Chris Bové:

Apple has written all of its new code to forbid the classic code. Hence why this whole time it has been an impossible venture to simply "upgrade" the classic Title Tool. 

This is a real question and I'm not trying to be snarky. If Apple has forbidden classic code, and therefore the legacy Title Tool cannot be altered/edited/recreated/upgraded to make it work within a modern MacOS, how is Media Composer able to do so? Why wasn't/isn't Media Composer hampered by the same constraints?

I don't know anything about computer programming, so please explain this like you would to a child.

Well I understand about Title tool.  Thanks for the info on how MC is developed, I didn't know that single binay thing.  But I stand by my general feeling.  The new version of MC has all sorts of windowing issues on Macs and when I talk to support they want me to do things the way they do, on a PC, and don't seem to undestand how Mac OS works. I think if you take Adobe or Resolve as a comparison, you will understand what I mean.  These apps run great on MacOS, while MC seems to have constant issues with windowing, file browsers, interface speed, etc.   MC has drifted further and further from MacOS standards, and also seems to be dragging a lot of legacy stuff around (or so Avid tells us).

Maybe it is just time for Avid to make a break with backward compatibility?   Create a version where you can open an old bin, but you cannot send a sequence backward to an older version.  More of an "import" mentality.   I love Avid's backward compatiblity, but at this point it feels like Avid uses it as an excuse for every kludgey old school clunky piece of code.

Don't change the interface, just re-do the code up to modern standards –– clear out the bugs, get the interface speed running faster and, of course, some sort of reasonable title tool.

Look, every product has its issues for sure and people will always complain. Some people complain for sport but I pay for a product that touts itself as the industry standard and the gold standard. Just fix the problems. I don't care what you need to do X code Y code classic code I don't give a rodent's behind how you do it. Just look at this antiquated forum interface and the clunky features, no spell check, terrible upload featues etc. It hasn't changed since the early 90's. You cannot even upload a png file here. Avid please read Yertle the Turtle it sounds like your business model.

Oh, the horror etc.:

Look, every product has its issues for sure and people will always complain. Some people complain for sport 

Here, here, Gary. The "recreational outrage", sometimes referred to as "manufactured strategic outrage" is sometimes fun to watch, and sometimes exhausting to constantly monitor (and I don't just mean tor titling issues). Regardless, I certainly know the difference. There are people with legit issues regarding any sort of title creation within Media Composer, and as a 30-year editor, I'm intimately familiar with all of them. Conversations are happening internally, and I'll have some news to share soon.

 

Oh, the horror etc.:

Just look at this antiquated forum interface and the clunky features, no spell check, terrible upload featues etc. It hasn't changed since the early 90's. You cannot even upload a png file here.

We are changing this very soon. 

 

Oh, the horror etc.:

... I pay for a product that touts itself as the industry standard and the gold standard. Just fix the problems. I don't care what you need to do X code Y code classic code I don't give a rodent's behind how you do it. 

 

Agreed, and we are doing so. I'll keep you posted on this.

 

Oh, the horror etc.:

no spell check,

When composing your post click on the HTML and you have a spell check. 

camoscato:

If Apple has forbidden classic code, and therefore the legacy Title Tool cannot be altered/edited/recreated/upgraded to make it work within a modern MacOS, how is Media Composer able to do so? Why wasn't/isn't Media Composer hampered by the same constraints?

😦 Media Composer is obviously, absolutely hampered by the same constrains! That's much of the work Avid has had to do over the past several years, to rid MC of its 32bit code, libraries and dependencies. Same reason why the Import Tool has been gutted. And same reason why you can't install MC2018 on any post-Mojave macOS. Heck, you can't even uninstall MC2018 from a Mac you've upgraded, due to these constrains.

 

I know enough about coding to understand that the classic Title Tool could not have been "edited", "upgraded", or "converted", or ported, in a feasible way. And I can appreciate it's not so easy to write such a tool, even though it looks easy. Flawless text-to-bitmap rendering, right-to-left multi-line text flow, dealing with dangerous fonts... It took Adobe a while to sort it out in Premiere's Creative Cloud-era, too. But that's all to say Avid should've had this figured out in MC2020.

 

Avid could (and of course still can) bring back the classic Title Tool: I want to clarify that they'd still need to build it from scratch, simply with clearer design goals to make this newly-written tool look and behave just like the classic Title Tool. The amount of effort would've been similar to the effort spent on Titler+, so I can kind of understand their thought process and decision: "If we're already spending $X to build it from scratch, now is the time to consider if this is the best interface for the times, and modernize it."  It's the implementation that failed.

(Personally, I'm no fan of Title Tool; it's simply that we all knew how to use it, and it worked and worked well. But IMO it's not The One Definitive Ultimate way to design a titler.)

 

Come to think of it... Avid developed Titler+ using their resources at hand. Had they directed those same resources to "update Classic title tool to 64bit"... we likely would've ended in a similar place: A titler with a well-known interface, but one that is just as slow and buggy. To end-users, it would look like "Title Tool is slow and buggy on new Macs."

Avid had no choice but to develop a new titler, and the problem is that it is taking them 4 years (and counting) to deliver a performant one -- whether it looks identical to Title Tool or looks like Titler+ or Titler+++.

 

binba:

My hunch is that Avid had lost much of the institutional knowledge in those 32bit components that formed the heart of MC, and that they spent a lot of development resources in the past 5+ years just getting up to speed with modernizing the code.

Don't mean to be a Debbie Downer, but hunches (speculation) are against forum guidelines. :) Please comment on what you know as fact.

Oh, the horror etc.:

Some people complain for sport

Good one. lol.

Adman:

Don't mean to be a Debbie Downer, but hunches (speculation) are against forum guidelines. :) Please comment on what you know as fact.

Hence clearly marked as a hunch. :) I took the paragraph out.

 

binba:

the problem is that it is taking them 4 years (and counting)

And here is my main problem. From a company like Avid it is reasonable to expect that the management and experience is present to manage the resources needed for the development of their products. As it has a direct relationship with the quality = value of their products, it is (one of) the reasons we pay Avid for our support contracts and upgrades. And that management team should also be able to deal with (unforseen) changes in the market and unavoidable internal human errors during development. 

If the period of 4 years is a 'normal/acceptable' duration for the development of something with the complexity of a title tool I would expect Avid to keep supporting and maintaining, meaning applying bug fixes if found, the existing functional products until the new products are ready for production. Instead while on the one hand we are faced with Apple saying:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208436

Apple has been working with developers to transition their apps, and in 2018 Apple informed them that macOS Mojave would be the last version of macOS to run 32-bit apps. Starting with macOS Catalina, 32-bit apps are no longer compatible with macOS. 

in the readme of media composer it writes:

macOS 10.14.6 Mojave is not supported with Media Composer 22.4 and later releases.

Simply said. We discontinue the old version/compatibility before the new is ready and version after version, patch after patch are we to test the latest release hoping that the resources were this time put in place to produce a satisfactory result.