[Bob Zelin]

easy. Take your “bad” RAID – the one that is working at 78mb/sec read. Delete the RAID group in Apple Disk Utility. Now, initialize each drive (that’s right – the 4 seperate drives) – and TEST EACH ONE. You should get about 68mb/sec PER DRIVE. One will probably fail, or hang up during your testing with AJA Kona System Test – this is your bad drive.

If you can’t do this test, because you have media on this array, and can’t delete the media – I bet your drive array is FULL. Full drive arrays don’t work very well.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

you will not “get rid” of the need for analog composite or component for a long time. Many people try to use converters (like the AJA HD10AVA) to avoid using an I/O LA or I/O. Forget it. You are going to have to deal with analog for quite a while, in our “digital age”. Get the I/O – as a matter of fact – get the I/O, and forget the Kona 3 for now. If you are not doing HD now, you don’t need it. The I/O will make you happy. Then, later on, you can get teh Kona 3.

If you think you are planning ahead for the future – you are kidding yourself. Every one of these products becomes outdated after a few years. Everything from AJA, everything from Blackmagic – everything from everyone else (including the products that have been discontinued, like the teriffic Pinnacle CineWave). You cant’ plan for 3 years from now. The I/O has miraculously been a great product for BOTH Apple PCI-X and PCI-E products.

You will not regret getting an I/O box – especially when you have to upconvert your Beta material in the future to HD. With all that said, the HD10AVA is teriffic. In the next few years, you will own quite a bit of AJA hardware.

Bob ZElin

[Bob Zelin]

this is a guess, since I don’t use iLife or iMovie. These things all work with Quicktime files. Simply download AJA VTR Exchange, capture your footage using the AJA I/O composite video input (from the Hi 8), and now you have a quicktime file of your media. Use iMovie all you want now.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

Michael –
you want, what everyone wants. They want to hit the play button on their edit system, send the video into a box (the DVD recorder box, the HD-DVD recorder box), and just make a quick super quality DVD, that can play back anywhere.

WELL, it doesn’t exist. The Pioneer, as has been described here, is the best of the bunch, but the only way you are going to make a “Hollywood quality” DVD is by using an authoring system and products like compressor. If you “just don’t have the time to screw with this” – you can purchase an Optibase MPEG 2 encoder card, that will MPEG encode your video to MPEG 2 format in real time, but you still have to get this signal onto a DVD-R.

“Don’t they just make something – AT ANY COST – that you can just hit a button and do it” –

NO.
Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

All drive performance decreases as they get full. The Seagate 7200.10 drives work just fine.
If you want to insure that you don’t get stuck with the -308 suffix Seagate drives, that have SSC (and dont’ work), buy from Ron at Maxx Digital (714) 374 4944, who only sells the -305 suffix drives (with SSC
disabled). You can monitor your drive performance on a regular basis with AJA Kona System Test.

And to answer your question – YES, the 750 Gig drives work just fine and dandy in this exact application.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

Well, well, well –
I have mentioned that SATA is EXTREMLY reliable. How reliable you ask? I have not seen ONE SATA drive die since April 2005 (I have seen chassis die). But this is not the point of my silly post here.

TWO DAYS AGO, my customer Disney Public Relations, had a wonderful StorCase DS-570 RAID 5 SCSI to ATA 8 drive array on their AVID system. It’s RAID 5, but THE RAID CONTROLLER DIED (and StorCase just went out of business). So you know what I did – I found another customer of mine with the same StorCase, I moved the drives into their box temporarily, and transfered ALL this client critical media to SATA. TODAY, I put in a second SATA array, as a backup (all RAID 0) in case the main one fails.

I have learned a big lesson about RAID 5 arrays – from StorCase, Dell, Apple, etc. If you don’t have TRUE REDUNDANCY – this means EVERYTHING – power supplies, RAID controllers, cases, etc. YOU WILL ONE DAY GET SCREWED. This is why “real” Apple XSan and AVID Unity systems are so expensive, and there is no such thing as a “bare bones” SAN shared storage system. If you dont’ have redundancy in your RAID 3 or RAID 5 system, IT MEANS NOTHING. A protected drive means nothing when your RAID controller card dies.

Both ATTO Technologies and Highpoint Technologies have new RAID 5 SAS (serial attached storage) to SATA II
host cards. They DO NOT support port multiplication (so no fancy Cal Digit or Sonnet drive chassis). The world is changing, and as we all know by now, 3 years from now, we will wonder how we were even working with these “primitive” SATA arrays that we use today.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

oops – the 700 did work at 1920×1035 format. The Kona will never read this material. You can try the VTR conversion.

bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

1035i is an old HD format I believe. I believe that if you can rent a HDW-500 with the optional 502 card, this will do the conversion for you, and get rid of the 5 line gap. These tapes must be from the early 90’s.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

go into your Kona Control Panel (in the utilites folder), select CONTROL tab, and bring up a test pattern like color bars. If your Luma monitor is dark, it’s your Luma monitor. Even though I hate the LMD-232, it’s not dark (and neither is the levels coming out of the Kona test pattern).

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

you say that you have a sync generator for your system (which you don’t need for some old 3/4″ machine). Take the black or color bar output of your sync generator and send it into the Composite Video input of your AJA I/O LA. Look at your Pro I/O Control panel, with INPUT tab selected to analog composite. Does it indicate that you are getting a video input (even if you are sending in color black)? When you say “sync generator” – I assume you have a generator that generates color black, and not sync, blanking and subcarrier.

The Pro I/O Control panel is a great tool. Forget FCP for now. If you can’t get a Video INput indication on your control panel, after sending black into the video input of the I/O LA, you have a problem with the I/O LA (that is, if your black generator is working).

Bob Zelin