Aja Kona LH After Effects preview problem
by Robert Lechner
on
May 9, 2008 at 9:27:52 am
Hi there,
We just bought our first AJA Kona LH cards to replace the Decklink boards in our Macs and now we are looking at a strange playback problem with After Effects preview on a broadcast monitor.
With the Decklink card everything was fine, but the Kona does not seem to be able to output a constant 25 fps on the broadcast monitor (we are working in a PAL environment). It seems to be going slower and faster (most of the time slower than 25 fps).
The preview output settings are set 625/25i and the funny thing is, the "mirror" preview on the mac's screen is stutter free and looks absolutely perfect.
Did I miss a special setting in After Effects or in Kona's control panel?
I would be glad if you could help me out with a solution.
Re: Aja Kona LH After Effects preview problem by Jeremy Garchow on May 10, 2008 at 4:02:49 pm
As long as your video output is setup properly in the ae prefs, make sure your AE preview window is set to 100%. The easiest way to do it is to hit the backslash bar before you RAM preview.
Re: Aja Kona LH After Effects preview problem by Robert Lechner on May 12, 2008 at 12:04:37 pm
We are using latest generation Mac Pros with OSX 10.4.11
The machine in question doesn't even have a raid installed instead it runs with a 320GB internal SATA drive.
Yet, whenever I set the video preview output to the AJA Kona card it only renders with 11 fps (never faster, never slower, always exactly 11 fps) and once I switch it back to "computer display only" I end up with real time rendering.
Also the Kona Desktop feature does not work as I thought it would. The refresh rate on the broadcast screen attached to the Kona card seems to be extremly slow with OSX and Kona Desktop, the mouse does not move smoothly on the attaced broadcast monitor.
There is an installation of Final Cut Studio 1 on that machine, could that be a problem? (I would not know why, but you never know...)
Re: Aja Kona LH After Effects preview problem by Jeremy Garchow on May 12, 2008 at 1:37:51 pm
Did you set your canvas back to 100%?
What version of the drivers are you running?
Outputting to the Kona definitely takes some more processing/disk speed. You should think of at least putting a 2 drive internal raid inside the macpro to give you a bit more performance.
I have no problems playing back any type of RAM previews out of AE up to 1080i/p in real time, but I have a fast raid.
Re: Aja Kona LH After Effects preview problem by Mikey Bouchereau on May 15, 2008 at 8:25:56 pm
The Studio I work at is having the same problem right now. We have 5 Mac Pros all with the Kona card, They all work great with Final Cut and out Ref monitors, but the min we just into AE (CS3) our Ram Previews do not play back at full frame rate. In fact, the playback speed is different on all the computers. I think the more complex the comp is the slower the play back may be. But im not sure. We had 2 pretty simple comps and one got a frame rate of 20fps and the other got 2fps, these are identical machines. 3.0 8Core Mac Pros, with 8GB of ram each. I just got off the phone with AJA and they said they would call me back they had to go talk to Engineering. So i will give an update, but if you have a solution please let me know.
Re: Aja Kona LH After Effects preview problem by Robert Lechner on May 16, 2008 at 2:49:27 pm
I am looking at exactly the same problem here.
In 2 weeks time the machine will not be booked and I hope to find the time to re-install every piece of software step by step.
