SOS I’m dying here

[Aanarav Sareen]

What type of media are you using in the project?

Aanarav Sareen
premiere@asvideoproductions.com
https://www.asvideoproductions.com/techtalk

[Chuck Bolland]

I am bring in .avi files captured with a Matrox RT.X2 card. I was on the phone with one of the members of the Cow team who walked me through a few steps and he says the problem points to a problem with the Matrox card or conflicts between Matrox and Adobe. I don’t know where to go from here. The dealer for the card, Matrox and the system is up in Everett and so far I’ve made 3, 200 mile round trips to try to get this system up and running. I am wondering if there is anyone who is real familiar with Matrox and Adobe and Windows XP who is anywhere near Olympia. I will be glad to pay their mileage and time and a very good lunch.
Chuck

[Tim Kolb]

The issue is either the card conflicts with some portion of the configuration, or the drivers for the board need to be reinstalled as they are corrupt (unlikely since that just happened I’m told) or there is just some strange bug in Matrox’s drivers that make it crash when a Matrox DV file is brought into a Matrox MPEG I-frame NTSC (720×486) timeline.

The problem is not very likley a conflict between Matrox and Adobe (that would have been unlikely to pass), but there is some reason why the Matrox project settings are crashing on this system and the Adobe project settings handle the same media without issue…the rest of the configuration needs to be looked at.

***I also question whether or not the dealer did indeed wipe it and start clean…or did they just simply take out everything but what they left on the system?

(strong feelings about this as I was the one on the phone chasing this one down…)

TimK,
Director,
Kolb Productions,

Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net

[Chuck Bolland]

Tim,
Early this morning I captured a segment that is going into the show, but I had to caputure through Matrox. I then opened a New project and took that .avi into a Microsoft dv avi environment. The work was very stable as I added titles and a couple of effects. The result is MS DV AVI that I will use to compile the entire program. As per your suggestion I will then render one as a Matrox so I can output to video tape and I’ll use the orginial rendered file to output my DVD’s. I’m crossing my fingers, but so far so good. And once again, thank you very much for your help and suggestions. Funny how a guy 1/2 way across the country who doesn’t even have a Matrox system seems to have more ideas on what is going wrong than the dealer out here.
Chuck

[Chuck Bolland]

Tim,
Early this morning I captured a segment that is going into the show, but I had to caputure through Matrox. I then opened a New project and took that .avi into a Microsoft dv avi environment. The work was very stable as I added titles and a couple of effects. The result is MS DV AVI that I will use to compile the entire program. As per your suggestion I will then render one as a Matrox so I can output to video tape and I’ll use the orginial rendered file to output my DVD’s. I’m crossing my fingers, but so far so good. And once again, thank you very much for your help and suggestions. Funny how a guy 1/2 way across the country who doesn’t even have a Matrox system seems to have more ideas on what is going wrong than the dealer out here.
Chuck

[Tim Kolb]

It’s unfortunate, but frankly unavoidable I think…

In the mid-90’s when you could count the professional NLE systems in place on your fingers in any but the most metro states in the US, companies didn’t have many systems to support and the configurations weren’t very diverse. There were definite differences between my peers who paid 80-100,000 dollars for their Avid systems at that time and my Media 100s which were “cheap” at about 40-50,000 dollars per chair and much more openly configurable…however when an Avid owner called for support, Avid knew every component in the system as they had very restrictive configurations, whereas when I needed support, Media 100 routinely blamed Apple, Apple blamed my storage vendor and the storage vendor could never figure out why they were getting calls on issues that had nothing to do with harddrives…

Many Avid owners felt like they were held prisoner, but really the restrictions on configurations led Avid techs to understand all components in the system.

Now, everyone expects an entire NLE system to cost less than $10K and the system configurations can be made more custom than ever before with more choices of components than one can realistically keep track of…

Well, tech support employees, many of whom are strictly hires who are expected to use a series of checklists to diagnose problems, can’t keep track of it all either. It makes all of this maddening for many customers, but for many of us who have been buying our own gear for a decade or two can tell you, post production gear is damn near disposable compared to ten years ago. Support costs money and most of us are paying relatively little money for our tools these days.

Profit margins are razor thin for manufacturers…an Avid probably had a profit margin far above 50% on those mid-90s systems, but that money could be invested in more service for the life of the product…whereas Adobe might realize a profit margin in the 50% range as well…the entire Production Studio suite costs less than 2,000.00 and they need those profits to operate development teams for more than a half-dozen applications, all with capabilities that make the 100K Avids and the 50K Media 100s of the 90s look pathetically limited in scope and functionality.

Add to that the fact that the software is so affordable that many different user sophistication levels are now customers of the same product, and with the explosion in volume of NLE customers comes an explosion in the percentage of customers that have little or no technical expertise, making increased technical support necessary, often at a very basic level of sophistication. I wonder what percentage of Adobe tech support cases are solved with one of the following responses:

1. Defrag your harddrive
2. Your harddrive is full
3. Use the proper project settings
4. Upgrade your computer system to the minimum config PRINTED ON THE BOX…
5. Remove games and unnecessary software from your system to resolve a conflict
6. Proper configuration of hardware (video cards, camcorders, etc)

I don’t know what the answer is, but as our tools continue to drop to an almost absurdly low cost, support is not going to become more expert, driven both by the demands of the majority of customers and the strains on profitability.

Maybe I could open a phone bank in the basement… 🙂

TimK,
Director,
Kolb Productions,

Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net

[Chuck Bolland]

Tim,
I’m back to a situation where I believe PremierePro and my system is running pretty well. Thank you for your assistance. I have posted a couple of questions on the Serious Magic list because there are two issues with Ultra. However, at least it is working after a fashion and it isn’t taking down my system.
For some reason, my system lockup (as we discussed earlier)following the video card upgrade and the replacement of the RAM seems to have just gone away. Now, I can’t duplicate the behavior. However, I am taking your advise and making two renders. One in Matrox and the other in Microsoft DV avi. Back to Ultra, I think I’m seeing that the program responds better when I capture my green screen files using Microsoft DV avi as well. I can always take those processed files into PremierePro and render them with the Matrox files.
Anyway, when you get time, take a look at my posts on the Serious Magic page. I don’t know if others have expereinced this or not.
Chuck Bolland
Olympia, WA