No HD capture on an Xserve?

[Luke Maslen]

Hi John,

[John Heagy] “We’re not getting HD input with FCP or Blackmagic Deck Control. SD works fine.”

FCP is working on the Xserve? This surprises me as the last time we tested FCP5 with an Xserve, we found that FCP still required an AGP graphics card and so could not be used in an Xserve G5. The previous Xserve G4 featured an unusual, combination PCI/AGP slot which made it possible to run Final Cut Pro 4 (and newer) if an AGP graphics card was installed. However the G4 processor and PCI-66 MHz slots meant that it could not be used in HD with our DeckLink HD cards. These details are documented in a support note named Can I use a DeckLink card in an Apple Xserve?.

Based upon your report, it sounds as though a newer version of FCP5 enables the use of an Xserve G5 with a PCI-X graphics card or perhaps without any card at all.

Can you tell me if you have installed a graphics card in addition to the DeckLink HD card? If so, what kind of PCI or PCI-X graphics card are you using and at what speed does it run?

The two PCI-X slots in the Xserve G5 share the same PCI-X bus at 100 MHz. If you have installed a 33 or 66 MHz PCI card in to one slot, then the DeckLink HD card will also be slowed to this speed which will disble its HD functionality. It will still work for SD. I suspect this is the problem you have encountered but would be very interested to learn what other card you might or might not have installed in the other slot.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[John Heagy]

Your right… I misspoke. It’s actually a custom app our chief engineer wrote not FCP that we have running on the Xserve. The Xserve is a client on our Xsan so it has a Fibre card in one of the slots, that would explain the slow down.

Thanks
John Heagy

[John Heagy]

Now that I think about it, Apple’s fibre card (newest version) is PCI-X so the DeckLink HD Pro car should work in the Xserve… No?

[Luke Maslen]

Hi John,

Apple have both an older 66 MHz PCI and a newer PCI-X Fibre Channel card (as well as a PCIe card). Check that you really have the PCI-X version.

If you were working with a tower G5, I would still recommend that the two cards be used on independant buses to avoid the potential for slowdowns on a shared bus. That is not an option in your case because of the shared 100 MHz PCI-X bus. In theory the bus should be OK for use with two PCI-X cards but maybe it just doesn’t have enough bandwidth for the high demands of uncompressed video.

With a bit of luck, the problem will be caused by the accidental use of an older 66 MHz PCI Fibre Channel card. If you are using the PCI-X version, you might see if you can obtain another brand of PCI-X Fibre Channel card and see if it works any better, eg one of the ATTO cards.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design