[Bob Zelin]

Jim –
you are doing WAY TOO MUCH thinking about block size – just use the defaults, stop running drive exerciser tests, and GET TO WORK. Digitize some 8 bit SDI, 10 bit SDI uncompressed, or DVCProHD . You will see that it works GREAT. You now have tons of cheap reliable storage. Stop trying to be a rocket scientist, and start making some money. You have great equipment. In the future, try the Hitachi SATA drives – you will be very happy.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

1) I would like to ASSUME that when you plugged in your AJA I/O box, that you downloaded the correct drivers for the AJA I/O, and once you launched FCP, you went to the Easy Setups, and selected something like Betacam 8 bit uncompressed. Bring up color bars/tone in FCP, and play it so you have continuous tone coming out of the unit. Do you see any levels on your mixer anywhere ?

2) I would like to ASSUME that you are plugged into the LINE INPUTS of your audio mixer, and that you have your mixer assigned to 1-2 or L-R, and your master faders are up (and no solo buttons are pushed anywhere). Do you still see no levels ?

3) find some cheapo “computer speakers” and plug them into the stereo mini plug out on the back of the MAC G5. If you hear any audio while you play back the FCP sequence, you have your audio outputs assigned to the MAC G5, instead of the AJA Pro I/O (which you can easily change in the Audio/Video settings menu).

4) Download the AJA I/O control panel from http://www.aja.com. It will allow you to independently pass your Beta VTR thru the IO/LA box without using FCP and all of it’s wacky setup menus. Play around with the I/O control panel, and you will see the way to select ANALOG AUDIO – it will feed your mixer the same way – do you get any audio now ?

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

1) Are indeed all color bars the same? When I output FCP bars, then Echofire bars, then Blackmagic bars, they all look different on my monitor (and I don’t re-calibrate the monitor, of course). They never look exactly the same.

REPLY – the physical spacing of the bars, and the I/Q may be different, but the lumanance/chromanance of the bars should ALL BE THE SAME levels – that is for 75% bars, or 100% bars (you should only be using 75% bars for 99% of the work out there). These measurements are made on a Waveform Monitor, which is the only thing you can trust – you can’t trust a TV monitor for levels, and color bars is the test signal for this calibration process. The ONLY way to tell who is correct, is to put the video out from the Decklink into a Waveform monitor, and look at them and measure them. I can assure that the FCP NTSC bars thru a Decklink card are 100% correct. You will not learn engineering theory on a forum like this – someone must show you, or you must study the Tektronix and Leader websites.

And I remember reading in several places (including the Synthetic Aperture manual) that most color bars you can find are “wrong”, I mean not properly calibrated. They said theirs are ok so it could be marketing :-)))

REPLY – I find it hard to believe that Synthetic Aperture said that most color bars are wrong. This is a foolish statement. You can only evaulate what is right and wrong on a waveform monitor.

But back to the set-up, then why in the Blackmagic folder after installing there is a Test Pattern subfolder containing SMPTE bars WITH setup and SMPTE bars WITHOUT setup? Now I am really confused.

REPLY – Digital bars that follow SMPTE 259M DO NOT have setup level. RS-170A color bars (the original analog color bars) have setup. ANALOG has setup, Digital has no setup. THE SAME DAMN IMAGE or the SAME DAMN COLOR BAR SIGNAL passed thru a VTR that can show analog and digital outputs will show the ANALOG output to have setup, and the Digital output to have NO setup. This is typical of the Sony DVW-A500 VTR. This means that the SAME SIGNAL looks DIFFERENT on a monitor that can display both analog and digital, depending on if you look at the ANALOG signal, or the Digital signal. It looks different becuase the digital signal has NO SETUP on it, so it looks “darker” or more contrasty. There is NOTHING you can do about this – this is the nature of the mistake not taken into account by the SMPTE committee when these standards were developed.

