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MC 8.5.1 Exporting in OS X 10.11 El Capitan
Hey All,
This is my first time posting here, I’m an AE at a small documentary company who recently decided to upgrade a lot of the machines to new Late 2015 iMacs. This was all great and good except that they all run on unsupported El Capitan and, from what I’ve read, there’s no way to downgrade them past the OS they shipped with.
So, my problem is this: I’m trying to export an hour long sequence and Avid is freezing during the export. The export dialogue box appears, but there is no exporting time/approximate time until completion in the window and the progress bar rapidly fills until about 25% and then Avid freezes and must be force quit. cmd+. doesn’t cancel the export.
So far I have done a complete uninstall/reinstall of Avid, created a new user profile in Avid, created new export settings, exporting same as source, tried exporting to our Terrablock server vs the local machine’s desktop, flushed the machine’s PRAM and repaired disk permissions because I’m at such a loss, and I think that’s it….
The strangest part of it all is that if I subsequence this episode into 6 segments of 10 minutes each they will all export fine. A different sequence of 00:13:00:00 will export fine, but a third sequence of 49:00:00 will not export.
I’ve tried contacting Avid support but all they can say is that “there’s a known bug” between El Capitan and MC which makes it crash when exporting using custom settings. As a television production company this is unacceptable for us and I desperately hope someone knows a work around.
The following are links to my export settings used and a random error it gave me Friday night, this error has since cleared and not returned.
Here are the export settings again along with the tech specs of the machine, and some images of the export dialogue along with the Activity Monitor. You can see by the time stamp in the image name that this bar is filling up exceedingly fast for an hour long sequence, and in the last picture the highlighted file in the open folder is the file that is supposedly exporting. After three minutes of exporting it still reads 0 bytes.
If you have any ideas please please let me know as I’m completely at a loss and our company is kind of screwed. These machines were purchased before I came into the office and now there’s no going back. I don’t know what to tell them. Thanks in advance for any help!
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7 Replies
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Did you do a video/audio mixdown of the sequence and then try exporting?
Shane
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For this particular full length sequence I have not. A co-worker created a video mixdown of one that was about 23:00:00 and giving the same error on Friday and nothing was fixed though. I hesitated to do it as I thought that if it exported the same sequence in 10 minute segments it should do the full thing. Also doing it same as source shouldn’t necessitate a mixdown right?
Honestly that’s my next step but the swing shift workers are in the office now and my test machine is being used for work. Hoping there’s something that wont mean double the export time for every output we create as we generally run about 8-9 hours of exports each night :\
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I just purchased a new iMac with El Capitan 10.11 and am in the process of installing the latest media composer. So this is troubling to hear. I hope this is not a problem for everyone.
I don’t know much in the way of trouble shooting, but I did notice your computer specs said OS 10.11.3
The latest update is 10.11.4, so maybe by a small miracle the problem doesn’t exist in this update…
However i think you’d have to re-install Avid again.Id be interested to know how you worked around this.
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So last night I tried to export with a video/audio mixdown that were both created to my local drive and it failed. I also tried to consolidate media to the local drive and export and that didn’t work either. The latter was at the suggestion of an Avid tech but I don’t understand why as you’d think that nothing would export if the media drives were the issue and this sequence clearly does when broken up. I will keep this ticket updated with everything we find.
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Hey there, thanks for catching this. I’m updating on one of the machines in the office right now as a test but, in my experience, the further ahead your OS gets from the Avid version the more problems there are :\
Right now the only work around we can think of is to export the 10 minute chunks, open them in Quicktime Player, and use its functionality to stitch them back together into one video. Fortunately we still have 3-4 machines on Mountain Lion and Avid 7.X which export fine.
Honestly, your avatar perfectly shows how I feel right about now. I can’t believe a version of a professional video editing program passed QC while “exporting with custom settings is a known bug that crashes Avid.” It’s utterly ludicrous to me. As I replied to the above poster, though, I’ll definitely keep this updated with everything we find. Hopefully there will be a solution.
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I just finished the update but the export still isn’t going. The big tell is if there’s no time that appears in the export dialogue box and the progress bar fills in quicker than it should. Every time this has happened the export has failed. It’s an easy way to tell in the first two minutes instead of having to wait for the full hour.
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We’re having a similar problem with Media Composer 8.5.2. Quicktime custom exports work intermittently. When they work, everything is as expected. When they don’t, the export progress bar hangs while the time indicators continue counting. Command-Period is supposed to allow you to cancel the export, but it does nothing. Force-Quitting Avid is the only option. Then the Mac must be rebooted before there is any hope of getting the export to succeed.
In our case, the length of the sequence doesn’t make much difference. I’ve had 3 min. videos hang on export. In our experience, a Same as Source export always works, except when it’s not permitted. I believe Long-GOP avid media is not supported for Same as Source but AMA linked Long-GOP media IS supported, go figure.
We’re lucky enough to have multiple systems, so we do most of our exports on MC 8.4.2 or earlier.
If you don’t have that option, the belt and suspenders approach is to do a video mixdown, remove all other video from the timeline, and export Same as Source. Then you have to transcode your export to the format you actually need, definitely doing things the hard way.
I think this problem was difficult for Avid to catch because custom exports work fine some of the time and there are many editors who’s workflow is always Same as Source export, so they never experienced the problem. I am perplexed at how long it’s taking Avid to fix this however. The problem has been clearly identified and replicated by Avid for almost 3 months. At the very least, Avid should add a hard-to-miss notice in the readme file with 8.5.2 so editors are aware of this problem before they install. I’m really expecting a fix to come any day now. I’ve been checking the Avid Download Center almost daily to see if the next release is out yet.
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