3.6 to 4.x upgrade - why?

[David Lamb]

Hi,
We are still using AV 3.6 on an old Nubus crate. We would like to here from people who upgraded to version 4, and find out what they gained from doing this, and if they lost any facilities by "upgrading"!

We are trying to find out if it's worth the cost, which is high due to needing to change to a PCI crate.

Thanks,

Davy Lamb

[Joncon]

1) Free upgrade/sidegrade to Pro Tools/AV which gives you the following:
- 24 bit audio files for better sound quality
- 32 tracks for free (atleast doubling AV PCI track count) or 64 tracks for some cash.
- TDM plugins (a biggee!!)

2) Faster CPU's

3) higher video resolutions (Pro Tools/AV will support both the PCI ABVB board that comes as part of the PCI AV system for resulotions up to AVR77 or the Meridian video hardware for uncompressed video, the choice is yours. Of course, the Meridian hardware will cost extra.

4) compatibility with current operating systems and other software applications.

5) To keep up with the Jones.

6) Free Tech Support (for a year)

7) and lastly, so you can get on the Digi User Conference and ligitemately complain about AudioVision PCI/Tech Support/ the weather or whatever...

Thanks,

Jon Connolly

[rob sayers]

don't do it...i just upgraded from 3.6 (nu-bus) to 4.1.8 (PCI) , and i wish i had my old system back! communications with the micro-lynx drops out intermittantly, and when it's working, it's not as good as 3.6 since the micro-lynx becomes the AV timecode where the old avid card output timecode...sometimes the 888's don't initialize on boot-up and i have to quit AV and restart to intialize...i was told that the pci AV was much faster than the nu-bus...i think it's a bit slower...i'm using a powermac 9600 300Mhz system...this system now feels more like pro-tools than AV.
joncon's reply is comparing AV to the new (as yet un-released) pro-tools 5.0...this is not what you were asking (i think). to upgrade from 3.6 to 4.1 is a waste of money...
keep AV 3.6 and add pro-tools as a great way to increase track playback, use "plug-in's, etc...it can become a glorified dubber for post.

[rob sayers]

don't do it...i just upgraded from 3.6 (nu-bus) to 4.1.8 (PCI) , and i wish i had my old system back! communications with the micro-lynx drops out intermittantly, and when it's working, it's not as good as 3.6 since the micro-lynx becomes the AV timecode where the old avid card output timecode...sometimes the 888's don't initialize on boot-up and i have to quit AV and restart to intialize...i was told that the pci AV was much faster than the nu-bus...i think it's a bit slower...i'm using a powermac 9600 300Mhz system...this system now feels more like pro-tools than AV.
joncon's reply is comparing AV to the new (as yet un-released) pro-tools 5.0...this is not what you were asking (i think). to upgrade from 3.6 to 4.1 is a waste of money...
keep AV 3.6 and add pro-tools as a great way to increase track playback, use "plug-in's, etc...it can become a glorified dubber for post.

[Joncon]

Rob,

If your new PCI AV system is slower than your old nubus AV system, you've most likely got some issues with your system. Some tweaking is probably in order, especially if this is a new system.

What exactly is slower? and when?

Depending on how you are using AV, if you choose to stick with nubus AV you will most likely start, if you haven't already, to see problems with taking media from newer Media Composer systems.

PCI AV shouldn't see any of that.

Thanks,

Jon

[rob sayers]

waveform draws are the same or slower, and all "finder" operations seem to be slower, ie: scolling through media files...i realize my system may not be "tweeked" yet...who can help me tweek it??? the biggest pain right now is having to re-start AV when the micro-lynx connection goes away. is there a way to re-establish this connection without quiting and re-starting AV??? also, why do the 888/24's sometimes not initialize on startup??? thanks

[Joncon]

Here's some of the most common tweeks in no particular order. Try the easiest ones first.

