[Ramona Howard]

Speaking of beefy. Did you hear that ATI released an 800 core GPU….yup, that’s not a typo 🙂

Cheers,
Ramona

Play hard today, it may be raining tomorrow!

[Ramona Howard]

You guys gotta understand that they can do this BECAUSE their hardware simply doesn’t fail 🙂

Yes once in a while something will go amuck, but just think about it. If a company had to constantly do this, they wouldn’t be in business very long. They go above and beyond because they don’t have to. They do it because they are honest people with REALLY GOOD PRODUCTS. Now you know why us in the high-end world never switch. We need stuff that just runs 24/7….and a company that stands behind their stuff.

Cheers,
Ramona

[Ramona Howard]

Yes Bob is always elegant in his delivery 🙂 wow

He is like the Simon Cowell for the The Cow…..with wild hair of course.

We still must not forget that peoples perceptions do mean something and it could be a perception that AJA isn’t doing much because they are not releasing a gazillion low end solutions that are absolutely meaningless to a high-end workflow.

Cheers,
Ramona

[Ramona Howard]

Andras,

Please forgive as I have not read every word in the conversations back and forth between everyone. Also if this covers anything you already know. I am simply going to point out a few things that may or may not have come up and or you and or others don’t know. Use what you can. Hope it helps.

Oh I remember the quicktime days when we did Sin City, yes it was rather frustrating….

DPX is really straight forward once you know the rules and once you know how things interact. It sometimes gets a bad rap, when it really isn’t the true fault of what is happening…

Within a DPX you can pack anything, any raster, and bit depth, any colorspace, log, lin, full range or SMPTE range, etc…..

In addition you can pack metadata in both the header and user space of the header. Within the header there are defined SMPTE standards of packing timecode, reel, keycode, etc. The user space is a free for all and almost anything can be put here. We pack audio chunks and other metadata that the Rave reads and writes. When done properly anything packed in user space DOES NOT EFFECT if a DPX can be used in anything else.

This is why DPX is so prominent in the high-end workflows, it is fairly versatile.

Here are some items that may be worth checking out to see where things are going wrong for you 🙂

Start with your original files, what colorspace and range are they? When converting to DPX, make sure you are converting to the same. ie, if it is 0-1024, make sure the DPX is the same, log to log, etc….

This way the conversion from your original files won’t be the issue and they should match bit for bit, if they don’t, here lies the issue. If your using shake you should be able to open both and compare.

Next.

Are the original files 4:4:4? is the DPX sequence being converted to 4:4:4? and is the Pro-Res 4:4:4?

Next.

Find out what range or format the ProRes works in (Full or SMPTE) and that it matches the DPX files

i.e, most products default to a SMPTE range for these types of codecs and or can’t support full range. So if you start with a full range DPX and convert to something else, they will not match. Same goes for 4:4:4 to 4:2:2. Most tape decks, monitors, etc do not support full range and or 4:4:4!

So if this isn’t the issue, check.

Some products have issues with sharing DPX files between MACs and PCs and reading the header info correctly. This may require you to do some digging (maybe someone here can answer) if this infact is part of the problem. We support both big indian and little indian in Rave, so we don’t care where the files originate from and we don’t see this issue but I have know other products that have. It is an old problem and surprises me to still see programs with this issue.

Last, call AJA, they will bend over backwards to help you get to the bottom of things if they can. The AJA hardware has settings that support pretty much all scenarios and you will see issues if you have the wrong one selected.

You may be asking why in the heck would I start with a sequence that is out of SMPTE range to begin with? Because, in the film-world we do it everyday, as film does not have the limitation that video does. The workflows that use full-range are also using LUTS (Look Up Tables) to do a remapping and or colorspace conversion to go out to TV/video and some monitoring. And, yes there can be good remapping and bad, so it will depend on where it is being done.

I hope that helps you get your head around the issue and the workflow, as honestly it isn’t that difficult when it works, which BTW I see almost on a daily basis. Just gotta know the rules 🙂

Cheers,
Ramona
https://www.spectsoft.com

[Ramona Howard]

Andras,

Please take a look. We have been filling this exact need for 10 years.

https://www.spectsoft.com/index.html

Native DPX so you can render right to the unit, or drop files from other sources and they just play. Uncompressed is what this unit has always been about.

Cheers,
Ramona

[Ramona Howard]

We have also run Telecast a very long distance and the best part is that a single strand can carry a signal to and from, in dual link 🙂

Ran this on the ground with lots of people walking on it and vehicles rolling over it. Worked perfect.

Ramona

[Ramona Howard]

ditto. We use it in Rave all the time.

Ramona

[Ramona Howard]

Igor,

I would be interested in where you think the problem could occur to corrupt the signal?

Power consumption I agree with. A hardware scope could consume less power than a computer running with an I/O board

Cheers,
Ramona

[Ramona Howard]

FYI….

CPU manufacturers – who used to void warranties if their CPUs were over-clocked – now embrace and even promote over-clocking as a feature (when you see Intel or AMD describe their processors as “unlocked” that’s what they are referring to.)

99% of the time, when people are talking about over-clocking, they are referring to the processor. This started because processors were deliberately slowed down in order to artificially create steppings in products. So for instance, an Intel Pentium processor that was capable of being clocked at 3GHz may have come out in 4 flavors: 3GHz, 2.8GHz, 2.6GHz and 2.4GHz. Over-clockers then knew that the 2.4GHz part could be tweaked (with the right BIOS tools) to clock up to 3GHz.

More advanced over-clocking takes place with memory and video cards – but this can introduce instability far more easily than CPU over-clocking. Over-clocking the PCI-E bus is the absolute trickiest and generates the most instability for the lease possible performance benefit.

There’s a lot more to it than that, but that’s kind of the gist of it… over-clocking is both an art and a science – and to answer your question about “lasting long” – it is the one thing you can do with a computer that can actually *physically* damage the parts.

Obviously it can be done, but when expensive parts are involved, I like to leave this up to the people that do it everyday for a living. We (SpectSoft) have always been on the edge of development and would certainly give this a look, but not before bringing all the component players together to fully understand the pros and cons.

Like Tim said, “at your own risk”. Sometimes this isn’t worth the few dollars you save, especially when there are well priced solutions available without going this route.

And besides in this world of updates and ever changing stuff (drivers, codecs, etc. etc. etc….)support for something of this nature will be hard to come by from the component and software vendors. Where does the finger pointing begin?

I do wish you success on your machine, no doubt if you have the smarts it will work.

Cheers,
Ramona

[Ramona Howard]

Bob,

My response is: If someone has to pay you to use their products, what is that saying? ouch.

I have to say that other companies can certainly make products that appear to do the same functions as what AJA offers but it is only when you start looking under the hood that it becomes apparent why they can be sold for less.

We have been working with AJA for 10 years now, John, seems like yesterday 🙂

and I have to say that their engineering has made it easier for us to do what we do. Other products pale in comparison when it comes to this. An example that you all will grasp. AJA has a hefty buffer on their boards. In the world of video, especially high-end video, this is rather important. Now go compare that to what others are doing. AJA doesn’t seem to cut corners when it comes to engineering and design, something we greatly appreciate.

In a generic video sense you may not deem these items important but in the high-end world we know the importance of good engineering and latch onto it. I am happy to pay that 3K, and you don’t have to pay me to use it.

Cheers,
Ramona