The Mystery of The Blinking External Monitor by Franklin W. Dixon

It was a beautiful day and i was hard at work in the edit bay when suddenly..... The external monitor went blue. It only lasted for about 7-10 seconds, so i continued to work.

Then after about 5 minutes of tweaks, BAM! it done it again. I thought about what had happened and wondered if the render command had something to do with it. Especially since the picture came back as soon as the render was done. Maybe its the FW cord, so i happily changed the fw leading to my consumer cam that acts as a deck. " That should do it ", I said with glee.

So i went back to editing my 50s master piece. I rendered and the picture stayed right there in my external monitor. Great!
Then i hit home and started to preview my sequence and half way thru i got a screen thats blue. However, this time it cam with a nasty RT warning. I read it and decided to limit real-time video playback to 25mb. On preview it done it again.

I left the project open and it done it even while there were no operations being performed. Even blue moon when it happens (2 out of 10x), I can here my drives revving. What's even spookier, is that it doesn't seem to happen in other pervious projects.

This project has about 5.4gigs of elements that includes; .motn (5), 50 stills, PSD (8), AE rendered lossless .mov (3), dv 16/9 30p 58gig, 15gigs of dvcpro50 720p30 converted from dvd, and some fcp text and animated text gen's.

Machine & software
Macpro quad3.0 intel / 7gigs ram / fcp 6.0.4 / ati x1900 v-card

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

Sounds like a sync problem. Are you feeding tri-level or black?

Thats new terminology to me and i am not sure where i would look to find this.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

If you're just feeding out a signal to your monitor, why'd you need an external sync clock?



www.strypesinpost.com

I wouldn't think one would normally either, but it sure sounds to me like the monitor's losing sync periodically.

I think you are on to something with that Jeff. I normally see white dashes at the top of my external monitor. If i am not mistaken that is TC from the reel.

The pattern is normally 2 short dashes on the left, the a long dash in the middle, and 3 short dashes on the right. When the screen goes blue, the pattern changes from what i have already described to having 2 short dashes on the left and one long dash on the right (nothing else).

So it could be the TC. If that is it, what do i do to maintain the sync?

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

>However, this time it cam with a nasty RT warning. I read it and decided to limit real-time video
>playback to 25mb.

Some thing sounds wrong. What RT warning? Dropped frames? What kind of drives are you using, what is your set up?

> I read it and decided to limit real-time video
>playback to 25mb.

What real time playback to 25mb?


>I wouldn't think one would normally either, but it sure sounds to me like the monitor's losing sync
>periodically.

But how would you set up a sync gen? This seems to be his configuration:

Mac --via FW--> DV camcorder ---via analog component/composite cables--> broadcast mon

On the other hand, if you're monitoring via composite cables, you should switch to component cables or at least S-Video if supported.

Edit: Re-noticed the word "camcorder"


Then again, heck, just go for a Blackmagic Decklink SDI capture card and monitor via SDI. It really should fall within your budget. They're really not expensive.



www.strypesinpost.com

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

Not sure why you need to limit the stream to 25 MBs as everything is rendered.



www.strypesinpost.com

yeah it was a shot in the dark with the 25mb limit. My external is still going blue. It does not stop any operations though.

Its just really, really annoying.

""" What you do with what you have, is more important than what you could do, with what you don't have."

> > > Knowledge + Action = Wisdom - J. Corbett 1992 """"

If I were you, I'd call in an experienced editor/broadcast engineer to take a good look at your set up. Something is wrong somewhere, eg. you're dropping frames when you're not supposed to, etc. Currently, it could be anything from a faulty hard drive to the monitor to the camcorder, or just a bad setting or corrupt preference file...



www.strypesinpost.com