Intesity card a solution for the nasty ASIO overloading pops with video?

[fuzzynoise]

So, I've been reading through a bunch of posts on the Nuendo boards and now here on Cubendo (great site, btw). I'm experiencing the same video issues that everyone has described at one point or another. I'm at the point now where I'm looking at going the route many people have and buying a Blackmagic card to add to my system. I'm looking specifically at the Intensity card over the Decklink (primarily because of budget). Has anyone had any luck with this card. I've seen a few posts on the other board and I know some people have mentioned they wished they picked up the Decklink cards instead. Any particular reason why?

My needs are pretty simple. I'm just looking to play back video with none of the nasty pops/clicks/dropouts from ASIO overloading that I've experienced while using the onscreen QT window. We usually receive 30 fps renders from inhouse animators. (We primarily use 30 fps to make it easy for them) I noticed that the specs of the Intensity don't mention 30 fps and only seem to show 29.97 and 25 fps. Anyone had any luck using 30 fps movies. Converting the videos on my end is an option if it turns out that it won't play them. After installing the new cards, have you noticed that the majority of the ASIO overload clips have disappeared? I'm already running a pretty high buffer rate to try and help, but it just doesn't seem like the answer. Thanks for any advice or direction you can provide.

Nuendo 4.2.2
Intel Core 2 Quad CPU @ 2.40 GHz
4 GB RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT
Fireface 800
UAD 1
Mackie Control

[TAFKAT]

Hey Fuzzy,

I have installed Intensity Pro cards in quite a few systems for clients, and they have been fine - as long as the required frame rate is supported.

Not sure about 30FPS support, I am sure some of the members using the Intensity cards can help out there..

Re the clicks and pops with QT onscreen, go to the Audio Device Settings, and change Audio Priority from Normal to Boost, that has resolved a lot of issues with clicks/pops for some users.. :-)

[kdm]

I have one of the older Blackmagic cards, but many use the Intensity as well. It's probably the best way to run video with Cubendo.

Dropouts, ASIO overload etc may indicate a conflict with your graphics card, but regardless, a Blackmagic card should alleviate that problem as well as provide better/higher resolution playback capabilities in most cases. We run mostly PJpeg here and it looks good on the full screen, and doesn't hit the cpu significantly.

[fuzzynoise]

Yeah, I've adjusted the Audio Priority to "Boost" before but still have an insane amount of pops and clicks at times. Buffer setting on the Fireface is at 1024 also. We switched over to using PJpeg codecs a while back, per suggestion from other posts on boards. There was definitely an improvement for us, over using H.264, but there are still some lingering issues. To avoid any long rants, let's just call these issues... frustrating. I'm sure we can all agree on that. :)

[HHaynes]

H.264 is ***MURDER** on a CPU... it's only good as a final delivery codec. If you have a card that can offload the conversion, then it's a different story. There are some video cards that have hardware assist on their GPU for H.264 and other formats, but that's sketchy at best (I've tried that with nVidia - not so hot)

That's the reason I went with the Intensity card (and transcoding all delivered media to Blackmagic MJPEG using their supplied codec) - which means that the only CPU used his is amount of weight that it takes to open the data pipe from the hard drive to the Intensity card, and of course handling transport and starting and stopping the data stream.

I have no idea of 30fps is supported (I work mostly in 24p) - frankly I'm surprised if it *doesn't* - but you should contact Blackmagic Design and find out. They're pretty friendly and responsive.

[psvennevig]

Yeah, I've adjusted the Audio Priority to "Boost" before but still have an insane amount of pops and clicks at times. Buffer setting on the Fireface is at 1024 also. We switched over to using PJpeg codecs a while back, per suggestion from other posts on boards. There was definitely an improvement for us, over using H.264, but there are still some lingering issues. To avoid any long rants, let's just call these issues... frustrating. I'm sure we can all agree on that. :)

There's lots of ways you can get overloads like you describe.
In the old days it was usually because the Nvidia driver set a to high AGP/PCI latency for its driver (done only to win performance tests).
Today with PCIe this should not be a problem.

The UAD1 is a know offender. Especially when you introduce new cards into the system.
I do not know you motherboard. But the problems with MoBos of today is that even if they have 4-5 slots, the slots are often shared PCI wise.
E.g. the PCIe slot you have your Intensity seated have a PCIe-to-PCI bridge connected and at the end of this is the PCI slot for UAD1.
This will give you trouble.

I find that IRQ sharing is almost dead. The problem of today is resource sharing at the hardware level. In workstations its mostly sorted out, but not always.

Taffy? Anything to share? Is there a latency hog of todays Nvidia drivers? Do you have a rec. for the exact driver build that should be used?
I'd guess you also recommend to throw out legacy DSP cards :-)

Best,
Pål

[colony nofi]

I use the blackmagic intensity here, on a mac 8 core (yeah vin, you can give me as much %^@# as you like <grin>) and it works a dream. HDMI out straight to client monitor, and composite out to a small monitor for me. Captures thru hdmi or composite / component from memory.

Have worked on 25fps and 29.97fps projects no prob.

Is a dream.

(I *DO* run a script to convert all video to mjpg though... as soon as I get delivery of a video, I drag it to my script, and its converted, and placed in my standard video directly without me having to do anything. As simple as moving the file to the right place on my hd in the first place. Just takes a little processing time.

Cheers, Brendan.