Relativity Media and Bandito Brothers' Navy SEAL action-thriller "Act of Valor," starring active-duty Navy SEALs, took the No. 1 spot in America in its debut weekend.
The film was independently produced by Bandito Brothers, an outfit known for its inventive filmmaking process, enabled by leveraging tools and technology by companies like AJA Video Systems.
"We used KONA cards with Adobe Premiere Pro to online 'Act of Valor,'" explained Jacob Rosenberg, Bandito Brothers CTO and post-production supervisor on the film.
The movie was primarily shot using Canon 5D MkIIs, and 35mm film was transferred to HDCAM-SR and rendered in Cineform. All of those source assets were combined into a single Adobe Premiere project based on an Avid EDL, and output as DPX files, and also laid-back directly off the timeline using the AJA KONA card.
Bandito Brothers used Adobe Premiere Pro to online the movie with KONA cards to enable a 2K workflow. The team powers its using AJA hardware with 2K over SDI and embedded 5.1 audio. It also leverages AJA Io Express to run both Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro from the same workstations, with files on the same partition, without having to swap out hardware.
