Cogent records for posterity its conferences with the AJA Helo Plus

IL AJA Helo Plus H.264 recording, encoding and streaming solution enables Cogent, an event specialist, to capture live footage of its productions for on-demand delivery to its clients.

Mark Beazley, Cogent’s chief video engineer, and his team have developed a workflow that allows multiple sessions to be recorded for live and on-demand consumption. One of the latest projects he has worked on was the recording of more than 100 talks over the course of a five-day conference held by the U.S.-based National Kidney Foundation.

Because the client demanded tight deadlines, Beazley knew he would have to work quickly and nimbly, and with manageable file sizes so that he could copy the data quickly and edit it. Although the team had used AJA Ki Pro HD recorders in the past to record sessions, they decided that the AJA Helo Plus was a more suitable solution for the job. As the engineer relates the experience: “We love Ki Pro recorders, and the Helo Plus interface is very similar to it, so it was an easy transition. Helo Plus records in H.264, which delivers beautiful quality video and great audio but requires much less time to copy over to our editing stations.”

Beazley and his team passed the presentation signal and audio from each mixer through to a Helo Plus in each room via HDMI or SDI. With this workflow, Cogent was able to handle a ten-megabit-per-second stream for recording and a five-megabit-per-second RTSP stream. In addition, all of the computers and Helo Plus units were networked and operated through the Cogent management system, so the production company’s staff could connect to one of the computers if they needed a stream on demand, open the stream on the local computer, and display it on a particular projector.

“We copied all the recordings over the network, so we could edit and hand them over to the client in less than 48 hours. It was a really straightforward, smart workflow that made our work much easier. (…) Helo Plus has been a fantastic addition to our workflow. We love it because H.264 is the de facto standard and provides great video and audio quality, so it’s a win-win,” concludes Beazley.