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Jeremyjo  
#1 Posted : Monday, January 21, 2013 8:15:29 PM(UTC)
Jeremyjo

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We're trying to replace a very old TriCaster with VMix. Currently we have three Sony BRC-300 ptz cameras which we have been recording via the TriCaster.

Vmix would allow us to add an HD camera or replace the Sony cameras as we could.

The system is set up using a hex core AMD processor with a ssd operating system drive and 1T storage drive along with 16G ram. We first tried to use the system this Sunday (20, Jan) and had several crashes in a row which we think are attributed to using the desktop capture on one input. The vmix computer is connected to a gigabit network and we get very good looking screen capture of our presentation computer, but we can't deal with mid service crashes,

How can we trouble shoot the crashes? Is there any solution to keep the desktop capture working?

We have three BlackMagic Intensity Pro cards and we are using S-video inputs with our three ptz cameras. Right now we are using the basic HD version of vmix, but I certainly can't see upgrading to the pro version I'd the software won't remain stable with only four inputs.

We're also experiencing progressive audio latency while using the system to record. What can we do to troubleshoot the audio latency?

Can you help?

Thank you.



admin  
#2 Posted : Monday, January 21, 2013 9:43:36 PM(UTC)
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Hi,

Can you provide as much detail as possible regarding the crashes, what error message do you receive?
Also what version of vMix are you running?

Thanks,

Martin
vMix
Jeremyjo  
#3 Posted : Monday, January 21, 2013 9:59:38 PM(UTC)
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I had another operator running the machine. He says one crash completely shut the machine down and it restarted. The other crashes just booted him out of the program without error messages. He says he had widows crash error message with a request to debug the program.

The operator says as soon as he shut down the desktop capture Vmix didn't crash again.

We were capturing from a iMac computer running ProPresenter 5, so we were capturing the secondary display of the imac presentation computer.

We want to record our services to post to Vimeo. As a possible feature request is there any way to record to mp4 H.264?

Thank you

Jeremy
Jeremyjo  
#4 Posted : Tuesday, January 22, 2013 1:00:26 AM(UTC)
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Ok I've done some experimenting now

I've left the vmix machine over an hour with a screen capture running and three sd camera inputs. That is four total inputs. The screen capture input is a feed from our ProPresenter computer running a simple moving background.

I set the screen capture to look at the secondary display of the presentation computer and at 25 frames per second

I've even been using SplashTop to log into the vmix computer remotely and rapidly switch inputs to stress the machine. No crashes so far.

Tomorrow I'll try recording for a while with the same setup. I suspect that is what cause the problem.

Jeremy
admin  
#5 Posted : Tuesday, January 22, 2013 3:09:24 AM(UTC)
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Hi Jeremy,

What graphics card do you have in the machine?
System crashes are generally caused by either faulty hardware or buggy drivers, so I would make sure you have the latest drivers for everything
as well.

Regards,

Martin
vMix
Jeremyjo  
#6 Posted : Tuesday, January 22, 2013 12:34:29 PM(UTC)
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The graphics card is Radeon 4550. I did a bit more experimenting and found that I could leave the screen capture running and switch back and forth with no issue, but when I started recording it went about 20 seconds and crashed the computer to reboot.

Then I changed the recording file type to MPEG2 and tried the same process; three SD video inputs and one screen capture input and I was able to record ten minutes with all four inputs, switching via SplashTop with no problem.

So, it seems like Windows Media files have trouble in recording.

JJ
Egriswold  
#7 Posted : Tuesday, January 22, 2013 3:28:10 PM(UTC)
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Jeremy,
It's most likely a band width issue. You should avoid recording to the system drive and use a separate drive or a stripped set of drives would be better depending on the bit rate you are recording. You can use the BlackMagic speed disk utility to check this. The utility will tell what a drive or drives is capable of handling.
Jeremyjo  
#8 Posted : Tuesday, January 22, 2013 4:22:53 PM(UTC)
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As I mentioned in my first post, we ARE recording to a separate storage drive. The OS and programs are on a SSD and the storage is on a 1T. 7200 rpm drive that shows consistent 100MB/s speed in the BlackMagic test you mentioned.

Do I need to investigate a Intel solution instead of the AMP board and processor I'm using now? Do I NEED a RAID array for recording to?

Thank you for your input.
Egriswold  
#9 Posted : Tuesday, January 22, 2013 5:36:19 PM(UTC)
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I personally never use AMD based machines Only Intel and Nvidia for graphics. I do have a lot of experience building these systems. You can see them at www.streambreeze.com
Steadirob  
#10 Posted : Tuesday, January 22, 2013 10:05:36 PM(UTC)
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For your information:

100MB/s is not really high for recording video. Is there a faster SATA connection on your motherboard?
On my system I have a choice of 6Gb/s and 3Gb/s sata channels.
When connected to the 6Gb/s channel, a WD 7200rpm 1Tb disk (blue) gets up to 185MB/s read and write.
But I just joined the 2 1Tb disks that I had in a raid0 ( Windows 7 can do without the Bios Utility) and now I have 356MB/s!

I can do Multicorder 4 channels on HD AVI and a program output recording on Cineform Codec without problem.
Jeremyjo  
#11 Posted : Monday, January 28, 2013 11:45:54 PM(UTC)
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Update

I made some bios changes and settings changes to V-mix and was able to successfully record about 1.5 hours of sermons and worship today while screen capturing our graphics computer output as another input on Vmix. I set memory speed to 1333MHz, and processor speed settings to default. I also changed the WMD codec to wmv1. It was wmv3 and would crash when trying to record three sd cameras and the screen capture input.

A big win for me is being able to upload the capture directly to Vimeo after service. With TrICaster I had to convert the recorded file from NT25 codec to a more generic avi, then "un stretch" the 4:3 output to 16:9 and convert to mp4 for upload to Vimeo. Because the old Tricaster is a Pentium4 computer, munching on 40Gig avi files consumed much time and space. It took me roughly six hours each Sunday afternoon to Prepare for VCR and then unstretch and convert to mp4. I would log into the TriCaster remotely using splashtop to start the tasks and check in later to see if they were done and finally upload to Vimeo.

Also, with Vmix, I'm hoping to use a HD camera as one input to further increase the quality of our videos.

I do need some help getting audio from our sound board into the Intensity Pro capture cards. Presently I use the line in of the computer, but that seems wrong; shouldn't I be able to use a capture card audio input along with the video input?

As there is no editing capability in vmix I'm trying to fade in and out of my show using vmix. How may I do that?

I used one input of the basic HD vmix software for screen capture. Our presentation computer feeds a Matrox TripleHead2Go and we use two-wide output, so I have to crop and pan the screen capture input to show only one screen of the presentation computer, I don't mind this so much, but it would be nice if the vmix preset saved the crop and pan settings and the secondary monitor input settings. Is there a way to do that?

I'm looking forward to stablizing the system with vmix pro and figuring out how to multicord for post editing if we choose. I'll see if there is a 6Gbps sata port on the motherboard and look into a raid array for multicord. But this Sunday was a success for us...

Jeremy
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