From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>
Date: November 27, 2005 2:13:12 PM MST
To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Re: DMK camera fixes itself - is there some kind of timeout?
Steve;
Okay - What you DIDN"T say was that Astro IIDC is still running after you unplug - replug, nor did you say any error messages show up. What your doing is just not a "smart thing" to do and if you try that with any device that is actively transmitting data, the results are unpredictable. That's the same thing as simply pulling the plug on your Mac while it's copying files, rather than shutting it down form the Apple menu. If you do that with a IDE, SATA, SCSI, USB or FireWire hard drive while transferring files, you can lose entire volume as the disk map can become corrupted - let alone kernel panics and other fun things.
When the Camera control window is up, Astro IIDC has an open connection to the camera hardware and may still be reading / writing IO control data. If you unplug it, it's left dangling and it is not going to refind the device. Under OS 9 it might have been able re-connect itself, but not under OSX - which is far sloppier and less robust as far as finding and connecting to devices goes. That's why so many people have had problems with FireWire hard drives and have lost complete volumes of information with each new X.x.x upgrade of OS X.
If you check the console.log you' likely see a whole slew of messages showing up too and your going to lose your last camera settings too, as it reads them out of the camera before it closes off the connection.
So the bottom line is don't do this sort of thing - your just causing yourself grief for absolutely no reason.
Milton J. Aupperle
President
ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting
Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist
#1005 - 815 14th Avenue. S.W.
Calgary Alberta Canada T2R0N5
1-(403)-229-9456
www.outcastsoft.com
On 27-Nov-05, at 1:51 PM, Steve Bryson wrote:
Hi Milton - Your comments are helpful. I don't know if there's a mystery here or not, but
I've verified the same behavior with both the DMK and Fire-i. Details below.
So long as I stop video before unplugging the camera everything's fine. This is good
practice in any case.
--- In Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com, Milton Aupperle <milton@o...> wrote:
--- snip discussion about strange behavior of camera
>
> The problem you describe might also be the bad Sony CCD issue too
> that was brought up last week here. If any of the wires on the CCD
> are loose or not making good contact you can get weird behavior. You
> can also get weird behavior like that from bad FireWire cables too.
>
> You can check both by moving the camera around when attached and
> seeing if video stops being displayed when moved. If it does,
> somehtign isn't right.
>
I don't see anything like that: no problems with the video image even when the cable is
under tension and the camera is moving with high acceleration. So it does not appear to
be a problem with loose hardware.
I checked the fire-i, and it shows the same behavior. Very specifically, for both cameras:
The "white video" condition has the following symptoms:
- the video preview screen is all white, unchanging no matter what the settings and light
entering the camera
- no image sharpness display dispite its being selected
- no histogram line
This is very distinct from overexposed normal operation, where the image sharpness is
displayed and the histogram line is flat at the bottom of the graph.
Using Astro IIDC there are two scenarios: "display image sharpness" is selected in all
cases
scenario 1:
1) unplug firewire cable from camera while capturing images: image freezes
2) plug camera back in, nothing happens
3) press stop video, then start video. both cameras show white video output, no image
sharpness display, no histogram.
4) exit and restart Astro IIDC, press start video, everything's fine.
scenario 2:
1) unplug firewire cable from camera while capturing images: image freezes
2) press stop video, then plug camera back in
3) press start video. Fire-i shows white video output, no image sharpness output, no
histogram. DMK gets error message
API Error
myStartCamera Err = -536870185 0xE00002D7
press OK, press start video again, get white video output, no image sharpness display, no
histogram.
4) exit and restart Astro IIDC, press start video, everything's fine.
There is still the mystery of why the DMK took over 30 minutes to recover last night. This
suggests it's something in the camera, not Astro IIDC. The camera was cold (about 45 F) if
that matters.
See anything interesting here?
Steve
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