Occasional blocky artifacts using HD Link

[Mark Woollard]

About 5 - 10% of my CF intermediate captures show a dancing blocky pixel artifact that stretches about across several frames. There are only a few blocky pixels and they appear in the lower third of the screen, but they're really noticeable. When it has occurred, it's only been once across the entire offending clip. Recapture does eliminate the problem, but is a real pain, especially with longer clips.

Anyone else getting occasional blocky artifacts with HD Link?

[Steven Gotz]

Only if I convert as I capture. In two separate steps it always works great.

[David Newman]

Steven is correct - that is a work-around. For some reason your PC is dropping firewire packets (corrupting the MPEG source data) when the conversion is performed at the same time. On faster PCs or disks (de-fregmented) will solve this issue. They were almost eliminated with Aspect HD 3.1 yet some PCs still need a little tweak to work perfectly. Contract support (file a trouble ticket) as there many have the perfect solution for your PC.

[Pierre Barberis]

I must say that i have abandonned the idea of simultaneously reading and converting to CFHD AVI.

This , on a 3.4Mhz with a VERY fast disk crashes every 3/4 minutes. Seems more frequent since these ununderstandable comments about "Using moonlight..;(mpeg=0)
appeared in V3.1.
3.2 did NOT solved it.
More , "Realtime" is worse in 3.1 AND 3.2 that it was in 3.0.....which means that if you try to capture AND convert, you'll have to wait anyhow after the capture itself terminates...

[David Newman]

It would be worth your while contact tech support as your experience is not normal. We typically find that drive configuration or Firewire controller causes the problem, generally these can be addressed for perfect capture. My personal 2.8 and 3.2Ghz P4s happily capture and convert without issue -- as do all the office systems.

As for conversion being slightly slower in 3.2, that is true, this was to allow for even higher quality. The new 4:2:0 to 4:2:2 conversion is really worth the small compute time. If you are not interested in enhanced image quality there is a register control that can turn it off. We figured as PCs get faster there is even more we can do to deliver the highest quality image. One pass capture is significant faster than two pass capture and convert, it is real-time for 720p (any modern P4) and real-time for 1080i on the new dual core parts (which are awesome.)

[Pierre Barberis]

I'll post some ticket as soon as I am back behind my Editing machine ( ie Late August).
Would you suggest i install the 3.2a before, and try to store my "summer footage" with this version before submitting ?

[David Newman]

You should keep up with the lastest version. It will help tech support as that will be one of their first questions.