Avid Behaving Badly #25: Avid 2023.8 is a hot fucking mess

My work upgraded me to a brand new, top of the line, Apple Studio M2 Ultra this week.

And you know what that means... We also upgraded to the brand new Avid 2023.8!

Which is so much garbage it lasted exactly one day on my computer. I was crashing every 2-5 minutes. And when Avid 2023 isn't crashing, it's busy not working in any way that you would want it to.

Import no longer works at all.

Alpha channels on graphics largely aren't recognized.

That old workflow where you'd have a graphic, and import it, and then update the source and batch in the new one so you didn't have to manually replace that graphic everywhere you used it? That's out the fucking window because you can't import anymore and alpha channels largely aren't recognized. So now your only option if you want to import to use native media for graphics is a PNG sequence (fuck that; those take hella long to render and it's a mess of files to manage). 

Avid's preferred workflow is that you just link to the graphic file, leave "live link" turned on, and then replace the original file with an identically named file whenever you want to update it.

And that should work, except that isn't how anything used to work, so if you have to go back and open an old project and change something you now have to fucking manually overcut your previously imported graphics files with the new linked graphic. Fuck you very much, Avid.

Also, everything you've heard about Avid Titler + is false. Avid Titler + is actually much, MUCH worse. It's fucking AWFUL. I've seen 3 year olds with a better understanding of user interface design. It's also not actually media anymore, so you can't do all the cool things you could do with the old title tool like put effects on the primary or alpha channel to create custom or animated lettering or shading. Or replace the primary channel with video to create letters filled with video rather than solids. FUCK. YOU. AVID.

6 months ago they did say "we hear you on how bad Avid Titler + is, and we're going to fix it" But since that was FIVE YEARS AFTER TITLER PLUS FIRST DEBUTED, forgive me if I'm a wee bit sceptical.

So yeah, 2023.8 is pure liquified feces.

We back-rev'ed to 2023.3.1. Totally stable to use! Until Avid Titler + crashed me out with a kernel panic. Also 2023.3.1 is no longer available from Avid as of tomorrow. So that's a concern.

These recent versions are so bad that the only thing stopping me from ending it all is I'm not a moron who would end it all over something as dumb as Avid being the worst program to use since some sort of automated program that ends it all. But yeah, you can expect quite a few more posts in the coming days and months as I become intimately familiar with the many new and exciting ways in which Avid has failed to produce a baseline level of functional software.

Weeeeee!

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