AJA Video helped facilitate the HD coverage of the recent American Football Game held at Wembley Stadium for US fans of the Miami Dolphins in its match against the New York Giants. AJA provided an Io HD that enables ingest from HD cameras for field editing in Final Cut Pro. “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 Miami Dolphins, writes Fergal Ringrose.
“We would not have attempted to do this sort of live, quick turnaround HD production before the Io HD. The Panasonic 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.”
Nieto heads up the production of all of the Miami Dolphins’ HD material for the stadium video boards, the team website and a local broadcast network. The London game was the first in-season game ever played outside of the US. Nieto needed a mobile HD editing system to take along on the trip and to get HD video into an Apple MacBook Pro laptop from various cameras including the Panasonic P2 enabled cameras and the Varicam.
He took HD SDI video straight out of the Varicam into Io HD, recording it right 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 MPEG4 video onto our server so that local fans could watch our features at a viewing party on the HD Daktronic Video boards at Dolphin Stadium in Miami,” Nieto explained.
