Frames dropped

[Mark Beazley]

Another thing you should check is the actual configuration of the Xserve RAID. I highly doubt this is the problem (since I doubt anyone would set it up like this), but you may want to check to make sure that journaling is off on the drives in the Xserve RAID. Also double check that you are indeed striping across all 4 drives. A single ATA133 drive is not fast enough for uncompressed 8bit. The reason FW800 drives work is because inside they stripe across 2 drives with a hardware RAID 0 (at least in the case of the G-RAID products).

You should easily be able to capture uncompressed 8bit or 10bit with that system.

-mark

[Sam Zimman]

We had a similar problem with dropping frames on Edit to Tape, and the only thing that got rid of it was reformating the computer and reinstalling FCP. We tried everything from fiber cables to firewire cables, permissions to pre-binding, firewire drives to firmware.

[Jay Blanchard]

Thanks again everyone for your help & recommendations with our problem.

Here’s the result of our benchmark testing of the XServe (which is our scratch drive for FCP Captures, Audio & Render Files):

XBENCH RESULTS:

Results 160.64
System Info
Xbench Version 1.1.3
System Version 10.3.9 (7W98)
Physical RAM 1536 MB
Model PowerMac7,2
Processor PowerPC 970 @ 1.80 GHz
L1 Cache 64K (instruction), 32K (data)
L2 Cache 512K @ 1.80 GHz
Bus Frequency 900 MHz
Video Card GeForce FX 5200
Drive Type APPLE Xserve RAID
CPU Test 124.22
GCD Loop 76.63 2.99 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 205.67 743.77 Mflop/sec
AltiVec Basic 88.24 2.56 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT 143.18 2.22 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library 248.64 9.95 Mops/sec
Thread Test 83.47
Computation 58.78 793.56 Kops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention 143.90 1.81 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 250.41
System 263.14
Allocate 583.14 380.39 Kalloc/sec
Fill 208.95 1663.27 MB/sec
Copy 204.08 1020.41 MB/sec
Stream 238.86
Copy 206.24 1507.64 MB/sec [G5]
Scale 210.79 1555.66 MB/sec [G5]
Add 271.57 1738.06 MB/sec [G5]
Triad 288.06 1760.05 MB/sec [G5]
Quartz Graphics Test 178.42
Line 179.25 4.56 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 133.54 9.39 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 176.95 4.08 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 186.80 2.03 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 253.05 4.12 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test 170.57
Spinning Squares 170.57 119.37 frames/sec
User Interface Test 232.43
Elements 232.43 74.76 refresh/sec
Disk Test 264.51
Sequential 161.69
Uncached Write 318.33 132.69 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 308.59 126.37 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 66.50 10.53 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 301.17 121.68 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 726.59
Uncached Write 1658.46 24.88 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 559.18 126.11 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 795.38 5.25 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 538.61 110.85 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Anything out of the ordinary here? The only thing that caught my eye was the “Uncached Read” speed–is it supposed to be that low?

The results with AJA’s Kona System Test app varied a bit, but I usually averaged around 127 MB/s for write speed and 64 MB/s for read speed (based on a 128.0 MB Disk Whack test).

Please let me know if these numbers are up to par for running the AJA Io at 8-bit uncompressed; thanks!

[Lee Berger]

Your numbers are similar to mine and I’m not experiencing any dropped frames. As noted in another post, do you have any other FireWire devices connected aside from Io? For backups I use a FireWire 400 drive connected to a FireWire 400/800 PCI card with no ill effects. Only the Io is connected to the built in FW port.

Have you talked to tech support at AJA? This forum is good, but I have found tech support at AJA to be very responsive.

[Jay Blanchard]

I guess the Xserve’s not the issue then. To answer the Firewire question, no, we have no Firewire cables (400 or 800) connected to the machine other than the 10ft FW400 cable we have coming from the Io.

I’ve repaired the permissions, so I’m going to try to test it again. Next step is delete the prefs and try a new firewire cable (even though it’s been tested with other devices and works fine). If that doesn’t work, I’ll bug AJA tech support tomorrow.

[Francois Stark]

I’ve had similar problems with our Cinewave system several times, and most of the times the culprit was the FCP prefs file. Delete and start from scratch.

Disk transfer rates are always the first suspect, but often that is not where the problem is. If FCP’s prefs are scrambled it can act very unpredictable, including dropping frames in the simplest effects.

I must say, most the the times I had this problem was with FCP 4.1 and older Cinewave drivers. The newest stuff seems to corrupt the prefs less often, and out decklink and Kona LS card systems have not had this problem.

If it happens regularly I would suspect the RAM of causing the problem.

Regards
Francois

[Jay Blanchard]

Hi all–

We seem to have everything working ok now. Journaling was enabled for the Xserve drives, so I turned that off, and I also repaired permissions for drives.

I also used an Io Easy Setup preset instead of the custom setup that had been selected (someone other than Carrie and myself had configured the setup of the Io, obviously incorrectly)

So now everything’s capturing fine. No more delay before capture with the “Allocating Disk Space” tagline & then the subsequent dropped frames. The clips that are captured all need to be rendered in FCP (no RT, but that makes sense seeing as it’s all uncompressed footage), but we’re happy with the results.

Thanks again everyone for your help!

[Mark Beazley]

You should not need to render the newly captured clips in FCP. Make sure your Sequence is setup for the same type of media you are digitizing and you should be able to play back in RT w/o rendering a thing.

I am glad everything else is working though, that Journaling option really makes FCP behave in a less than adequate manner. 😀

-mark

[Lee Berger]

Jay,
With XServe RAID and Io you should have RT, even on uncompressed footage. You shouldn’t have to render clips. If you used one of the 8-bit uncompressed easy setups then you should not have to render on your timeline. Sometimes a timeline won’t match the capture setting. It took me a little time to get this straight.

The easiest way to do this is to apply the easy setup again, and open a new sequence. That way your clips and timeline will match. With the XServe RAID you are supposed to get two streams (not layers) of uncompressed 10-bit video without rendering clips and simple effects like dissolves and keys. That’s the way it works for me.