Wings card. Performance enhancement?

[GorfTheChosen]

sorry got avid and adobe mixed up there, thanks for pointing that out

and @GorfTheChosen thats two variations of the targa pci card I think both low (with added daughter cards) and medium range but I'll had to recheck my notes placed elsewhere?

If you're referring to the two cards I posted a image of, the one on the right is a Radius VideoVision PCI.

The one on the left is the Radius Telecast PCI card ... it interfaces with the VideoVision card by means of a bridge board - aka the "VideoLink PCI" which connects along the top of the two cards and provides professional-level Video and Audio connections and I/O to the VideoVision card.

You can see the bridge connector board sitting on the (left) Telecast card towards the rear of the card ... it's a fairly small U shaped connector, roughly 2 3/4" long.

The three components (two PCI cards and the rack I/O breakout box) make up the Radius VideoVision Telecast (PCI) system ... not counting the associated cabling of course, which is rather hefty itself.

I'm fairly sure I know this for certain ... because all of it is sitting about 8' away from me right now ...

There was a similar Nubus VideoVision Telecast system that, of course, used Nubus cards ... but the same rack I/O breakout box.

The basic VideoVision came with a different cabled breakout bar ... with consumer level connections (RCA and S-Video IIRC) I'd provide a picture of of that ... but it's presently buried in a pile of stuff in the other room ...

I had been seriously wondering about one for awhile especially as I'm still curious about regarding that the card seemingly can also output to a monitor but I never could quite yet figure out if that was from its own 2d gpu or that it still required a dedicated video card adjacent to the targa card instead

Not sure about the Targas ... although I seem to remember having one of those at one point. Targa 2000 maybe ?

Probably prior to this ... to use it's video output to feed a video signal for recording to a tape deck ... back when I was laying off animation to Betacam SP frame-by-frame with a Diaquest Animaq Nubus card, which controlled the tape deck.

That was back before real-time input and output and non-linear video editing was really a thing.

The Telecast does allow the connection to a computer monitor.

Not really a whole lot going in the way of "gpu" though, as far as a connected monitor goes.

the pdf did indeed mention up to 720x something resolution for some targa card variations as I recall now nevertheless

Yeah ... seems right.

IIRC, the basic Targas came first and then Truvision later developed an additional card to allow real-time capture and output back to tape.

 

[GorfTheChosen]

@joevt wrote a SoftVdig for OS X and the PowerMac 8600 video capture HW, so he likely has some idea what the Apple supplied HW of this ear can handle?

Well ... I would certainly hope so ...

As far as data rates and CPU needed to encode in real time.

Yup ... I'm pretty sure he would be familiar with both.

 

[chelseayr]

ah interesting gorf, seem the two companies had very similar card designs then as the right one still looks exactly just like the targa pci card re the replaceable few variations of daughter card to 'upgrade' the acute card model itself
(on another note one variation of the targa pci card only could handle sdi alone, no analog support at all. not surprisingly theres still quite a few of these digital-only cards out there being selling around or so)

 

[joevt]

For the Power Mac 8600, I don't remember all the options, but 640 pixels/line * 480 lines/frame * 30 frames/second * 16 bits/pixel * 1 byte/8 bits * 1K/1000 bytes * 1M/1000K is 18.432 MB/s.

18.432 MB/s is faster than internal SCSI, so I think the normal recording rate is half of that (320x240 60Hz) or a quarter (320x240 30Hz).

I think the uncompressed frames from the digitizer are saved to disk and they get compressed by QuickTime after recording is stopped.

PCI is 133.333 MB/s.
The Power Mac 8600 bus is 400 MB/s (50 MHz * 64 bit) but the RAM is 114 MB/s (70ns 64 bit) ? That doesn't seem right. Need to make a benchmark to test all that...

 

[DarthNvader]

For the Power Mac 8600, I don't remember all the options, but 640 pixels/line * 480 lines/frame * 30 frames/second * 16 bits/pixel * 1 byte/8 bits * 1K/1000 bytes * 1M/1000K is 18.432 MB/s.

18.432 MB/s is faster than internal SCSI, so I think the normal recording rate is half of that (320x240 60Hz) or a quarter (320x240 30Hz).

I think the uncompressed frames from the digitizer are saved to disk and they get compressed by QuickTime after recording is stopped.

