Anyone with a real stable Decklink Windows system?

[Jeff Anderson]

Our editing system has been stable with the v5.2.2 driver. We have not experienced the problems that you have been reporting. Maybe it is due to the hardware you are using; ie, MB, raid card or other PCI cards. We are going to try the latest driver this week. I’ll report if we encounter any problems.

Jeff Anderson

MB – Supermicro P4SCT+II
CPU – P4 3.4
RAM – 2GB
OS – Win XP SP2
Video – 128MB Matrox Parhelia with dual LCD monitors
Boot HDD – WD 7200 RPM
Video array – Stripe set of 4 x 250 GB SATA HDD with Promise FastTrak S150 SX4 RAID controller
Video Capture – Decklink Extreme v5.2.2
Video Editor – Adobe Premiere v1.5

[Shane Chadder]

Thanks Jeff

Can you do me a favour and see if you can use project manager to create a trimmed project? That crashes every time for me unless I use version 5.1.2 or 5.1.1.

Shane

[Scott Brown]

Hi Golf Guy

I agree that Matrox are charging a premium price for their Axio system and it is perhaps too early to judge if this is worth the price.

We used a Matrox Digisuite / Speed Razor combo for several years back in the days when the only other option for us was to go the AVID route and fork out BIG bucks! After the downfall of In Sync, we made our decision to move to MAC, based on the quality of the Final Cut Pro software – at that time Adobe Premiere was still considered a semi-pro application. The other reason we switched to Apple was the availability of the Decklink card (MAC only at that time).

Like you I had never been a fan of MAC’s, however now I love them and find moving back over to PC’s a real pain.

Moving a little off -topic, I note that you work in golf production. Golf makes up around 75% of our output, so perhaps we should have a chat at some point. We’ve just completed a 7 x 30 Scottish golf series on Digibeta and we’re currently working on a ten part international golf travel series that we’re shooting in HD.

Best wishes

Scott

[David Braswell]

We have recently (within last week) built an XP based DL SP system. We followed the recommended specs to the letter. Bernardo, I feel I should point out that your motherboard is not listed as a tested, acceptable board to use with the Decklink series of cards.

Now, we’re having a frame dropping issue that we’re trying to sort out. Just goes to show that there are no guarantees. But I think starting with approved components is absolutely necessary. That way the variances between systems is reduced somewhat. That is an area where Mac has a definite advantage. And I don’t want to move back to the Apple platform!

[Shane Chadder]

Maverick

If you “think” you have a stable system here is a quick test. Try the following.

In Premiere open an existing project with a timeline and try – Project/Project Manager/create trimmed project. With 8 bit NTSC sources my error is “There was a problem copying or trimming the following file….” With DV sources it will crash after 5 or 10 minutes of rendering with the famous “Sorry, a serious error has occurred that requires Adobe Premiere to shut down….”

Do you get the error? If not I’ll keep rebuilding our systems and assume it is me.

On my system I’ve tracked this down to the “BMDimporter.prm” plug in. If I remove it the render will run, but I wouldn’t want to try editing without the plug in or something might be corrupted.

I built our systems with approved bits as well. Day to day editing is fine, but try and build a trimmed project or do a long render and down it crashes.

Shane

[Alan Hunter]

Scott,

I fullyt agree with you, if you go the MAC route the road has a tendency to be a bit less bumpy, but like one of my favorite groups just to sing; You Can’t Horses In The Middle of The Stream. Thus I feel stuck after my most recent investment into a unit to stay with PC. As far as what we do; we produce a weekly golf show seen in more than 20-million homes around the US. We are just finishing up our second year and within several months we will open an office in North Carolina. Our original office is in Scottsdale.

my e-mail; alan@tvgolfshow.com

[Alan Hunter]

Scott,

I fullyt agree with you, if you go the MAC route the road has a tendency to be a bit less bumpy, but like one of my favorite groups just to sing; You Can’t Horses In The Middle of The Stream. Thus I feel stuck after my most recent investment into a unit to stay with PC. As far as what we do; we produce a weekly golf show seen in more than 20-million homes around the US. We are just finishing up our second year and within several months we will open an office in North Carolina. Our original office is in Scottsdale.

my e-mail; alan@tvgolfshow.com

[Geoff Gartside]

Hi Maverick,

I’m a little confused about your comment that Bernados’ system is not certified.

I too have a P5WD2 MB with P830 proc. It is a certified system for DL Extreme PCI-E cards, written up in the BM windows system descriptions.

Can you expand..

Geoff Gartside.

[David Braswell]

Redactions & apologies here. I missed the “Dual Core Systems” specs the first time I read through BM’s support page. We’re only using the SP card on a SuperMicro board. I stand corrected 🙂

[Jeff Anderson]

I use the Project Manager to trim projects on a regular basis and have not encountered any problems with our PC crashing. Although, I did have one project that became corrupted and sometime crashed when opening. It was a monthly show that I trimmmed each month and then reused the project. This was done to save time because the project had all of the elements; i.e., graphics, wave files and animations needed. I resolved the problem by creating a new project and importing my elements again. Since I’ve done that there has been no problems.