Avid Hates You

If you're like me, well, first off... Why?  That's weird.  Stop it! Ahem. If your work set-up is like mine, you have to log on to an ISIS server before launching Avid in order to mount all of your media drives.  If you're a responsible editor who doesn't like to crash and lose all of his or her work, then at the end of the day you quit Avid, log off of ISIS, and shut down your computer.  Except, well, that's not really how the end of the day goes.  It's more like you quit Avid, log off of ISIS, select "Shut Down" from the apple menu, tell ISIS to force eject all mounted workspaces, and then your computer shuts down. For me, this is not an isolated incident.  This happens every time . In fact, ISIS failing to log off every drive happens pretty much every time I log out of ISIS, no matter which system in the office I'm using. Let's take a minute to step back and examine the ISIS Client software.  It does two things, which are to securel...

These error messages sometimes appear when attempting to save a title in the Title Tool: The first message, contains the useful information:  "Applied to free block" means that Avid has failed to allocate enough memory to save the title.  Which is dumb.  The title should already be fully stored in memory. This second message is less helpful, though I guess it does let you know that your title didn't save.  So not a total failure. in addition to your title not saving, the title tool window won't close after these messages appear and you can't deactivate it, preventing you from saving your bins (in my opinion, that's the real problem caused by this bug).  Fortunately for you, dear reader, I have a workaround for that.  Your title, however, is not going to save, and you're going to have to restart Avid in order to try again.  So yeah, the good news is that the title tool is pretty basic, so it shouldn't take you too long to recreate your title...

I don't know why I post all of the bus thread pictures; they all look exactly the same.  But whatever, here you go: Pretty sweet. This particular bus thread error was when attempting to import a still image for use as a graphic.  The file is a .PNG, and Avid hates it.  Importing the image into Photoshop and exporting a flat .PSD also failed.  so did a .TIFF.  And a .JPG.  And every other format we could think of.  Testing all of these formats was fucking awesome, because every fail results in this crash, and necessitates a relaunch of Avid.  Hooray for two minutes of sitting around with my thumb in my ass. So what gives?  I can import other files, so it's not the act of importing.  I can import those files to the same drive I'm trying to import this particular file to, so it's not the drive. Okay, what's going on with this graphic?  It's 720p, has transparency, is full-raster 16:9, and - oh.  What the fuck?  Why ...

Avid doesn't give a shit when you last saved.  If you set that autosave timer to every 15 minutes (the standard at every company I've ever worked at), then it will goddamn autosave on the hour, quarter past, half past, and quarter to the next hour, regardless of whether or not you literally just pressed save. Today I saved my bins at 1:14 pm, and by the time it finished saving, the clock and turned, and so Avid ran the autosave.  In whose fucking moronic brain did this behavior make sense?  Editors are paid to edit, not to watch the slow as molasses save bar crawl across the screen like a geriatric without LifeAlert! Avid devs, take note:  Change Avid to log the last time that the program saved all of the bins, and the run the autosave fifteen minutes after that.   If the user saves all the bins within those 15 minutes, reset the goddamn timer.  Seriously. Speaking of time being tantamount to money, if I'm going to get my producer so he can watch down...

This is just plain old terrible programming. When creating a new bin, the bin window appears in avid, but the new bin itself does not appear in the project window.  If you close the new bin's window, it still won't appear, and effectively is lost to Avid.  What could possibly be going on? Looking at the Finder level, I can see that the new bins were created without ".avb" at the end of their names.  If I manually add that extension, lo and behold the bins appear in the project window! But what's causing these bins to be created sans extension?  Some crazy bug?  Some horrible computer virus?  Nope.  Just dumb fucking Avid. This problem is the result of turning on the option in the General Settings to allow for filenames longer than 27 characters.  For some reason, Avid takes this to mean "stop properly writing bin names."  Turning that option off again fixes the problem. Dumb.  Fucking.  Avid. Seriously did no one testing...

Man I wish I'd gotten screenshots of this one.  Sometimes I forget to think about my blog when I'm working under a deadline.  Weird, I know. Here's what the error said: An unexpected Error has Occurred when Importing Quicktime Audio.  Do you wish to continue importing the file?  The audio may be incomplete or missing. [Continue]  [Abort] First off, I'm using Avid, right?  So there's no goddamn way that any  error is "unexpected."  What's unexpected is when the software fucking works. Sorry, I just had to get that out. Honestly, this is a pretty good and descriptive error message.  Something's wrong with your audio and we don't know what it is, so it may be screwed up when the import finishes.  Fair enough.  Let's click "Continue."  Oh, hey, do you know what I didn't expect?  I didn't expect "continue" to work, that's for sure.  And would you look at that?  It didn't work.  New error: SYS_...

Why the fuck does it take so long to make a goddamn new bin, Avid?  WHY?!? ...that is all.