Nifty gadgets for easing workflow bottlenecks

Matthew Causon, AJA Europe, in demo mode

As this video shot last month on the AJA Europe stand at BVE 2017 shows, while cameras might steal the headlines there are always some very interesting boxes you can attach them to that will make your production life easier worth hunting out. 

AJA Europe's Matthew Causon is your guide as he talks you through a couple of the newish products the company had on its stand. First is The Helo, an H.264 recording and encoding device that can take a signal in from a camera, and record it and output it as an H.264 stream at the same time. And what makes that an interesting proposition is that it can do it at different bitrates: so you can have both your optimised output for live streaming and your high-quality master for later post or archiving. Bitrates vary from 32kbps to 256kps.

Then there's the U-Tap. Simply put this provides USB 3.0 powered SDI and HDMI capture and, as Causon says: "It means you're able to get a professional video signal into a computer situation without having to go through too much heavy video technology."

See it below.