Archiving Projects on AVID MAM

We archive our projects into AVID MAM. When a computer does not have FCP X installed it will just show a folder with the project files in it. Normally you would "show package contents to see the files when FCP X is installed. Archiving does not allow for spaces in folder names and text should not exceed 256 characters. It won't let us archive. Has anybody had these same issues when archiving to the MAM?

Hi Brian, welcome to the forums.

Try this: R-click the Library folder and choose "Compress" to ZIP your folder. Then archive the ZIP file to the MAM.

- Ronny

Thanks Ronny. Would zipping the library bundle have bad ramifications since it is compressing the library?

-Brian

Hey Brian,

Not that I'm aware of. I have sent some quite large zipped Library files back and forth to remote editors, and we have never had any issues with these Libraries. Zipping Libraries is even advised when you need to send them over the internet.

This is a ZIP I created from a Library. I then un-zipped the fie and opened the Library in FCP X without any issues:



- Ronny

Compressing data files/folders is not the same as video compression, you don't lose data, like you can with videos and images. Not the same type of compression. In fact, compressing data files/folders to send over the Internet is preferable, not only due to size issues, but due to data integrity. I've emailed documents to folks, only to have email servers alter that attachment and make it unreadable. A .zip file won't have that happen, as it is left alone, nothing touches a .zip file's contents at all. It is like a locked suitcase, rather than an open picnic basket. Zip away!

OK we did some testing and the parsing errors went away. However, when we unzipped the zip of the FCP X bundle on a machine that does not have FCP X installed it would not unzip. It would unzip on a machine where it was installed. I assume this would be normal behavior on a machine without FCP X. Would this be a concern?

Thanks for all your help.

-Brian

Certainly not a concern. You don't want to un-zip a Library unless you will use it with FCP X anyaway, so you will do this on a machine that has FCP X installed.

- Ronny

OK the people that run the MAM where I work do not like zip files because in the past when restoring projects they ended up corrupted. They also used TAR as well. I suppose that there are many variables that caused the corruption and not necessarily because they were ZIP or TAR. They are concerned that by nature they compress files. I told them I am not zipping media just the FCP X bundle (project file).

I was wondering if a sparsedisk.image would work as well? This will not compress anything.

Any thoughts?

Sounds like they are making excuses and being difficult IT people. It happens. I would not get confrontational about it, though. Nothing good can come from that. The sparse disk image should theoretically work in any case. I have successfully run libraries from sparse disk images on a few different file systems.

I have had experience with AVID Unity.
Don't know how MAM differs, but we were never able to successfully archive a zipped Library, or a disk bundle to Unity and bring it back again alive.

I spoke to the engineers at Avid about it, and they said that they would "never" support an FCPX library in Unity.
(They were very friendly about it, though

MAM may be a different story. I would try to reach out to the Avid folks about it, and see if they have any advice.

I wonder if they don't want Libraries because they just hate FCP X and don't want to make it work or it just does not work.

Have you seen this:

www.marquisbroadcast.com/news/product-ne...-vendor-systems.html

We use ISIS for our storage and we have FCP X projects that work just fine. We had some of the old FCP X projects that had to use a sparse disk image to be able to store anywhere and I was able to update them to a later version of FCP X with no issue.

I sure miss Final Cut Server. Wish someone would make something as good as that was...