I'm Tony Cacciarelli, I'm the product marketing manager for AJA.
And at NAB 2014 we've had a really big announcement.
We've been holding it in for a few years now, it's actually four years in the making.
We finally released our first camera.
It's a whole new world for us, it's something kind of new and exciting and not something
that we went into lightly.
We actually did a lot of research and a lot of development to come out with something
that we feel is a camera that addresses an area of the market that really wasn't necessarily
getting all the representation it deserved.
We wanted to have something that's a real open camera, ergonomically designed, easy
to use but also kind of geared at a more professional level and something that working
professionals can get into, get some fantastic imagery out of but still not have to mortgage
the house to get into it.
So we wanted to make it kind of affordable.
The camera itself is called Scion and we released it Monday here at the show and the buzz has
been fantastic.
It's just been unbelievable the amount of people that we've had coming in, the response
has been great and I think part of the reason for that is some of the technology that we've
put into it.
Again, we took a long time to really think through the camera market, look at what was
going on, kind of evaluate it and come up with something that was a little bit different
while still being very much the same.
We went with an over the shoulder design.
First of all, the ergonomics of the camera are really great.
It's something that if you look at most cameras, smaller form factor camera, the first thing
you need to do is get something so you can throw it up on your shoulder if you've got
a camera that is going to have something like a PL mount lens on it.
So the PL lenses are the high end lenses and working in 4K, this is a 4K camera.
So if you're going to work in 4K, you got to put some good glass on the front of it.
That high quality glass can really make sure that you're getting the images that you need
and 4K will find every flaw.
So you really want to have a good lens on it.
The nice thing is PL mount lenses are something you can rent really easily.
They're expensive lenses, but the rental houses are well stocked with them.
If you need a particular one, you can grab it, throw it on the front there and you're
good to go.
But the shoulder mount area here allows you to put it right up on your shoulder real easily.
No gear really necessary beyond that.
And then the connections, all of the different connectors and things that you see on the
camera, we spent a lot of time coming up with where they're going to be placed exactly
and what those connectors are going to be.
So you'll notice that every connector on the camera is an industry standard connector.
The BNCs are the kind of connectors you find on professional equipment and BNC cabling
is everywhere.
They're really easy.
HDMI is obviously a very open standard spec and you find that on all kinds of different
monitors.
XLR for audio, you can see this is really geared at a professional market, but everything's
really open and accessible.
All of the different accessories that you have out there that people have been making
for years are going to go right on this camera.
We did standard rosettes up at the front.
These are really solid mounting points for putting on things like handles that are going
to support a lot of the weight of the camera, as well as cheese plates on the top and the
bottom.
These are pre-drilled holes that allow us to attach in accessories like our included
handle, view finders, any of the other things, battery packs can go on the back and gives
us just mounting points to put all kinds of accessories on the camera and really trick
it out for exactly what you need.
But again, all standard stuff, so there's thousands of different bits and pieces out
there that you can put on this camera right away, right out of the box.
You don't have to buy a lot of special stuff.
The sensor on the camera is an APS-C sensor.
That's basically a 1.4 offset from a 35 millimeter sensor, so very close to 35 millimeter sensor
at the front.
There's some actually kind of interesting stuff on that sensor.
We put two filters on it that are built into the sensor.
One's an infrared filter.
That filters out infrared light, which can kind of pollute the sensor a little bit and
alter the color that you end up with, and we also put in an optical low-pass filter.
What that does is it removes a lot of that high-frequency noise.
With 4K resolutions, it really pulls out a lot of detail, and you want that detail,
but you don't want it to create more ray patterns in the image, and that filter actually helps
with that.
One of the nice side effects of that is that you can use standard ND filters up at the
front here on a matte box.
You don't have to get the more expensive NDIR filters, so that's all taken care of.
For file formats, on the back end of the camera, we actually have a slot where our media goes.
This is our pack media.
It's the same media that we used on our KeyPro Quad, which was a 4K recorder that we built
before the camera, and it's a sturdy SSD media.
It's in a reinforced case with a connector that's very durable, stands up to being inserted
and removed a bunch of different times, so we want something that's going to hold up
under the rigors of production.
That records ProRes media at 4K resolutions up to 30 frames per second at ProRes 4444,
and we can do 60 frames per second at ProRes 422.
We can also do ProRes 422LT and proxy resolutions as well, and we're not restricted to 4K as
well.
We can do HD, 2K, even down to HD resolutions.
Even if you're not looking at doing 4K work right away, you can work with a camera like
this at HD resolutions, switch to 4K at any time.
One of the really interesting things there, too, is when you're working at HD resolution,
we still use the full sensor to capture the image, and then we downscale that to HD.
You don't have to worry about recomputing your focal lengths based on using a smaller
portion of the sensor.
It's always using the full sensor, and then HAA has been doing down conversion for years
at very high quality, so we get that high quality down convert, and you get a fantastic
HD image off of this as well.
As you can see here, we get that original
If you liked this episode, please stay tuned for my full review as I walk the floor of
the 2014 NAB show.
