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Do I need a LHe?
I’m new to the HD scene… been working in SD for the last 3 years and now that I’m making the jump I want to make sure I’m equipped to work quickly and efficiently.
Here’s what I’ve got now:
MacPro 2.8Ghz 8-core, 16GB RAM, 8800GT
FCS 2, After Effects, Cinema 4DI’ll be working in 720p 24 and I’m wondering how adding a LHe to my setup would effect everything. I was looking for a solution to output sound to balanced XLRs for my monitor speakers and it seems like the card would do the trick there. The Kona website isn’t much help, so I’m hoping someone here can clue me in.
Thanks in advance!
Charlie
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4 Replies
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The Kona LHe is a fantastic product, and a steal for the price. About the only things it doesn’t give you is hardware upconversion and dual-link HD-SDI. I bought my LHe around a year ago and never looked back. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
You are correct – it will give you balanced XLR analog audio out.
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But if I’m not using it as a capture card. Am I really reaping the benefits of its hardware acceleration enough to justify spending the $$? (I’m recording uncompressed HD to solid state so no need for a capture card).
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Approximately $1500 gets you HD and SD capture and monitoring (both digital and analog), realtime hardware downconversion and DVCPRO HD and HDV hardware acceleration. Without the Kona, you have no way of monitoring HD on a preview monitor other than using FCP’s Digital Cinema Desktop preview, which is not color-accurate and which does not properly display interlaced content (should you be working with 1080i). The Kona can also convert HD to SD on the fly for viewing on an external SD monitor.
If $1500 is a lot of money to you for that functionality, then you don’t need the card.
The Kona LHe page on AJA’s website has a pretty comprehensive explanation of the Kona’s hardware acceleration.
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It’s not a price issue… I just don’t want to spend money on something I’m not going to get my $$ out of for what I’m doing; but it seems like that’s not going to be the case! I’ll pick one up lather this week! Thanks for all the info!
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