AJA Io Final Cut 5, Dropping Frames

[Marcray]

I too am having this same problem but with a macbook using an extermal sata enclosure with 2 drives. My system benchmarks at 120MB but still drops frames.

[Jus10case]

I talked with a guy at AJA today, and he wants to think that it’s just physically something about the drives causing it. I’m not so sure I buy into that though since they are the same brand/speed as my 200GB single drive, that tests at like 40MB/sec and captures perfectly at 10bit uncompressed. And yet I have seen stranger. 🙂

[Tony! Hulette]

My first thought is that you need to make sure you format the drives as “Mac OS Extended” not “Mac OS Extended Journaled”

Next, I would follow the recommendations of AJA as follows:

Q: I

[Jus10case]

Yea I DID have them as Journaled before (and my 200GB drive that works perfectly is currenlty Journaled) but I did correct that the other day per the AJA “support” site, as well as try several other of their suggestions. I was on the phone with a tech person at AJA today, and they actually pointed me to this site as a place to see if anyone had any suggestions on ways to fix it.

[Marcray]

Tony,

I have gone through all the reccomendations aja has to offer including calling tech support. Also the drives are not journled but just formatted Mac OS Extended. I think I forgot to mention but the problem only seems to be during capture as I can playback from the timeline fine. I just ran another benchmark using the Kona test suite and it does show some fluctuations down to 80mb per second during write tests. Do you think 2 striped sata drives should work if I put this on a g5? I do not have a sata card in my g5 so I would need to purchase one, but hate to put any more money into the situation if I am not at least somewhat sure it will work:) Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Marc

[Marcray]

Which program are you using to benchmark the drives? If you are using the kona test suite you may want to check the graph for random drops in the write speed.

Marc

[Bob Zelin]

you have not said what resolution you are working at – DV25, or 10 bit uncompressed SDI – or something in between ? If you are using 8 and 10 bit SDI uncompressed, or DVCProHD, you will never get reliable results with one single drive. I urge you to use an external SATA host controller card (like the firmtek or Sonnet), and TWO SATA drives that are stripped togeher RAID 0. You will easily get 120mb/sec speeds, which will do 8 and 10 bit SDI uncomrpessed with no dropped frames. One SATA drive will do nothing for you reliably.

Bob Zelin

[Jus10case]

I was trying 10bit uncompressed from the DigiBeta. I have a firmtek internal SATA card with two 500GB Seagate drives Stipped Raid 0. It’s a kit from Transintl.com that allows you to mount up to 3 more internal drives in the G5’s. It’s avg around 100mb/sec according to the kona test thing from aja. I also looked at the graph and text from that test and it does slighly fluctuate, but never more than 10mb/sec or so.

[Jus10case]

The other strange thing about it, is that I can move the media from my 200GB single drive to the two raid 0 500GB drives and edit 10bit uncompressed with no frame drops at all, but still it drops during capture.

[Bob Zelin]

just10case writes –
The other strange thing about it, is that I can move the media from my 200GB single drive to the two raid 0 500GB drives and edit 10bit uncompressed with no frame drops at all, but still it drops during capture

REPLY – this is not strange. when you move media onto your 500 gig drives, the READ SPEED is faster than the WRITE SPEED. If you simply run AJA Kona System test, you will see that the read speed of your 500 Gig drives is faster than the write speed (it’s all right in front of you on the display). If you would like to persue this further, please list EXACTLY what SATA host card you have, and EXACTLY what SATA drives you are using.
I find it very hard to believe that you are able to CONSISTANTLY do an entire editing job at 10 bit uncompressed SDI off of one single 200 Gig drive. There is a big difference between doing a simple capture and playback, and actually editing, and asking the drive to search all over the place for material.

Bob Zelin