[Ramona Howard]

Bram,

I know you were not pointing fingers, didn’t mean to imply you were (it was a general post for those that may think that all items that go wrong is linked to hardware). In this case many of us can speak up that the hardware works as it should because we are using it outside of these applications 🙂

I know the hardware handles non legal to legal just fine, we do it all the time. I would certainly keep pressing the application manufacture/s to fix it 🙂

Cheers,
Ramona

Play hard today, it may be raining tomorrow!

[Ramona Howard]

Hello,

So just to clarify. These issues are application issues not hardware issues. We also use the AJA boards (along with many other manufactures) in our products and allow a feature set to work with all kinds of levels since the hardware is built to handle it.

The hardware allows for everything to operate in a SMPTE range as well as beyond it. How applications clamp beyond to SMPTE will vary and some do a better job than others.

I just wanted to make sure you guys know where the real problems lie, as AJA does make an awesome product.

Cheers,
Ramona

Play hard today, it may be raining tomorrow!

[Ramona Howard]

You have to also remember that you can push far more than the legal limit over SDI, maybe the Harris product simply can only detect to a certain level?

certainly explains the deck to deck comment. Get your self a waveform monitor, you will be good. Also, doesn’t the product pushing the video offer the ability to clamp down to legal limits properly, that is basic stuff these days.

Cheers,
Ramona

Play hard today, it may be raining tomorrow!

[Ramona Howard]

Jim,

Yes those were some turbulent times 🙂
Since Grant wrote the original mac drivers but was also developing his own company behind the scenes things were interesting.

I would certainly call AJA and ask their advice BEFORE changing anything. You may be out of luck with that upgrade unless you step into a card that they fully support on their own (they write their own mac drivers now). They do have some fairly inexpensive boards on the SD side. As far as I know they haven’t gone back and re-written drivers for the SD, HD, DL or Kona2, but I could be wrong as we have never used their drivers (we have written our own for Linux).

Best of luck,
Ramona

Play hard today, it may be raining tomorrow!

[Ramona Howard]

No worries 🙂

You want to learn video quick? If you got a friend in a post house, go hang out for the day in the machine room (if they will let you in), if you already have some basic knowledge this will be uplifting.

People think they don’t need all that and can do everything on a single computer…..in a one man world yes, but when you need to share, post houses (at least the ones I have know over the years) do this very well.

I am talking about sharing resources. Decks, sync, monitoring, data, etc…but better yet the tape jockey knows he can’t drive an HD deck with SD sync. Again understanding the basics will only help you in what you do. It is all relative these days.

Have a good one.

Ramona

Play hard today, it may be raining tomorrow!

[Ramona Howard]

Jason,

8 drives should yield more than 160mbs, I would check to see if you have a slow or failing or even failed drive in the mix.

I can’t totally speak for how this all works in the MAC world but I can say from MANY years of experience that slow arrays stem from several reasons no matter what they are connected to. If you were once able to capture uncompressed with that array (which I do believe you were) then something has gone amuck.

Simply suggesting to drop to a COMPRESSED format like ProRes isn’t a good suggestion (Maybe this guy really needs uncompressed). It is a fairly decent codec but it isn’t uncompressed quality by an means.

Here are some suggestions and if all else fails you could always call in help from people like Bob Zelin, who make a living doing this on the MAC.

Again, I can only make suggestions based on what I am familiar with here

Does the hard drive controller in your system allow for configuration? If so a wrong setting will certainly effect drive speeds.

A controller in an improper slot in the Mobo, or one that is contention with another device will certainly cause problems (drop frames being a big one)

Again, physical drive issues in the array. Drives are not designed to just sit for lengthy periods of time once they have been in use. Drives have gotten better over the years but I am guessing your array is several years old 🙂

Capturing the wrong flavor of uncompressed with an array that isn’t fast enough. For example there is a huge difference in needed thruput for 8bit YcbCr (YUV) than for 10bit RGB.

Try wiping your array clean and re-formating.

Hope that helps a bit, good luck

Ramona

Play hard today, it may be raining tomorrow!

[Ramona Howard]

Real-time was the key words. The other solution will require a render 🙁

Cheers,
Ramona

Play hard today, it may be raining tomorrow!

[Ramona Howard]

Brad,

Your not sending the HD video signal from the deck, your sending reference. If you don’t have a $400 Tri-sync generator from AJA, then pull the sync from the deck. ugh……this is basic video stuff (sorry a little of Bob was coming out in me).

In the video world devices need sync (they need to run together), if they are not you get all kind of nasty things.

Cheers,
Ramona

Play hard today, it may be raining tomorrow!

[Ramona Howard]

well there you go.

There are still many devices that need SDI, which would be a good reason to go with a converter vs a fixed HDMI solution. Not limiting yourself to HDMI only would be a smart approach.

Ramona

Play hard today, it may be raining tomorrow!

[Ramona Howard]

Keith,

This will be a little off topic but all relative.

What you are asking is a feature we have designed into our new RaveDi. Since we have written our own driver for the AJA hardware and our own code for the application we can do things like pass data between the AJA and GPU easily, in fact we do this all the time. This is a real time process, actually faster because we have to account for other things.

We can stay in a 16bit work space (so no wishy washy 10/12/16bit to 8bit going on). If your in RGB, that is what you pass and stay in. We have not done anything with the Lhi yet as all our current customers need SDI and all the options of the Kona3, but our driver is designed to work with any AJA board.

I know AJA makes a HDMI to SDI converter (we use this for showing off another product we make), is there one the other way? If so, and if it supports a newer HDMI spec, then there you go, problem solved.

I have not dug too deep into Nvidias HDMI implementation to see what spec they are supporting so I can’t suggest using a graphics board that has HDMI on it just yet. But if it does we could go from AJA straight to Nvidia out.

Cheers,
Ramona

Play hard today, it may be raining tomorrow!