Buggy, jittery playback (grrrr!)
I've been dealing with jittery content playback & Phoenix capture throughput for a long time but thought I had it mostly figured out & cleaned up on the last tour. At Richard's suggestion about two years ago I bought some GTX285 cards on eBay & used DVI Detectives to lock all outputs to 1080-59.94. This did not completely slay the dragons but it was at least a reasonable improvement to the problems I'd been seeing previously.
Recently got all four machines back into the shop, douched clean, and embarked on an adventure of trying to figure out, once and for all, the best build/configs for these machines to FINALLY have smooth, consistent playback & SDI throughput.
Result? A big dose of FAIL. No matter what I try, it always ends up in horrible output. Basically the content & SDI throughput will sometimes play smoothly, and then randomly become jittery, drop frames, hiccup, ... Sometimes the smooth playback will last for several minutes and the junky playback will only last momentarily before playing smoothly again; other times it will be junky for many minutes at a time and only infrequently play correctly. I'm also unable to get consistent behaviors in this regard. ie, identical bootup/startup procedures do not produce identical results. It feels very random. But in any case, not acceptable performance/quality to be sent out on a show.
I do understand the rules about the video card frequency needing to match or be evenly divisible by the frame rates of content and SDI sources. That is not the problem. For testing purposes I'm using LCD monitors that are 60hz natively and have experimented with playing back content rendered to 30fps, as well as HDSDI source feeds at 30fps. Still jerky & jittery.
I've also experimented with using DVI Detectives or Lightware EDID Managers to lock output to 59.94 and then playing 29.97 content and feeding HDSI @ 29.97 into the capture cards. Still no bueno.
Actual monitor frequency is always verified using the "stats" window in the HUD.
(The SDI source--a Hyperdeck Shuttle--is looped through a proper SDI monitor before hitting the Phoenix card to verify a smooth feed, and it looks perfectly normal.)
Have also heard that Catalyst derives some timing from the first output and the importance of having at least one mix up on output 1 even if only output 2 goes to the stage. Done and done, but problem still exists.
I'm reaching the end of my wits as I've seen similarly-equipped systems from other vendors/tours do much better than what I'm able to achieve with my own kit, but can't get these birds to sing at all on my own. As the kids say these days, WTF??
Below is the pile of hardware I currently have at my disposal. I've tried swapping video cards, SSDs, etc between the machines trying to find the magic winning combination, but only have achieved boatloads of FAIL.
- Mac Pro 4,1 8-core 2.26ghz, 24GB RAM, Quadro 4000 video, 3xPhoenix D20x4 cards, OSX 10.8.5
- Mac Pro 4,1 8-core 2.26ghz, 8GB RAM, GTX285 video w/2GB, 3xPhoenix D20x4 cards, OSX 10.6.8
- Mac Pro 3,1 8-core 2.8ghz, 14GB RAM, Quadro 4000 video, Decklink Quad, OSX 10.8.5
- Mac Pro 3,1 8-core 3.0ghz, 12GB RAM, Quadro 4000 video, OSX 10.8.5
- extra GTX285 video card w/2GB RAM, various and sundry EDID spoofers, SDI monitors & D/A's, etc.
- 4 x V4PRO dongles. I'm using m466b for all of this testing but have also tried prior versions without any better luck.
No need to point out that none of these systems match each other. The first two in the list used to be absolutely identical (last tour: GTX285) but the machines are now in their current state as I swap cards around, add RAM, try different versions of the OS, etc in an attempt to find a winning build.
All four machines have SSDs for O/S. The first machine has three more SSDs in RAID0, which adds more playback capacity but obviously does nothing to improve the quality of the SDI throughput, nor has it helped smooth out content playback. The problems described will occur even if only playing back a single layer.
The BM values in the stats window hover at or near zero. FYI. I've completely disabled Phoenix inputs 2-6 in the "inputs" window to make sure it isn't a bus bandwidth problem, and also resorted to testing with a 480i signal instead of HD. Same problems still exist.
I've disabled Spotlight, turned off all filesharing, etc but not seen an improvement.
I'm at a loss. I refuse to accept defeat, but this really makes me want to go back to programming lights!
I can only imagine that this has been discussed before. I'm willing to endure all manner of the Catalyst community's ridicule if it means finding a solution, so feel free to unload...if you know how to fix it :)
Many thanks.
Leif
