I have the AJA Kona LHe, a KL breakout box and a Convergent Design HD-Connect LE converter box. I use a Canon HV-20 as a deck going firewire into the converter box and coming out in SDI with embedded timecode and audio through the KL box to the Kona capture card. Using this configuration I have been able to routinely and successfully capture in DVCPro HD 1080i/29.97 in Final Cut Pro. It is a memory hog, though: 1.75 hours captured in this codec will consume 100 GB of disk space. Any serious project requires a RAID 5 storage system with at least 4 TB.

I also have Avid Media Composer on the Mac Pro, but the AJA Kona card will not communicate with it. Unfortunately Avid's support in this respect and for the Mac platform in general has been sub-par.

I'd like to know if anyone has a similar hack for capturing in Avid via SDI.

Howard,

We've been using both the H1 and a HV10....connected via firewire to the Convergent HD Connect. Going directly into our Avid Adrenaline...we capture in DNxHD 220 or 145.