[Litzwire]

Holy cow, man….I just figured out a whole boatload of stuff just by using one dropdown menu that I hardly use in Premiere, in my 7 years of using it for national TV work, working 15-18 hour days 6-7 days a week. I use it all the time in After Effects, but I might have used it twice in 7 years in Premiere. It hit me like a ton of bricks! INTERPRET FOOTAGE! When you are working in an HD timeline, and all the stuff you capture and work with is 1080i or becomes 1080i after a run through AE, you don’t think of that one. It’s always the same so no need. Luckily it did occur to me, and it solved the fields issue that cleared a lot of stuff up. But here’s the thing….in order for it to look right with the BMD hardware, I had to set interlaced footage to Progressive….no fields, as opposed to the upper fields setting I have used for almost all capturing and exporting for networks. I brought the 1080i/29.97 footage from a Matrox machine that assumes Upper Fields for everything – and what I personally think is the right way of thinking – and BMD wants it to be rid of the fields in order for it to play with the proper cadence. Very weird to me, but problem solved. Jeeezuz…I’m going to make an instructional video someday….I can’t imagine how many people are letting this kind of thing slip because they don’t have the patience to test it, the gear to see it, or the experience to simply know that their footage looks like poop. “Blacknmagic says it’s going to look great…it must look great, even though I don’t have the right monitor.” Anyway….all’s well that ends well. I haven’t run long runs of footage after this revelation to know whether my original problem of stuttering will be fixed with this, but I’m betting it will. Thanks for dropping by, Peter!

[Litzwire]

I have even more goodness, unrelated to the previous problem, which by the way still exists for both systems using certain codecs. For this issue, I brought in some HD AVI footage from a Matrox-based machine and played it on a timeline in the BMD-based machine. The footage is 1920×1080 (1.0) at 29.97. The sequence in the BMD machine is 1920×1080 (1.0) at 29.97. I also have the same footage in the Matrox-based machine on a 1920×1080(1.0)/29.97 timeline. Both systems are running into an SDI monitor via SDI. The opening title part of the footage coming out of the Matrox machine, with it’s precised text and graphics, is smooth and clean as a baby’s booty. The BMD signal looks clean at first, until it hits the title sequence, where you can see that it is unacceptably pixelated, like it’s lacking a field. What gives BMD folks? I’ve housed it in a smokin’ system and it’s playing with perfectly professional outboard gear, but so far it’s not treating me like a professional. Would love to hear someone’s take on my setup and tell me why I can’t play long clips and why the footage looks like it’s missing a field.

Hop

[Litzwire]

I believe the latest drivers, for Windows anyway, which is what I use, are 9.6.8. That is what is listed on the BMD site and it is what I am using.

Hop

[Litzwire]

Okay….I’m currently only half of a dumb****. In the case of one of my systems, I discovered that the GTX690 is not supported yet, and therefore GPU acceleration was not selected. I fixed that, and the problem, for short clips anyway, went away. However, the 680 machine, which is the only one I’ve run long-form stuff on so far, is GPU-acceleration-enabled, and timelines still begin to stutter at around the 5-7 minute mark. Once I start running longer shows on the bigger machine with the 690, I’ll know for sure if it’s exhibiting the same behavior. Does anyone have any experience with this or think that perhaps a driver rollback is in order? Again – both systems are running fast RAIDS (see above post for specs).

Hop

[Litzwire]

Thanks for weighing in. I guess checking for problems ahead of time is simply a difficult road when you’re talking about 8+ drive arrays. Being an editor that has to deliver shows to national TV on a weekly basis, I don’t have time to do difficult checks for symptoms before they break into full-blown disease, unless I can get help from software. I will look away from HighPoint for my next RAID controller….that’s the lesson I’ve learned.

[Litzwire]

Yeah – Highpoint’s apparently stinks. When you use “Verify” it goes through the process for 4 hours and doesn’t tell you Jack at the end of it.

[Litzwire]

So even though I haven’t received the replacement 2314 card yet, I did get a replacement drive (although discontinued, it has the same specs as originals and I was able to find it on ebay). It MAY be – and I emphasize MAY BE – that I don’t need the controller after all. I put the new drive in the first slot of the 4 drives that were going offline, and even though I have not proven proper operation yet, the other 3 drives in that 4 drive division are at least showing to be online. I’m attempting the rebuild process now, and if it works it will of course take many hours. In the meantime, I’m soliticing affirmations on this opinion: Whereas the other array I have, upon having a failing drive, showed me which drive was failing, allowing me to easily replace and rebuild, this array showed four drives completely offline, making it look like (to me and to ProAvio support) there might be a hardware problem associated with those 4 drives sharing a common eSATA interface board, common power connectors, etc. Since this was Drive #1 in the set of 4 (in an 8-disk array), is it possible that the fact that it’s the first one in a line was causing the HighPoint GUI to tell me that all four in that set were offline, as opposed to the other array, where the failing drive was #2 in a set? I’m assuming now, as the array continues to rebuild, that since the other 3 in that set are now listed in the GUI as looking like the rest of the 8 – i.e., not offline – that adding this one replacement may have done the trick. In other words, this may have been all much ado…. However, I’m not counting the chickens until they’ve not only hatched, but have run around in the heat for a while.

[Litzwire]

I’m with ya, but the first enclosure, which is the one in question, is about 6 months out of warranty (the other one is still under warranty, but I was honest :P). At the time, their suggestion to replace the eSATA board made a good deal of sense, and it really wasn’t a big deal financially or logistically to replace that card, but after that didn’t work the remedy became much more a puzzle. I’ve disussed it with ProAvio, but their suggestions are somewhat limited to obvious things. And yes, I have bought that replacement 2314 controller card, but I still await its arrival. It’s not readily available anymore, so I had to go through a seller that’s seemingly not as fast as a Newegg. In the meantime, I do have a couple of extra drives that I am going to troubleshoot with. If that doesn’t reveal a culprit, it’s up to the card when it arrives. After that, I will feel like I’ve spent enough time, and will find a service to figure it out. I might have done that a while back, but by nature, and as a builder of my own editing systems, I’m curious about these problems, and if I conquer it (with help), that’s a feather in my knowledge cap.

[Litzwire]

Great idea. Will report. Thanks!

[Litzwire]

In my last post I said I would look into that. However, I should remind you of the original post where I explain how this problem is the same across two different enclosures, leaving me to believe that the problem lies in either the controller or the drives themselves, and not any connections or boards in the enclosures (even though I replaced the eSATA board in the first enclosure thinking that would solve the problem). I would think that it couldn’t be the power connections in the enclosure as this would have been remedied with the second enclosure. To backtrack a bit, I have to say that the most logical explanation to me would be that this is all drive related – given that even when I change cable positions from the card, those 4 drives are always the ones that go offline. However, the ProAvio tech support seemed to think that there was no way all four drives malfunction at once, and that would be my assumption as well, but therein lies the rub: Can a controller card, if it’s the thing that’s malfunctioning, always associate it’s own internal problems with a select group of drives, no matter which output they are plugged into, or should the problem always move to different drives according to which output they are using? Does that question make sense? To get closer to the bottom of this, I’m about to take a step….I just got a couple of extra drives in from ebay. They are older drives and are not available through traditional sellers. I am going to replace the first drive in that 4-drive group and just see what the interface says. I will let you know.