Black outs or frame drops on the aux 1 and 2 live screens

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Abalard

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  • Joined: Tue Oct 30, 2012 6:04 am

Black outs or frame drops on the aux 1 and 2 live screens

PostTue Oct 30, 2012 7:23 am

We have an atem 1 production switcher and we do a lot of live switching and usually have all the Aux outputs at work.
On occasion I have noticed that the signal to the beamers (usually on Aux1) was lost for about a second and then resumed resulting in a black out on the screens. We always concluded that it must be a power issue due to a big airco unit in the building and since it rarely happened I did not pay much attention to it.
Yesterday we were in a production and had two sets of monitors hooked up to the atem one Aux1 SDI=>DVI=>optical=>HDMI and one set of 4 monitors aux2 SDI=>HDMI all 1080 50I. Aux one was continuously running graphics from the Mac mini (propesenter)
Aux2 had the live feed on it. Aux3 had a samurai hooked up to it and program had a ki pro with a loop through to a teranex that was putting out a live stream and the loop through on the teranex was hooked a H264 encoder (blackmagic) for backup.
During rehearsal we had 1 or 2 short black outs on the monitors that had the DVI converter but we thought we solved it with a new power supply. During the show the DVI screen started to show blackouts aux1 and halfway during the show the 4 aux2 screens started to join in (not at the same time though). On the samurai in aux 3 and the recorders I never had any problems. When the show stopped the problems were gradually decreasing and by the time we could start testing what went wrong we could not reproduce the problem any more.
Now the only explanation I can come up with is an electricity problem in the converters since the rest was all hooked up to a UPS. Now this was probably a very long explanation to for my question but here it is. Has any one experienced similar problems ? Are the black magic converters very sensitive to power issues. In this case the whole event was on one generator but I have had similar problems in other locations where there was no Geni (never this bad though maby one or two blackouts in 10 hours and usually nothing.)
I hope to start testing this week to solve the problem but is any one here has an answer it would be great. By the way all the converters were black magic (mini SDI=>HDMI and the hd link for SDI=>DVI) the glass converters and screens were rental

Thanks and I hope some one has an answer
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Alexis Vanier

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  • Location: Montréal, Canada

Re: Black outs or frame drops on the aux 1 and 2 live screen

PostTue Oct 30, 2012 10:12 am

I don't think I've experienced dropouts on our ATEM 2ME, but the Blackmagic converters always required a watchful eye as they are very sensitive to heat. I have experienced heat related dropouts on several types of BMD mini-converters when the heat reached a certain point.
Alexis Vanier.
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Abalard

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  • Joined: Tue Oct 30, 2012 6:04 am

Re: Black outs or frame drops on the aux 1 and 2 live screen

PostTue Oct 30, 2012 10:48 am

Thanks, did you solve the heat problem ?
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Alexis Vanier

  • Posts: 26
  • Joined: Sat Aug 25, 2012 4:02 pm
  • Location: Montréal, Canada

Re: Black outs or frame drops on the aux 1 and 2 live screen

PostTue Oct 30, 2012 2:05 pm

No. Most of the converters that had heat issues and were glitchy eventually gave out within a year or two. That said, all of BMD's products run hot, but only a few converters on a rental house's large pool actually were glitchy.

I've seen a colleague at another rental house start rehousing them in bigger casings with heatsinks and fans with some success, albeit the added bulk and weight.
Alexis Vanier.

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