NLE Unreliability

[David Grantham]

I tried an answer which got witheld for review by forum moderators. I understand that. Treating issues with advertisers must be handled fairly, so I’d just as soon not ID any brand name here nor link to where they occur. But I’d love your kind input in a tech troubleshooting area.

[David Grantham]

Thankyou Paul.

Treating issues of unreliabilty claims must be handled fairly by moderators, so I’d just as soon not ID any brand name here nor link to where they occur. But I’d love your kind input in a tech troubleshooting area. I may be able to check into these items, but in general everything is quadruple checked to mf’r specs.

[Ron Lindeboom]

[david grantham] “I tried an answer which got witheld for review by forum moderators. I understand that. Treating issues with advertisers must be handled fairly, so I’d just as soon not ID any brand name here nor link to where they occur. But I’d love your kind input in a tech troubleshooting area.”

I am the one that most times does the moderating of this particular forum, David, and I do not recall censoring any post here in this forum or any other because of “advertiser concerns.” To be honest, I haven’t moderated much of anything for any reason in the last year or more. With my amount of gray hair, it could be years since I’ve moderated a post due to advertiser concerns and I wouldn’t remember.

Perhaps you have us confused with Chris over at DVInfo.net??? We are regularly told that he does that, a lot.

We have moderated for a lot of reasons here at the COW over the years, but silencing honest issues with manufacturers or advertisers hasn’t been one of them.

The only time we have ever done anything like that is when we had — for example — a guy who hated JVC cameras and was a VAR for another brand. He tore into them and made it out like there was a bunch of different people in agreement with him. There wasn’t, it was just him masquerading under numerous names and accounts — but all hailing from the same IP address. When I warned him that we check things and that I was ready to reveal his ID publicly if he tried it again, you would be shocked at how silent that all those “various and assorted people” became.

Ron Lindeboom
creativecow.net

[David Grantham]

No worries Ron, when I got the notice that the post was being held up because it might violate policy, I thought you were just doing what was prudent, making sure that a renegade user wouldn’t be making outrageous inflammatory statements without cause. No objections, but thanks for the clarification.

[Ron Lindeboom]

Thank you for understanding, David.

Sadly, all newer accounts are moderated for a while as one of the newest tactics of spammers is to have a real person create an account, make a few posts by copying and pasting answers from other older posts, and then once the account is approved, they go crazy across the forums. If you look at a recent thread on the COWmunications forum, we had an account opened and approved that did just this and when they got approved after a few posts, they quickly added a couple dozen or so posts for their DVD piracy program they were selling.

Best regards,

Ron Lindeboom

[Walter Biscardi]

[david grantham] “Walter, it sounds like you are conetnet with low expectations of those developing this technology in terms of advising their user base on how to keep it working – or at the very least whom to consult to do so. “

Nope, I research all my options before I purchase. And then I find the best possible people to work with me, even if it costs me more money to do so, to ensure that the solution works correctly. If the solution doesn’t work and work right away, it’s gone. I get a refund or it gets replaced with something else.

This has happened on multiple occasions, just last week in fact, and in each case, the VAR took care of everything. In your case, it’s too late now, you are the editor, engineer and researcher.

[david grantham] “What I appear to be hearing here – and its a bit startling – is not to rely on a system manufacturer for support and advice on how to maintain their own gear. If that’s the case, we should decalre that as shortcoming in the indsutry and the unreliability of their advice should be taken to task and I believe they should undertake accountability for it. “

What you are hearing from me is your system is not properly configured, or it has some other shortcoming that does not work for whatever it is you’re doing with it. There’s no way I would work with any system that was unstable for one week, let alone one year.

I have no idea which manufacturer you’re using, some have said Matrox which does make some good products. I don’t know anyone personally who uses any of their Windows editing products, but many folks use the MXO and MXO 2 for Final Cut Pro successfully.

Here are all the possibilities that I can think of for an unstable system and again, I absolutely no clue what you’re running:

Bad components in the computer.

Incorrectly configured components in your computer.

Insufficient RAM (we run 8 to 20GB RAM in our systems)

Bad RAM

MisMatched RAM

Incorrect Card Placement in the PC

Incorrect Card drivers for the OS installed

Incorrect Host Bus Adapter for your storage

Insufficient Storage system (too small, too slow. We have 8TB, 8TB and 24TB systems available)

Overloaded Storage System (storage is over 80% full)

Fragmented Storage System (I erase my drives every three months as possible)

Capturing Media to the internal System Drive

Putting a lot of media elements on the internal System Drive.

Conflict between Graphics card and Video Capture Card.

