Say Hello to KiPro, say Goodbye to Digitizing!

Say good bye to digitizing! Meet the KiPro from Aja:

Awww! Breath a sigh of relief- finally, no more agonizing hours of digitizing! With the new KiPro you are ready to edit as soon as your wrap. No more tapes! Isn’t this what you and your clients have been wanting for years? Yeah it is!
For a long time here at Studio B, as I am sure is true with your team, it was always a time-suck and a money-waster to digitize footage after a shoot. Not only was it a pain to dedicate an edit suite and an editor to the digitizing process, it was always tough to justify invoicing your client for this time, they will always question that cost. And this is not to mention the cost of and the ware and tare on a VTR. Bottom line is, digitizing was the last thing you wanted to do after a shoot.
All that has gone away now!
This thing is amazing. It is just what we all had been calling for, for years now, and yet again, Aja has heard these calls and made a great device. They always seem to nail it over at Aja, and this new “box” from them is no exception.
The KiPro, if you don’t know, is a small “on board” recording device that will record any signal in Apple’s ProRes codec. You can hit this box with anything from a composite signal from an older prosumer camera to an HD-SDI signal out of your new Varicam and it will record it to a small drive that you can edit from directly!
It’s like magic!
Not only will it eliminate digitizing and wasted time, it will breathe new life into your old tape based cameras and effectively bring it up a notch to the level of card based cameras.
Because the KiPro records at ProRes (HQ) which is pretty standard these days for creating your Final Cut Pro projects, it will match up all your footage so you don’t have too. In other words, no more converting different formats or codecs, it’s just good to go.
For example, here at Studio B, we have a new Varicam 3700, which shoots to P2 cards. When we ingest the footage from these cards, we “log and transfer” them into ProRes HQ quicktime files. But then we are often shooting B-roll or second camera with our older HDX-900, also from Panasonic. With this tape based DVCPRO camera, we used to not only digitize these tapes, we would need to convert them to ProRes as well. This would slow our edit down by hours, if not days. But now, we use the KiPro, along side the HDX-900, record straight to ProRes and now it’s even faster than the Varicam.
The other beautiful thing about using the KiPro is that you are tapping the output, which is typically wired to the sensor, not the VTR of a camera. What this means is that, because the BNC or Component output of a camera is NOT compressed, that you are getting a HIGHER quality image. Generally speaking the compression ratio is quite high on older tape cameras, and then you also compress slightly on the ingest as well. This will bring the quality of your next project way up.
If you have a project that simply has a small turn around time – perhaps, your client wants to fly away with the digitized footage, this will make it a breeze. All you would need to do, is set the KiPro’s drive to transfer footage to a second hard drive, while you wrap your cables and your client walks away with the footage…And at a super high quality nonetheless.
This device is also a great value. For a relatively cheap rental, you can continue to use your slightly older camera, but bring it up to the level of the latest generation of card based cameras. It is a great addition to any production, no matter the size of the crew or budget. And, just think about how much you’ll save on tape stock.

I was sold on this thing when it was still just a glimmer in some engineer’s eye. And seeing it in action I am absolutely in love with it. The interface is straight forward, the work flow is very simple and integrating it is a breeze- JUST ONE CABLE!
Come see this thing in action for yourself, come on by the Studio or give me a call for your next rental! RENT THIS TODAY!