AJA Kona LHI & Native XDCAM Ex

[Arnie Schlissel]

[Akbar Ukani] “I went with the MXO2 and I constantly kept getting dropped frames with native 720p60 footage during playback on my Plasma HDTV”

Dropped frames have absolutely nothing, nada, zilch, to do with your capture card. Dropped frames are completely, 100% the result of your drives not being able to play the material back fast enough. Get a decent drive system and you will not have dropped frames.

Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/

[Akbar Ukani]

I understand that; however I am not a 100% convinced that it could be the hard drives because the same footage plays fine if I am not monitoring it on the plasma hdtv. In addition, if it were the drives then it really shouldn’t affect my computer RAM to the point where it becomes sluggish all over where it would require a complete reboot

In addition, the hard drives I have are hitachi deskstar 7200 rpm and they are nowhere near full.

Can you please explain? and if possible address my initial question about Kona LHI and XDCam EX? Thank you for your help

[Gary Adcock]

[Akbar Ukani] “I asked an AJA rep whether the LHI card can assist me in monitoring NATIVE XDcam footage from my FCP timeline and here is the answer I recieved…and I quote”

Akbar.
Unless I am mistaken, that was not an AJA rep, but a sales person from a dealer. None of the Aja Reps I know would answer that way. ( May I ask where this question was asked?)

The Answer… “”All AJA cards accept UNCOMPRESSED video only and output the same. When working in the XDCam codec with FCP I am not aware of there being any complaints about dropped frames.”

is partially correct- Aja does output uncompressed video from all of its products. but card based tools from AJA offer you the full power of the desktop without sacrifice. YES with a Kona LH card your Xdcam footage can be handled to the full power of your computer.

Please note that dropped video frames are an issue with Drives/ storage not being fast enough.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows

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[Jeremy Garchow]

[Arnie Schlissel] “Dropped frames have absolutely nothing, nada, zilch, to do with your capture card. Dropped frames are completely, 100% the result of your drives not being able to play the material back fast enough. Get a decent drive system and you will not have dropped frames.”

I have to disagree here. WHile yes, that is mostly true, if your capture card can’t buffer the video fast enough due to having to process/decompress/transcode the video in real time, you might get dropped frames. If your capture card is in the incorrect output format that does not match your timeline, you can get dropped frames. While disk speed has a lot to do with it, it’s not 100% the reason for dropped frames.

[Akbar Ukani]

Hey Gary,

I appreciate you taking the time to clarify things for me. I eventually called AJA tech support; however I was transferred to some voice mail. Thereafter, I decided to use their support system via the website. I got the response via the support system.

As far as the dropped frames, I would think that the matrox mxo2 which I had purchased (now going back) should playback video on my plasma tv without any problems considering the following settings

1. Dedicated Video Hard Drive for A/V only (hitachi deskstar 7200rpm SATAII)
2. Mac Pro 2.66Ghz x 2 with 8Gb of RAM
3. Sequence settings: XDCam 720p60 VBR 35Mbits/sec
4. RT Settings: Dynamic
5. Video Playback Output Setting in FCP: Matrox MXO2 720p59.94 YUV 10-Bit 1280×720
6. Mirror on Desktop Turned OFF

Any suggestions as to why I was getting dropped frames constantly. Also, in all instances with the dropped frames, I would notice that I would only have about 200-250mb of RAM free. I would have to reboot the machine and the problem would go away until I started monitoring footage again via FCP

[Shane Ross]

Whenever you send a signal out thru a video card to a monitor, it takes a tad more system resources. Be it the MXO2 or Kona 3…you can have dropped frames while playing back thru the card, but not when the card is off. This is ESPECIALLY true with the GOP formats like HDV and XDCAM. They take a lot of system resources as it is.

I had the same issue when working with HDV on my Kona 3. But then I captured everything as ProRes and the issue went away.

The solution? Faster drives…as mentioned…and get out of the GOP format. Working NATIVE XDCAM is overrated, especially given the workflow you will have of delivering a DVD.

Shane

GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def

[Keith Pratt]

Can’t FCP only address 4GB of RAM? What other software do you have running?

[Akbar Ukani]

When you put it this way then shoot it makes sense…I never tried converting the clips to ProRes to see what would happen…I guess I got way too caught up with the fact that it might be something wrong with the I/O box…besides Matrox says it on their website that you would be able to monitor native xdcam footage without dropped frames…I guess as a consumer I am not entitled to hold Matrox for everything they say about their product =)…j/k but thank you for your insight..I have already shipped the MXO2 back to B&H and I have decided to go with AJA being that it is so popular

BTW…as far as faster drives, the only option I can think of is to have a hardware raid controller on my mac….Therefore, with AJA LHI using PCI-Express slot 3 (x4) can you recommend any hardware raid controllers that would utilize the PCI-Express Slot 4 (x4)?

[Akbar Ukani]

You are right, FCP can only utilize upto 4GB of RAM, but I kid you not when I looked at the activity monitor on my mac pro, it showed i had approximately 200-250mb of Free Memory and almost 60%-70% of the total memory was “wired” (atleast thats what the pie chart showed)…I can’t recall the exact figure…the rest of it was either “active” or “inactive”

[Arnie Schlissel]

[Akbar Ukani] “BTW…as far as faster drives, the only option I can think of is to have a hardware raid controller on my mac….”

Either an Areca 1600 series card, or an Atto R380 series card. Both are SAS controllers with hardware RAID right on the card. They will outperform most other host cards for direct attached storage.

Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/