Hello all,

I spent the better part of yesterday troubleshooting a terrible issue when switching projects between versions of 2021 and 2018 that I thought I should pass along -- hopefully no other users have to spend the time I did troubleshooting this one and fingers crossed it gets addressed soon, as there seems to be a bunch of threads that point to this type of error but do not address it outright. It seems there is some sort of issue with bins that are created in 2021 appearing as corrupt media/bins when utilizing 2018, with the issue being something to do with how these new bins are created in 2020/2021. My workflow in the past I would just copy my project between systems, work and then copy between systems without ever having any issues - however yesterday issues began showing up as some clips appearing ‘online in the timeline’ and yet the avid wouldn’t play them back (the composer window just stayed black), you could match frame, relink without issue but the error you’d get is: ‘MXF_DIDMapperSegmented::ReadRange - End Sample Index exceeds on-disk Index Entry Count.’ and in the console you’d see a ‘BuildPipes’ error. Sometimes this error would appear in the source/record monitors and sometimes it would be a proper error window, but I could still open/work on some of my sequences and that’s when it started to almost infect all of the bins/sequences I'd opened from that point forward — meaning I could pull an archived project from a few days ago, and begin checking clips/sequences but slowly and surely it would just stop working there too. With the help of Mr Chuck K - we tried trashing/recreating the databases for all my shoot days media, trashing the MCState, trashing the settings XML, new users, reinstalling avid, making a new 2018 project, moving the mmob files to make new bins, going back to an even older version of avid on a completely different system etc etc to no avail when I got sent this by Chuck - https://community.avid.com/forums/t/200445.aspx — it turns out there is an unfixed bug with bins created in 2020/21 that they will not load properly, and act like corrupted media/bins/sequences in Avid 2018. When I ran an update on my Avid 2018 Mac Pro 5,1 to bring me from 2018 to 2021.6 - all of the problems stoped and my previously ‘corrupted’ bins/sequences worked fine. For science's sake, my originating project's Avid is an iMac Pro 2021.6 machine. We ran some further tests, and it looks like bins created in 2018 and passed between versions are ok - however it's the bins created in 2021 that have a potential to go rogue when shipping to a 2018 system. It might be advisable to those working in a mixed version environment, that the AE's process everything on 2018 if the Editor's are not all on 2021 just to be safe.

Hi,

Thanks for sharing this info. Hope Avid can join on this one.

 

Jeroen van Eekeres:

Hi,

Thanks for sharing this info. Hope Avid can join on this one.

 

Yes, thank you John, for your post! It is so important.

interesting how this is one of the biggest workflow issues to hit avid in decades and not any real documentation about whether this is a bug or intentional for moving the software forward and perhaps moving everyone to the newest platform and letting all these mulitple versions go so that we finally only have 1 version of avid again.  Been radio silent on this issue from multiple threads for the better part of 6 months now with Avid leaving it to productions to self manage what could have catastrophic outcomes should someone lose a timeline or days worth of binning.  This hasn't been a problem before in the 25 years I've been working with avid software. Bit troubling.

I wonder if it's some weird interaction between the Resolve synced media being imported into Avid 2021?   I haven't seen this bug moving back and forth between Avid 2018 and 2021 on media synced within Avid.

There were documented issues between some 2018 versions and later versions and Avid did release an update in the 2018.12.x line that fixed the issue. I don't recall which point release fixed it but the readme's would have that info.

What I'm going to add in this post might not be very helpful but I want to share it anyway.

Since the summer of 2021 we have been in the process of trying to update several of our customers from MC (and interplay) 2018 to 2020/2021 and all sites either rolled back or we have multiple cases open where some progress is made, but not in ways that give me the impression that we are soon going to have 2022 releases as stable as the 2018 ones.

But it is not just the manner in which the new versions aren't completely ready for use in a real world production, it's also a sense of acceptance that in today's market this is a natural/normal result and we should not care too much about product management, development, services and support not being able to keep up. In other words, an apathetic attitude, 'this will have to do for now'. Those who complain need to drink some of the marketing cool aid to get better.

Regarding moving from MC 2018 to 2020/2021. After 20+ years of support and pulling the last few hairs out on the top of my head, I'm for the first time concluding I'm not able to find out why Windows systems that have been running MC 2018 fine, have performance issues and project/bin/media indexer bugs after an uninstall, manual settings and folder deletions and install. Only by performing a format/system reset, new settings, new projects can stability be restored to a certain extend.

Dynamic relink in Interplay environments, while being better with the december 2021 updates, keeps producing unpredictable results and with every bin save you fear the issue of a spinning circle (or beach ball on mac) will start appearing for 10+ seconds before actually saving with every save from that moment on while for days it has been working without issue. No errors appearing or error logs helping to find a possible cause. And support suggesting things already tried numerous times.

And some fixes listed in the readme's often using wording that suggests a possible relevance, but the perception of a performance increase or reduction in the occurences of a problem/error after updating leaving you in a 'it seems better but I'm not sure' and/or 'do we have to delete user settings, site settings, project settings or do a full rescan again after the update or do we have to format the machine again'?

As a support engineer ACSR, I feel Avid is pulling the carpet from under my feet, leaving me looking like a fool. 

 

 

 

Definitely possible although most show's i've done use a resolve sync workflow for dailies and i've never had this issue pre 2021.2 and 2018.5 + i believe as in the comment below about 2018 versions i believe 2018.+ requires specific updates for compatibility after .4 but memory is slipping on those. We were using 2018.12.15 when we encountered this issue with 2021.6 and beyond. If it is an issue with Resolve it still begs the question why it appearks after 2021.2 ...something still must have changed somewhere to instigate some kind of metadata issue coming from Resolve if that is the case. And I have to believe that resolve sync dailies has been around for quite some time now and is becoming the norm if not already so. Worth a look at though.

The only reason I suggest it might be Resolve sync is that when this corruption issue came to my attention in 2021 I was aware of two 23.98 1080p DNxHD 36 shows synced in Avid (not Resolve) and the editorial teams on both shows were sharing bins between Avid versions 2018 and 2021 and neither show encounted this corruption issue.   Resolve sync dailies have been around since at least 2017 but this issue may have only been triggered with when bins emerged created using the 2021 Avid software.

 

Do you know what version of Avid the Resolve sync media was prepared in for the bins of synced clips you received?

 

Another thing to keep in mind that all of these shows are 23.98fps 1080p DNxHD 36.   On a side note I had a USB microphone not work with the punch-in tool and when speaking to Avid support it was discovered that the issue was limited to 23.98 projects.   29.97 projects were fine with a USB microphone.   So it's important to consider all the variables at play here.

Yes. The bins were prepared in 2021.6 and originally edited in 2021.6. When transferred to a 2018.12.15 system some dailies showed up black not offline. Moving that system to 2021 resolved the immediate workflow needs but didn't uncover what the issue was.

But for the transfer of synced Resolve media and ALE import to Avid, is it known what version of Avid was used for that, before being prepared in 2021.6 and edited in 2021.6 and then transferred to a 2018.12.15 system?