[Francois Stark]

Thanks. I’m on all Apple-branded LSI fibre cards – with Apple writing the drivers. I suspect that’s the cause of my woes.

Unfortunately Other cards are much more expensive – the Qlogic dual 3gbit card is almost four times as much…

Regards
Francois

[Francois Stark]

Floh

What fibre cards are you running?

Francois

[Francois Stark]

I have so many oprions to try, but no time… I can swop machines to test optical cables and qlogic switch; I can swop fibre cards between working machines and the bum seat; I can try a dual G4 in the same seat; but I don’t have time!

About a month after we installed the SAN we started getting so busy – we have seven edit suites running full time now – four FCP’s and three AVID’s. All busy. Three Pro Tools as well. The SAN has opened up the possibility of much larger jobs, and it’s paying off.

But I’m still stuck on this sixth seat – the machine just won;t see hte LU’s properly.

Regards
Francois

[Francois Stark]

Sorry, a bit lazy of me…

[Francois Stark]

Hi Luke

“1. You are running Final Cut Pro HD 5.0.x. The DeckLink 4.8.1 drivers are designed for use with Final Cut Pro HD 4.5 and the Blackmagic easy setups will not appear in Final Cut Pro HD 5.0.x. If you are running Final Cut Pro HD 5, download the latest DeckLink 5.0 installer and then run its Uninstaller before installing the latest drivers.”

No, I’m running FCP 4.5 on os X.3.8 on a G5/2.0DP/4 GB RAM.

“2. There may be some problem with the Final Cut Pro preferences file which caches the information about which easy setups are present. Running the Uninstall Blackmagic DeckLink utility and then installing the DeckLink 4.8.1 drivers should help to avoid such a problem. If this still doesn’t work, run a permissions repair with Disk Utility and then run the Uninstall Blackmagic DeckLink utility and then reinstall the DeckLink 4.8.1 drivers again.”

I would have time for uninstall/reinstall, but every time I lose all my prefs: scratch disks, autosave time, default timeline settings, window layouts, etc.etc. Lot’s of stuff I have to reset with every driver re-installation so I’m not going to do that now. If I backup the user prefs to save my settings, I would probably be backing up up the problem as well…

Regards
Francois

[Francois Stark]

[gary adcock] “the 1080P format for 4:4:4 Dual link content is a true progressive frame but data at that size is over 200megs per second and could NOT be sent over a single USB2 connection. Dual Link HD requires 2 HDSDI feeds to support it.”

Ok, nobody on this forum has answered this question: How do they propose getting more data than a single SDI link can handle through a 480Mbps USB 2 link?

I looked in the Reel stream forum and found this little gem:

**********************************************************
———————————————————-
Posted: Tue May 03, 2005 4:09 pm Post subject: How does Andromeda squeeze 1540 x 990 x 36bpp through USB-2?

——————————————————————————–

By my calculations:

1540 pixels * 990 pixels * 36 bits-per-pixel * 24 frames/sec
= 1,317,254,400 bps = 1,317 Mbps

Which is much more than the 480 Mbps which USB-2 can handle.

What am I missing?

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Author Message
paparazzi

Joined: 13 Jan 2005
Posts: 6

Posted: Tue May 03, 2005 4:30 pm Post subject:

——————————————————————————–

Never mind… I think I have answered my own question:

If the 1540 x 990 resolution is achieved by shifting the green CCD half-a-pixel both horizontally and vertically, then the native resolution of each CCD is (approx):

1540/2 x 990/2 = 770 x 495 pixels

Which would make perfect sense for a camera which was originally designed to output 720 x 480 resolution!

So, 770 x 495 pixels x 36 bpp x 24 fps = 329 Mbps, which USB-2 could potentially handle.

The red and blue pixels would then be “combined” with the green pixels during post processing to create the 1540 x 990 output resolution.

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Author Message
Juan P. Pertierra
Dr. Frankenstein

Joined: 03 Nov 2004
Posts: 205
Location: West Lafayette, IN
Posted: Thu May 05, 2005 7:13 pm Post subject:

——————————————————————————–

There you go.

*********************************************************

I don’t buy this. First you half the vertical and horisontal resolution, squeeze it through USB2 and then MAGICALLY recombine to get a full resolution? At full 24p framerate? Continously? Who are they trying to fool? If it was so easy, why do the camera manufacturers not use it in the original products? Oops – forget I even asked. This sounds like a real quarter-res RGB solution to me – anybody remember the original Cinewave off-line resolutions? Anybody care to generate a serious headache in 10 minutes?

This is almost the same issue as I had with the AVID Adrenaline when it came out and AVID proclaimed the the adrenaline box included “the computing power of 10 three GHz Pentium-4’s”, and that’s why it could do so many real-time layers. Well, I figured out that they can not possible send more than two streams uncompressed through the firewire 400 to the Adrenaline box, yet the system does 10 streams in real time… Which means the processing all happened in the Host box, with only the uncompressed output stream being passed to the Adrenaline.

I don’t know why you keep discussing 24p versus 24PSF – both must have the same datarate, even though the data might be coming in a different sequence. The problem I have with this Reel Stream system is how they get the RGB 4:4:4 stream they are selling through USB2.

Regards
Francois

[Francois Stark]

Hi Luke

I downloaded and installed the 4.8.1 on my G5/extreme/os X.3.8 system on Friday. After restarting the capture presets were gone. I checked library -> prefs and the blackmagic presets were there.

Inside the app, the blackmagic timeline presets were available, but only the standard DV apple capture presets. No Blackmagic capture presets available.

I re-installed 4.8.1 with no change. Then I ran out of time since I had to capture urgently. I duplicated the DV PAL firewire capture preset, and changed it to use the blackmagic capture input and DV compressor, and created a second version with the uncompressed codec.

I captured the urgent footage and it worked fine. So: If this problem pops up somewhere else, there might be a problem with 4.8.1 not showing blackmagic capture presets after installation.

Regards
Francois

[Francois Stark]

Hi Nick

We’re talking about three months and what feels like a million set-up changes here, but I seem to remember switching on the extended bit on both controllers.

I tried finding our what it actually does, but got no real answer, except that it’s better set to on.

Regards
Francois

[Francois Stark]

Hi Tom

No, the clip does not have embedded alpha. I’m talking about the alpha that the 8 point garbage matte creates.

I have found something new about this. If I dissolve to or from nothing (on top of a background layer), I get this alpha problem with the garbage matte. If I dissolve to or from another clip, it works as it should.

go figure…
Francois

[Francois Stark]

Hi

I missed that… I was actually at the ADTX booth – spoke to Sergio about the quote I recieved from our local ADTX resellers, which I eventually ordered. I did not realise they were running a full SAN… Damn…

well, I guess I’ll maybe see you next time.

Regards
Francois