Sluggishness or Errors After New Media Deliveries

If your workstation is sluggish after a new delivery of material, there's a good change Avid's phonetic indexer is to blame.  The indexer powers Phrasefind is an often overlooked and unused feature of Avid Media Composer Ultimate. To be clear, Phrasefind is not associated with the beloved ScriptSync. When media is added to a project, Phrasefind silently scans the audio and builds an index of sounds that is later searchable phonetically via a special button in the Find window. Here’s how Avid’s blog describes Phrasefind’s use: 

To really get good at PhraseFind, you’ll need to start thinking phonetically. Let me rephrase… You’ll need to start thinking “fun net tick lee”. If you don’t, you’ll actually be capping your chances of getting good responses. For example, search for the abbreviation for Los Angeles by typing “L.A.”, and then search for “el lay” or “elle ay” or “L A” with spaces and without the punctuation. PhraseFind will give you better results if you think like a microphone, not like a dictionary.” 

If you’re great at Mad Gab, Phrasefind may be your ace in the hole for frankenbites. If you don't use it however, the background indexing it requires may negatively impact your workstation's performance every time new media is added to your project. Worse yet, if phrasefind's background indexer crashes the, “InitPhoneticIndexDone: GetResult() failed” error message may appear (If you see that error, contact support.)

If you don't use Phrasefind and your team is working in the post-redesign Avid, you may now turn off phonetic indexing for maximum performance. To do so, follow theses steps in each project you regularly work in:

1. Open the find tool via the Edit menu > Find
2. Click the gear icon in the bottom left side of the window
3. Press the Stop Phonetic Indexing button
4. (Optionally, if the search data directory is listed as Default, use the drop down menu to switch it to Local Default and confirm the change in the dialog box that follows it)