• Blackmagic Design

  Media Composer Mac and BlackMagic Multibridge–monitor freezes–any ideas?

  Posted by Steve Tomich on December 18, 2012 at 9:52 pm

  I’ve been putting up with this problem for months, and haven’t found any solution, or any cause, really, for it.

  I’m running Media Composer 6.5 on a Mac with Lion OS on Facilis shared storage. I swear this problem didn’t show up with the earliest “open-hardware” Avid 6.x software, but maybe it was obscured by other early bugginess. At any rate, my source-record monitors freeze up on a daily basis. Load a clip into them, and the previous clip is still displayed. Shuttle or jog–no movement of picture, just frozen. Play the clip, and the monitor will play correctly. This happens in every workspace (Source-Record, Capture, Effects, etc.), and in every format (HD or SD) Customizing or reverting to default workspace settings–no solution. The external HD monitor updates fine, always. I’ve been able to work around this by nuking my MCState file and relaunching Avid. At some point, though, whether it’s minutes or hours, the freeze-up returns. Agh!

  I’m addressing this to the Blackmagic forum because our Avid rep insists that the scores of other installations with either Avid or Aja hardware never have this issue. No info on the Avid forums (forae?) either, that I’ve found.

  So, anybody else out there having these problems?

  BTW, I have gone through the BlackMagic setup and have always loaded the latest drivers, but still, no improvement.

  Any suggestions welcome!

  Steve Tomich
  KGO-TV, San Francisco

  Steve Tomich replied 13 years, 4 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Keith Mottram

  December 20, 2012 at 5:13 pm

  yes same problem here, 10.7.5 with latest BM drivers- my comp is a quad 3 tower with a hdpro pcie. I continuously get problems with my main viewer, oddly the correct picture can be seen on my broadcast monitor. when i press play it’s fine, but nudging frame by frame i not only get freezing but sometimes other clips showing. if it wasn’t such a pain i’d downgrade to mc6.

  keith mottram

  london
• 

  Steve Tomich

  January 14, 2013 at 10:00 pm

  Thanks for your note, Keith. At least someone else out there has some similar issues, so I’m not completely mad. Anyway, here’s the latest: After some very timely back and forth with Blackmagic support, their rap is that the Mac graphics card (ATI Radeon 5770, 1GB RAM) draws the video onto the Apple Cinema display, and since the video output (which is definitely the BM card, of course) is fine, then maybe it’s not the Blackmagic card after all.

  To BM Support’s credit, we did go over drivers, other apps that might conflict, etc. The tech I worked with was very helpful. For a while it looked like the onboard Matrox CompressHD board might be the culprit, but no.

  So, we’re still where we left off, in terms of frozen monitors. This does happen in multiple rooms, with the same shared footage, the same rev of Avid, the same kind of CPU/gfx card/BM hardware, so I just don’t know what could be causing the problem. Anyone else have issues with Radeon 5770 cards in a Mac running Avid?

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