Hello folks and happy new year!   

I know many of you have posted here and on Facebook about frustrations with a change in the way I/O boxes from Blackmagic are behaving with Media Composer. Media Composer customers have seen many hangs and crashes with these devices attached and it's not getting much better.

Some users are commenting that they aren't seeing similar issues with Adobe or Blackmagic’s NLEs,  so naturally they assume that the fix will be coming from Avid.  Nope.... It’s more complicated than that......  

The fix was needed in two places: 

-  The Avid Open/IO plug-in. Avid needed to address some issues in Media Composer’s code. This fix was completed a while ago. 

-  The driver from Blackmagic. Blackmagic has been working to address in their driver for quite some time now.  Avid has been tremendously cooperative with Blackmagic and we have been working closely with their engineering team for months. We are waiting for them to release an updated driver that our testing suggests would fix many of these issues.  

The changes in the driver from Blackmagic include specific changes for Media Composer. They are very complicated according to Blackmagic and require a lot of back-and-forth testing and validation. Constant OS releases from Apple have slowed the process and thrown additional testing into the mix. Blackmagic continues to test the new driver but have not given us a target release date yet.

We have a constant stream of communication with them and have repeatedly conveyed the urgency of this matter and the impact that it has on our mutual customers. They agree it is an urgent issue and have given it high escalation in engineering and executive leadership.

We cant do anythig more other than wait for their new driver but it might help speed things up if they also heard the urgency directly from customers who are impacted. If this has affected you and your workflow, please reach out to them through the links below.

Link to the Black Magic Forums (use the one called “Post Production”:

https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewforum.php?f=3

Contact their customer service by phone. Use this link to find the number in your area:

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/support/contact/phone 

Send them an email with your support request:

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/support/contact/email

Thanks all.....

Marianna

Thanks for the detailed update Marianna. 🤞

Marianna:

Blackmagic has been working to address in their driver for quite some time now.  Avid has been tremendously cooperative with Blackmagic and we have been working closely with their engineering team for months. We are waiting for them to release an updated driver that our testing suggests would fix many of these issues.  

The changes in the driver from Blackmagic include specific changes for Media Composer. They are very complicated according to Blackmagic and require a lot of back-and-forth testing and validation. Constant OS releases from Apple have slowed the process and thrown additional testing into the mix. Blackmagic continues to test the new driver but have not given us a target release date yet.

We have a constant stream of communication with them and have repeatedly conveyed the urgency of this matter and the impact that it has on our mutual customers. They agree it is an urgent issue and have given it high escalation in engineering and executive leadership.

We cant do anythig more other than wait for their new driver but it might help speed things up if they also heard the urgency directly from customers who are impacted. If this has affected you and your workflow, please reach out to them through the links below.

Link to the Black Magic Forums (use the one called “Post Production”:

https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewforum.php?f=3

Contact their customer service by phone. Use this link to find the number in your area:

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/support/contact/phone 

Send them an email with your support request:

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/support/contact/email

Let me start by thanking you once again Marianna for being the one that conveys the message in a coherent and comprehensible way. But here we are Marianna, approx. 8-9 years after the introducion AJA I/O in media composer 5.5 and Open I/O in media composer 6.0, where we are asked to believe 'Avid's side of the story' and to put pressure on Blackmagic as if it is their fault which I do not doubt.

I am glad I am not in your position conveying messages on progress in this thread, and several other threads for that matter, promissing that the issue has been found, updates being tested and almost ready for release. Finding, as time goes by, that none of these 'promisses' are being kept while it is your or Chris's name that stands to the left of those posts. 

Wether it is development team coordinators, product managers or beta testers from Blackmagic, Aja or your own at Avid, that provide 'false hope' which you, or any of the other Avid representatives, forward... it doesn't really matter anymore. At least to me. Your reputation as customer advocate and Sr. Director, Customer Experience and Community is and has never been in doubt, and your latest post only supports that position. But asking the customers to engage in putting the blame and pressure on Blackmagic only confirms how dysfunctional the relationship between Avid and (one of) its integrators has become. And that situation needs to be addressed before it is too late.

