Before I look for a feature request or ask for one,
Am I the only person who finds it frustrating that we can’t export OP-ATOM mxfs for AVID?
If I’m not the only one then I will request it but if I am I will not. I’m sure I’ve made the request previously but I could be mistaken.
Avid’s managed media is OP-ATOM, but otherwise I have never personally had the need to go that direction. Just curious, what is your use case?
Not something that has crossed my desk before no.
When doing VFX on features and series, you usually have to return versions of your shots back to editorial for them to insert into the edit so that they have the latest versions of each shot. 99% of the editorial teams we work with are AVID based and the large majority of the editorial departments cut with OP-ATOM DNxHD mxf files. If you give them an OP1a mxf then they have to transcode it so the specs specify ATOM and that is not negotiable.
There is already a feature request for this FI-00157
It was accepted 11 years ago. How is that request coming along @fredwarren? Any chance it’s going to be in a soon to come fabulous list of implemented user feedback requests that you post each release?
Absolutely loving the metadata node. OP-ATOM export would be a wonderful Christmas in July present 
We have not got much request for the Flame to Avid workflow using OpAtom MXF. Every time we meet customers, we go through media format support request and this one never shows up…
The feature was accepted because it could be a nice workflow but as you can see it is quite low (3 hit in 11 years) and is not currently on our short term radar. But who knows what future can bring!
For the pipelines that nees to share content with Avid as managed media, there are many technologies like FFMPEG that could be used. I guess it is another good reason to give a try to our Python API to automate file conversion post export.
Thanks @Slabrie
I was already heading the direction of FFMPEG and Python for this. It would obviously be nice to have this integrated into Flame but also appreciate that the majority of Flame Artists won’t ever require this in their workflow and studios such as ours will have a pipeline that would look after this requirement anyway. I wouldn’t want any precious dev resources going to a not widely used feature.
Just saying, after months of watching Nuke Studio regularly crash during VFX reviews as a Supervisor, and Resolve just being a PITA for certain aspects of this as well, I’m currently testing using Flame for this now. So far, it is so much better. Pattern Browsing works incredibly well for this for us. There’s going to be a few holes though that we’re going to have to fill which is to be expected. I’ll be sure to make available any tools I/we build for the greater Logik & Flame community.
There have been several great additions to Flame in the past few years that have really made Flame viable in our environment. Metadata is a big one, but Match Grain & the Lens distort tools have also been huge. There’s still a few I wouldn’t mind seeing but I’m pretty sure there would be some other priorities that would benefit the greater Flame community beforehand.
Hey Adam, funnily enough I was working on a ffmpeg transcode hook last week since I had a delivery spec that I couldn’t meet natively in Flame. At the moment it’s specifically for mp4 but I’ll have a look next week tackling your need.
Thanks Kyle.
I really appreciate the offer of help. Offers like that is what make Logik such an amazing community.
I have to write a few bits and pieces of FFMPG code so will do so will send off some good vibes and hopefully it will magically happen. Seriously though, it would need to be something fairly custom to our needs but I’d still encourage you to look into it and share to Logik in case someone else has a need.
If you already know the command then that would make life super easy…but if not I can dig around. I’m sure one of our AI overloads could point me in the right direction, haha.
ffmpeg -i FlameExport.mxf -codec:v copy -an -f mxf_opatom NewFile.mxf
Thanks Bob, but sadly it’d appear that ffmpeg’s OP-Atom implementation isn’t really doing the trick. It breaks the file.
From what I’ve gathered @AdamArcher, you’d need bmx-tools to wrap the OP1a into OP-Atom file. It’s purpose built so it should do everything needed to make those files work with Avid. I don’t have it installed so I don’t know the exact syntax but Claude gave me the following where my input file was named jum_0010.mxf.
bmxtranswrap -t avid --clip jum_0010 -o /path/to/output/ jum_0010.mxf
Let me know how much you’d like this and I can look into installing it to test. I’m on a mac and it’s not available on homebrew so it’ll take a bit of tinkering to get it running.
Hmm. I just tried it in our MC and it works for me. The only caveat was that it showed up in the Media Tool with no name, but I fixed that with
ffmpeg -i FlameExport.mxf -codec:v copy -an -metadata material_package_name="My Lovely Clip Name" -f mxf_opatom NewFile.mxf
There might be other metadata requirements (-metadata creation_time might also be nice too) that aren’t achievable with ffmpeg for whomever’s purposes (honestly I don’t know why an OP-Atom MXF having to be put in MC’s black box managed storage, and then scanned and found in the media tool to drag it into a bin is superior to an OP1a easily linked to in MC in one action, but I’m sure there’s some old workflow issue at play here) but as far as the media file is concerned it seems to work and play correctly. DNxHR LB in my test case.
Thanks Both. I really appreciate your efforts and am honestly humbled that you both want to help this fella out
Unfortunately what I need to do is a bit more complicated as it needs to factor in colour science, CDLs, reformatting, burn ins and a few other processes. As I will probably make it part of our pipeline there are further complications there as well. Our use case is to provide editorial back AVID media for VFX shots we are working on, essentially VFX dailies.
I am capable of building something myself. It just would have been much simpler if I could select a bunch of clips in Flame and publish OP-ATOM mxf media.
Interesting. I only tried to view the resulting file in Flame and it failed due to a bad handler. I don’t have access to Avid…but that raises the question, can Flame view OP-Atom MXFs? I would have assumed yes but maybe that’s a bad assumption.
No, Flame doesn’t read OP-Atom files.
Ah, ok. Well then, I guess that command works!
@AdamArcher I just need to add the metadata bit @ManChicken mentioned and then you’d be good to go. The logic would be you export your mxf as you do now, then select them in the mediahub and run the hook. It’ll overwrite the files of I could create a sub-folder if you wish.
I hear you on wishing Flame would do this w/o jumping through hoops but since it doesn’t, a solution is ready if you want. If nothing else, you could steal that bit of code and then add it to a custom export hook to be run post-export.
Of course Flame reads MXF OpAtom!
If Flame cannot read your MXF OpAtom files, it might be a codec issue. Either the essence is not part of the format we support or the file has been generated with mixed compression flavors.
If you have such files, you know where to find me 