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NLE Unreliability
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As I said, it was and still is listed as a compatible board for use with Velocity and VelocityQ systems. There are people using it successfully even today. But certain versions and revisions of the motehrboard were just flat out bad. As I said, google that brand and model and you’ll see.
You can’t blame the manufacturer (Matrox) if they tested that MB and it worked. The only people to blame are the motherboard manufacturer and your system builder (for not researching the board). Matrox, just like Leitch, probably tested their hardware and Premiere thoroughly with this board and it likely worked flawlessly. But motherboard manufacturers are constantly changing chips, writing new code, changing bios settings, updating drivers etc. They could even get defective materials and chips from their suppliers.
You can lament the accountability issue all you want. You’ll never get anywere with it. Nobody plans for this type of failure. Not the motherboard maker, not the video capture hardware company, not the software company and not your system builder. Nobody wants this to happen.
At the end of the day, you were unlucky. It sounds like Matrox, Adobe and your system builder have tried mightily to fix the issues. But if the core hardware (your motherboard) turns out to be the problem, you certainly can’t blame them.
We bought a turnkey VelocityQ back in 2003. Worked great for a couple months then it started crashing. Upon reboot, it wouldn’t go past the bios screen. We sent it to Leitch. They couldn’t replicate the issue, but they wiped the thing clean, reinstalled, put in a new boardset. We get it back…same damn thing. Leitch recommends we call IBM as the workstation is under warranty. We call IBM and they’ve got a tech there that afternoon. He tears the thing apart, tests everything; can’t find a problem. He too wipes the drives, reinstalls, uses Leitch disk image to install the NLE software. Hooks it all up. Same damn thing!!
They take the computer to their shop. They hook up similar components (external USB’s and a Firewire drive), run it under similar software loads. They can’t replicate the problem. They suggest we have a power issue in our building. We call an electrician who comes out, checks everything (we had 200 amp service installed that serves just for our 3 edit suites). He can’t find any issues. They bring it back in, we hook everything back up, boom, same problem. They’re stumped. They replace virtually everything in the PC right there in the suite, motherboard, RAM, power supply, graphic card, all one by one. SAME PROBLEM. All this went on for a month and this suite was down the whole time.
I get a free day and I go in and take EVERYTHING non-essential out of the PC and unplug everything non-essential from it, including the USB backup drives and a firewire drive we used for rendering).
Boot it up. Works. I start adding components to the inside. After each card is added. Boots up fine. I get to the external USB drives. Boom…won’t boot. I unplug the USB drive (Seagate) and plug another brand USB in. It boots fine. I re-plug the Seagate USB. It won’t boot. So for a month I’m blaming IBM, Leitch, and anybody else I can blame, when the entire issue was caused by an incompatibility with the USB chip on the Intellistation and Seagate’s USB external drives. I later learned MAC’s had a similar issue with some brands of external USB drives. The Seagate drive worked fine as long as you turned it on AFTER booting.
I still can’t believe that experienced IBM technicians weren’t trained to work backward like this when troubleshooting…but they weren’t! The moral to the story is that there could be 20 things causing your problems. My guess is the motherboard, but it might be a bad or incorrect driver, it could be an incorrect setting in Premiere, it could be defective RAM that tests out ok (happens all the time). It could be a darn external USB drive! So stop looking for a reason and someone to blame and get on with getting a system that works.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Thankful for your thoughtful comments I look forward to reading the whole article after this dust settles.
Every marketplace responds to the demand for highest quality at the lowest price. Let’s not use that reason to excuse this one from delivering.
I used to be symathetic to the troubleshooting time encurred to a manufacturer, but not after all this. I’m afraid I have little sympathy for the cost of support technicians when they waste my time without fruitful results. Not anymore. It’s not about the value of their time, it’s about the value of their gear. Either the gear should basically work or supportable or they shouldn’t be selling it. Mine doesn’t. I don’t think it ever will.
It would have been annoying but more useful to hear from tech-support months or even years ago “you know, we can’t solve your problem, you’ll have to work aroudn it or replace the unit.” Instead they strung me along for months of interruptions to my work with drastic attempted fixes at great expense to us all. It cost them way more to do that. It goes deeper than bad support. It appears to be bad engineering, and bad testing. And it cost them a lot of their troubleshooter’s time, so it appears to be bad management as well.
The destructiveness of all this on my life and professional circumstances is enormous, and before embarking with this gear on a major proejct I gave them every direct oportunity to tell me in advance if it wouldn’t do the job.
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Wow, effective tale. Thanks. Strangely comforting to imagine such a hassle for someone else… I’ll get something that works somehow.
I thank you for the encouragement not to delay a solution.
And I get your main point I think, but I don’t completely share your conclusions.
This wasn’t bad luck only for you, but for those providing the gear. But who took the huge hit if you had to retire your gear because they couldn’t find what you could? Only you. That’s not right. If we’re in this together with the supplier for good or ill, then we share the good and the bad. “Tough luck for you,” here’s your money back is no loss for them. It’s the absence of gain. Seems different to me. By all means let’s be reasonable, but folks in creative fields like ours shouldn’t be doormats; it’s hard enough here.
I wouldn’t specify a motherboard to anyone without pinning it down to a specific version of it. Besides, they checked all that and found that I had the right chipset. There’s nothing left to swap out on this machine. Its’ just two hard drives and a video card and a motherboard and power supply, all with current drivers.
We wouldn’t make someone a movie that might not play on their DVD player and refund the cost of the show if it didn’t. If that happened we would move heaven and earth to correct it – and if we could not there would there not rightly be hell to pay? I propose that it be the same with our suppliers, even if it’s as difficult for them as you relate.
