Avid and Boris – Between a rock and a hard place - Boris FX

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Avid and Boris – Between a rock and a hard place

Posted by Douglas R bruce on May 7, 2011 at 5:05 am

Recently on the Avid Media Composer Forums, probably due to more and more users trying out AvidFX and BCC AVX filters, there have been a few threads started where users are concerned about the working/non-working of those applications together with MC.

In some cases there are repeatable crashes, in other cases (my own for example) there are artefacts appearing after rendering certain effects.

I will limit this post to AvidFX (currently 5.8.3 – a very close relative of Boris RED 4)

At present I am running Avid Media Composer 5.5.1 on Windows 7 64bit Professional together with the 190.38 driver that is the one recommended and certified for use by Avid.
I have an Nvidia QuadroFX 3700 card. I have that card because Avid certify Quadro FX cards only – and they should be run with the correct drivers as I mentioned above.

I open a Support Ticket at BorisFX and their first suggestion is “Update to the latest Nvidia drivers”.
This is almost to be expected. The others who have had more serious problems (application crashes) and who have contacted Boris have also been given the “update to latest” driver as one possible solution.

OK.
BorisFX are the developers of Boris RED (whish is the base of AvidFX) so I believe what they say.
I also believe Avid when they say that I should not have the latest drivers. Huh?

I decide to give Boris suggestion a try.
I install the latest Nvidia Quadro FX driver 270.71 and I boot up AMC 5.5.1

I am not at all surprised when I see:

So if I continue to work with 270.71 Avid is telling me I can’t use OpenGL – the whole point in having this card in the first place and if I go back to 190.38 Boris is telling me that I may continue to get the artifacts.

Now I could understand this situation if I was using an established Application and I tried to run some amateur freeware in conjunction with it. I would not be surprised if there was some conflict between the two.

But here we have 2 commercial partners who are collaborating with their products.

This situation is a great example of “Between a rock and a hard place”

My question is (and I have already started a similar thread on the Avid forums) what can be done about this conflict of advice that is suggesting an impossible scenario?
At the moment it is not acceptable.

Over to you Avid and Boris.

Regards,
Douglas

Douglas
(Kumamoto, Japan)

Douglas R bruce replied 15 years ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
2 Replies

Boris Yamnitsky
May 7, 2011 at 10:48 am

Douglas,

Sorry to hear about your problem. One quick solution that I can offer off the top of my head is to run Avid-approved driver and disconnect Open GL in Avid FX. Depending on what you do in Avid FX, turning off Open GL may not affect your speed. In Boris RED/Avid FX OpenGL is only used for preview acceleration and not for final rendering. To turn Open GL off, go to the Preview menu and turn Open GL Mode to off. Rest assured that we are working with Avid on solving this problem.

Boris Yamnitsky
BorisFX
Douglas R bruce
May 7, 2011 at 11:23 am

Thank you, Boris, for taking time to respond.

I have already been in contact with Peter (a couple of days ago), but that was a more direct report to BorisFX.
This thread was to show my disappointment that Avid make life so difficult at times.
I am happy to hear that you are working together on the wider issue.
In the meantime I will try your suggestions.
Thank you
Regards,
Douglas

Douglas
(Kumamoto, Japan)

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Avid and Boris – Between a rock and a hard place