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Multiply Your Options

Nov 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Barry Braverman

The AJA Kona 3 capture card helps shooters keep up with the ever-expanding list of formats and resolutions.

It's no secret that today's shooter manages an ever-increasing glut of HD frame rates and resolutions. With upwards of two dozen formats and associated variants to choose from, and one or two more appearing seemingly every few weeks, it's a full-time job just keeping them straight. The Panasonic AG-HVX200, for example, records digital audio and video in 81 different frame rates and resolutions — and that's in a camera without support (at the moment) for 50i/50p recording. The HDR-SR1 AVC HD, announced jointly by Sony and Panasonic in July, further illustrates the trend towards ever more flavors of HD. While the AVC HD is currently intended strictly for the consumer market, this will likely not stay the case for long as wedding and event professionals see the economy of flash memory-based recording and jump on the bus.

The HD morass

Amid the chaos that is HD today, the shooter-producer must be cognizant of potential workflow snafus and pitfalls. Unsupported formats and resolutions abound with many frame rates and scanning modes to choose from — all costing potential time, money, and angst. Jim Lindsay, indefatigable director of The Mexican War for The History Channel, is intimately familiar with this spirit-sapping swamp, and counts himself as a survivor of the struggle. His secret: the AJA Kona 3 capture card.

This is no mere hype. When The History Channel requested a 1080 24PsF D5 master as the show's primary deliverable, Lindsay and editor Shane Ross blanched. They understood the desirability of the D5 format; its versatility provides easy and efficient output to virtually any TV format, including standard-definition digital Betacam, which the network also requested under its comprehensive producer agreement.

Lindsay initially attempted a software transcode from the DVCPRO HD timeline, but this approach proved impractical due to the excruciatingly long processing times required, in some cases extending over several days. “It was like watching grass grow,” Lindsay says, only half kidding, the tone of his voice now reflecting the wisdom and confidence someone who has stared down the HD beast — and survived.

“The key for producers,” he says, “is to shoot 720p24 and stick with it throughout production and not worry about the 1080 thing until the output master. Then the cross-conversion to 1080 24PsF can be achieved quickly and easily through the Kona 3 card.”

Following this modus operandi requires due diligence, however, because the fine detail that appears stable in progressive 720 may produce noxious moiré or other aliasing artifacts when viewed in interlaced standard-definition DVD. For this reason, the HD producer should view all footage on a standard-definition monitor prior to delivery of the 1080 D5 master.

It's worth noting that high-detail scenes containing fine horizontal lines usually benefit from reduced vertical detail. The slight blurring introduced in camera can produce much-improved results during subsequent interlacing and downconversion to standard definition.

To Lindsay, working within the constraints of a cable budget, it was important to avoid a costly online conform session. This is the major reason that Lindsay opted to work in DVCPRO HD. The format provides for a simple and efficient workflow on the desktop; the editor works directly with the HD footage, not a low-resolution proxy (like DV) that would require the extra time and expense of an online layback session. To its credit, the Kona 3 card elegantly supports this streamlined approach. “It's beautiful thing,” Lindsay says.

Because many cable outlets require producers to furnish all original camera tapes as one of the specified deliverables, the issue arises how to fulfill this obligationfor P2, XDCAM, and HDD tapeless shooters. At The History Channel, several FireWire drives containing the off-loaded camera footage was deemed acceptable by network executives. At other networks, such as The Discovery Channel, a videotape backup of the original camera footage is usually required. Here again the Kona 3 can provide a viable solution, providing a simple tape-out functionality for archival purposes.

Defensive shooting

Whatever the decision regarding format and resolution, today's HD shooters must be confident that their choice will be recognized and supported downstream. Compatibility in postproduction can no longer be assumed, as I discovered recently after shooting several segments for Tobias Rehberger's latest museum installation in Milan and saw for myself the value of the Kona 3. The producers of ON OTTO specifically requested that I shoot 720p25 — an unusual non-standard format, even in Europe where 1080i50 is the norm.

