Splice Now

With every Avid I’ve ever used, problems grow as your project, bins and sequences become larger and more complex. Avid has never done a good job testing in this kind of environment.

My brand new Adrenaline system worked like a charm for the first month or so. That was a welcome change from the past. But now that I’m working with 20-minute reels and large bins I’m seeing new issues. For example:

• EDL manager won’t load a bin until you quit from MC. If you don’t quit MC first, you crash. Yes, you read that right. It’s a known bug — but it somehow doesn’t affect everybody. And it seems that nobody knows what causes it or how to deal with it except to quit MC when you want to make a list.
• Project funkiness. My assistant and I are sharing a project over Unity. The other day the assistant’s system started crashing during saves. Any saves — but only from our main project. Two days of attempted fixes later we narrowed down the problem to a gremlin — something to do with the name of the assistant’s machine. The solution was to create a new project. Not difficult, but it sure took a lot of juju to figure it out.
• Unable to copy multiple bins to Unity. Yes, you read that right, too. It turns out that with Mac clients, you can’t copy more than about fifty or sixty bins at a time from the client workstation to the server. If you try to do more you’ll run into a Mac “-36” error, and the copy will stop before it completes. Avid says that this is a known bug and the way around it is to copy your material to a closed folder. I haven’t tested this yet, but I’m a bit skeptical. Bottom line, if you want to restore from a local backup of your project, be prepared to copy it in batches of fifty bins at a time. Doing that and not missing anything can take some real concentration.
• Can’t make a list from FilmScribe with any templates except HTML. The solution is a new set of templates that Avid says they’ll distribute with the next point release (after 2.7.3). Your supplier should be able to get this — but there has apparently been no announcement of its availability.
• Slow performance with large bins. Once your bins get bigger than about twelve or fifteen megabytes performance deteriorates. The system is slow to move icons around, slow to load sequences into monitors. It’s a subtle thing — a matter of feel — and probably more noticeable when you’re in frame view. But it can be very annoying, nonetheless.

These aren’t catastrophic problems, and we’ve found the workarounds. But they sure put a kink into our lives over the last couple of weeks.

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This entry was posted on October 7, 2007 at 8:05 am and is filed under Avid Technical Tips. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.