Guide

Where Avid Media Composer stores your media

Short answer: on each drive, in one folder named Avid MediaFiles/MXF. Everything you import or capture lives there as an MXF file. Here is what is actually inside that folder, and why that one path shapes how you work.

The one path

When you import, capture, or transcode in Media Composer, the media is written to Avid MediaFiles/MXF at the root of whatever drive you targeted. You do not point Avid at an arbitrary folder; it reads from that one, by name, on every drive you have mounted. Plug in three drives and Avid sees the media in all three at once.

What is inside

Open it and you find numbered subfolders, 1, 2, 3, and up, holding the MXF media itself, alongside the database files Avid uses to index every clip, the .mdb and .pmr files. That database is how Media Composer matches the media on disk to the clips in your bins. It is also why you leave the folder alone: hand-editing it, or letting the database and the media drift apart, is how clips go offline.

What MXF is

The media is wrapped as MXF, Material Exchange Format, an open SMPTE standard rather than an Avid-only container. It is simply what lands in Avid MediaFiles/MXF whenever Avid manages your media.

Why one path is the catch

One folder per drive is simple until you want several projects to share a drive in separate folders. Only one of them can be the Avid MediaFiles/MXF that Avid reads at a time, so editors end up renaming folders to swap. Put each project on its own drive and the problem disappears; you just plug in the one you need. If you are juggling several on one drive, the next read is keeping multiple Avid projects on one drive.

Symly leaves your media in its own folders and repoints Avid MediaFiles/MXF to whichever project you pick, so the one path Avid needs always points at the right media, without you renaming anything.