DVCPRO HD Acceleration. AJA KONA 2

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DVCPRO HD ® Acceleration

Developed in close cooperation with Apple, KONA 2’s hardware takes a portion of the DVCPRO HD codec processing load off the CPU, allowing more processor time for Real Time effects in Final Cut Pro HD. KONA 2 also has hardware support when capturing from HD-SDI to the DVCPRO HD codec.

KONA 2 along with Final Cut Pro HD and the DVCPRO HD codec bring real time HD production power to the desktop.

With KONA 2, any HD-SDI source can be captured using the DVCPRO HD codec—giving you online HD quality at remarkably low data rates (between 6 and 15 MB/sec.) and allowing the internal PowerMac SATA storage to be used for

HD capture, playback and even RT effects. Of course, you will get even better performance and more RT when using a fast SCSI or Fibre Channel array, but this allows HD to be used where only SD would have been considered due to budget or time constraints.

How does the KONA 2 accelerate DVCPRO HD? Panasonic DVCPRO HD uses a 2-step process in the codec. First, the HD image is scaled to a lower pixel count horizontally, and then the reduced raster is compressed using a DCT based codec.

For example, for 720p, DVCPRO HD reduces the raster from 1280x720 to

960x720, and 1080 from 1920x1080 to 1280x1080. The reason for this is a favorable trade-off between resolution (that is often not there anyway), and a much more efficient codec due to the smaller raster. Critical to this is a proper high-quality scalar to reduce the raster on capture, and scale it back up on playback. KONA 2 performs the scaling step in hardware for both capture and playback.

Because KONA 2 has AJA’s scaling engine, these steps are performed at a very high quality level. Also, since the CPU does not have to do the scaling, additional

RT is possible when outputting to HD-SDI.