Avid Hates You

After two years, it has occurred to me that I have been remiss in my duties.  Up until now I've failed to mention the most basic troubleshooting techniques for dealing with Avid:  Resetting your PRAM and Deleting your Site Settings.  Seriously, what's wrong with my brain? Basically whenever you're getting weird errors, or multiple bus thread error crashes in a row, or "you can't write to drive X" message when pretty fucking clearly you have write permissions, the problem isn't you; it's Avid.  That's a shocker, I know, and wholly unexpected, but the fact of the matter is that Avid is the only program I've ever used that required regular resetting of your Mac's PRAM (Parameter Random Access Memory).  Avid is also one of the rare pieces of software that corrupts it's own fucking settings.  Seriously, how is that even possible, Avid?  you generate  the settings on launch, so can't you do a goddamn checksum to make sure the existing o...

Dear ISIS:  I love you.  You're great.  None of the bullshit file count limits of Unity, I can fill your drives to 100% without issue, you have automatic redundancy built into your RAID storage, your control panel is .html based and runs in my browser, and you work over ethernet instead of requiring fiberoptic cable.  You're pretty fucking swell. But there's this one thing you do sometimes that reminds me you're made by Avid.  See, it's like this:  When I create a user that has write access to a drive, and I log in as that user, I goddamn expect to be able to write to that fucking drive. Instead, Avid gives me this: What the fuck is that supposed to mean, Avid?  You're blaming the goddamn system OS for the fact that ISIS mounted my drive with incorrect permissions?  Why the christ would you do that?  Wait, wait - hang on while I get out my goddamn dictionary of What the Fuck OSErr: -5000 means. Okay, yeah, this is a write error. ...

My work has upgraded to Avid 6.5.4.  While it's a vast improvement over 5.5 (you know, the one with the user experience akin to stabbing yourself repeatedly in the dick), it's got some seriously annoying bugs.  Mostly because they either don't throw error messages at all (like the one I'm talking about here), or because no matter what the error messages are, the solution is to reset the PRAM and delete the site settings and user folder within the project.  Fucking buggy ass application, man. But I digress.  Avid has been doing some fucked up shit in this new version, and I'm here to tell you how to work around it.  Why me?  Because the entire fucking internet doesn't seem to know a goddamn about this AAF problem I've been having.  Fuck you, internet.  You don't know shit about Avid (well, okay, after I post this, you'll know a small amount of shit, I'll grant you that). And now I'm digressing again!  Okay, on to business: -- Randomly ...