PCI is 133.333 MB/s.
The Power Mac 8600 bus is 400 MB/s (50 MHz * 64 bit) but the RAM is 114 MB/s (70ns 64 bit) ? That doesn't seem right. Need to make a benchmark to test all that...

I thought you could also use 60ns RAM in the Kanas boards, and it could be Interleaved for better performance?

Not to get too far off topic, just always wondered what speed the RAM did run at in the Kanas 8600/9600's?

I always wanted to try those 50ns RAM sticks they made for servers too, but never pulled the trigger and now they have vanished.

18.5MB/s shouldn't be too much for a good PCI drive controller to handle.

Any ways, something is not right with my Beige and Wings card. When I use the Apple Video Player it does save then compress after the recording has stopped and the audio is way slow down, it's comically slow.

I'll have to upload a video file.

I don't know if it's the G4 upgrade or what, but that should speed things up, not slow them down.

When I use BTV and the right QT audio codec things are OK, but trying to capture as DV NTSE drops a lot of frames in the recordings, no where near 30 fps.

It's more like 15.

This can't be right, I must be doing something wrong or the wings hw is failing.

I'm using the Built-in Rage graphics upgraded to 6MB of VRAM, as the Wings card was made to 'overlay' to that chip, you can't even get video from another PCI GPU unless the Rage II-C is an active display.

I'm having other issues too with QT MPEG2 encoder, only on the Beige, it seems to only save one key frame as the video output to .mv2 then skips straight to saving the audio.

Not an issue on my QS G4 or my MDD, so it maybe the Powerlogx AltiVec enabler I'm using in OS 9.

Is there another AltiVec enabler for a ZIF G4 upgrade?

Fractional Demo Carbon runs just fine, I'll have to check if iDVD can encode MPEG2 proper on the Beige, as I know that uses Altivec too.

Anyway, after I get this capture sorted out.....

I can just save the full over the air transport stream to a USB drive with my tuner box, so if I never get the Wings thing sorted I'll still have good streams to test.

 

[GorfTheChosen]

ah interesting gorf, seem the two companies had very similar card designs then as the right one still looks exactly just like the targa pci card re the replaceable few variations of daughter card to 'upgrade' the acute card model itself

I wouldn't doubt that at all.

Thinking back on it some more, I don't think it was actually the Targa card that I had when I was laying off to tape frame-by-frame.

I believe it was the Nuvista.

(on another note one variation of the targa pci card only could handle sdi alone, no analog support at all. not surprisingly theres still quite a few of these digital-only cards out there being selling around or so)

Yup ... not surprising.

Technology marches on at a fairly rapid pace, with "new, mo betta" tech taking the place of often fairly short-lived items. Only sometimes it's not exactly "mo betta" (DV as an example)

The "old stuff" certainly still works at what it did ... albeit sometimes comparatively slowly, and lacks whatever new features and capabilities of the tech that replaced it.

Then it sells for cheap ... or hits the scrap pile.

Hard to imagine the amount of digital video stuff that has made that journey.

Call me sentimental ... but it's probably why I still have the Telecast ... it's a beautiful piece of engineering of professional level equipment, which at the time was at the bleeding edge of the nascent digital video revolution.

Hard to consign it to the recyclers, but that's likely where it's headed.

 

[GorfTheChosen]

For the Power Mac 8600, I don't remember all the options, but 640 pixels/line * 480 lines/frame * 30 frames/second * 16 bits/pixel * 1 byte/8 bits * 1K/1000 bytes * 1M/1000K is 18.432 MB/s.

18.432 MB/s is faster than internal SCSI, so I think the normal recording rate is half of that (320x240 60Hz) or a quarter (320x240 30Hz).

Was pretty sure 1/4 res was about the practical limit ... dimly recall that being the number at the time.

I think the uncompressed frames from the digitizer are saved to disk and they get compressed by QuickTime after recording is stopped.

Basically 4.608 MB/s for 1/4 res then.

Potentially even a stretch for a single (narrow) drive to do without dropping frames somewhere along the way ... considering drive thermal re-calibration and possibly other factors.

PCI is 133.333 MB/s.
The Power Mac 8600 bus is 400 MB/s (50 MHz * 64 bit) but the RAM is 114 MB/s (70ns 64 bit) ? That doesn't seem right. Need to make a benchmark to test all that...

Would be interesting to know.

I've got a 7600 here I could do a little test with, since it's essentially the same logic board as the 8600 I believe.

