Avid Behaving Badly #28: Avid 2023.12 Batch Import just refreshes the old Media Somehow and it's Fucking Stupid

Avid 2023.12 is the first moderately functional Avid since 2018, in my opinion. Titler+ is still hot flaming garbage, but the rest of the NLE mostly works. It only seems to crash when quitting the program, so, like, task failed successfully, I guess, and editing is pretty smooth. You can even import .mov files with transparency again!

HOWEVER, there is one MAJOR caveat to this, and that's that the Batch Import functionality is sometimes completely off its fucking rocker.

I'll walk you through what I consider to be a perfectly normal workflow:

- I make a graphic. It's gorgeous. Goddamn I'm good at graphics. Holy shit this thing is the goddamn Platonic Ideal of what a graphic should be.

- I import it into Avid. Since I'm on Avid 2023.12, and not, say, 2019-2023.AnythingElse, this works.

- My producer sends me a note to change the graphic even though she hasn't even seen it yet. Fine. I move the old graphic out of today's renders folder, drag it into the garden, and shoot it while it plays with the rabbits one more time, George.

- I make the new graphic without being in any way upset because I'm a goddamn professional.

- In avid, I delete the media (but not the master clip) of the graphic. It now very clearly says "MEDIA OFFLINE" on my source monitor, because that's how deleting media works.

- Still in avid, I now right click on the offline clip and select "Batch Import" from the pop-up menu. I then point the clip to the brand new version and hit "Import."

- The original graphic comes back online as if I never deleted media in the first place.

Wait, WHAT??

What the actual fucking fuck, Avid??? That is NOT the purpose of batch import. I don't want the fucking media that I just deleted to come back; I want the BRAND FUCKING NEW media.

So what it seems is happening, is that you just can't have a file with the same name at the same filepath as the original file, or else Avid will somehow track down the original file that's now in a totally different filepath and just use that instead. How the fuck this happens is beyond me. I mean, we're talking about a piece of software that famously drops links to media that's been in the same folder for fucking years.

But it does happen. 

And it gets weirder. If you take the new file and just try to import it fresh, it'll import as the original file anyway. And if you wholesale delete the original master clip and media and then try to import the new file clean, Avid will say, "nope, you already deleted that so we're just not gonna bring it in at all."

But fear not, dear reader; I have found a workaround.

At least, until Avid is broken up into component parts and sold off to the highest bidder in order to pad the quarterly profits of its new vulture capitalist overlords at the expense of the entire professional television and film industry, you can give each replacement clip a brand new filepath, or otherwise use a unique file name (perfect GFX v2, for example). With a new filepath, you can batch normally. With a unique name, you have to bring it in clean and then manually overcut it into your sequence. Wee...

It amazes me that Avid is still alive and kicking given that they haven't had a functional piece of new software in neigh on 6 years. Get your fucking shit together, Avid. No one wants to have to edit in Premiere.

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