From: Milton Aupperle <maupperl@gmail.com>

Date: July 4, 2015 1:26:25 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Naming Cameras?

Hi Kevin;

On 2015-07-04, at 9:22 AM, Kevin in Fort Davis fsm79734@gmail.com [Astro_IIDC] <Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com> wrote:

Thanks so much for that analysis, Milton, I appreciate it!  I've somewhat verified that empirically, and have found it safer to sometimes run at 3.750 fps.  Would the video preview screen's freezing be a likely effect of a lack of FireWire bandwidth?  Also, is there any advantage of using the FMT7 modes of the camera in terms of bandwidth?

Just to be clear, by "video preview screen freezing" do you mean the app works (i.e. move windows around, change camera controls, switch to a different app etc.) but the video doesn't change in the preview window or do you mean the app itself freezes?

If its the first case, then the camera did not start up when send it the start transmit command, so hitting the start stop button would get it running again. That should be caught and reported as an error, unless of course either the camera doesn't report a FireWire error code or Apple is getting it and not passing it back to us (which happens pretty frequently now - especially under Coca which I avoided with Astro IIDC and stayed with C & Carbon). There were also some pThread contention issues too where Apples threads would just go dead (stop responding) from sleep wake states - and I had to make some really skanky code to detect and work around this too.

I'm not sure how your launching the apps either, because your running 3 copies of Astro IIDC at the same time. Are you starting them up individually and giving them time to get each camera running or are you using some Apple Script or other script method to launch the apps at the same time?

With 2 cameras, I've never had the contention issues, but usually one is running at absurdly slow frame rates and the other is maybe running 15 fps for tracking. So bandwidth wasn't an issue in my case and I had them daisy chained together too - meaning I had no hubs in the mix either.

HTH..

Milton Aupperle