My team upgraded to 2024.10 once AJA rolled out new drivers to fix the glitchy playback output on the DNxIV.  Half of us are on M1 Macstudio and the other half are on Intel "cheese graters".  Media is shared via Nexis upgraded to the latest drivers.  BUt we all are experiencing intermittent freezes of Media Composer for around :30 then the machine regains control.  Any  have any ideas?  I tested the software for over a month before rolling it out to our team and never experienced it.  Now it's multiple times a day for each of us and it's driving us nuts.  We've been trying to figure out if it has anythting to do with any background services like background auto-save or transcription.  Any ideas of things to try is welcmome before we roll everything back to a previous version.

 

Thanks

Hi Jason,

Can you email me directly together with the specs of your system. We can start a case for this one so that the team can check and assist you.

My direct email is [email protected]

Thanks!

I've been going through something similar and have a case that I've been updating for the past month.  After solving the main segmentation error, I've focused on the beachball thing.  I found it varied depending upon the speed of the drives attached, but I feel it is some kind of timing issue in software.  IDK

The recommendations I got were:

Create a new project, exit MC, move all the bins from the old to the new project folder in a Finder window.  Open the new project and the bin, and see if beachball occurs - it did for me, but was reduced

Disable the I/O hardware, work on a test project using only local drives - I tried, beachball still occurred

New OS user and see if it works - did not try this

Complete uninstall process, reinstall everything but make sure backed up, using these steps: (I did this)

1) uninstall everything AVID by running all applciations inside the Avid Media Composer Uninstallers (this includes Avid Link and Cloud Client Services uninstallers)

2) Once done, remove and delete all remaining Avid folders in the Application folder, including inside the Applications/Utilities folder.

3) Go to /Macintosh HD/Library/Application Support and remove and delete all Avid folders.

4) Click "go" in the Finder top menu and press and hold the Option button to click the hidden Library folder, then go inside the Application Support folder and remove and delete all remaining Avid folders

5) Restart the machine and install a fresh copy of the Media Composer installer

6) After installation, restart the machine, run the Avid Link to verify the license activation, and then run Avid Media Composer.

7) If you previously installed I/O hardware and third-party plugins, you must uninstall them following the Media Composer uninstallation and proceed with reinstallation.  To make everything work, ensure that I/O hardware drivers and third-party plugins are compatible with the latest Media Composer version.

After doing the above, and for a brief one hour of testing yesterday, no beachball.  I have to do some extensive testing this week.

The more nuclear option given was: Re-image your machine with a fresh OS installation or create a partition of the local drive, install fresh OS and install everything - this option I haven't done yet. Yikes.

That's the feedback I've been getting.  Maybe it can help you.

Best,

Ernie

Thanks Ernie.  Let me know how your your system is fairing before I go down that road.  The wierd thing is that we have 6 systems on 2024.10 all connected to a NEXIS.  I tested the software for an entire month before migrating the others and never encountered this. It was only after we all moved over.  The only differences were that some of the machines were on Monterey and some were on Sonoma.  Additonally, 2 of the machines were 2019 intel cheese graters and the others were M1 MacStudios.

Jason, Do you by chance have any Boris FX installed? I had 30 to 40-sec beachballs, just like the ones you've described, that were dogging me for six months. After trying everything, including an exhaustive support case with Avid, I finally figured out that Boris Continuum was the culprit.

Will keep you posted Jason. I'm on Ventura, if that makes any difference. One would think a month of testing is pretty thorough. Were you connected to the Nexis when you were testing, or just directly attached drives? Were both the Monterey and Sonoma systems o.k. during the testing?

Brian - Boris FX? I have Boris Continuum as well and just upgraded to the latest version. Did you have the beachball if you didn't even use a Boris effect in your timeline? Could it be that simple? Right under our noses? I've seen many others complaints of the beachball, but you're the first to tie in Boris FX. I'll do some testing this week.

Hey Ernie, Yes, Boris Continuum is a problem at the moment, even if it's just installed. I've used Boris FX since forever, and never even thought that it could be a problem. But at one point I uninstalled it to move my license, and I noticed that on the machine with no Boris FX, the beachballs stopped almost completely.

I wrote to Boris and eventually had an email exchange with the lead engineer on Continuum, and he says this:

"This is an issue we are aware of and actively pursuing on several fronts, but we don’t yet have a solution. The problem is related to a stall when contacting our license server and it affects all versions of Continuum for anyone with a normal license (meaning not a dongle and not a floating license server)."

He went on to say that the issue was pretty consistent in their testing, with the stall happening every 15 minutes, so if you've been seeing these 30-sec beachballs 4 times per hour, Boris Continuum could be the cause.

I've communicated with some other Boris users who say the beachball hang problem was lessened when Boris Support recommended they back-rev to Continuum 17.5.1.

Hope that helps.

Hey Bri

Good to know.  I sent this thread over to Freddie and Torsten our service engineers so they can look at this - did you chat with Peter at Boris or ????? As I would like to chat too and see if we can figure it out.

You can email me direct./...

Marianna

 

Ernie,

Did you do any testing? Based on my observation, even having Boris simply installed on the machine, not even necessarily using the effects, there is a significant uptick in these 30 sec beachballs where Avid then recovers. There was a period of several days where I was in fine cut and not doing much effects work, but I was still getting way too many beachballs. I uninstalled Boris, and they went away.

I've been having a back and forth with Continuum's lead engineer, and he was surprised by this. He thought the license check issue was triggered by someone actually using the plug-in, so he's scratching his head about Boris just being a general source of beachball hangs.

Let me know if you've had any observations?

Thanks to you, Ernie, and Marianna for getting some traction on this.  We have both Boris and Sapphre installed on our machines.  Half of my team rolled back to 2022.12.6 (which was the last truly stable version for us) and either it's went away when they went back, it's happening way less, or they've stopped complaining and have reached step 5 of grief.  I'd try uninstalling Boris on my machine to see if it solves the beachballs, but would like to keep Sapphire which I use more frequently.  But I'm wondering if they are part of the same licensing engine.  What do you all think?

The just-released Continuum V18.0.2 mentions the following in the release notes:

Improvements in Continuum 2025 v18.0.2 for Avid AVX:

• Prevent UI/Render stalls during periodic Continuum license checks

 

Yes, anyone invested in this thread should install the publicly released 18.0.2 and let us know if the beachball hangs have been reduced. Having said that, our thinking on this has evolved, and Continuum's lead engineer is not convinced that the UI stalls during license checks are the cause of beachballs that occur even when Continuum is just installed on your CPU.

In other words, I told him I was getting beachballs even when I was not using any effects from Boris, and that threw him for a loop. Made him wonder if he's got separate, bigger problems, or if the problem is more local to my set-up and workstation. However, I've been in touch with several other users who say that they see beachballs when Boris is simply installed on their computer, without them necessarily even using it.

Please report back here your observations about Continuum 18.0.2. Thanks all!

Installed it first thing this morning and no change.  We also have Sapphire installed.  Any idea if that needs an update too?

Jason, I don't know if Sapphire is a culprit. All I know is I am getting multiple beachballs an hour with Continuum, with no Sapphire installed. I'm going to report your experience to Boris. It would be helpful to know how many Mac Avid workstations you have that are beachballing? I need to convince him that it's not just an isolated problem.