An Unexpected Error has Occurred when Importing Quicktime Audio...

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_ERROR, OSErr:-1704.
[Continue]  [Abort]

There's the Avid that I know and love.  Fucking useless message.  It's like saying, "Hey, guy on the sidewalk!  Potato!  Yes or no?"  What?  How in the flaming shit am I supposed to make an informed decision here?  Okay, let's hit continue, because that's been doing great so far.

And back to the first error.  Sweet.  Pressing Abort at either of these stages just ends your file import.  Converting the file to a different codec doesn't fix anything.  Stripping audio out of the file completely to import just the video results in going directly to SYS_ERROR, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.  Rad.

So I took this one to the Google.  My search result brought up this gem, which is for Avid 5.5 (not 4.0.5.14 like I'm on), and occurs at boot instead of during import, but hey, it's better than the internet usually is when I'm troubleshooting:  http://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/en_US/Error_Message/en278403

Shockingly, the advice given was correct.  Delete your site settings, and the files will import normally.  You'd think after the first couple of versions, Avid would be able to write a goddamn settings file properly, and put in some sort of checksum to make sure it doesn't corrupt every time they want to save which of my bins is still open.

Unexpected errors, my ass...

Comments

  1. Agree!!! but forget me for being stupid --- where exactly I delete my site settings?
    thank you

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I get blank window site settings, if I click Special -- site settings in AVID

    ReplyDelete
  4. Site settings live at the finder level:

    MacHD / Applications / Avid Media Composer / Settings /

    There are 7 files in that folder and you want to delete the bottom 4 when sorted alphabetically:

    MCState
    Site Settings.avs
    Site Settings.xml
    Site_Attributes

    ReplyDelete

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