Avid Hates You

Dear Avid, Thank you for taking the time to read this letter.  I know that you're very busy fucking up someone else's job, career, and possibly life, and so I truly appreciate you stepping away from whatever catastrophe of television horror you were in the process of creating to listen to my humble question. Why doesn't autosequencing work? If timecode is a thing, and sorting by timecode is a thing, then why the fuck, when I sort my clips by goddamn timecode, do you sometimes just give me an autosequence of them that is fifteen fucking days long?!?  And then, when your shitty little single-processor-using compu-brain goes and makes a fifteen day long autosequence for no fucking reason, why do you even bother to alert me that the playlength toggle needs to be turned on?  I mean, if you know it needs to be turned on, why don't you just go ahead and turn the damn thing on already?? But I digress. They say that the definition of insanity is repeating the same acti...

Let's engage in some hypothetical discourse: Hypothetically, you are the creator of a suite of editing software. Hypothetically, you want this to be the  go-to editing suite for professionals. Hypothetically, you understand that once businesses design their workflow, they want to plug that workflow into every single one of their projects. Any guesses what I'm talking about, here, Avid?  None?  I'm talking about this bullshit : Seriously, how fucking hard is it to add project templates  to this behemoth of a program?  If my goddamn Cannon Printer Software can store templates, how incredibly hard would it be for you to do it?  And I'm not talking about anything complicated here.  I'm just talking about making and naming a bunch of folders so as to save me from spending fucking days fixing some asshole's half-handed attempt at organization just so that I can actually do some goddamn work. Do you know what I do?  I have a folder saved...

Well, if you like pictures (and who doesn't?) you're going to love the issue du jour.  Near as I can tell, this error is really a non-issue, but what the hell, let's check out how horribly Avid handles it! You know how it goes:  You're just sitting at your desk after a long day and you're getting ready to head home.  You close all of your bins (because you're a goddamn responsible adult) and you quit out of the project.  When this bullshit happens: What the fuck, Avid?  Why do you crash when quitting so much?  Okay, let's click "continue."  Oh, sweet, some more debugger code: Ugh.  Whatever.  Avid's assertions be failin' left and right, yo.  Okay, continue again...  Oh fuckballs.  It's the first error again.  And so forth.  Forever.  Eventually you'll either force quit Avid (which is probably the thing I should have done), or you'll notice that there's a brief period of time between each debugger me...

Clicking OK from this super helpful error message gives you the twice as helpful: Literally twice as helpful.  Hooray. The good news is that this is an easy fix to a dumb problem.  The problem is that your computer has dropped it's connection to the remote media drive during media creation (in this case, mine was named "TN02_CASTING_MEDIA").  My computer is named "zEDIT01_104B" which is why the media folder in the error message bears that name as well.  The title of this post has been made more generic so you can better understand where the files that you need to delete are living. The fix to this problem is to quit avid (if it doesn't just crash out on you), dismount and re-mount your drives, delete the creating folder in the directory specified in the error message, and then start creating the media again. So yeah, the error message is wrong, but the path is correct, so in the scope of Avid errors, this is - as stated - actually super helpful....

This message appears on launch, alongside an old favorite: Ahh yes, the good old bus thread error.  Well fuck me sideways. Now let's travel back in time and try to find out what caused this nonsense:  I came in to the office today to hear the four words everyone in tech fields loves to hear:  The power went out. Awesome. After booting ye olde Avid, I found that every time it got to the "initializing media manager" stage, it would crash out with the above two clickyboxes.  Of course, you can't click either one of them, so you have to manually force quit out of the crash.  Hilarious. What does this mean?  Well, I tried a bunch of stuff.  I deleted site settings.  Nope.  I deleted the databases on my mounted drives.  Nope.  I deleted the database on my local drive.  Nope.  I deleted the media  on my local drive.  Nope.  I cleared the shared attic, deleted shared users, reset the computer, reset the...

This one is just asinine.  For no reason that I can think of, Avid simply won't draw audio data (waveform or energy plot) on Audio Track 24.  Tracks 1 through 23 work perfectly well, but track 24 is total bullshit. Anyway, simple workaround:  Use a different audio track. Protip:  You can add a specific audio track by hitting Command + Option + U (and a specific video track with Command + Option + Y).  Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.  The other half of the battle is killing people.

This is a great error.  It's great for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, the problem isn't that "Avid_MediaFiles' can't be found.  That's the folder on your media drive named "Avid Media Files" and it's pretty goddamn easily found by both you and Avid.  No, the real problem is that a file *inside* Avid Media Files can't be found.  Which file?  Good question.  A database file.  What this error message should really say is: File 'msmFMID.pmr' not found. OR File 'msmMMOB.mdb' not found. Or the error message could be actually helpful and say: The File 'msmFMID.pmr' which should be in path 'MediaDriveA/Avid Media Files/MXF/Ingest1' cannot be found. You know, something actually fucking helpful.  But no.  No, this message basically just says that Avid lost something, it isn't sure what, and it sure as shit isn't going to let you save any bins until you fix the problem.  Also, opening the Med...