By Staff, January 17, 2008
AJA Video's Kona 3 video capture card was used with Apple Final Cut Pro as the editing platform of choice for the 20th Century Fox release Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. This follow up to 2004's Alien vs. Predator is directed by visual effects artists and commercial/music video directors The Brothers Strause. In the effects-heavy film, the iconic monsters from two of the scariest film franchises ever wage their most brutal battle yet in an unsuspecting Colorado town.
The Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem editorial team modified their existing workflow to integrate with the pipeline at visual effects studio Hydraulx, setting up an Apple Final Cut Pro editing pipeline for the film that relied heavily on AJA's Kona 3 card. AVPR was shot by Cinematographer Daniel C. Pearl, ASC, on 3-perf 35mm film. The FCP/Kona 3 setup allowed the Hydraulx team, led by Hydraulx visual effects supervisor Rob Hodgson, to cut the film at a 1080i resolution, lay down previews to a D5 deck and go out to an HD deck for studio reviews before finishing the film at EFILM with a 2K digital intermediate scan and film output. The pipeline employed five Kona 3 cards: a projection system, an editor system, a visual effects editor system, a utility system and an assistant system.
"The AJA Kona 3 cards are rock-solid and completely reliable," says Ryan Chavez, visual effects editor for AVPR. "As much as we push HD formats, the industry is still behind on what it can do with HD, so many times we still need to create a standard-definition tape or go from 1080i to 720p. Kona does it all with ease, and the quality is incomparable."
Chavez cites a number of reasons for choosing AJA Kona solutions with Apple Final Cut Pro. These include the performance and reliability of the setup, as well as the flexibility gained by making creative changes and outputting without a traditional online.
"We chose Kona 3 because of its flexibility, but it's the features AJA has started to add--such as the downstream keyer--that are making our lives easier," Chavez adds. "The real-time keyer saves us hours. We can load images with an alpha channel and it goes straight to tape."
"This project would have been very difficult without the AJA Kona 3 card," comments AVPR editor Dan Zimmerman. "It's capable of so much stuff you need as an editor on a day-to-day basis. The picture quality is amazing, as is the fact that it does multiple layers of real-time rendering and burns in matte cover-ups on the fly," he continues. "When we first saw the picture quality--full 1080i at DVCPRO HD codec, close to uncompressed--we were amazed. The Kona 3 is remarkable. Without it, we wouldn't be doing any of this."
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