[Tim Allison]

Are you using a system with Leopard installed on your Mac? I’ve heard that the decks and the drives don’t mount quite right in FAM mode when using Leopard.

[Tim Allison]

Yes. We have one of those Horita BSG-50 black burst generators. The AJA tech support guy actually said to try disconnecting this from the Io-HD, and setting the Io to “free run” sync.

Our biggest problem is this is an intermittent problem. It is very difficult to test to track things down. Sometimes it does it, but most of the time it doesn’t. Even when it does ingest out-of-sync, if we just simply throw away the bad media, and then batch digitize to replace it, everything usually comes back into the system correctly.

If the thing would just consistently screw up, then we could actually test to see if the problem is with the Io, the Caldigit drives, Final Cut, or whatever.

Another problem is that this is a completely new system. We changed the Mac, the OS, the FCP version, and the input interface. About the only thing we didn’t change was the Caldigit drives, but we did change the eSATA host adapter card that it connects to. So we’re really just “shooting in the dark” trying to track down this problem.

[Tim Allison]

You don’t understand, Jeremy. These clips are being CAPTURED out of sync. This NOT a playback issue. We’ve experienced the “fast scrubbing causing the timeline to playback out-of-sync” issue, and this is NOT the same thing.

Some new information from yesterday….it is still an intermittent problem, but all clips that were captured out-of-sync were a consistent 7 frames off. The audio was ahead of the video. Every time this happened, we could throw away the media, batch capture again, the the second time through, the clips were captured correctly.

We changed the Firewire cable between the Io and the Mac…didn’t solve the problem.

[Tim Allison]

I’m confused. ProRes422 is just a codec, just like DVCproHD. How come you can batch digitize with one, but not the other?

I don’t have a Kona LH, but we do have a Kona 3 and an Io-HD. Select ProRes or DVCproHD in the Easy Setup menu. After you do this, you will probably need to go the Audio/Video settings, and change machine control to Firewire. That always works for me.

[Tim Allison]

Ernie,

The problem I’ve had with all of this is that the Betacam footage still doesn’t look anywhere near as good as the HD shots. I upconverted using a Kona 3. The best bet for good looking footage is some creative editing where you do NOT use the Beta footage as full screen shots. Make them smaller shots, picture in a picture, with some sort of graphics background, or with an HD shot as the background. In my limited experience, the smaller you make the native SD shots (within reason), the better they look compared to the native HD video.

[Tim Allison]

That can’t be Gary. This is a brand new MacPro….the MOST powerful machine that Apple presently sells…3.2 Ghz 8-core with 16 GB RAM. If this machine can’t handle it, then it can’t be done.

Any other suggestions?

[Tim Allison]

Did you download and install the new AJA 5.1.1 software update? The old version was simply 5.1 software. When I put the new version on, I also had to update the firmware.

[Tim Allison]

I realize a consumer grade HDTV set is not the BEST option. But this edit suite is for teaching purposes at a local high school. Budget is a concern. An Intensity card will cost around $250, and a consumer grade HDTV will cost just a little bit more. That’s pretty chap for a functional HD monitoring solution for a Final Cut Pro system.

Thanks for the help.

[Tim Allison]

I called CalDigit. They had me reset the P-RAM. Other than that, they are guessing right now. They recommend plugging the eSATA cable into a different port on the Fasta card, and even changing the cable. Per Shane’s response below, I’ll change the Power Brick too. Good suggestions, but they are kind of shots in the dark right now.

One detail I didn’t mention…..the drive is approximately 90% full. I realize that could slow it down. But would it cause inconsistent performance? Like I said, this drive tested at 90 MB/s yesterday, when we were experiencing the problem, and at 140 MB/s today. It is still 90% full today, just like it was yesterday.

[Tim Allison]

This is a valid question and concern. We are in the process of replacing a couple of G5s with Mac Pros, and the Mac Pros come loaded with Leopard….we had no choice in the matter.

Sony better dang well have this fixed by NAB.

Here is the only information I have on the question at hand. Sorry, it’s not much help:

Yes, I was one of the guinea pigs and there are issues under Leopard. 2.1 works great under Tiger but with Leopard there is some issues with the ProDisc driver. It won’t prevent you from using it altogether, but it’s not the best and it messed up my disc library as I’ll explain below. You won’t get an icon for the ProDisc on the desktop either.

When you first connect the camera/deck you get an icon with a volume label of ‘untitled’ and the first thing I do is give the disc a volume label and then eject the disc and reload it.

Under Leopard, existing volume labels aren’t recognized and are replaced with something like the UMID. This messed up my importing of additional material from a disc that I had imported earlier.

I am set up to have imported material go like this.

Movies –> Sony XDCAM Transfer —>(folder, labeled with disc volume label)–> Ciip Title.

So Leopard gave the same disc a new volume label and created an unnecessary folder.

Also, anything I had imported under Tiger does not display properly in the proxy viewer. The thumbnail is correct, but the clip playback is stretched when it doesn’t need to be. I supposed I could re-import all the proxies and get them to work, but I still have the disc naming issue.