If you use a color bar pattern with NO SETUP (0 IRE black level), and do an analog project, the blacks will be elevated to 7.5 IRE on the analog outputs. You can’t appreciate any of this unless you look at a waveform monitor. Just looking at your TV will confuse you.

2) But what I’ll do I will just use FCP color bars since this is my editing platform and calibrate my monitor to it, using all the known steps, and using the pluge at the end. This should give me peace of mind the calibration is accurate, right?

REPLY – you will NEVER have peace of mind until you observe these signals on a waveform monitor. PLUGE is just a convenience tool to setup the brightness control on your TV – it is not a way to calibrate your signal.

I remember the first time it “clicked” about the difference between analog and digital – with setup, or no setup – and my only reaction at the time was “how can this be – what the hell were these guys thinking – how could they have expected no one using D1 machines to ever use an analog Beta VTR or 1″ source in the same session”. You get over it, you eventually don’t care.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Ed –
For great performance with SATA drives, you should be using TWO SATA drives stripped together in a RAID 0 configuration (simply using Apple Disk Utility to do this). I use the 2 port and 4 port Firmtek Seritek cards ALL THE TIME, and have ZERO problems with them. If you are using the Sonnet Tempo X, make SURE to download the V1.2 firmware to have no issues. The Firmtek card works great in Slot 2 or slot 3 with the Blackmagic in Slot 4.

I use 4 SATA drives stripped togeher in AVID Adreanline systems to get 1:1 with no problem as well. I am surprised that you are getting poor performance.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

REPLYS below

1) There are several color bars that we can find, the FCP bars, the Test Pattern Maker/EchoFire bars, the Blackmagic bars. In your experience, what bars are accurate/correctly calibrated? Which ones should I start to constantly use?

REPLY
Color bars are color bars – they should all be EXACTLY the same. FCP bars are dead accurate, and Blackmagic, Echofire, and FCP bars should be EXACTLY the same – you should see NO DIFFERENCES between levels. Most people use SMPTE or 75% saturation bars – not 100% bars, which have a 100% saturation level in the Pb Pr levels.

2) should I use the color bars with set-up or without set-up? Again, I will finish on digital (that would say NO set-up) but I am monitoring on an analog device (that would say use setup).

REPLY – SMPTE color bars have NO SETUP on them. Let me make this clear, because it is confusing. The exact same NTSC color bar signal passing thru a Digi Beta VTR will have setup on the analog outputs at 7.5 IRE and zero setup (at blanking level 0 IRE) on the SDI output. This is why people say “hey I shot this Beta tape, and now the black levels looked crushed when I look it on an SDI monitor”. Good reason – the SMPTE committee never considered that people would be mixing and matching analog and digital source material. There is no way to resolve this – digital SDI signals (and HDSDI) have zero setup, and analog has 7.5 IRE setup in the US. Which is correct – they are both correct. How do you explain to a client that it looks different when you look at the analog or digital signal – good luck – tell em to sue SMPTE.

Plus, when I try to calibrate based on the pluge, with set-up I can see the 3 small black bars and I can easily calibrate, while when I use no set-up everything is black all-over and is harder to differentiate.

Reply – PLUGE was developed to help assist you in setting up the brightness control (black level control) of your TV monitor. The bar to the left in pluge is considered “blacker than black”, and the bar to the right is “whiter than black”. You turn your brightness control until the blacker than black bar disappears, but the whiter than black bar is still visable. This is the reason it was invented. But nothing beats having a waveform monitor to see all of this.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

you say that you have 8 XLR cables (4 channels) in and out between your AJA I/O and your VTR (Sony BVW-75 or Sony UVW-1800 – you are not clear here). What is clear is that you are not saying how you are monitoring your audio. How is your audio connected to your speakers? I HOPE that you are not monitoring the audio output of the MAC G5. You MUST monitor the audio output of the AJA I/O box. If your AJA IO audio outputs are going into the Beta VTR inputs, how are you monitoring your audio? Instead of connecting and disconnecting, you should use a small mixer, that will allow you to monitor whatever you want.

