Kona SD and BM Driver (which combination?)

[Kristian Lam]

Hi Steven,

The v5.9 driver will work. If you’re having issues with the v5.9 driver, try the v5.6 driver located here:

https://blackmagic-design.com/support/software/register.asp?softID=97

Are you having the same issues with timecode when capturing with Final Cut Pro?

regards

Kristian Lam
Blackmagic Design

[Brian Hughes]

We’ve also had an issue with the BM drivers, a Kona SD card and Final Cut Studio on Mac OS X 10.4.8. This is on a 2001 model QuickSilver Mac. I tried the latest drivers (5.9) but they didn’t work, in fact the card wasn’t visible in the System Profiler. I downgraded until I found one that worked but I don’t recall the version number and I’m not at work. I’ll follow-up when I am.

Looking at the installer package and the System Profiler it appears there is something missing, a driver dependency if I recall, that isn’t missing on the older driver install. I’ll know more tomorrow.

Brian Hughes
Napa Valley College
Broadcast Engineering Program

[Steven Kochones]

Thanks for the advice, Kristian.

We uninstalled all other BM drivers and installed v5.6 which seems to be the only driver that works with our Kona SD card. Even still, we’re experiencing the following occasional problem: during capture, the video will freeze in the capture window (while the tape keeps rolling) and then we get the spinning beach ball, requiring a force quit. The error creates one of those -av QuickTime files in the capture scratch folder, which we promptly delete.

So v5.6 is “sort of” working. And timecode capture seems okay.

At some point we can try v5.9 again, but we just started a new project, and I’m hesitant to mess with things too much.

One other comment about v5.9: when we had this driver installed, the editing workflow was okay except HDV-to-SD conversion did not work. A still image appeared on the NTSC monitor but would not play. Audio played and, strangely, we could scrub video and see it advance in the monitor. With v5.6 the HDV-to-SD works as advertised.

Steven Kochones
Arclight Productions
Hollywood, California

[Steven Kochones]

Brian,

At one time we had the same setup as yours: a Kona SD in a QuickSilver G4. After a lot of research on Creative Cow, we discovered that the QuickSilver (just that specific model) was the culprit. This was with FCP 4.5 (not FCP 5.x.x) and our only stable setup was running OS 10.3.4 and the v4 BM driver (I believe the last BM driver that AJA “approved” for their card). We couldn’t upgrade the OS even one point without terrible problems.

It’s interesting to hear that you got it to work at all with FCP 5.

Steven Kochones
Arclight Productions
Hollywood, California