Hello Everyone,

With our facilities 2yr Interplay Anniversary coming up in June I thought this would be a great time to discuss the software.  For all of us out there who lived through the adventures of the "Early Days of Interplay" it's time to share some ideas.

I would suggest picking a subject, perhaps Installation and Setup and start from there.  If there's another subject that you think would be a better starting point please suggest it.  Hopefully in the end we'll all gain some knowledge.

Thanks and let me know what you think,

Dennis

EDUCATION!

In my 20:20 hindsight, the facility I work for could have *doubled* the amount of end-user education we planned for in preparation for our upgrade from WG4 to Interplay. It's a complicated system and very different from the workflow that long-time Avid editors are accustomed to.

I agree,

The lack of education and a clear understanding of the differences between working with local storage and working in a shared environment had an enormous impact on our facility.   With both editorial and production personnel and Senior and Executive staff we could have done a better job in preparing our team for the transition.

Two of the examples are the use of Open Bin and the ability to work in a Multi Resolution workflow.  The use of Open Bin to locate clips or sequences from other projects caused problems within the Interplay Database.  Of course this something we’ve all done since our first Avid edit session but should never happened in the Interplay Environment.  The Interplay Window within the editing application should be used exclusively to access clips and sequences outside the current working project.

We also use Low Resolution Proxies in our workflow.  The inability of our editing staff to correctly navigate the Multi Res and Dynamic Relink functions caused us many problems.  Editors would batch digitize clips they thought were offline but they were not.  The High Res media had been deleted but the Low Res Proxies were online.  They would then batch digitize the clips again which would break all links to the High Res media on our storage silo.  Weeks later when we would attempt to restore a Low Res proxy sequence the metadata of the new clips no longer had any association with old clips on the silo and we could not restore the sequence.

I do believe facilities that work in Media Manager before coming to Interplay will have a distinct advantage.  The basic fundamentals are there and many of the things that are different will be those you wanted changed.

We bought ours a year ago. It hasn't worked correctly from day one. The tech problems have been so staggering that it is impossible to trust simple playback from a Media Composer's timeline... and Avid has been equally impossible to deal with. I've been a die-hard user of Avid products since the 1980's, but I'm not exaggerating when I say the higher-ups in my company are upstairs at this very moment in a meeting discussing the selling of every Avid-branded thing in our building and replacing them all with Final Cut Pro-based systems. All because of Interplay and Avid's lack of customer support for the product.

All fixed, and running beautifully - the way it was sold to us 13 months ago!

We needed to upgrade - not to the newest versions of software - but to a "golden environment" - a combination of versions that Avid claims has worked the best with each other.

Result: Unity 5.1.1, Interplay 1.2.3, Mesia Composer 2.8.3.

Sure there are newer versions out there but smooth operation is the priority!

repeat after me,  Do not break workgroup compatibility...  EVER.

Pixel Monkey:

 

All fixed, and running beautifully - the way it was sold to us 13 months ago!

We needed to upgrade - not to the newest versions of software - but to a "golden environment" - a combination of versions that Avid claims has worked the best with each other.

Result: Unity 5.1.1, Interplay 1.2.3, Mesia Composer 2.8.3.

Sure there are newer versions out there but smooth operation is the priority!

Yeah no kidding... but realize that the incompatibility was right out of the box and installed by Avid! Hats off to them though for realizing it and getting us back on track. (Big thanks to Tim Dermody from Tech Support.)