[Bob Zelin]

I have an alternate cross conversion question for the AJA Kona 3. You do your entire job in 720p, and now want to “cross convert” it out to 1080i. The job is already finished inside your MAC at 720p (having used the Kona3 to capture the job at 720p). If you go into the Kona control panel, when you select 1080i, it doesn’t “stick” – so I know that I must be doing this wrong. How do you cross convert to 1080i, once the job is on your machine at 720p ?

Thanks –
Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

The stupdity in this thread is almost beyond belief. ATTO is “behind the curve” because ATTO does not get support or advanced releases of the products from Apple. They have to figure it out themselves, and don’t get machines before any of us do. My snide remarks come from the fact that when the MAC Pro came out, APPLE (and their subcontractor) was NOT READY with their Fibre Channel Card for their own Apple XServe RAID, but ATTO WAS READY (at least the card worked, and saw the Xserve RAID). When you say “time to start looking for someone else” – WHO is absolutely a correct response. APPLE is not going to help Adaptec, LSI Logic (except when LSI builds the FC card for Apple), QLogic, ATTO or ANYONE ELSE. The same thing happend when the MAC QUAD came out with the PCI Express buss. It would be NICE if APPLE send their development partners a computer, and a phone number for software support, but they DO NOT. I guess APPLE does not consider ANYONE ELSE who makes host adaptors their partner, other than APPLE.

Do you think that APPLE is helping AVID get the Media Composer application working on the MAC Pro ?

OK, Mr. Smartie pants ?

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

The single green light on the Tempo X4P card indicates that is connected to that particular port on the X4P card. If you were to yank out the eSATA cable, that light would go out. And yes, the amber light is drive activity. Everything you described is normal.

When your drive “disappears”, you must see if the green LED on the X4P board goes off. This will indicate that your array has disconnected itself from the X4P card (bad cable, loose connection, etc.). If it’s on, then the cable is ok, but you have another issue.

You have not said if you swapped out the 500P chassis yet.

bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

If I was there, the only thing I would do would be to open up the side of the MAC, and observe the LED’s on the X4P card. You should (since you are having trouble) – see how the LED’s behave on the card, when a drive is plugged in, and when a drive is not plugged in. If you have an intermittent eSATA cable, or a bad port on the card (but you just changed the card – right ?) – you can tell from watching the status lights right on the X4P card.

And change out that chassis before you start wiping out your computer !

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

you DO have Energy Saver turned off, don’t you (in the System Preferences window in OS-X) – and you have MADE SURE that “put drives to sleep whenever possible” is not checked in this window

Am I correct about this !!!!!!!

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

you are in a difficult situation, as you have media on your drives. Drive bay 2 should not “hang up”. It’s easy for me, and Sonnet support to say – “unstripe your drives, reinit them, and try them one at a time – because it’s not our project, and not our labor – but (Even though I have had luck with never seeing a bad SATA drive) – you certainly could have a bad drive, or a bad drive enclosure.

I am not following if this is the 500P with the 5 drives stripped RAID 0, or if this is the array with the seperate drives in them. If it is the 500P with the 5 drives stripped RAID 0, I don’t care how corrupt your media is – drive bay 2 should not “hang up” by itself. At this point – since you have the luxury of owning two of these 500P enclosures, I would swap out all the drives and carriers into the other array box, to see if it still hangs up. If it does not – you have a problem with the 500P. If it STILL HANGS UP – you COULD have a bad drive, or a failing drive. The next step (gulp !) would be to blow away all the material on this array, and reinit (erase) using Apple Disk Utility, and do some quick tests with just drive # 2, to see if it hangs up. Of course, this is easy for me to say -, but I realize what a nightmare this will be if you have a failing drive.

bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

David –
you did not upset me at all, and I have been repremanded by management of this forum to try to use a different “tone” in my writing style, in the past. The only thing that upsets me is the fact that some people THINK that I am upset, simply by my choice of words. I am only trying to help you, and feel your pain and frustration. You read that this stuff should just plug in and work, and then it doesn’t.

This story won’t help you, but it may try to show the insanity of our business. I have been using SATA from day 1, and was an original user of the old Sonnet Tempo X 8 port card. On this MAC G5, I have done numerous firmware updates, as time went on. When the Sonnet X4P came out, I could never get it to work in this particular MAC G5 that had the Tempo X. Even after numerous calls to Sonnet, no X4P would ever mount in this computer. I realized that I either reinstall the MAC OS from scratch (clean install), or just bite the bullet, and forget about this particular system and the X4P (which I did, and it is running to this day without the X4P).

