Story Time

28 Bugs Later

Written by Antony Blanshard

If you’re reading this, hopefully I can spare you a few headaches by sharing what my team and I had to learn the hard way. When I joined a previous job on a HETV show, it didn’t take long before I realised just how many problems can creep into a workflow. The show was being edited on Avid 2023.12.4, and those bugs were the first to show themselves, but the issues we had to wrestle with weren’t just down to that version of Avid. From dailies through to turnovers, we ran into challenges that slowed everything down and forced us to get creative. What follows is the story of what we faced and the fixes that somehow got us through.

I came onto the job later than the rest of the team, stepping in as the Block 2 Second Assistant. Block 1 had just finished their dailies, the editors were already cutting away, and I thought I was joining a setup that was running fairly smoothly. But as soon as syncing for Block 2 began, the 2023 bugs started to reveal themselves, and it quickly became obvious that things were not going to be straightforward.

One of the first nightmares we ran into was the ghost lock. Working with people remotely has its challenges, and one of the hardest is not always knowing what the other person is doing, unlike being in the same room where there is usually a constant flow of communication. This bug just made that distance harder. My First Assistant was on their Salon Sync box at home, I was in the office, and Avid refused to show the red lock that should make it clear when someone’s already in a bin. On both our machines it looked open, so we were both working away in the same “unlocked” bin without realising it. Then the second I tried to close it, Avid hit me with, “Warning: Bin is locked and can’t be saved, but you may save a copy” This message should only appear if the bin had actually been locked. At that point, I felt like Avid was gaslighting me, and I honestly wondered if I was going mad.

As if that wasn’t enough, next came the grouping issues. Audio from both cameras appeared in the group, but only one video track was included. This affected almost every group we worked on and meant manually editing each one to add the missing video track. Tedious does not begin to cover it, and it was easily one of the more frustrating bugs we encountered. And, of course, there were the crashes. Avid has always had a reputation for throwing tantrums, but the 2023 version took the crown. Sometimes even the simplest press of the spacebar would make Avid throw its toys out of the pram.

Block 1 had sailed through dailies unscathed, but only because the Second Assistant was working from home on a Windows machine. Avid 2023 is a nightmare for Mac users because classic Avid was built for Intel and had to be completely rebuilt from scratch to run properly on Apple’s M-series. Running it on these chips relies on Rosetta, Apple’s translator. For simple apps, Rosetta does its job fine, but Avid is far from simple. It crashes if you look at it funny, refuses to follow instructions, and makes you seriously question whether the computer is secretly plotting against you and that is just Avid on a good day. On Macs, Avid 2023 reacts like a teenager would if injected with twice as many hormones, turning every small hiccup into a full-on meltdown. Meanwhile, the Windows users carried on without any problems, running the same well-tested software while we wrestled with ours.

With all the chaos Avid 2023 was throwing at us, we naturally assumed the next problem was just another one of its outbursts. But not this time. This one wasn’t tied to 2023 at all. In fact, it’s not even a well-known bug, so you’ll want to take notes. It can crop up in any version after 2018 and is linked to the Zaxcom Deva series audio recorders. Our sound team was using a Zaxcom Deva 24, and it triggered a bug you don’t even notice until you try exporting an Embedded or Copy All Media AAF, resulting in the source timecode in the AAF not matching what’s on your original timeline.

After endless emails and test turnovers with our post-sound team and far too many forum deep dives, we finally found someone else hitting the same bug on Avid 2020.6.0. Their sound team in Pro Tools noticed that while the audio itself was in sync, the source timecode didn’t match the original file, meaning that selecting a different channel of the same multitrack recording could jump to the wrong timecode. This bug didn’t exist in 2018 Avid, so their workaround was to export AAFs from that older version. Avid weighed in, saying:
“It seems there is some kind of metadata issue with the files created in this multitrack, Zaxcom Deva5 which makes the AFF create this problem. Due to the Apple policy with Quicktime (https://www.idownloadblog.com/2020/06/17/macos-catalina-video-formats-support-issues/). Engineering has rebuilt some code affecting the import option. I recommend you link and consolidate because you have the best control of the media. Due to the quicktime policy, some code in the import tool was rewritten in Media Composer 2020. The import tool has many bugs which are covered by the link and transcode/consolidate.”

Downgrading to 2018 wasn’t an option, so we had to get creative. We set up a fresh project just for relinking, consolidated all the sound rolls onto a new Nexis partition, and took the timeline completely offline by unmounting the other partitions. With all the originally imported sound safely offline, we relinked the timeline to the newly consolidated files and carefully remounted everything once that was done. Finally, after what felt like a minor miracle and a quick prayer to the post gods, we exported an AAF that actually matched the source timecodes from the original timeline.

Lesson learned: always link and consolidate your sound to avoid a potential world of pain later. And believe me, the pain doesn’t stop there. If the editor used any audio channel beyond A1, those tracks could still show up as offline. Relinking depends on a few key pieces of metadata: Tape Name, Source File ID, and Timecode. A1 often clings to this info like a toddler with a security blanket, while the other stems can lose it during consolidation. When that happens, Avid can’t find a match, and those clips stay offline, forcing you to manually relink to A2 and above.

There were plenty of other challenges that required us to create workarounds, scripts, macros, sacrifice a chicken, offer the soul of our first-born child, and perform voodoo rituals, but they were not bug-related. I might save those for another post. For now, the main takeaway is simple: always link and consolidate your sound, and if you can then steer clear of Avid 2023!