Most of us understand the complexity of keeping up with the fast changes made by Apple, Microsoft, RedHat, etc... to name just a few, but Avid also put itself and its customers in a similar position with their product changes, licensing and support programs. Pretending to 'just' be victim of the dysfunctionality of 'the others'...  I do not have the information to judge who's at fault in this case but I think Avid needs to look in the mirror and think how we ended up here and how to maintain relevance in the market, relationships with 'the integrators' and the customer's trust! 

Like was said before in this thread by Rob,

rockpaperscissors:

Treat your customers like partners -- keep them in the loop.  This does not have to include made-up unrealistic estimates about when a thing will be fixed, it just has to be honest evaluations.  We have to continue working however we can and the best way for us to determine how we can do that is if we know what's happening.

And I believe the time has come for this to be addressed to Media composer product management and the CEO at Avid, Jeff Rosica. 

Who is responsible for compatibility testing of I/O hardware in 2024? Does Avid still do testing of their part of the integration and certify drivers of Aja and Blackmagic? Up to January 2023 you sold rebranded Blackmagic and Aja I/O under the Avid name and still have the drivers available in the download center. Also in the readme it says:

• Avid Artist DNxIO and Avid Artist DNxIQ: If you are using Avid Artist DNxIO, Avid Artist DNxIQ, or a BlackMagic Designs video device, please update to Desktop Video software version v12.4 or higher. If you are using Avid Artist DNxIV and Avid Artist DNxIP please update to AJA software v16.2.2 or later.

Should customers be aware that since Avid discontinued selling I/O boxes in 2023 it also discontinued all testing of Media composer with any I/O device?

Has it occured to us.....

....that BMD might have no interest in supporting AVID because they compete....

...so, they slow walk the fixes for AVID....

It's January 17th and still no update to the driver from BMD. Any word on this Marianna?

There is a new release 12.8 of Desktop Video on Blackmagic website. No mention of any bug fixes for Avid users. Is it supposed to help mitigating the issues or should we be patient again and wait for the next one?

Since I am not considering myself as a beta tester, I am not very inclined to test by myself...

damien78:

There is a new release 12.8 of Desktop Video on Blackmagic website. No mention of any bug fixes for Avid users. Is it supposed to help mitigating the issues or should we be patient again and wait for the next one?

Since I am not considering myself as a beta tester, I am not very inclined to test by myself...

Hi there.....

Unfortunately, this new driver is not the one we are looking forward to having them release.  if you look at the release notes its for decklink.

BMD has the driver in beta QA and is testing it along with us here at Avid. fingerrs crossed this is the one and we have something iwithin a few weeks.

Marianna

Hi!

Thanks for the clarification. Hopefully next round will be the one...

More than slugginess, I have sort of intermittent  black frames everytime I stop playback, that are quite annoying. I think it is related, but perhaps I should also open a support ticket...

I can't get 12.8 to work on PC. Avid wont load with it installed, Get an AME Resource Manager error.

rolling it back to 12.7.1 works fine.

Stumbled on this thread while having related yet unrelated video I/O problems. I'm not here to hijack the thread, but to point to the similarities.

Digital Audio Scrub breaks Open I/O in recent MC versions (a known bug on Avid's side, according to Avid);  and DNxIO HDMI surround output channel mapping is wrong (Lfe and C are flipped), something that was supposed to be fixed in 2016, but evidently wasn't. Or maybe got broken again in recent Desktop Video driver versions.

On-topic, the Avid support response was specifically aggravating:

"This was logged and resolved by BlackMagic in DV v10.5. If this is not working as expected on your current system, you will have to make contact with BlackMagic to discuss the regression with their technical department.

The DNxIO is end of support and as the BMD driver resolved the issue in the past, BlackMagic will have to be contacted and the current issue discussed. There is unfortunately not much we can do from our side to further assist with this issue."