Based on your description, I am GUESSING that you are monitoring your audio thru the MAC G5 audio output, and this is NOT CORRECT. If you plug your powered speakers into your AJA IO audio outputs, you will hear audio.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

LANC capture is not always frame accurate. There is no secret here. The Addenda LANC to RS422 adaptor (and others available from TAO and other manufacturers) does not provide miracle support. HDV – contrary to what we want to use it for – is not a professional format, like Sony Broadcast products (like the HDW, BVW, UVW, PVW, DSR series VTR’s). The transports are crap – not any different from a DSR-11. You would not expect a Sony DSR-11 DV VTR to perform like a Sony DSR-1800. I expect that we may see a “pro” HDV VTR at NAB (this is pure speculation), but for now, we work with what we got !

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Kai –
It’s not a cable legnth issue. Small amounts of cable are only going to affect the subcarrier phase delay, not enough for H timing. I can’t believe that you are having a problem like this. I ASSUME that you have a SINGLE NTSC black generator feeding the Genlock input of your Beta VTR Ref Video input, and the Genlock input of the Blackmagic card. Am I correct about this Kai ? No tricks now.

You have not stated what Beta VTR you are using, but older Beta VTR’s may have a 2 field/4 field switch on them. I have not discussed color framing issues in years, but you should black your tape (you are doing an INSERT EDIT into your master – aren’t you ? ) – with composite black from your black generator in 4 field position. Leaving it in 2 field allows the edit controller (from the linear editing stone age) to control the color framing, and can potentially create a shift. So Black your tape in 4 Field, and leave it in 4 field, and the VTR will color frame the edit properly without a shift.

If you were to try the “cable delay trick” – which won’t work, by the way – the way to generate advanced sync to make this happen is to get a second professional sync generator that can genlock to your house black generator, and send this “pro” sync generator (not a Horita – but a box like a Sigma, Leitch, Videotek or Tektronix that has H phase adjust) into the VTR. You could then turn the H Phase to advance sync the VTR – but THIS IS NOT YOUR PROBLEM. This was a “trick” we used to do with everything from Ultimattes, to Chyrons, to the old Video Toaster that had to be advanced synced into analog video switchers.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

No one can give you a straight answer – so here is the answer.

I have built Pink Sneakers Productions in Orlando, FL. They shoot everything with 8 HDV cameras, and I use the Sony HVR-10MU HDV VTR to
go directly into an AJA I/O analog component inputs. The HVR-10MU
downconverts the analog HD to analog CAV, which feeds the AJA I/O Y Pb Pr inputs. I use the Addenda RS-4/L to convert the LANC VTR control to RS422, which works as well as can be expeced with the AJA I/O (the limitation is LANC in general, and the poor transport of the HVR-10MU). Delivery to Viacom is on Beta or Digi-Beta. VH-1 does NOT want HD masters delivered.

Hogan Knows Best on VH-1 is done this way, and now two new shows for VH-1 will be done this way as well.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

The following will resolve your problem. You have two Seagate 7200RPM Sata drives – correct? Get TWO Firmtek Seritek SATA Host controllers (they make a 2 port and a 4 port, but I am not aware that the 4 port has support for Win XP), and stick the 2 TWO Port Seritek SATA host cards in slots 4 and 5 of the HP xw8200. Use 4 Seagate SATA drives, and use Microsoft Windows Disk Manager to stripe all 4 drives RAID 0.

You will ABSOLUTELY be able to get 1:1 uncompressed SDI with this configuration, and this is a CHEAP SOLUTION. I assure you this works. Don’t use the Promise card – the Firmtek comes with the driver software CD that you will need (it will auto install).

I love these “this is the way it has to be” opinions from people that don’t know.

Bob Zelin