3 Replies Latest reply: Oct 5, 2012 11:10 AM by Tayedrummer RSS

    Odd AME behavior...any explanation?

    Tayedrummer Community Member

      I'm usually delivering OP1a MXF files to broadcast clients.  I export DNxHD QT's out of Resolve out of one machine to a drive that is shared on the network.  I have AME set up on another machine and set the Resolve render folder as a watch folder so AME converts each file as it is finished from DNxHD QT's to OP1a MXF's.

       

      Works great but when AME is done it leaves a mess of Resolves' output folder.  Some of the source QT's are left where they were, others are moved into subfolders in a folder AME makes called SOURCE.  Putting the folders contents back in order is just a bit of a pain if I want to go back to the QT's.

       

      Why is this happening and is there any setting in AME to correct it?

        • 1. Re: Odd AME behavior...any explanation?
          Mark Mapes Employee Hosts

          AME is working as designed with watch folders. It checks the designated folder every few seconds looking for supported media files, encodes them to the specified format(s), and then moves them to the Source folder so that it doesn't find and process them again the next time it looks for new content. While we could design the watch folder to keep a log of what files have been encoded and then leave the source files in place, that would introduce other problems. For instance, you wouldn't be able to drop another file by the same into the watch folder until you had moved or deleted the one that's already there.

           

          As for why AME is leaving some files in the watch folder, that's because the program is looking only for supported media files and does not pay attention to other types of files.

           

          Two workarounds that I've used:

          1. Instead of using the Resolves folder as your watch folder, copy it's contents to a second folder that's set as the watch folder. (Somebody who knows a little bit about coding could write a script that manages the copy process.) Then the Resolves folder remains intact as your DNxHD archive and you can periodically delete the copies in the watch folder.
          2. To reduce the pain involved in retrieving the files from the timestamped subfolders, go to the Source folder in your file browser and search for "." [i.e., dot, or period]. That will find all the media files, making it easy to reunite them with the other files left behind in the Resolves folder. But remember, you have to move all the files to another folder, say "Resolved_Processed";  if you put the media files back in the Resolves folder, AME will just process them again...
          • 2. Re: Odd AME behavior...any explanation?
            TVOperations Community Member

            Instead of a separate timestamped folder for each file, why not consolidate processed files into a single "Processed" folder?

            • 3. Re: Odd AME behavior...any explanation?
              Tayedrummer Community Member

              Gotcha!

               

              I've been doing the search for .mov in the output folder to get everything cleaned up.

               

              I think my confusion was due to the fact that AME isn't moving all the processed files into timestamped folders, just some of them (totally random).

               

              I'll vote for TVOperations suggestion that they are all just moved into a "PROCESSED" folder instead of individual timestamped ones.