Rivergate Software Inc. - makers of DVDAfterEdit

I finally realized that one of my problems is that the test tapes that were sent to me were written on a DLT8000, and I only have DLT7000's, so I can't read tapes written at the highest tape mode. The drive can choose to write tapes compatible with the slower drives, so I will investigate that, of course.

I am making good progress on the new tape utility.

Regards,

Larry

Hi Michael,

I have three DLT7000 drives. One has 4-40 female retaining nuts on the 68-pin connectors. The cables have 2-56 hold-down bolts. The Adaptec card in the Dell PC also has 4-40 nuts. The cables seem to fit tight enough without the hold-down bolts.

One of the drives also required a cleaning tape last week, which seemed to fix the problem at the time. I have been hooking up only one drive at a time to the PC, where I run Eclipse.

Thursday I received the ATTO UL5D. I hooked up a drive to the Macintosh, wrote a tape, and verified (compared) it, no errors. Tried hooking up a second drive. No dice, it didn't show the second drive information in the System Profiler, and neither drive showed up in DVDAE. I tried all of the drives in combination and one at a time, but had only one terminator so couldn't try one drive on each channel of the UL5D. (I sent some equipment to Barry months ago).

I received more cables and terminators yesterday, and two DLT-9 tapes from a customer to run through Eclipse. (He had problems with marking the layer-break cell non-seamless, and I volunteered to check them for him). Could not read the tapes on the PC. Tried each different drive, no dice. The customer is now sending me DDP on DVD-R.

Went back to the Intel Mac Pro & DVDAE. The tapes say that they can't find the volume header. Yet the customer had read back the tapes and created a disc image which played. Of course I wasn't there, so it's possible that he sent me the wrong tapes, though unlikely.

Tried hooking up two drives, one on each channel. No dice. Back to one drive. Can read tapes written earlier, no problems. Have only one DLT IV tape left (I sent the others to Barry), which has an image on it that I can read. Tried writing a DLT III tape, it runs for a bit and then fails. Don't want to try writing to the only DLT IV tape.

I also have started writing a brand new universal tape utility in Cocoa, last week. I cannot debug the DVDAE PPC emulated code on the Mac Pro, and I don't have a desktop PPC machine, only a laptop.

So I have decided to drop everything else and concentrate on the new program, where I can see what is going on. You can imagine how much time I was burning with all of the above testing. And also, it is possible that in all the drive and cable swapping, a cable pin was bent. So I need to work my way up from the bottom on one machine, with one drive. The new program is working perfectly so far, on the sense ready and inquiry phases.

I'll keep everyone posted on further developments, here.

Regards,

Larry

After posting the above, I have discovered some problems on my Mac Pro:

At this point I am not sure if some of the problems may be hardware problems, bad connections, dirty read mechanism, etc. I am also having problems on the PC with Eclipse.

So I can't guarantee that DVDAE Mastering Edition will work correctly on Mac Pro under all circumstances.

I had already started writing a new stand-alone universal binary utility for copying DDP images to and from tape. This way DVDAE can be used to create the DDP image, and the utility can handle writing and verifying the tape. I will be concentrating my efforts on this avenue. The new utility will also be used in conjunction with HDAfterEdit for DLT operation, rather than having that function built-in to HDAE.

----------------

Larry,
Thanks for making that effort. Please keep me informed.

Brett Bolander
www.PAVER.us

Denis Martin sent us a report about ATTO drivers here. I will email him and ask what he is using, currently.

Ian

Hi Ian,
Sorry that it’s down to Apple, ATTO and/or Ratoc to solve the SCSI issues for the Mac Pro and DLT to work. I am not optimistic any of them will do so, the way that they have responded. I hesitate to do as Larry suggests, and have someone who already owns DVDAfterEdit do the transfers for me for a fee, since that increases my expenses and shows the client that I can’t take care of it all in-house which is far from ideal. So I guess my best option is to get an older machine that will work with both DVDAfterEdit and my Quantum DLT7000, even though I would rather not have to cram another machine in my small workspace. So since I am after another machine, what are the minimum system requirements for DVDAfterEdit 3.0, and what SCSI cards will work? I could not find system requirements on the site, or a list of approved SCSI cards. Also, which OS is best? 10.2, 10.3 or 10.4? I know there were SCSI problems that surfaced in 10.4.9, but since I will be using this machine for one purpose only, knowing what OS you recommend most would be helpful. Thanks!

