Everytime I try to drag a video file to my bin, I get an exception error message that says "There are no media drives available for import."  I never had this problem when I had 8.9.1  and before I upgraded to High Sierra.  How do I fix this?

Hi,

check Media Creation Settings, is the system drive filtered out? In my case it was after upgrading to 8.9.3.

And, if no other drive is available, check if the system drive has write permissions. Since OSX 10.7 you have to do this manually when you clean install your OS.

See: http://community.avid.com/forums/t/101235.aspx

Doyle

derDoyle:

Hi,

check Media Creation Settings, is the system drive filtered out? In my case it was after upgrading to 8.9.3.

And, if no other drive is available, check if the system drive has write permissions. Since OSX 10.7 you have to do this manually when you clean install your OS.

See: http://community.avid.com/forums/t/101235.aspx

Doyle

This is what my Media Creations settlings look like:

Should I make any changes to it or should I instead go ahead and change the "Read Only" to "Read & Write" in the Privilege column?

After upgrading to High Sierra, the OS will not let you give Media Composer "read & write" premissions to the boot drive, so that's why you can't import any media to the boot drive. As far as I can tell there is no fix for this currently. I have been going back and forth with Avid Support on this for 2 weeks now on my MacBook Pro.

CMAeditor....

As I said before........ there is nothing for Avid “to” fix.  Apple implemented new security along with APFS in High Sierra and this is NOT allowing write permission to the boot partition of the drive.  It’s not a good idea to turn off the MAC OS security anyway. Avid has worked with Apple software developers and we will not shortcut their new security measures on the boot drive.  Apple suggested the disk partition work around to get write privileges for the system drive.

Again, we recommend that customers stay at Sierra 10.12.6 if they wish to change their write permissions or if they do forge ahead with High Sierra, both Apple and Avid recommend they use the disk utility to create a partition for the media (off of the boot drive).  This method works fine and does not have any protection issues.   

Marianna

Marianna:

Again, we recommend that customers stay at Sierra 10.12.6 if they wish to change their write permissions or if they do forge ahead with High Sierra, both Apple and Avid recommend they use the disk utility to create a partition for the media (off of the boot drive).  This method works fine and does not have any protection issues.   

Marianna

Thanks, can you explain in step-by-step how to do that?  This isn't something I'm familiar with.  I assume I go to Applications, then Utilities, then Disc Utility and then what?

Another neat way to do it, without compromising the integrity of the OS drive is to create a loopback:

https://thefinishline.pro/loopback-media-composer-hack/

Marianna:

Again, we recommend that customers stay at Sierra 10.12.6 if they wish to change their write permissions or if they do forge ahead with High Sierra, both Apple and Avid recommend they use the disk utility to create a partition for the media (off of the boot drive).  This method works fine and does not have any protection issues.   

Marianna

bump

Hi Marianna, I was initially hesitant to open the disc utility because I wasn't sure what I would find in there.  I see there is a partition function.  So if I click the partition button, is there anything else I need to do?

On my system 10.11 partitioning the drive erases all data, so please be careful,

The "hack" above i sa  really neat way to give avid access to your system drive, do note the consol command within avid  "mount all drives", as instructed.

That is really neat, thanks for sharing.

OK, so if neither changing the write permission nor partitioning the drive are valid options, then what is my option, apart from waiting for a future version of MC to address the issue?

This Monday will mark my first week of not having usable access to MC.  With the holidays coming up, I anticipate it will be at least another week before my problem is solved.

Avid won't "fix the issue" since it's something caused by Apple up'ing security with each new releases.

So you can either try what I posted above, or you just get a cheap USB hard-drive and plug it to your Mac. That'll be your media drive.

The issure can be fixed. Media composer doesn't need Read/Write priveliges to the root of the drive, just the Avid MediaFiles folder structure (which is does have).

From what I can tell with my experience using Media Composer for 17 years is that when a new drive is attached Media Composer checks for Read/Write permisssions on the root of the drive so it can create the MediaFiles fodler structures if they don't exist on that drive.

Since you already have these MediaFiles folders on your system drive, any MXF media in the proper folders should be able to be read by Media Composer, but since it only looks for read/write on the root of the drive it won't refresh the media database files, they will not show up in the Media Tool.

If Avid were to change where it looks for the read/write permissions from the root to the Mediafiles folders, you would be able to import and capture media to the system drive.

Avid aready does this for Project, and other settings files. The User folder and it's subfolders are located at the root of the system drive, yet Media Composer doesn't have problems saving Project files and settings to their proper location in it.

I probably should have stated this sooner, I'm not using any external drive, I'm using my computer's drive.

Andrew:

OK, so if neither changing the write permission nor partitioning the drive are valid options, then what is my option, apart from waiting for a future version of MC to address the issue?

This Monday will mark my first week of not having usable access to MC.  With the holidays coming up, I anticipate it will be at least another week before my problem is solved.