register and Transcode consists of the following steps:

1. Insert the camera formatted media such as backup disk with camera media, a P2 card, or XDCAM disk into a reader on the Media | Director client.

2. Drag the volume onto the Media | Director client and select a predefined Profile.

3. For workflows containing Park, Media | Director copies the media from the card or disk to a parking storage system such as an ISIS 2000 or other parking storage. This parking storage provides a single location where you can always find a copy of your original media. This allows AMA workflows to function reliably no matter what happens to the original carrier.

Support for non-ISIS parking storage is a licensable option.

4. For workflows that contain Register, Media | Director uses an AMA register process to create an AMA-linked asset in the Interplay database. These assets point to the media on the parking storage. Note that for pre-Interplay 3.0 workflows, AMA register can be turned off, producing “standard” assets.

About Media | Director Workflows and Processes

At this point the media is available for a limited number of users that can work directly with high res AMA material. For example, you can now edit the material on a Media Composer or NewsCutter system. This is represented by the “AMA Access” portion of the illustration.

5. Next (if the Park, Register and Transcode workflow is used), the Media | Director server uses its built in proxy generation to create a proxy.

Once the proxy is available, editors and other Interplay clients can relink to the proxy. This makes the material available to a much larger group of users such as MediaCentral | UX, Interplay Assist, and Media Composer | Cloud.

This finishes the Media | Director Park, Register and Transcode process.

Once the editors and producers create their sequences and other output based on the proxy, editors can use the Avid editing application or the Interplay Transcode service to initiate a transcode/consolidate operation to bring the desired high res material onto the ISIS 5500 system in the Interplay environment. This will copy the desired portions of the original AMA material from the parking storage onto the ISIS 5500 in the OP-ATOM format used by Avid applications.

You can also use the Media | Director Consolidate from Parking workflow to transcode or

rewrap all of the AMA material in a volume to the Interplay Production ISIS system.

About Media | Director Workflows and Processes

When a new job is submitted, the job profile defines which of the built-in processes are executed. Depending on the profile, the user may have the opportunity to supply additional detail information to the process such as the clip name or the name of an Interplay database folder to create to store the clip metadata.

About Media | Director Workflows and Processes

For every process built into the Media | Director Engine, there is a profile template in the Templates folder as shown in the following illustration:

From those templates, you can create profile “instances” or copies that are tailored to a specific purpose via a set of storage and naming rules. The profile instances start the process they link to with different rules and dynamic data. Even though profiles can be renamed, they remain linked to the original process template. The right column in the profile list shows the original process template that a template has been derived from.

About Media | Director Workflows and Processes

The following table lists the Media | Director built-in processes.

Process Name Process Description

Direct Ingest Directly rewraps volumes from the source carrier to Production Storage (ISIS)

without copying or registering the AMA clips first. The Transcode portion of the profile contains a “transparent pass-through” option. This option treats native codecs as follows:

• If the native codecs are supported in Interplay Production, they are preserved.

You can change the default XDCAM HD 50 resolution to another

resolution. See “Modifying the Workflow Foundation Parameters” on

page 86.

This process is compatible with pre-3.0 versions of Interplay Production back to Interplay 2.7.5. Backwards compatibility is possible because the process does not rely on AMA support in Interplay Production.

Direct Ingest via Cache This process is similar to Direct Ingest except that the AMA media is first

copied (cached) and then processed from the parking storage. This is intended for source carriers that cannot be efficiently processed by a Media | Director, for example because they that are small, fragmented or cannot be read as a network share. Having Media | Director read a volume directly requires the driver to support multi-user access since Media | Director may issue parallel read requests. (Some USB card readers and the pertinent drivers only support single user access).

The Direct Ingest via Cache process works around this limitation and optimizes performance by tasking a dedicated service installed on the client (the copy provider service) with the copy operation. The Media | Director Engine will then automatically pick up the media from the high performance parking storage and consolidate or transcode it.

This process is also compatible with pre-3.0 versions of Interplay Production back to Interplay 2.7.5.

Process Name Process Description

Media | Director Process Detail Descriptions

Hi-Res Conform from Parked Volume

Rewraps volumes on Parking Storage to Production Storage (ISIS) while preserving logging information on AMA clips and proxies. In The Transcode portion of the profile contains a “transparent pass-through” option. This option treats native codecs as follows:

• If the native codecs are supported in Interplay Production, they are preserved.

You can change the default XDCAM HD 50 resolution to another

resolution. See “Modifying the Workflow Foundation

Parameters” on page 86.

