[Luke Maslen]

Hi Bob,

Yes, you should be able to play back and down convert both DVCPRO HD and HDV material in any of the 720p59.94, 1080i50 and 1080i59.94 formats using your Kona SD card and DeckLink 5.6 drivers.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Chadwick,

Please reduce your RAM to 3GB and then see if the kernel panic goes away. The DeckLink 5.7.2 Readme file includes the following statement:

Currently all DeckLink standard definition cards are limited to 3 GB of memory, however this will be updated in a forthcoming software update.

I’m guessing that reducing the RAM for use with the standard definition card will be the solution to this problem. Please let me know if it continues when only running 2 or 3 GB of RAM.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Sean,

Yes, absolutely. I apologise that the Kona SD support was missing from the latest revisions of drivers and we had a meeting about that yesterday. It turned out the developers thought Kona SD support wasn’t required with the universal binary drivers as the Kona SD can’t be used with a Mac Pro. However it can certainly be used with Final Cut Pro 5.1 on a PowerMac G4 or G5 so they’re going to add it in again and I expect that will happen in the next driver update and we intend to maintain Kona SD support in future driver updates. As long as Final Cut Pro includes support for PowerPC Macs, I expect we will be able to maintain support for the Kona SD 🙂

In the meanwhile, the latest DeckLink drivers with Kona SD support are the DeckLink 5.6 drivers which can be downloaded from this link.

Thanks for letting us know that you’re still using our drivers with Kona SD as that is useful information when I’m discussing driver support with the engineers. We want to maintain support for the Kona SD as long as we can and the engineers really appreciate knowing that the drivers are being used with Kona SD. There is also a support note on our web site which provides the latest information about the Kona SD and Kona HD cards.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

Any dual-processor G5 with PCI-X slots will be fine. The G5 has one 133 MHz slot and two shared 100 MHz slots. It would be best to have the DeckLink and Sonnet cards on seperate buses, ie don’t place them both in the 100 MHz slots. Put one in the 133 MHz slot and the other in a 100 MHz slot. The reason for this is that the DeckLink HD Pro card is a PCI-X card and having it share the 100 MHz PCI-X bus could slot it down and make it unable to cope with HD video. The DeckLink HD Pro 4:4:4 card is a tight squeeze in slot 4 (133 MHz) but it’s fine to use a 100 MHz slot if that is easier for you.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Jaap,

It’s hard to know if Avid software and installation of the Firewire card could have had an impact on Final Cut Pro. I doubt they would have any direct impact on Final Cut Pro but if the software installed on your Mac was already in an unstable condition, then installing and removing the Avid software might have aggravated the problem so that other software misbehaved and the problems just happend to shop up in Final Cut Pro. However this is really just unfounded speculation so the best bet would be to start by verifying your hard disk with Apple’s Disk Utility or Alsoft DiskWarrior 3.0.3 and then delete and reinstall Final Cut Pro 5.1.2 and see if stability returns.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Jaap,

If I’ve understood you correctly, the crash still occurs even if you uninstall the DeckLink drivers and try editing one of the Apple capture settings to make it anamorphic. Is that correct? If so, then the problem has no link to the DeckLink drivers.

Given that your copy of Final Cut Pro is regularly crashing during launch, and also frequently crashes when you edit capture settings, I believe your copy of Final Cut Pro may be corrupt. At the very least, I would recommend deleting Final Cut Pro and then reinstalling Final Cut Pro 5.1, run the update to v5.1.2 but avoid installing the DeckLink drivers. Check to see if the crashing problem has gone away. If Final Cut Pro appears to be working without crashing, install the DecekLink drivers and then see if you can reproduce the crash. If reinstalling Final Cut Pro does not help, then you might have to consider reinstalling Mac OS X 10.4.8, QuickTime 7.1.3, Final Cut Pro 5.1.2 and DeckLink 5.7.2 but hopefully you won’t need to do this. I would also recommend you use Disk Utility (or Alsoft DiskWarrior 3.0.3) to verify your hard disk and check it for any directory structure corruption. If problems are found, you will either need to repair them or reformat your disk before reinstalling any software.

Please let me know how you go.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Sean,

I completely agree with your comments. If Kutmasta happened to find an inexpensive G5 with PCI-X slots, or if he has other PCI cards that would be expensive to replace, then a G5 with PCI-X slots might be worth considering. However where possible, I would definitely recommend stepping up to the Mac Pro (and use PCIe cards). It’s an awesome machine 🙂

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

Please quit out of Final Cut Pro and launch Blackmagic Deck Control. Go to the Preferences and change its easy setup to PAL DV and also set the disk location where you want your clips to be captured. To make this a fair comparison test, make the disk location the same as you use for Final Cut Pro. Now go ahead and capture some PAL material via SDI. Does Blackmagic Deck Control successfully capture the material and save it to the PAL DV format in a QuickTime movie or does some problem occur, eg a crash?

This test will provide a useful comparison to see if you have a general problem or one that is confined to Final Cut Pro.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Jaap,

I haven’t been able to reproduce that problem. Please uninstall the DeckLink drivers. Then launch Final Cut Pro and edit one the standard Apple capture settings and try to make it anamorphic. Does Final Cut Pro still crash or does the problem no longer occur?

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the extra details you sent to Matt via email. I think a lot of the problems you are seeing are related to running mixed vintages of software and the short version of this is that we would recommend you upgrade to Premiere Pro 2.0. I don’t think that the X5DA8 has anything to do with this issue you are seeing and the issues are almost definitely due to software.

While you have the latest QuickTime 7.1.3 and DeckLink 5.7.2 drivers, you’re running the older version of Premiere Pro 1.5.1 which was released about 8 months before QuickTime 7 was released for Windows. We simply don’t know how your QuickTime movies will work with Premiere Pro 1.5.1 as QuickTime 7 was not around when Premiere Pro 1.5.1 was developed and so even Adobe could not have tested with it.

If you want to use the newer features in our current drivers, then you will need to use Premiere Pro 2.0, QuickTime 7.1.3 and DeckLink 5.7.2 drivers together. If you continue to use Premiere Pro 1.5.1, then I would recommend you uninstall QuickTime 7 and revert to QuickTime 6.5.2 and previous DeckLink drivers which can be found at software archives. Premiere Pro 2.0 was released in January 2006 so I would suggest the DeckLink 5.3.1 drivers which were released in December 2005. Newer versions of drivers focussed on support for Premiere Pro 2.0.

As a general rule of thumb, it’s a good idea to use software that is all of the same generation and would have been tested with each other. Our latest drivers receive a lot of testing with the latest versions of video applications and there is less focus on testing with older applications as they were fully supported with older drivers.

I hope this helps and please let us know if updating to Premiere Pro or back-dating to QuickTime 6.5.2 and Decklink 5.3.1 helps.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design