Avid Hates You

Man I wish I'd gotten screenshots of this one.  Sometimes I forget to think about my blog when I'm working under a deadline.  Weird, I know. Here's what the error said: An unexpected Error has Occurred when Importing Quicktime Audio.  Do you wish to continue importing the file?  The audio may be incomplete or missing. [Continue]  [Abort] First off, I'm using Avid, right?  So there's no goddamn way that any  error is "unexpected."  What's unexpected is when the software fucking works. Sorry, I just had to get that out. Honestly, this is a pretty good and descriptive error message.  Something's wrong with your audio and we don't know what it is, so it may be screwed up when the import finishes.  Fair enough.  Let's click "Continue."  Oh, hey, do you know what I didn't expect?  I didn't expect "continue" to work, that's for sure.  And would you look at that?  It didn't work.  New error: SYS_...

Why the fuck does it take so long to make a goddamn new bin, Avid?  WHY?!? ...that is all.

This error sometimes occurs when you try to edit an existing title in the title tool.  You click in the title window, and get this error.  You try to close the title, and you get this error.  You're stuck. This error is also yet another shining example of how terribly unintelligible Avid's errors are.  No one, and I mean literally no one, should ever be expected to memorize the error codes of the platform they're working on.  Period.  Put in a goddamn error handler and add some strings from the Programmer-Speak to Actual Normal Fucking English dictionary. If you were to consult such a dictionary, you'd know that any time computers are talking about "free blocks" they're actually talking about RAM, or the type of hardware memory that computers use to run active applications. Any time something having to do with memory fails, you're about to crash. Case and point, what happens when you click "OK" in the error above? Yup. ...

This bug annoys the crap out of me. So, because I work in Reality TV, I have to edit in low res.  It's just not financially possible to keep all 2000+ tapes of any given series online in full 1080i HD (even at DNx145).  So when we edit in low-res, we also make titles in low-res.  We use 10:1m for our low-res editing, in case anyone is interested.  When you re-create those low-res titles in HD, an interesting thing happens: Any titles that used kerning are re-created incorrectly.  This is Super Awesome. Now, when I say re-create the titles, I mean the easy method of marking in to out over the whole sequence, going up to the Clip menu, and choosing the "Re-Create Title Media" option.  That's the one the creates bad titles where kerning is involved (as far as I can tell, only when moving from SD to HD projects). The solution is also Super Awesome.  You have to manually select each affected title in the Effect Editor, click the "edit title" button in...

You don't say... So this little error pops up when you try to play or copy a sequence that contains, well, pretty much what it says:  A range that's outside of the component.  And of course this error also prevents you from playing or copying that sequence.  Here's where being able to translate Avid's horrid "engineer-ese" into "actual goddamn useful information" is a pretty good skill to have. Let's see... Upon consulting my Avid to English dictionary, I can see that what the error is saying is that whatever it is you are cacheing - be it for playback or duplication - contains invalid information about the duration of a clip. The "Range" is the information in the sequence - it says, for example, that your clip exists from 10;00;00;00 - 10;00;01;00.  That's the range specified for Dup.  Whatever Dup is.  You'd guess duplication, until you realize that you get the same error just during playback.  I'm assuming Dup is ...