- Drag and drop a folder in the Media panel from the MediaHub.
Flame imports all the media files and folders contained therein. Note that only supported media files and the folder structure are imported: other files are ignored.
- Drag and drop multiple files in one operation:
Ctrl-click or
Shift-click to select multiple files to import before dragging them over to the Media panel.
- Double-click a clip to display it in the Preview panel. Use the Preview panel to display the clip information and additional metadata.
- For large media, use the Preview panel to set In and Out points and import only a subclip.
- If the media file to import is located on a network drive, and if you plan on using referenced media instead of cached sources, make sure that the network connection is at least 1 GB ethernet to have decent playback.
- MediaHub does not recognize media files without file extensions, as is it sometimes used with mov, dpx, or cin files.
-
Flame is frame-based, which means that any audio-clip that does not end on a frame is padded with silence until the next frame. When this happens, the audio-only clip appears as Mixed in the Cached column of the Media Panel's list view, even if the clip was never cached.
- If the media file to import is located on a removable media such as a USB drive, and you plan to remove the drive before the end of your project, import with Cache Source Media enabled. This way
Flame creates natively managed media out of the original, removing the need for the connected drive.
- From the Media panel, right-click > Import... to import media to that location.
- To work in a manner similar to offline editing suites, enable
. This creates local, transcoded, and managed versions of your media. To work online, disable Cache Source Media: the clips remain linked to the original media, and are not transcoded.
- The first time you browse a folder containing Long GOP based codecs (.mts- and .m2ts-structures for AVCHD ),
Flame creates invisible index files in that folder. These index files will speed up browsing the next time you open that folder.
Note: Technically, the index files are created with the suffix
.index in the folder being browsed and can be removed if needed: this will only impact AVCHD browsing performances in that folder, not reading nor writing performances. If that folder is write-protected,
Flame creates the index files in the local
/var/tmp/.
Long GOP Optimization
Flame optimizes the decoding of Long GOP (Group Of Pictures) codecs to facilitate playback, jogging and shuttling of clips the following codecs:
- Sony XDCAM
- Sony XAVC Long GOP
- Panasonic Long GOP
- Canon MPEG 2
- Canon XF-AVC
- AVCHD
- QuickTime Long GOP
The required optimizations are only available when importing from the Local Devices list from the MediaHub. Importing media from the Autodesk Network list of volumes can result in sub-par Long GOP decoding performances.
Note: Lustre does not have access to this kind of Long GOP-read optimization.
About the Tape Name
Some media file formats have provisions on how to determine the tape name. For those that do not, MediaHub derives the Tape name from the file name. Here are the various formats rules. You can override these rules by specifying your own method in MediaHub,
.
Audio Files:
- Wave, AIFF, MP3, etc.: Uses the filename.
File Sequence:
- DPX: Uses the information stored in the file header (the
Input Device data is used); falls back to filename if the header contains no tape name.
- OpenEXR: Uses the name of the directory where the OpenEXR is stored.
- ARRIRAW: Uses the information stored in the file header; falls back to filename if the header contains no tape name.
- Image Sequence (TIFF, TGA, JPEG, HDR, PNG, etc.): Uses the Tape Name entered in
.
- PSD: Uses the filename.
Movie Files:
- MTS (AVCHD): Uses the filename.
- REDCode (R3D): Uses the information stored in the file header.
- Canon (MXF): Uses the filename.
- Panasonic (MXF): Uses the name of the essence.
- Sony XDCAM EX (MP4): Uses the name of the essence.
In case of spanned clips, set
to Tape Name from File Name. Leaving it to the default setting of Tape Name from Essence will actually use the name of the span segment for tape name.
- Sony RAW/SStP/XAVC (MXF): Uses the name of the essence.
The tape name is derived from the MXF Source Package that is presented as <TAPE>; falls back to the filename if empty.
- MP4/MXF/QuickTime: Uses information stored in the file heade; falls back to filename if the header contains no tape name.