AJA showed up at Inter Bee 2018 in Tokyo ready to talk up its new Kona 5 card and show off 8K HDR workflow, demonstrating two different approaches to 8K production that use its Hi5-12G SDI-to-HDMI mini-converters to monitor signals on an 8K HDMI monitor.
Workflow diagram depicting 8K playback with HDR transforms.
AJA
For HDR workflow, 8K material would be played back from a Keisoku Giken KRS-8K Plus player, which is essentially a control unit housing and coordinating the functions of four AJA Ki Pro Ultra Plus devices. The KRS-8K outputs 8K content via four 3G-SDI connections from each Ki Pro Ultra Plus (for a total of 16 3G-SDI connections) that feed a rack of four of AJA’s FS-HDR appliances. Ganged via AJA’s free Control-Link software, the four FS-HDR units can perform necessary HDR conversions and frame synchronization before outputting 8K HDR content via four 12G-SDI connections leading into four Hi5-12G mini-converters. The four HDMI outputs from the mini-converters feed into an 8K HDMI HDR Sharp monitor for display.
Workflow diagram depicting 8K playback with Kona 5.
AJA
A Kona-powered version of the workflow is a little simpler, playing out 8K from a computer workstation equipped with the new Kona 5, which was introduced at IBC. The Kona 5’s four 12G-SDI outputs feed four Hi5-12G mini-converters, which again drive an 8K Sharp display. (AJA said its SDK makes 8K capabilities on the Kona available to its developer partners.) AJA’s demos show Kona 5 working in concert with Colorfront’s QC player to output 8K from an HP workstation. Update: After this story was originally published, AJA clarified that this demo also supports HDR playback — the Hi5-12G mini-converters just need to be set for HLG or HDR10 as appropriate to match the encoding of the footage coming out of the Kona 5.
Also at Inter Bee, AJA released v15 of its Desktop Software for Kona, Io and T-Tap, a free download that features support for the Kona 5 as well as the new AJA Control Room full-screen playback system.
The AJA Kona 5 is now shipping for an MSRP of $2,995.
