There’s a scene from Mr. Mom where Jack Butler (Michael Keaton’s character) drops off his kids at school for the first time.

As he pulls into the parking lot, his kids bluntly declare, “You’re doing it wrong!”

Moments later, the crossing guard Annette (Miriam Flynn’s character) pulls him over, sweetly greets him, then tells him:

Consider me your Annette for a moment as we talk about renaming those special media folders Avid Media Composer uses.

“South to drop off, north to pick up.”

Annette told Jack, “We enter from the south and exit from the north,” to drop off the kids at school.

If you want to open a Clip and see and/or hear something in Media Composer, the right media files must be stored in the right folder for the right situation:

OMFs

• When Working Alone - /OMFI MediaFiles/(N)
• When Playing in a Band - /OMFI MediaFiles/(Someones Computer)

MXFs (OP-Atom)

• When Working Alone - /Avid MediaFiles/MXF/(N)
• When Playing in a Band - /Avid MediaFiles/MXF/(Someones Computer).(N)

MXFs (OP1a)

• When Working Alone - /Avid MediaFiles/UME/(N)
• When Playing in a Band - /Avid MediaFiles/UME/(Someones Computer).(N)

I’ve written about this in Mimiq’s documentation, but now I’ll be more direct.

“You’re doing it wrong.”

Dailies Technicians, Assistant Editors, Media Managers… I implore you: please stop renaming these special folders.

Why?

Avid didn’t design Media Composer to allow humans to understand where your media will be stored for a specific Project (or in a specific Bin). That’s why you have Bins – you use Bins to organize your Clips, Clips are linked to media, and Media Composer was built to manage where to store the underlying media.

Also, renaming those folders after Media Composer generates the media index files (i.e. the PMR and MDB)? Yes, that works, but only when someone on the team continually (and fastidiously) renames additional incoming media folders using the same naming convention. But if you’re playing in a band and someone consolidates/transcodes something new to a shared volume with those renamed folders? Media Composer will create a new /1 folder, which will cause Media Composer to perform unpredictably. Most notably, someone will open a Clip with media they know is available on their shared storage only to be shown MEDIA OFFLINE.

Be Like Jack

Eventually, Jack got it.

In fact, he became so good at dropping off his kids, he became a crossing guard himself!

If renaming those special folders is a bad idea, what can you do?

1. Let Media Composer store the media where it wants, then use MDVx to scan media folders to determine which media belongs with which project, then copy, move, or delete some media accordingly.
2. If you must rename your folders, then rename the numbered folders based on something like a timestamp. For example:
   1. “../Avid MediaFiles/UME/Isaacs MacBook Pro.20240612” could mean this folder is full of dailies from the June 12, 2024 shoot.
   2. “../Avid MediaFiles/UME/Isaacs MacBook Pro.202406121337” could mean this folder is full of dailies from the June 12, 2024 shoot ingested at 1:37 (13:37) that day.

Further, if human-readable filenames are another layer in your breadcrumb trail, use EditReady to transcode your dailies. EditReady will use the filename of your source media in the resulting filenames of your transcoded media.

In the end, Jack didn’t just make the crossing guard pool. He and Annette ended up being good friends.

So as your Annette for this read, I sign off by asking: please… stop renaming those media folders.

(And remember: south to drop off, north to pick up. 😄)

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