1) Increase the amount of RAM allocated to AV, If your system can afford it you may want to bump the prefferred memory setting in the "Get Info" window of the AV application to 50 55 MB. The number you type in may change slightly when you hit enter or close the window, this is normal. You shoud have at very minimum, 96MB total system RAM to bump it this high.

2) Set your disk cache setting in the memory control panel to 128k. If you have a lot of memory in your system this number can default to a very large number and cause your system to be sluggish. You must reboot your system for this to take effect.

3) In the "Apple menu options" control panel uncheck the "remember recently used items". Restart the computer.

4) In AudioVision, go to the console and use the media validate command. This will give you the option to bypass the media validate thing when getting into AV. It is particularly helpful when you have a large number of drives on your system.
The command is:
set CONFIRM_VALIDATE true
then hit return.
I would recommend choosing the "validate" option atleast once a day and/or if new drives or media have been added to the system.

The "Initializing the Inbox" process can be bypassed by creating a folder and giving it the following name:
•AVQANoNetwork
The dot is option 8 on your keyboard and must be included.

This folder must be placed in the same folder as the AudioVision application. The inbox is the Avidnet portion of AV, unless you are using Avidnet to transfer files between two or more systems you probably want to disable this. This will decrease your AV launch time.

5) If you haven't done so already, you should reinitialize all of your audio and video drives with the most recent version of the Avid drive Utility which I believe is 2.1. You will have to attach your audio drives to either the Mac SCSI bus or the Atto card to do this.

6) Rebuild the desktop. Hold down the option and command keys while rebooting the computer. Hold them down until the "rebuilding desktop" dialogue appears. Or you can use Norton utilities to rebuild the desktop as well.

7) If you've got 9 or 18 gig drives, you may want to partition them down to 4 gig partitions or so. This is not absolutely necessarry but can improve system performance by enabling the drives to look in smaller areas for data, decreasing seek time.


8) Run Norton on your system drive to make sure it thinks everything is in decent shape.
If Norton finds any problems, follow it's advice for repairing the system drive.

Note: Do NOT use speed disk on any media drives in AV, especially striped drives. To defragment drives, copy the data to another drive or partition (and back if necessary) and be sure to delete the old files. The copy process should defrag all of the files.

9) verify correct SCSI terminatin and cabling. If you are using wide drives on the narrow SCSI bus make sure you are using the adaptor that came with your AV system. Likewise, if you are using narrow drives on your wide video bus be sure to use the 68 to 50 pin adaptor that came with the AV system.

Swap SCSI cables.

Make sure SCSI cable length is with the guidelines, essentially, as short as possible. Let me know if you need more info on this. If you've got multiple drives on either SCSI bus you may want to try just one, temporarily, to see if performance improves. If it does, you may have a drive or cable problem.

10) If applicable, upgrade your Mac OS to 8.1 atleast. Mac OS 8.5.1 is even better. Mac OS 8.6 has not yet been tested.

11) Trim down your extensions and control panels. The best way to do this is to start out with the Mac OS base set minus all of the printers and Internet stuff. Then install AV using the AV 4.1 install CD-rom.

12) If your PCI system is new, you probably won't have to do this but, you can check the firmware versions of your video hardware and SCSI accelorator and update them if necessary using the utilities that the AV 4.1 CD rom installs in the Utilities folder. Let me know if you need more info on this. The only thing that usually needs upgrading here it the Atto card using the EPCI updater utility.

13) Once you have run the AV 4.1 installer, download the most recent version of AV which is currently 4.1v9, install it and trash the 4.1 version. Though it may or may not cause problems you should trash all other copies of AV (and it's supporting files folder) other than 4.1v9.

14) Disable "calculate folder sizes" in your Mac OS. Depending on what version you are using this could be in a couple of different places.

The Microlynx communication thing may be straightened out in a couple of ways...

