Every week, Frame.io Insider asks one of our expert contributors to share a tip, tool, or technique that they use all the time and couldn’t live without. This week, Jack Brown shares how to rebuild your Media Composer profile.
Knowing how to rebuild Avid’s profile may be the most important tip for anyone who works with Avid Media Composer. Every time you update Media Composer, install on a new system or are facing buggy behavior you can’t explain, just rebuild your user settings.
Avid’s user profiles, while very helpful and customisable, are prone to corruption. Especially when moving between Avid versions. This is usually due to the code in the settings changing as new features are added and the settings of your old user profile not playing nice with those updates.
Avid did try to address this by adding an “update user profile” function to the user settings drop down menu, which is supposed to check for any conflicts between versions and resolve them. But it often fails, so I’ve never bothered with it. Personally I create a new user profile at the beginning of each project and name it after the version of Media Composer I’m using. For example my current user profile is “J Brown 2024.2”
Now I realize that many of us Avid users have very customized keyboards and this can be a chore to rebuild but there is a way to port settings from an old user into the new one. Here’s how:
- Open up your settings window and go to the user tab
- Go to File->Open Setting File (Cmd/Ctrl+O)
- Navigate to where your old settings are stored. (If you can’t find them you could export your old setting to your desktop before doing this part.)
- Go into the old settings, select the XML file and hit Open.
Now you’ll see two settings windows. One showing the settings of the old user profile and one of the new/currently opened user profile. You can drag and drop settings between these to recover customized items from your old profile. One note of warning—only use this to restore things like keyboards and bin layouts. Doing this with other settings can cause the very corruption you’re trying to avoid as the other settings are often updated and changed between versions of Media Composer.
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