Nashville-based live-event production company Camp Digital recently mobilized a huge team to capture over 500 hours of video for Life is Beautiful – a three-day music festival in downtown Las Vegas that ran from Oct. 24-26 spanning over 21 city blocks. The festival featured 67 musical acts ranging from the Foo Fighters to Lionel Ritchie, Kanye West and more. In order to facilitate Internet broadcasts of the performances, Camp Digital relied on file-based HD/SD recording devices from AJA Video Systems‘ Ki Pro family.
“We decided early on that Ki Pro would be the recording medium for all of the stages and trucks, and we have over 40 Ki Pros on site working the event,” explained Tom Gregory, co-founder, Camp Digital. “We were early adopters of the first Ki Pro when we moved to a non-tape environment and more recently installed 16 Ki Pro Racks into our mobile truck. In addition to all of the workflow benefits, they’re huge space savers.”
Camp Digital assembled a crew of 97 people to work the festival, including technical directors, camera operators, audio specialists, directors, motion graphics artists, editors and broadcast engineers. In addition, the company brought together several mobile broadcast truck vendors to collaborate on the project, including High End TV, NEP, CVM Productions and Video One Productions, all with their own crews and engineers.
“We started doing multi-cam on tape in 2006 and regardless of format, every one of our clients was editing in ProRes or DNxHD codecs, and at the time, that required the added step of capturing tape footage at a post facility, significantly increasing costs and turnaround time,” said Adam Mills, owner, High End TV. “With the Ki Pro recorders, we cut out hours of capturing tape since they record to the native NLE codec, and as a result we’re getting better quality images and saving a ton of time and money.” Mills also uses AJA KUMO routers feeding the monitor wall and all point-to-point routing on his mobile production truck.
Across the five mobile trucks and multiple crews, there were also hundreds of AJA Mini-Converters in use, everything from Hi5 HD-SDI to HDMI video and audio converters to HD5DA distribution amplifiers. Using AJA’s FiDO SDI/Optical Fiber Mini-Converters, all of the trucks were interconnected via 14,000+ feet of single mode fiber moving signals around the festival and getting it back to the master control location.
“Much of the work that we do these days is for live streaming, and those clients don’t treat the production quality any different than something that’s being delivered through traditional broadcast channels,” said Gregory. “AJA products deliver the quality that our clients demand, plus they’re bulletproof and made to be used over and over again. Not only do they withstand the rigors of bouncing up and down on the road, everything from the Ki Stor drives to the FS1 and Mini-Converters are also made to be plugged and unplugged hundreds of times without failing.”
