io HD or Kona3

[Jeremy Garchow]

[adrian sustaita] “*io does not need the actual kona3 card to work right? (i know it sounds silly but someone threw off last night by telling me that you still need the card…. just want to doublecheck) “

No, as a matter of fact, the ioHD and the Kona 3 cannot currently reside on the same machine.

[adrian sustaita] “*aside from the io not playing back HDV and blocking all other FW ports in the same bus is there any other major backdraws for the io vs kona3 “

The ioHD really wants ProRes or ProResHQ footage in HD. If you are comfortable working with ProRes, then the ioHD is great. It does not do Uncompressed HD, 4:4:4 or dual link and frame geometries higher than 1080. If you need any of those, you should go with a Kona3

[adrian sustaita] “*don’t care (at least for now) about portability, i care more about being able to input anything (hd,dsi,dvd, downconvert, upconvert etc)and to put it back on tape after editing
“

The Kona3 is a digital input device only. If you need to capture anything analog, you will have to get converters. the ioHD has analog and digital capture capabilities.

[adrian sustaita] “*i’m still a bit confused about ProRes i know that the io does everything at this res, is there any disadventage on using FW vs Component? “

For what format? If talking dv, Component will allow you to put your dv footage in to a bigger color space bucket and will generally lead to cleaner captures in my opinion. If talking HDV, you will get out the hdv codec nastiness. In SD, the ioHD can do any codec you want from DV to Uncompressed. It’s only in HD that ProRes is almost mandatory.

Jeremy

[Adrian Sustaita]

Hey Jeremy thanks for your response you certainly cleared those points for me….by the way i saw your story about how you used the ioHd in a project…..very cool stuff!
Adrian

[Jeremy Garchow]

[adrian sustaita] “by the way i saw your story about how you used the ioHd in a project…..very cool stuff! “

Oh, thank you. We have been using a lot for that very purpose and it’s been great!

Jeremy

[Tim Allison]

Adrian,

We have both a Kona 3 and an Io-HD on two separate systems. The Kona 3 will give you more options in the HD rhelm, like uncompressed HD and dual-link 4:4:4 stuff, but we don’t need any of that right now.

The Io-HD will give you more overall options. In this crazy world we live in where most of us still do standard def projects while trying to move to HD projects, the Io-HD gives us incredible flexibility. I call the Io-HD the “swiss army knife” of connectivity. We presently have an XDCAM deck, a Betacam Deck, and a HDV deck all hooked up to our Io-HD. In fact, we have discovered that the Sony deck does a better job of downconverting from HD to SD than the Io does, so we have both HD-SDI and SD-SDI connectivity between this deck and the Io-HD, for a total of four separate video input options into the Io-HD. You can’t do that with a Kona 3.

Betacam decks and the Kona 3 are a pain in the butt. It’s certainly possible, but you have to use a lot of external converter boxes to make it work. The same applies to using the component out connectors on a Sony M25U HDV deck. It will work, but only with a bunch of converters. Betacam decks and Io-HD are very simple hook-ups.

[Adrian Sustaita]

Tim, many thanks for your response you certainly hit the spot, i could not agree more that this is crazy post world these days and the way you describe the io as the “swiss army knife” is just perfect, you can even dig in DVDs thru the SVideo input! and like you i don’t think i will need uncompressed HD, dual link and 4:4:4 for now, so that being said i have decided to go with the ioHD done deal…Now i’m just looking at my storage options and then i’ll dive right in and buy the io. Thanks again
Adrian