Avid Tips:
Essential Stuff for Your Avid Tool Kit
by John Venzon
SECTIONS:
This month's tip has a little something for everyone: suggestions on Mac utilities and a special note for those users of Avids with PCI slots. More on that later.
As every assistant knows, part of what you take from show to show is a little toolbox, usually red, that has the basic tools you need to take apart, pry and coax that flatbed, bench or upright into shape. With the advent of the Avid (I've been wanting to use that in a sentence for quite some time...) this toolbox has expanded to include a box of floppy disks full of software to keep the Avid up and running. I am excluding such mainstays as Avid Drive Utility, Avid Log Exchange and Disk First Aid, as they are usually included on the Avid. It's not a bad idea to make backup copies of these programs to your own floppies, just in case. In fact you should go do that right now. Go on, we'll wait.
If the software is available on the internet, I am including the internet address to get it. You can use your web browser of choice to go pluck these goodies from out of the ether. If you try to download these programs and the server tells you that it's busy, try again later. Most FTP sites only allow 100 people logged on at a time.
This wonderful program rebuilds the desktop on any of the drives that you have mounted. For those of you who might not be familiar with this mystery 'desktop,' it is an invisible file that lives on each and every hard drive that you own. It tells the Mac what is on the drive, what the icons are supposed to look like and what programs run which types of documents. If you've ever double-clicked on a letter that you typed in Word only to get the dialog box telling you that it can't find the program that created it, chances are you need to rebuild that drive's desktop. TechTool allows you to be selective about which drives you want to rebuild and the program creators say it does so more thoroughly than pressing option-command at startup. TechTool will also zap your PRAM, which is something that Avid tech support will tell you to do every time you call them. The program will also scan your system folder and check if anything is damaged. It has saved me having to reinstall the system software so many times that I've lost count. Those of you who already know about TechTool, version 1.1.2 is the most recent, the most stable and, perhaps most important, has the coolest graphics.
Friend, how many times has this happened to you? You are working along without a care in the world when suddenly the Avid locks up with the dreaded error message and gives you the code ID=04. ID=04? It sounds familiar, but you are sickened when you realize that it's only because it was the name of the movie you rented the night before. Well friend, if you had the amazing Chiron v2.4 you'd know that the error message ID=04 is a 'Zero Divide Error' which is when the Macintosh tries to divide any number by zero. Neat, huh? The Chiron program is in the form of an 'online' book that lists just about every error number the Mac can spit out at you. If it's a common error message it helps explain what might have caused the message, and from there you can locate the trouble. Even when it doesn't offer help, at least you can tell everyone looking over your shoulder "Oh yeah, error ID=04. Those usually happen when the programmer inserts a number divided by zero as a break point to help in debugging. It looks like they forgot to take it out." After the Avid is back up and running, you will be hoisted on the shoulders of your co-workers and carried around the cutting room. Just don't use that little ID4 joke when it happens. Trust me on this one...
This program has but one purpose in life, to tell you what the memory configuration in your Mac is, what the maximum amount of RAM you can add is, and other vital info about your system. You have the folks at Newer Technology, a RAM chip maker, to thank for this program. This makes it the only useful piece of propaganda to ever come out of the computer industry. You can use it when it comes time to add more memory, telling you what size and type to add. Besides that you can use it to find out if you have an L2 cache, or for those private moments when you want to know how much VRAM you have installed.
Sure, I know what you are going to say, "But John, I already have a copy of Norton!" What I am suggesting is that you actually go out and BUY a copy of Norton 3.2. Not only does this give you the manual, which is chock full of tips on keeping your hard drive healthy, but you also get the warm and fuzzy feeling of knowing that you are giving money towards the cause of making the program better. That and the fact that it comes with a floppy disk that will boot your Avid if the hard drive ever crashes. Paranoid enough? How about access to the Norton/Symantec tech support hotline? Each time I've called it I was helped in less than 5 minutes. I can't say the same for other tech support lines for companies that begin with the letter 'A'. You still might be wondering why I suggested buying a copy of Norton. If your Avid is on a Powermac 9500 and you use MediaShare it is a must.
In Media Composer 6.1.2 and MScanner PCI there is a bug that causes the directories on your media drives to corrupt over time. Avid is aware of this and they are hard at work fixing it. If you use a Powermac 9500, but are not using the MediaShare system or are on a NuBus Avid (Quadras, Powermac 8100 or A.M.P.), you won't be affected by this bug. The only way around it, at the moment, is to run Norton on every drive, every day. If you don't, the drive will get worse and worse until it crashes, refusing to mount. Keep in touch with your Avid service provider to find out when they are releasing the fixed version. Don't let this happen to you!
Norton Utilities is available for about $95 from MacMall/Creative Computers and other stores and mail order suppliers.
Reprinted from
The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter
Vol. 18, No. 1 - Jan/Feb 1997