Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/28735
On-Set Post VENDATA SOLUTIONS Scott Heames, in Van Nuys, CA, is a video production truck engineer who started his own side business less than a year ago, providing tapeless solutions for HD-shot projects. Vendata Solutions (kiprorentals@gmail. com) offers AJA’s Ki Pro units for on-set acquisition.The com- pany has 16 KiPros, and according to Heames, demand in some cases has ex- tended beyond its own inventory. The production truck he works with is started going through the rental process with clients. [It’s] grown quite a bit.They are being requested much more in the field for eight-, nine- and 10-camera shows.” AJA’s Ki Pro uses 250- or 500GB remov- able drives for storage.A FireWire 800 port allows for the transfer of media. Heames says the Ki Pros are best suited for HD shoots.“As long as it’s HD-SDI or standard def,” he explains of the acquisi- tion. “It’s pretty robust as far as what’s input.You can feed it an analog in. It will do upconvert, cross-convert. I did a comedy show two nights ago. It was shot in HD 23.98psf, so it will do different frame rates.” For shoots that prefer to use one of the new digital cinema cameras, Heames says, “If you can get an HD tap out of the side of it, which most of those do, it will record to that.” A typical on-set workflow will pair one Ki Pro to each camera. “Initially, we started doing two Ki Pros per camera ISO, just for back up, and lately it’s just been one Ki Pro per camera. I’ll do two line record back-ups. It all depends on the show and their needs, and ob- viously their budget too. A lot of Vendata’s Scott Heames with his AJA Ki Pros and MacBook Pro controller. The units are well suited for multi-camera shoots. regularly involved with live shows — The Emmys and Grammys are two of them — as well as on reality television programs. “We were finding that a lot of clients were coming in and looking for solutions be- sides tape, as far as their acquisition goes,” he notes.“That’s where the Ki Pro came in. I had a chance to demo one, when it first came out, on a Disney show, and then when they released the software for Version 2, it became a little bit more reliable and robust for multi-cam work. I started my own sepa- rate company and purchased a few, and these shows are pilots, so they want to keep their costs down.They will do a main line record, a couple of ISOs, and maybe back up the line record on a tape machine if they feel comfortable doing that.” Heames feels the Ki Pro’s niche falls be- tween high-end broadcast gear and stacks of Mac Pro towers. “In the higher-end broadcast, you have Profiles, the Grass Val- ley Summit server.You have an EVS.These are all very high-end, server-based record- ing devices. They will record a variety of codecs and provide instant management and playout of those clips. For live televi- sion and sporting events, you can’t beat them,” he says. “Once you get into tapeless, you get into a Mac Pro with a Kona card in it, for in- stance. You can digitize an HD-SDI feed into your computer and go that way with it, but putting a Mac Pro on a TV truck or stacking eight Mac Pros up to ISO record eight separate cameras is really not easily done on a live show.The infrastructure is not there. If you are out in the field, you are not going to set up eight Mac Pros with separate monitors just so you can acquire eight ISO cameras. “Suddenly the Ki Pro comes out, and that’s a little device with controls on the front panel that every tape operator is famil- iar with. A basic menu structure gets you around, and they added a Web interface to it.You can genlock the playback output of it, which is very cool.That becomes a much more viable option in the field to record your camera feed to.” To date, the most demanding project he’s provided units for involved 13 Ki Pros going at once. A MacBook Pro helps to manage the set up. “I put them all on a switch and put them all on individual tabs so you can have a good visual representation of all the settings on each machine,” he explains.“Once you have everything dialed in and ready to go, you just pick one machine as your master and slave everything to it, kick it into record and you are off and running.” Back in November, Heames’ Ki Pros were used for a Taylor Swift concert that was shot and edited together for an ABC package. He’s also working with the MTV show Lucha Libre, which records 10 tape- less feeds. And a few days before post caught up with him, he worked on a Laugh Out Loud comedy show. 38 Post • April 2011 www.postmagazine.com