AJA Drives Capitol Television Broadcasts

When Capitol Television in Rhode Island enlisted service engineering company Finer Associates to upgrade its facility, the company integrated the AJA KONA LHe Plus I/O card with AJA Control Room software into five, custom-built record and playback servers.
"The KONA cards and AJA Control Room software make the whole Capitol Television setup click; without them, you couldn’t provide a real-time broadcast feed in this scenario without spending at least another $120K,” said company leader Steve Finer.
"AJA Control Room features like clip thumbnails make it very user-friendly, which was key for Capitol Television, where reliability of equipment and ease of use is paramount."
Capitol Television records and broadcasts Senate and House chamber meetings throughout Rhode Island on the state's cable system.
Filming is conducted via eight Sony HDC-P1 HD cameras, with four cameras positioned in each of the two main chambers and three other meeting rooms outfitted with Sony BRCH900 robotic cameras.
Every camera feeds to a Ross Video Carbonite production switcher and through a Ross Video router, where the feed is offloaded to any one of the five playback and record servers. The SDI signal is then sent to the KONA LHe Plus I/O card in the server and back through the router.
All recorded, converted or compressed data is stored on a 36 TB RAID system that was built using off-the-shelf enterprise components. Telestream's Episode Engine software converts the DVCPro HD output of the KONA cards to H.264 or MPEG-2 for the on-air server. All captured footage is archived on LTO tape. SAN sharing program Metasan allows all five playback and control servers to communicate with storage, and a sixth server houses the RAID.
"Capitol Television needed to be able to playback, record, name and archive files. AJA’s KONA cards and Control Room software enabled us to develop a very clean and elegant solution, with AJA Control Room as the glue connecting all six servers and allowing the workflow to operate seamlessly," Finer concluded.
"Other popular solutions that offer the same functionality would have more than doubled our client’s cost and been overkill for their needs."
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(IT/MH)