Currently has a Sonnet G4/450 accelerator card and a pair of 9 GB fast and wide 7200 rpm drives in it, connected to an ATTO ExpressPCI PSC SCSI card.

Pretty sure there's nothing of any value on either drive ... so it would be easy enough to set the mode pages on the drives for A/V and digital video and then them up as a RAID 0 array, and see what kind of capture rates could be obtained.

Is the built-in digitizing hardware limited to 640 x 480 ... or will it do the full 720 x 486 ?

Of course, this would all be in OS 9 ... since I haven't been successful in getting OS X installed on it.

 

[chelseayr]

gorf well sdi itself still is 'current' but if we're talking about 480 or 720p videos then yeah thats from quite awhile ago whereas the current sdi standard can quite recently handle 4k video!

either way regarding capture resolution and disk speed altogether, wasn't that also basically the purpose of nubus90 bus standard and the few cards that actually were sold being able to utilize that in term of "the high-end standard" 68k setups?

 

[GorfTheChosen]

Got the RAID 0 created on the 7600 after setting the drives' mode pages for video with ExpressProTools.

Had to break out a copy of Remus Lite v1.4 for the array ... forgot ATTO ExpressProTools doesn't do RAID ... it's a separate product, ExpressRAID which I don't own or have a copy of. lol.

The array tests out at around 20 MB/sec sustained, read and write using the largest file size (8 MB) available in the ExpressProTools benchmark.

Got BTV Pro 5.4.1 installed and video output from the DV/SVHS deck connected to the in's on the 7600.

First thing I see is Apple Video Player and and BTV Pro seem to list the (maximum) frame size as 640 x 480.

The DV standard is 720 x 480 ... so that would seem to be a mismatch right off the bat.

Seems to me that knowing what is going on there would probably be good to know.

What's going on in the process, in terms of dealing with that mismatch ?

Tried to capture some video @ 640 x 480 with Compression set to "None" ... which should have been the easiest at least in terms of processing on the computer, since it just requires the data stream to be written to disk.

It hung the computer.

So a little more investigation there to see what's up with that.

 

[GorfTheChosen]

gorf well sdi itself still is 'current'

Yup.

but if we're talking about 480 or 720p videos then yeah thats from quite awhile ago whereas the current sdi standard can quite recently handle 4k video!

I was talking about standard def NTSC ... 720 x 486 or thereabouts ... because that's the particular hardware I have and was referring to ... and because that's what Darth is working with.

either way regarding capture resolution and disk speed altogether, wasn't that also basically the purpose of nubus90 bus standard and the few cards that actually were sold being able to utilize that in term of "the high-end standard" 68k setups?

Yup, seemingly so.

 

[DarthNvader]

Got the RAID 0 created on the 7600 after setting the drives' mode pages for video with ExpressProTools.

Had to break out a copy of Remus Lite v1.4 for the array ... forgot ATTO ExpressProTools doesn't do RAID ... it's a separate product, ExpressRAID which I don't own or have a copy of. lol.

The array tests out at around 20 MB/sec sustained, read and write using the largest file size (8 MB) available in the ExpressProTools benchmark.

Got BTV Pro 5.4.1 installed and video output from the DV/SVHS deck connected to the in's on the 7600.

First thing I see is Apple Video Player and and BTV Pro seem to list the (maximum) frame size as 640 x 480.

The DV standard is 720 x 480 ... so that would seem to be a mismatch right off the bat.

Seems to me that knowing what is going on there would probably be good to know.

What's going on in the process, in terms of dealing with that mismatch ?

Tried to capture some video @ 640 x 480 with Compression set to "None" ... which should have been the easiest at least in terms of processing on the computer, since it just requires the data stream to be written to disk.

It hung the computer.

So a little more investigation there to see what's up with that.

Thanks for that, I completely missed the compression 'none' setting.

I have audio set to 32bit 44.KHz 16 bit and video set to no compression. It captures at 320x240 for some reason, maybe a limitation of the Wings card or I don't see the Frame Size setting in BTV?

Anyway, I get a steady 9.0MB/s and 30 fps.

Capturing to a 80GB Seagate drive on the internal ATA33 bus.

I have faster drive buses for the PCI slots, just don't want to nuke a drive right now to toy around with this.

If I playback the file created at 320x240 it doesn't drop frames in QT 6 player, but enlarging the video window to 640x480 drops frames like crazy in playback on the Rage II+DVD built-in video chip.

I'll have to check I have the latest ATI drivers for this chip.

