Blackmagic Forum

I've had the HD8 ISO for about a month now and loving the upgrade from the TVS Pro HD, however, I have started having issues with the panel.

Common issues I've had was the input select, DSK and recording buttons stopped changing colours, the LCD stopped updating current preview/program sources, even though the switcher responded to my selections, seemingly random macro buttons also stopped triggering and source select for both AUX outputs stopped responding to input.

This was awfully inconvenient when it happened in the middle of a production. A power cycle seemed to stop this behaviour but this has happened twice in a row. I didn't check at the time if software control still had access to the frozen functions so I'm not sure if it's just the panel or the whole switcher having issues. The switcher has been on version 9 since I got it and this has only started very recently, but happens every time I use it now. I'm not sure what else to do about it at this point, other than to survive until new firmware comes out.

I've been using Marnitz' ATEM HD8 ISO, and can verify that it has big problems. Since his post we've noticed that:

• it happens after a few hours of running
• software control can't connect when it's in this state
• the multiviewer windows still update, even the recording status and audio meter window, but the tally indicators don't move
• the panel button program/preview selections don't update, so without looking at the program and preview monitors, we don't know what source is online
• aux 1 PV/MV switch will go to preview from multiview, but not back (it just goes blank).
• LCD displays don't update.
• macros cease to work.
• menus don't work.
• most of the other buttons respond, though none of the button colours update

I thought that maybe we were maxing out the number of connections to it (we have about 5 or 6 devices connected to it at one time) and that would possibly be kicking the panel connection out, however, when decreasing the number of connected devices it still happens.

It's very disconcerting when switching to suddenly have this issue crop up. Thankfully the output still works and the ISO recordings continue, but it's almost like driving a car with a failed instrument cluster.

Has anyone else had an issue like this?

For anyone that's wondering what happened with this, the problem was related to Wi-fi based tally units we had connecting to the switcher (there were other actual issues with that unit too, but not to do with this thread).

There is a limit to the number of connections that can be made to an ATEM at one time. We limited the number of devices connected to it so that we wouldn't go past that limit, however, we didn't know that when a wi-fi device temporarily loses its connection, it takes a period of time for the ATEM to realise that it had disconnected and subsequently close the connection. The wi-fi device would reconnect before the previous connection was closed, and then increase the connection count by 1. If all the tally devices dropped out around the same time, or if one was particularly unstable, lots of extra connections would be created before any of the previous ones were disconnected, thus reaching the limit in no time at all.

We've since re-engineered the tallies to connect to a PC that would be a single wired connection back to the ATEM. Thus, the problem has gone away.