[Tim Allison]

This is a brand new, Apple latest,greatest box. 8 core 3.2 Ghz with 16gb RAM.

[Tim Allison]

Dave,

If I digitize something in Final Cut, close FCP, then drag that media file to the Quicktime player app, and it plays out of sync, doesn’t that indicate that it is being captured out of sync? Can it possibly be digitized correctly if it plays back out of sync in both Final Cut Pro and in Quicktime? I don’t see how. We are not getting any kind of drift. It is out of sync by seven frames every time. If we put the clip on a FCP timeline, unlink audio and video, and then slide the audio track down the timeline seven frames, everything then looks OK.

When this thing is acting up, we can see gross “out-of-syncness” in the log and capture video window within FCP. The actual video monitor looks OK during digitization. Remember, this video monitor is being fed by the Io-HD box. That means that the audio and video from the Betacam deck are coming into the Io-HD (via component/analog audio in)and going out to the monitor (via SDI out) and it looks fine. But something is happening to the part of the signal that is going from the Io-HD box to the computer (through the Firewire 800 cable). We have switched out the Firewire cable. That was one of the first things we tried. Somewhere along the way, the audio and the video are getting out of sync by 7 frames.

Confusing, ain’t it? Like I said, I’m stumped on this one.

[Tim Allison]

Jeremy,

Please excuse my laziness in typing. I am only talking about an AJA Io-HD. Sorry for the confusion there. We do not own any SD flavor of Io, so any time that I typed “Io” I was referring to an Io-HD.

We’ve got a Fasta 4e card in one PCI slot, and a Sonnett Firewire card in another. I’ll have to check to see which specific slots.

[Tim Allison]

Devin,

Yes…both the Io-HD and the Beta deck are hooked up to the same Horita BSG-50 black burst generator.

[Tim Allison]

Dave, I know the clips are out of sync because they play back out of sync….in both Final Cut and in the basic Quicktime player.

I first considered the AJA Io-HD to be the primary suspect. But we had an extra Io (in an unopened box) that had not been installed on another system. When we replaced one Io with another, and we still had the same problems, that tells me one of two things: either the Io is NOT the problem, or all Io units share the same design fault that causes this problem. Since I have not been reading about this problem with other Io users, that second conclusion is kind of hard to believe.

Is this a Final Cut Pro problem in digitizing BetacamSP video? I don’t think so, because the problem came up when we digitized with both FCP and VTR Exchange.

So now I’m to the point where I don’t think the problem is with the Io-HD. I don’t think it is with Final Cut Pro. So could it be some sort of Mac Pro/Leopard issue? Could it possible be a drive issue, or made an eSATA host adapter card issue?

Why does this problem commonly show up when we first fire up the system? That has really been the only “most-of-the-time” consistent behavior we’ve noted.

The next thing we’re probably going to try is swapping out the CalDigit Fasta 4e eSATA host adapter card.

[Tim Allison]

No other devices. In fact, this is brand new system that has never ever had any other input devices on it, so there is no chance that some rogue left-over driver is causing us problems.

[Tim Allison]

Gary,

This has nothing to do with bars and tone, and nothing to do with Panasonic. We’re simply digitizing Sony BetacamSP video. We usually work at 8-bit uncompressed.

Some new info from this morning….first, we had an extra Io-HD that had yet to be installed, so we switched it out with the first one. We fired up the system, and sure enough the first three clips we batch captured were 7 frames out-of-sync. We threw away the bad media, batch captured them again, and they were fine.

We completely shut down the system, and then fired it up again. We logged in three more clips, batch captured them, and they were 7 frames out of sync.

Any idea what’s going on here? The problem seems to be limited to the first batch capture after firing up the system. Since we switched out the Io-HD, and experienced the same problem, I do NOT think this is Io-HD related.

[Tim Allison]

The way I understand things, you are obviously compressing your video when you record the XDCAM files on your cards. If you play that video out through HD-SDI, and ingest it into Fianl Cut with the DVCProHD codec, you will compress it once again.

Why not use XDCAM Transfer software, and Firewire the XDCAM files directly into Final Cut? Just curious.

[Tim Allison]

I don’t completely understand why you even need an Io-HD. If you acquire on the EX 1 and your final product is always DVD, why not go straight from Final Cut to Compressor? I don’t see why you need the Io unless you either come in from some tape format, or need to go out some tape format.

You will need something to feed your HD monitor, but there are many less expensive options than an Io-HD if that is all you need to do.

To me, the Io-HD is the swiss army knife of input/output devices. In our system, we have one Io, but we have an old Betacam deck, and HDV deck, and a XDCAM deck hooked up to it all at once. The only time we use the Io-HD for the XDCAM deck is when we want to transcode XDCAM into ProRes422 for whatever reason.

[Tim Allison]

We too have experienced some weird audio sync issues. Sometimes when you scrub along the time line too fast, audio and video will go out of sync. But if you merely wait 10-15 seconds, and then play the time line again, everything is back in sync. We can live with that.

We have experienced an intermittent problem where clips are captured out of sync. The past several times it has happened, the audio is always ahead of the video by 7 frames. If we go into the capture scratch folder and throw away the media from these shots, and then recapture them through batch recapture, most of the time, they are recaptured correctly.

This has been an impossible problem to chase down. First, it is an intermittent problem. We have not seen any consistency to this problem at all. Secondly, we just rebuilt our system. We went from a G5 to a Mac Pro. We went from Tiger to Leopard. We went from a Kona LS to an Io-HD. We went from FCP 5 to FCP 6. The only thing that has stayed constant is we are still using the same CalDigit S2VR Duo drives, but we change the eSATA host adapter cards, so even that has changed.