I am not saying that you need to do a ground zero reinstall with your system – I just want to assure you that (as per your original question) – there is no conflict between the sonnet X4P and the AJA Kona LH card – they are a rock stable combination. However, there are countless things – everything from a MOTU driver, to a bad eSATA cable – that can be causing your issues. It’s difficult to discuss every combination on these forums, and as you try things, and more and more things don’t work – it becomes frustrating.

Sorry if I came off angry – I wasn’t.

bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

David’s post is a typical example of why bizarre errors occur. I reread his first post, to make sure that I didn’t miss anything, and in this last post (just above this one) – he mentions that he has a Mark Of The Unicorn audio card in the system as well.

Whenever there are issues, it’s usually because of some conflict. I worked on a system for Sun Sports several months ago, that I personally built, and “all of a sudden” it stopped working. WE DID NOTHING they said, but the editor neglected to tell me that they loaded in a bunch of After Effects plug in’s recently, and it wasn’t until I got AJA support on the phone, where after much frustration, they helped me identify the plug in’s, and eliminate them, and everything started working (this killed an AJA I/O box from working).

We have seen posts like this, where guys can’t get their AJA I/O box to work, and then you find out “oh yea, I have 6 Firewire 400 drives chained on the firewire buss, along with the AJA I/O”.

With all of this said, I HAVE NO IDEA OF WHAT ELSE IN ON YOUR SYSTEM. Most systems are FCP edit systems, with a Kona 3, and a storage card (ATTO, Sonnet, CalDigit, Apple Fibre Channel, etc.). ANYTHING ELSE that you have on your system – be it a MOTU, a slow Firewire 400 card, and all kinds of other crap – can be causing ALL KINDS OF ISSUES, and it is impossible to diagnose these problems unless you report EVERYTHING THAT IS ON YOUR SYSTEM.

The Sonnet cards works without software – it just plugs in and works (as do many cards like the Firmtek SATA cards). If there were other drivers (like Highpoint drivers) in your system previously, this will cause issues. At this point, I have NO IDEA of what else was in your system. I can assure you that the Sonnet Card does not conflict with the AJA Kona LH, but there are always dozens of variables that make systems not work. If you innocently upgrade your MAC OS to something new that comes out, there are often issues with third party cards. Companies like AJA and Sonnet try to make it easy, but it becomes very difficult when you introduce these variables. You can’t test EVERYTHING for incompaitibility.

You said that you tried the drive array on a second dual 2 Gig MAC G5, and it still did not come up – do you mean the 500P that has all 5 drives at RAID 0, or the one with seperate drives ? You have 2 chassis, you can try both chassis.

Of course, with all of this said, you may have a bad SATA card, you may have a bad drive, you may have a bad 500P chassis. But if you introduce all these variables, it makes it very hard to diagnose these problems. If you have a 2 Gig G5 with NOTHING ELSE ON IT, you should be able to pop the X4P into this computer (and nothing else), and first see if you see it in the SYSTEM PROFILER, and then pop on a 500P chassis. Look at the LED’s on the X4P – do you see them light up?

I’m here – let me know.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

KEVIN WRITES –
It worked flawlessly for the past 6-8 months and just suddenly started going off line on us. It happens when copying media and the RAID will disappear from the the desktop and say “device unexpectantly went offline.” It seems to do it consistantly on copying certain files. Bob, does this sound more like a drive failure if it does it each time I try to copy a same file? We called Sonnet and they said to break the RAID and test each drive, but that would mean killing everything on the drives, right? Not sure I’m that desperate yet.

Anyways, for a while the RAID was getting worse and worse. It would appear on the desktop for about 5 seconds and then pop off. I used Disk Warrior and it repaired the directory so now it stays on. However, it still goes off on certain files.

REPLY –
Until you said “I used Disk Warrior and now it stays on” – I would have only guessed a flakey eSATA cable. I have never seen a problem like this, but if you have corrupt media, I dont’ know what might be happening. When you kill the stripe, you can test each drive seperately, but I have still NEVER seen a dead SATA drive, but I certainly have seen flakey SATA cables, and cables that unseat themselves from the SATA card (the SATA I cables were MUCH better – they didn’t fall out like Firewire and USB).

I bet you do NOT have a dying SATA drive, and I am sure that you don’t want to lose your media. It would be great if you could identify the corrupt media, and get it off the array, and redig it (but I have no idea of why this would make the volume disappear from the desktop). CERTAINLY it is cheap enough to REPLACE your eSATA cable, to eliminate this potential problem. When your drive disappears on you again, pop the side of your MAC, and look at the LED’s, to see the status of the array. You actually should do this NOW while things are working, so you can see what it is like when a drive is connected, and disconnected. You can do this HOT (as long as you are not writing to the drive) with everything turned on. You will not blow anything up.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

on your question “can it be converted to a VGA connection” – the answer is yes. I use the cheapest piece of crap VGA montiors for this with, and it works just fine.

Bob Zelin