Avid Hates You

This is possibly the most ironic of the errors that I've encountered while using Avid.  Imagine, if you will, a program that crashes two out of every three times that you use it.  The only program on the Mac (at least that I'm aware of) that is so poorly coded as to literally require you to reset your PRAM on a regular basis just in order to keep it running.  Imagine that this program is so frustrating to use, so annoyingly buggy, that you just want to quit. But you can't. I hit Command-Q and I get the Mac "bonk" sound.  Avid doesn't quit.  Go to the File menu and choose "Quit."  Bonk. What the fuck, Avid?  Of all the times that you could just crash me to the desktop, instead, you refuse  to exit.  You dirty, sneaky, underhanded asshole. Near as I can tell, this is a bug that only happens in Avid 5, which is good, because no one on Earth should ever go near that flaming piece of garbage.  It's the Final Cut X of Avids.  I'm ...

At my old office, we edited everything in 10:1m after a real-time capture because that codec is fucking good at its job. At my new office, we edit everything in MPEG-4 from the XDCam proxy files, and that codec blows hairy goat sphincter. In addition, because we deliver in HD, people keep wanting to work in an HD project.  I understand their belief that this matters, but they're wrong.  In fact, yellow/green mode in an SD project is every bit as good as yellow/green mode in an HD one as long as you're talking about multicam 9-split playback. Which I am. SO... If your producer or editor is having trouble with a group that's lagging during playback, losing audio sync, or otherwise doing that thing that Avid calls "functioning normally," the solution is often as simple as changing the format of their project from HD to SD.  That does an automatic downconvert on all playback footage, and stops stutter in its tracks.  Erm, starts stutter up again.  No.  ...

Well kids, I've "upgraded" to Avid 5.5 at my new office, and that means there's a whole host of new issues for me to bitch and moan about. Chief among them is this bullshit: Exception:  AUTO_COMP_NO_SYNC This is what happens when I try to multigroup by doing exactly the same fucking thing that I used to do in Avid 4.0.5.16.  Fucking Avid 5.5 is bullshit. I guess there are some minor differences here:  I'm working in a 1080/23.976P project.  Okay, so there's one minor difference.  Fucking Avid, of course it goddamn breaks. Let's start at the beginning (because it's a very good place to start) (and also because I like making Dad Jokes, apparently):  The group I'm making has a lot of pretty basic flaws.  First, it's eight hours long - that's actual media length, not the time spanned by that media.  Second, there's both XD Cam footage and imported GoPro clips.  Third, there's also iso audio.  Fourth, that iso audio is actua...

Dear Avid, Thank you for taking the time to read this letter.  I know that you're very busy fucking up someone else's job, career, and possibly life, and so I truly appreciate you stepping away from whatever catastrophe of television horror you were in the process of creating to listen to my humble question. Why doesn't autosequencing work? If timecode is a thing, and sorting by timecode is a thing, then why the fuck, when I sort my clips by goddamn timecode, do you sometimes just give me an autosequence of them that is fifteen fucking days long?!?  And then, when your shitty little single-processor-using compu-brain goes and makes a fifteen day long autosequence for no fucking reason, why do you even bother to alert me that the playlength toggle needs to be turned on?  I mean, if you know it needs to be turned on, why don't you just go ahead and turn the damn thing on already?? But I digress. They say that the definition of insanity is repeating the same acti...

Let's engage in some hypothetical discourse: Hypothetically, you are the creator of a suite of editing software. Hypothetically, you want this to be the  go-to editing suite for professionals. Hypothetically, you understand that once businesses design their workflow, they want to plug that workflow into every single one of their projects. Any guesses what I'm talking about, here, Avid?  None?  I'm talking about this bullshit : Seriously, how fucking hard is it to add project templates  to this behemoth of a program?  If my goddamn Cannon Printer Software can store templates, how incredibly hard would it be for you to do it?  And I'm not talking about anything complicated here.  I'm just talking about making and naming a bunch of folders so as to save me from spending fucking days fixing some asshole's half-handed attempt at organization just so that I can actually do some goddamn work. Do you know what I do?  I have a folder saved...

Well, if you like pictures (and who doesn't?) you're going to love the issue du jour.  Near as I can tell, this error is really a non-issue, but what the hell, let's check out how horribly Avid handles it! You know how it goes:  You're just sitting at your desk after a long day and you're getting ready to head home.  You close all of your bins (because you're a goddamn responsible adult) and you quit out of the project.  When this bullshit happens: What the fuck, Avid?  Why do you crash when quitting so much?  Okay, let's click "continue."  Oh, sweet, some more debugger code: Ugh.  Whatever.  Avid's assertions be failin' left and right, yo.  Okay, continue again...  Oh fuckballs.  It's the first error again.  And so forth.  Forever.  Eventually you'll either force quit Avid (which is probably the thing I should have done), or you'll notice that there's a brief period of time between each debugger me...

Clicking OK from this super helpful error message gives you the twice as helpful: Literally twice as helpful.  Hooray. The good news is that this is an easy fix to a dumb problem.  The problem is that your computer has dropped it's connection to the remote media drive during media creation (in this case, mine was named "TN02_CASTING_MEDIA").  My computer is named "zEDIT01_104B" which is why the media folder in the error message bears that name as well.  The title of this post has been made more generic so you can better understand where the files that you need to delete are living. The fix to this problem is to quit avid (if it doesn't just crash out on you), dismount and re-mount your drives, delete the creating folder in the directory specified in the error message, and then start creating the media again. So yeah, the error message is wrong, but the path is correct, so in the scope of Avid errors, this is - as stated - actually super helpful....