Park and Register Parks volumes on Parking Storage and registers them as AMA clips in

Interplay Production 3.0 and higher.

Park, Register & Transcode Parks volumes on Parking Storage and registers them as AMA clips in

Interplay Production 3.0. Transcodes source material from parking storage to user-definable proxy format.

Starting at Media | Director v1.1, you can specify two different

Transcode resolutions in separate subfolders under the base Production ISIS folder.

that are already on parking storage.

The following section describes the Processes in detail.

Media | Director Process Detail Descriptions

The Media | Director Direct Ingest Process

The Media | Director Direct Ingest process is designed for customers who want to use a classic Avid workflow where all source material is transferred to the production ISIS storage and made available as native Avid assets in Interplay.

Under the Direct Ingest Process source media does not get parked; rather it is consolidated over to the production storage directly from the source. This assumes that the source media carrier/disk is large and fast enough to keep a Media Processor busy for the duration of the ingest. Depending on the target resolution setting in the profile, media will either be transcoded

Media | Director Process Detail Descriptions

to one of the formats supported by Media | Director, or – if “transparent pass-through” is selected in the profile – will be converted (rewrapped) to native Avid media as lossless as possible. As always, sources are read through the matching AMA plugin. Since different AMA plugins provide a different level of support in the case of “transparent pass-through”, the ingest operation will be handled as one of the following two cases:

• If the source media contains essence that is natively supported in Interplay Production, the source media will simply be rewrapped to OP-Atom, placed onto the Production ISIS storage, and checked into Interplay according to the rules defined in the profile. This is the default behavior of the “transparent pass-through” option and is one of the fastest operations available.

• Some AMA plugins provide only uncompressed frames for media like GoPro and some Quicktime files. As uncompressed frames cannot be consolidated, Media | Director automatically transcode these formats to XDCAM HD 50 instead. Alternatively, a specific ‘transcoding’ target resolution can be defined in a profile. Because a transcoding step is involved, these options will be slower than the pure rewrapping operation from the previous case. Since the source media is read through the AMA plugins, the plugins also define the possible throughput to a large extent. Specifically, single threaded plugins like Apple QuickTime will provide significantly lower throughput.

You can change the default XDCAM HD 50 resolution to another resolution. See “Modifying the

Workflow Foundation Parameters” on page 86.

For a list of supported AMA plugins, see the table of “Supported Volumes Types” in the Media | Director ReadMe.

The Media | Director Cached (Direct via Cache) Ingest Process

The Media | Director Cached Ingest process is designed for customers who want to use a classic Avid workflow where all source material is transferred to the production ISIS storage and made available as native Avid assets in Interplay.

Under the Cached Ingest Process the source is first copied (cached) and then processed from the parking storage; this is intended for source carriers that are small or connected in a way where it does not make sense for one of Media | Director’s Media Processors to work on the media

Media | Director Process Detail Descriptions

directly. The essence format can be preserved or transcoded. As always, sources are read through the matching AMA plugin; since different AMA plugins provide a different level of support the ingest operation will be handled as one of the following two cases:

• Some AMA plugins provide only uncompressed frames for media like GoPro and some Quicktime files. As uncompressed frames cannot be consolidated, Media | Director automatically transcodes theses formats to XDCAM HD 50 instead. Alternatively, a specific “transcoding” target resolution can be selected in a profile. When a transcoding step is involved, the operation will be slower than the pure rewrapping operation from the previous case. Since the source media is read through the AMA plugins, the plugins also define the possible throughput to a large extent. Specifically, single threaded plugins like Apple QuickTime will provide significantly lower throughput.

You can change the default XDCAM HD 50 resolution to another resolution. See “Modifying the

Workflow Foundation Parameters” on page 86.

The Media | Director Hi-Res Conform From Parked Volume Process

This process rewraps volumes on Parking Storage to Production Storage (ISIS) while preserving logging information on AMA clips and proxies. It preserves the native codec if supported in Interplay production. If the source formats are not natively supported it transcodes the sources to XDCAM HD 50.

You can change the default XDCAM HD 50 resolution to another resolution. See “Modifying the

Workflow Foundation Parameters” on page 86.

The Media | Director Hi-Res Conform from Parked Volume process is designed for customers who want to add additional resolutions to existing AMA or proxy assets in Interplay production. This process will add the new resolution in a non-destructive way, meaning that markers or subclips created for the AMA or proxy resolutions will be unaffected.