Incorrect Media / Codec version (not sure what that is in Windows, it would be Quicktime on the Mac)

System not configured for codec (i.e. trying to edit HD on a system configured for SD)

System not configured for project type / length (i.e. trying to edit a 2 hour feature on a system configured for shorter projects)

Application Software conflict

Control Software conflict (the video card control panel if there is one. AJA has this for the Konas)

Accessory conflict (tablet, special keyboard, mouse, trackball, usb stick, usb / bluetooth device)

Running multiple applications with NLE open.

Internet Browsing / Email with NLE application open.

Bad or incorrect reference signal to the video card and your VTRs.

Bad power to your system (we have power conditioners and APC’s on all systems)

It takes about a week to run through all of these and more. If I’ve tested and cleared all of this, then the system would go back.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

Read my Blog!

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[David Grantham]

Helpful Walter, thankyou. (Most of thos issues have been troubleshot and the surface none of them appear to apply, but they bear investitation.)

What about protecting ones’ interest where upgradability is concerned?

One of the reasons I chose the setup I did is that it was upgradable. It was this upgraded version of the software which caused the problems further into the life of the gear. Initially I thought I had to live with crashes every 45 minutes, and I had to find my own fix to non-pre-multiplied alpha channels on titles, but otherwise out of the box it was okay – espeically compared to the way it developed. The hidden wrinkle was the lack of promised performance on the next upgrade of the NLE software.

[Chris Blair]

Heck nobody else will say it…so I will. Premiere Pro cannot be considered at the top of the heap of any high-end editing system.

Can you edit professional projects with it. Yes. Can you do it without pulling your hair out? Doubtful, unless you couple it with the Matrox Axio hardware.

We’ve tried virtually every version of Premeire Pro since version 1 all the way up to CS3, and it’s one quirky, resource hogging, finicky piece of software coupled with most other hardware. Over on the Premiere forum one of the most popular pieces of advice for users experiencing problems is to:

A. Not run ANY other programs while you’re editing.

B. Not to install ANY other software on your NLE machine.

This is flat out unrealistic, as Adobe’s products are designed to allow you to seamlessly move projects from one product to the other. The list of configuration recommendations for setting up Premiere is about 3 pages long…with half a dozen esoteric tweaks to registry and OS settings. We’ve run it with Canopus hardware, Blackmagic hardware and with no hardware. I’ve successfully built and configured no less than 20 high-end graphic and NLE workstations over the years going back to 1996 and have a pretty good working knowledge of hardware, Windows configurations and NLE troubleshooting.

From your list of specs I can tell you where your issue lies. The motherboard. We had a graphics system built on that motherboard and while it’s highly rated among many gamers and CAD programmers, it’s a piece of crapola when it comes to editing. (Hey I didn’t mention the brand). We tried to install one of our Velocity editing systems on that board, and while it’s also an approved board on the Leitch/Harris compatibility list, it absolutely would not run correctly on it. Constant hangs, crashes and quirky behaviour. We moved that Velocity boardset to an IBM Intellistation Z, has worked perfect ever since (5 years).

So…you CAN get Premiere to work without crashing, I’ve seen it run adequately in our shop on HP xw series computers, but I doubt you’ll ever get it to run on that motherboard. Switch motherboards. NOW. Buy a used, approved HP xw8200 or IBM Intellistation (if they’re approved with the Matrox hardware) off of ebay. You can get them for under $500. Then try reconfiguring.

Hope that helps…although it’s probably not what you want to hear. As others have pointed out, there are probably tens of thousands of people with RT-X boards that work fine. There are probably hundreds of thousands of people editing with Premiere Pro without constant crashes. But keep in mind this is $600 software coupled with a $200 motherboard (when new) and a Matrox board that was, if memory serves me, about $1,500 new. Our current turnkey NLE systems cost over $20,000 new, and that’s without video storage, which typically was another $3-4000.

Bottom line, I don’t see how any of the manufacturers are at fault here. The people that recommended the motherboard don’t sound real bright as you can google that motherboard model and find a litany of problems with it. So they’re the only ones that might owe you anything. I bet it was an IT company because that’s who recommended that board to us as part of them building a graphics workstation. Needless to say, I don’t use that IT company to build workstations anymore. Not after the hours I spent troubleshooting that thing.

I will use outside vendors, but I research the specs and hardware and ask questions on forums before diving in. Still, I’ve had experiences just recently that were disappointing. Dare I say it was combining Premiere Pro CS3, an HP xw6200 and a Blackmagic HD Extreme. It works…but only after we spent 2 months configuring and tweaking and updating and…whew…makes me tired just thinking about it.

