New Bugs

Posted October 7, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid Technical Tips

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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Stop Competing with Yourself

Posted October 2, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Avid Wish List & Bugs

To restate the obvious: editing is being democratized. The market is getting shorter and wider — less money per sale, more sales, more and more power in the box, less need for specialized hardware.

Avid has to lead in this world, not the old world of big hardware and fewer, higher-priced sales. The question is not whether they have the expertise to aggressively innovate — they do. The question is whether they can pry themselves loose from their old business model to do it.

In some ways, they don’t have to invent anything. They could make a very good start by rolling together all the goodness that now resides in the diverse and still separate applications they’ve bought over the years.

Wouldn’t you like to have some of these capabilities?

  • Background saves (never again be interrupted by a save).
  • Background rendering.
  • 5.1 mixing in the main application.
  • The ability to generate a DVD directly out of the timeline.
  • Compatibility with AJA hardware.

Where do you get all that? Not from Final Cut — from Liquid, which is now an Avid product.

Or this:

  • DPX file editing and conforming, all the way up to 4K.
  • Sample-based editing.
  • Nested sequences.

You get all that, plus all kinds of terrific effects capabilities, in DS.

And aren’t you eager to benefit from some of the sound editing and mixing capabilities that reside in Pro Tools? (Details in this post.)

Bottom line — Avid has to show it can lead in the way it empowers creative people. It once did that in spades — and it beat every competitor. It can do it again. But it has to take off the gloves and change the way it does business. Anything less than that is a formula for slow death.

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Academic Pricing

Posted September 30, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Education, Laptop Editing

In what appears to be a pretty dramatic shift in policy, Avid is now selling Media Composer to students and teachers for — just $300. You don’t seem to need an academic P.O. anymore — just valid ID. I saw a couple of web sites that have it, including this one: Academic Superstore.

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Comments: 14 Comments

How a Little Bug Gets Created and Killed

Posted September 28, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid Wish List & Bugs

It used to be that if you imported a sound file into Media Composer via drag and drop from the desktop, you got a clip with the same name as the file — but the name was truncated to 27 characters. Most of the time that didn’t matter. But with sound effects it could cause problems because sound effects libraries often have long, descriptive filenames.

Unlike a filename, there isn’t any intrinsic reason for a clipname to be shortened, so the MC was recently changed to take those filenames and turn them into clipnames intact.

And therein lies a tale.

Early last Friday I imported such a clip, and then blithely worked all day in the same bin without problems.

Monday morning I booted up to discover that the bin wouldn’t open. The error message included this text:

Exception: DOMAIN_COPYOUT_FAILED
Exception: STRM_BUF_SMALL, buflen: 256

The attic only took me backwards a few hours — none of those bins would open either. I had a backup from Thursday which worked — but that meant losing a whole day’s work. Unacceptable.

Some internet research and a few frantic calls to friends turned up the idea that the bin might open in a PC system — and, indeed, our rental house was able to open it in a Nitris. We then began the laborious process of trying to figure out which sequence within the bin was the problem. Many hours of trial and error, passing bins back and forth over the net, produced an unambiguous result — it was that sound effects clip.

Avid tech support thought the problem might be with the clipname and suggested that I keep all clipnames to 27 characters. I was skeptical since I’ve had dozens and dozens of clips with names longer than that on every show I’ve ever done. Nevertheless, I did another hour or so of experimentation and learned the following:

Now that the MC doesn’t truncate your clipnames on import, you can indeed screw yourself up pretty badly using names the MC doesn’t like. There are three conditions:

  1. Files that won’t import. In this case the MC produces a generic error message telling you that the file couldn’t be imported. Just renaming the file that you’re trying to import, using a short name with pure alphanumeric characters (no punctuation), will cure this one, but you have to know the secret.
  2. Files that cause the MC to hang on import. These have clipnames with characters that don’t produce an error message — they just hang the machine.
  3. Files with clipnames that are too long. Here’s the gotcha that we faced this week. If your source file’s name is longer than 216 characters then the MC will import it just fine. And you will be able to use it without problems. But once you close any bin that contains that file, you won’t be able to open it again — on a Mac.

