[Luke Maslen]

Hi Hamish,

Apple recommend 4 GB of RAM for working with uncompressed HD in Final Cut Pro but you can use less for standard definition. The After Effects RAM preview obviously uses RAM so more RAM is always better. However I do not believe the amount of RAM would have any impact on the performance of your eSATA card, even though more RAM may help with the performance of your video applications. In other words, I do not believe you need more RAM to fix a problem with your eSATA card. It would be better simply to invest in a faster eSATA card as Bob suggested.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Richard,

Thank you for confirming you are using the HDLink power supply and I’m sure your IEC cable will have no bearing on the problem you are encountering. HDLink isn’t drawing any power from the USB port and that’s why it has external power.

This is a puzzling problem. Can you please disconnect the USB link to the HDLink and then launch the HDLink Utility. Now disconnect all USB devices from your G5 at the front and at the back. Remove your keyboard and mouse too! I want to test the possibility that a shared USB bus is struggling to cope with all your USB devices. Now plug in the HDLink and see if the HDLink software interface becomes active and/or if you see the low power message. If this seems to work, plug in your USB devices one by one, starting with the keyboard and mouse and observe if and when the low power message appears.

If this doesn’t work, please let me know. While this could be a bug in HDLink, I think that is unlikely as I haven’t heard of any other reports of this problem. There could be a USB issue with your G5 but it’s hard to be sure given other USB devices seem to work OK. So please let me know how you go with all USB devices removed and just connecting the HDLink. This should help to narrow down the problem.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Joe,

We noticed the Digital Cinema Desktop (DCD) feature of Final Cut Pro seemed to become disabled when Leopard was released. I haven’t heard of this happening under Tiger.

Your Multibridge Pro can output video via SDI, HDMI and analog. In contrast to DCD which can only output compressed formats such as DV and HDV, your Multibridge Pro can output uncompressed and compressed video formats via HDMI as well as analog and SDI outputs. Have you tried using the HDMI output of Multibridge Pro? I’m not sure why there would be a need to use DCD given you have higher quality outputs on the Multibridge Pro including HDMI output. In other words, the Multibridge outputs essentially obsolete the DCD feature of Final Cut Pro and of course you can use Multibridge Pro to output from applications other than Final Cut Pro, such as After Effects and Photoshop. Do you have some need for the DCD feature which Multibridge Pro does not address?

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Hamish,

Your DeckLink HD Extreme card is a x4 lane PCI Express card. This means you need a disk array which is connected to a HBA, such as an eSATA card, which is x4 lanes (or faster). If you have a x1 lane eSATA card, it will not have the capacity to keep up with the x4 lanes of data being sent to it by the DeckLink card. The RAM preview of After Effects requires faster bus speeds than Final Cut Pro and might explain why you are just seeing the problems in After Effects. While your eSATA card might not necessarily be a “cheap piece of junk”, it does appear to be too slow for working with uncompressed video, especially in HD. Bob’s recommendation for an eSATA card is doubtless a good one although I have not used it.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Hamish,

[hamish boyd] “So does that all but rule out any conflict with the BM card?”

Correct. When the Blackmagic drivers are uninstalled, the card is not loaded by the computer at startup time as it lacks the firmware and drivers to do so. If you wanted to be absolutely sure, you could also remove the DeckLink card but it looks strongly as though the problem is with the eSATA card.

If you find the problem still occurs after removing the DeckLink card, you could try the following and see if it helps.

• Ensure you have downloaded and installed the latest drivers and/or firmware for your eSATA card.
• Shut down your Mac Pro.
• Reinstate the DeckLink card in slot 4.
• Move the eSATA card to slot 3.
• Start up the Mac Pro.
• If the Expansion Slot Utility does not appear automatically at startup, go to Macintosh HD>System>Library>Core Services and open the Expansion Slot Utility.
• Choose the second PCI Express profile, ie: x16 Lane Graphics Slot + Two x4 Lane and One x1 Lane Slots
• Click the Save and Restart button.

Upon restarting, test if your eSATA card is now behaving. If not, I would recommend contacting the manufacturer of the eSATA card.

If the eSATA card is working well, reinstall the DeckLink drivers, restart the Mac and test if the eSATA card and the DeckLink card are behaving well together. Hopefully this will be the case and in which case the PCI Express bandwidth allocation was the key to the solution.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Richard,

Thank you for confirming you have tried a direct USB connection to a USB 2.0 port on the G5. Given that, I want to check something you said about the power source for the HDLink. If you use a third party power adapter, there is a high chance of damaging the HDLink. The IEC power cable is not a source of problems but substituting another power adapter might well explain the problem you are seeing. Can you please clarify if you are using the power adapter which should be included with the HDLink or if you are using a power adapter which you have supplied yourself?

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Will,

I’m not sure why you’re experiencing that problem as your graphics card is a high-end card. I’ve heard of reports in the past where a 30″ and a 24″ monitor would work fine when connected to a low-end graphics card but that screen redraws could become sluggish when a DeckLink card was added with it’s extended desktop enabled. This did not seem to be a problem with more powerful graphics cards.

In your case, it would be worth trying the latest updates to Mac OS X 10.5.4 and QuickTime 7.5 and see if the problem goes away. If not, open the DeckLink PrefPane in System Preferences and configure it as follows: When not playing video, send Black to all the video outputs. Then restart your Mac and I believe the problem will no longer occur. The same should also go away if you leave the DeckLink extended desktop enabled but disconnect either of your monitors. That’s probably not what you want to do so setting the DeckLink desktop to black is probably the best option. While the Mac desktop will no longer display on the DeckLink output, you will still be able to output video from software including Final Cut Pro and After Effects with the extended desktop disabled.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Richard,

I see the same message, about drawing too much power, when I plug my USB 2.0 memory stick in to a USB port on my keyboard. If I directly plug it in to one of the USB 2.0 ports on the Mac, there is no problem.

Have you tried directly connecting the HDLink to a USB 2.0 port on your G5? I’m guessing you might be connecting via some kind of USB hub, such as the USB ports on a computer monitor. HDLink does work with a direct connection to a USB 1.1 port but mightn’t receive enough bandwidth on a shared port so please try a direct connection to a USB 2.0 port on the G5 itself and see if this fixes your problem.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Sorry Herb,

I read your posting as meaning native 720p29.97 and not as a Varicam question. Kristian’s response is spot on. Our list of Blackmagic easy setups is already very long in Final Cut Pro and so we don’t include easy setups for every conceivable Varicam format as the list just becomes annoyingly long. You can just modify one of the existing Blackmagic HDTV 720p Varicam easy setups as Kristian mentioned.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Herb,

I looked at the manual for the Panasonic AJ-HD1200A deck and couldn’t find anything suggesting that it supported 720p29.97. I did find that it supports 720p59.94 and would recommend you try a Blackmagic HDTV 720p59.94 easy setup in Final Cut Pro and see if that works for you.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design