Anyone do any tests to see what is the highest resolution you can set your monitor before avid freaks out?

I tried wkumingo's work around and the text ends up a bit fuzzy on  MC 8.8.5

same here. found it down on res as well.

any news Avid?

I see MC 8.9 now has GUI scaleablity.

But I need to fully understand display limitations before I do an urgent system upgrade:

Knowledge Base and Readme documentation does not provide a clear answer.

I wish to use a new iMac i7 Retina display as 4K Full Screen.

My second display will be a 34" ultrawide  2560 x 1080 for Bins and Composer.

Would this work, or would I be limited to lower resolution on the Retina?

Advice would be appreciated.

Schmidtsk:

I see MC 8.9 now has GUI scaleablity.

I am also curious what the GUI scaleability actually means.  Although we can change the default bin font size, I don't see anywhere to increase the size of the most important stuff, like in the effects pallette.  Unless I'm missing something, it doesn't seem like anything signficant has changed at all in respect to the GUI in 8.9.

Things still do not seem right with this 8.9 release.

First, TURN OFF the Windows Compatablity setting in the MC shortcut (as explained in an earlier post) because the setting seems to persist through software updates. Mine did, anyway.

Second, the scaling is now supposed to be handled through Windows Display settings, but in Avid there is NO DIFFERENCE between some of the scaling percentages. Using a 15" UHD screen on a laptop, I took screenshots of the interface and compared every scaling percentage from 100% up to 250%.

• 100%, 125% - no difference in scaling (and impossibly tiny)
• 150%, 175%, 200%, 225% - no difference in scaling (but just about usable on a 15" although larger screens would probably be better)
• 250% - impossibly large! Avid launches with an error message that the minimum screen height must be 768 (remember those days anyone?)

So basically the scaling is either (a) impossibly tiny, (b) usable but with no fine tuning, or (c) impossibly large

Finally, App Manager is NOT FIXED. So you'll need to continue using the Windows Compatablity trick as before. HOWEVER, DON'T LAUNCH AVID THIS WAY. If you launch Media Composer through App Mgr then it inherits this Compatibilty setting and will again give you the fuzzy text and super tiny Smart Tool icons, etc.

I would appreciate if anyone else could confirm or deny any of these findings.

I just tried it here on an HD (not UHD) monitor, and everything scaled appropriately. I'll hook up my 4K and see what that does when I get a chance.

So I'm using a 2560x1440 monitor and I just tried the Windows scaling trick and setting the Windows scale to 125%.  This DOES scale the effects pallette (my main gripe), which is great.  However, the troubling part of this is that EVERYTHING in the GUI, including the source/record screens seem to scale without elegance. They're bigger, but blurier. Having a blurrier view in the source/record monitor is not ideal, and is probably a deal-breaker for me and most pros as far as this resolution "fix" goes. 

So, I think I'm going to have to just wait. Luckily, if my knowlege of numbers is correct, there is a big release on the way in version 9.  Either Avid will finally and permanantly fix the scaling issue in their next big full-number release, or they may as well never bother. At that point, if this isn't fixed, Avid needs to just sell off whatever assets they own to some other company that knows what to do with them. 

Atomike:

I just tried the Windows scaling trick

If Avid's addressed the scaling, you need to turn the Windows Compatability setting to OFF (unchecked). Leaving it on will make things blurry as that setting overrides the application's attempts to scale. This was necessary before 8.9, but if Avid's fixed things, it needs to be unchecked.

With the Compatability setting turned off, do you notice a difference between the scaling percentages? As I noted there were no differences in the interface from 150-225%. 

AND I just read the ReadMe more closely:

"This release provides support for HiRes or HiDPI monitors. We currently support setting your
monitor scaling to 200%."

In other words, scaling has been hacked in but not properly addressed as the only supported percentage is 200%.

wkumingo:

If Avid's addressed the scaling, you need to turn the Windows Compatability setting to OFF (unchecked). 

In other words, scaling has been hacked in but not properly addressed as the only supported percentage is 200%.

Ok, I understand better now.

However, after turning the Windows Compatibility to OFF, and then changing scaling to 200%, the MC UI still doesn't work well because:

- Source/Record window is very blurry.  I don't think anyone would use Media Composer this way. Seeing what you're editing is more important than Avid Management seems to think.

- The rest of the interface is clownishly large. 

It seems they tried to make UHD screens at least workable, and yet really didn't change anything.  A swing and a miss. 

If this type of functionality isn't a priority for Avid, then Media Composer is not a priority for Avid.  Unless there's something in 8.9 with the UI that we're all missing, this situation is a truly epic embarrassment. 

To go along with the W10 Anniversary edition scaling feature, applications need to be modified to call a couple of different functions that were added to the Windows API. These allow the app. to control the scaling of the windows they create individually, and they look a whole lot better than using the display settings scaling feature. But this creates it's own problems as these functions do not exist in Windows 8 or earlier (and I think at least 1 of them does not exist in versions before W10 anniversary). And while there are work-arounds for this kind of problem, it adds complexity to the code and doesn't solve the problem of scaling on older versions of Windows.

I'm not saying that UI scaling is perfect. But I do honestly believe that Avid shouldn't be holding back their development (or wasting resources) to accomodate older versions of Windows. Windows 10 has been out for two years now, and it is a very good OS.

BobbyMurcerFan:

Avid shouldn't be holding back their development (or wasting resources) to accomodate older versions of Windows. Windows 10 has been out for two years now, and it is a very good OS.

^^ THIS ^^  1000 times over  ^^ THIS ^^

Windows 7 is eight years old. Microsoft ended support in 2015, so should Avid.

Windows 8 is five years old, and is effectively EOL too.

Windows 10 is already just over two years old, Anniversary Update is 1 year old, and the Insider Preview program has made upcoming features accessible well in advance of the public release schedule.

"But, programming is really hard!" is not such a good excuse.

Fortuately checking the facts from Microsoft is not difficult.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/13853/windows-lifecycle-fact-sheet

Meanwhile, back on topic, Avid's scaling still does not work as expected and therefore should be removed from the feature list or rephrased to say "LIMITED support for hi res monitors." At the moment it's rather misleading.