G5 + Scopebox

[Robert Houllahan]

Did you try setting SB to 8-bit? I think the old G5 will have a hard time running Scopebox in HD at 10-bits. What display video card is installed in the G5?

-Rob-

Robert Houllahan
Director / Colorist
Cinelab Inc.
http://www.cinelab.com

MAHC-PRO 6-Core 3X GTX285 20Tb SAS Wave Panel Panny 11UK SDI Plasma. Light-Space CMS + Hubble

[Boris Tivchev]

Thanks for your assistance, Robert. Im away from the studio at the moment so I’ll have to get back to you on this later, probably Monday.

Cheers

[Robert Houllahan]

For the money I would just replace the G5 with a Mac-Mini and a Blackmagic Thunderbolt SDI box.

-Rob-

Robert Houllahan
Director / Colorist
Cinelab Inc.
http://www.cinelab.com

MAHC-PRO 6-Core 3X GTX285 20Tb SAS Wave Panel Panny 11UK SDI Plasma. Light-Space CMS + Hubble

[Drew Lahat]

I’ve tested Scopebox for months, since NAB 2011 – experienced the same exact problem. Very low performance (~3fps), high lag, and instability, on G5 with Kona2 card. Practically the same experience with v2 and v3.

Divergent Media are aware of it but I’m not aware of any fixes. The last I’ve heard was that they were “tracking down performance issues with PPC… I’m working on a few optimizations and additional debug options so we can have users record additional info on their systems.”

Personally I gave up and moved on. Scopebox is still a great system, it just needs an Intel Mac. Get a mini… or just get a Blackmagic Ultrascope with a cheap PC.

[Robert Houllahan]

I think the scopebox creators are to be commended for still trying to support the obsolete Power-PC platform.

I sold my Ultrascope to setup a new ScopeBox setup I like the scopes more than the BMD Ultrascope which is only 1080line 4:2:2 capable.

-Rob-

Robert Houllahan
Director / Colorist
Cinelab Inc.
http://www.cinelab.com

MAHC-PRO 6-Core 3X GTX285 20Tb SAS Wave Panel Panny 11UK SDI Plasma. Light-Space CMS + Hubble

[Sascha Haber]

Exaclty…

A slice of color…

DaVinci 8.2.1 OSX 10.7.2
MacPro 5.1 2×2,4 24GB
RAID0 8TB
GTX 470 / Quadro 4000
Extreme 3D+

ICA Instructor
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[Boris Tivchev]

The video card installed is an ATI RV360 128MB. Would you say upgrading the video card would let me have an usable Scopebox for HD, be it in 8bit?

[Robert Houllahan]

Hard to say, I talked to the developer a bit about G5 performance and he said it is a combination of CPU and GPU that makes SB run. I suppose that a better GPU than a stock 128mb card would boost performance but it is hard to say if 1080p video will work even in 8-Bit.

-Rob-

Robert Houllahan
Director / Colorist
Cinelab Inc.
http://www.cinelab.com

MAHC-PRO 6-Core 3X GTX285 20Tb SAS Wave Panel Panny 11UK SDI Plasma. Light-Space CMS + Hubble

[Juan Salvo]

I would suspect the 128mb of VRAM is a major factor.

Online Editor | Colorist | Post Super | VFX Artist | BD Author

https://JuanSalvo.com

[Mike Woodworth]

Hey all,

We have been working on trying to boost performance for all machines. At this point, it only makes sense to make changes that speed up both PPC and Intel… PPC is just too old to devote a lot of resources to going forward (and apple makes it harder each year to even ship an app that runs PPC and Intel). That said, we found a solution to a slow down some users have seen with slow GPUs (this includes many PPC machines).

If you’d like to give the fix a try, send me an email at mike [at] divergentmedia [dot com] and I’ll set you up with an internal build of the changes.

mike