Brett Bolander
www.PAVER.us

Hi Brett,

We've been discussing this and the consensus is that if the Ratoc isn't working with DVDSP, it is unlikely to work with DVDAE either, unfortunately. Similarly with the ATTO cards. Our tests with the Ratoc a year or two ago weren't encouraging, unfortunately. And since DVDAE only hooks into the OS-X SCSI code, we can't assist if this isn't working correctly.

So, if the Mac Pro is your only option, we suggest that you talk to either Ratoc or ATTO to try and find a solution there. Once that hurdle is crossed, DVDAE will help by alowing you to restore DLTs flagged for CSS, and writing new masters.

Alternatively, if you can find a G4 or G5 on Ebay for a good price, then adding an ATTO card with our recommended drivers is probably a quicker way to get up and running !

Sorry we can't be of more help at this stage, hope to hear of some progress soon !

Cheers,

Ian

Hi Brett,

I completely understand your point of view, I will discuss the situation with Larry and see what we can come up with.

Ian

Hi Brett,

Bootcamp is just a dual-boot setup, so it runs everything I've thrown at it so far, including Bioshock ;-) Parallels runs Procoder 1.5 quite happily, albeit at around 2/3 the speed of Bootcamp. I haven't tried Procoder 3 but I'm sure it will be fine. The latest version of Parallels should be even more flexible because it can open your Mac files directly, although I don't have it yet.

If the projects are all as straightforward as you suggest, I think rebuilding in DVDSP and just using DVDAE for restoring & writing DLTs is the way to go, to begin with at least - assuming the SCSI driver support is up to scratch. You can experiment with DVDAE and as time goes on maybe move to writing your own spec-level navigation to speed things up and perhaps even ultimately create templates for copying and pasting.

Ian

Hi Brett,

Certainly DVDAE is a useful tool for this kind of work - it is much more reliable at reading DLTs than DVDSP, for example, and CSS isn't an issue, assuming the keys aren't actually written to the tapes. The question of OS-X SCSI drivers is a tricky one, though. As I expect you have seen from the site, our usual solution is to recommend specific drivers for ATTO cards - but, these are for PPC so that won't be an option using an Intel Mac. In general DVDAE is much more rigorous about it's SCSI implementation than DVDSP, so it's possible the restores will work where DVDSP has failed.

Is anyone else here using ATTO or RATOC SCSI on an Intel Mac with 10.4.9 who can offer some feedback ?

As far as using DVDAE in the conversion process itself goes, deciding the best way forward depends greatly on the complexity of the original titles, and the availability of the digis. As a rule of thumb, I would say that if the originals are straightforward, then rebuilding from scratch is probably the best way forward. However if they feature any complex interactivity, you may save authoring time by simply muxing the assets in DVDSP and copying and pasting all the commands from the original PAL to new NTSC project. If the originals all follow a standard "template", this can be particularly valuable approach.

I suggest you use ProCoder for the MPEG conversion - Compressor is glacially slow and the encodes won't look as good. Working from ripped MPEG-2 files usually looks fine, although digibeta will give you better results, assumimg you capture at full resolution ( ie, not converting to DV or similar for capture ).

Menu conversion again depends on the originals - if there has been a lot of money spent on sexy designs or motion menus, then converting is the best way to go. Static menus can be scaled in Photoshop, motion menus using ProCoder. DVDAE doesn't really influence this decision.

So to sumarize - if the SCSI driver issue can be resolved, then DVDAE is the best way to read and write your DLTs, and for a large project will be well worth the investment. Using it for the actual re-authoring depends heavily on the projects themselves - if you want to post a summary of the authoring requirements ( number of assets, menus, audio streams, subtitle requirements, playlist/stories etc. ) then maybe we can offer a more informed opinion about using DVDAE as part of the conversion process. The learning curve for the kind of features you want will not be too steep. Check out the Replace VTS article to get an idea of the kind of procedure you might need.

Sorry I can't be more specific, but I hope that's a little useful ? Please let me know if you have any other questions.

Cheers,

Ian