Conforming a 3D Feature on AVID

Prior to this I've had no experience with AVID or conforming a movie, so the method I go about this might not be the best or most efficient, but it's what I figured out with the advise of a few professionals, some poking around on the internet, and a lot of trial and error. If you have any advise on improvements I could be making in my workflow, they would be appreciated.

What I've got:
- 7TB of raw left and right eye footage from a RED EPIC.
- A ProRes 2D rough cut of a feature using left eye footage.
- A PC workstation at a Post House (No, I don't know the specs)
- AVID
- 2 Master 12TB RAIDs (Mac Formatted, RAID5)
- 1 Back-up edit RAID (Mac Formatted, RAID5)
- Some snacks.
- A book.
- My MacBook Pro.

I've heard a lot of negative things about AVID. So far, I'm okay with AVID. We're not friends, but I'd say hi if I passed AVID on the street. At first the constant auto-saving was annoying, especially since you can't do anything else while it's happening. It also occasionally freezes while auto-saving, though I'd imagine that has something to do with the large drive to drive copy happening on at the same time. I'll know for sure when that copy finishes. If I wait long enough AVID usually remembers what it was doing and un-freezes, this is where the book comes in handy. The other thing I dislike about AVID is the auto-saving upon quitting. For example: I thought I messed something up and wasn't sure how to undo it, so I though, 'I'll quit and re-open without saving.' NOPE! AVID MUST SAVE ALL! ALL THE TIME! Luckily I hadn't actually messed anything up and all was well; lesson learned. Also according to my sort of mentor, the little squarish white, black, white stripped thing in the bottom left corner of each window is called the hamburger.

First I made a bin to work out of separate from the bins the editor was using, so I wouldn't mess anything up. I made a copy of the edit sequence to work from. I set all of my bins so they only show me the columns: Tape, Camroll, S3D Clip Name, S3D Channel, S3D Group Name, S3D Inversion, and S3D Eye Order. I also clicked on the hamburger so I could set the bin display to only show me Master Clips, Sequences, Groups, and Stereoscopic Clips, and to Show Reference Clips.

Upon the recommendation of a professional at Spy Post (http://www.spypost.com), which is where I'm working on this, I first went through and gave all of the ProRes Tape and Camroll names that matched the clip names, minus the .mov part. Camroll is easy because you can just click on the field and directly copy/paste it. Tape is more annoying and tedious since you have to right click, select modify, go to source, copy/paste the name, and click through a bunch of 'Are you sure you want to do this? The world might end.' prompts. On the bright side, once you've entered all the source names they are available to select when you go to enter Tape names for the R3D clips.

When importing all of the raw R3D, I used the Link to AMA Volume feature. This would almost be really cool and efficient if I didn't have to select each roll folder instead of being able to select days. (My file folder structure goes like this: Drive Name>Days>Rolls>L or R) I could have told it to make specific bins or something, but I didn't, so it made L and R bins. It did at least put all of the rolls in the same L or R folder, instead of making a million new ones. This was nice when I dragged all of the L and R bin contents into my special bin I was working out of.

I then went through and selected in the S3D Channel column whether or not clips were left or right eye, and while you're at it, you might as well select the S3D Inversion as well, depending on how the movie was shot. A cool thing I learned a little late was if you have multiple clips selected, they all change when you get the channel or inversion. I found it most efficient to do all of the left eye first, then re-sort the organization by the S3D Channel column so all of the Monoscopic clips end up together, select all of them because most are probably right eye, deselect all of the ProRes .mov ones that get mixed in from the edit, and set their Channel and Inversion.

Now for S3D Group Names! I thought it'd be super cool if I just selected everything (minus the .mov ones), right clicked, and selected 'Populate S3D Group Names automatically', and everything worked, but it didn't. Something about not liking multiple roll names (using the console from the Tools menu is helpful for figuring these things out). I ended up having to select each roll and populating the group names. I did it so they would all have the left eye name since the edit was done with it. Again, selecting each roll, deselecting the .mov that get in the way, and voila, group names. This was also good for me to find the occasional missing eye clip. AVID will complain about something something can't exactly remember the prompt, then you look to see which eye has one that the other doesn't, deselect it, and voila, group names. I noted which were missing so I could track them down later.

If I wanted to, I could make a new bin for 3D clips and turn all of my group named clips into stereoscopic clips and put them in that bin, which I've done in a test and it works great, but I would first like to figure out how to conform the stereoscopic clips back to the edit, so I'm working on a test. I'm failing so far. Matching raw R3D back to the edit is easy, once you figure out that AVID hates Mac formatted drives but holds back its disdain until the moment you go to relink. After moving the clips to something Windows formatted, it's happy to conform it. So I had to figure out where to get 7TB of space with no budget for buying another RAID. I ended up dividing the Edit Back-up drive onto the remaining space of the Master raw drives, reformatting it for Windows, and copying all of the raw onto it. And by me I mean the editor because I was out of town.

Blah blah blah, stuff copied, AVID happy with a NTFS drive, missing metadata re-entered, able to conform back to 2D R3D footage, but I still can't for the life of me figure out how to get stereoscopic clips to relink to the edit. So now I research, scour forums, maybe make some calls to AVID, eat some cereal, maybe go for a walk because I have been sitting for WAY too long.