Re: Avid says No to NAB 2008

Well as an Avid licensee, once rabid supporter and now disgruntled user, I can only say this: I don't care whether Avid attends NAB, does road shows, or sells out of the back of panel vans with the guys who do velvet paintings of Elvis. All I care about is whether their products actually WORK!

When you lose a whole day and a half of editing because their P2 consolidation workflow is precisely 180 degrees out of phase with what you would and should expect to do, then your software has problems. Until Avid fixes some of its software issues (I mean real engineered fixes and not half-a$$ed workarounds that users have to discover for themselves!), Avid should forget marketing and concentrate on making their products at least as bug-free as Premiere Pro 2.0!

The P2 problem is a real doozie! If you consolidate linking the master clips to the media on the target drive and try to consolidate from other P2 cards in the same bin later (as was the situation I recently encountered), the first set of consolidated master clips loses their links to the media on the target drive and returns to pointing at the P2 card reader!!!

When that happens, any previously consolidated media suddenly appears "offline" even though the media still exists on the target drive!

When I had a project that had 9 x 8gb P2 cards, plus media on a 60gb P2 storage drive, consolidating a second set of cards would cause all the media from the storage drive and previous cards to go offline!

It wasn't until halfway through a second day of editing that I finally got an answer from broadcast support: don't link master clips to media on the target drive!

OK, so if that workflow doesn't work, why the hell is it not only an option, but the most logical of the two options provided for consolidating P2 media?!?!?

Want another Avid issue? Under General settings, selecting "NTSC has setup" causes the application to add setup (7.5% black) to incoming video. That's fine if you're bringing DV material in that possesses no setup. But when your Mojo is hooked up to a broadcast Sony SX deck with a TBC on the analog outputs that already adds setup, suddenly your video has 15% setup, not 7.5%!!!

I wrote Avid once and suggested that simply changing the wording on the setting from "NTSC has setup" to "NTSC needs setup" would go a lot farther in actually explaining what their software is doing when that option is selected! That suggestion was made at least two years ago, and as of this writing, nothing has been done to fix this!

How 'bout a Pan & Zoom plug-in that is such a memory hog, using it is likely to cause your Avid DNA device to stop working, forcing a shutdown of the entire program and reset of the Mojo or Adrenaline!!! I can run Combustion 4.0 rendering in the background and capture and edit with Avid in the foreground and not run into the kind of memory problems Avid has WITH ITS OWN PLUG-INS!!!

Avid is full of these kinds of traps and pitfalls that simply don't exist in other applications. If Avid is in trouble, it's because the marketing guys promise features and performance that the engineering guys can't deliver. And - until fairly recently - their customer support and service was abysmally bad, too.

Sorry for the rant. Didn't mean to hijack the thread, but I work with craptastic Avid Newscutters every day and am frequently left wondering how I'm actually going to get my work done. If my experience is any barometer for other people's experiences with Avid, then Avid should stay away from NAB and any other potential customer until they get their stuff together!

Just my $.02.