AJA Io 4K Plus, essential equipment for Video Village Miami shoots

Frank Collins, head of the production company specializing in video support for commercial and music video shoots Video Village Miami, uses a selection of AJA equipment such as the Io 4K Plus or the Kumo 1616-12g to record, capture, playback, edit and process video input and output for his shoots.

After a 20-year career in sound mixing, Collins turned to Video Village Miami in 2019 to expand his scope of work and support a wide variety of audiovisual productions. His primary job is to make sure that all parties involved, on and off set, are seeing the same images. In this way, creatives can view and collaborate on shots taking place on set on their own monitor, separate from the director’s screen.

Collins typically receives the client’s video signal from the camera transmitters via a wireless transmission system. The signal then goes from the camera to the wireless receivers. From there, it is wired back to his system, and that same signal is sent through an AJA Kumo 1616-12G router and an AJA Kumo control panel to an AJA Io 4K Plus, and sent to the computer running QTake. The signal is then sent back to an output device. “AJA Io 4K Plus just works; it’s recommended by QTake and does what it says it’s going to do,” he says.

When the production requests playback of the content, Collins is able to deliver the footage immediately from the point where the action was requested. To do this, Collins normally records a 1920×1080 proxy file and plays it back; however, the Video Village Miami head built his system with Io 4K Plus to support up to two 4K video feeds if necessary. In his own words, “When I bought my cart, mobility and reliability were top of mind, which is why I love that Io 4K Plus is compact; I have two of them and they fit nicely into my rack.”

“Reliability was also a consideration because my gear needs to be stable in many different temperature environments, from outside on the beach to the Everglades, in a cold studio, etc. Florida is extremely humid and can affect electronics, plus the cart I use has to be durable because it gets banged around during transport. All of our equipment is subjected to many elements, but it needs to hold up; for one of the last projects I worked on, the special effects team made it rain. I only use quality products that can withstand those elements and demands, and my AJA Io 4K Plus, Kumo, and Kumo Control Panel continue to run uninterrupted, even with everything they’re put through,” Collins explains.