I was home nerding out about shooting and editing with a family member at my mom's birthday party. It turned out we both use Avid MC on our shows. He works for a cable network news program and I edit a syndicated cable show.
I unloaded all the troubles I've had with Avid lately and really almost since I switched to it two years ago. (Granted some of those problems were solved by learning curves and reluctantly accepting that all footage must be transcoded but now I'm just dealing with bugs). These are the headaches I'm dealing with in the the current point releases of Avid MC:
8.5.3 - After a few days a Memory Leak opens up and it makes exports stall out and the only way to get the timeline to export out is to reinstall 8.4.5
8.4.5 - After about a week of usage the timeline bogs down eventually slows to a crawl so every move of the timebar stalls the system for 5 to 15 seconds. Only way to fix is to install 8.5.3 and work on the project till the memory leak rears it's ugly head then reinstall 8.4.5 to export.
8.2.8 (or whatever is the latest) - Error on install refuses to complete installation so haven't been able to use it.
I told him that I'm thinking of moving my show back to premiere because Avid is next to unusable after a few days of editing. And I'm spending almost half my time tending to Avid problems instead of editing.
He was surprised to hear I was having so much trouble. And I said, "you don't have these kinds of problems on your Avid edit bays?" He said occassionally but not to the extent I was describing. And I said how long have your bays been up and running their copy of Avid?
And he said their IT department does a complete wipe and reinstall of the OS, Avid and all plugins every night on all 8 bays. And I was like wait what?!
Is this really how Avid is supposed to work that it needs to be reinstalled every night? And not just Avid but the entire OS. In my experience that would probably fix my problems but I'm a two man band and don't have a tech team to do this nor do I want to spend the extra 90 minutes a day doing it when I've already added so much time to my workflow with transcodes and mixdowns being added which I didn't need when I was on premiere.
Has Avid code grown so unstable that's it's become this late game Jenga statue that needs all the help it can get to stand up straight these days? It feels that way to me.
And I really like Avid, I think you have such great people giving the best customer support available for any editing software out there right now. That's why I've hung in so long. But after hearing that reinstalling the entire os and all programs nightly is how corporate news keeps their avid bays stable, I've decided to start experimenting with moving my show back to premiere. Because I just don't have the time or inclination to add one more time hungry step to my workflow just to stay on Avid.
How many people work for companies who's policy it is to do this nightly Avid bay wipe? This was a subdivision of NBC that my family member worked for.
The one ray of light I'm hanging on to is that after talking to someone that had talked to some Avid engineers, they said that the engineers believe Avid 8.6 is going to be a premiere killer. I don't know what it means or what features or bug fixes are in the pipeline but I guess the engineers really feel like they have something exciting in store for us with 8.6.
I hope so I was ecstatic after using 8.5 for a few days but seemed like there were performance regressions in the following point releases and that the memory cache didn't work as well in the following point releases and then the memory leak became an issue. I was expecting new point releases by the time I got back from my trip yesterday since they seem a bit overdue especially when the memory leak in 8.5 seems to be pretty widespread. But got home last night, checked the forums 1st thing and still no new point releases. And got the notice today that the new premiere releases are out. So downloading those now. Believe me I'm no adobe fan boy. Their customer support was the worst when I used it and premiere had just as many bugs at the time. But right now I'd rather have some new problems than keep grinding away dealing with the current Avid point release problems.