It is often the case that media comes from camera sources directly into an existing Avid Media Composer environment in an existing production suite. Clips make their way to the Blackbird platform via an Edge Server, which ingests to Blackbird Proxy on the Blackbird Cloud. Editing work is performed upon source clips within Blackbird Forte, the result exportable as an AAF for importing into Avid Media Composer as an edit timeline. The AAF which left Blackbird and which is now in Avid is re-associated with the original clips.

This workflow often proves more economical and less time-consuming than using the Avid environment itself for that same work. The AAF produced by Blackbird will associate with Avid Media Composer (and Adobe Premiere) in most circumstances. However, there are considerations which require attention to produce a satisfactory round-trip.

Blackbird® is to be set up from the Edge Server for watching a watch-folder. This will typically be what Avid sees as a destination store, into which new linked files are consolidated or transcoded.

After consolidating onto a destination store, the consolidated result may be used by the Avid workstation (or other Avid workstations) and the original volume with the camera files we just imported can be unmounted and removed if desired.

Avid will create an Avid Mediafiles folder, in which all of the tracks of the original content are split up during transcoding and then stored. The MXF files are MXF OP-Atom type, which is what Avid itself uses at the editing level. These are separate files for each audio and video channel (or other data types), tied together by common metadata (and file naming structures).

On the selected file(s), Secondary-click to reveal a contextual menu with a Consolidate/Transcode… entry.

This will show Avid’s Consolidate/Transcode pane. In the top left corner, we are setting Consolidate to active. In this case, no conversions are necessary.

Pressing the Consolidate button will pop up a choice. We will keep native Master clips linked to media on the original drive, here.

A progress bar shows the consolidation process (also seen as a group of temporary files inside the folder Avid MediaFiles MXF 1 Creating.

When the temporary files in the Creating folder disappear, they will have become MXF OP-Atom files, one per media track or channel.

Here we see only one video and two separate audio files (ending “V”; “A” and “A”) as we only consolidated one original source clip in this example.

At this stage, it is a common procedure to also move the atoms to shared storage. The Blackbird Edge Server will have already been set to watch that particular location. Viewing the progress in the Edge Server Expert panel will show the progress, as well as the set destination for Blackbird proxy in your Blackbird account.

Here in the Blackbird Edge Server’s Expert GUI interface, you see the Folder column for the selected row (the row in question is the example we refer to here) the entry is set to Avid/25/bypath – the latter ensures that the same path name is given to the result in Blackbird.

In the Edge Server Expert pane, ensure that the Kind column indicates avid rather than avid-v, as the latter may seek a separate audio file in Blackbird, despite the the Blackbird proxy video file having correctly re-combined audio in it already!

With the sequence selected, in the main Avid menu go to File Output Export to File…

…or Secondary-click (or Option+click/Alt+click) on the sequence itself to produce the contextual menu, then File Output Export to File… from there.

Using the Options button on the file save dialogue box, ensure that the Export Settings are set to Link To Audio And Video with the Export Method menu set to not export any physical media: Export Method Link to (Don’t Export) Media.

Also, turn off Render Video Effects if it is not already off.

In the Audio Details tab of the same pane, turn off all options (from Include Rendered Audio Effects and Render All Audio Effects, down to all the Convert Audio … options – turn them all off)

Once we press Save (and in the export dialogue box, Save again) we produce an AAF file effectively containing no more than the master clip metadata.

The resulting AAF file will be exported to wherever you saved it to (for example, the Desktop).

In Blackbird’s Control Centre, as an “account manager” role, press the Upload button on your account.

Locate the AAF file with the Choose files button.

In this example, we left it on the Desktop.

The Upload file button uploads it.

In Blackbird, work such as logging; sync pulling; sync mapping, will now retain the reference to each master clip (which refers to the original metadata), thanks to this imported AAF. In this example, the referenced clip can be opened into Forte.

In this example we perform a very simple demo edit – a cut between two clips which Blackbird has ingested from the same volume that Avid transcoded the original files to.

We then drag that freshly saved EDL of our edit all the way over to the left Toolbar in which we see a cyan publishing button representing AAF export.

Dropping the EDL on this will open a new window containing the AAF.

The resulting AAF in this case is actually only a dummy AAF, it does not refer to the actual working essense files on the Avid. The edit is represented by references to the presence of an equivalent amount of audio and video tracks, their timing and lengths, including the in/out points and the edit on the timeline. The media tracks themselves will be dummy tracks, in which only the timing is important.

It is important to remember, when performing a manual relink such as this, that this AAF does not reference the original files (the transcoded or consolidated ones) in Avid. All it contains is references to what are now dummy clips which have exactly the same lengths as the original Avid files.

