Avid Behaving Badly #14: The Leading Indicator that Avid 6.5.4 is about to Crash is that the Attic Stops Working

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 bug through work-arounds.  Once your attic stops, you're very unlikely to notice it stopping, and you're equally unlikely to notice any other issues until you get that wonderful Bus Thread Error: 0x0 message.  All I can do is offer some Best Practices:

1)  Back your work up.  It's not enough to save your bin on the regular (even though it should be).  You should have a second backup bin that you open, copy your work into, and immediately close.  Think of it as a personally curated attic if that helps.
2)  Quit and relaunch Avid every now and again.  This seems to reset the internal "when should I fuck everything up" timer that has been a standard feature since Avid 1.
3)  Don't be a moron.  I can't believe I have to say this, but if you are aware of this issue, you should plan accordingly.  You're not a special butterfly who won't have Avid crash on you.  Avid hates you, and me, and fucking everyone.  It even hates adorable little puppies with big floppy ears.  You aren't safe, so plan ahead and back your shit up!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How to Reset your PRAM and Delete your Site Settings

Exception: SYS_ERROR, OSErr: -5000

File 'Avid_MediaFiles' not found.