For the past seven years, production company Windowseat Pictures has been the official broadcast partner of the Vans Triple Crown of Surfing, the Super bowl for pro surfers that takes place annually in Hawaii. This year the company leveraged a tapeless production workflow using the Ki Pro portable tapeless recorder and Io HD video I/O device from AJA Video.
The production employed a crew of more than 60 people over two weeks that directed, produced, shot, created graphics packages and edited surfing and lifestyle segments from the six-week long competition. Much of the material was produced live for Web and mobile broadcast and as edited programming for Time Warner Cable VOD and Fuel TV.
Moz Mirbaba, executive producer for Windowseat Pictures, said that this year they produced content faster and with greater efficiency thanks to multiple AJA Ki Pro units and Io HD products, which were used to capture live feeds directly to servers in 1080i HD compressed with the Apple ProRes 422 codec.
Windowseat Pictures produced more than 100 surfing videos from the event for the Vans website alone and continues to produce four one-hour highlight programs that will air on Fuel TV through April.
The AJA Ki Pro is a portable, tapeless video recording device that records high-quality Apple ProRes 422 QuickTime files onto computer-friendly media. Because it features SD/HD-SDI, HDMI and analog inputs, users can interface with virtually any type of camera. The AJA Io HD brings HD/SD editing to the MacBook Pro and Mac Pro using Apple’s ProRes 422 technology and compatibility with Final Cut Studio and other QuickTime-based applications. Io HD offers a full range of professional digital and analog I/O connectivity as well as up/down/crossconversion, all at 10-bit hardware-based quality.
