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Kona 3 HD Monitoring problem
We have recently upgraded to a dual quadcore and stuck a Kona 3 in. The system is then hooked up to a Sanman 16 bay fibre channel. All latest drivers for FCP Studio 2, Quicktime and Kona.
We have noted that there is an issue in getting realtime output to the monitors (SDI or analogue).
Playing back through a final cut timeline doesn’t work, reports dropping frames and Kona TV loses synch with the audio as it forceably plays all frames and gets progressively more and more out of sync (as if it is achieving about 20fps or worse).
I’ve benchmarked the raid and this is reporting a sustained read speed of 350mb/sec.
We are talking about a rendered clip, I’ve tried 10-bit uncompressed and even ProRES HQ doesn’t work.
The same quicktimes in quicktime player will play back flawlessly to the computer monitor so it doesn’t seem to be drive related seems to be Kona related or video card?
Our previous dual processor running a Kona 2 with the same Raid smoked along and could easily put the HD streams out to the broadcast monitors further ruling the raid out.
Has anyone got any ideas or had a similar problem?
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11 Replies
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without OS versions, QT version, Kona Driver version
( and by the way is that a g5 quad or an intel quad)its hard to help without some base info.
gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows -
Have you set up the expansion slots according to the K3 manual?
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Hi Gary,
To clarify it is one of the new Intel Mac’s; Two 3.0GHz xeon quad-core processors (8-core). The video card is ATI Radeon X1900 512MB graphics card. It has 16gb of RAM and fibre channel is a dual 4gb card hooked up to a 16 bay fc raid.
As mentioned the drivers are all the latest as trying to solve it we run software update to make sure everything was current. So it is latest OS, latest QT and Kona drivers are v4.0.
Does this help shed any light?
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if you had a Kona 2, you had a different computer. You are using the SanMan from DigiStor
https://www.digistor.com.au/products.php?cat=10&subcat=33
which uses Infortrend hardware.Do you have drivers for that support the MAC Pro for this product ?
I don’t give a CRAP if this worked with your PCI-X MAC’s – how do you know that this works with PCI Express MAC’s – are there new drivers for this ?Whenever a new OS or new computer comes out, everyone who makes storage – from ATTO, to Sonnet, to every make and model of storage host adaptor has to scramble to release new drivers that work with the new computer, or updated operating system. This CERTAINLY applies to AJA, ATTO, and everyone else that we deal with. I have never used SanMan from DigiStor, but what you are describing is most definately a drive array problem, and it appears that you are assuming that “it should just work”.
If you have kept up with these forums, you would know that even Apple XServe RAID owners that upgraded their systems, had to update the firmware of all XServe RAID’s, and then go into the RAID Admin to disable cache flushing. So now, when it comes to the DigiStor (and I know NOTHING about this product) – did you upgrade this, when you switched from the Kona 2 system to the Kona 3 system ?
Bob Zelin
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I want to re-itterate that you need to contact DigiStor, and say “I have moved your system onto a MAC Pro, and we are having thruput issues, do I need to do any system upgrades”. I don’t know what type of 4 Gig Fibre cards you are using – QLogic, ATTO ???? Latest drivers for these? What about the firmware in the Infortrend chassis. If these things are CRITICAL in an Apple XServe RAID, and HUGE Systems products, then I can only assume that this is critical in the DigiStor.
Bob Zelin (why can’t things just work !).
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Hi Jeremy,
Good point to check, I know in another system we were once caught out with another PCI card slowing the overall bus down.
Will definitely check this to make sure, although I think the only other card is the Fibre Channel card and would have thought this would be a high speed card also.
It has be something obvious as on paper this thing should be smoking!
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Hi Bob,
This is also worth a check, thank you for your help.
I was looking elsewhere for the problem given the benchmark confirmed we were getting 350mb sustained read from the raid and that the uncompressed HD would playback flawlessly in QT player or FCPS2 canvas when it wasn’t trying to output via SDI.
Soon as it needs to output via the Kona3 outputs it seems to be the problem and if you are watching the FCP canvas it is actually still in- synch and the frames are way ahead of what is being displayed on the broadcast monitor. This is very weird.
Agreed (it should just work!)
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It will be if you have your PCIe Expansion Slots set properly.
From the manual:
For the PCIe version of the KONA 3 capture card, AJA recommends that the
KONA 3 be placed in Slot 3 and the Apple Expansion Slot Utility be
configured so that the slot is running at x4 lane speed or higher. (The choice
of x4, x4, x1 and x16 is ideal.) For the PCI-X 133Mhz version of the KONA
3 card (KONA 3X), PCI-X enabled G5s slot 4 is a 133Mhz slot. For the
Intel based Apple XServe product, the PCI-X version of the KONA 3 may be
used in the slot -
Thanks Jeremy, will definitely check that we did this and let you know.
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Hey guys,
Thanks for your input in this one.
It was a PCIe bus config issue. For anyone else needing help with this one you can find out what you need in the Kona3 manual and at this link.
https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304122
The thing we have encountered though is there is no config that will allow all the cards to run at maximum performance.
The video card wants x16
Fibre Channel wants x8
Kona 3 wants x8.The best I could come up with was x4 for FC, x4 for K3 and x16 for video card. The HD output is now working sweetly just wonder what is missing if the bus could allocate what each of the cards really want in an ideal world.
Anyone else done any experimentation with this?
Cheers,
G.
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