FCP Playback Problem

[John Pale]

Seems like your systems should be fast enough for this type of work. You should check with Blackmagic about PCI slot order. With my Aurora Igniter system years ago, if I put the SCSI card ahead of the Igniter card it would rob PCI bandwith causing dropped frames. Don’t know if the Decklink card, I assume you are using, has any such restrictions.

[Dave Martin]

What kind of video drive do you have?

Tim Martin – MacBook Pro – 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo – 2 gig Ram -FCP Studio 5.1 -Lacie D2 dv external drive

[Nook Kim]

Pelda033,
Just wonder what data rate the Blackmagic 8 bit compression uses. If your video is compressed with too high data rate, FCP won’t be able to play it real time. I just haven’t used that compression type, yet, so it’s hard to be certain.
For example, if you use the codec ‘animation,’ with its highest setting, FCP won’t play it at all.

Hope this helps.

[Pelda033]

Video drive? Sorry, but do you mean What format of tapes I print to? If that, then it is BETA SP UVW-1400AP.
I connected it over USB convertor to RS-232, cose Decklink does not have support for it, only for RS422 which my BETA does not have…

P.S. I have tried to disconnect everything from mac except outputs of course, but still no success.

[Pelda033]

Blackmagic 8 bit, uses 21.4 MB / Sec, do you think it is too much, cose few times happened with DV as well? I capture at 8 bit regulary, HDD gets it without problem, so why it should not play it back from a timeline.
I’ll check it out! Thank you. I’ll kill myself if this is a problem! 🙂 Let me try it, I will answer you tomorow… Thanks again…

[Pelda033]

Actually I can give you my answer today already.. It does not working again. I captured video as Blackmagic DV compression which is 5.1 MB’s/Sec. and it is not ok again. I’ve know idea what else should be the problem. Sorry people but hope someone will come up one day with the solution of my problem. I’m getting mad. and desperate!

[John Pale]

[Pelda033] ” My Mac is G5 x 2 – 2.7 Ghz, 2 GB of RAM, 500MB HDD”

Hmm..have you striped 2 drives internally within your G5? (Not really a good idea to capture to your boot drive) Or are you using external drives? What kind of drives? You should be able to get resonably stable playback even from a single 7200 RPM Firewire 400 drive (though not recommended for editing) using 8 Bit Uncompressed (either Apple or Blackmagic).

[Pelda033]

HDD Drives are internal. 7 days ago they were divided and then this guy came and put them in to stripe. The problem existed even before striping.
Is it possible somehow that Blackmagic card died and it shows problems in that way. Cose few months ago I had a green frame on outputs on video monitor. Does this saying anything to you? Thank you all for your advices in finding solutions for my problem!!!

[John Pale]

[Pelda033] “HDD Drives are internal. 7 days ago they were divided and then this guy came and put them in to stripe. The problem existed even before striping.”

This is probably your problem. The G5 can only have 2 drives (without that contraption for Weibetech). If you stripe them together, its faster, but you will still be capturing to your boot drive, because now you are effectively capturing to just one big drive. Not a good idea to capture to the drive your operating system is running on. Will drastically inhibit performance.

To work effectively with Uncompressed you do need striped drives (a RAID), but you should not be running your operating system off of it. You would be better off with an external SATA RAID or a firewire 800 RAID (such as a G-RAID or Lacie Big Disk). Personally, I am still using a SCSI RAID, but that is kind of passe…you can get more bang for the buck with SATA these days.