Hi guys.

A problem has popped up that I have difficulty with finding what causes it.

I have 8 avids on my unity 5.1.1 . 4 of them are on windows XP 32 MC 2.7. these 4 are working on the same project. 3 of them are connected with ethernet 1 is connected with fiber.

Avid1 is the edit that is loading all the material and is connected with ethernet. As soon as this avid starts capturing avid11, that is the one connected with fiber, can't open. It crashes with the error:

Sharing violation M:\OMFI MEDIAFILES\AVID1\CREATING\CREATING0. The 2 other ethernet clients, Avid 9 and 10 have no problem. As soon as Avid1 stops capturing all is fine. Also avid11 starts scanning its workspace to rebuild its database files as if Avid1 has changed something in its M:\OMFI Media files\avid11 folder. I have deleted the creating folder but that does not help. Capturing to another workspace with Avid1 makes no difference except that the drive letter changes in the error message on Avid11.

I'm under the impression that it has to do with the names of both avids but before I start experimenting I want to ask if anyone has a clue what is causing this? And as a solution will a name change of Avid1 in Avid01 fix this?

Avid 11 and Avid 1 seem to actually have the same name-   Change Avid 11's name to Fred, and see if your issue goes away.

JDS

Thx doc.

Just had a FLASH... I don't have macs connected to my unity but know about the character problems with user name etc... Could it be that spaces are also not allowed in the user names even if the whole system is on the pc platform????

My user names are avid<space>1 ....avid<space>11....

Dear Jeff,

What I'm going to write now could be a lot of rubbish but I've come up with a theory.

In workspaces the folder names are copies of computer names. A computer name has to be unique in any network. The rights to those folders are based on user name. Avid software is non-Unicode . (That is what causes the problems with apple OS-X and non English characters in bins.) For unity it seems that avid has tried something to ignore the space in the user name. But as a side effect it only reads the next character after the space. That would leave us with 3 folders, Avid1, Avid10 and Avid11 in each workspace but their "user" would all be Avid<space>1. In windows nothing goes wrong. But what if the avid application bases which folders to access on these folders user rights and not the folder name?

Wouldn't that explain this behavior???   

Ok its now 3 o'clock in the morning local time. I've removed all the spaces from all user names and replaced them with a "0". So on Avid1 the editor logs in as Avid01 and on Avid11 the editor logs in as Avid011.

Although this did not solve the error when opening MC on Avid11, it seems to have fixed the random scanning. Tomorrow I will be sure to report more.

Today I had a talk with my ACSR at my reseller... and guess what. He has seen this problem before at another unity user and gave all avid computers names of Greek islands. He told me that he believes avid and unity have a problem if most characters are identical in the computer names on the network. He told me that changing the names solved the problem... just like you also said Jeff.

If it is true it would at least be nice if avid gave guidelines on how to organize your computer names. But a BUG like this needs fixing.

I think your onto something there, I always put the number in computer names and user names first and this seems to work well, for example, 01AVID, 02AVID, 03AVID etc.

All of our Unity logon's are "avidxxx", where xxx is the room number.  Never really been a problem.

Hi Randall, Hosed,

Thx for your replies. I have changed the computer name of "Avid1" into Alpha. This fixed the problem just like Jeff and my local ACSR said!!!! I am now able to open MC on Avid11 while Avid1 is capturing!!!! Also the scanning issue seems to have stopped. But its only day 1 so I'll give it a few days to see clear result. So to be clear it seems not to be a user name related issue.

(Over the next few days I will use the NATO alphabet for renaming my computers so they stay in the right sequence in the admin tool.)

Obviously MC2.7 is not able to distinguish correctly between the folder names "AVID1" and "AVID11" in a workspace. I have read the readme's of 2.7.7 and MC 3.1.1, searched extensively in the knowledge base and this forum and nowhere is anything mentioned about any computer name restrictions except when using OS-X on apple.

Maybe this also has to do with the introduction of the MXF format cause I also saw something else that I think is wrong. MC also made an Avid1.1 folder inside an OMFIMediafiles folder in another workspace. I thought it is supposed to only do this inside the MXF folders.

Randall, Maybe you could try to reproduce my configuration and see if a similar error pops up? Name 1 MC "Avid1" (ethernet) and another "Avid11" (fiber), start capturing something on Avid1 and then try to open Avid11. As I did not find any mentioning anywhere in readme's etc.. I expect this might be MC version independent.