AJA solutions become part of BC Live Productions’ core

The production services company BC Live Productions has found أجا solutions to be an indispensable partner in its day-to-day business.

The Los Angeles-based company BC Live Productions produces a variety of events, ranging from film premieres to Hollywood concerts, eSports championships or reality shows. For the vast majority of productions, company founder Brett Collins opts for AJA solutions: “We rely on a lot of AJA products that we source from Key Code Media, both in production and our rental pool. We use Fiber on a lot of projects so that we can transmit audio and video across longer distances, so FiDO Mini-Converters have been great for video transport; the four-channel throw down is super convenient. We also do a lot with KUMO routers, and the Ki Pro GO multi-channel H.264 HD recorders are fantastic for when clients want files right away – they can just grab the USB drive and go as soon as the program wraps.”

Although the BC Live team initially developed remote workflows for their international corporate clients before the pandemic, they quickly moved to offering remote kits when work on local live shows ceased. Demand for the remote kits skyrocketed, and the company’s solutions helped get productions like RuPaul’s Drag Race or content for the NBA and NFL back on air: “The pandemic challenged many production outfits, BC Live included, to embrace distributed ways of working, and now that people have realized that everyone doesn’t have to be in the same place to create content, it’s becoming easier to keep pace with consumer demand for content. As clients become more aware of new possibilities, however, the requests become a little more adventurous. We try to stay ahead of the curve and anticipate their asks, so that we’re always providing the best solutions possible. Part of that is evaluating new technologies and implementing them where it makes sense, like video over IP, which is now totally ubiquitous.”

Part of these new challenges for his customers involves delving into the world of UHD: “There are also endless instances where we need to spit out different flavors of video, which is easy to navigate with our AJA gear, even as we step into the 4K world. Our Ki Pro units are also super popular as rentals. In general, using AJA gives me comfort because I know they take their engineering seriously, and their tools hit the trifecta of metrics: price point, reliability, and elegance.”

The Arcane event for Netflix

One of the BC Live biggest engagements to date has been the launch event for Arcane، أ نيتفليكس animated series set in Riot Games’ League of Legends universe. Collins and his team streamed the red carpet event, which was held at Riot’s Santa Monica campus, on Twitch. His team handled everything: the initial broadcast of the event, the premiere of the live show, and a broadcast for European audiences streamed in 22 languages simultaneously.

To achieve this, the team recorded the programme in ProRes on a tower housing several AJA Ki Pro Ultra Plus recorders. A master video file containing 22 different languages was included for transmission through an encoder farm, each of which was recorded on a Ki Pro. For rebroadcast, the team wrote code to play the Ki Pro’s as a group, and the outputs were sent to different encoder channels to go to different regions.

Furthermore, Collins sees الملكية الفكرية as the future of live production. For this work, he continues to rely on أجا: “Plugging in BNC is great for reliability, but with IP video, you can also include a lot of ancillary data, and it’s incredibly scalable. Fortunately, we have exceptional network engineers so adding IP capabilities has been relatively smooth and we’ve been able to thrive in the remote world. Each new venue or OB truck we interface with has their own set of connectivity protocols, so we need to be nimble and make sure we’re able to work with all kinds of formats. With gear from manufacturers like AJA, we’re well situated to navigate between protocols, platforms and codecs.”