Capsule Media / PODASS highly recommends regular maintenance of Avid projects, bins, and the Unity Attic to keep your team’s project data safe. Good maintenance practices help your team avoid worst case scenarios with project data. Anyone collaborating on shared storage can benefit from understanding these principles and keeping your team honest about regular maintenance.
Keep Ingest and Edit Projects Separately
Each Avid workstation regularly searches for changes to bins of its open project. The more bins in a project, the greater the indexing task. We recommend the following when segmenting your assets into different projects and bins:
- Create a project for editing and a separate AE project for ingestion. For episodic content use one project per episode.
- If your workflow is using a shared “bin locking” AVID server within Capsule Media’s facility or in one of Capsule’s data center locations use separate editing projects and Ingestion projects.
- If your project involves “POD” workflows we strongly recommend that each editor use individual projects. The “POD” servers function identically to our main facility servers. Including bin locking features. However, depending on where a POD is in the world, and what connection speeds are available, each POD will sync at different intervals. Generally, PODS will update sync within 5-20secs with each other. However, depending on connection speed, sync can be delayed. Especially if a POD loses internet connection for a period of time. Therefore, it is possible that one editor could open a bin that is in use by another editor. (Both editors open same bin before sync update.) They will both have write access and can potentially save over each others work. As projects progress, they can grow to large data sizes. Especially if there are a number of editors on the project. Sync can then be delayed somewhat over slower connections due to the total size of the project updating.
- Avoid accessing bins from other projects. Copy bins from one project into another instead. If you do access external bins, remove them from “Nexus Bins” folder when you are done (The folder is located at the bottom of the project window)
- Avoid dividing content excessively into separate bins and folders. For content like archival, use metadata and bin columns to segment data instead of separate bins if possible.
- Never permit bins to exceed 150 MB. AVID will become unstable with excessively large bins. More so with a lower performance workstation. Archive old sequences to “archive” bins and keep them closed when not in use.
- Delete bins that are no longer necessary and regularly clear the trash
Cycling Out the Unity Attic
Avid creates a Unity Attic folder on the root of the project’s drive for bin backups for your entire team. Though the attic is a great tool, it is not infallible. We recommend assistant editors cycle out the attic out once per week to keep bin saving quick and reliable.
Recreating the attic is easy! It’s not necessary to have everyone sign out of the project before cycling the Attic out. Simply rename the Unity Attic with a useful suffix (e.g. “Unity Attic_YYYYMMDD”) and the next time a background bin save occurs (on any workstation) Avid will create a new Unity Attic. Old Unity Attic folders should be retained until no longer needed by your team.
Regular Project Backups
Don’t rely exclusively on the Attic alone for your daily bin snapshots. We recommend assistant editors compress, date, and archive the project folder daily to at least two locations (e.g. a backup folder and a cloud drive space)