DoP Michael Sanders adds AJA U-Tap SDI to his kit

British cinematographer Michael Sanders has decided to include the capture device in his camera kit. AJA U-Tap SDI USB 3.0.

Los U-Tap of AJA are USB 3.0 3G-SDI or HDMI capture solutions that bring high-quality connectivity and video capture to laptops and workstations. Sanders has decided to use them given their versatility and variety of formats: "Whether the production team is abroad and cannot travel, or if we simply need to reduce the number of people in a room, it is increasingly common to create an output with the material collected by the camera. The U-Tap is an ideal tool for this task. It is portable and plug-and-play, and the most important thing is that it does not need a power supply, since it is powered by bus. In addition, it is very versatile: it supports almost all formats and frame rates imaginable. The fact that it also works with multiple frame rates, from 23.98 to 60p, means that I only need one device to serve a number of clients.”

The Sanders workflow gives you the flexibility to provide a stable connection so that the interview can take place regardless of the distance between the production team and the interviewee. For one of Sanders's first projects, a documentary, the director, production team and screenwriter were in the United States, but the interviewee was in the United Kingdom. To facilitate a real-time connection between the group, the camera output was provided through the U-Tap, which simply appeared as a source on Zoom. Connected to this platform, the production team was able to see, hear and monitor filming in real time. With the recorder's audio mixer connected to the camera, the U-Tap was able to extract audio from the embedded SDI stream.

Convenience and profitability

Sanders also livestreamed an earnings report from a European company using the AJA solution. Using two identical camera setups located in different offices within the same building, one for the CEO and one for the CFO, plus two U-Taps and a collection of other equipment, the team was able to send high-quality signals from the UK to the US over the Internet. In the US, UK signals were integrated with three different signals from other members of the executive team using vMix Call. Sanders says, “Because U-Tap supports 1080p, we were able to easily send our signal over the Internet at a quality high enough for a remote director to do very good chroma keying and unify the output from all five remote sites.”

Although remote workflows have been standard practice for Sanders for some time, he hopes that the advantages “that have become evident to the sector as a whole” throughout the pandemic will be “hard to ignore in the future,” especially the profitability aspect. Furthermore, he considers that this practice opens new doors to projects that were not viable before due to budgets, logistics and travel.

Whatever the approach to production, Sanders is confident that the AJA U-Tap will continue to be a key part of his workflow. "U-Tap is my work tool for remote production because I don't need to think about it. I just plug it in and it's there, available as a source in any application. It may sound boring, but what you need from any equipment in this industry is: reliability, ease of use and support when something goes wrong. With U-Tap, AJA offers all three," he concludes.