I am working off an ISIS and am trying out a workflow with AMA on MC7. I have encountered some issues that are testing my patience with AMA. Never used it before. We use USB SD card readers and they use the same drive letter on the 2 machines we are ingesting on.
1. I plug in, select all clips to transcode and start the job. I move to the next machine and plug in the card and it wont populate because the drive letter is the same and it wants to create a bin or open the already named bin.(Workaround was to alter the drive letter by the plug in one card and then another to change the letter) Now the bin pops up and were fine.
2. Im done with one card and i select all the new files and drag them into their proper card named bin. I pop in a new card and the bin just adds more ama files into the same drive lettered bin. It also looks like it links the last card's ama files to this cards media too?! I have duplicate files (001,001,002,002 etc) in my list. This got very messy very easily. I feel there is an unmount AMA option but I cant find the darn thing. I hesitate to delete the old unlinked files (after the card is pulled)
Out of time im just ditching AMA for timessake because I dont know how to start a fresh ama card properly. The automatic drive lettered bin name was not ideal in this method. I would like to figure out how to AMA transcode as I heard that it uses more processor power(why normal import doesn't seems crazy) and is faster.
We will NOT be copying cards to the drives because that is counter productive. We will NOT be changing the drive leter for every card we import because that is crazy. There are other issues we are having with AMA transcoding errors etc but will address that problem in another post.
Can AMA be an advantage for our ingest? I could care less about editing AMA as I prefer the snappiness of DNXHD performance. We have many hours of footage however and a small gain in ingest speed sounds really nice.
All machines are Avid Cert Z800 with plenty of juice.