I feel like a beta tester. Ever since AMA was introduced, the AMA, later Link setting defaulted to 'Automatically Link to volume'. This made sense in the beginning as all you could really do was mount a P2 card or XDCAM cartridge and let Media Composer process the links. These days, personally and at work, I back up camera cards, usually to a sub-folder on a drive or ISIS so the auto function is not what I want - I always deselect it and in 8.6 use the Source Browser.

On Friday I was troubleshooting a long delay in the browser. The card copy was AVCHD/MTS from a Panasonic 160. There were 178 clips and it took what seemed like an age to link. I then took the original card to another Mac that had 'Automatically Link to volume' selected and plugged in the card. Wow! Speed!

I then ran tests on an 8.6.1 and an 8.6.5 installation. Both on Mac OS 10.11.6. Results:

Insert card with 'Automatically Link to volume' turned on: 47 secs.

Link to card using Source Browser with 'Automatically Link to volume' turned OFF: 3' 17". That's Three minutes seventeen seconds!

What is up? I should say that I trashed the AMA Management folders and AvidSourceBrowserCache> OPFrameGenerator.db before and after each test. I wonder if OPFrameGenerator.db is the culprit? When auto linking it grows to a mere 117 KB. With the Source Browser, is is 6.5MB.

For reasons of backup and data security it is not possible for many editors to use the auto link feature.

If it works fast one way, make it work fast the other way!

So, being an inquisitve kind of fella, I tried the Option+drag and drop method to get a camera card into my bin. This gets around the 'Auto Mount ' issue as any folder can be dropped. Guess what? Fast. I think this must bypass all the metadata built by the Source Browser. But drag and drop is so ... juvenile! Avid give us the Source Browser so please, can it be streamlined?

Roger Shufflebottom:

 I tried the Option+drag and drop method to get a camera card into my bin. This gets around the 'Auto Mount ' issue as any folder can be dropped. Guess what? Fast.

I was just going to tell you about this one , good that you found it for yourself

So - can someobody from Avid comment on this disparity, please? I'll wish you Happy New Year twice over!

It´s only me and not Avid but have you tried with customizing the media cache settings , my own are to have the cache location on a fast media drive and settings 2000 and 1200 , the default might be your bootdrive and 200 - 120

And a continued Happy New year to you too

Well, I am not sure about that. Tried what you suggested (caches on external Thunderbolt drive) but still a big difference between drag and drop and using the Source Browser. Also, when I drag and drop to a bin, I have the bin in text view, so no thumbnails. If I preset the Source Browser to list view (no thumbnails generated) it is still dog slow and it is not adding anything to the media cache folders. Also, I'm having to reset the Cache settings every time I switch projects which looks wrong as this setting is listed as a Site setting (the default Site settings usually do not have to be specifically dragged to the SS folder but I will try that).

Referring to my comment on the Media Cache setting, this is not behaving as one might expect. Dragging it into the Site Setting folder does nothing (as we might expect, as it is already there, but hidden). Switching back to a project where I had made changes to the Media Cache setting showed that Media Composer had reset the path to the default (Mac HD>Users>Shared etc etc) so this is not working properly.