Using Avid Media Tool
One of the most overlooked features of Avid Xpress or Media Composer is the media tool. The media tool makes it extremely easy to view media across all of the hard drives connected to the system.
A great feature of Avid Xpress is the ability to detect old media files, even if the projects themselves have been deleted. It is a good practice to always use the media tool when deleting media from Avid Xpress. I do not recommend deleting associate media from a project itself. Instead, use the Avid media tool. If you take a look at the OMFI MediaFiles folder on each of your hard drives, you will notice it is filled with the raw media. Unfortunately, these files can be hard to interpret.
The Avid software uses special unique codes so that each media file has its own unique name. This is an important feature, because it allows you to rename the clips in your Bin without having to worry about linking those clips back to the raw OMFI mediafiles.
The Avid media tool will scan all of the available hard drives connect to the system and will display any media it detects. It will display the original project of any media file that it finds within a OMFI mediafiles folder.
Remember, even if a particular project has been deleted from the Avid, the media tool may still find media that links to it. This is a great way to remove unwanted media from projects you have deleted from the system.
The choices at the bottom of the media tool allow you to delete either the rendered files, or the raw DV media.
The word 'Precomputes' is a fancy word for rendered files.
The term 'Master Clips' and 'Media Files' represent the same material. Selecting 'Media Files' will show you the individual media files that points to a master clip icon. In other words, a clip that contains both Video and Audio, would contain two separate mediafiles. One file for the video, and one file for the audio.
Deleting either one of the elements will cause the media to be deleted. Although not recommend, it is possible to only delete the Video or Audio portion of a clip.
And finally, there is an amazing product from www.randomvideo.com called Media Mover. It is a program that will automatically move the RAW media for a particular project into a separate folder. This makes it extremely easy to archive the media for one particular project. There is a full working 30 day trial version of Media Mover on the website.
