Luxor Takes Mobile Production Truck Digital

posted:

30/10/2012

AJA Ki Pro Rack and Apple FCPX

Providing on-the-go production and post services for live television series such as Iceland Idol and Master Chef Iceland, is no easy feat, but one-stop creative shop Luxor is always up for the challenge. A part of Saga Film, Iceland’s largest production house, Luxor’s talented team captures and edits more than 2,500 hours of content per year for everything from TV programs and films to live concerts and events. When the studio recently decided to take its mobile production truck digital, Luxor Manager Bragi Reynisson turned to the AJA Ki Pro Rack.

In October, Reynisson began plans to phase out the use of Betacam tapes in the truck and embrace a file-based workflow to transition from SD to HD. To ease the transition and enable HD recording in a 1RU rack mount form factor, he purchased seven Ki Pro Racks. “ProRes is our main codec, so we spent a lot of time researching ProRes recorders, and Ki Pro Rack won hands down. It’s one of the most affordable, reliable solutions on the market that can fit neatly within our limited production space and deliver the high-quality ProRes we need,” he shared.

Luxor ordered its Ki Pro Rack units less than two days before beginning production on Master Chef. Within 40 hours, all of the equipment was at Reynisson’s doorstep. He was able to unpack, install, adjust and get the units up and running in under an hour. “Ki Pro Rack worked out of the box. Setup and configuration went off without a hitch,” he said.

Often on a tight production schedule, Reynisson and his team constantly are on the move in their custom built outside broadcast (OB) truck. Equipped with five Sony D50 cameras and seven Ki Pro Racks, he and his team gather hours of footage each day. The footage is taken back to the studio for editing in an edit suite equipped with ten Mac workstations running Apple Final Cut Pro X.

Master Chef Iceland

“Budgets are tighter than ever, and we’re being asked to do more in less time, so any technology that can accelerate our workflow is a huge boon,” Reynisson said. “Ki Pro Rack has been a great addition because it’s allowed us to increase the quality of our production while also freeing up time to focus on other creative tasks.”

Since integrating Ki Pro Rack into its workflow, Luxor has experienced tremendous time-savings. Reynisson added, “Importing all of our beta footage could easily take up to 60 hours before, but with Ki Pro Rack, we can easily shoot everything in ProRes, take the files straight from our truck and send the footage straight off for editing, which has really accelerated the post process. We’ve already made our investment back in three weeks with the time we’ve saved.”

He concluded, “The Ki Pro Rack is really something special. It’s made our transition to digital so smooth. AJA’s support team has also been amazing to work with and quick to answer any questions we might have. I appreciate that level of exemplary service, especially in an industry where time is money.”

About Ki Pro Rack
Ki Pro Rack is the ultimate tape replacement device for video facilities, broadcasters and mobile truck operators. Ki Pro Rack enables recording of high-quality, edit-ready files for the fastest path from camera to edit in a 1RU rack mount form factor. Ki Pro Rack uses the same SSD or spinning disk storage modules as the Ki Pro with recording capacities scaling up to 750GB. Ki Pro Rack simplifies the acquisition-to-edit workflow by creating high-quality Apple ProRes 422 or Avid DNxHD files which can be used directly in most standard professional editing systems without the need to import or transcode files.