Unlike a lot of post production users, Mike Aiton has made the jump to Pro Tools 11 and as we discussed on the Avid stand at BVE recently the Avid Video Engine in Pro Tools 11 is far from being a bed of roses.  Mike has been working on a documentary this week and we asked him to log his experiences together with what works and what doesn’t work. Over to you Mike…

My Video Setup

I am using Blackmagic Design DeckLink Studio hardware card with the video reference set to 25 frames per second PAL from my Nanosyncs and my Sync HD unit. I am using the Blackmagic Design v10 driver, using the onboard SD hardware down mix from the Blackmagic card of the HD pictures to feed my SD screens.

Wednesday

Today I started sound editing in Pro Tools 11.

Audio - I imported the OMF from the video edit and re-arranged everything to correct tracks etc for splits.

Video - I tried using Pro Res Proxy file (14GB for 47 min) which works out at about the same size-ish of file as DV PAL. 

I had three crashes with the Wait Play bug.

I had the orange video media once in the timeline with “video with no known codec” bug which I was able to clear with a reboot.

Lessons Learnt From Wednesday’s Experiences

Do not try to reconnect to AVE - it is out to lunch. To get round the Wait Play bug. Always quit Pro Tools, reboot the Mac and relaunch Pro Tools, it is the only reliable solution. Allan Sallabank’s suggestion, which he finds works on Pro Tools running on Windows, to jog the video after a Wait Play bug doesn’t work on a Mac for me.

Thursday

Today I am dialogue editing in Pro Tools 11. Using Scrub Trim seems to cause a crash which is different to the Wait Play bug I had yesterday. Using Scrub Trim seems to cause Pro Tools 11 to loose contact with the AVE.

The best workaround I have found for this is to save the session, quit and relaunch Pro Tools. Don’t double click on the session to relaunch Pro Tools as this tries to open the session tracks and reconnect with the AVE, which don’t work, it just gets its knickers in twist.  It is better to relaunch Pro Tools without opening the session, then open Playback Engine, enable the Avid Video Engine (its quick). Finally use the Open Session from the File menu.

Today I had 10 crashes doing this within 2 minutes of opening session. At Mike Thornton’s suggestion I transcoded the Pro Res to Avid DNxHD to see if the problem was codec related or not but after a false start I found that didn’t help either, it was still an issue with Avid DNxHD, the Trim Scrub crash is easily reproducible.

The next idea was to turn off the Enable Hardware During Scrub option in the Operations tab in the Pro Tools Preferences window. This fixed the Trim Scrub crashes, but I still had a few Wait Play errors today.

Lessons Learnt From Thursday’s Experiences

Disable the Enable Hardware During Scrub option in the Pro Tools Preferences.

Transcoding the Pro Res to Avid DNxHD didn’t fix the Wait Play bug. 

Other Notes - Recommendations To Avid

Please make video tracks visible in Mix window, as well as, or instead of Edit window, so I don’t have to have the I/O setting showing in my Edit window just to see the Video display settings. On a two screen system it makes much more sense to have this available to me in the Mix window, so that I don’t have to keep showing and hiding the I/O settings in the Edit window just to change the video settings.

Please make a second video option in the Video section of the Operation tab in Pro Tools Preferences to disable video window popping up and vanishing from the Desktop when scrubbing audio. I don’t use it and it annoys me popping up all the time.

Mike Thornton says - What are your experiences? Can you repeat Mike’s Scrub Trim bug?  If so does turning off the Enable Hardware During Scrub option work for you too. Any better workarounds for the Wait Play bug?