Session Corruption

[mushoopork]

Having a weird problem that pops up now and then, and is *always* a pain when it rears it's head.

Seemingly randomly, a session will corrupt - hard to pinpoint when, because as long as it's open it's fine. Closing and reopening it will hard crash to desktop, and the only fix seems to be going back in time in the auto-backups to find an uncorrupted session, often losing hours or days worth of work.

Sessions with this issue always crash at 'Restoring miscellaneous settings: Restoring track settings."

Crash handler does not appear.

Importing session data to a new session will bring up the tracks list, but crash when importing ANY track from that session.

Holding shift while opening to disable plugins will still crash at "Restoring miscellaneous settings."

Opening the session on a different system will still crash, rebooting the machine doesn't help either.

My system is a 2020 Intel iMac with 72GB RAM, running Pro Tools 2024.3 on Monterey 12.6.7. It's happened to some of my other editors, but I don't know their system specs offhand. Only other thing to note is these are large sessions (150-250MB session files - supersessions containing anywhere from 1 to 20 episodes of a TV series).

Anyone have any other ideas? Or some thoughts of what to avoid and hope we don't have this issue rear its head again? (Ideally we could identify what's causing this corruption and get it fixed in an upcoming PT version!)

Thanks!

[mushoopork]

Hey thanks for the response. My guess is that PT prefs/plugins doesn't have much to do with it, since the session won't open on any other system(s) either. Rebooting doesn't help so I doubt logging in/out of the user account would do much different from that either.

So far the 'best' lead I've had is that I sent the session to the guys over at AATranslator (had the thought that maybe I could export it out from that as an AAF and reimport!) who replied that there was some corruption in the file, and that an older version of PT (12.5 I think?) complained of bad region groups while attempting to open.

So my guess is that *something* (no idea what!) is crossing some wires in PT, and then saves that bad short-circuited data in the session. It works fine while the session is running, but when it tries to load the session from disk it encounters that bad chunk and dies. It's just impossible to tell WHAT is causing it because I'm not saving and reopening the session every time I do anything.

[Darryl Ramm]

These can be near impossible to track down but one thing that can cause corrupted sessions is plugins, which get to write stuff to the session file. If you've updated/changed installed plugins or started using new plugins in these sessions then you might want to be suspicious of those. But that's only really helpful if this keeps happening and you can try stuff.

[mushoopork]

The only track-instanced plugins in this session should be Avid built-in ones, and maybe two or three others (Lowender, Phase Plant, and MMorph), none of which I've updated recently -- and I'd expect if it was a plugin issue, I'd be able to import track data from a plugin-less track into another session. ANY track import (even a video track!) from one of the bad sessions will instantly crash to desktop.

Honestly I'd love it if I could whittle this problem down at all, but it's super slippery. Even removing literally all the AAX plugins from my AAX Plugins folder didn't improve anything!

[Darryl Ramm]

If a plugin has corrupted a session it may be corrupt in ways that Pro Tools won't work with it with or without that plugin installed. I'm not saying it is a plugin I'm just pointing out it's a possibility, and it's bloody hard for mere mortals to ever know what caused the issue.

[Rich Breen]

Originally Posted by mushoopork

Hey thanks for the response. My guess is that PT prefs/plugins doesn't have much to do with it, since the session won't open on any other system(s) either. ...

Yes, but the corruption happens on *this* machine, not the other systems. I'd do a clean reinstall and carefully examine plugins. I also wouldn't necessarily write off hardware: Does this always happen working off the same drive? If so, I'd try working to another drive. Unlikely, but possibly RAM related?

[mushoopork]

I suppose I was unclear (or just neglected to mention) this same corruption - or at least the same symptoms - have happened to other editors I work with as well, so it's not only coming from my machine/hardware/install that the corruption happens. I don't have their system specs offhand, though. Similarly sized sessions. Our best guess at the moment is that stray neutrinos are smacking our SSDs in just the wrong spot!

[albee1952]

Have you tried opening the session while holding the SHIFT key(which makes all plugins inactive)? If the session opens that way, then you know its a rogue plugin

[mushoopork]

Yes - I mentioned that holding the shift key when opening the session (and clearing out the PT plugins folder) has no effect in the original post.

[smurfyou]

Are you using shared storage or is each machine local?

Were all these problem sessions started from the same template? Do any of them date back to PT 12?

Have you opened a case with Avid yet so they can poke at the session file?