Avid Hates You

Dear Avid, Let me tell you about computers.  Computers are amazing.  They can do lots of things that humans can do.  They excel at boring and repetitive, data-driven tasks.  I'd like you to realize this, because your program, Avid, runs on a computer, and should probably take advantage of that fact one of these days. Herein I'm going to lay out some things that computers can do, some things that Avid already does, and some things that people pay thousands of dollars for people to do which Avid could do because:  Computers.  This will get into some very "big" ideas for the future of software, hardware, and video production and post-production.  There will be no tl;dr. -- Computers can do voice recognition.  I can use Dragon speech to text to transcribe my footage, but Avid could just do this for me. Computers can do facial recognition.  The camera on my phone knows where faces are and facebook can figure out who that face belongs to....

The title of this post is factually correct.  The thing that is supposed to save you in case of crash is the most likely thing to stop working prior to you actually crashing.  I mean: what the flying fuck, Avid?  This is the one single part of your program that absolutely fucking has to work 100% of the time!  Here's how it plays out at my office: Producer:  "My Avid Crashed and now my work is missing." Me:  "When was the last time you worked on this?" Producer:  "I've been working on it all day.  I guess I crashed at 7:30 pm, so ...  7:30 pm." Me:  "The last attic save is 1:45 pm." All:  "Fucking Avid." Sometimes "Producer" is even "Editor" which is a rare substitution in lost work issues, but in this case I've see it with my own damn eyes. -- So what can we do to avoid the fact that Avid is a flaming piece of feces, fresh from the anus of Graal the World-Eater?  There's no fixing this bu...