Avid Hates You

What the actual fuck, Avid. Why???  WHY!?!?  Why would you make it so that the button I press when I want CAPS to STAY THE FUCK ON disables itself every time I open the Title Tool Application? Jesus Christ, Avid. Jesus. Motherfucking. Christ. (Avid 8 only). UPDATE: As of Avid 8.5.6, there is an option to turn this "feature" off. Go to: Settings > General and then uncheck the box marked "Enable Caps-Lock Protection (clears and restores on focus change)." I wonder what other lovely "features" Avid has added lately without documenting them or including a means of changing them in the initial release? UGH.

Dealt with this years ago, but it's come up again for a friend on Avid 8.x.x so I figured I'd write it out.  This is so stupid.  When you AMA link clips, avid generates a pointer hash that tells the bin which clip file is being referenced.  Unfortunately, whatever algorithm generates this hash is totally stupid and frequently creates duplicate hashes.  The result is that clip AH010602A01.04 suddenly has a tape source of AH010602F03.  Fucking Avid. It doesn't matter if the clips are different lengths, have different TCs, or are even in the same format.  If you have AMA linked clips, you can have bad reference pointers.  The problem isn't super common (maybe 1 clip in every 50), but if you're working on a real show, it'll pop up daily.  Yes, before you ask, dear reader, this will happen with quick ingest XDCam stations since they AMA link to the MPEG reference files for copyover. So how do you prevent this nonsense? Well, you can't.  Not ...

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...