Avid Hates You

You know how sometimes you feel like you've dealt with all the weird shit that the version of Avid you're using is ever going to throw at you, and you're fucking Avid Superman around the office?  And then this happens.  This weird, absurd, ridiculous problem. I mean, I just wrote that title, which is an exact description of the issue, and it still looks like goddamn gibberish. So what error am I talking about?  Well, none.  Avid doesn't give an error in this case, it just spits out video that's corrupted.  If you, unlike Avid, know what fields are, the rendered video has the fields out of order.  The resulting image looks like it has scan lines, or some kind of fucked up interlacing, or something.  It's all shitty looking on the screen, basically. Now this is a rare issue.  It seems to only happen when you do all of the following: Step 1) Convert the framerate of your source video clip to another framerate, either by editing with it in a di...

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...

As with all things Avid, this is just stupid.  My Quicktime movie isn't mixed resolution, nor do I even know how I would go about making a mixed resolution movie.  What does that even mean?  Like halfway through, the resolution changes from 480p to 1080i or something?  Without even getting into why Avid seems to think that such a thing would ever exist, the fact of the matter is that this message is just completely fucking wrong.  Well, maybe not the text, per se - it's very possible that Avid cannot import a mixed resolution file, much in the same way that I cannot ride a goddamn unicorn to work.  What I mean is:  The thing causing this error is not the thing the error is talking about. See, this message shows up when you're trying to import to a drive that's full.  I mean, come the fuck on, Avid.  Isn't "Error:  Not enough Space" a thing you used to LOVE showing back in the good ol' 3.1 days?  I seem to recall an "Error: ...

There's no error message for this, because Avid doesn't like to admit when it's just fucking wrong.  Also, this is almost certainly related to the issue with autosequencing that I raised in my Avid Behaving Badly #12 post below. Here's the bullshit workflow we have to use because stupid fucking Avid can't play back proxy MPEG-4 video in 9 camera split without stuttering (I know, it's not an every-frame-keyframe codec, but jesus christ, maybe if you used more than 2 fucking cores of my SIXTEEN CORE system, you'd get, I don't know, more fucking processing power!!   Seriously).  First, we capture using AI direct because Avid can't be bothered to implement their own tapeless fucking workflow.  Then we have to transcode  everything to 8:1m because that's the only codec that works cleanly in 9 cam multicam split playback.  Transcoding, by the way, takes for goddamn ever.  I'm sure you knew that. In order to transcode to 8:1m, for some reason th...

I'm working on a 24P show and we've been using the XDCam proxy files for our offline editing.  This season, however, we've added more cameras, and the multigroups lag when using the proxy MPEG-4 codec.  To solve this, we're transcoding everything  to 8:1m.  So much for faster than real time capture.  But I digress.  In order to make the transcode happen, you have to change your project format to 23.976 NTSC or else the 8:1m codec won't even be made available to you.  Which is horseshit, but I digress.  After transcoding, I figured hey - there's no reason I can't make my timelines and groups in the standard def project, right?  Wrong.  There's a very good reason why I can't do those things, and it's that Avid is a piece of fucking garbage.  For a reason I cannot fathom, autosequences created in 23.976 NTSC projects don't match clip TC to sequence TC.  They just don't. Change back to 1080P/23.976 and autosequencing works perfec...

Here's a quick thank you to everyone who's checked out this blog and - hopefully - learned how to solve some stupid Avid bullshit as a result.  I've passed 20,000 pageviews, and that makes me feel pretty good!  I really just started this page as a means of both venting my frustration with Avid and the real lack of troubleshooting help on the internet for large-scale productions, but I'm glad that I have been able to get at least a couple of people through some tough bugs. Keep on editing, and post here if there are any Avid issues you'd like see me post about.