Display Counter Jitter
 

Hi,
Only the Display Counter is jittery, I noticed the issue started on 2018.10

Happens on both of my systems:
Mac Pro 5,1 (2010) 12-Core Running Sierra
MBP 15" late 2013 Quad i7 . Running High Sierra
PT-- 2018.12 using both Ultimate and Reg PT



Thx!

Re: Display Counter Jitter
 

What do you mean "jittery"?

Re: Display Counter Jitter
 

try opening PT in low resolution mode. same happens over here when tons of waves are on screen- graphical issue. I bet the meters are kinda off too... or- roll back to 2018.7 ... I am on ultimate w a similar MacBook pro, stayed on 2018.7 bc of others reporting graphical lag as well. this was worse in older versions, then got better, then I guess got worse?

Re: Display Counter Jitter
 

Re: Display Counter Jitter
 

I posted a Link with Jitter. I've tried changing Display resolutions. This happens on my macbook pro and my 2010 Mac Pro. Both running 2019. This started on 2018.

There is an empty session...

THanks

Re: Display Counter Jitter
 

Looks really strange. Never had anything like that happen here since we went back to PTHD at 9HD. We had several macs over those years and none hqs displayed that symptoms. Sorry I cant help you here.

Re: Display Counter Jitter
 

Don't see that here either

Re: Display Counter Jitter
 

You've got the wrong font. Something you've installed (probably on both systems) has substituted a system font. It's noticeable because:

• Your pre-roll/post-roll numbers exceed the space of the area where it should fit and are cut off.
• The colon separator should be bottom aligned to the numbers with the right font. Yours are not
• The "2" is the wrong shape. The "1" also might be the wrong shape but it's harder to tell with the low resolution picture.
• The "length" is not aligned with the numbers above as it should be with the fixed width holders.

Something to compare to (2019.5); tried to make it as much as like yours for the first frame captured in the video.

https://i.imgur.com/If2vzAN.png

Re: Display Counter Jitter
 

BScout is right on. You somehow have a proportional width font in the counter display when it should be fixed width, and it’s just jumping around as the characters change width.

First try the wack-a-font-cache http://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=341609

If that does not solve it...

Have you installed any typography or design software or messed with fonts?

I would have to think how to check the exact font you should be seeing there, will need much more caffeine and time at my Mac, you may be able to just replace that. May be as simple as the fixed width font having been being deleted...

If for any other reason you were going to do a clean macOS reinstall (eg to get to Mojave) and reinstall Pro Tools etc. then that should fix it as well

Re: Display Counter Jitter
 

In case trashing the font cache did not work.. and I'd try trashing prefs in Pro Tools again, make sure you get everything.

---

So I did a little more playing around (I worked at Adobe, love typography)...

As far as I can tell the font used for the standard counter is just plain old Arial regular and for the large counter is just Arial Bold. Sensible choice by Avid for cross Mac/PC platform work. Pro Tools bundles custom fonts for musical scoring inside the Pro Tools app package, but apparently not for the counters.

While these counter fonts appear monospace/fixed width in Pro Tools, and there are monospaced/fixed width versions of Arial, those monospaced versions are not installed in Macs or Windows PCs by default. So that shoots down my idea this is a simple missing monospaced font. Pro Tools will manually position the proportional width fonts to make them look like a fixed width.

It might be possible that Pro Tools is not finding Arial and getting all upset. I can't guess what the font is in use in the video, it's pretty fuzzy, I'm not 100% sure it's not Arial. A high quality screen shot, not video, showing lots of different digit characters, might be intersting for curiosity reasons.

The Arial (Regular and Bold) font are stored in /Library/Fonts/Arial.ttf Do not try to mess with that file directly.

I would be very surprised if that file is missing.

You can open the mac font utility /Applications/Font Book.app", click on the top level "Arial"in the font list to select it and then in the on the top "Arial" font the font list tree and choose validate font. Actually while there shift-click on all the fonts to select them all and validate them all.

Again, I'm curious what that says.

Next thing I'd try is is use Font Book.app to reset the default system fonts.

In the Font Book.app top menu bar try File>Restore Standard Fonts...

You will get a serious seeming warning

"Restoring the standard system font configuration will remove any nonstandard fonts from the system font database. Proceed?"

click Proceed
Enter your password when prompted

(it will *not* remove other fonts used by standard applications).

---

reboot the mac, test.

If that is not it the next things to look at may be more painful that just trying a full clean macOS install.