Pipe works with iChat/iSight

I was following a thread in the Blackmagic/Decklink forum regarding the iSight camera not working when a Decklink card is installed. As you know we've had this discussion several times on the Aurora forum dating back six or eight months ago. Everyone here came to the conclusion that the Igniter card, and all cards for that matter, would conflict with the iSight camera. Well, I just discovered that the Pipe Pro card I have installed on my system DOESN'T conflict with the iSight camera. This is due to the remarkable engineering of the Aurora team. Actually, it has nothing to do with the engineering of the card, and everything to do with the random luck of the products name.

It appears that QT is loading the video input devices in an alphabetical manner. iSight comes before Pipe in the alphabetical listing, therefore it works. Blackmagic, Cinewave, Igniter, Kona etc come before the letter "i"Sight, therefore they conflict.
This doesn't address the overall problem of what to do if your device does conflict, but at least it points to the problem. Thanks, Mike at Aurora for helping me figure this out.

Now there are some of you out there who feel that an editing system should be uses solely as an editing system and nothing more. That's fine for you if you want to limit yourself to such thinking. But OS X far more robust and stable than OS 9 ever was. It's an OS that was designed for multitasking and multithreading. Now if FCP would just incorporate multithreading. It's not uncommon for me to be editing in the foreground and compressing into MPEG 2 via Compressor in the background. I'm an editor who was tight deadlines to keep. I don't want, nor should I need, multiple computers to accomplish a simple task that one computer (with multiple processors) should be able to do on it's own. Email, surf the web, graphic design, music composition etc, should ALL be possible on the same machine. This is 2004, not 1994.

Michael Alberts
Ambidextrous Productions, Inc.