By Shane Goddard
Avid Media Composer - Auto Save, the Attic and You
There's nothing worse than working on a sequence and hitting a show stopping error and needing to restore a project to recover a sequence from your last nightly backup (your projects ARE backed up nightly, aren't they?)
There may not actually need to restore that project.
You can use a 'self-help' alternative...the Avid Attic!
The aptly named Attic is where Media Composer stores copies of all your bins, which are backed up at regular intervals.
Note that the Attic only stores copies of bins, not project or media files!
Your Avid Attic directory contains a separate folder for each of your projects and within that, a folder for each of your various bins.
DISASTER!
If a bin or some of its contents are accidentally deleted (nice one, Jerry!) or you just wish to recover an earlier version of a sequence, the first step is to head over to your Avid Attic folder:
MacOS: Macintosh HD/Users/Shared/AvidMediaComposer/Avid Attic
Windows: C:/Users/Public/Public Documents/Avid Media Composer/Avid Attic
1. From here browse to the project and then bin you wish to restore and select the most recent copy. In this case it’s ‘Dimensional Diaries Sequences.3’. Alternatively, you can choose the bin based on date if you’re rolling back to particular time.
2. Select and make a copy of the bin to a convenient area such as your Desktop.
3. Return to Media Composer and make sure that if you are restoring an existing bin that it is closed!
4. Now go to File > Open Bin… > Click the Options button and change the Enable option from ‘Bins’ to ‘Any’ and select the bin you wish to restore.
5. The selected bin will now appear in ‘Other Bins’ folder.
6. You can now open the restored bin and drag the content you wish to restore to a new or existing bin.
7. Once you’ve moved the content out of the restored bin you can safely delete it.
Making the Attic your own
You can customise the Attic to suit your workflow in several ways. To access these options, go to: ‘Settings’ and double-click ‘Bins’
The options of most interest to editors are:
- Auto-save Interval (Default 15 mins)
- Maximum files in a project's attic (Default 1000)
- Max versions of a file in the Attic (Default 50 copies)
Be careful not to set these values too high or low as they can impact your workstation’s performance!
Finally, depending on your settings the Avid Attic can accumulate a lot of smaller files over time. So, it’s a good idea to regularly check your Attic and delete any old completed project folders that are no longer needed.