What exactly AJA Kona TV anyway?
by Michael Pierre
on
Jun 3, 2007 at 1:30:20 am
I've been opening .movs from my desktop and playing them through Kona TV/Kona Card to a nice CRT monitor. The quality is great! Before I had to bring these clips/.movs into a timeline in Final Cut Pro in order to veiw them full screen on the CRT.
I'm assuming this is the idea behind Kona TV.
I noticed there isn't much documentation/instructions for it?? Strange.
I haven't had much luck playing .H264 with strange internet compressed dimensions though?
Is there a way around this?
Is there a "missing guide to Kona TV" .
Re: What exactly AJA Kona TV anyway? by JeremyG on Jun 3, 2007 at 2:04:57 am
[Michael Pierre]"I'm assuming this is the idea behind Kona TV."
Yep. You hit the nail on the head. Kona TV allows you to play any codec that Final Cut Pro can play out in real time. Web compressed codecs like h264 are not supported, just like real time playback of h264 content is not supported in FCP.
Kona TV is a handy little app that essentially opens up quicktime to be viewed on an external monitor through the Kona card.
Re: What exactly AJA Kona TV anyway? by JeremyG on Jun 3, 2007 at 2:56:43 am
Think of the Kona Tv as a souped up Qucktime app. H264 plays through quicktime on the computer. Since the KOna card cannot understand the H264 codec, it can't play it out to monitor, but since the computer does understand, it will display it on the computer monitor. If H264 was a video editing codec, the KOna could play it.
Re: What exactly AJA Kona TV anyway? by Michael Pierre on Jun 3, 2007 at 3:03:10 am
ahhh yeah, that does make sense.
Is there a way to convert h264 to quicktime (after downloading) while still maintaining the quality so I can play it through Kona TV on my big monitor?
Re: What exactly AJA Kona TV anyway? by JeremyG on Jun 3, 2007 at 3:08:45 am
You can sure try. Run it through compressor and use the advanced format conversion options. The thing is with those h264s, most of them are at a funky aspect ratio so you might have some stretching/cropping that might look weird once getting it a format that the Kona is happy with.
Re: What exactly AJA Kona TV anyway? by John Pale on Jun 3, 2007 at 3:56:23 pm
[JeremyG]"The thing is with those h264s, most of them are at a funky aspect ratio so you might have some stretching/cropping that might look weird once getting it a format that the Kona is happy with."
Yes. You can convert them to another codec, such as DVCPRO-HD. I edit an award show for movie trailers and have done a great deal of this. Most (but not all) of the trailers on Apple's site are in the extremely wide 2.35:1 aspect ratio...however, if you use the letterbox filter in Compressor (or the new padding feature Compressor 3), you can properly letterbox them within a 16:9 frame. Some of the trailers are blown up/cropped to 16:9 already (you can identify them by checking its properties), and appear full frame, others are in the 1.85:1 aspect ratio.
Re: What exactly AJA Kona TV anyway? by John Heagy on Jun 20, 2007 at 3:38:55 pm
One very cool thing that KonaTv does is play out a simultaenous alpha when playing an Apple "None" compressed movie with an alpha channel. An "Animation" movie works too depending on your processor.
