[Grant Lovering]

Hey guys,

Thanks for your input in this one.

It was a PCIe bus config issue. For anyone else needing help with this one you can find out what you need in the Kona3 manual and at this link.

https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304122

The thing we have encountered though is there is no config that will allow all the cards to run at maximum performance.

The video card wants x16
Fibre Channel wants x8
Kona 3 wants x8.

The best I could come up with was x4 for FC, x4 for K3 and x16 for video card. The HD output is now working sweetly just wonder what is missing if the bus could allocate what each of the cards really want in an ideal world.

Anyone else done any experimentation with this?

Cheers,
G.

[Grant Lovering]

Thanks Jeremy, will definitely check that we did this and let you know.

[Grant Lovering]

Hi Bob,

This is also worth a check, thank you for your help.

I was looking elsewhere for the problem given the benchmark confirmed we were getting 350mb sustained read from the raid and that the uncompressed HD would playback flawlessly in QT player or FCPS2 canvas when it wasn’t trying to output via SDI.

Soon as it needs to output via the Kona3 outputs it seems to be the problem and if you are watching the FCP canvas it is actually still in- synch and the frames are way ahead of what is being displayed on the broadcast monitor. This is very weird.

Agreed (it should just work!)

[Grant Lovering]

Hi Jeremy,

Good point to check, I know in another system we were once caught out with another PCI card slowing the overall bus down.

Will definitely check this to make sure, although I think the only other card is the Fibre Channel card and would have thought this would be a high speed card also.

It has be something obvious as on paper this thing should be smoking!

[Grant Lovering]

Hi Gary,

To clarify it is one of the new Intel Mac’s; Two 3.0GHz xeon quad-core processors (8-core). The video card is ATI Radeon X1900 512MB graphics card. It has 16gb of RAM and fibre channel is a dual 4gb card hooked up to a 16 bay fc raid.

As mentioned the drivers are all the latest as trying to solve it we run software update to make sure everything was current. So it is latest OS, latest QT and Kona drivers are v4.0.

Does this help shed any light?

[Grant Lovering]

I found a similar issue when converting something graded in HD to SD. We are using a Kona system and it came down to the Apple Uncompressed 10-bit codec as the problem. We found by using the codec supplied with the kona drivers v210 it solved our problems. One thing you need to do though is enable AE to see this codec. There is an FAQ on Kona’s site about how to edit the preference so AE can access it.

Hope this is helpful and if not, might lead you to the problem.

[Grant Lovering]

I would disagree on that one, I’d say it is even more relevant for the movie theatre. Having seen the wide variation in 3 screenings of a title sequence we recently finished I would say you safely can bank on loosing up to 20% top and bottom. Particularly when you are talking cinemascope where every projector is setup differently by someone who doesn’t really give to much consideration to accuracy. I think the mentality doesn’t go much further than checking focus and that it is pointed at the screen 🙂

[Grant Lovering]

Hi Steve,

When you talk about 4,8 and 16 cpu workstations, what are we talking about here?
The 16 cpu option sounds pretty good or are you talking about using Gridiron to utilise multi quads? (which we will need it to be updated to work with AE7 first)

Look forward to your repsonse.

Cheers,
Grant

[Grant Lovering]

Thanks for comfirming what was the gut feel….looking forward to seeing the benefits of going from a dual to a quad and finally a card that can leverage Open GL properly. My experiences with Open GL in the past have always led to disabling it, but sounds like it is quite well integrated now.

[Grant Lovering]

Nice one….thanks for all your input on this one. Now the $$ to fill that baby full of 2GB chips 🙂