AJA KONA Lhe to play HD & Black burst

[Matt Larson]

1 — If I get the card, will I be able to play an HD timeline to my SD monitor? I’m assuming that I can’t but will get a single frame in pause to view.

>>Absolutely! I did this for the first few months I had a Kona 2 but no HD monitor. Make sure that FCP is set to playback the HD sequence, and then set the Kona to downconvert the output to the monitor.

2 — Can I downconvert from a deck to another deck without digitizing? (You don’t need a card for that, do you?)

>>You are right in that it has nothing to do with a card (everything to do with the deck). I’ve used a DVCProHD deck and an XDCamHD deck and both of those have the option to do live downconverts. I think it’s a pretty standard feature, definitely check with the specific deck though.

3 — Will I need a black-burst generator? I read there is one selling for $300 but do I need it since I don’t own any decks? I try reading about those devices but can’t seem to grasp the purpose for it.

>> You already need one once you asked your second question. There are much better blackburst authorities on this forum than me, but for lack of a better term, BB keeps all of your gear in sync. If you ever plan on using the Kona with a deck or going deck to deck (Like question 2) you want a BB. Buy the Gen 10 from AJA, plug it in to your Kona and any decks you get in the future and don’t think about it anymore.

4 — Final question, when people downconvert to SD & edit it, why would they upconvert back to HD? Doesn’t this lose quality?

>>Once you downconvert to SD your footage will not be HD quality again. So in that sense you are right. But, your SD footage will not look any worse once it has been upconverted to HD. Does that make sense? If I have an NTSC version of an ad that I edited in HD, I will upconvert it to put the NTSC version on the same HD master tape as the HD edited spot when I am doing backups. It won’t look as good as the HD version, but it won’t look worse than dumping it off to Betacam or some other NTSC format.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Matt Larson] “>>You are right in that it has nothing to do with a card (everything to do with the deck).”

You can also do this with the Kona board by putting it into Input Passthrough Mode. We do this when we want to make dubs from our Pansonic 1400 to our BetaSP machine. I like the quality of the downconvert through the Kona a bit more than the deck itself.

[Matt Larson] “3 — Will I need a black-burst generator? I read there is one selling for $300 but do I need it since I don’t own any decks? I try reading about those devices but can’t seem to grasp the purpose for it.”

Yep, you can pick up the Horita 50BSG for around $300 but the AJA Gen 10 is the better buy right now. Tri Level sync so you’re set for today and the future.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html

Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi

[Scott Robert]

Ton of thanks to you both for clearing it up.