• Avid Media Composer

  Avid UME Link: JPEGs Showing Random Durations and Playback Errors

  Posted by Nacho Santana on March 23, 2025 at 12:34 pm

  Hey folks,

  I’ve been running into some strange behaviour in Avid and hoping someone out there has figured this out.

  I’m working with high-res stills (All JPEGs — 4000×6000, etc.) and trying to keep them at full resolution for zooming/panning in a 1080p project. I am using UME Link to avoid downscaling, and yes, I know the trick with Avid Pan & Zoom, but I’d rather not drop an effect and manually re-import each time if I can help it. Gets tedious when you’re dealing with 25+ images.

  The issue is: I’m getting totally inconsistent durations when linking the images. Some stills default to 30 seconds (which is fine), but others randomly show 0:21, 0:16, even just a few frames. It’s all over the place. There doesn’t seem to be a clear pattern, and even though all the files were exported the same way, Avid seems to read each one differently. On top of that, I sometimes get playback errors after relinking, which makes the timeline hard to trust when each image behaves differently.

  So, on a technical level, I’m wondering:

  • Has anyone else run into this kind of disparity with linked image durations?

  • Could Avid be reading metadata in the JPEGs weirdly?

  • Any clean way to unify image durations without importing/transcoding?

  Would love to hear your thoughts — just trying to keep a high-res workflow without things falling apart on the my porject and the timeline. Appreciate any insight!

  Thanks,

  

  Nacho Santana replied 4 weeks ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
• 0 Replies

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