Merging Technologies

Hi
We have had an discussion here at work: what is the advantages of the whole system of mounting/scanning folders as oposed to the "usual way" where you simply browse files and folders. (like in any other application)
We all know the disadvantages, like waiting for Pyramix to scan/mount folders, having to hit the refresh button, wait some more.
Folders permanently mounted, quick mounted ,etc.
What does it all mean, and why is it there?
Can anyone enlighten me?, its hard to understand this concept coming from other systems

Nikolai

Having come from Sonic, where any sound file on the computer, (or the network for that matter) was available to the system, I'm confounded every day by the complexity of media management in Pyramix.

The reason is sound-to-picture post production workflow. You can have huge compositions with thousands of clips, which are hungry on the system resources, while you at a given editing stage might only need a small fraction of the clips of the whole project to be online and thus audible, the rest would still be present in the form of clips in the timeline (e.g. following editing moves like ripple in time etc.) but the audio itself be offline/not mounted.

At some later stage only, e.g. the mixing stage, it would be necessary to mount all media that is used in clips in order to mix the whole composition with dialog, foley, music etc.

Somebody correct me if that's wrong.
Cheers
B.

You can have huge compositions with thousands of clips, which are hungry on the system resources,

..

but the audio itself be offline/not mounted.

1. You are saying that the clips are still there, so it can't be the actual clips that use the resources but the audio files
2. If so, why does not Pyramix load these audio files on the fly when needed?
3. Can’t recall that this is an issue in Protools or Nuendo.

How many resources does having access to a audio file or having a clip in the timeline actually use?
Would it not be better to do it the other way? like having access to all you files at once but then deciding with ones should be offline, sort of like the Freeze feature in Nuendo, and Logic
i'm still confused...

The reason for the all-inclusive scanning is: Speed of operation. At least, that's the theory.
Do you remember the first time Quick Mount was invented? Never seen any program open huuuge projects as fast as PMX did. It was amazing. But Quick Mount also had it's drawbacks. (Moving or removing files in windows explorer, refreshing in Media Manager, offline trouble, etc) So Merging gave us the choice (as always...thank god for that!) to use it or not. Don't like it? Don't use it.

In PMX 7 an additional system is invented that keeps track off all audio ever assembled on the system. (The Media_Library_.pml ) Here too you have the choice to use it or not. This Media Database is made in order to provide the growing need for fast library management. 1.5 Terabyte online SFX Libraries, that sort of stuff. The old Global Library structure was simply too slow and ate too many of resources of the system.

Needless to say that logging files is in fact quite normal and of course wanted behaviour for any given software environment. (That answers your question, btw )

If you switch all quick mounts, mounts, media library stuff etc off, you will notice PMX opens just as slow as PT does. Switch it on, and PMX ought to react much more responsive. But, as I mentioned above: that's the theory. The practice is that some systems slow down and overload while others don't, depending on both hard and software configurations.

There is probably no rule of thumb or a magic equation that predicts your settings. You will have to experiment.

Regardless of all above: I too have my doubts about the current system and am struggling to remove the stalls. On my main system the Media Database grows to insane props within a week or two and causes the whole system to slow down, brrr...

The reason for the all-inclusive scanning is: Speed of operation. At least, that's the theory.
Do you remember the first time Quick Mount was invented? Never seen any program open huuuge projects as fast as PMX did. It was amazing. But Quick Mount also had it's drawbacks. (Moving or removing files in windows explorer, refreshing in Media Manager, offline trouble, etc) So Merging gave us the choice (as always...thank god for that!) to use it or not. Don't like it? Don't use it.

In PMX 7 an additional system is invented that keeps track off all audio ever assembled on the system. (The Media_Library_.pml ) Here too you have the choice to use it or not. This Media Database is made in order to provide the growing need for fast library management. 1.5 Terabyte online SFX Libraries, that sort of stuff. The old Global Library structure was simply too slow and ate too many of resources of the system.

Needless to say that logging files is in fact quite normal and of course wanted behaviour for any given software environment. (That answers your question, btw )

If you switch all quick mounts, mounts, media library stuff etc off, you will notice PMX opens just as slow as PT does. Switch it on, and PMX ought to react much more responsive. But, as I mentioned above: that's the theory. The practice is that some systems slow down and overload while others don't, depending on both hard and software configurations.

There is probably no rule of thumb or a magic equation that predicts your settings. You will have to experiment.

Thanks for the detailed reply
Yes we have tried quick mount, and that helps, although I don't get the actual difference. also it creates these quick mount files that reproduce like rabbits on the hard drive.

