Avid Hates You

"What the fuck does that title even mean," you're probably wondering. Well, I'll tell you: It means Avid is fucking stupid. Not that this fact should surprise any of my long-time readers. Let me lay out the scenario. I'm on Avid 8.6.somthing. My production team shot on a brand new Sony Fancycam 9000. They shot in 4k. The "24P" setting on this camera is actually, apparently "23.97." Where did the 0.006 go? No one fucking knows. Maybe they though that because 29.97 was a thing, 23.xx should be rounded to 23.97 as well. I couldn't tell you. What I can tell you is that when I AMA linked the source footage, transcoded it into an XDCam 35 codec (which is standard fare for my particular project needs right now), and then tried to export it, the export fucking failed. Not in a nice, polite, "here's an error message for your troubles and also so you can screenshot it and use it in your blog posts because we appreciate the value you add to t...

 For the purposes of making this issue easier to search for, I'm going to write a few more sentences here: - Avid Audio too Loud Nitris DX - Avid Output too Loud - Avid Audio Too Hot? - Avid Audio fucking sucks my asshole - Nitris DX audio blown out? - What the Fuck is up with my Audio? - Seriously, What the Fuck, Avid??? That should make it easier for people to find this helpful page where I'm going answer all of life's great mysteries the question as to why Avid sucks fucking asshole (see above). Actually no, I'm not going to answer that. Honestly, who can? At this point, the fact that Avid sucks my fucking asshole is just an immutable fact of existence, like the sky, or the Chargers missing a field goal with two seconds left to lose a game. But you're not here to ponder the Truth of Existence with me. You're here because you audio is way too fucking hot coming out of your powered studio speakers. Fortunately for you, I have a fix for this problem. Near as I ...

 If you work in a professional environment, you're probably used to production DPs insisting on always using the newest, fanciest, most whizz-bang gadgets on the market without ever checking to see if the people they're delivering footage to can actually work with what they're shooting. Usually, the result of this is a few hundred (or thousand) bucks extra cost to post for buying card readers and codecs that aren't pack-ins with Avid. Ahh, but now there's Sony's "new" (it's a couple years old, actually) S-Cinetone camera setting. And it's a motherfucker. First, I appreciate what Sony is trying to do. They're combining color look-up-tables (LUTs) and gamma information into a single setting on their cameras in order to get their digital video to look as rich and deep as film. Kudos, you spectacular assholes. What Sony did not do, and which they absolutely fucking should have done, is produce LUTs for editing suites that are able to work with ...

 So if it isn't working for you on your phone or tablet or whatever the kids have now please let me know, because I foolishly believe I've got things in a good and stable place. Cheers!

I've upgraded to Avid 8.5.6 over the last few years, and you may have noticed that the number of posts I put in my blog has dropped dramatically. That's good. It means Avid is scared that they might start losing market share to Adobe Premiere, or DaVinci Resolve, or Sony Vegas (okay, definitely NOT Sony Vegas). They've started improving workflow, fixing bugs, and even - seriously - demystifying some of the many many error messages that appear while you work. It's great! It's almost enough to make you think that Avid doesn't truly hate your goddamn guts anymore. And then shit like this happens: That is not at all what my graphic is supposed to look like during playback. What it's supposed to look like is this: Isn't that lovely? So why the fuck isn't it playing back correctly? Let's talk about how complicated this graphic is: It isn't. At all. Complicated. It's simple enough to ride the short bus and get a free candy and a pat on the head ...

I don't usually post news in this blog, because it's supposed to be a place for bug fixes, error message decoding, and ranting and the useless fucking quality assurance team that Avid employs (if any such team exists). In this case, however, it seems like we can chalk up another very large hash mark on the side of "there is no QA." Why? Because Avid-installed Macs across hollywood are failing to boot up after being shutdown. This issue hasn't affected me (yet), but holy fucking shit this is a bad fucking bug. I mean, how goddamned hard is it to NOT BREAK THE COMPUTER, AVID??? Which, I mean, if you've used Avid for even thirty minutes ever in your life you know that breaking the computer is like their favorite pastime. So now we're stuck with a software program that frequently requires a full reboot (and PRAM clear) to resolve issues in, coupled with a bug that prevents the system from properly fucking rebooting after you shut it down or restart. Yay. It...

Are you working on the newest, "top of the line," "best," Avid? Do you have multigroups? Are your multigroups completely fucking broken such that you can't select which camera is active in your quad or nine splits, and if you just cut the whole damn thing into your sequence, matching back into it actually takes you to a subgroup rather than the main group? If so, the problem isn't you. It's motherfucking Avid. More specifically, Avid is crawling its way into the future of tapeless workflow and vast arrays of digital codecs in exactly the same way that a two year old might cling to every available surface in order to avoid being unceremoniously deposited into a crib. Seriously, Avid, why are you fighting the future? Why do you hate progress? Why can't you make LUTs work in any sort of reasonable way? Wait... LUTs? Color Look Up Tables? Why the fuck are those even being mentioned in a rant about how bad Avid is at future proofing their product? W...