A possible use case for this workflow would be to bring high resolution media online before finishing work starts on a project. Assistant editors could have created shot selections and marked areas of interest based on the AMA or proxy media, conserving space on the production ISIS. Editing and finishing would then be performed in Interplay Production, with full availability of all standard Avid workflow, archive and transfer options.

The Media | Director Park & Register Process

This process parks volumes on Parking Storage and registers them as AMA clips in Interplay Production 3.0 and higher.

Media | Director Process Detail Descriptions

The Media | Director Park & Register process is designed for applications where minimal latencies and maximum conservation of production resources is desired at the expense of ISIS bandwidth and interactivity. The process copies the source media to the Parking Storage and relies on the Avid AMA technology for playing back media from the Parking Storage.

This means that all streams will play back as full resolution; consequently the user experience will depend on the bandwidth available on the Parking Storage and may be sluggish some times.

This process is best suited for a small number of users who need the fastest possible access to media and are willing to accept that bandwidth is not guaranteed in order to conserve the maximum amount of production capacity.

The Media | Director Park, Register & Transcode Process

This process parks volumes on Parking Storage, registers them as AMA clips in Interplay Production 3.0, and transcodes the source material from parking storage to a user-definable proxy format.

The Media | Director Park, Register and Proxy process is designed for applications where a larger number of users want to work on a proxy copy of bandwidth-intensive source material. For example, this could include a department with a dozen employees that want to work with AVC-I 100 sources. The process is also suitable to projects that use high-bitrate media such as DNxHD 220 or better.

The Media | Director Park, Register & Transcode Process will copy the source media to the Parking Storage and then first make the media available through the Avid AMA technology to provide quick access to a subset of the departmental users. It will then proceed by creating a proxy copy of the source media for low latency, low storage footprint playback from the production ISIS.

Once editing on the proxy copy is complete, users have a variety of options for creating full resolution output:

• In scenarios where all participating system components fully support AMA workflows, no actual import of high res media is necessary. For example, full resolution output clips can be generated directly from the AMA linked media on the parking storage.

• For cases where production components do not yet fully support AMA workflows, full resolution media can be consolidated over from the parking storage. This can be done in two different ways; for clip-based consolidate or if transcoding to non-native high-res formats is required, Interplay Transcode can be used. The Media | Director Engine in turn offers lossless high-speed rewrapping for high-res formats that are natively supported in Interplay Production.

Media | Director Process Detail Descriptions

Depending on the resolutions available, streams will play back either as full-res AMA stream from the parking storage or as proxy or full resolution from the Interplay Production storage, the same way as today in classic Interplay Production workflows.

Note that relinking to either available resolution requires a manual operation through the

Dynamic Relink function of the Avid editors.

The Media | Director Register Process

This process be used to register or re-register media that has already been parked, or update AMA media locations when the AMA media has been moved to a different storage location.

2 Using the Media | Director Drop Utility

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The Media | Director Drop Utility features a MediaCentral | UX style interface with tabs and panes that are easy to customize. The following illustration shows the Drop Utility’s position in the Interplay environment. The application resides on a Media | Director client system. This can be one of a number of supported PC or Mac systems.

Typically a user performs the following tasks on the Media | Director client:

• Start the Drop Utility application

• Connect a drive, a share, or, insert media disks into an available media drive.

• Drag the associated volume from the media disk into the Drop Utility interface, select a profile, and initiate a job.

Administrators use the Drop Utility to create profiles that direct the jobs and simplify the operations for the users who are creating the jobs.

What is a Volume?

A volume is a folder containing the AMA source material. It can be a folder on local or shared storage. It can also be a folder or camera media structure on an external card reader or camera. The following list describes where volumes appear on different devices:

• For P2, navigate one level above the Contents folder

• For XDCAM disks, navigate to one level above the Clip folder

• For XDCAM EX, navigate to one level above the BPAV folder

• For QuickTime, navigate to the QuickTime folder that holds the QuickTime files

Note that Media | Director can recognize certain volume types and, by leveraging this capability, can traverse folder structures containing volumes. This means that there can be multiple volumes in a folder hierarchy, for example on a backup disk. Media | Director will create jobs for each of the source material folders. Also, Media | Director’s rules system can be used to extract metadata from the folder hierarchy. For example, this can be done if the folders are organized by date, shooting site and camera team.

You can use Media | Director’s volume auto detection capabilities as follows:

• If you want Media | Director to perform automatic traversal of the volume hierarchy, hold the Shift key down while you drag the volume.

