[Miska Draskoczy]

Is it only ProRes thats losing sync, or all codecs? The super weird thing for me is that its only ProRes – uncompressed or dvcprohd work fine. I had to put off troubleshooting with AJA tech support for now because I had to actually, you know, edit 🙂 Unfortunately in dvcprohd until this gets solved. Hopefully I’ll have some downtime soon to tear my system apart again. If you find a fix in the meantime, please post here. thanks.

-miska

[Miska Draskoczy]

its a new mac pro, early 2008, so it doesn’t have the PCI slot configuration utility. thats the weird thing, from tracking down what seems the be the same problem that other people were having, they had the older 8-cores and using the PCI slot config util solved it a/v sync issues. But the new macs don’t have that util (apparently pci 2.0 doesn’t need it) so what to do…

I’ve been talking to AJA as well, they haven’t figured it out yet either. They suggested I exchange cards, which I will do eventually if nothing else works but it seems like since its only happening with one codec that it must be a configuration error.

thanks,
-m

[Miska Draskoczy]

yep, ‘render 10-bit material in high-precision YUV’ radio button is selected in the video processing tab of the sequence settings. i’m loading the AJA ProRes HQ 1080i29.97 preset to make these sequences, so unless they’re misconfigured somehow to begin with, they should match.

-m

[Miska Draskoczy]

thanks, tried it again with both the 5.1 NDD drivers and 5.1, still doesn’t work.
-m

[Miska Draskoczy]

yes everything is rendered and on the same 4-drive raid 5 (can do over 150mb/s). abort on drop frames is ON in prefs (otherwise I can’t make a tape master if its going to skip frames) in any case, I’m not getting dropped frame errors, its just falling massively out of sync with no error messages. I’m also at this point not even using media files to do tests, just bars and tone, which should take very little bandwidth to play in ProRes since there is no intraframe movement.

the plot thickens – I did more tests, fiddling with the view->video playback setting:

AJA Kona 1080i29.97 10-bit (1920×1080)
– playing from the timeline (not ETT), external monitor/SDI quickly falls approx 2-3 secs out of sync.
-Using ETT, same thing, quickly goes out of sync by 2-3 secs.

AJA Kona 1080i29.97 8-bit (1920×1080)
– playing from timeline (not ETT), external monitor/SDI DOES stay in sync! (and this isn’t even supposed to be the setting for ProRes HQ, right?).
-Using ETT, same thing, quickly goes out of sync, but by a lesser amount, 1-2 secs.

gotta be a setting or driver/config issue somewhere, but can’t seem to see what that could be.

-m

[Miska Draskoczy]

yep, thats what I did, I only striped 20secs or so at the head of the tape as I would usually do with SD. I think the other poster mentioned blacking the whole tape as a possible solution to my problem.

-m

[Miska Draskoczy]

Just to chime in here, I’m realizing i have the same problem as well. Just ‘upgraded’ to AE CS3 / FCP 6.0.3 and suddenly my workflow is broken. This really is a huge problem and makes any fcp/ae combined project difficult to impossible.

[Miska Draskoczy]

actually, i just figured it out. deep in the menus is a setting for REGEN MODE, which needs to be on ‘as&in’ (assemble and insert) which means it reads from the tape when looking for timecode while recording. it was on MANU (manual) which means it keeps reading from the int generator. each time I striped the tape, then backed it up, the int tc generator was at whatever the last highest TC value I was getting up to, like 00:59:12-18, wherever I stopped striping and rewound the tape. this is where it would pickup again when it started to record onto the tape as it was still reading from the int generator instead of the tape.

thanks.

-m

[Miska Draskoczy]

yeah I know, it seems kindof retarded, the problem is I have an fcp / kona HD sytem, post house has avids. I wish they would just cut on final cut at the post house, but they insist on offlining on avid cause thats what their editors know. some of these places just don’t seem to get the irony of using a 30k media composer to go back and forth with an online/offline, when they could just edit the dvcproHD straight away on a 2k g5, hell a freaking laptop. its still 1993 for some people I guess…

I think there is a way to translate the timecode on the clips, I seem to remember some util called fcp2ale that convereted final cut and avid bins and edls. but I wasn’t put in touch with the post house soon enough to properly test with them and be fully confident that it would work, so I was put in the odd position of advising them not to hire me to load on set and instead go the usual overnight dubs to dvcam, offline edit, conform from hd deck route.

thanks for your help

-zoltan

[Miska Draskoczy]

yeah, I meant the bsg-50, not 20, my mistake.

I’m not using a K-box, so I have the kona ref bnc hooked up directly to the bsg-50. I have (and had) the terminator switch set to ‘on’ on the deck above the sync input, also knowing about the termination issue.

I followed your steps, played a tape back with the generator off – stop button light flashes, no sync. then turned the generator back on – stop button goes solid. (incidentally there was no ‘non std ref’ alert on the super output, might not be a code on this deck, didn’t see it in the manual). I also tried this by unhooking all cables, not just turning off the box, same result.

So I guess my bsg-50 is fine after all.

Now here’s the weird part. I went back and plugged in the sdi out from kona->in to deck, (I had unhooked everything but sync and monitor to try your test) and now it loses sync…. So in other words, play back tape with no sdi in – fine, sync. play tape with sdi in connected to kona, even though I’m not playing anything on the kona or using the mac at all – loses sync, stop button flashes.

so some of this is still a mystery to me… but at least I figured out the work around by using the ‘input’ sync option, and not relying on the generator at all, so I can get my work done.

thanks again.

-z