KI-PRO stops recording

[Jeremy Garchow]

What do you have the “arm record” function set for? tc/rec or rec only?

What format? How long is the recording?

Jeremy

[Kevin Christopher]

If the KI Pro loses video signal it will stop recording. This is what i see the most. If your video feed is not stable, or goes on and off then you will have this problem.

Kevin

[Shane Hunt]

Hello Jeremy,

Thanks for your reply. The record arm is set to rec only, we are feeding timecode into the kipros via our in house TC generator.

We are recording in the ProRes422HQ format, with 500 gig drives and the drive is no where near 10%. Some records the kipro will not stop for the entire time of approximately 4 hours, but others they will stop after 10 minutes, 50 minutes, etc.

Shane

[Aja Sales department]

Shane, Jeremy and Kevin,
There are three conditions, by design, where the Ki Pro will stop a recording:
1) Ki Pro detects a loss of video or does not detect video because no signal is connected or is an invalid type. This feature prevents Ki Pro from recording glitched or compromised video as a QuickTime and is meant to alert the user to problematic signal. A WARNING prompt would appear on the front panel in such situations.
2) The Ki Pro Arm Recording parameter is set to arm via TC/REC Button and the timecode is starting and stopping either as intended from the source or unintentionally because the timecode has a disruption and is \”flickering\”. No prompt appears in such a situation as there isn\’t a way to determine intended or unintended TC value changes.
3) The Storage Module reaches the 10% remaining capacity and prompts \”WARNING MEDIA Full\”. This protects against disk errors due to seeks being compromised on filled disks. Again a prompt appears.

There are other relatively rare conditions where Ki Pro could stop recording, such as a disk i/o error (not dropped frames, but directory, IOPS level errors, etc.). Disk level errors might be beyond the scope of Ki Pro to diagnose. The recommendation would be to backup the data and reformat the media via the MEDIA menu parameter on the Ki Pro.

The SSD modules are of course unaffected by vibration, but the spinning units (250GB and 500GB) can be affected by extreme vibrations or high decibel situations where a spinning media would typically be affected by such phenomenon.

Finally, there is the possibility that the source video is overly compressed and degraded before reaching the Ki Pro for encoding. Yes, a satellite feed could be degraded sufficiently to be overly complex to encode. If the video being fed to Ki Pro is a bit compromised, you might consider updating to the latest 2.0 firmware released this week on at least one of your units as an effort was made to make Ki Pro more forgiving of compromised source signals; to be clear, no changes were made to the ProRes encoding, simply to what was considered valid incoming video.

If none of these suggestions seem to answer the question, please don\’t hesitate to contact AJA technical support on Monday.

Hope this is helpful.

—
AJA Video Systems
+1 (530) 274-2048 Intl.
(800) 251-4224 US
sales@aja.com

[Marc Colemont]

First of all it are the best recorders I have ever seen or worked with
It might be by design, but it doesn’t act as any other video recorder would do. It has freaked out both me and my customers. To a point were I needed to find a solution as otherwise one client did not want me to bring my 4 KiPro’s anymore.
If the User doesn\’t stop recording it is very frustrating finding out that footage has been lost due real life conditions during a captation.
A cable can have glitch, a cameraman on stage needs to swap his battery. A steadicam drops a frame on his wireless transmitter. It should just keep recording. We don\’t care if the frames are black or have unreadable image during that event. As long as it keeps recording frames during the event, rather then finding out later it just stopped recoring by itself.
Currently I connect the KiPro\’s which ingest the mobile camera\’s on stage, through AUX connections of my mixer. As the mixer keeps generating steady frames while signals possibly glich.

[Kevin Christopher]

[AJA Sales Department] “The SSD modules are of course unaffected by vibration, but the spinning units (250GB and 500GB) can be affected by extreme vibrations or high decibel situations where a spinning media would typically be affected by such phenomenon.”

.50 Cal gunfire, Rocket launchers, and being too close to explosions. all knocked the red drive out also. Good thing there is solid state for these situations.

KC

[Brian Walker]

I had this exact same thing happen on a live record of a show. Luckily I had ISO’s to rebuild the program rec that kept stopping!

The Fix?: Here is what I surmised…. Somehow the unit that stopped was in ProResHQ, and I was only sending SD.
Once I put the unit back into regular ProRes it worked flawlessly!

Thanks in advance!
Brian Walker

[Patrick Sproule]

We have experienced the frustration of this as well. We are using KiPro’s as backup recorders in our OB truck. The cameras all run HD over fibre and very occasionally if a connector is not mated correctly or is dirty we can have a signal dropout. Unfortunately the vision mixer passes this right through and the Ki Pro drops out of record. Our master recorder (Mac Pro with Decklink) does not stop, and nor does our 3 Play. I would love to have the option to set this – “record no matter what”. Might not be particularly simple though.

[Ron Pestes]

We have had problems with the 500 gig drive. When shooting with the 128 gig drive there were no problems but as soon as we changed to the 500 we started dropping frames and it stopped recording. This happened many times and made our recording useless. We finally got the 128 gig drive downloaded and used it again with no problems. Any ideas?

Apple Certified Master Pro FCS 2
Sony EX-3
MacBook Pro

[Marc Colemont]

I think this is another problem, then the recording which stops as soon as one video frame is not received right.
Your 500GB drive is it 7200RPM?