There seems to be a bug in Avid when it comes to exporting QuickTimes that causes the application to randomly crash. I’ve see this a lot when exporting all kinds of QuickTimes, Same as Source, h.264, etc. At some point during the export, the progress bar will stop advancing and the spinning black and white cursor will freeze. (Sometimes the cursor is a ⌘ that stops blinking.) That’s when you know you have a problem.
Soon the frozen cursor will change to the usual “spinning multi- color beach ball of death” and you have to Force Quit and relaunch Avid.
What makes this worse is that it usually happens after the progress bar gets to 100%, after it spent all that time exporting. And the QuickTime file you we exporting won’t be playable. Now you have to Force Quit and re- start the export process, under the threat that it may freeze again. A maddening situation to find yourself in at 10pm on a Friday night when trying to do an output.
Now, this doesn’t happen EVERY time you export a QuickTime, only some of the time. Maybe slightly less than half of the time. But it’s enough that it’s not worth risking an hour export, only to have it crash when it gets to the end.
And one interesting caveat to this, I have seen it actually come back to life. Sometimes, after about 45 minutes of hanging at 100% complete, the ““spinning multi- color beach ball of death” will go away and Avid will come back to life and the QuickTime file will be playable. But other times I’ve left it spinning over night, only to come back in the morning and it’s still spinning. either way, waiting 45 minutes after an already 45 minute render isn’t really an option.
The solution to this is to simply export a QuickTime reference and do the heavy encoding in another application, such as Compressor or MPEG Streamclip. This takes only a few minutes to export and frees up your Avid so you can do other tasks while your encoding, and I don’t think I’ve ever had it crash on a reference export.
But the point is not that there is a way around it, the point is that it is a bug and Avid needs to fix it. I’ve seen this bug with many different versions of Media Composer and QuickTime, and on Mac and PC.
A QuickTime reference will work most of the time, but there are situations where it would be more convenient to spend the time exporting a whole self contained Same as Source QuickTime. It’s an important part of Media Composer and we should be able to rely on it working.
Now, this doesn’t happen EVERY time you export a QuickTime, only some of the time. Maybe slightly less than half of the time. But it’s enough that it’s not worth risking an hour export, only to have it crash when it gets to the end.
And one interesting caveat to this, I have seen it actually come back to life. Sometimes, after about 45 minutes of hanging at 100% complete, the ““spinning multi- color beach ball of death” will go away and Avid will come back to life and the QuickTime file will be playable. But other times I’ve left it spinning over night, only to come back in the morning and it’s still spinning. either way, waiting 45 minutes after an already 45 minute render isn’t really an option.
The solution to this is to simply export a QuickTime reference and do the heavy encoding in another application, such as Compressor or MPEG Streamclip. This takes only a few minutes to export and frees up your Avid so you can do other tasks while your encoding, and I don’t think I’ve ever had it crash on a reference export.
But the point is not that there is a way around it, the point is that it is a bug and Avid needs to fix it. I’ve seen this bug with many different versions of Media Composer and QuickTime, and on Mac and PC.
A QuickTime reference will work most of the time, but there are situations where it would be more convenient to spend the time exporting a whole self contained Same as Source QuickTime. It’s an important part of Media Composer and we should be able to rely on it working.
Yes please - but as someone who's used Avid on and off for almost 20 years, I can tell you that the main reason Avid's competitors even got heir foot in the door was b/c of Avid's chronic, arrogant dismissal of client problems and overall lack of support. I worked in features a long time, and we all hated the Avid company. Avid's great when it works, but when it doesn't, don't expect anyone at the company to give a rat's patootie.
ReplyDeleteC'mon, FCP! Get those big shows so we can bury Avid once and for all!
6 years and a lot of versions later... still struggling with the same problem :(
ReplyDelete