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Media 100 iFinish odd glitch
I have a Media100 V20 iFinish system and it’s started giving me an odd glitch. When I digitize and play back the video, it appears on my monitor to be flickering, kind of like field jitter, but it does so irregardless of whether I’m displaying first, second, or both fields. When I extract a frame and look at it in photoshop, what I see is an odd checkerboard pattern in groups of 2×2 pixels. One group will be slightly red shifted and have stronger saturation and contrast, and the next group will be slightly green shifted and have lower contrast and saturation. This covers the entire 720×484 image (digitized at this resolution for mpeg2 encoding later). When I play the video at full speed you don’t see the flickering, but rather the entire image is either slightly red with increased contrast, or slightly green with decreased contrast. However when I excode the video to mpeg2, the checkerboard pattern is plainly visible, so it’s more or less useless.
I have restarted the program, rebooted the system, reinstalled the software, and reseated the cards and connectors, all to no result.
This really has me perplexed, and I’m hoping it’s not a hardware repair issue. I haven’t made any hardware or software changes to the system that might have screwed somthing up, but the fact that it seems to be in the encoding side does seem to point towards a hardware issue.
Anyone seen this before?Tech info: Media100 iFinish V20 system running software version 4.6 (P6000 + M6000 boards)
Computer is a dual xeon 2.66 w/ 1 gig ram, Win 2kPro -
7 Replies
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I would guess that this is a hardware problem. Have you tried running the hardware diagnostics?
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Yeah, the hardware diagnostics that came on the 4.6 disc say that it’s functioning normally.
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A checkerboard pattern does sound like a codec/hardware problem as Floh indicated.
Is your slot config per the recommendations in the CPG?
Do you have any other third-party PCI cards in the system? If so, try pulling them.
If you have access to more than one Finish system, try swapping the boards between them and see if the problem follows the board.
You could also try looping the diags to build up stress/heat and see if it might fail then.
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My cards should be in the correct slots. I do have some 3rd party cards, but they’re my SCSI card and my network connection, so it would be difficult to pull them to test, especially the SCSI card.
Ideally, there shouldn’t be any problems with it. It’s worked just fine in this configuration for over a year, then suddenly this week it’s screwed up. I find myself quite frustrated with that, plus the fact that just to ask Media100 what they think would be $200.
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For an example of what this looks like when you extract a frame, go to:
https://www.pocatello.us/Vision12/Images/flicker.tga
or
https://www.pocatello.us/Vision12/Images/flicker.jpg -
I think you should check your video cabling. This looks somewhat like if you have connected the Composite output of your deck to the Y in of your iFinish and you are digitizing in Component mode. So definitely check your component cabling from the deck to the iFnish system. And for a test, connect the Composite out of your deck to the Composite in of the iFinish and digitize in Composite.
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Well, I haven’t been digitizing component, I use s-video throughout. But I did as you suggested and tried just using composite, and I got no difference.
Pretty much at this point I’m convinced that it’s a hardware issue.
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