If you have an Avid question but not Avid Assurance and therefore Romania won't take your call, you might have to dig for the answer at Avid's Knowledge Base, a.k.a. KB. The KB can in fact be a treasure chest of most useful information, but it may prove to be excessively difficult to find its key. One of the main reasons so many have little luck finding answers in KB is actually not ever improving but still inadequate search technology but the human factor. Here's a case in point.
Not so long ago I was dealing with a weird Media Composer booting problem. The xw8600 was cold booting just fine but on a restart would hang in POST with forever blinking cursor. But if you disconnect the Nitris DX box - all is fine. Long troubleshooting story short, this turned out to be a problem with BIOS settings. Specifically, if SATA Emulation is set for any kind of IDE, you'll have the problem, if it is in default RAID+AHSI, you'll be fine. Why would you ever want to change that? Well, to ghost the system, for one.
Obviously this particular problem is limited to
- Nitris DX hardware
- xw8600 CPU
- Windows
There is an article on the Avid's Knowledge Base about this very problem right here. That's great. But let's take a look at the Details for this entry. If you unfold the Details button in that article, you'll see the list of affected products. Let's go down this list and find Symphony Nitris, Symphony Meridien, Media Composer Adrenaline DNxcel, Media Composer Adrenaline, Media Composer Mojo SDI, Media Composer Mojo, Media Composer (software), Media Composer (Meridien), Film Composer, Avid DS Nitris, Avid DS Dual Link, NewsCutter Adrenaline, NewsCutter Mojo SDI, NewsCutter Mojo, NewsCutter (software), NewsCutter XP, NewsCutter (Meridien), NewsCutter Mac, NewsCutter FX, News Station, Media Station. None of these would ever have even a chance to experience this problem.
Evidently whoever created the article just dumped all the platforms into this issue without giving their relevance any thought. Now this article may be included in searches for all these platforms producing irrelevant search results. The user will end up sifting through pages of unnecessary information not unlike a gold panner.
Any database is only as good as the data in it. Avid may spend thousands upon thousands of dollars improving the search engine, but it will all be easily negated by the sloppy data entry - the human factor of not caring enough.