We rarely use it though as it just doesn’t work the way it’s advertised by either Adobe or Blackmagic. It’s little more than a software based editing system with SDI capture and output, with very little real-time hardware acceleration or real-time functionality. But again…what was I to expect with $600 hardware and $1000 video hardware??

Like I said…can you edit a professional project on it? Certainly. Can you do it without pulling your (graying) hair out? Doubtful.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Tim Kolb]

[david grantham] “This acceptance doesn’t seem to be right in the long run for any of us. If we can win accoutablity and insist on deliverable quality, certifable advice from manufacturers about how to maintain gear, and absolute accountability for failures, let’s.”

Ok David, I follow your idea here…sorry, I went into gear analysis.

On your larger point, I think the market has dictated that more features and less purchase price is what they want. That’s now what we have…but let’s look at the financial ramifications…

In 1996, I bought my first NLE. Faaaaar less sophisticated than anything anyone uses now. It was dedicated hardware ($14,000), a Mac with 16MB of RAM and a 1X CD ROM reader ($5500.00), I needed another 72MB of ram…which had to be installed on an add-in card (another $5,000) 4x 9GB harddrives ($4,000/pc=16,000) along with various monitors, removable drives, peripheral software, etc. I paid 2500.00 per year for tech support and software upgrades (I believe Avid users were paying around 10K/yr in those days on bigger systems). For all that I had 2 video tracks, 4 audio tracks and a title track…and I rendered everything. The only stills I could put on the timeline were PICTs and they had better be perfect in their dimension and dpi or it was a mess…

Now, Apple and Adobe make a software NLE for around…5-6 hundred dollars. It runs on a beefy, but off the shelf computer system, PC or Mac (FCP is Mac only of course), which will run you 3-5,000.00 for a reasonably efficient machine. Harddrives are all over the board depending on whether you can RAID-0 some Westerns you picked up at Best Buy on the motherboard, or you need a big-iron array with redundancy and serious throughput for HD/Film.

So, the marketplace (us) has what it (we) wants…cheap and powerful. The issue is that there’s no margin left for the kind of tech support that professionals want…but then the pros are paying near-consumer prices in many cases (for software at least).

I don’t know if the customer base can make a LOT more demands on NLE manufacturers…our appetites for cheap and powerful has put severe stress on the manufacturers who have traditionally stood behind their products…if the profit margin on one box of software is more than wiped out by a 1.5 hour phone call to a knowledgeable support person, then prices have to go up, or support has to go down…simple.

The reason why software manufacturers say quite clearly (though usually in tiny, dense type) that user remedy is limited to replacement or refund of the product, is that they know quite well that production work costs far more than one license of NLE software.

It’s why government purchased items cost ridiculous amounts of money.
You can’t verify the grain structure in the handle of every 5.00 hammer to make sure there are no weaknesses that MIGHT cause it to break under conditions so severe one can’t even imagine them…but an 80.00 hammer could be Xrayed and run through an MRI causing 40% of finished product to be discarded instead of shipped…if the price is high enough, expectations can be high with no problem.

I’ve been saying for some years that the cost of our tools going down was going to have negative as well as positive effects.

this article is a bit rambly…but the “1-800-SUPPORT” section sort of addresses this situation…I wrote it in 2003, so if the products/situations sound a little dated, that’s why.

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/kolb_tim/value.php

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[David Grantham]

Thankyou Chris. It’s great to get all these stories and possibilities. I’m still looking at all solutions.

I’ll iterate (reiterate, I think) that the choice of this motherboard wasn’t at all arbitrary or recommended by unknown sources. It was listed on the accelerator card mf’rs website for every possible purchaser to see as one of a handful officially sanctioned as tested to be compatible for this purpose, and to make matters worse, a bad slot for it identified as the only one that would work (overheating next to the video card). (That slot recommendation was eventually changed, but not in any offical follow-up sort of way. It eventually sort of came up in tech-support sessions years after the fact.)

THere’s got to be some basic accountability there with a card mf’r who claims it’s been tested as compatible with something if – as you say and I seem to be experiencing – it is not.

Compatibility was a simple claim and yours is a simple assertion: that it’s false. If we consider such failures to deliver as a labyrinth of interdependent components too complicated to be followed up and accoutnability demanded, we’re doormats inviting others to propose slipshod assemblies in the future.

This systme is really on the threshold of not working at all. I don’t know if I can get to the finish line. THe NLE isn’t the problem as far as I know, it’s the accelerator card mf’rs claims.

Sure I’ll have to find a remedy and that’s ongoing, but it seems to me some redress is required after all this. It simply seems wrong not to stand up for that.