Quote Originally Posted by SourceChild View Post
On two occasions with the 2006/2007 Mac Pros I have been hosed using a Phoenix and LFG at the same time. They work fine in 2008 or 2009 machines. However, the PCI lane assignments don't play nice with these two different cards in the 2006/2006 Mac Pros. Unfortunately, the PCI bus on the older Mac Pros was technically only 2 16x lanes and those lanes were shared with all slots and internal devices such as the I/O Controllers.

This is okay as long as the hardware takes reasonable priority with respect to other devices. Unfortunately, the way the Active Silicon capture cards are designed, they are not always aware of each other. In the case of the Phoenix, it tells the system that it is priority so the system tends to ignore the LFG card which is why you see freezing frames.

I had the same issue true using different models of the Phoenix cards in the same machine where the capture wouldn't work and would send frame buffer errors.

Simon is right, currently 10.6.7 is working fine and working faster than 10.5.x. There are also better PCI algorithms in 10.6.x. I am not even sure the LFG and Phoenix would function together at all in 10.5.x.

A suggestion:

Since you need a VGA capture and you need two Composite I would suggest using an Epiphan VGA to USB capture device as your VGA and then using the LFG4 Card for the two cameras.

Technically I would say use two Phoenix cards to capture your two cameras and VGA. This is the better practice but would require converting three devices to SDI (or HDSDI).

You could also try using a Decklink Intensity card in combination with the LFG4 card. This would give you DVI capture and the 4 LFG composites. I do not know how this would work though so you should test it extensively if you are able to try.
Thank you very much for your help-

E. Cueto