From the course: Media Composer 2019 Essential Training: 101 Fundamentals 1

Refreshing the media database - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 2019 Essential Training: 101 Fundamentals 1

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Refreshing the media database

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- [Instructor] While we are still thinking about the, media files associated with this course, it's worth highlighting a little tip to help you if you find the Media Composer loses your media or just doesn't update properly when you move the contents of your storage drives around. Avid Media Composer uses a media database to manage its media. In fact, whether or not you fully import media, bringing the files into the media management system or not, which we'll be covering later, they're still a reference to all of the media associated with your projects. And that reference, that filing system might not always update. So here I am inside of Avid Media Composer and we'll be getting into this properly in a moment. But before we do, I want to show you under the File menu, under the Media sub menu, we've got a couple of interesting options. We'll get on to the media creation settings later. But first, I want to show you the refresh media directories and load media database options. If you have moved your media around, then it's possible that Media Composer doesn't know which file or which folder or which drive relates to which. And so if you click this option, Refresh Media Directories, Avid will perform a kind of tally to check that the database that it has on file, matches the media that you have on your system. Very often just choosing this option will cause media to become available in projects that was otherwise missing. And then we've got this option, Load Media Database, which is very technical sounding term. Actually, I mentioned a database that Media Composer uses, that database isn't fully loaded all of the time. In order to maximize the system resources available for video editing, Media Composer only loads the parts of the media database that it thinks you need. This means if you're making changes to the contents of your projects, while parts of a project are closed, which is something we'll look at how to do later on, the part of the media database that you need when you later open other parts of the project, might not actually be in the system memory. And again, you'll find that some pieces of media just missing, they're just not available. Well, there's a short version, of course of everything I'm telling you here, which is that in any case, if you find that your media is not available in the way that you expect it to be, while you're editing, you can just go into this File menu, go into Media and choose first of all, Refresh Media Directories, that'll usually fix it. And if not, you've got Load Media Database. And here I'm in the Avid Media Files folder for one of my media drives. I'm inside that MXF folder and inside one of the numbered folders. And you'll find in each one of these numbered folders in the Avid Media Files folder, you're going to have a .MDB and .PMR file. These are the actual database files that Media Composer is using to manage and navigate the media that you are working with. If in doubt, you can always select these two files and delete them. It's worth mentioning at this point that it's possible you won't see the file extensions on these files. That's an operating system option, you have to hide known file extensions. And I suppose they might be hidden altogether. You might have an option set for your operating system to hide files of these kinds, but they will be there and you can safely delete them. Media Composer will recreate them automatically for you. So if you do get some weirdness with your media, where even going through the process of refreshing the media directories and loading the media database, that doesn't help, go into each of the separate numbered folders that you have, look for these MDB and PMR files and just delete them and try again. When you next start up Media Composer, I should mention, it shouldn't hurt to have Media Composer running when you do this, but you're better off not having Media Composer running, then you start up Media Composer and these files will be recreated fresh. And just in case there's some file corruption in there which can happen on any operating system, they'll get created a new. And you'll very often find that this allows media to become available that was otherwise missing.

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