Review: AJA's Ki Pro Mini

AJA’s Ki Pro Mini is one of those must-have units in your camera bag. Few products offer such diverse functionality in such a bite-size form factor. You get great quality and good value with a unit that integrates nicely into any Final Cut (Apple ProRes) editing pipeline. The unit will appeal to the seasoned veteran and indie market.

At Zoic, the Mini’s big brother, Ki Pro, is a standard device on our virtual production pipeline for broadcast (we’ve used it on the ABC show V for the past two seasons). Ki Pro Mini presents many of the advantages of its full-size brethren while offering a subset of functionality in a smaller, lightweight package.

MOUNTING OPTIONS

I was very pleased with the size, weight and feel of the unit. The Ki Pro Mini is light enough to be mounted on-camera and the body is well engineered and thoughtfully designed. Ki Pro Mini can be mounted to AJA’s optional cheese plate and 15mm rail system just about anywhere on or around the rig. With additional cheese plates it’s even possible to sandwich two of them together for stereo or virtual production.

In my tests, I experimented mounting it below, behind and even above the camera. I opted to mount it on its side instead of vertically, leaving the memory magazines accessible from the back of the camera. Then attached a cheese plate below the unit to mount to rails and a cheese plate above to mount an Anton battery attachment. Set up and configuration was pretty simple using a few screws and an extra 15mm bridge. read more...