Major issues with Nexis

[David McCarthy]

I'm having a hellish time trying to get PT to work with our Nexis Pro.
For over ten years we've done solid work with Mac Pro5,1s and incorporated the Nexis about five years ago without any problems. It was a terrific workflow.
Recently, we decided the time was right to upgrade the studios as we had pretty much reached end-of-life with hardware, OS and software.

We opted for the Mac Studio M1 Max with Sonnet expansion chassis for the HDX cards. Out of the box they would not play nicely with the Nexis. The Nexis system software was pretty old so I knew that would be an issue, but it also wouldn't talk to a newer Nexis that we have for video work.

For a while we worked locally which worked - mostly - but was inconvenient. I then repurposed a Synology NAS for studio connectivity and that has been working - mostly.

Now, I have updated the Nexis system and the Nexis Clients. I have updated the MacOS. I have updated Pro Tools. I checked that all components were compatible according to Avid documentation. Still no good.

The issues seem to be read/write ones. First thing I tried after confirming everything was running the appropriate software was a "Save Copy In", copying a project from the NAS to the Nexis. A few seconds in... 'bad address' error. I can't describe how depressing this was! This error cropped up frequently when we first upgraded, most noticeable when opening AAFs.

Next, I tried to move the Project folder from the NAS to the Nexis in the Finder. 150MB in... computer spontaneously shut down and rebooted. This happened twice and seems replicable.

Next, I moved a project from the NAS to the desktop and then to the Nexis. That worked. So is the two-way network traffic causing a problem?

Finally, I opened a project from the Nexis. So far, so good. Played OK. A couple of things I tried indicated that the Nexis workspace didn't have record permissions but I fixed that. Then I went to render a clip using Audiosuite and Pro Tools hung. I left it and went for a coffee. Came back. Still hung. Forced quit - restarted Mac - tried again. Same.

I haven't done much more as I have a lot of work to get on with so I'm back on the NAS. There are other non-Nexis issues like 'missing codec' errors when I've been playing a session with the same video file perfectly well for several days prior. But for now, if I can just sort this Nexis issue I'll be happy.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? It does feel like a networking thing. I've submitted a support case with Avid so will work through it with them but I know fellow-users often have genius ideas that might help.

Many thanks.

Mac Studio M1 Max
Sonnet Echo 1
Pro Tools HDX

PT Ultimate 2022.9
MacOS 12.5.1
Nexis Pro 22.5.0.109

1GB Network