• If you do not press the Shift key while you drag the volume, Media | Director will process exactly the folder you selected, and automatic traversal will not occur. This allows you to use Media | Director with new AMA plugins that are not recognized automatically.

For additional information, see “Supported Volume Types” in the Media | Director ReadMe.

The Drop Utility User Interface

The following illustration shows the main portions of the Drop Utility interface. Depending on your needs, you can move the panes around. For example, if you are not creating profiles you can drag the entire Profile Builder pane behind the Job Builder pane.

The Drop Utility User Interface

The following section describes the different types of Media | Director users and how they interact with the user interface.

Typical Media | Director Users

Media | Director users can be divided into three categories. Different users will focus on different parts of the user interface.

Starting at Media | Director v1.1 there are some basic user management functions that allow you

to prevent operators from having access to the profiles in the Profile Builder. See “Setting the

Operators

Operators are staff members responsible for the actual ingest of camera media. They need to be able to process media quickly and in an efficient, simple-to-use manner. An operator may not necessarily be a subject expert on camera codecs, formats, or how the workgroup environment is set up. They may be handling many tasks at once throughout the work day. They may be less experienced staff or their focus may normally be in other parts of creative process.

An operator typically uses the Job Builder and Progress panes of the Media | Director interface.

Administrators

Administrators are often responsible for setting up and maintaining the workgroup environment. They may be responsible for directing or helping direct facility-wide asset management pipelines. An administrator needs easy-to-use, yet sophisticated tools to fine-tune the environment and make sure media is accurately processed. Administrators are often subject experts on camera codecs, formats, and how they line up against project needs.

Typical Media | Director Users

An administrator uses the Profile Builder pane of the Media | Director interface.

Combined Operator and Administrator

Depending on the site, some staff members are responsible for both the actual ingest of camera media and maintaining the workgroup environment. They need to be able to process media quickly and in an efficient, simple-to-use manner. They are usually subject experts on camera codecs, formats, how they line up against project needs, and how the workgroup environment is set up. This individual typically handles many different tasks throughout the work day and must be able to efficiently handle the addition of new workflows.

The combined operator and administrator uses all three panes of the Media | Director interface. See “Setting the Login Behavior” on page 33.

Accessing the Drop Utility Installers

The following are available on the Media | Director web interface:

• The Installers link brings you to a page that contains the following:

- Drop Utility installers for Windows and Mac OS X

- A link to download supported AMA plug-ins on the Avid Knowledge Base

- A link to the Media | Director documentation on the Avid Knowledge Base

• The Administrator link brings you to the Media | Director Engine System Administrator. For additional information, see “Modifying the Media | Director Engine Configuration” on

page 80.

• The Job Status link displays the Progress tab of the Drop Utility application.

To access the Media | Director web interface:

1. Open a browser and navigate to following URL:

http://<engine name>

The following illustration shows the web interface.

Accessing the Drop Utility Installers

Configuring the Drop Utility Application

To access the Installers web page on Windows use Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Internet Explorer

v 9.0 or higher. On Mac OS X, use Mozilla Firefox.

The Media | Director Engine System Administrator interface is not supported on Mac OS X. It

requires Internet Explorer.

To install the Drop Utility:

1. Click the Installers link and then click Media | Director Drop Utility for Windows or Mac OS installers.

2. Download and start the installer.

3. Follow the system prompts to complete the installation.

4. Start the Drop Utility application and configure it as described in the following section.

Configuring the Drop Utility Application

The first time you start the Drop Utility application, you must configure the connection to the Media | Director Engine. The next time you open the application it automatically connects to the Engine. You can also switch between different Media | Director Engines. See “Viewing or

Changing the Connection to the Media | Director Engine” on page 32.

To configure the Drop Utility application:

1. Double-click the Media | Director application icon. If the system asks for login credentials the user name is Admin (initial capital) and the password is admin (all lower case).

If the Drop Utility interface opens showing the Job Builder or the Job Builder and Profile Builder tabs, it means that the application recalls the previous Media | Director Engine that it was connected to. In this case you can do one of the following:

- View details about the engine or change the connection to another Media | Director

Engine. See “Viewing or Changing the Connection to the Media | Director Engine” on

page 32.

- Set the login behavior so that users that don’t need the Profile Builder tab will not see it.

See “Setting the Login Behavior” on page 33.

- Rearrange the panes on the display to your liking. See “Rearranging the Panes on the

Drop Utility Interface” on page 35.

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