Avid Hates You

At my old office, we edited everything in 10:1m after a real-time capture because that codec is fucking good at its job. At my new office, we edit everything in MPEG-4 from the XDCam proxy files, and that codec blows hairy goat sphincter. In addition, because we deliver in HD, people keep wanting to work in an HD project.  I understand their belief that this matters, but they're wrong.  In fact, yellow/green mode in an SD project is every bit as good as yellow/green mode in an HD one as long as you're talking about multicam 9-split playback. Which I am. SO... If your producer or editor is having trouble with a group that's lagging during playback, losing audio sync, or otherwise doing that thing that Avid calls "functioning normally," the solution is often as simple as changing the format of their project from HD to SD.  That does an automatic downconvert on all playback footage, and stops stutter in its tracks.  Erm, starts stutter up again.  No.  ...

Well kids, I've "upgraded" to Avid 5.5 at my new office, and that means there's a whole host of new issues for me to bitch and moan about. Chief among them is this bullshit: Exception:  AUTO_COMP_NO_SYNC This is what happens when I try to multigroup by doing exactly the same fucking thing that I used to do in Avid 4.0.5.16.  Fucking Avid 5.5 is bullshit. I guess there are some minor differences here:  I'm working in a 1080/23.976P project.  Okay, so there's one minor difference.  Fucking Avid, of course it goddamn breaks. Let's start at the beginning (because it's a very good place to start) (and also because I like making Dad Jokes, apparently):  The group I'm making has a lot of pretty basic flaws.  First, it's eight hours long - that's actual media length, not the time spanned by that media.  Second, there's both XD Cam footage and imported GoPro clips.  Third, there's also iso audio.  Fourth, that iso audio is actua...

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...