"We did a lot of research and ended up standardizing on the KONA card because it's reliable, it has regular firmware updates and it can handle anything that the future is going to throw at us," said Olly Wade, delicious edit's Director of Facilities. "We recently brought in Smoke for Mac and learned that it uses the KONA card. We feel really good about the fact that the cards we bought five years ago are still at the top of the market."

delicious clients bring the shop everything from NTSC footage, 24- and 25-frame projects, files that need HD/SD up- and down-conversion, and a range of custom formats and frame sizes.

"With KONA, if I'm doing an HD job and someone brings in SD footage I up-res it on the spot. I don't have to spend time rendering an SD shot in an HD project -- or vice versa."

The shop relies on an Apple ProRes workflow throughout the creative process. "We digitize as ProRes, use it as an intermediary format for keying, color correcting, DVDs and that kind of work, and output it. ProRes goes from Final Cut into Smoke and out. You're talking about files that are a fifth the size of uncompressed and they're the same quality. It's absolutely brilliant," said Wade.

 

 

delicious makes particularly creative use of KONA's Control Panel software. Because of its simplicity, everyone from senior editors to junior assistants can easily change the input, formats, output, and even references coming in. "We were doing an auto show recently where the client wanted to show 32x9 format screens behind a particular car. Rather than putting masking tape on monitors, I just put a 32x9 mask in the data stream, and I didn't have to do any rendering. The client was looking at a 32x9 image on the monitor and we were able to save time and money."

KONA software plug-ins for Adobe After Effects, Photoshop and Premiere, too, deliver continual conveniences, as delicious editors can quickly review clips in progress on broadcast monitors to check color space. "AJA updates the software continually, to keep up to date with new things around the corner, like stereoscopic 3D. When we get that work, we know we can address it."

While KONA plays a role that remains largely unseen by delicious edit's clients, it's a critical one for Wade and his team. "The way KONA fits into my workflow is the way I want a video card to fit in -- it's kind of invisible. I don't want to think about what my card is doing; I just want it to do it -- I'm busy editing! KONA is transparent and can cope with any situation that walks in."

About AJA KONA
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.

About AJA Video Systems, Inc.
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.