This message appears on launch, alongside an old favorite: Ahh yes, the good old bus thread error.  Well fuck me sideways. Now let's travel back in time and try to find out what caused this nonsense:  I came in to the office today to hear the four words everyone in tech fields loves to hear:  The power went out. Awesome. After booting ye olde Avid, I found that every time it got to the "initializing media manager" stage, it would crash out with the above two clickyboxes.  Of course, you can't click either one of them, so you have to manually force quit out of the crash.  Hilarious. What does this mean?  Well, I tried a bunch of stuff.  I deleted site settings.  Nope.  I deleted the databases on my mounted drives.  Nope.  I deleted the database on my local drive.  Nope.  I deleted the media  on my local drive.  Nope.  I cleared the shared attic, deleted shared users, reset the computer, reset the...

This one is just asinine.  For no reason that I can think of, Avid simply won't draw audio data (waveform or energy plot) on Audio Track 24.  Tracks 1 through 23 work perfectly well, but track 24 is total bullshit. Anyway, simple workaround:  Use a different audio track. Protip:  You can add a specific audio track by hitting Command + Option + U (and a specific video track with Command + Option + Y).  Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.  The other half of the battle is killing people.

This is a great error.  It's great for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, the problem isn't that "Avid_MediaFiles' can't be found.  That's the folder on your media drive named "Avid Media Files" and it's pretty goddamn easily found by both you and Avid.  No, the real problem is that a file *inside* Avid Media Files can't be found.  Which file?  Good question.  A database file.  What this error message should really say is: File 'msmFMID.pmr' not found. OR File 'msmMMOB.mdb' not found. Or the error message could be actually helpful and say: The File 'msmFMID.pmr' which should be in path 'MediaDriveA/Avid Media Files/MXF/Ingest1' cannot be found. You know, something actually fucking helpful.  But no.  No, this message basically just says that Avid lost something, it isn't sure what, and it sure as shit isn't going to let you save any bins until you fix the problem.  Also, opening the Med...

If you're like me, well, first off... Why?  That's weird.  Stop it! Ahem. If your work set-up is like mine, you have to log on to an ISIS server before launching Avid in order to mount all of your media drives.  If you're a responsible editor who doesn't like to crash and lose all of his or her work, then at the end of the day you quit Avid, log off of ISIS, and shut down your computer.  Except, well, that's not really how the end of the day goes.  It's more like you quit Avid, log off of ISIS, select "Shut Down" from the apple menu, tell ISIS to force eject all mounted workspaces, and then your computer shuts down. For me, this is not an isolated incident.  This happens every time . In fact, ISIS failing to log off every drive happens pretty much every time I log out of ISIS, no matter which system in the office I'm using. Let's take a minute to step back and examine the ISIS Client software.  It does two things, which are to securel...

These error messages sometimes appear when attempting to save a title in the Title Tool: The first message, contains the useful information:  "Applied to free block" means that Avid has failed to allocate enough memory to save the title.  Which is dumb.  The title should already be fully stored in memory. This second message is less helpful, though I guess it does let you know that your title didn't save.  So not a total failure. in addition to your title not saving, the title tool window won't close after these messages appear and you can't deactivate it, preventing you from saving your bins (in my opinion, that's the real problem caused by this bug).  Fortunately for you, dear reader, I have a workaround for that.  Your title, however, is not going to save, and you're going to have to restart Avid in order to try again.  So yeah, the good news is that the title tool is pretty basic, so it shouldn't take you too long to recreate your title...

I don't know why I post all of the bus thread pictures; they all look exactly the same.  But whatever, here you go: Pretty sweet. This particular bus thread error was when attempting to import a still image for use as a graphic.  The file is a .PNG, and Avid hates it.  Importing the image into Photoshop and exporting a flat .PSD also failed.  so did a .TIFF.  And a .JPG.  And every other format we could think of.  Testing all of these formats was fucking awesome, because every fail results in this crash, and necessitates a relaunch of Avid.  Hooray for two minutes of sitting around with my thumb in my ass. So what gives?  I can import other files, so it's not the act of importing.  I can import those files to the same drive I'm trying to import this particular file to, so it's not the drive. Okay, what's going on with this graphic?  It's 720p, has transparency, is full-raster 16:9, and - oh.  What the fuck?  Why ...

Avid doesn't give a shit when you last saved.  If you set that autosave timer to every 15 minutes (the standard at every company I've ever worked at), then it will goddamn autosave on the hour, quarter past, half past, and quarter to the next hour, regardless of whether or not you literally just pressed save. Today I saved my bins at 1:14 pm, and by the time it finished saving, the clock and turned, and so Avid ran the autosave.  In whose fucking moronic brain did this behavior make sense?  Editors are paid to edit, not to watch the slow as molasses save bar crawl across the screen like a geriatric without LifeAlert! Avid devs, take note:  Change Avid to log the last time that the program saved all of the bins, and the run the autosave fifteen minutes after that.   If the user saves all the bins within those 15 minutes, reset the goddamn timer.  Seriously. Speaking of time being tantamount to money, if I'm going to get my producer so he can watch down...