DeckLink HD Pro vs Kona 2 ??

[Walter Biscardi]

Do a search on this forum for this topic and you’ll find some thoughts. Find a VAR locally who has both products and test them yourself. I tested both products here in my shop and I went with Kona 2. Much of it is personal preference as the cards are about identical. I like AJA and the guys in support are always quick with an answer.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.com

Now in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[John Ladle]

kona 2 has up (any day now!) and down convert that is hardware based and very high quality among other things. the card earns it’s keep!

[Bob Zelin]

Both products are excellent, and I also have a preference towards AJA, but let me ask you a question. You are going to purchase a $3000 MAC G5, more in RAM, one or two Cinema displays at $2000 each, lots of storage for HD, which doesn’t include a host controller, an HD monitoring setup which will cost you several thousand dollars, a sync generator, and an HD VTR that will cost you at least $27,000. Why are you basing your decision on a $500 difference for the HD capture card?

bob Zelin

[Eric]

Good point, but I

[Joe Murray]

On the support side I have found AJA support to be excellent.

Joe Murray

[Jeremy Garchow]

I don’t know how important this is to you, but I know that BM cards do not have 24p down conversion, at least they didn’t when I worked with them. There are of course many ways around this (including using a deck), but it’s nice to be able to run the down conversion through the card as well as monitor HDSDI simultaneously through the card, especially if you don’t have a deck on hand all the time. We still make many SD (BetaSP) masters (but are posting more and more in HD) so this feature is key for me and the small shop i work for. As a former BM user, I am sooo happy I switched to AJA and Kona 2 for DVCPRO HD. It works much better than the BM cards in my experience.

On the upside of BM, there is more real time functionality with uncompressed HD and they also have the temporary solution of the RGB to YUV rendering problem from AE figured out, provided you use the BM codecs. I am hoping the release of quicktime 7 will address some of these issues.

The control panel for the Kona 2 is also a great feature as it gives you a visual map of the signal routing of the multiple digital ins & digital/analog outs. Very handy.

I have also switched our SD system to the io, which is another great product that I have had zero issues to report.

Happy cutting.

Jeremy

———–
AJA Kona2>HD10C2>D10A

Decklink Extreme

[Juan Salvo]

The BMD Decklink has 24p down conversion! You could set it manually by changing the output setting since the very first HD card. Now it’s a software enabled feature.

Since the cards are roughly the same… as far as drivers go I think the BMD drivers are much more mature, they’ve been around a couple of years more than the kona 2 drivers and I believe the current version 4.8 is much more stable and less buggy than the current Kona drivers 1.05.

BMD used to have a policy of doing sort of public beta testing… this resulted in some buggy drivers… they’ve since become much more strict about testing their new drivers and have for the last few revisions released mature driver updates. 4.8 is completely bug free.

But I think you’re fairly safe with either card.

[Gary Adcock]

[Juan Salvo] “they’ve since become much more strict about testing their new drivers and have for the last few revisions released mature driver updates. 4.8 is completely bug free. “

I have never met a product that is bug free…

[Walter Biscardi]

[gary adcock] “I have never met a product that is bug free…”

I’ll second that.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Creative Genius, Biscardi Creative Media
https://www.biscardicreative.com

Now in Production, “The Rough Cut,” https://www.theroughcutmovie.com

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Jeremy Garchow]

I was aware they had 1080i down conversion, but not 720p24.

I think Decklink Hd Pro also does the down conversion in hardware (as does Kona 2). It’s on the “cheaper” decklink cards that the down conversion is done in software.

Here’s a link:

https://www.creativecow.net/forum/read_post.php?postid=110739272692812&forumid=124&highlight=720%2Cdown

This feature is good to know if you will be working with 720 footage and need to down convert. K2 has BMD “beat” in that regard.

Cheers.

Jeremy