AJA Ki Pro

[hoosierdraft]

Anyone using the AJA Ki Pro? Thinking through using it for sermon capture for use at a satellite campus via sneakernet and then for midweek editing for web use.

[bpalermini]

I've rented one twice. It works great. We fed it HD-SDI and analog audio. Files it makes are very nice and easily transferable and editable in FCP. I'd be sure to use genlock if you are making a long recording.

[tdangelo]

My only gripe with the Ki Pro is that if you lose input signal, the Ki Pro will immediately stop recording.

[[Director] drew ryan]

We are using them for this same purpose. We are doing the Center screen lockdown shot and then our side screens are the imag from the main campus. The biggest issue that we run into is in playback. Right now there is not a way to jam sync the playback. So, we are using a DNF controller and making sure everything is getting sync signal. I would recommend getting the Solid State Drives. The regular drives spin down and require waking them up a minute or so before playback.

[hoosierdraft]

Originally Posted by drew ryan

The biggest issue that we run into is in playback. Right now there is not a way to jam sync the playback. So, we are using a DNF controller and making sure everything is getting sync signal.

Drew, can you explain this issue and solution in more depth?

[[Director] drew ryan]

I will give it my best. Being an audio guy might make it a bit less than perfect . . .

Basically the KiPro was made as a capture device that is highly mobile. The cool thing is that on record you can slave multiple unites to a master unit so that whey you push record on the master, they all spin up and record the same time code.

There is not a utility onboard to make this happen with playback. So, we are using a DNF 4000CL controller to tell the 2 units to fire at the same time. When we first tried this there was almost always a frame or several offset. We figures the drives were spinning down and needed to wake up. Once we bagan to do that the offset got better. We then figured out how to provide sync to the units and that sealed the offset issue. We still need to wake up the drives a minute or so before putting them into use. My theory is that if we use solid state drives then there will be nothing to wake up.

Hope this helps.

[Jay M]

We use 7 of them to record our services. They are pretty great for the price, but you need to make sure they are in a cool environment. We capture in Prores HQ at 720p, then edit in FCP. We are using the 500 GB drives and I suspect that we have a bad batch of them because we do get failures from time to time. We never had failures when we used 250 GB drives while recording standard definition.

Overall, I'm happy with them, but there are some other great products out that might even be better.

Aja's support is second to none. That alone would make me recommend them to anyone.

~Jay

[hoosierdraft]

Thanks Drew. Are you shuffling the drives then to playback on another KIA unit at your satellite?

Jay, explain more what you do with 7 drives please.

[Jay M]

Not much, we just like to be redundant. We only use 3 cameras. Each camera feeds a Ki Pro, then the Ki Pro output feeds a second Ki Pro. That's 6. The seventh Ki Pro records the line edit from the SDI switcher.

That may not be the best way to do redundancy, but it has saved our back sides a few times. As was mentioned before, if a Ki Pro loses SDI, it stops recording. In that case, the attached backup unit kept going. If a drive overheats in the primary unit, it will still pass video to the second unit.

Our Pastor is not likely to re-preach a sermon just because video wasn't recorded, so we think the redundancy is worth having.

~Jay

[Gracetech]

Why not record using a H.264 Pro Recorder and just play the file back on a computer? Just tossing that out there. The Ki Pros work great as a mobile capture device but there are cheaper alternatives that do the same thing.

crt

[hoosierdraft]

Originally Posted by Gracetech

Why not record using a H.264 Pro Recorder and just play the file back on a computer? Just tossing that out there. The Ki Pros work great as a mobile capture device but there are cheaper alternatives that do the same thing.crt

With the Black Magic unit connected to a computer ingesting the video stream? Stream then saved to a file that is transferred to another computer at satellite campus for playback?

[Gracetech]

Yes and Yes. Makes sense to me and cost alot less. I'm sure if you got out a magnifying glass you could see the difference in playback quality. Chances are no one sitting in the seats will know the difference. I mean the H.264 encodes to a BluRay quality stream so it's pretty stellar and HD/SDI connection means no loss of quality between components.

crt