Now that production effort has been added in Blackbird, the AAF also contains edit information such as in and out points for clips, and edits on the timeline. Those are not in Avid yet until we bring the AAF into Avid. When we do bring the AAF into Avid, there will be edit information, but not associated with any media that Avid knows about – in other words, still referencing dummy clips. What we have to do now is associate the dummy clips that the AAF refers to, to the the real clips that Avid knows about. Once that is achieved, Avid will have the edit or production work, applied to the transcoded or consolidated Avid files. The relink process is fairly simple.

This is our Avid bin with the (in this case) transcoded files and links to the original camera files. We also have the window open (top right) which contains the Blackbird published AAF of the edit. We drag the Blackbird AAF onto the Avid bin.

You will see this dialogue warning: Encountered exception 'Failed to import a clip' Do not worry – we expect this, all is well. Simply press Yes and continue. The scary warning was because Avid is importing an AAF which appears to be linked to only dummy media (in other words, the intended media is offline), yet that is exactly what we intend to do at this step.

Select the newly imported Blackbird AAF and use the contextual menu item Relink….

From this dialogue box, there are two menus that should be specifically set to the following menu items:

Choose the second menu item Tape Name or Source File Name.

Choose the second menu item Any HD video format. This is safer, in case the project settings differ from the original camera files, and assuming you are working only in HD. In this example here, for example, we started off with camera files shot as 50i, but transcoded to 25p. If we left it on the first option the files would not relink properly.

As we see here, we have successfully relinked the Blackbird production edit work to the originating Avid transcoded media. The timeline is no longer red indicating media offline, but the expected colours for normal media which can be found.

From a bin, Secondary-click (or Option+click/Alt+click) to obtain the contextual menu entry Input Source Browser

The Source Browser interface, when you have found your way to the desired media, shows you some important columns to observe.

The column titled Plug-in displays which plugin will be used to handle the media – either using Autodetect or a specifically loaded AMA plug-in for your media. At this point you could discover that your media has no associated plugin to import it correctly.

Similarly the Colour Space profile may require attention – media shot using the camera’s Log or Flat shooting profile may have not been correctly detected as logarithmic. If necessary that choice could be forced through a contextual menu, although you are unlikely to need this in an established workflow.

At this point you select a bin, or elect to create a new bin which will take the name of the folder of the media you are bringing in.

The assets are now linked into the bin – they are not actually “in” the bin (yet), at this stage they must still exist in the location you brought them in from (for now).

Once the linked data is in the bin, you may select which metadata to view (there are a great many other columns to make use of should you need).

At this stage we could, if we wished to, add custom metadata. Use the contextual menu to “Add Custom Column”, then give a meaningful name to the column.

Then add an actual data value (again, some meaningful text) into that column on a clip. Copy it to quickly paste it into other rows of that column.

The important aspect is that when the clips are transcoded or consolidated, they will take this new metadata with them.

Metadata entered here in this manner is considered “bin metadata", unlike “structural metadata” which came in with the file and might consist of frame-rate, frame-size, clip-duration, timecode, etc.

Within Avid Media Composer and within Blackbird® it is possible to set and maintain reel name and reel number metadata, keeping them intact through the trip from Avid to Blackbird and back again. One immediate use for this metadata is to account for several (perhaps similar) cameras in a multi-cam shoot producing similar or identical file names.

Accepting consecutive batches of files from more than one camera giving the same filenames stands the risk of overwriting each other. Most production teams adopt a consistent methodology to account for this, such as creating specific folders per camera (where cameras are often named in some distinctive way) and then copying the camera files into their own folder. Once they are ingested, however, the filenames are still similar (although treated as distinct resources) and thus it can still be a source of accidental confusion. Using folder names as Avid bins is one solution. Using reel name and reel number metadata keys is another, more established, methodology in the industry. In the days of film, the reel names would be common across a production shoot, and the reel numbers refer to the actual physical reel of film (where it would be typical to have more than one reel in a complex shoot). Similarly, disk label is another metadata key offering a similar benefit.

Entering the reel name or disk label in Avid at the start of the setup will ensure that this metadata travels all the way through the Blackbird production work too.

A Blackbird Edge Server can be set to watch a folder on either the same machine or another volume – perhaps another machine or a NAS, or any shared network volume seen by Avid as a destination store. As new files appear in this watched folder, Blackbird will have been ingesting to the cloud in the background. If set this way, the result is a situation where Avid knows about the project’s working files (and perhaps references to original files). Meanwhile, Blackbird has working proxy of the same files. Production work such as editing may be efficiently carried out on the Blackbird assets. This work must in some way be brought back into Avid in such a manner that allows relinking of the Blackbird reference to Blackbird proxy in the Blackbird cloud, back instead to Avid’s reference to the corresponding Avid working files. This process is called relinking and is the subject of this document.

Using Log profiles (such as Sony’s SLog) when round-tripping via a relinked AAF from Blackbird, any Log or Flat profile characteristics are unaffected. There is no profile change while actually editing in Blackbird Forte.