ProRes Capture Issue
by Michael Orlansky
on
Jul 21, 2008 at 9:03:43 pm
Hi Everyone,
I'm having trouble trying to capture any flavor of ProRes or 10 bit uncompressed, everything else seems to capture fine. It seems anything with a 10 bit digitizer won't capture. At this point I'm only trying to capture to the internal drive but will later need to capture to our new SAN. Once the capture screen opens it immediately stops on the first frame and reports dropped frames.
Specs: Mac Pro, Leopard 10.5.4, Final Cut Pro 6.0.4, QT 7.5, AJA Kona LHe
One thing we tried was to take the ProRes 422 preset and change the digitizer to 8 bit which did capture. Regardless we need to figure out why the 10 bit stuff won't, any help would be great, thanks everyone.
Re: ProRes Capture Issue by walter biscardi on Jul 21, 2008 at 9:16:23 pm
[Michael Orlansky]"t this point I'm only trying to capture to the internal drive but will later need to capture to our new SAN. "
Your internal drive, if it's a single drive, will not support uncompressed or probably even ProRes captures. Try capturing to your SAN and let us know if you still can't capture.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.
Re: ProRes Capture Issue by Michael Orlansky on Jul 21, 2008 at 9:32:16 pm
Capture Card - AJA Kona LHe - HD material , 1080i
We can capture 8 bit uncompressed, as well as the above mentioned variation to the SAN. I just tried to capture to a 1TB Glyph drive with no success using the regular ProRes HQ easy setup, it still dropped on the first frame. As soon as we get rid of the 10 bit digitizer it seems fine.
Re: ProRes Capture Issue by Keith Koby on Jul 21, 2008 at 9:59:20 pm
we get the same results using the aja vtr exchange utility. 1080i 8bit to uncompressed or to prores hq is fine. 10bit to anything doesn't work. Altering the fcp setting to 8 bit defeats the purpose of using prores somewhat. I think the idea is to oversample on the way in even if you are using an 8 bit source like an hdw2000.
Keith Koby
Head of Post-Production Engineering
iNDEMAND NETWORKS
Howard TV!/MOJO/Movies On Demand/iNDEMAND Pay-Per-View
Re: ProRes Capture Issue by Jeremy Garchow on Jul 21, 2008 at 10:41:32 pm
10 bit works in Leopard too.
Are you sure you guys have everything setup properly? Such as the proper easy setup? Kona control panel is showing the proper format? If it's dropping frames right off of the bat, it's usually that the drive is not fast enough, or your format is bonked between the deck, computer and FCP.
Re: ProRes Capture Issue by keith koby on Jul 21, 2008 at 11:13:20 pm
control panel showed 1080i 29.97 in. Incoming video is the correct format bc dvcpro hd 1080i60 and 1080i 8 bit uncompressed is fine. It's not bandwidth bc we are testing 300 MBs read and writes, plus we have no problem capturing 8 bit uncompressed.
Re: ProRes Capture Issue by Jeremy Garchow on Jul 22, 2008 at 12:24:22 am
And when you choose a 1080i29.97 ProRes easy setup, it doesn't work? Something doesn't sound right. I believe you that you know what you're doing, but I capture ProRes a lot along with 10bit UC HD and I do not have these issues, altough I have a Kona3 and not an LH.
Let's start with the Kona drivers, what version are you running?
What version of the MacPro do you have? Is it pre or post 2008?
Also, Keith, do you and the original poster work together or are we dealing with separate machines?
Re: ProRes Capture Issue by keith koby on Jul 22, 2008 at 1:53:01 am
thanks jeremy. We do have some experience with FCP. ;). I thought configuration problem at first, but after a day of checking, I'm not seeing anything obvious.
FCP 6.0.4
10.5.4
Qt 7.5
AJA 5.1 (regular not ndd)
Xsan 2.1
The CPU:
3.0 GHz quad core 2007 (we bought a bunch so as not to do what we are doing right now... Moving to leopard new San etc).
And yes, the original poster and I are talking about the same CPU.
Thanks man!
Kk
Keith Koby
Head of Post-Production Engineering
iNDEMAND NETWORKS
Howard TV!/MOJO/Movies On Demand/iNDEMAND Pay-Per-View
Re: ProRes Capture Issue by Jeremy Garchow on Jul 22, 2008 at 3:08:55 am
Alright. I have a couple of ideas, and some of these may sound redundant and you might have tried them, but let's go through it all anyway as maybe you didn't.
First, I don't understand this part:
[keith koby]"we bought a bunch so as not to do what we are doing right now... Moving to leopard new San etc"
You bought a bunch of pre2008 in the hopes that you wouldn't go to Leopard?
First, what PCIe slot config are you set up to? Have you followed these instructions for a pre2008 model?
I assume you're on 5.1 and not NDD because you have Shake in your pipeline? What happens if you uninstall 5.1 and reinstall 5.1 NDD? Does it work? This of course would disable Shake output for the moment.
This 300MB/sec, you are getting from your SAN, correct?
How much RAM do you have, and how is it configured on the risers?
Re: ProRes Capture Issue by keith koby on Jul 22, 2008 at 10:06:01 am
long story about staying on tiger... we have a lot of workflows that are fine on tiger. we bought up as many tiger capable computers as possible at the beginning of the year to preserve those workflows. We were planning to upgrade later this year, but other needs have started the move early. email me for the details if you want.
I agree, pci-e expansion slot utility seems like the likely culprit. I've gone there twice though. After the initial upgrade of the system to leopard I installed the LHe. That automatically brings up the utility. Yesterday we blew away the system and did a clean build. Again, I brought it up to check that we had 4 lane and 4 lane on fibre channel and LHe (1 lane on nothing and 16 on gpu). I'm going to call it up one more time and I'm going to reseat the card. After that I'll swap for a different LHe and then I'll report back.
For these tests, there has been 4 gigs of ram. 8 x 512, so it would be hard to mess that up. I'll let you know what we find and thanks again for the all the advice.
Re: ProRes Capture Issue by gary adcock on Jul 22, 2008 at 12:43:22 pm
[keith koby]"And yes, the original poster and I are talking about the same CPU. "
Yo Keith... (hey dude)
( jeremy - I can vouch for Keith)
First
on that Quad are you running at least 8G ram?
Same size chips ( good) Mixed sizes ( bad)
all same MFG? ( please do not say apple- bad)
Secondly
dropped frames in ProRes seems to always have more to do with the CPU and RAM than storage, contrary to capturing all other formats. I am seeing more and more RAM "failures" with the ProRes codec than ever before- huge numbers of RAM chips do not seem to be up to snuf for the capture of ProRes.
Do not set the PR to capture 8bit try use ProRes Standard first, I am tracking something but it looks as if PRHQ is trying to over sample the incoming video to round out the 10bit data stream in some cases, but in issues with low CPU numbers ( sorry but that quad intel does fall on the bottom of the specs)
Try capturing in the standard version of ProRes- rather switching to 8bits.
The same also holds true for the software conversions, I am not using the HQ version for any software ProRes conversions.
gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
Post and Production Workflows
Inside look at the IoHD
