In Broadcast - May 2013 - 66


I N T E R N A T I O N A L

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 19 - MAY 2013

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InMEDIA

AJA Fuels ‘King of Hammers’ Race
E

very year in February, more
than 170 of the most formidable
Ultra 4 Racing teams assemble in
Johnson Valley, California to battle
it out in front of 45,000 spectators
for the chance to win the world’s
most challenging off-road race –
The King of Hammers.
Sponsored by Nitto Tire and
broadcast live to 600,000 online
fans, the competition combines
every off-road discipline imaginable
– from desert racing to rock crawling
and short course.
When Hammerking Productions
Executive Director Dave Cole
decided to broadcast the event live
for the ﬁrst time two years ago, he
called upon former pro athlete turned
freelance producer Dan Campbell-

66
The King of Hammers race takes
place in Johnson Valley, California

The King of Hammers is hailed as the world’s most challenging off-road race

Lloyd. Having collaborated with
some of the biggest names in
extreme sports production –
including Red Bull Media House,
Matchstick Productions and
Freeride Entertainment – Dan was
up for the challenge. 2013 marked
the second year that he and his
crew helped broadcast the event
live in SD on-site via jumbotrons and
online. HD footage from the event
was repurposed later on to cut TV
shows and a DVD.
This year’s event was shot on a
combination of eight Sony NEX700, NEX-VG20 and EX3 cameras.
Leveraging the AJA Ki Pro Mini

digital video recorder, Dan recorded
segments of the race in the Apple
ProRes 422 codec in the field,
utilising an ATV and helicopter. The
device also played an integral role
in his playback workﬂow, which
included an AJA Io HD, Apple
MacBook Pro, Thunderbolt monitor
and drive, eSATA drive and Firewire
800 hub. Signals from ﬁve satellite
microwave dishes in the ﬁeld, one on
the side of an ATV and another in the
helicopter were all fed to a TriCaster
850EX multi-camera production
system using a combination of 30
AJA Mini-Converters for a large
variety of conversion needs.

“When broadcasting live from
remote locations, having tools
from AJA is awesome! The gear is
so reliable; it never misses a beat,”
he said. “If one thing went down,
we would’ve been in major trouble,
because the whole live broadcast
would’ve gone under. There’s no
way we could’ve done what we
did without it.”
Using the Ki Pro Mini, Dan’s
team captured footage in the ﬁeld,
brought it back and laid it into an
SSD feed straight away.
“It was almost like instant replay;
because of the Ki Pro Mini, we could
put footage into the show like it was
live,” he said.
Facing high winds, snow and
rocky terrain throughout the race,
having a rugged digital recorder
like the Ki Pro Mini proved essential.
“You couldn’t really ask for a tougher
climate, but the durability of the Ki
Pro Mini was spot on. It just worked
– even when sitting in piles of dust
and facing super harsh weather
conditions,” Dan said. “It’s also so
easy to use; you can put it in almost
any vehicle and away you go.”
The team also used AJA MiniConverters extensively to retrieve
live feeds from each microwave dish
to the TriCaster.

Pablo Rio Real-Time 4K And Beyond
Q

uantel announced at NAB that
its Pablo Rio high-end colour
and finishing system supports
the AJA Corvid Ultra video card,
facilitating workﬂows at 4K 60fps
and beyond. This is the ﬁrst time that
Quantel has offered interoperability
with any third party video card.
In addition, Quantel also
demonstrated Pablo Rio running the
latest NVIDIA Kepler architecturebased Tesla K20 GPU accelerators.
Tesla K20 GPUs provide about twice
the performance of the previousgeneration Tesla GPUs based on the

NVIDIA Fermi architecture, and 10
times faster performance than the
latest CPUs. Both developments
reﬂect the open, software-based
strategy that enables Quantel
to take full advantage of all the
latest advances in off-the-shelf
computer technology.
The demonstration on the stand
also showed Pablo Rio working in
real-time with 8K material, doing
colour correction, applying LUTs and
even resizing on the ﬂy to 4K for
playout via the Christie 4K projector
on the stand. The images looked

Quantel’s Pablo Rio was shown working on both 4K and 8K footage at NAB

simply
stunning
and Pablo
Rio handled
it all with ease.

Corvid Ultra
Real-Time 4K
The AJA Corvid Ultra is being
offered by Quantel as an option
in Pablo Rio turnkey systems and
is available from AJA resellers
for software-only versions where
customers configure their own
system. Much more than just a
video card, the Corvid Ultra is a
professional solution that provides
broadcast standard connectors on
a rack-mounted break-out box.
The Corvid Ultra card enables
Pablo Rio to deliver real-time
4K video output to 3840 x 2160
(quad HD), 4096 x 2160, 3D, 2K
and more, and is the only solution
available today that is capable of
supporting 4K at 60fps.
“Pablo Rio delivers an excellent
open architecture solution for
professional colour grading, editing
and effects, and we’re pleased to
facilitate streamlined 4K and high
frame rate workﬂows for Quantel
customers, who can now beneﬁt
from Corvid Ultra as part of their

AJA Corvid Ultra video
card facilitates workﬂows
at 4K 60fps

hardware configuration,” said
Nick Rashby, President, AJA
Video Systems.

Kepler Power Up
Exploiting the processing power
enabled by the Kepler architecture
to the maximum has allowed
Quantel’s engineers to enhance
real-time performance on Pablo Rio,
realising a processing gain of 60100% in colour, effects and ﬁnishing
operations. The result is massively
enhanced throughput, which will
make even 4K working at 60fps an
interactive, client-friendly process.
The Tesla K20 GPU accelerators
are being offered by Quantel
as standard on new Pablo Rio
turnkey systems as well as being
supported in software-only versions
where customers conﬁgure their
own systems. In addition, existing
systems can upgrade to a Tesla K20
accelerator at any time according to
their business needs.

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In Broadcast - May 2013

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