AJA Ki Pro Rack, on tour in South America, with The Cure

En la última gira de The Cure, Jason Harvey, fundador de Short & Spikey ha supervisado la producción audiovisual a lo largo de ocho ciudades con ayuda de la tecnología de AJA.

Short & Spikey, compañía especializada en ingeniería de vídeo para espectáculos en vivo de alto perfil, se ha encargado de la grabación audiovisual de la gira de la banda británica The Cure por América del Sur. Fundada por Jason Harvey, ha prestado sus servicios en producciones de Lady Gaga, Cher, Madonna, Bon Jovi, Paul McCartney o Christina Aguilera, or citar algunos, tanto de forma independiente como contratista para PRG Nocturne, un importante productor de espectáculos en vivo.

On The Cure's latest tour, Jason Harvey supervised audiovisual production across eight cities.

For this setup, Harvey wanted to go with a powerful and proven solution that would address the pressures of operating in less technically advanced locations, such as Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Colombia and Mexico. Since more than 300 hours of recording were planned throughout the tour, tape was not an option. Editors working with Harvey encouraged him to build a pipeline that would support coding. Avid DNxHD and, in this case, Ki Pro Rack from AJA It fit perfectly.

Harvey acknowledges that he has traveled thousands of kilometers with AJA equipment, “even hitting it in airplane and truck loading operations. There is obviously great appeal in trusting a manufacturer that is known and trusted, and furthermore, a digital workflow was a no-brainer here. We were going to be dealing with a huge amount of footage, so we needed a recorder that could ably manage the data as well as withstand the physical demands of the road, so the Ki Pro Rack was a natural choice. The DNxHD codec was also crucial for daily intake.”

Multicam

Although Harvey was very familiar with Ki Pro technology, this tour was the first time he had used Ki Pro in a rack for multi-camera recording. He relied on up to 14 Ki Pro racks and one Ki Pro to record each performance, which captured between seven and fifteen cameras, depending on the location of the concert. The typical show setup carries ten camera sources into ten Ki Pro Racks with a mixer line and backup, for a total of 12 outputs. Due to varied availability depending on region, Harvey often had to mix and match different high-definition cameras, as equipment and equipment were hired locally.

During the show, Harvey monitored every signal making sure the Ki Pros were working perfectly. Once recording was complete, data was transferred to AJA KiStor Docks via Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 connections with five 8TB G-Tech drives connected to five Mac laptops.

Each show accounted for about 350 GB of data per camera, adding up to more than 7.5 TB of data after eight shows. Once the masters were created, the data was transferred for backup, preparing the recorders for a new concert.

Harvey has assured that “by working digitally we saved a lot of time, especially considering the enormous amount of material we were capturing. Additionally, we were able to offer live H264 encoding of the entire show in HD 1920x1080 30p compressed in MPEG-4, so from a simple USB drive, Robert Smith and the director could review all the material and anticipate future shows. The flexibility of the Ki Pro Rack is great.”

In addition, Harvey had a multi-screen system with all the cameras in a 4×4 configuration with signals directly coming from the Ki Pro Rack (BITC output), so the director, Tim Pope, could see all the signals on multi-screen as if was on a mobile. Recorded in 720, Pope could review the quality of the files, facilitating subsequent editing by doing offline/online post-production back in London.

Harvey concludes that “AJA's technical support has been impressive. Whenever we ran into a problem, AJA was always very practical and quick in her response. The whole experience reinforces that AJA technology always does what it has to do.”

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