Maybe I’ll try taking the DVD player off of it. It’s probably the only expendable (which it isn’t, really) utility on it.
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[Chris Blair] “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”
Oh, I’ll bite back at that.
We are not a big-time big-city post house by any means, but we do very professional work and broadcast commercials on the local, regional, and occasional national level.
We’ve been a Premiere house since we started, 12 years ago.
The very first machine we had cost darn near half as much as my house, was a DPS Perception machine (anybody but Tim Kolb remember those?) running Premiere 4 on Windows NT. Since then we have been through a number of generations… Canopus DVrex, Canopus Storm2, Aja XENA, and Matrox AXIO. Right now we have three Windows suites running Premiere… my personal suite is an AXIO running Premiere CS3.
Believe it or not that original Perception machine is still running strong…. rarely used, of course, but we keep it around in the rare instances that we have to access those old proprietary .pvd files.
With a couple of exceptions and a few small speedbumps through the years, we have never had any problem with any of our boxes, they are rock solid stable, never crash… and all happily run Premiere. And I am happy to edit with it.
And even though I probably technically shouldn’t… I will routinely keep quite a few other applications running while in Premiere. It’s never given me a second’s worth of trouble to do that or bog down any machines in any way.
All of the editing platforms have come a long way through the years… so much so that these days FCP, Avid, and Premiere are darn near interchangable in terms of quality, usability, and fuctionality.
Now, all that being said… we do typically buy whatever is absolutely the most powerful smokin’ fast computer availble anytime we are moving to a new NLE… but… I think the success has a lot more to do with the fact that the machines are perfectly and properly configured by a VAR that builds turnkey systems for a living. I’m a relatively swift guy, but I would never attempt it myself. I’d much rather pay someone who knows how to do it right than waste my time trying to do it myself.
I think configuration is key.
T2
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Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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[Todd Terry] “All of the editing platforms have come a long way through the years… so much so that these days FCP, Avid, and Premiere are darn near interchangable in terms of quality, usability, and fuctionality. “
Yep.
[Todd Terry] “Now, all that being said… we do typically buy whatever is absolutely the most powerful smokin’ fast computer availble anytime we are moving to a new NLE… but… I think the success has a lot more to do with the fact that the machines are perfectly and properly configured by a VAR that builds turnkey systems for a living. I’m a relatively swift guy, but I would never attempt it myself. I’d much rather pay someone who knows how to do it right than waste my time trying to do it myself.
I think configuration is key. “
Ditto.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
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No – Windows Media plyer won’t scrub properly. I wonder if having WinDVD – which scrubs nicely and I have to scan DVds of al my footage regularly – might cause a problme.
There’s nothing else on this that the mfr didn’t add. maybe there’s a known-to-be-benign DVD player I can use.
Gotta take that Q to the techforum somewhere.
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“I think the success has a lot more to do with the fact that the machines are perfectly and properly configured by a VAR that builds turnkey systems for a living. ”
If this is necessary, system providers need to let that be known.
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Todd,
I didn’t mean to imply you couldn’t do very high-end work with Premiere and I stated as such. I even pointed out that an Axio based Premiere workstation is very powerful. Heck, a talented individual could do high end work using Premiere Elements or Vegas Movie Studio or Final Cut Express.
But it’s tough to argue that using Premiere with anything other than Axio hardware is as fast as using other systems. I know dozens of colleagues who share my take on Premiere from a configuration and performance standpoint COMPARED to systems like Avid, Final Cut systems with AJA hardware, VelocityQ and VelocityHD systems etc. If you compare the system I mentioned, Premiere CS3/Blackmagic HD Decklink Extreme to a VelocityHD or even a VelocityQ, it blows….even when it’s configured properly. You just simply cannot edit as quickly, efficiently, or with as much visual feedback. Plus, configuration of a system like that yourself is MUCH more difficult and quirky than building say VelocityQ systems like we have, or Final Cut systems yourself.
My point was that David has to consider that Premiere is a $600 program, and the machine, the video capture/acceleration hardware, and the configuration all contribute to the stability and performance of it, especially considering his hardware.
I have a friend using Premiere CS3 with Axio and he says it’s virtually identical to editing on a real-time Avid or Velocity system and is very stable, but with so many varied configurations possible with Premiere, there’s a pretty wide berth out there for opinions on it’s performance/stability quotient. And even on many properly configured systems using approved hardware, performance is pretty dismal compared to competing systems.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
David, This reminds me of *Edit 10 years ago. That software only worked on a particular Intel chip set. No matter what anyone did, it only worked on the system it was designed for. And, if you installed Word, the whole thing would crap out because of a conflict in the registry. On our FCp machines, we have every software under the sun.
The small “p” indicates “not quite pro, long way to go”.
Steve Wargo
Tempe, Arizona
It’s a dry heat!Sony HDCAM F-900 & HDW-2000/1 deck
5 Final Cut (not quite PRO) systems
Sony HVR-M25 HDV deck
2-Sony EX-1 HD . -
No offense taken, Chris…
You are right, it depends on the system and the configuration. I didn’t like my Aja XENA system, too much… I ditched it for the Matrox AXIO which I love… works flawlessly and is lighting fast.
I must say though that I was a HUGE fan of the Canopus/Premiere combination. We had two systems, worked great, crashless, fast.
In fact, if Canopus hadn’t gotten out of bed with Adobe I’d probably still be using Canopus. But we like Premiere so much that when Canopus ditched Premiere for Edius, we ditched Canopus.
Again, I think it has to do with proper configuration, because I don’t generally get that lucky.
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
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