Final Share and 1+hour sequences stuttering question for Walter Biscardi

[Bob Zelin]

Tony –
you neglect to mention that your Mac Book Pro does not exhibit this issue. You also did not mention that with only 1080p 23.98 media, there is no issue. The problem arrises when you put in 720p media
into your sequence, and the problem occurs locally as well as the SAN. Is this accurate information ?

Bob Zelin

[Tony Silanskas]

Bob,

Thanks for throwing that out as I thought I linked to my other forum question here. I consolidated the project (got rid of all the long sequences) before I tried it on the MacBook Pro so that is still an unknown variable that is on a list to try this week but yes, it works on the MacBook Pro. As you know, we are punting and trying everything and since I remembered reading Walter’s blog about the long sequences, figured it may be an issue, but yes, the stutter happens when 720p material in a 1080p sequence, not in a 720p sequence.

As of late last night, here is where we are:

I got an email from another colleague that said he had issues with a Nvidia driver at some point. It got me thinking about what graphic cards have been installed in our two MacPros and I found a common variable that I missed. Right now we have a GT 120 in one and the 8800 in another. But they both had used the same Nvidia 8800 card at some point (we upgraded one and switched it to another with a clean install) so those drivers were on the both towers. Tonight, we reformatted the 2008 MacPro and installed a brand new Nvidia 4800 that we recently purchased but have been waiting to install because of these issues. As of this moment we have not been able to replicate the problem so it could be that 8800 card and driver.

tony

[Tony Silanskas]

I noticed today that having the Overlays on in the Canvas or Image+Wireframe selected makes it stutter whether it is 1080p footage or 720p. I know this issue has been around for eons so maybe that is part of the problem.

tony

[Walter Biscardi]

Our problems were related to the Mac Pro Octo Core 2.93 machine and Apple changing the Ethernet controller on that machine. We installed a Small Tree PEG 1 card in there to solve the problem.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

“Foul Water, Fiery Serpent” Winner, Best Documentary, LA Reel Film Festival.

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[Tony Silanskas]

Walter,

Thanks so much for sharing your answer to that problem. I believe all the boxes here have that card but it’s worth checking into. Are you using Final Cut exclusively for your 1080p edits and if so are you happy with it’s performance?

tony

[Steve Modica]

Hi Tony,
Sorry about coming late to the party. Bob sent a link to this thread and I read it over today.
Small Tree tests all of this stuff and we’re currently working on all the new stuff (SSD and 6Gb SAS/SATA along with 10Gb Ethernet). We are pretty versed in what is required to make the video work without stuttering 🙂 (We are all former SGI realtime/networking guys).
From what I gathered, the material you were playing was actually getting dragged over to the local machines, or was playing off the local machines which caused the problems.

The hardest part of all this isn’t the networking. That’s usually the easy part. The storage is the hard part. A local drive can handle 40MB/sec, but that’s an average over time. It cannot handle 40MB/sec continuous in a realtime fashion. The RAIDS we sell (as well as Maxx) are designed to handle the workload in realtime. So the overall bandwidth can actually be lower, but they are able to satisfy each IO request within the designated window. For the most part, storage that is optimized for the highest bandwidth will not work well in realtime.
Steve Modica

[Tony Silanskas]

Thanks so much for chiming in Steve. I have tried three different drive configurations with the same issue; The Final Share Ethernet Raid, External OWC Firewire Raid (AJA system test 70MBs/sec), and the internal MacPro Drives. Are these still not fast enough? The mystery remains as to why the MacBook Pro works with all three of these configurations which leads us to believe it’s still a graphics card issue. And having Overlays on in the Final Cut Canvas definitely adds to the problem.

tony

[Steve Modica]

Are you seeing the generic drop message or the “slow disk” drop message?
Since you are mixing formats, I would render the timeline and try again. Assuming you are only running one stream on the timeline, this will show that when FCP doesn’t have to transcode on the fly (to handle the mixed formats) it will work.
We’ve been cataloging all of these little quirks.
Walter did us the kindness of sending us a long video sequence that was very complex and we found many things like this:
Still images on the timeline
mixed codecs on the timeline
reversed sequences
sped up sequences
various audio formats (like mpeg)

Depending on the speed of the system, these things can cause drops reliably, or just make them more likely to occur. If the system is an imac without jumbo frames, they are *much* more likely to occur. In fact, we use ours as a test bench since it’s more sensitive.

With our stuff, we make sure that from spindle to FCP, all of the data shows up on time. What final cut does with the data once it gets it can be a mystery 🙂

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications