[John Knowles]

Just when I thought it was safe to go back into the water…

I plugged the IoHD into a 46″ LCD yesterday for a client to watch the 1080i footage I’ve been capturing and BAM — I got the bad kernel panic of death screen. Restart the Mac, try again. Same thing. Repair permissions, trash prefs, no joy. Unplug the Io and everything (FCP, project, footage, RAID) works normally.

It DOES support this kind of video previewing, no? I’m convinced I have a lemon at this point. I can’t get a hold of tech support this weekend but I will first thing Monday and try to get a new unit.

Oy ve.

[John Knowles]

The Apple article definitely helped, and I think anyone who is unfamiliar with things like RAM placement in the Mac Pros (lots of confusion out there) would benefit from it. And I had never heard of a solution like that text plugin before, so that was a nice “magic bullet.”

BTW, here’s the text from AJA’s version of the plugin for anyone who’s interested. The first line is the only one that’s different from the Apple version:

// Enabler to disable alternate ETT polling mechanism

startuponly
FileVersion(60243, 41391, 68)
code

dictput(0,”kgDeviceControl”,”useAltETTPolling”, “value”);

Save this as a plain text file, name it “DisableAltETTPolling.txt”

JK

[John Knowles]

THE UPDATE:

First thing this morning I tried Jeremy’s suggestions from the Apple article about the .txt file to cut down on the frequency of FCP ‘polling’ the player over the serial cable (all the other items I had already done or tried). BTW, I’m capturing to a SATA RAID and have no other FW devices attached. Anyway, no dice — just a bad as the night before. Also, the text that Apple supplies in the article is wrong — the file it created caused an error message when FCP started up. (I got a replacement version of the same plugin with one additional line of text from AJA; works fine)

I decided to return the J3 and pick up a JH3 for my pile of HDCams, see if that went any better. I got the deck configured to remove the pulldown so I could capture 1080i29.97 instead of 23.98psf. So far so good — but no timecode or deck control! I swapped out the SDI cable and serial cable with new ones, still nothing.

So I called AJA tech Support (who are just great, very patient) and Rudy led me through a series of tests where we trashed every preference under the sun, zapped the PRAM, and even tried the VTR exchange app. What we determined was that A) it’s not FCP, B) the serial port appears to be working, and C) there’s no apparent conflicts on my system setup or user account. We were stumped. In desperation I called a friend who uses a lot of AJA products and he had in fact seen an IoHd freak out once before.

From excessive heat.

I realized that the IoHD was situated close to the deck, a monitor and other warm gear, and it had been on all day yesterday (plus some of the gear was on overnight). So it was pretty hot. My friend said that his original solution had been to stick it in the fridge for 5 mins.; not wanting to mess with condensation I stuck it in front of the A/C vent until the case was nice and cold. Then I plugged it all back in and rebooted. And it worked! I had deck control back and TC. I was able to batch capture about 5 tapes this evening, although there’s still some lingering deck control weirdness. Right after a new tape is inserted I still get the “new tape” prompt a few times, and then an occasional hiccup during batch capture on some tapes where I would just lose deck control for no reason until I re-opened log and capture. Those I might chalk up to a bad tape or two, and maybe the deck is a bit twitchy still; I’m getting another one tomorrow hopefully to test it out.

I still have the glitch with the audio out of sync by 7 frames, will have to keep talking to AJA on that one. I’m also worried that something in the unit may have gotten fried a bit, so a replacement may still be in my future…

JK

[John Knowles]

Jeremy, I just added a new post with all my issues; it went beyond this sync issue and I think it’s a whole separate (though perhaps unrelated) problem. hope thats OK…

[John Knowles]

Hi Jeremy,

It’s out of sync in Quicktime as well, even tried them in AJA TV but no dice.

Upconverting: I set the output as 1080 29.97 ProRes HQ, input is standard 525i29.97. SD to HD is set to ‘pillarbox’. These settings are reflected in both FCP and the AJA panel. TC control shows ‘SDI 1’ as the source (it was set to Freerun initially but it snapped to SDI 1 when I hit Log and Capture.)

I’m starting to have lots of other issues now though, like lots of TC breaks in every tape and intermittent deck control; I’ve been using this rented Sony J3 all day and I wonder if it’s crapping out on me… has that been known to happen? This is my first real hands-on experience with analog decks and deck control outside of Firewire.

I’m supposed to get a JH3 tomorrow for another round of tapes, I can see if the HDCam fare any better. If so I may ask them for another Beta deck. Still, it looks like I’m having a similar problem as others who don’t have bad decks (supposedly), so maybe I have two sets of problems?

Thanks
JK

[John Knowles]

Hello guys,

I don’t know if this thread is dead but if you’re still checking it I’d love to know if any of you have figured out this issue yet? I just got my IoHD and have been trying to capture all day; I noticed clips were out of sync on playback and sure enough, it was 7 frames off just like Tim’s issue.

I’m upconverting Betas and BetaSP to Apple ProRes HQ 1080 29.97 (pillarbox). Playback deck is a Sony J3. Mac Pro 2.66, 6GB RAM, 3TB eSATA G-Speed RAID, FCP 6.03 and QT 7.4.5

Thanks,
JK

[John Knowles]

Just ran into this error last night. I was trying to export a 19-minute DVCProHD piece embedded in an SD timeline — an intensive task but certainly nothing crazy. FCP would crash after exporting 20% or so; error message was the same, EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGBUS)

I just installed Leopard on a brand new HD and updated it to 10.5.3. Reinstalled the Pro Apps and updated to .03 versions. Everything is new, including the user account.

From the Apple boards, looks like other apps like iTunes have crashed with this error too. No decent solutions yet…

[John Knowles]

As others have said, there is nothing wrong with “classic” typefaces. They’re classic for a reason: they work. Despite the glut of new typefaces that come out every year, many designers still rely on the same dozen or so fonts: Times New Roman, Helvetica, Univers, Bodoni, Futura, Garamond, etc.

Use a face that is readable, and suits your project.

On the flip side, I try really hard not to use whatever crap fonts simply came with my computer. A lot of them were made to look good on screen for email and web sites, but they’re not good for much else. I find many of them boring or too badly kerned to be of any use. So if I interpret your question correctly, yes DO seek out some good classic typefaces to use in your projects, don’t just rely on the lame font set that came with your OS. Your projects will look that much better.