The good news is that I’ve reported all this to Tewksbury and a fix is in the works. The bad news is that it represents the kind of problem Avid faces when improving the MC. The system has grown so complex that even a simple change like this can produce unexpected side effects — and in this case, pretty disastrous ones.

Meanwhile, if you import files via drag and drop, double check the filenames before you bring them in. No punctuation except a single period between the name and file type, and make sure the filename is less than 216 characters long.

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Too Suite?

Posted September 25, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Adobe Premiere, Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Final Cut, User Interface

Adobe and Apple are pushing suites of applications in their quest to dominate retail post production. You make a single purchase and get a studio in a box, a studio that’s supposed to, by itself, serve the needs a diverse group of editors. That’s the competitive environment that Avid finds itself in, and it looks like there’s no going back to the old world of high prices and neatly defined market segments. However, just how these suites should function is still up for grabs.

Working with Final Cut, you end up creating separate projects in each application, and this can be problematic. Getting data between them is quirky and inconsistent. Dealing with an underlying Final Cut sequence that keeps changing isn’t easy. Hooks to make it easy to conform your work outside the suite don’t necessarily work. And not all the applications are consistent in terms of look and feel.

It’s arguably easier for software engineers to add functionality via the suite, but it’s not at all clear that we editors want so many separate applications. Take a look at Microsoft Office. Yes, they’ve kept spreadsheet and word processing separate. But Word now includes all kinds of desktop publishing features, and HTML and graphics are included via modules. Double click on an image and your toolset changes — but you stay inside Word.

One of the key questions application designers now face is how much functionality to put in the main ap and how much goes into the suite. Personally, I skew toward putting more power in the central program where I can get at it easily. I don’t particularly want to learn Pro Tools to do temp mixes — I want more power in Media Composer. But when the time comes to do full-bore final mixing, I sure want to know that everything I do is going to move over to the big sound ap, easily, transparently and intact.

There’s no magic to this — some things are better done in the editing application and some are better done via the suite. Figuring out which is which might turn out to be a big part of what separates the winners from the losers in the next round of post production competition.

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Toward a Unified Product Line

Posted September 24, 2007 by Steve
Categories: Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, User Interface

In recent years, Avid has added many new companies to its roster, creating an overabundance of editing applications. What does the Avid brand represent? Professional post-production, hopefully. But in terms of a point of view about editing tools, I’m just not sure.

Depending on how you divide them up, the company offers half a dozen lines of picture editing software, including Media Composer, Newscutter, Xpress, DS, the Liquid line and Pinnacle Studio. And within families there are typically several variants that have to be supported and tested. The total number of discrete pieces of software is up around 15, depending on how you count. That makes no sense to any kind of buyer, and it’s draining resources from a company that can ill afford inefficiency.

Avid needs roughly four products: something for consumers, something for high school kids and wedding videographers, something for pros, and a full-bore finishing application.

More or less like this:

  • Pinnacle Studio (competing with iMovie)
  • Xpress Pro lite (competing with Final Cut Express)
  • Media Composer (with Newscutter and Liquid functionality rolled in)
  • Nitris or DS (a full-bore finishing application)

But I don’t mean to imply that these applications, in their current incarnations, fit together effectively. To varying degrees, they all need to be rewritten in order to provide a single, unified user experience and full media and project compatibility. Learning one would help you understand the others. If you start your project on one system, it should move with you up the price ladder.

With a lineup like that customers would have an easy time figuring out which application they need, and Avid would have a fighting chance of defining itself both internally and to the market. They’d stop wasting resources competing with themselves, and they’d be able to combine all the great engineering talent within the company and focus it. In short, they’d be able to lead.

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