[Bob Zelin]

I am confused as to what concerns you. You are NEVER going to get a replacement for a CRT monitor. Even though the resolution of the Panasonic is technically better than a Sony PVW-20L5/1, I will never get used to LCD or Plasma – but you and I BETTER get used to it – because CRT’s are OVER. Sony announced that even the hi end $35,000 BVM’s are at the end of their life cycle. These products (CRT monitors) will no longer be available very very soon, and your color correction will have to be based on what people own (your clients, ad agencies, conference rooms, end users, etc.), and this will be on PLASMA or LCD – not CRT monitors. In 3 years, only Grandma, and die hard old school color correction guys will have CRT monitors – everyone else will have LCD or Plasma.

So for right now, the Panasonic BT-LH is about as good as it gets. Like it or not.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

the Apple Cinema display, and any direct LCD display, like the Dell 2407FPW, Sony SDM-P234b, or HP2335, has no ability to display a STANDARD DEF signal, and when you try using the HDLink, it looks like crap. HD looks fantastic with the Cinema Display, but Standard def does not. This is one of the major advantages of buying the Panasonic. There is no 20″ model – the next size down is the BT-LH1700W, which is 17″ (and has a built in waveform monitor). It is very nice, and about $2600 US.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

choose an EASY SETUP from the pulldown menus – like AJA I/O Betacam 8 bit uncompressed, and I bet it starts to work. I ASSUME that you installed the AJA I/O drivers on your system. If you did not, you will not see any choices for the AJA I/O (or Pro I/O) in your EASY SETUP menu selection.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

Dax –
I will contact you directly. To answer your question, when you use HDCam, and you shoot at 23.98 (only George Lucas shoots at 24), the Sony VTR (like the JH-3 or HDW-F500) will do a 2:3 pulldown on the 23.98 material, to enter it into your edit system at 59.94, so you can edit at a normal frame rate. If you own a Sony HDW-M2000 or HDW-S280, there is no 2:3 pulldown, so you would have to edit at 23.98, and then output from the Kona (using a menu in the audio video settings), so you could output at 29.97. We have found this to be inconvenient for customers, and the “quickie” solution is to put a Cobalt Digital 8021 converter (about $3000) at the output of the HDW-M2000, to do a hardware 2:3 pulldown, so you can input at 59.94. Again, if you work with the inexpensive JH-3 player, it has the pulldown converter built in. All Panasonic VTR’s have 2:3 pulldown converters in them.

Talk to you in person on Monday.

bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

the Kona LHe will work at 1080i, and will be able to output an analog component HD signal to feed any HD ready Plasma screen you feel like buying, at any budget.

If you have any specific questions (other than “what potholes”), please ask away.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

Dax – when you work with products like the JVC-BRHD50, even if you shoot at 23.98, you will input to your system at 59.94, not 23.98. These products do not work at 23.98 (it still looks like film when the VTR converts to 59.94). The AJA HD10A, and AJA HD10AVA are used EVERY DAY to simply convert products like the BR-HD50, and the Sony HVRM25U into HD-SDI signals.

If this is unacceptable to you (because you don’t like these little converter boxes for some reason) – wait for the Sony HVR-1500 professional HDV VTR to come out. You will be EXTREEMLY UNHAPPY if you attempt to do all of this with firewire at a professional TV station.

Any dealer that you are dealing with should be knowlegeable about all of these products, and the process. You can get easily screwed if your dealer does not know what these products can and cannot do.

bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

Dax –
no offense here, but FORGET HDV, and the HDV Codec. You will want to output from your Sony HVRM-25U or JVC BR-HD50 from the analog component outputs (analog HD) rignt into your Kona LHe card, OR – get an AJA HD10AVA to convert the analog HD signal from these VTRs into an HD-SDI signal, so you can go directly into a Kona 3. You DO NOT want to input an HDV signal. You will capture with either the DVCProHD Codec, or uncompressed 8 or 10 bit HD-SDI. Everything will work great, and you will treat this like the HI END system that you are building, and everything will work great. Your HUGE drive array will handle all of this very nicely.

bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

David –
this is not a SATA forum, nor is it a Sonnet Forum. I thank AJA and Creative Cow for not objecting to all this “OT” that does not relate to AJA products on their forum.

This is my opinion. You actually answered your own questions here when you said –

“And yes, after all of this, I did put the 5 x 500 Media RAID drives in the other enclosure to test that – Unfortunately…SAME PROBLEMS! ”

REPLY – you are in the middle of a big, important project, and you can’t reformat your drives, and you are crashing no matter what you do. I use SATA like this all day long without these problems. You have followed the correct steps – you have a 2nd computer, you have a second X4P card, you have a second Sonnet 500P chassis – AND IT IS STILL FAILING. You feel that this whole SATA thing is flakey.