Also about the speed of opening projects, maybe Pyramix have an advantage with very large projects (our are often pretty small) but Logic, Cubase, Nuendo all seem to load faster on our systems.. but that might just be a coincidence. The other systems seems to only load the audiofiles actually used, while Pyramix mounts all sound in all the folders even though only one of the sounds are used in the project.

I know there are so many workflows that there is no set of options that would suit them all that is why we have options.
So for our work flow, our SFX liberary is handled by third-party software, so that is no issue.
We usually have one main folder for each production "Production A" under this folder we might have "Music", "Sound Effects", "Files from Composer", "Voice over Recording", etc and we would like to have all these files available in the project.
So we mount the parent folder "Production A" to get access to it an all the subfolders.
Now is someone sends us a file and we put it in "Files from Composer" we need to refresh and wait for pyramix to remount everything.
Sometimes files don't show up, sometimes they do. Sometimes when you refresh some folders are gone.
If a user mounts c:\Production A\ and c:\production A\Music (to try to fix these issues) everything gets messed up and we have to un-mount all folders and start over again.
Does anybody have the aprox same work flow and could give us any tips?

J.Wajer wrote:The reason for the all-inclusive scanning is: Speed of operation. At least, that's the theory.
Do you remember the first time Quick Mount was invented? Never seen any program open huuuge projects as fas as PMX did. It was amazing. But Quick Mount also had it's drawbacks. (Moving or removing files in windows explorer, refreshing in Media Manager, offline trouble, etc) So Merging gave us the choice (as always...thank god for that!) to use it or not. Don't like it? Don't use it.

Snip....

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Keep in mind that this system is my first foray into working with windows.

Here's my read on it. My experience has been that Pyramix is slower than Sonic was opening projects of comparable size. Sonic relies on the Macintosh's file system. If a file was used in the project, then Sonic would find it, and find it quickly. My Windows machine is a couple years old, but it's still newer and faster than the Mac I was using for Sonic.

Like so many things about Pyramix, I'm sure there are aspects of the media management system that I don't understand. Perhaps I can make things run quicker. More time with the manual. More time testing is needed perhaps.

Where I really see the speed difference is when I need to compile a 25 track CD from 25 different edit projects. Perhaps Sonic didn't have such a fancy media management system, but it was fast and never let me down.

To be clear, I'm not defending Sonic, nor do I want to go back!

Nikolai wrote:So for our work flow, our SFX liberary is handled by third-party software, so that is no issue.

I urge you to look at the way this has been implemented in PMX 7. You can create huuuuge offline Global Libraries from your SFX and have them 100% integrated in PMX!
You can create an Offline Library by invoking the Meda Manager Tab command: Media Folder/Create Offline/Reference Library. Select the root folder you want to process, give the library a name and go drink some coffee. Once this lib is assembled you can now open it from the Global Libraries Tab using: Open Library. Using offline Libraries can save you a lot of time as it dramatically increases search-query speed and allows you to do all sorts of interesting filemanagement operations.

Nikolai wrote:Does anybody have the aprox same work flow and could give us any tips?

I would advice you to work with fixed network paths. This way all Media and all projects are available in all sets. This is extremely versatile. I used to work on 4 sets with 4 Pyramixes, all with the same network paths, and project could be transported from one set to another without altering anything to the /paths!

I urge you to look at the way this has been implemented in PMX 7. You can create huuuuge offline Global Libraries from your SFX and have them 100% integrated in PMX!
You can create an Offline Library by invoking the Meda Manager Tab command: Media Folder/Create Offline/Reference Library. Select the root folder you want to process, give the library a name and go drink some coffee. Once this lib is assembled you can now open it from the Global Libraries Tab using: Open Library. Using offline Libraries can save you a lot of time as it dramatically increases search-query speed and allows you to do all sorts of interesting filemanagement operations.

Yes this was one of the reasons we went with Pyramix back in the late 90's, but at that time it could not handle all our sound effects efficiently. I'm sure it works fine now but we are very happy with our current sound effects software. Besides just making our regular project files mount properly is enough for us.

I would advice you to work with fixed network paths. This way all Media and all projects are available in all sets. This is extremely versatile. I used to work on 4 sets with 4 Pyramixes, all with the same network paths, and project could be transported from one set to another without altering anything to the /paths!

Do you mean a fixed path like "x:\songs\project a\audio"?
We have all our projects stored on a network drive, this is mounted as z:\ on all work stations around the building.

The original question remains; what do this mouting thing give me? Why do I need to click refresh and wait for it to scan ALL the files in a folder. and don't tell me that checking if a file is "online" takes that much resources. there are .net functions for this that does thousands of files in just a few seconds.