AJA Video Customer Support

Throughout the last several years, there’s been a very cordial, quiet battle between fans of BlackMagic Designs and AJA products.  The battle always seems to have less to do with the products and features as they have been about customer support.  I just wanted to offer up this little anecdote to the battle.

DISCLAIMER: I have absolutely ZERO experience with BlackMagic Designs hardware, hence I have never dealt with they’re customer support team.  This is not a bash on BlackMagic Designs.

Now for the story:

I have been editing away on the Average Joe’s Huntin’ Show episodes (premieres Monday, June 28th on the Pursuit Channel — set your DVRs!).  A couple weeks ago came time to put the first couple shows on tape to send off to the network.  Fire up the trusty ol’ AJA IoLA to do a pass of color correction and print them to tape, and guess what I see?

Everything looks fine on the timeline, but the sync is berzerk on the external monitor.  And it’s 10pm.

So the next day, I emailed support at AJA and got a near instant response.  I called in, a human being picked up the phone, and transferred me to another human being.  We’re already off to a good start.

But we couldn’t track down the problem.  The box had worked perfectly in March, the last time I used it to print commercials to tape for another client.  What had changed since then?  Oh yeah, a new computer.  We re-flashed the firmware, reloaded the drivers, even hit the reset button on the back of the unit.  No change.

So Hector says, “Well, what we will do is replace this unit for you for the cost of shipping.”

Wait.  Did I hear that right?

“But this box is about 5 years old.  It’s way out of warranty.”

“That’s okay, we’ll change it out for you.”

So they did.  And guess what?  The new box arrived, and still no change.  It’s obviously a software issue, not hardware.  More troubleshooting, this time around with Tony.  Nothing changes.  Now, what to do.  I mention that the box is undoubtedly on it’s own FW bus, so that couldn’t possibly be a conflict with another FW device.  He hung up to pull a different IoLA unit on his end and see if he could recreate the problem, and said he would call me back.

While off the phone, I remembered, hey, this is a new mixer, too.  So I unplugged the Project Mix I/O.  Still no change.

About an hour later, Tony called back to report he couldn’t recreate the problem with any box on any computer. I told him I had unplugged the mixer which hadn’t done anything, either.  Then Tony had a thought.  ”Your AJA box is connected to the MacPro’s FW bus, right?”

“No, it has it’s own PCI card with nothing else on it.

“Oh, it needs to be connected directly to the computer, we don’t test them with any other cards.”

Swap the cable.  Bam.  All that, and I had just plugged it into the wrong port.  I was so careful to not have anything else on the bus, that I forgot it needed to be on the actual computer’s port.  So now I’m busy printing to tape.  And editing more episodes.  And printing to tape.