IO-LA or HD10AVA?

[Lee Mceachern]

Probably a good idea. Thanks to each who gave me advice here.

Lee

[Jeremy Garchow]

The problem that I have with the LHe is no upconvert. As someone who is just getting started in HD, I would think that this feature would be a killer as people will being in their SD stuff to add to your HD program (and if you think they won’t, they will). Of course, there are other ways to upconvert, but that’s just more money. Getting the converters, in my opinion, is the best way to go, or as has been mentioned you get the io. The problem with the ioLA is that you can’t send that to your Kona3. With the io, you can, but then again it’s more money. Whatever you choose, you are picking AJA products so you don’t have to worry about the quality. It’s just a matter of what’s best for you. FWIW we have an io that acts as our audio and video SD DA. It works great. We are moving to a new office and are going to try and conglomerate all of our gear to a central location (machine room) and we will use the io as our main DA, but we will have to get converters as well as we are going to send SDI everywhere instead of analog everywhere. It’s more expensive, but it’s a lot easier to deal with one cable for video and audio then it is to deal with 3 cables for video and two or more cables for audio to every room.

Sorry, I digressed, but I was just using that as an example. You will be fine, you just have to figure out what you need. If you really don’t think you will be using the upconvert/cross convert features of the Kona3, then perhaps the LHe is the way to go. If you are unsure, I’d spend the money and get the Kona3 and the converters, or the Kona3 with the full blown io.

Jeremy

[Jeff Coleman]

Jeremy is right. The hardware upconverter is an extremely time-saving benefit of the Kona 3. If money were no option, the Kona LHe and the AJA FS-1 would be sweet. No matter how many rooms you had going you could always bring in the FS-1 to do the cross or upconversion or even use to do some dubs (get quite a few calls for that) in another room while you’re cranking away in the edit bay.
Let us know how it works out for you.

Love,
Jeff

Final Cut Studio 5.1, G5 2GHz Dual Processr, 2.5Gb RAM, AJA IO

[Lee Mceachern]

It’s great to have such detailed and thoughtful advice. I can’t tell you this minute what I’m going to do but I will re-read everything in this thread, the AJA marketing info, and probably add in a direct contact with AJA. All taken together, how can I go wrong? (Yeah, I know….there are a million ways. ha!)

Thanks, guys.

Lee

[Jeremy Garchow]

Do you have the Kona 3 already? Have you considered the ioHD?

[Lee Mceachern]

Hi Jeremy,
I don’t have the Kona 3 yet. I had looked at the IO-HD only briefly and I guess I was a bit put off by the portable form factor. I’m used to rack mount or at least shelf mount in the studio. But it certainly does appear to do everything I need.

Do you use this? I haven’t yet figured out what my configuration would be. Is Firewire a good enough protocol to get everything to and from the computer as well as if I had a Kona 3 installed? I guess I would monitor my HD image (on a Panasonic plasma) via the HDMI out? And I guess another “overall” question is whether you think I lose any functionality over the Kona 3/HD 10AVA combination that I had planned on.

Sorry for the list of questions. But here I am, on the verge on making purchases before the end of the year, and your (good) question causes a lot of potential re-thinking.

Lee

[Lee Mceachern]

Thanks again Jeremy. It looks to me now as though the IO HD would give me everything except the ability to capture uncompressed HD. I want to have that ability in the system. For that reason and the fact that the Kona 3 is so tried-and-tested, I think I will stick with it.

I appreciate your suggestion. It’s good to make me think!

Lee

[Jeremy Garchow]

Yes, I use the ioHD on my laptop. I have begun to wrap it in to our shoots for onset capture, which is totally sweet. On my desktop I use a Kona3 (I had it already before the ioHD came out, if I had to choose right now between the two like you are, it’d be a tough decision). I have succumbed to the ProRes pressure. I have switched from an uncompressed workflow to ProResHQ and it really has not let me down yet. It is a 10bit codec and I have been getting great results with killer rt functionality. The ioHD is basically a ProRes conduit and you are right that it doesn’t do uncompressed. It is a great little piece of gear, as long as you like ProRes. You need an intel mac to run the ioHD. If you truly need uncompressed (and I understand this), then the ioHD won’t suit you, although I think you should give ProResHQ a chance.

You can monitor through the many various connections, HD SDI, HDMI, analog component, and all the various SD connections. It’s truly versatile.

Jeremy