Still dropping frames

[Walter Biscardi]

[hperez] “Sorry for posting again on the same issue,”

don’t create duplicate threads for the same issue, makes it confusing to keep up with your situation.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com

Director, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.com

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[Jeremy Garchow]

What does the free AJA Kona system test tell you?

[David Battistella]

Walter is right.

I have no idea what the problem is because I did not read the past thread.

SO,

What drives?

Do you have an I/O box attached too?

Is there an ipod on your firewire bus.

Are the drives daisy chained?

Do you have a deck on the firewire Chain?

Is it the firmware on your card?

If you take out the FW card then does the drive still drop frame when on the Apple bus?

Have you tried the drive on another computer?

How have you initially formatted the drive?

There are so many factors here. It also sounds like you are reaching the PCI bandwidth limit. You have a card in every slot. Stick to one thread and you might get better help.

David

Peace and Love 🙂

[Bob Zelin]

Mr. Perez –
your ATI card has NOTHING to do with this problem. Continue to keep your FW card out of the system. As Jeremy suggested, download the AJA Kona System Test program from http://www.aja.com/support, and run it on your computer. Even a single decent drive should get 68mb/sec, and your HUGE should do dramatically more than that. I have to assume that you have a current MAC OS operating system, a current FCP version, current AJA drivers, and current ATTO driver for your MAC, that matches the MAC OS (I assume you DID download a UL4D driver from http://www.attotech.com, and did not use the default SCSI driver that comes with the MAC OS – yes, this is important).

I assume that if you have done all of this, and you are still dropping frames, then when you run the AJA Kona System test, you will see poor performance (like 12mb/sec), which means that somehthing may be wrong with your HUGE Drive array. It may require a firmware upgrade.

If all the stuff I am describing to you is overwhelming (download this, download that, upgrade firmware, etc – why can’t it just plug in and work !), then perhaps you should hire a freelancer to help you with all of this stuff. Contrary to popular belief, it ain’t easy getting a system to work properly, and requires a little bit of work, which is often done by a Value Added Reseller.

I also ASSUME (and no insult here) that you know to go into System Settings on the FCP Program, and SET the drive to capture to, to the HUGE array, and that you are not trying to digitize to your internal hard drive in your MAC. Because you are not describing all of the details, I don’t want to assume anything.

Bob Zelin

[Gary Adcock]

[David Battistella] “What drives?
Do you have an I/O box attached too? Is there an ipod on your firewire bus. Are the drives daisy chained? Do you have a deck on the firewire Chain? Is it the firmware on your card? If you take out the FW card then does the drive still drop frame when on the Apple bus? Have you tried the drive on another computer? How have you initially formatted the drive?”

I want to add
NO CD/ DVD’S mounted,
No ext Drives that you are not using
No itunes
No other apps open

gary

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[Humberto Perez]

Ok guys, first of all, sorry for not following the proper forum protocol by opening another thread. Didn’t know and won’t happen again, I promise.
Secondly, I am not exactly sure what factors are at play here, so I only mentioned what I thought might affect the matter.
When I run Final Cut, the only application open is Final Cut, and the problem I am having is happening when I play back DV resolution movies. This is only roughly 3.6 megs a sec, and I’m playing back from a ‘Huge Systems’ 500Gig SCSI drive (which should be able to play back close to HD without a hitch). I have long ago done everything I was told to try in this thread, such as running the freebie app. from Kona, and that reads a rate of almost 120 megs a sec reading. Capturing is not a prob, it’s just playing back simple 30 sec media, all found withing the ‘Huge’ Drive. Also, the settings within Final Cut are all set to the correct drives.
As for me, I’ve been cutting stuff in a computer for more than 12 years, and I have set up a bunch of non-linear systems, so I’m not new to this. BUT, this is the first kona2/ Final Cut combination that I’ve put together, and I just can’t find the problem.
I had a Firewire card taking up a PCI slot, and to that I had a LaCie 500gig drive, and a G-Raid 1 terrabytes drive. That card is now gone, leaving that pci slot empty, but the problem is still haunting me.
The Huge system drives are connected to an ATTO UL4D card, now in the pci-x slot. The Kona2 card is in the slot right below the ATTO card. The latest drives and firmware are installed. In addition, I’m running all this in a G5, dual 2ghz, running Os X 10.4.5, but this problem has been present since OS X 10.3.9.
iPOD is not installed, and everything else that comes with any new G5, is still in it.
Thanks for any help you can provide.

[David Battistella]

Are there any effects onteh footage?

What are your RT settings?

What are your sequence settings?

Are you using the correct KONA easy setup for the footage you are playing back?

How many layers?

How was it captured?

David

Peace and Love 🙂

[Bob Zelin]

Mr. Perez writes –
I have long ago done everything I was told to try in this thread, such as running the freebie app. from Kona, and that reads a rate of almost 120 megs a sec reading. Capturing is not a prob, it’s just playing back simple 30 sec media, all found withing the ‘Huge’ Drive.

REPLY – if you are running the AJA Kona System Test on the HUGE drive array, and are getting read and write speeds of 120mb/sec, and you cannot playback a DV timeline without getting drop frames, I urge you to bring in a freelancer (editor or engineer) to help you, becuase you are doing something wrong operationally. 120mb/sec read and write shows that the HUGE drive array is working correctly.

At this point, (since you won’t take my advice right away), I ask you to pull out your ATTO SCSI card, forget the HUGE array, stick your firewire card back into slot 3 or 4, hook up your Lacie drive, and try it again, this time digitizing to your Lacie or G-Tech drive. Does it work now ????
If it DOES work, send your HUGE array back to HUGE for Firmware updating. If it does not work, PLEASE hire someone to come in and help you, because you are doing something wrong that is just operational (like not selecting the correct drive to record onto).

Bob Zelin

[Humberto Perez]

David,
There are no effects on the footage

RT Settings are set to unlimited, but changing this does not improve the situation (I’ve tried)

Sequence setting is set to Kona2 DV 525i

Capture settings is the DV NTSC one

As for layers, it is only 1 of video, and 4 Audio

and it was captured via firewire, directly to the HUGE System

The one thing to add might the fact that the movies I’m trying to play back have been rendered in After Effects, using the DV/DVCPRO codec, at the original size of the digitized video.

Bob, I’ll try taking the ATTO out. I do want to try everything before bringing someone in and finding out that it was something really dumb to start with.

I really appreciate everyone’s input. Thanks.

[Humberto Perez]

In case anyone reads this, I finally resolved the issue, in a way. It seems that having every PCI busy, is not a good thing for the Mac. The way my system was set up, I was working DV via firewire, but outputting with a Kona card. The reason why I needed the firewire card was because I was digitizing from the xl1 camera, and apparently the G5 does not like to have the Canon XL1 and the firewire drives connected at the same time. The solution to that was to get a firewire 800 card, connect the drives to that, and digitize from the XL1 with no problems. In doing this though, I’ve ocuppied all the PCI slots and that’s when the G5 starting give problems. Taking either the Kona or the Firewire card out, will solve the problem of the lock ups. As for the dropping frames thing, I uninstalled and re-installed the Kona software, re-downloaded the easy set-up folder from the Aja site, and everything seems to be working just fine now. I had already done this a million times, but not without leaving one of the PCI’s open. I don’t know if I just got lucky this time, or having all the PCI slots taken up was the major cause of everything.
All is good now, so on to bigger problems.