If the response centered on "DNxIO is end of support" I'd still be upset because we users want infinite support, but it'd be a more straightforward issue.  But pushing us to BMD like this, is textbook "give the customer the go-around", or more indicative of strife between the two companies. That's the impression this kind of response gives the customer.

I should point out that there was a recent similar experience between Adobe & BMD:  Premiere with BMD video output sent the wrong aspect ratio (DCI instead of 16:9) and cropped the video. It went on for many, many months, and both companies calmly repeated it was the other company's fault and sent the customers to complain there.

So I'm echoing Robert Martindale's point, that this conflict of interest is surely odd; BMD is in the business of competing with MC and Premiere, so why spend resources on helping Avid & Adobe? The BMD hardware happens to work just fine in Resolve....

From personal interactions with Grant Petty I had nothing but positive experiences, so this is a worthwhile topic to bring up at NAB...

binba:

So I'm echoing Robert Martindale's point, that this conflict of interest is surely odd; BMD is in the business of competing with MC and Premiere, so why spend resources on helping Avid & Adobe? The BMD hardware happens to work just fine in Resolve....

Hello. Please allow me to step in here to put this idea to rest.

Regarding Avid, Apple, BMD, and others... Yes we all share a healthy competition in the market and industry when it comes to some products, but we also share a terrific internal relationship and communication structure with each other. I've seen absolutely zero evidence of any malicious intent on anyone's side. We have regular meetings between Avid's engineers and those at Apple, BMD, AJA, and so on. All parties involved are all working together to discover/triage issues, and their respective managers are also doing so in a positive manner... saying things like, "...yes this is a priority for us..." and such. This is because we all know that the days are LONG GONE when editors and assistant editors had only one NLE's icon in their computer's dock. Every editor uses every app possible, and that's a healthy reflection of today's market. Plus, Avid and BMD have a good history of working together to make products (DNxIO, DNxIQ, and so on). In particular instances like this one, where a series of highly complex bugs needed to be fixed by a number of teams across many different companies, it simply took a great deal of coordination and time. The good news - and the evidence to prove what I'm saying - is that Avid and BMD have indeed worked together to fix this, and are very close to being able to release a fix. There's simply some quality control work being done to make sure that such a fix doesn't break something else (a concern that all parties are sharing and working on, diligently). 

Hope this helps. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

I know I have been probably the most vocal about this in the last few months. There is definiately a bug with audio scrubbing and IO. I have shared media with blackmagic and they have been able to reproduce the issues. Blackmagic is 100% working on a fix. 

Hi Chris,

I posted separately about it and emailed too, but feel like this thread is the right place to ask for a follow-up on the other IO problem -- AJA boxes are still not working with MC.  There is a buffer problem that results in stuttering picture.

Can you provide an update on the two cases MCDEV-17407 and MCCET-5232 please?

Thank you for the frank response, Chris.

kkordisch:

There is definiately a bug with audio scrubbing and IO. [...]. Blackmagic is 100% working on a fix. 

As far as I can tell from this thread, that is a separate bug. Digital Audio Scrubbing works great in 22.12 + BMD, and broken in 23.12.  (We just rolled back a station from 23.12 to 22.12 due to this.)  To me, Avid support said it's an Avid bug (open I/O) not BMD. But as a customer, if a bug has been successfully characterized and logged, my work is mostly done.

Ironically, before seeing this thread I grabbed an AJA Io XT on eBay for $100, because all our hardware here is BMD so I realized it'd be good to have an egg in another basket. Really the original impetus was Adobe-BMD interopability problems: 

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-discussions/unsupported-frame-sizes-set-to-scale-down-sends-2k-signal-instead-of-1080p/td-p/12924740

TBH this makes it seem like the Avid-BMD relationship is faring better...

binba:

TBH this makes it seem like the Avid-BMD relationship is faring better...

It's not a question of relationships being positive or negative, but rather just a whole different set of criteria, bugs, and items on a list to work through. It's scheduling, testing, communication, testing, qulity reviews, testing, syncing schedules between two companies, and oh did I mention testing? :)