AJA And RES Deliver Visual Spectacles

Commanding an audience’s attention is challenging in public settings, yet museums, art galleries, and event venues are breaking through the noise with technology-driven visual spectacles. Immersive art exhibits, as an example, have taken the world by storm in the last year, as droves of people have signed up to see the works of legendary artists come to life via video projection. Such installations require specialised knowhow, foresight and backend planning. Based out of London, the creative and technology services of Realtime Environment Systems (RES) provide video and projection mapping for museum, concert, and live event projects. And for this they employ AJA KONA video I/O cards for 4K and 8K playout.

RES’ project portfolio includes work currently on display at the National Museum of Qatar, and leaving its creative stamp on previous spectacles for the 2020 Japan Games torch relay, Coldplay World Tour and Eric Prydz ‘HOLOSPHERE’ show. In translating client visions to realities, RES Founders Dave Green, Trey Harrison, and Mark Calvert found themselves using a similar set of tools for video playback, and saw an opportunity to commercialise their work. Out of this realisation, they launched HIVE in March 2022. The new technology company develops cost-efficient, portable media control solutions for driving projection and LED displays in AV environments. 

HIVE offers four different media players, including PLAYER_3 and PLAYER_4, which support 4K and 8K playback and include an AJA KONA 4 card and an AJA KONA 5 card respectively. In addition to supporting 4K and 8K video via built-in KONA 4 and KONA 5 cards, HIVE’s PLAYER_3 and PLAYER_4 products also include an NVIDIA GPU. Systems integrators and venue teams simply connect the media player box to their display technology, and log into HIVE’s web-based application. An interface then allows users to upload video files for playout directly from a phone, tablet, or computer, and set up and/or edit the playlist or timecode cue list directly from the app. 

Commenting on the design, Founder and Technical Lead Dave Green shared, “I’ve been using KONA cards for more than a decade now because they provide consistent high quality video playback, even for the most complex installations. Integrating them into our new media player boxes just made sense. Our media players eliminate the need for massive racks of expensive, complex hardware setups, and AJA KONA is a key enabler, packing a big punch with a small footprint.” 

PHOTO CREDIT: Antonio Pagano Photography