But you have NOT REFORMATED – I can only ASSUME that there is something wrong with your media, and I don’t know what it is. In my OPINION, if you were to stick different drives in your system (or dedicate two drives for this test), and digitize NEW MATERIAL (not copy old media) onto these new drives, you would have NO PROBLEMS. This is easy for me to say, as I am not in the middle of a big paying job, that pays your bills – but this is how you will identify your issues. I was about to write “if I am wrong about this, you will need to do a ground zero reinstall of your OS, and FCP and try again” – but I am wrong, and you do not have to do this, as you have a SECOND MAC there, which serves the same purpose. I can ONLY ASSUME that there is something wrong with your media – and even though you transfer this material to other drives, and take the drives and put it into a second chassis, with a second X4P card, and a second eSATA cable, in a second computer, AND STILL HAVE PROBLEMS – it’s got to be your media.

The only other assumption anyone could have is that this entire Sonnet SATA think is a piece of flakey crap, and I can assure you that this is not the case (as many others on this list can confirm). In my opinion, you should not proceed any further without dedicating a couple of drives to REDIGITIZING media, to see if it works, or locks up. I don’t know what you have on the drive array with 2 drives striped RAID 0, and the 3 that are single drives, but if you can, I would reinit this array to RAID 0 all 5 drives, and REDIG YOUR MATERIAL (easier said than done) – and you will see that nothing locks up or crashes.

I RESOLVED THIS SIMILAR PROBLEM ON AN AVID THE OTHER DAY. AVID Meridian System MAC OS-X 10.2.6. System would not boot up – 4 Seagate SCSI 73 Gig drives. We play with the cables, and eventually get the system to boot. We can play material back from the drives, but we can’t write to them. They try to transfer the media off these drives, and the system crashes. As they continue to use the system, it keeps crashing, and the drives keep hanging up. I finally convince them to reinit the drives, where we split the RAID 0 of 4 drives into 2 groups of 2. I figure that one of the 2 groups will fail, and then I will identify which one is the bad drive. Once we reinit the drives, and they redigitize their media, THERE ARE NO MORE PROBLEMS ! No drives have failed for 4 days now. I don’t understand why corrupt media can make a drive fail, so that it even stops the system from booting up some times, but it did.

Pick 2 drives, take ALL OTHER DRIVES off system, redig, see how stable it is. I bet you have no problems.

I feel your pain.

If you wish to take this further, please email me off this forum at maxavid@cfl.rr.com.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

to answer DAvid’s question, I am a big fan of SATA arrays. I am awaiting my Cal Digit eval unit, but I have been successfully been using Sonnet SATA arrays with great success. My most recent install was at Adrenaline Films, where we put two Sonnet 500P chassis on one Sonnet X4P in an “old” dual 2.7 gig MAC G5 and a Kona 2, and we got 450 MB/sec from AJA Kona system test. This is 10 drives stripped RAID 0. The entire cost is under $6000 for 5 Terabytes of storage. Since 220mb/sec is enough for 10 bit uncompressed HD, 450mb/sec is MORE than enough for uncompressed HD. At this price point, it’s hard to ignore.

I await my Cal Digit.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Dax –
this is an excellent system. Don’t forget, you will need house reference from your station as well. The JVC does work, but Sony will soon release the HVR-1500 HDV VTR, which will have HD-SDI outputs on it, as well as RS422 control. The JVC has analog component HD outputs, and you will need either an AJA HD10AVA to convert the analog HD CAV signal to HD-SDI to get it into your Kona 3, or you will need the new Convergent Design HD-Connect-MI, to convert the HDMI port to HD-SDI. For monitoring, I recommend the Panasonic BT-LH2600W or BT-LH1700.

If you buy your system from Virtual Media in Orlando, I can build the system for you. We did many systems in Tampa, including Brighthouse Networks.

The ATTO FC42ES works fine in the MAC Pro. I am sorry that Walter had problems with his HUGE array, but as I am sure he experienced, HUGE support is excellent, and is quick to replace anything defective.

In my opinion, since you are used to working with pro gear, try to avoid firewire input – you will be much happier with HD-SDI and RS422 control, which is why I am not objecting to the JVC-BRHD50 (with RS422 control), or waiting for the new HVR-1500 – OR just getting the necessary converters, available from AJA.

bob Zelin