I,ve been sent 40 DVD,s with OMF,s of NTSC material (shot on DV). I,m using a PAL Avid MC so I set the project at NTSC 30i and began importing the OMF,s into the project. Some of the material imports fine but by over half of the material I get a warning saying unable to import embeded material. I assumed that something may have gone wrong by exporting the material as an OMF, but the client insists everything is fine when they imported them on their NTSC Avid. Has anyone encountered similar problems on a PAL based version of Avid?

The Avid software and hardware is system-agnostic, it is neither PAL or NTSC - as long as the project type matches the footage, there shouldn't be a problem. Check that you're using the correct project type.

One problem you face is the DVDs - in my experience they can be prone to errors (especially with really large files).

My suggestion is send a removable Firewire drive to the client and have them Consolidate the project onto the drive, then copy the AVB file with the consolidated files onto the drive and send the drive back.

Alternatively they can use the MDV media manager to copy all the media for the project to the drive.

An AVID isn't really either NTSC or PAL, you can as you are aware create either project type.  It's only the hardware you attach that will determine your ability to do PAL or NTSC.  To do NTSC on a machine in a PAL environment that normally means an NTSC Black and Burst generator and NTSC decks and monitor.

For media on discs however this is irrelevant.  You should be able to just remove your PAL reference (if you have one) or run on internal.

As to your problem with these files are they OMFs exported from an AVID or are they OMFI MediaFiles from an OMFI MediaFiles folder?

I fthey are OMFI MediaFiles they should be readable if you just put them in your OMFI MediaFiles folder - you wouldn't need to import them.

If you have the master clips from the project they were created in then they should be available to you. 

If you don't have the master clips from the project they were created in you can open the media tool and drag them to a bin in a new project.

If they have been exported as OMFs then are you trying to import directly from the discs?  Maybe your drive is having a problem reading those discs.  Try copying them to a local drive then importing from there.

If the copy fails then you will have to find another drive that will read them and copy them over somehow.

regards

Brian 

 

(EDIT - must type faster next time - Sycophant beat me to it)