Relativity Media and Bandito Brothers’ Navy SEAL action-thriller Act of Valor, starring active-duty Navy SEALs, was independently produced by the media company using technology from 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. “Overall, we’ve had great experiences with AJA video cards and I/O devices, they’re super reliable, sturdy and last forever–in fact we’ve never had hardware failure with any of their gear.”
Act of Valor combines stunning combat sequences and up-to-the-minute battlefield technology, showcasing the skills, training and tenacity of the real Navy SEALs.
The movie was primarily filmed using Canon 5D MkIIs, with film 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 of the timeline using the AJA KONA card. Bandito Brothers used Adobe Premiere Pro to online Act of Valor with KONA cards to enable a 2K workflow. The team powers their theatre using AJA hardware with 2K over SDI and embedded 5.1 audio and also using 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.
“AJA offers the best realtime support for the variety of formats that we work with: Cineform, DPX and more,” added Mike McCarthy, director of Technology at Bandito Brothers.
Act of Valor marks the third film project produced by the partners behind Bandito Brothers, and follows the release of their two highly-acclaimed documentaries, Step Into Liquid and Dust to Glory.
Picture credit: Relativity Media
