When I had an NFL show I ran five loops simultaneously on the Klipstore. It would take 45 minutes to load them in the morning and if the switcher crashed during the show I prayed that both coaches would leave their little red flags in their pockets long enough for the clips to reload. The second season of using the loops I figured out that by shrinking the clips to with the DVEous or a transform engine and changing the fence size to 1/4 (I guess it's a measure of resolution) the clips took up way less memory and loaded in about half the time. Of course, when played back I had to burn a transform engine to blow them back up. They didn't look any worse for wear because they were graphics elements and they were provided in SDI-SD 16:9 in the first place.

Thanks Bob, sounds like not a good idea to rely on Klip Cache for a lot of loading/unloading during the show (in and out of cache). Even 10 minutes to load a clip or two is a long time. thanks Bill

The Kalypso is designed to "overwrite" the stills that have not been used for te longest time. It will not overwrite stills that are locked (that have the little closed padlock symbol) - only those that are either unlocked or those that still have the floppy disk symbol (meaning that they have not yet been loaded into the cache from disk). In theory, you'd choose the stills that you want to get rid of & select UNLOAD. Unfortunately this does not unlock them & thus does not guarantee that you'd be setting them up for overwriting. In the past, you'd thus use the UNLOCK ALL/UNLOAD ALL command, but we have been told by GVG Engineering that this action can set up a condition that locks up the still store...the only currently specified correct way to clear out the cache is to reset the main processor (yikes!). If you unload clips 1, 2 & 3 and then cache clips 13, 14, & 15, the system will probably overwrite clips 1, 2 & 3, as it will eliminate whatever it has to from the cache in order to make room for the new images. But that's not going to be your big problem. Your problem is going to be that if you have clips that are large enough to fill up your cache memory (assuming that you're going to be using the expanded Cache option - if you don't have it, you're really limited in cache memory), when you try to re-load clips 13 - 15 over the originally loaded clips, you're going to be waiting a LONG time to load the clips - in SD mode, assume about 1-2 seconds per each still image of each clip...double that if it's a V/K pair. In HD mode plan on 7-10 seconds per each still image. When I was doing testing at GVG, I tried to max out the cache in both SD & HD modes. To fully load up the cache in SD mode took about 40-45 minutes. In HD, it was between 2 1/2 and 3 hours...not condusive to loading in a break. You can manually select which clips to load first by building your "pre-cache" e-mem to choose those clips...nothing says that you have to start at image #1. I usually start by loading all my stills 1st and then load the clips.

Ok here is one. This is not the case, but more of a theory I guess. Lets say you have a 20 clips for a show. The clips are long enough were you can only load approx. 12 into the Ram at a time. So maybe some of the clips are used for certain segments, and therefore are clear to be replaced after that segment is over. How can you decide I want to get rid of clips 1,2, and 3 only. So that I can load clips 13,14, 15. If the Ram is full and your try loading new clips to replace some through an emem or manually, can you designate which clips get the boot first? One other question I remember reading that there is some sort of GVG still loader for a graphics op to mail stills into the Kalypso SS. Is it possible to mail animations, avi files, etc.? thanks Bill

Brad - I do not believe that the Kalypso allows you to E-MEM to the Preset side. The Preset side was originally intended as a manual function to allow pre-cache of images without having to wait for the disk load on an on-air channel.

It should also be possible to place items in a Still Store's "Preset" side, so they'd load into cache even though not being displayed anywhere. Thus you could load 16 items with a single keyframe of E-Mem. I've never done this with clips, but if a clip is loaded in more than one Still Store output, the replay is compromised (double speed! of all things). It would probably be the same with a clip loaded into the Preset side. If I'm wrong about that, someone please correct me. (I'm not at a Kalypso at the moment.) brad fisher bradfisher.org/kalypso

Bob and Mike.. thanks I definitly understand the process and how it works better then I did. In the past I would just freeze stuff that day of show, use it a few times and be done with it (sports). thanks Bill

All stills need to come from the SS hard drive - even if you transfer stills & clips into the RAM from some other drive, it gets put into the SS HD in the USER directory (or another directory that you can create) If you load directly from an external drive, they go into the INBOX directory, but don't get saved. To load a SD still into RAM from the internal HD takes about 1-2 seconds...multiply that by about 5 for HD stills. Thus a 2 second HD clip (60 stills at about 5 seconds per still) takes about 300 seconds (5 minutes) to load...video only - double that for V&K images. I used to use a macro to pre-cache images. I found during testing that this could "confuse" the still store. The E-MEMs use a different path that doesn't confuse the still store. So I build 1 E-MEM that loads up to 8 images per keyframe (one per output per keyframe). Then I just run that E-MEM register. It takes the same amount of time to pre-cache, but without the potential for locking up the still store.

Bill, the stillstore has it's own hard drive and in theory the stills are stored there otherwise the data would have to be transferred over the network, along with the data needed to control the switcher. The first time a still is recalled it is loaded into a cache and it may take a second or longer (if it is a clip) to load. After the clip is cached recall is almost instant. How to precache the stills and clips? A macro could it.

[quote="Bob Ennis"]The Klip Kache is a hardware upgrade, but it requires software to allow you to record past 103 pages, so it is both. Clips are recorded as a series of stills (but you will see a clip as one entity), so they are stored short-term in the SD RAM and long-term on the still store's HDD. That means that if you lose power or reset the frame, you will have to re-load the clips from disk back into RAM. I think that the maximum number of total frames available in the RAM (for SD) is somewhere around 2600...in HD it's enough to record about 30 seconds of clip material. .[/quote] Bob, So the Kalypso Hard drive (or any drive I suppose) hold all the media. So you could have in theory 10 minutes of clips on there. Then you need to bring the clips or stills you want for that show into RAM? (up to around 2600 frames in SD) Is there a way of doing this or do you just call it up manually or via emems?. What is the function to go from hard drive to RAM.? thanks Bill

The Klip Kache is a hardware upgrade, but it requires software to allow you to record past 103 pages, so it is both. Clips are recorded as a series of stills (but you will see a clip as one entity), so they are stored short-term in the SD RAM and long-term on the still store's HDD. That means that if you lose power or reset the frame, you will have to re-load the clips from disk back into RAM. I think that the maximum number of total frames available in the RAM (for SD) is somewhere around 2600...in HD it's enough to record about 30 seconds of clip material. When you make in & out points, the excess data is NOT erased. In order to erase the excess data you have to: 1. Mark in & out points. 2. While playing this shortened clip back, RECORD it onto another clip. 3. Erase the original clip. By the way, E-MEM's override the in & out points. So if you have a 5-second clip that is recalled via E-MEM & you mark new in & out points, those points won't be remembered unless you re-save or MOD the E-MEM.