TriCaster 855 extreme crashes and restarts during live production.

[Joseph Zammit]

Hi All,

We have run into a very troublesome problem. Our TriCaster 855 Extreme will randomly crash and restart in the middle of Live Production. There is no pattern to it, as is it will crash during different segments; ones that require a lot of material on air (DSKs, DDRs, Virtual Inputs) and others that use the bare minimum of resources such as 2 basic SDI cameras with no graphics or overlays.

Generally there are 4 SDI inputs from cameras connected, both DDR bins and titles in use. The software is updated to the latest version as well. The show is broadcast daily over national TV and therefore any downtime is immediately evident, and adds to the urgency of the matter.

I have run Prime95 CPU and RAM stress tests overnight, but the TriCaster did not hang.

Has any one encountered such an issue? Could the dual PSUs be at fault, maybe one of them stops working and the other is not taking over?

The issue is now happening once everyday and any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Joseph

[webslave]

Has the unit moved recently?

[Joseph Zammit]

Hi,

No the unit is housed in a rack in a cooled chamber wired for daily studio work.

[webslave]

Check out the Windows Event Log (it should tell you if Windows is BSOD'ing and rebooting and why if that's what it is), and potentially the TC software log.

[dhodlick]

Most BSOD's on stationary computers are a result of either failing RAM or a failing hard drive. Occasionally, a buggy display driver will do it as well. RAM errors will not show up in logs

[Joseph Zammit]

Check out the Windows Event Log (it should tell you if Windows is BSOD'ing and rebooting and why if that's what it is), and potentially the TC software log.

Thanks for your reply. I have checked the windows event log and it is listed as 41 Kernel Power Event which does not narrow it down. Can you tell me how to access the TC software log as I was unaware of it?

[Joseph Zammit]

Thanks for your reply. I have run RAM stress tests where RAM was 100% for long hours and it does not seem to have affected the TriCaster in anyway. We do not have a spare TriCaster System drive to swap as it is built in the TriCaster and the function to Clone the Hard drive was removed from the 855 software.

[bbailey]

How long has it been that you replaced the BIOS backup battery?