(Also posted in a couple other places...sorry!)

I'm having some serious issues trying to create a workflow to send the media from an XDCamEX sequence off to an external drive, so that I can take the project to a physically separate AVID system.

The sequence contains material from an EX3 camera on SxS cards, and music from a DVD collection. In both cases, I originally copied the files to folders on my system drive desktop. For the EX3 material, I used Sony Clipbrowser and the "export mxf for NLE" option to create the files on the C: drive on my desktop. For the music, I just did a drag and drop from the DVD into source folder on the C: drive.

Then in AVID, I imported the media from both folders into the project and edited the sequence. Now I've got two problems:

1. If I try to decompose and batch import the new clip media to the external drive, MC will only reference the files in the original folder on the C: drive...not the imported clips on the AVID editing drives. This works, but: this also means I have to maintain double media folders, which would be impractical for a very large upcoming project. Is there a workaround for this? Did I make a workflow mistake in the beginning?

2. I got the bright idea to do a "consolidate" to the external drive...which makes more sense on paper. However; when I began the consolidation, I immediately got an error pop-up which said: "Range specified for Dup is outside range of component." Not sure what that means, and couldn't find any reference to it in AVID Help. I thought my external drive/USB connection might be too slow, but received the identical error message when trying it with a very fast esata external drive, as well.

What am I missing in either of the scenarios? I'm running MC 3.5 on a Windows XP Pro platform.

OK, still having issues.

1. The decompose function, while working, still insists on batch importing from the original folder on my system drive holding the "export mxf for NLE" material I sent out of Clip Browser direct from the SxS card. Even when I moved that file and its contents off to an external drive, AVID kept insisting it wanted to batch import only from the system drive, even though the media for the decomposing sequence was sitting on the edit drives.

2. Still can't consolidate without getting the "Range specified for Dup is outside range of component" error message. I can consolidate a DV sequence and an HDV 1080i sequence without any issue. Tried creating a new project and importing the sequence for consolidation...same error. My buddy FTP'd me some of his EX-3 video in a sequence. It won't consolidate without the error message either.

What is that error trying to tell me to do? Is this a problem with MC 3.5? Is there a fix? My friend was able to successfully consolidate that same sequence he sent me on his Mac AVID 5.0.

Perrone: I saw you mention that you use AMA a lot for EX-1 video. What is your workflow to get SxS video into the AVID, if you don't need to use AMA? Like, for instance, a large documentary program?

Thanks