I have been out of Avidland for almost 4 years but recently upgraded to Media Composer 3 because it was supposed to work with Leopard AND Mojo (classic).  It doesn't and Avid says "The Ball is in Apple's court" which basically means go jump off a cliff with your analog mojo pal.

I contacted the always helpful Edie Arbetter and she said to call tech support.  Tried to call but now you need a code.  I looked up my one free call code with the upgrade and was connected to "Peter" in Romania. He was a nice enough fellow but had NO CLUE WHAT WAS GOING ON!!!

I ACTUALLY HAD TO TELL HIM WHAT IT SAYS ON AVID'S WEBSITE!!!

This was the worst call to Avid in the 17 years I have had the pleasure of calling them.  When I realized he knew nothing, I asked that I get credit for the call and I do not loose my precious "1 free call"...he did not even understand that...he kept saying I can call again in 24 hours.  This really was ugly.  (FWIW...in the old days of waiting on hold for hours but  then getting a really smart person on the phone...this kind of stuff was an instant comp...this is not a support issue...this is a misrepresentation issue.

He then turned on the "BS" and told me he would send me an email in 5 minutes with another code for future use...and started to hang up...I said..would you like my email...he said yes.  I asked for his full name or a reference number and his hesitation said it all.  He gave me "Peter Taranu".  I knew this was over and we politely hung up.

Avid is pushing new lows.  Do others have this level of incompetence on the pay support plans too?

Is there a human in tewks who I can contact to get my coveted "1free call " credit back? and who will put a timeline or the truth on resolving the firewire issue...so this doesn't get more miserable???

Sorry for the rant but all the excitement of 3.0 is gone now.  I thought this was a "new" Avid?

Morgan

We only have support on Unity and DS Nitris.  When we call, we get Tewks, and the people who answer are people we've talked to for years, and they are extremely knowledgeable.  I had heard rumors of offshore support, but really didn't believe it.  Ten years ago, Avid tried to push support outside, with the Softwrench concept.  It fell apart so fast, it never really got set up.  The knowledge it takes to support Avid is not book-learning.  Or worse, not something a support rep can do by looking up the same info we can on the Knowledge base.  I get the economics of offshore support, but it simply doesn't work.  Even Dell had to pull their Business Support back inside.

As a sidenote, I did phone support in the Avid Burbank office for 4 years, taking almost 8,000.calls, from '95 - '99.  Ah yes, the good old days.

 Morgan:

I'm quite sure that if you contact Marianna, Avid's Customer Advocate and a frequent participant on this Forum, she will make sure your "1 free call" situation is resolved to your satisfaction. I would suggest you send her an email.

Yes, you will. I will contact marianna and we'll get this fixed right now. Outsourcing support is one of the biggest mistakes Avid has ever made. I've heard nothing but disaster stories. If that ever happens again, do not go forward with the call until the foreign "rep" escalates your call to Tewks.

Is there anything that we can help with here?

It is true that 3.0 does not work reliably with Leopard. It will launch and you can work but, with a DNA attached, you will get an error about a device on the 1394 bus. Restarting clears the problem but, for us, it was reoccurring 5 or 6 times a day.

Until Apple gets the problem fixed, you can run 3.01 on Tiger with your DNA.

Was there anything else?

thanks Blkdog,

This is certainly no issue with Apple's competing products, so what do you think the likelyhood of them doing anything for Avid is?  This is why I'm skeptical.

I guess I will need to uproot everything to get BACK to 10.4.11 with the 3.1 to try to get this to work on my MBP  I have an appt at the apple store tomorrow to see how to best back up my 56gig 10.5 then reformat to 2 partitions and install 10.4.11 on one for Avid then restore the other 10.5 partition, then try to get all my 3rd party apps over too.  Is there any easy way?

Could I make a 10.4.11 boot disk on a esata drive running on a expresscard34 esata card?

Is there any firmware upgrade for Mojo? (I think I last did this @march 04)

What if I used another (loaner) imac running 10.4.11 just to digitize with mojo, could I then edit on 10.5 without mojo...using the same media files or will they not play and/or the effects loose the realtime.  This is a mix of DV, BSP (y, r-y, b-y) and even 3/4 sp.???

I'm more concerned with quality than time so I actually considered bumping everything to DVD-R at the highest setting just to preserve the component path and then break out the streams to quicktime and trancode to avid...but this is another daunting workflow.

Any workarounds???...

thanks,

Morgan

Morgan Reese:

This is certainly no issue with Apple's competing products, so what do you think the likelyhood of them doing anything for Avid is?  This is why I'm skeptical.

It actually is. If you read Apple's boards, there are all sorts of FW problems related to this. It just so happens that Avid's packet delivery code revealed the bug in a different way.

Morgan Reese:

Could I make a 10.4.11 boot disk on a esata drive running on a expresscard34 esata card?

Yes. This is one method that has worked for us.

Morgan Reese:

What if I used another (loaner) imac running 10.4.11 just to digitize with mojo, could I then edit on 10.5 without mojo...using the same media files or will they not play and/or the effects loose the realtime.

Yep, that'll work too. The problem only happens with a Mojo connected. To tell you the truth, there are a few folks on these boards happily editing away on Leopard with a Mojo. They haven't seen the problem at all. You could get lucky.

BLKDOG:

Yes. This is one method that has worked for us.

which express34card worked?  Is it an esata or fw800?

Apparently only a few will allow a boot.

 thanks

I have a separate Drive inside my Mac Pro that I use for alternate OS versions. That way I can boot to Tiger or Leopard depending on the need. If I am testing a new build, I have a drive specifically for that.

 Morgan,

This is certainly not the norm with support I can assure you.  If it was I wouldnt be sane handling the calls and emails.  Every now and then a situation does arise and I know Thomas who runs the group likes to jump on it quickly to rectify.  Are you available for a chat with me today?

Send me your # and I will call you.... and issue you another SEC code and see what I can advise to resolve your issue with the system.  Once we get that out of the way, I can then get the necessary information to work with Thomas to resolve the situtation with the tech.

Only an email away so send me your contact information and I will call you.

Marianna

Thanks Marianna,

Avid has contacted me and given me all the real info they have at the moment.  The good news is apparently the Digidesign engineering people have resolved this issue with their use of Mojo & 10.5 so it should not be much longer for the Avid fix.  I can only wait a few more weeks before tearing everything up to backgrade...hope they get it working.

3 Avid people besides Marianna have contacted me about this...very good!

Morgan