Mysterious AVID issue knocks out trash can Mac Pros across Hollywood

Apple's Mac Pro was released on December 19, 2013
Apple’s Mac Pro was released on December 19, 2013 and never updated

Janko Roettgers for Variety:

Film and TV editors across Los Angeles were sweating Monday evening as their workstations were refusing to reboot…

Social media reports suggested that the issue was widespread among users of Mac Pro computers running older versions of Apple’s operating system as well as AVID’s Media Composer software.

https://twitter.com/mattpenndotcom/status/1176355775096205313

Some analysis by affected users seemed to suggest that the outage… [is caused] by a recent software update that may have corrupted some data, with some suggesting a OS X reinstall that keeps the existing data to restart the machine. Either way, it’s a good idea for anyone running AVID software on a Mac to back up all data right away.

Ben Lovejoy for 9to5Mac:

There are mixed messages about the variables involved, but there are reports of macOS 10.11 to 10.14 inclusive being affected… Isolated reports suggest machines are “slowly crashing,” but most seem to be referring to reboot failures on startup or after a deliberate restart. This suggests that most people can avoid the problem by not shutting down or restarting machines.

The advice for anyone using Mac Pros running Avid is to do an immediate backup to protect your work, and not shut down/restart until more is known.

MacDailyNews Take: Back up and hold on as we’re fairly sure Apple and AVID are aware and already working on an issue as pressing as this.

5 Comments

  1. This is good info. Avid tends to have memory leaks, and when I worked on shows, I’d do a reboot anytime I took a break. BTW, working on a Symphony on atrashcan Avid was one of life’s great pleasures…smooth as silk.

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