What is AIR One™ from Advanced Image Robotics?

What is AIR One™?

AIR One™ is a groundbreaking remote production platform consisting of robotic digital cinema cameras on the front end, and a full cloud production platform on the backend. It’s cloud-native, meaning we’ve built it from the ground up to minimize equipment and optimize distributed computing. From offsite or onsite, you now have full camera control with real-time precision pan, tilt, zoom, focus, and position set & recall via intuitive touchscreen UI, and a full cloud switcher that can feed any CDN. No need to roll a truck! Everything connects over a standard gigE LAN and broadband ethernet. On the back end, AIRcloud™ acts as a central hub for project setup, permissions, routing, media storage, communications and shoot day management.

How long does it take to setup?

Because of the self-leveling head and ability to ship fully assembled, you can pop it out of the case and be up and running in under a minute.

What's the ROI?

We’ve consistently demonstrated more than 50% savings in production costs in our test cases. But that’s not all! Because a lot of the work can now be done remotely by a distributed team, AIR One™ reduces the number of crew needed to travel. Because crews spend far less time setting up and breaking down equipment, you get more engaging content, faster, which translates into more eyeballs on your work.

What is AIRcloud™ and what does the subscription include?

AIRcloud™ is our remote production operating system. It securely connects your onsite cameras to your offsite crew and enables you to run industry-standard production apps like vMix®, Adobe Premiere® and more from the cloud. Your subscription includes remote connectivity + control, direct-from-camera streaming, shoot prep software, and 500GB of storage. Cloud switching, routing, and editing is available by the hour.

What about latency?

We’ve demonstrated ultra low latency AIR One™ camera control at a distance of ~60 miles. We’ve also demonstrated virtual AIRcloud™ switching from over 3,000 miles away with imperceptible latency. The bottom line is that using robust connections in roughly the same region of the continent, controlling your AIR One™ camera and AIRcloud™ switcher remotely is largely indistinguishable from running it on premise. And if you’re talking latency from location to home viewer, using the AIR IP-from-origin workflow and a specific CDN we’ve demonstrated glass-to-glass (live location to home viewer) latency <2 seconds, that’s faster than over-the-air broadcasts.

Can I use the AIR platform for IMAG?

While fine for remote operations, IP based systems using switchers like vMix® generally introduce too much latency to be acceptable for IMAG (Image Magnification). However, AIR One™ is equipped with an HDMI output so you can configure it for control over IP and switch the signals using traditional baseband equipment. Contact us for more info.

Can you use other cameras / tablets?

We’re launching with the Z CAM E2-M4 as our core camera module due to its open API, connectivity options and affordability. You can also upgrade to any other Z CAM model in the flagship line. Eventually, the AIR platform will be camera-agnostic as other manufacturers’ open APIs allow. For tablets, we plan to stick with iPad® for now (which is included in the base package) thanks to its ubiquity and ease-of-use.

Can you use other lenses?

Absolutely. General guidelines are: MFT or EF mount, 1Kg weight, max 180mm in length, focal lengths up 300mm. Some lenses slightly outside these specs may be compatible.

What output formats are there?

For live streaming, 1080p or 4K, h.264 or h.265 with transport via RTMP or SRT. Internal recording h.264, h.265, ProRes, ProResHQ. Up to 4K at up to 120fps.

Check out this AIR overview. 

Learn more about the AIR One Charter Kit here!