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Hi has anyone here ever managed to get real time playback on the old effect/flinto2 option3 on o2 using a fibre channel array (XLV) ?, I hear ILM use them, i was wondering what spec to use? anyone tried 2gb FC?
I never quite managed to get realtime PAL, even on a 400Mhz O2 with the full gig of RAM and an FC array which sustains 90MBytes/sec and is fine for PAL on other systems. It was close – 20fps was always fine, but never quite 25.
I’m not sure if there are any 2 gig FC cards for O2. I have heard that it’s supposed to work if you get exactly the right combination of Irix, Flint and array.
that is strange , it doesnt make sense if u sustained 90mb/s, that should be enough,… did u try to capture from digibeta?
I can get realtime 7 times out of 10 using 2 FC drives getting 50mb/s, im going to upgrade to faster FC drives and add a few more, it should work 10/10 after that, I hope.
tS
This was always a problem for me and my o2 flints. I recall that I found out that there is a problem with the o2’s inability to blit the necessary amount of pixels to the screen for full res NTSC D1 playback. It’s annoyingly close but just shy. On my systems they would only playback say 26fps full res even from memory. If I shifted the playback window over so that 5 or 10% of the image was cut off it would start playing at 30fps. It was almost as if they designed it to have that limitation but apparently that is the way the o2 was made. Hope this helps it was a long time ago……….
The o2 is capable of realtime playback, its Flint that needs more than say FCP ie pal needs 2mb/f rather than 1.2mb/f in FCP. like i said i can get 25fps most of the time, ive only tested upto 30sec, with 50mb/sec 2bay 1gb FC array im sure with and extra drive and faster disk i can get 70-90mb/s and be able to playback NTSC, if not then i will test out a 2gb FC card which should be able to give me around 150-170mb/s.
Dean were u using scsi or FC?
deandec wrote:This was always a problem for me and my o2 flints. I recall that I found out that there is a problem with the o2’s inability to blit the necessary amount of pixels to the screen for full res NTSC D1 playback. It’s annoyingly close but just shy. On my systems they would only playback say 26fps full res even from memory. If I shifted the playback window over so that 5 or 10% of the image was cut off it would start playing at 30fps. It was almost as if they designed it to have that limitation but apparently that is the way the o2 was made. Hope this helps it was a long time ago……….If JF is reading this can u confirm this is true, bocos it makes no sense?
deandec wrote:I recall that I found out that there is a problem with the o2’s inability to blit the necessary amount of pixels to the screen for full res NTSC D1 playback.As I said it was a long time ago. JF was the one that explained it to me and maybe I’m remembering wrong but I don’t think so. That was the case for my systems but they were not top of the line cpu if that makes any difference. What I didn’t understand was that input /output could play full res but not the player. I think because the player passes through the OpenGL engine? Seemed a little nuts. But then again using an o2 Flint nowadays seems a little nuts. It was a great system but so slowwwww especially compared to anything made now. Check out Combustion. It rules. I was using scsi. 2 drives striped on the built in external scsi controller and 2 striped on an add on PCI scsi controller. I’d get about 50mb/sec. or more. That bandwidth was not the problem. That is why it was so confusing and illuminating when JF finally explained the o2 limitation. Hopefully he will answer as he was always “The Man” on these sorts of issues. Good luck!
P.S. If you need any parts etc. Please ask. I have the scsi cards, Miranda dongles etc. in storage.
deandec wrote:P.S. If you need any parts etc. Please ask. I have the scsi cards, Miranda dongles etc. in storage.Yes please send me your contact details to [email protected]
The O2 was a hell of a weird little machine, it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that it can’t blit SD through the player. I was running mine on one of those wide SGI flatpanels, and believe it or not on an O2 the higher the screen resolution the less memory bandwidth is available to the CPU so that probably didn’t help me 🙂
Older O2s would probably be faster for this, the ones with the R5k processors instead of R10k or R12k. When they switched to R10k they made rather a balls up of the memory interface and various things ended up slower.
The O2 can actually blit YUV or RGBA encoded pixels to screen. But the problem is, flint stores frames as RGB24 bit images. But you have to convert RGB24 to RGBA32 on the fly, to blit it to screen. That is the bottleneck in O2 realtime playback. So it doesn’t matter, even if you put dual 4G FC arrays to O2. You can not get realtime playback, when using discreet software.
However I could play realtime from Media Illusion, either YUV or RGBA, on my O2. Probably 10 yrs ago something…
kuban wrote:The O2 can actually blit YUV or RGBA encoded pixels to screen. But the problem is, flint stores frames as RGB24 bit images. But you have to convert RGB24 to RGBA32 on the fly, to blit it to screen. That is the bottleneck in O2 realtime playback. So it doesn’t matter, even if you put dual 4G FC arrays to O2. You can not get realtime playback, when using discreet software.However I could play realtime from Media Illusion, either YUV or RGBA, on my O2. Probably 10 yrs ago something…
Kuban nailed it. The bottleneck in Flint is the O2’s lack of RGB to YUV color space conversion in hardware. That’s why Flint (effect option 3) can’t lay off material to tape directly from disk, it has to cache footge into RAM first. That limits the amount of playback time to the amount of RAM in your O2.
As Kuban mentioned, some apps can play back full-res uncompressed video on the O2 directly from disk. Alias|Wavefront’s Zap!iT was a utility that allowed realtime playback of RGB(A?) frame sequences so that animators could record full (video) resolution animated clips to tape or watch them on a broadcast monitor.
interesting stuff kuban, but it seems I can get pal most of the time , well it seems that way bcos the playback line stays yellow.
The problem is trying to sustain 10Mpixels/sec from memory into graphics. CPU model can make a difference the more powerful the better playback you will get ‘Play to Video’ is the best option, but bigger bandwidth can help overall processing speed
At the moment i a have r12 400 1gb ram, and wonder how a modified RM7000 600mhz CPU would perform in this case.
kuban wrote:The O2 can actually blit YUV or RGBA encoded pixels to screen. But the problem is, flint stores frames as RGB24 bit images. But you have to convert RGB24 to RGBA32 on the fly, to blit it to screen. That is the bottleneck in O2 realtime playback. So it doesn’t matter, even if you put dual 4G FC arrays to O2. You can not get realtime playback, when using discreet software.However I could play realtime from Media Illusion, either YUV or RGBA, on my O2. Probably 10 yrs ago something…
BTW sorry for starting this poor man flame thread, yes it is old but still great!!
theStable wrote:BTW sorry for starting this poor man flame thread, yes it is old but still great!!What’s really amazing is that the O2 is still even usable after 10 years, although it’s quite slow by modern standards. I don’t think any PC or Mac based system has aged as well in that regard!
Ah yes, thank you Kuban. That was the problem. It’s been so long since I’ve had to recall all this o2 stuff.
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