X-Marco_Chainho
Imported Account
May 29, 2001, 9:17 PM
Post #1 of 5
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AVOID THE WORTHLESS AVIO
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Hello, I am a "Casablanca I" user since January of 1998 (I own a video production company in Alenquer – Portugal) and I have been very happy with it almost from the beginning. In those days (early 1998) Casablanca was not a very reliable machine because it had some bugs that could provoke system crashes, sometimes leading to the loss of many hours, days or even weeks of hard work. But then came the software upgrades that made the original Casablanca “solid as a rock” V2.7.3 (1998), V3.0.8 (1999 – with Heimdall support) and more recently the V 3.1 (2000).
My problems with Macrosystem began when I bought an AVIO in May of 2000 that came with lots of major bugs (with the software 1.0 it was difficult to find something that worked properly!). Before buying I only tested it for 5 minutes because I was so pleased with the original Casablanca that I thought AVIO would be (at least) as good as it’s predecessor... but it was not!
AVIO was released in the first quarter of 2000 and we are almost at the end of the second quarter of 2001 and it still has lots of problems. I have upgraded my AVIO to 64 MB of RAM and correctly installed (I did not use the update option) the newest software upgrade the 1.4b (PAL).
I agree with everything Mr. M. J. Wise said in his message AVIO=JUNK because my AVIO has all those problems and more (the AVIO is unworthy of bearing the name Casablanca). Just a SHORT list of the many problems:
- Scenes still get corrupted making the machine stop during playback of a finished project (I’ve spent countless hours struggling with it just to record my work to tape).
- AVIO still drops frames when digitising footage trough the Y/C input.
- In the edit screen the “substitute” button still malfunctions when attempting to replace an insert.
- Sometimes scenes in the scene bin still show a misleading first frame (a frame that has nothing to do with actual scene, usually with stills), increasing the difficulty of identifying scenes.
- Now the green line moved from the top to the bottom of the screen (does Macrosystem think that PAL users are stupid, or what?) and some of the transitions also bring it to a more visible area.
- Now it often crashes when rendering audio (with the last unrecoverable error the entire storyboard – 300 scenes! - lost audio synchronisation and got full of audio beeps)
- Now the split function does not work has it should when splitting an already trimmed scene or sample (to free HD space); If we only generate one new scene or sample it does not discard the unwanted (trimmed) footage.
- Now we cannot use real-time transitions with video inserts (maybe we should go back to the Stone Age?)
- Now we cannot use the audio fades of the “camera track”.
- Now when just making a small adjustment of the “fade in” or “fade out” of an audio sample we have to re-render the whole sample again (a sample could have 30 minutes length or more...).
- Now, If at least one of the scenes is an insert we cannot watch (from the transitions screen) how scenes without effects (hard-cuts) “glue” together. It just does not work!
- Now the effect “Página batida” (Portuguese) does not work well.
My patience is exhausted and I think that Macrosystem does not give a darn if their clients spend countless hours trying to deal with the many problems their second generation editors have. If they did, they wouldn’t sell them until they were sure the editors would not malfunction because of software problems. I am really disappointed. 13 months of continuos malfunctions is enough. I am really fed up with this worthless AVIO. I will keep the fantastic “Casablanca I” but I will certainly not buy anything else from Macrosystem.
Best regards to all you Casablanca users.
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