PT 12.1 Video Engine Problems

[gives]

Originally Posted by Ray JB

Hi Brandon

Yes I have Pete Gates Pref utility and have used that several times but to no avail.

Sometimes the message "The Avid Video Engine was unable to stop" comes up in a dialogue box.

Other times pix and sound playback locks up, and then playback will not occur until I take the picture track offline and then I'm greeted with the "Waiting for Video process to complete" again.

Sometimes I have had and issue, although rarely with video freezes.. I used the latest iDEfrag and compact algorithm which does not take long AFTER I run disk warrior 5 to check directory repair issues. iDefrag is a great product, cheap, and always fixes a video freeze problem on the screeen when I have had it. https://coriolis-systems.com/iDefrag/
I works scoring to picture, so my rig has to be right. Not really seeing much of this now that I am running thunderbolt drives and disk caching. G

[Ray JB]

Originally Posted by cananball

Still working on 10.3.9 here, so this is a serious question.

If you've upgraded to 12 does that mean you have a support plan in place? Can you call avid and work this out? Maybe next year when everybody is on a support plan and they get all of these support calls for the same problems over and over they will be inclined to actually fix stuff.

Good point and as I'm in New Zealand I just phoned the Asia Pacific AVID support as per the AVID website. I'm on hold. It's 12.25PM now.

[ggegan]

The two main problems that I have with the video engine are that maybe once out of every 50 times I hit play it locks up way out of sync, but if I stop and play again it is back in sync, so I can live with it. It would be worse if it were only a frame or two, because I might not realize it is out of sync and adjust things erroneously, but it seems to usually be so out of sync that it's obvious (I hope so anyway). The other problem is when I get timeouts connecting to the video engine when launching a session. I think this has to do with external drive issues (I've got a lot of them). So far a system reboot sorts it out, but I have heard of situations where someone accidentally named a drive with an illegal character that caused the issue.

[Brandonx1]

I had lots of Ave issues until I switched to a pcie ssd. Now it feels like pt 10 speeds.

[mgoorevich]

Originally Posted by Brandonx1

I had lots of Ave issues until I switched to a pcie ssd. Now it feels like pt 10 speeds.

Fine. Could Avid garanty that if I switch to PCI SSD its AVE will work as it should? I wish that Avid would make some kind of statmens like this. But for now Avid assumes it works based on some percentage of successful users experience.

[SBP]

Originally Posted by Ray JB

Pics are playing off a Samsung 850 EVO SSD. Mac OS X 10.8.5, Mac Pro 5,1 32 GB Ram 8 core Westmere, Blackmagic Desktop Video 10.2.3.

Ray

Hi Ray -did you try dropping off the Blackmagic and testing without that hardware attached?

Cheers

Bruno

[Ray JB]

Interesting things have come up from troubleshooting this:-

Checking out the file just using Quicktime Pro 7 produced a juicy wee Quicktime crash that stated it crashed whilst accessing the AVID DNx codec. SO I didn't think it was just a Blackmagic problem.

I started wondering if there was some sort of file corruption or as an outside chance that the latest AVID DNx codec was to blame. I tried transcoding another DNx36 video file from the one I'd been using using compressor and got errors.

So perhaps the AVID video engine may have been hiccupping on a slightly corrupt DNx36 picture. Got the pix redelivered (compressor happy to use file, no errors on a transcode) and then ran them on my other machine (same specs except 12 core mac pro and genlocked BM extreme 3D) and noticed a glitch in picture that I could park on the frame in ProTools and see the picture tearing badly.Timecode point noted. Now today after the APP manager downloaded the AVID PE latest versions of codecs for some reason, the glitch cannot be found on the picture file at that point.

So there are obviously some things going on under the hood with the Codecs and AVE. I don't mind, it's working and I seem to be not having as many AVE errors. Does spring to mind that perhaps the AVE should pass the user on some more feedback as to what's made the error? Is there a way AVID that AVE can report a QT file corruption? Or even a codec error?

[garnoil]

Originally Posted by Ray JB

Interesting things have come up from troubleshooting this:-

Checking out the file just using Quicktime Pro 7 produced a juicy wee Quicktime crash that stated it crashed whilst accessing the AVID DNx codec. SO I didn't think it was just a Blackmagic problem.

I started wondering if there was some sort of file corruption or as an outside chance that the latest AVID DNx codec was to blame. I tried transcoding another DNx36 video file from the one I'd been using using compressor and got errors.

So perhaps the AVID video engine may have been hiccupping on a slightly corrupt DNx36 picture. Got the pix redelivered (compressor happy to use file, no errors on a transcode) and then ran them on my other machine (same specs except 12 core mac pro and genlocked BM extreme 3D) and noticed a glitch in picture that I could park on the frame in ProTools and see the picture tearing badly.Timecode point noted. Now today after the APP manager downloaded the AVID PE latest versions of codecs for some reason, the glitch cannot be found on the picture file at that point.

So there are obviously some things going on under the hood with the Codecs and AVE. I don't mind, it's working and I seem to be not having as many AVE errors. Does spring to mind that perhaps the AVE should pass the user on some more feedback as to what's made the error? Is there a way AVID that AVE can report a QT file corruption? Or even a codec error?

I have seen 'video errors' that the video editor tell me are NOT in her picture, but I am 99% sure this is not a Pro-Tools thing but rather a problem that happened at the export from the video editor. I have a feature that has frame freezes in 2 spots where even the printed timecode stops running for 8 to 10 frames. The video editor says her video is perfect and therefore my video (which is an output copy of hers) should also be perfect. I played the movie in other apps and they all have the video freeze so in this case it is a video output problem and not a Pro-Tools issue. As far as codec, my system works the same with DnX or Pro-Res, so to minimize size (about 20 gigs for a 90 minute feature) I use Pro-Res Proxy during post ans change to full Pro-Res during final mix

[mgoorevich]

I have same issues even from the final exports (prior DCP) from the FilmLight colour grading systems. It happens also with the ProRes Proxy format.

[MusoPro]

Same thing here. I have to force quit PT and start over.