Recognized by the UK's Broadcast Magazine as the Best Post Production House three years running, ENVY Post Production offers its clients everything from editing to audio, finishing, VFX, DI/color grading from SD to HD, 2K and stereoscopic 3D -- to two fully licensed bars and a rooftop terrace, out of its three London locations. Their work spans television, feature documentaries, commercials and promos for clients including the BBC, Channel 4, ITV, Animal Planet, The Discovery Channel and Sky; promos and branding campaigns for Virgin Media, Film Four, E4, MTV, Nickelodeon; spots for brands such as Burger King, Samsung, Mitsubishi, Sega, Marvel, MasterCard, Budweiser and many more.

The infrastructure behind ENVY's creative services in 95 operational areas include Avid and Apple Final Cut Pro editing systems, Avid DS Nitris and Symphony, and Autodesk Smoke finishing and grading systems, Flame, Nuke/Ocula, Maya and Softimage 3D compositing and modeling/animation systems and a range of AJA solutions to keep workflows running seamlessly.

ENVY uses KONA I/O cards in their Apple Final Cut Pro, Autodesk Smoke and Flame systems. They also employ AJA Mini-Converters throughout their facilities. "KONA acts like our Swiss Army knife," said Adam Davies, senior engineer at ENVY. "It's useful for format conversions and supporting codecs and formats that aren't easily supported on some of the other systems."

The ability to manage multiple formats is particularly important as ENVY sees a rise in shooting on DSLR cameras. "Two issues that impact post are that there's a lot of compression when these cameras record H.264. The other is that there's no timecode available. H.264 is not a codec you can seriously edit in. At ENVY, one ethos that we follow is that we always pursue the highest quality route for any given workflow. One of the strengths we find in the KONA is the quality of the conversion engine on the card."

As ENVY continues to see camera formats that shoot in frame sizes considerably bigger than HD, Davies anticipates needing a high-quality scaling engine to deal with these formats. "We look forward to seeing new developments from AJA to help us with that," he said.

The KONA family is AJA's line of 10-bit uncompressed capture and playback cards for video and audio input and output. KONA 3G features 10-bit uncompressed video 3G/HD/SD I/O, HDMI 1.4a output for high quality monitoring, configurable SDI I/O mapping, 16-channel AES digital audio I/O and 16-channel SDI embedded audio I/O, realtime hardware-based conversion to support a range of SD and HD, dual-link HD, even 2K formats, a hardware downstream keyer and more.

Since 1993, AJA Video has been a leading manufacturer of high-quality and cost-effective digital video interface, conversion and Desktop solutions supporting the professional broadcast and post- production markets. With headquarters in Grass Valley, California, AJA maintains an extensive sales channel of dealers and systems integrators around the world. For further information, please see our website www.aja.com.