My Panasonic HDX900 met the challenge nobly (see digitalcontentproducer.com/cameras/revfeat/handson_hdx for more). This worldly camera features a bevy of recording formats for the itinerant shooter, including 720p25. While this appeared to be good news, and it certainly validated my choice of camcorder, there was unexpected trouble looming ahead, downstream of the exquisite images flashing across my 50Hz/60Hz-compatible viewfinder.

The immediate issue: how to prepare the PAL DVD screeners for review in Europe. At first, the request seemed routine — until I considered that 720p25 is not supported via FireWire, thus making direct capture to the NLE out of the HDX900 or Panasonic AJ-HD1400 VCR impossible. Enter the Kona 3.

Kona 3 gets on the bus

The AJA Kona 3 card offers shooter-producers total confidence in its ability to move to and from virtually any HD or SD format or resolution. In my case, in order to meet the DVD screener request, I captured the 720p25 footage via SDI into Final Cut Pro uncompressed at 625/50.

One shortcoming of the Kona 3 has nothing to do with the card itself, with but the NLE or capture software often used with it. Only in the last few months has 720p25 gained support inside Apple Final Cut Pro, thus obviating the need to painstakingly set up the capture and timeline parameters by hand. Lack of downstream support in the leading editing and compositing systems is a major contributor to the HD labyrinth — the Kona 3 card being one of the good guys in this epic struggle.

One exception to the great versatility of the Kona 3 is the lack of built-in support for encoding output to HDV; the HDV encoder is not present in the Kona 3 hardware. In my opinion, this is not much of a limitation given the prodigious capabilities of the capture card in virtually all other respects. (Not incidentally, most HDV folks are usually trying to bail out of the format, rather than find ways to jump back in.) The upconverting of long-GOP MPEG-2 HDV to DVCPRO HD or other frame-based formats is now de rigueur for most professionals in serious applications, and the Kona 3 card can accomplish this feat with grace and aplomb.

Install the Kona 3 PCI Express card in your Mac G5 Quad or Mac Pro tower, and it works. Period. There are no drivers to load or convoluted configurations to execute or troubleshoot. Of course, some of this heightened reliability and compatibility may be attributable to the Mac OS itself, which is conducive to operational simplicity in general, but it also attests to AJA's near-obsessive commitment to producing a solid workhorse in direct collaboration with Apple.

The Kona PCI Express architecture offers increased bandwidth compared to the older PCI-X model. For the first time, a viable 2K workflow on the desktop is feasible. This is in addition to the format cross-conversion for mastering to the D5 24PsF as described earlier. P2 shooters using the HVX200 should take particular note of the Kona 3's optimal handling of 720p24 material for mastering output to 23.98 PsF D5.

A storage solution

With the advent of tapeless acquisition systems such as P2, the need arises for a versatile capture card such as the Kona 3 and a fast, reliable hard drive array and storage system. One solution that works well with the Kona 3 is the Sonnet eSATA PCI card. While the Kona can ingest a wide range of HD flavors, the Sonnet Tempo eSATA E4P PCIe host adapter provides the correlated function, providing the necessary bandwidth to capture HD-SDI streams in a high-speed RAID configuration of up to 20 spindles.

The HD challenge

In the face of proliferating codecs, frame rates, and resolutions, today's HD shooters face a daunting morass of choices. Amid this ever-growing chaos, it is reassuring to know that our link to the IT world is rock-solid, reliable, and versatile as hell. The AJA Kona 3 card has become the go-to solution of choice in these uncertain times when downstream workflow is not always clear or defined, and even for times when it is. The Kona 3 card, for example, has particular appeal to the various news outlets whose field crews shoot SD material for HD broadcast, because the card enables the increasingly necessary upconversion from 23.98 SD to 23.98 HD.

The Kona 3 offers an all-embracing and elegant solution that provides supreme functionality and peace of mind, especially when outputting to D5 or other tape format.

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