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AJA killing my system… and me.
Hello,
I just got the AJA card, installed and running but i have questions as to what type of performance i should be experiencing as opposed to what I’m getting.
I understand about the increased time to open a project in Premiere 2.0, but once in if I happen to ALT-Tab to another program, then ALT-Tab back into Premiere it takes a good 5 to 10 minutes before i can do anything. Not too mention that my premiere has crashed more times than i can count since i began using the card.
I’m pumped about the potential of this card but am experiencing nothing but headaches in performance. I am thinking its a memory problem but before I go get another 2 GIGs of RAM, I’d like to know that that’ll solve the issues.
Current system: (and i know its not a BOXX or HP but i was told by AJA that it wouldn’t matter)
Windows XP service pack 2
Intel Xeon 3.06GHz
2GB RAM
300GB RAID Drive @ 7200RPMAny help or insight would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks a lot,
A.J.
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25 Replies
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Is that 2X Xeons? Even if it is 2X Xeons I think that the 800FSB are not up to it or barely adequate. You should be using Woodcrests.
Also, have you got a Quadro FX card? That is a requirement. -
When you talk about Alt-tabbing between apps, are these apps often Photoshop and AE?
TimK,
Director,
Kolb Productions,Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net -
I can be alt-tab-ing between anything and it just seems to grind to a halt. I try to not work with more than one adobe app at a time just because of the memory usage they take up. Another example is that i accidentally hit the windows key on my keyboard to initiate the start pop up menu and without any other programs running it still took about minutes to get back to Premiere.
Thanks to both responses so far…
AJ
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Hmmm… Interesting.
Can you describe your system in more detail?
Configuration?
Other software/hardware?
TimK,
Director,
Kolb Productions,Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net -
I had the same exact problem! Just clicking on the Start menu will also do the same thing, causes PPro to just sit there forever.
I haven’t fully tested it yet by doing a full project, but I removed a Soundblaster Audigy 2ZS card that was on the same PCI bus as the Aja card and my preliminary tests show the problem went away. I discovered there were problems when I replaced that sound card (yay no more Avid on this system!) with a USB/Firewire card in the same slot. The machine wouldn’t boot due to conflicts between the USB card and the Aja card.
The problem was so bad, I had to move my current project to another computer and work on it with an Adobe HDV preset. The problem put me so far behind schedule, I need to finish the project before doing further testing to see if I really did fix it.
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i have the same problems, however, i think it is our fault because we are not sticking to the required hardware for the Aja card, ie. the xeons, dual opterons, proper mobo, and the quadro, as well as raid requirements.
I have had nothing but crashes int he oddest times, slow alt tabbing, etc. but my specs are:
opteron 170, asus a8n sli, 1.34tb raid 0 (media drive), 400gb raid 0 (system os drive), both raids are on 7200rpm drives, ati 1900xt..
I think the best solution is to stick to aja’s recommended specs
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I got a little excited about the possibility of moving my RAID card being a possible solution… but it just took about 15 minutes for a 3.7MB project file to open.
While typing this, I just tried to switch back to Premiere and my computer is reeeeaally chugging now. Extremely frustrating. According to my IT guy and from what I can tell, my specs match up and everything should be working properly. I really don’t understand what’s happening and what’s more frustrating is that i haven’t used an AJA set up before so I don’t know what I should be experiencing.
Tim, my IT guy is gone for the day and without ripping open my machine, I can’t give you a detailed tech spec. I will try to post that tomorrow.
Thanks again for people throwing in their 2 cents…
AJ
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I am running the same motherboard as the approved HP xw8200. I am also running dual Xeon 3.6 800 MHz FSB CPUs on the motherboard (the approved list has 3.2 800 MHz FSB, but I seriously doubt having .4 more speed on the CPUs is an issue). So for all intents and purposes I’m running the equivalent of the HP xw8200 that is listed on the system requirements document.
Before I bought the card, I sent my machine specifications to Aja and their technical department gave me the thumbs up. More than one person at Aja has assured me that their card should work fine with my system.
I’ll know if the issue has been resolved soon, when I start a new project on the machine though, but like I said, my initial tests look good.
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Well… i know that my big new 3+ TB RAID is sitting until we figure out how to free up a PCIe slot for the controller because my Xena LH is in a PCIx slot and my storage guys tell me that having the video I/O card and the drive controller in the same set of slots is bad mojo…
It’s a possibility…
TimK,
Director,
Kolb Productions,Creative Cow Host,
Author/Trainer
http://www.focalpress.com
http://www.classondemand.net -
one of the requirements of hi end capture cards, and hi end storage is having 2 seperate busses. The HP xw8200 (for example) use slot 1, 2 and 3 as one buss (that is shared with the firewire buss), and slot 4 and 5 for your storage devices. If you are running an AVID Adrenaline (for example) that uses the firewire port, and stick a card into slots 1 or 2, EVERYTHING STOPS WORKING. Any storage card must be in a seperate buss – slots 4 or 5.
This certainly applies to the MAC’s. If you have a Mac dual 2.7 or MAC Quad (for example), slots 2 and 3 are on one buss, and slot 4 is on another buss. If you put the AJA card in slot 2 and the storage card in slot 3, you will have nothing but problems. Something must be in slot 4. (MAC Pro’s are dynamically assigned, so they do not suffer this issue).
Another great example that happened to me recently was at an AVID client on an HP xw8200, that was also running Pro Tools LE with an M-Box. They wanted to put the M-Box on another computer, and had about 20 DELL computers in their office. We tried FIVE DIFFERENT DELLS, and could never get the Pro Tools LE software runing on the DELL – even thought the M-Box just used the USB port for the interface, it conflicted with the hardware !
Moral of all of this – USE THE RECOMMENDED HARDWARE.
I always point out to people, that when you go to a trade show, and you pass the AJA booth, the Blackmagic Booth, the Adobe booth, and the AVID booth – they are all using HP xw series workstations.
Bob Zelin
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