[Will Pisnieski]

I worked with Rudy from AJA support for several weeks on this issue only to end up back at square one. We tried various tests that AJA recommended such as capturing directly to our computer’s internal drive, trying other codecs, frame sizes etc. Ultimately I gave up on getting a solution from them.

I wasn’t referring to codecs inside the Kona control panel rather we created a custom codec in the Final Cut Pro software and captured footage via firewire NOT HDSDI from a Panasonic 1400 deck. This is how we were able to capture HD footage into our server at offline RT Photo Jpeg NTSC correctly. Basically we can’t accomplish this feat using a Kona card.

I’ve spoken to Harris tech support on multiple occasions and your solution is the first I’ve ever heard. I’ll give that a try.

[Will Pisnieski]

I pressed AJA on this issue of support for offline RT Photo Jpeg NTSC for over a month, however their tech support seemed baffled by the problem and recommended that we stick with the version 6.5 drivers on the systems that still need to capture offline RT standard definition until they worked out the kinks. This was back in February and I’m still waiting for an answer. Our workaround has been to bypass the Kona control panel altogether when capturing offline RT and create a custom capture preset that allows us to capture offline RT photo jpeg via firewire 400. We also still have a handful of digitizing stations that have the older control panel installed on them as well.

As for the disk storage manager and the Kona control panel, you’re absolutely correct they should have absolutely nothing to do with each other, however we’ve experienced numerous drop frame errors when both the Terrablock manager was running along with the Kona v6.5 control panel. Unfortunately the disk manager has to remain running at all times on Facilis in order for the drives to update and we can’t avoid accessing the Kona control panel all of the time. Facilis Terrablock is aware of the problem however they’ve been unable to find a solution and were waiting to see if AJA came back with any solutions.

This is not the first time we’ve come across AJA control panel problems but normally our our issues are hardware related such as the Kona cards will on a regular basis freeze up our Harris DL-860 color legalizer when a connection is made between the edit bay and the legalizer through a patch panel. Once again, this is another problem that AJA is aware of however they stand by the notion that the problem is a Harris issue and Harris says it’s an AJA issue. We as the client are just stuck in the middle trying to get something to work.

[Will Pisnieski]

Unfortunately the new Pro Rez proxy files sizes are too large for reality tv shows to work with that shoot 100+ hours per episode. Our server is already 100+TB because of the amount of shows we post each week. Offline RT has to remain a viable codec for the future of reality tv, especially with network budgets shrinking and them having no desire to offer production companies rental costs for media storage in the budgets. The fact that offline RT is not working properly in Final Cut Pro v7.0.1 is an AJA problem. Clearly AJA is behind in the times and has not properly tested all of the codecs in FCP7 with their video cards.