[Peter Barrett]

Expansion Slot Utility? On a G5? Isn’t that a Mac Pro thing?

[Peter Barrett]

I agree, it’s VITAL INFORMATION! The 2nd drive slot is occupied. Yes, I agree there’s an underlying issue with the RAID but that doesn’t account for the fact that with the Kona out and the Multibridge Pro PCIe card in and running, the nag felt like a racehorse. The LHe was the only thing that changed. Hmmm…

Thanks!

[Peter Barrett]

Now it’s daylight and I can see the slot numbers:
1 & 2 Quadro 4500
3 Kona LHe
4 ATTO SCSI
Seems like the approved layout.

Re the RAIDs, the slower of the two is doing about 75MB/s write speed, the faster one double that. There’s a mere 200GB free on the faster one, but close to 1TB free on the slower of the two. Can’t wait to clear off the data and reinitialise.

The black burst box is a Kramer – I’ll check termination at the digibeta end.

Re prefs, trashing them is all well and good but having a replacement set handy that were saved when fresh is good too – that’s what the script “Replace FCP Prefs” was about… no more lost Favorites!

Thanks!

Quad G5/NVidia Quadro/Kona LHe/Infortrend RAID/Final Touch HD 2.6.1/FCP 5.1.2/OS X 10.4.8

[Peter Barrett]

Wow Bob, a comprehensive post – where do I start?

Re pulldown, I’m sure that’s what I tried, with a playout full of dropped frames – I’ll try again for future reference. Perhaps I had things around the wrong way…

Card configuration is the NVidia card at the bottom (presumably spanning the graphics slot and one other), then the Kona, then the SCSI card. Now I’m uncertain of the actual slot numbering schema, but presumably if they were installed in reverse order nothing would work!

Re prefs, I used to make beer money selling a small Applescript and shell-based utility that did precisely that – trashed and replaced prefs (til FCP Rescue came along and did a rather coarser-grained job for free). Time I updated mine for FCP5!

Certainly the array has been very full of late – and I mustn’t blame the card for any system clogs that it creates. I also suspect there’s an issue with one of the RAIDs (we have 2 x 4TB) as its write speed (but oddly, not its read speed) seems down when using the above utility. I’ve been waiting to clear projects before cleaning both up, running some tests, and doing a RAID 50 stripe across them. But perhaps there are controller issues or a disk is playing up… nothing in the RAID’s showing an error though…

Thanks for the heads-up on the Digibeta thing – we have been using a black burst generator for all captures and laybacks to good effect, often looping through the KL Box – perhaps we should send both signals direct from the generator’s outputs

Thanks so much for your time – I’ll continue the detective work. You’re right, something’s not right… perhaps I have weird alien static…

Peter

Quad G5/NVidia Quadro/Kona LHe/Infortrend RAID/Final Touch HD 2.6.1/FCP 5.1.2/OS X 10.4.8

[Peter Barrett]

Fair call Walter. It sits in the 2nd slot above the Quadro (2 slots deep) and below the Atto SCSI card… I gather Quads are less fussy about card location than Mac Pros. Anyhow, I’d love to know how the LHe and Kona 3 compare in this regard… and the LHe in the other machine (a Dual G5 2.3) is also a bit flaky… perhaps both the premium cards (Kona 2 in its day, and K3) are just better than the LHe… I’d love someone to confirm that though.

Quad G5/NVidia Quadro/Kona LHe/Infortrend RAID/Final Touch HD 2.6.1/FCP 5.1.2/OS X 10.4.8

[Peter Barrett]

Thanks, yeah, I certainly wouldn’t try running FT with a Multibridge (weirdly, people do) but given that the Kona 3 feature set is of negligible immediate value, I guess I’m just keen to know whether there’s likely to be a general performance boost, or whether we’ll spend the extra and it’ll all feel the same (a bit sluggish)…

Quad G5/NVidia Quadro/Kona LHe/Infortrend RAID/Final Touch HD 2.6.1/FCP 5.1.2/OS X 10.4.8

[Peter Barrett]

Thanks, tried that but the output was significantly jerkier, with what looked like the odd dropped or doubled frame – yet normal 1080i50 and 59.94 play out perfectly, as does Graeme Nattress’s plugin renders which I recommend if you have the time (which we barely do) – it does a beautiful job. The RAIDs are handling capture and playout with ease.

The rule of thumb rendering pulldown on the Quad seems to be about 7x the duration of the piece. The film’s 80min, so that’s the rest of theday gone! But as for these boxes and cards we bought… I’m sure there’s an elusive key to this that I’m not finding. I have my dunce’s cap on already, I know it’ll be that simple, but just playing a timeline doesn’t look that great…

Quad G5/NVidia Quadro/Kona LHe/Infortrend RAID/Final Touch HD 2.6.1/FCP 5.1.2/OS X 10.4.8

[Peter Barrett]

Ah! I’ll try it.

Quad G5/NVidia Quadro/Kona LHe/Infortrend RAID/Final Touch HD 2.6.1/FCP 5.1.2/OS X 10.4.8

[Peter Barrett]

Thanks Gary – but I think I’m just seeing duplicated frames… by the Video Out you mean FCP’s Video Playback settings? Or the Kona codec menus? Because 1080i29.97 is greyed out on mine when the video arriving is at 1080sf23.98…

Quad G5/NVidia Quadro/Kona LHe/Infortrend RAID/Final Touch HD 2.6.1/FCP 5.1.2/OS X 10.4.8

[Peter Barrett]

Well, 24P is all my LHe can do! Assuming the project came in at 1080 from the 1200, the 1080/ 23.98Psf setting worked for me using 25fps media reconformed in Cinema Tools – but I wanted 29.97 from it!

Quad G5/NVidia Quadro/Kona LHe/Infortrend RAID/Final Touch HD 2.6.1/FCP 5.1.2/OS X 10.4.8