The data rates for capture are right on what @joevt said.

 

[DarthNvader]

BTW InTech still sells HD Speedtools for the Classic Mac OS.

A bit pricey but we have to show some love for the fact they still support us.

Intech Software Corporation : Products

www.speedtools2.com

 

[GorfTheChosen]

Thanks for that, I completely missed the compression 'none' setting.

I have audio set to 32bit 44.KHz 16 bit and video set to no compression. It captures at 320x240 for some reason, maybe a limitation of the Wings card or I don't see the Frame Size setting in BTV?

BTV Pro 5.4.1:

The 4th menu to the right of the Apple menu on the menubar:

"Video Size"

That appears to set the size/dimension that the raster will be digitized at. It also resizes the display window to the selected size.

There's also a useful item under the Apple menu:

Second item down:

""Video Input Information"

... which appears to detail the capabilities of the video input ... but not necessarily what the software is currently set to digitize at.

Anyway, I get a steady 9.0MB/s and 30 fps.

Tells us something about the data rates required for full-frame, uncompressed video eh ?

Capturing to a 80GB Seagate drive on the internal ATA33 bus.

I have faster drive buses for the PCI slots, just don't want to nuke a drive right now to toy around with this.

If I playback the file created at 320x240 it doesn't drop frames in QT 6 player, but enlarging the video window to 640x480 drops frames like crazy in playback on the Rage II+DVD built-in video chip.

Yeah ... that's forcing the processor to scale up/interpolate the captured video file to display it ... which is making it do a lot of extra work.

QT Player will try to playback the video in real time ... if the computer can't deal with the processing load it will drop frames in an effort to do so.

Unless you set the preferences to play every frame of course ... but then it won't playback in real time.

I'll have to check I have the latest ATI drivers for this chip.

Likely will make no difference ... but never say never ...

 

[GorfTheChosen]

BTW - that BTV Pro software looks pretty nice ...

 

[DarthNvader]

BTV Pro 5.4.1:

The 4th menu to the right of the Apple menu on the menubar:

"Video Size"

That appears to set the size/dimension that the raster will be digitized at. It also resizes the display window to the selected size.

There's also a useful item under the Apple menu:

Second item down:

""Video Input Information"

... which appears to detail the capabilities of the video input ... but not necessarily what the software is currently set to digitize at.

Seems to ignore that setting and just capture at half res. anyway.

I've read conflicting reports the 'Wings' card is fixed at 1/2 res.

I know there were upgraded 'Wings' cards, so maybe that's it, but doesn't seem like Apple would cheap out there considering the 8600 could do full res. in the capture HW even tho the disks on the built-in SCSI Bus were too low to handle it.

I already nuked the Preferences, but still 320x240, so maybe I'll try and reinstall of 9.2.2 and see if that fixes some of my issues, but I think I already did that.

 

[GorfTheChosen]

Seems to ignore that setting and just capture at half res. anyway.

Interesting.

I've read conflicting reports the 'Wings' card is fixed at 1/2 res.

I know there were upgraded 'Wings' cards, so maybe that's it, but doesn't seem like Apple would cheap out there considering the 8600 could do full res. in the capture HW even tho the disks on the built-in SCSI Bus were too low to handle it.

Yeah ... seems to me when I tested it on the 7600 here you could set the capture settings to 640 x 480 and it was getting that ... even if it was having trouble recording it to disk. Would have to retest it to be sure though.

No idea on the various Wings card and what Apple did with those, tried looking around for info on them and it was pretty spotty at best.

I already nuked the Preferences, but still 320x240, so maybe I'll try and reinstall of 9.2.2 and see if that fixes some of my issues, but I think I already did that.

Worth a shot I guess.

 

[ArmorAlley]

Got the RAID 0 created on the 7600 after setting the drives' mode pages for video with ExpressProTools.

Had to break out a copy of Remus Lite v1.4 for the array ... forgot ATTO ExpressProTools doesn't do RAID ... it's a separate product, ExpressRAID which I don't own or have a copy of. lol.

There is a copy of ExpressRAID 1.0 on one of the ARPLE disks on the Macintosh Garden. a search will reveal which one. I haven't used it yet though.
I have also found a copy of ExpressRAID 2.8 [1] but without a licence key.

There is a copy of FWB RAID Toolkit 1.8 also on the Mac Garden.

[1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/atto-ul3d-ul4d-scsi-pains.2373862/