Video freezes every minute or so during capture.

[David Battistella]

What slots are your cards in?

Maybe you could put the ATTo in Slot 4 and the LH in 1 2 or 3.

It sounds like a card/drive throughport issue to me.

David

The new year is over

[Bob Zelin]

David is corect – you have a card slot or drive issue. Specify what drives you have, what host controller you have, what card slot order you are using.
We will tell you if they will work with 8 bit uncompressed.

Bob Zelin

[Nick Balogh]

I have the Kona LH card in slot 2….slot 1 is used for the monitors. I put the Fibre channel card for my apple 3.5tb Raid in slot 4. It still has problems capturing in the uncompressed 8 bit file format. It freezes in random places. Doesnt matter if i capture 4 minutes or 45 minutes. I can capture using the DV/DVCPRO NTSC compressor just fine but the file size is really small which makes it harder to do some blue screen effects. I am also having issues capturing 60fps vericam footage using the HDSDI inputs with the AJA Kona LH: 720p 59.94 8 bit settings. It stutters as well. This is actually why I started trying it with the standard def settings in the first place….I figure its all part of the same problem.

I appreciate the help.

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Nick –
the older Apple FC cards ran at 66MHz, so unless you just bought it, put the Apple FC card in slot 2 or 3, and the AJA Kona LH in slot 4. I ASSUME that your drives are striped as one big RAID array, and that you have more than 4 drives stripped together (since you say that you have 3.5 TB, which if you have at least 7 drives, you should have no trouble doing DVCPro or SD uncompressed). With 7 drives (or more), you should have NO PROBLEMS doing DVCProHD either. I ASSUME you have used EASY SETUP to setup your FCP, and not manually selected things from the Audio/Video and Sequence settings – correct ?

Certainly, right now, use the AJA Kona System Test in the Kona Utiiltes folder, and run it. Select 10 bit 720×486, and pick a 4 Gig file size. What are your read and write speeds ? If for some reason you can’t find AJA Kona System Test on your MAC, download it NOW from the aja.com/support site.

Bob Zelin

[David]

Nick,

I’m surprised the experts missed this one. You’re using an XRaid right? Go into the performance tab in Raid Admin and UNCHECK the middle option which I believe is “allow host cache flushing” or something like that (I’m not in front of my computer at teh moment) That WILL fix your problem BUT you’ll need to reset this each time you reboot. Not sure why it won’t hold the settings but it doesn’t. Please email us back to let us know if that worked.

David

[Nick Balogh]

Allright everyone. I moved my KONA to slot 4 moved my Apple FC to slot 3. I turned off “allow Host Flushing in the RAID Admin for my xServe. I tested the the KONA read/write speeds for my xServe. The Write speed is 74.8 mb/s and the Read is 186.6 mb/s. I recorded 10 minutes of footage using AJA KONA:Uncompressed 8 bit 4:2:2 setting and it played great. No lag at all. Im now going to try a whole tape then i will try 720p uncompressed 8bit and see if this fixed the whole problem.

Again thanks for everyones help. I will keep you posted.

[Bob Zelin]

Your problem is not fixed. There is something wrong with your XServe RAID. The XServe RAID is a very fast unit. I use SATA drives all the time, and one
SATA drive gets about 60mb/sec (both read and write) and 2 SATA drives striped together get 120mb/sec with burst speeds up to 135mb/sec.

I worked on an Apple XServe RAID the other day with “only” 6 drives in it, and I got 230mb/sec performance. Your drive array is barely moving. It’s making me question if your drives are in a RAID 5 configuration at all, and if all of your drives are being used. It is my opinion that if you do nothing (becuase it’s working), as your drive array gets more and more full, you will start to get “drop frame errors”. Using RAID Admin, you should rebuild the RAID array, and then use Apple Disk Utility to reinit the drives – if you have drives on both sides of the XServe, stripe both sides together. You ABSOLUTELY will get dramatically better performance from an XServe RAID than 74.8mb/sec, even if you only have 4 drives stripped together.

Bob Zelin

[Nick Balogh]

I double checked how everything was set up. I am running a RAID 5 configuration with 7 drives on each side striped together creating one big hardrive on my desktop. I called and checked with my Pro applecare guy and he said its running normal write speeds. So im sure if i should have someone come out here and check it or keep working?

[Nick Balogh]

So after a day of inputting footage its starting to freeze again. I dont know what my options are at this point just short of reinstalling everything and re formating and re-striping the drives. Ideas?

[Bob Zelin]

Nick –
1) when you say that it’s starting to freeze again- freeze only when you do an edit to tape, or freeze while you are PLAYING BACK material that you captured. Disk drives that are not fast enough will “freeze” or stutter the playback, just from simple playback. I was under the impression from you that the only problem was when you edit to tape.

2) you state –
called and checked with my Pro applecare guy and he said its running normal write speeds. So im sure if i should have someone come out here and check it or keep working?

This is PROOF that Pro Applecare is run by a bunch of incompetant idiots. You don’t get 708Mb/sec write speed with an Apple XServe RAID with 14 drives in a Raid 50 configuration. If this was true, you could never do uncompressed 10 bit HDSDI capture onto an XServe RAID. Apple is filled with incompetance in their support department, and this is proof of it.

You may have many issues going on with your system, but I can assure you that if you have 14 drives in a RAID 50 config, and get these slow read and write speeds using AJA Kona System test, then there is something DEFINATELY wrong with your system.

I realize how frustrating this is for you, but when you say “after digitzing all day, it’s starting to freeze again” – you must be specific of what is freezing – simple playback which you see on the MAC screens, or only during edit to tape.

In my opinion, you have major drive issues, based on your information.

bob Zelin