[Bob Zelin]

Hey,
Ensemble Designs used to send ME chocolate whenever I helped them complete a sale. With this mindset, I should have AJA have the chocolate tractor trailer back up to my house.

bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

this particular post has taught me a valuable lesson. WAIT on buying a Mac Pro – let someone else suffer this out (between the 2 Gig issues, the firmware issues, the SATA and ATTO issues – I can wait another 60 days).

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Jim –
it is wonderful that you could post a picture of what is actually happening.
Let me suggest this. I am trying to determine if your TV is screwed up. Forget DVCProHD, and just go into easy setups and select something like Betacam 8 bit uncompressed NTSC, to get a SD image. Select color bars, and look at the output the same way (but now you are in a 525 SD project). Do the color bars on your TV look good now.

Before replacing the card, you really need to make sure that your TV and video cable are ok. You can simply plug in a cheapo VHS or DVD player to make sure the TV is ok (going thru the same video input on the TV).

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

1) open up a 720p project (with easy setups DVCProHD)
2) select 720p bars
3) take the Y out of your KL box and send it to your TV
4) Kona Control Panel, control tab – set to FREE RUN just for now
5) Kona control panel, set analog out to Composite Y/C (not Betacam, or anything else).

Do you see color and a clean picture? If you don’t and ASSUMING that your TV and video cable are actually ok, you may have a bad card.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

As all the others have stated – the Panasonic’s are terrific, the Sony LUMA’s are horrible.
We can sit here all day and discuss how LCD’s and Plasmas can’t be used for color correction, but by 2008, there will be NO MORE CRT MONITORS, so you better get damn used to doing color correction on Plasma and CRT’s – because if you think that someone is going to go into the “refurb your old CRT” business, you are dreaming. By 2010, those $35,000 Sony HD CRT monitors will all be soft, and NO ONE will ever see a CRT ever again after that.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

I agree – if you are getting these good numbers on your SATA drives, and still getting dropped frames, something (and I don’t know what) is setup incorrectly. I know that you want suggestions, and I usually have them (weather I know what I am talking about, or not), but not this time. I can’t imagine why you are getting dropped frame errors with drive speeds like this.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

there is a major backlash to AJA “giving away” all these new free download upgrades. Too many people say “yea, there is nothing new with the AJA products”.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

if you are using strickly SD, and don’t care about HD at all, get the AJA I/O, which will give you more functionality than either the Kona LS or Decklink Extreme. If you want to use the 30″ Cinema, you will need the Multibridge Extreme, which supports the DVI Dual Link connection for the 30″ monitor.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

you are not being clear here about your firewire drive. From the old 2 Gig computers, to the current MAC Pros, and everything in between, you need AT LEAST a FW800 card to do DVCProHD. If you are using a FW400 drive, I have no idea of how you got it to work reliably all these years, but you should have been playing the lottery. You can’t do DVCProHD on a FW400 drive. As for SATA drives, which is all I have been using in countless systems for the past 1 1/2 years, you need at least TWO SATA drives stripped RAID 0 to get reliable playback of DVCProHD. If you are in a MAC Pro, stick TWO SATA drives into the MAC Pro, stripe them together with Apple Disk Utility RAID 0, and you will have no problems. You can use AJA Kona System test to test the speed of the drives. Two SATA drives will give you about 120mb/sec, which is more than enough to do anything with DVCProHD.

Like I said, you were not clear about your FW drive – FW400 or 800. If your 800 is giving you drop frame errors, there may be issues with your drive, but if you can’t get your FW400 drive to do DVCPro HD, well, no one can. And if you have been doing it for the past two years, well, you are lucky.

Also, I assume that you have gone to EASY SETUPS in FCP, and selected the AJA Kona DVCProHD codec.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

I hate to sound like a broken record here, but I was on a system yesterday that was working fine, and all of a sudden, NO AUDIO out of the AJA. To make a long story short, after spending 20 minutes checking everything, I trashed the FCP preferences, and audio came back.
So, even if it’s not the problem, if I was you, I would now start by trashing your FCP preferences.

Bob Zelin