Installing Avid Media Composer 2023.3: Overcoming Common Issues

As a professional editor, I recently experienced difficulties getting Avid Media Composer to work properly on my new Mac Studio Max M1 with a Blackmagic UltraStudio 4K Mini. Despite starting a support ticket, I never received a response from the team. After some trial and error, I managed to resolve the issue by returning the M1 and upgrading to an M2.

However, I still encountered problems when working with high-bitrate files. Specifically, I noticed a dramatic drop in bitrate when importing 10-bit files into Media Composer. The bitrate displayed in MediaInfo also showed a significant reduction, which led me to suspect that something was amiss.

After conducting some tests, I discovered that the issue was not unique to my system. On multiple other systems running Avid Media Composer 2021.9, I reproduced the problem with ease. It seemed that the software was incorrectly interpreting the file size and bitrate of ProResHQ files.

To resolve this issue, I began by exporting a DNxHD HQX file from Media Composer and sending it to other encoders (Vantage) to produce a ProResHQ file. To my surprise, all of these encoders produced smaller file sizes, which suggested that the problem lay not with the encoding process itself but rather with Avid Media Composer's handling of ProResHQ files.

I then tried importing the same source file as ProResHQ media into Media Composer and exporting it again as ProResHQ. The resulting file size was approximately 87Gb, which was significantly smaller than the original file size. This led me to suspect that Avid Media Composer was somehow compressing or downsampling the video data.

To further investigate this issue, I imported a ProResHQ source file into Media Composer as DNxHQX media and exported it again as ProResHQ. The resulting file size was approximately 132Gb, which was closer to the original file size but still significantly smaller than expected.

Overall, my experience installing Avid Media Composer 2023.3 has been frustrating, to say the least. While I have managed to resolve some of the issues I encountered, others remain stubbornly persistent. I hope that future updates will address these problems and provide a more seamless editing experience for users like myself.

Instal Avid Media Composer 2023.3