Avid Hates You

Sometimes Avid wants to pee in your cornflakes in a major way.  I don't know why, but that's definitely how it is.  One such time is when you are attempting to relink offline media.  Avid scans the drive, relinks... and then crashes out with a bus thread error just as the relink hits 100%.  Thanks, Avid, you flying piece of shit. Sometimes you'll get lucky and you can just relaunch Avid and the relink will work. Far more often, however, more drastic measures must be taken.  I suggest powering off the computer, physically unplugging it for 30 seconds or so, and then - on the subsequent boot up - resetting the PRAM 5 times (hold down Command+Option+P+R keys during boot up.  Each chime is one reset). So when Avid tells you they know how to program, don't have memory leaks, artifacts in RAM, or other sloppy memory issues, you can slap them with their own Bus Error.

If you're like me, then you spend a large portion of your time wishing you could chuck your Avid out the window, and then realizing that your office doesn't have any windows.  So you create multigroups instead. One thing that my company uses is Iso Audio - isolated mics saved as separate .wav files with no accompanying video, raw and unmixed, so that editors always have access to the best audio regardless of how terrible the on-set audio mixer is that day.  We put this iso audio on Audio Track 24 in our timelines because there's no related video and this seems to make sense from an organizational standpoint.  And it should, right?  I mean - this should work just fine. Except that Avid doesn't draw audio waveforms for audio track 24.  I have no fucking clue why, since audio tracks 1 through 23 draw waveform just goddamned fine, but track 24 doesn't draw in. Fuck you, Avid.

This one was awesome, and unfortunately I do not have an actual image from the actual crash to show you, but it wasn't an Avid error, anyway.  Nope, this was a MacOS error - alert, really - just letting me know that this program which costs hundreds of dollars, running on thousands of dollars of machinery, required for producing hundreds of thousands of dollars of televised programming, crashed. Well, thank you MacOS, for letting me know.  I had no idea up until this point that Avid was crap. But what was I doing with this crash occurred?  Surely I was abusing the open workflow of Avid in some horrible, mean-to-programmers way?  Maybe, I guess, if you consider choosing "Batch Capture" from the Clip menu as a mean thing to do. Workflow:  I select my clips in a bin, choose Batch Capture from the Clip menu, Avid asks me to put in Tape X, I put in Tape X, Avid stalls for 20 seconds or so and then exits to the desktop, which MacOS kindly points out to me. ...

This is one of the few errors that actually - and correctly - describes the problem that caused the error (in this specific case): Failed to save bin, BIN_NAME, to PATH_NAME Changes will not be saved. The volume is full. Sweet, my drive is full.  Well, I'll just click OK, clear some space off the drive, and then save again. Hrm.  Fairly insistent little bugger, isn't he? I'll double check.  Okay, yeah, well Avid, there's definitely 63.9 GB free on this volume now.  Maybe you should refresh or something.  Oh, wait, you don't do that anymore.  Thanks... dick. Oh yeah, remember how I said "In this specific case" up above?  You can also get this same error message due to a bug in Import settings.  Basically, when your import settings are set to a full or read-only drive, Avid will try to import to that drive, even if you specify a different drive to import to in the import dialogue box that appears when selecting "Import..." from th...