Re: Is Avid Express Pro reliable enough?

"I am getting a pink stripe at the edge of blanking and picture (sometimes, but more than not) when I apply some AVX plugins. I had this in 4, 4.1, 4.11 and now 4.31. Is it Avid's fault or the plugin maker's? All I know is that the same plugins worked fine in Xpress DV 3.5..."

This is a well-documented issue that has been around since the release of Xpress Pro 4.0. It has to do with the fact that Xpress Pro with or without Mojo renders effects in full-frame NTSC (720 x 486) while anything DV is captured at 720 x 480. This creates a "gap" of six lines (four top and two bottom) that have to be filled with something. In some cases, the padding was done with black. Pink is "in" now on certain other effects.

The only workaround I know now is to manually crop the padded portions of the XPro frame where these lines occur.

This, however, is not a stability issue, but does require manual cropping of certain effects to keep these pink blanking lines out of the frame's viewable area on PIP and resize effects.

The infamous audio sync drift issue for systems without Mojo has been fixed in 4.3.1.

As far as XPro's reliability goes, I'm running it with Mojo to do a lot of paid freelance work, and find it to be very stable. Just make sure you're running at or as close to Avid certified specs as possible.

HTH.