The Miami Dolphins used Aja Video’s Io HD to facilitate a remote HD editing solution during the team’s recent loss to the New York Giants at Wembley Stadium in London.
AJA’s Io HD provides 10-bit quality video over FireWire for Apple’s Final Cut Studio, and natively supports Apple’s New ProRes 422 format, enabling HD editing on MacBook Pro and Mac Pro computers.
The Io HD allowed the fans in Miami to view the London game live on HD Daktronic Video boards at Dolphin Stadium in Miami.
“The best thing about the Io HD is that I got it, plugged it in and it worked—it’s really as simple as that,” said Brendan Nieto, senior manager of production and programming for the Dolphins. “We would not have attempted to do this sort of live, quick turnaround HD production before the Io HD. The Varicam, a laptop and an Io HD are all you need to get the high quality results that previously demanded much larger, more cumbersome and more expensive solutions.”
The London game was the first regular season NFL game ever played outside of the United States.
Nieto needed a mobile HD editing system to take along on the trip. He wanted to get HD video into an Apple MacBook Pro laptop from various professional cameras including the Panasonic P2-enabled cameras and the Panasonic Varicam at the event. Nieto took HD SDI video straight out of the Varicam and into Io HD, recording it onto the laptop’s hard drive using the Io HD’s hardware-based Apple ProRes 422 encoding capability.
“With this setup we were able to edit material on the fly, and send MPEG 4 video onto our server,” Nieto explained.
The Miami Dolphins are a longtime AJA customer, with several Kona LHe cards in the team’s studio, based out of the its training camp facility.