1) You may want to use the console command that tells AV to maintain communication with the serial devices when AV goes to the background. This is detailed in the AV 4.1 (or later) release notes. NOTE: that the 4.1 release notes document has a typo and should read:

set ReleasePortsOnSuspend X

X = true or false.

and/or

2) Trash the "serialports" document in the settings folder which is in the AudioVision folder and restart your computer. This trashes the serial ports settings for AV so you will need to go in and reset your Serial ports window in AV. Once this is done once you shouldn't have to do it very often.

and

3) Next time this happens, go to the Finder and use the "Commcloser" utility located in the Utilities folder on your internal hard drive. This utility clears out the serial ports without having to reboot.

Or

4) Go to the serial ports window in AV and toggle the serial ports setting to none then back to the appropriate port.

The 888/24 initialization thing... This could be caused by a corrupt or more than one digisetup file... The digisetup file is going to be in one of two places, System folder or System/preferences folder (older versions of the Digi System Init put it in the system folder, newer versions put it in the System/preferences folder). Trash it (and digi.com if it exists) and restart the computer. You may want to also, power cycle the 888's. After doing this you may not see the 888's totally initialize until AV or Pro Tools is launched and the digisetup file is recreated (by selecting 16 or 24 bit 888's in AV or configuring the hardware setup or playback engine dialogues in Pro Tools)

If you are using DigiSystem Init 3.2.3 you should upgrade to atleast 3.3 or 3.4. We did notice this more often with 3.2.3 for reasons we are not sure of. Later versions can be downloaded here on the Digi website or can be found on the Pro Tools CDrom you should have.

This should help, if you are still having problems let me know.

Thanks,
Jon Connolly
Digidesign

[rob sayers]

thanks for your help jon!

just a few more questions though:

i tried typing the command: "set ReleasePortsOn Suspend X" to maintain comm. with the micro-lync, but the "console" won't take the command...am i typing it in correctly?
should i use "active" scsi terminations only?
should i install AV 4.1.9? what's new or fixed?
and finally, i was told by someone at Sam Ash here in new york (who shall remain nameless) that using the avid drive utilty with pro tools hardware is a big no no...so after having the system delivered from sam ash formatted with FWB and NOT partitioned, i then installed and partitioned the drives with the latest avid drive utility, because i thought this was the way to do it, only to here from the guy at sam ash that this was a big mistake...so we used FWB again and kept the 9-gigs 9-gig...now you say that i should use the latest avid drive utility and partition!!!
what gives...it seems to work both ways about the same anyway???
i've checked all other tweeks you mentioned.
one other thing i just remembered: AV boots up in "millions of colors" even though it was set to 256 colors before launch...is there a reason for this...won't AV run a little slower with millions of colors set???

thanks again jon

[Joncon]

For the console command, X is a variable either true or false so to enable this command you would type:

set ReleasePortsOnSuspend true

then hit enter. If the command is taken you will see that same line listed in the console window. The only spaces are after set and before true. I just typed this exact line and it worked on my system.

To disable this command once it has been enabled you would type:

set ReleasePortsOnSuspend false

then hit the enter key.


Active terminators - Normally you want to use active over passive terminators. All of the terminators included with your AV system are active and, if possible, you should use those. They are the Avid terminators that are blue in color.

Active terminators are much more effective than passive terminators in eliminating electronic noise and echoes on the SCSI chain. This noise and echo can contribute to data transfer errors and corrupted images which translates into poor system performance and/or error messages or corrupt files.

Yes, you should most definitely upgrade to 4.1v9. There have been several (atleast three or four) versions of AudioVision released since 4.1. Each release addresses atleast one and some releases address several bugs that have been fixed.

The Release notes that are included with the 4.1v9 download will detail all of the fixes sinces version 4.1. It is definitely worth your while to use version 4.1v9.

However, If you are doing a first time install or have initialized your internal drive and are re-installing everything fresh. You want to use the 4.1 installer first then install 4.1v9. The 4.1 installer correctly places all of the extensions, utilities and goodies necessary to run AV. The 4.1v9 download ONLY installs the AV application and it's supporting files folder and contents.

