[Shiloh Heyman]

Have you added any new firewire devices to your configuration? You may be having somekind of a firewire bandwidth conflict betwene the camera and the drive. At times I have to turn off my firewire audio interface in order to capture. You may try capturing to an internal drive and transfering to external afterwards. Or try a second firewire card for each device. I think all the stock firewire ports are on the same bus, but Im not sure. Firewire cards are pretty cheap.

[Shiloh Heyman]

I wanted to say thanks to all of you (John Pale, Chris Poisson and David Roth Weiss) for responding to my cry for help. Thanks especialy for your tips on monitor setup. I am now running my output through firewire to my XH-A1 and out the composit video (the componet out gives an uneven color cast from left to right, but only through this configuration and not in camera mode). After re-color correcting and re-encoding the results are much closer to what I am looking for.

After all of this I am now considering a more professional monitoring solution. I am interested in the new JVC DT-V24L1DU LCD Broadcast Monitor which has SDI, HD-SDI and a DVI input. I am wondering if the DVI input is meant for displaying RGB computer signals or if it converts it to broadcast colorspace or both. Depending on the fore-mentioned, I may be looking into a AJA Kona 3, Kona LHe or IO HD. If the JVC DT-V24L1DU has the built in hardware to do the broadcast signal conversion from DVI. I would wait for a while before buying the video interface. If not I would buy the interface and try to suck some more life out of my sony monitor.

Any thoughts about the difference between the AJA products? From what I can tell the Kona 3 is the solution for capturing uncompressed dual link HD and 2k. The only way I see myself working with these formats in the near future would be in Pro Res or if some dream came true Red Code Raw. Im thinking the K3 may be overkill for me unless Im missing some other advantages it has over the LHe besides audio IOs.

My thoughts on the IO-HD:

Lots of every kind of IO, Nice!

Built in Pro Res hardware? (Doesn’t the CPU have to do the same amount of work to send and receive the signal over FW800?). Could the hardware in the K3 and LHe do the same in the future with new drivers?

No PCI card obsolescence. Nice! (Black Magic had the right idea with interchangeable PCI cards, too bad about their poor customer satisfaction and reliability ratings).

Firewire Bandwidth Hog. Not Nice! (Could this be solved by the addition of a 2nd firewire card?)

Any thoughts or suggestions on any of these topics would be greatly appreciated.

I have a Mac Pro 2.66 w/ 3 Gig Ram, ATI X1900 XT.
My current monitor is a 29″ Sony CRT with Component, Composite and S-Video inputs. It has Blue Only for calibration and adjustable white point.
I will be working mostly with 1080 HDV and DV from the Canon XH-A1 and Sony FX1 for now.

Thanks again in advance.

Shiloh