Your Sam Ash connection is not totally wrong regarding drive maintenence.

Pro Tools 24, Mix and Mix Plus systems require that you use FWB on your hard drives.

AudioVision uses the Pro Tools III hardware which does not require FWB. You can use FWB if you choose but you may also use the Avid drive utility.

If you are using only AudioVision on your system I would recommend using the Avid Drive utility to be consistent. It's a good idea to do both initializing and partitioning with the same app. I would suggest re-partitioning and therefore re-initializing with the Avid Drive utility but, then again, if ain't broke don't fix it.

Also, you can keep the 9 gig partitions if you want but in an attempt to get better performance from your system, you should partition them in half atleast. There are plenty of AV users that are using 9 gig partitions without problem so this is not a must.

Yes, you probably want to get the system video to run in 256 colors as opposed to millions. I'm not sure why that is happening you may want to see if there is a preference that you can trash that may be keeping that setting.

Also one other thing I forgot to mention, the video output of the ABVB card for the second mac monitor, Not the composite or YUV video outputs, is not designed to be a great mac monitor. If you are using only one monitor for your Mac and it is connected to the ABVB card you should disconnect it from the ABVB card and attach it to the stock Mac video card that came in the 9500 or 9600. In other words your bootup monitor should not be attached to the ABVB card.

I hope this helps, let me know if you have any other questions.

Thanks,

Jon "diarrhea of the email" Connolly

[rob sayers]

joncon: thanks for your help...your last comment about the "2nd" mac port on the avid card being slow was the answer for my Mac "slowness". i have a (1) monitor system and the monitor was plugged into the avid card's "edit monitor" port. once i moved this to the 9600 card port, the Mac function slowness was gone. However; i must say that waveform draws and most other functions in general are about the same as my old nu-bus system...the waveforms acually move across the screen more "jerky" than i remembered (whether set to "millions of colors" or "16 colors").
the system is functioning o.k. except for 2 (pain in the neck) problems...the connection to the micro-lynx still drops out intermittantly (i typed the command "set ReleasePortOn" both true and false, but still get the drop outs. at least i can re-establish this connection (thanks to your help) by opening the serial window in AV and setting deck control to "none" and then back to "modem" ...maybe it'll work better on the printer port???(i'll try) also, the 888/24's still don't initialize sometimes (about 50/50)
by quitting AV and then re-launching, the 888/24's then are o.k.???already trashed "digisetup" and looked for multiple init's...
thanks for any help you can give...

[sswatson]

One thing to keep in mind: Your monitors may not be compatible with the new video card. You will be able to use at least one monitor and it will be attached to the Mac video card. There is something about the sync signal that the Avid video card sends that not all monitors like. (Notable the Mitsubishi 20M's & 20H's that shipped with many AV 3x Nubus systems.)

And: You will need a seperate NTSC monitor to view your video images. The newer version of AV *doesn't* switch one monitor back and forth from full screen NTSC / computer desktop. Instead, you have a dedicated screen for it. So... a third monitor to add high pitched noise to your room.

Good points for AV 4: Media compatability with newer versions of Media Composer and the higher resolutions are nice. In fact, clients expect to see the same quality picture in the sound suite as they just saw in the edit suite.

Since the upgrade path to the next generation of AV/Pro Tools is free it is worth considering. The increased track counts will be hugely beneficial once that comes out.

OHHHH! Almost forgot: AV 4+ uses seperate SCSI chains for video and audio. The video chain SCSI drives must be fast & wide drives to handle the higher resolutions. If you only have narrow drives, you will have to get some more to capitalize on the higher AVR resolutions.

That's all the thoughts for now,
Sam Watson

p.s. Jon, thanks for the informative posts. Rob, thanks for asking questions that resulted in informative posts.