Atomos Ninja Now Shipping According To Press Release - SDI Samurai at $1495.00 USD

David, does the media drive have to formatted a particular way?

For example, can Mac users format it as MacOS Extended, and PC users as FAT32?
 
David Saraceno said:
David, does the media drive have to formatted a particular way?

For example, can Mac users format it as MacOS Extended, and PC users as FAT32?
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David,

The drive must be formatted in the Ninja, which formats it as FAT 32. This works well with both Mac and PC. Formatting takes a few seconds for a typical drive.

Dave
Atomos
 
David Shapton said:
For those who never want to use any Apple product, we are able to implement other codecs, and the next one is likely to be cross-platform. But we will not finalise our plans until we see a clear consensus as to which one we should do next.
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Well I vote Cineform for your next codec iteration. Its more cross-platform for me than ProRes.
 
speedracerlo said:
why is this prores only? only for mac users?
seems not many people are concerned about this at all, but I am a hard headed PC maniac; I'm never going to Macs
like someone said, Cineform would have been nice
looks like a great product, but I won't be buying something that only uses Apple's prores
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+1
 
I would like to have the ability to capture to image formats like DPX, tga, and tiff for use with programs like Eyeon Fusion and PFMatchIt these programs are 64bit and do not play with 32 bit QuickTime. This would eliminate extra transcode step for VFX shots.
 
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thank you for the info David, it's great to know that you're hardware is not limited to prores only
the Ninja and Samurai look very awesome and I look forward to the day that it supports Cineform
 
For Windows, I'd say a DirectShow or .AVI codec is vastly preferable to a Quicktime codec. Quicktime can be used on Windows, but on the editors that I've used they seem like they're a lot quicker and more efficient with DirectShow codecs.

Nice thing about DNxHD is that there's apparently a *free* source code license available.

Any of the three (ProRes, DNxHD, or CineForm) are available cross-platform so any of them would be fine. Obviously if you've already got ProRes .MOV in there, there's not a whole lot of need to go adding another .MOV format, I'd rather see a .AVI or even .MXF codec system. Whichever way you go, you want to choose a codec that has a freely-downloadable, freely-interoperable decoder available. All three of these fit that bill.

I'm a little bit torn on what to recommend -- I'm not 100% enamored of the concept of a proprietary third-party codec that could potentially not be supported anymore; I know that's not likely but it could happen. If Cineform or Avid were to go out of business, or Apple were to sell off their apps to someone else who discontinued support for the Windows version... man... that wouldn't be fun. Not that it will happen, but ... I like the idea of a free open-source license like DNxHD, and I would totally say go with DNxHD if it wasn't for it being a Quicktime codec instead of DirectShow. I like the idea of CineForm being multi-platform and offering a free decoder, and of the three choices maybe it's the one that makes the most sense.

Of course, you could go in a different direction and develop your own wavelet codec based on free/open-source JPEG2000, and that could be pretty darn cool.
 
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I was just wondering why the choice of Apple ProRes as the *current*codec of choice.
I'd imagine you'd want to reach as many customers as possible, not just Mac/FCP Users.
If it was being offered with several other codecs I would understand but since its your only codec
I would have thought something like Cineform would have been chosen as its multi-platform.

Edit: Just saw Barry Green's post...so I say yay for Cineform :)
 
Boncrek said:
I was just wondering why the choice of Apple ProRes as the *current*codec of choice.
I'd imagine you'd want to reach as many customers as possible, not just Mac/FCP Users.
If it was being offered with several other codecs I would understand but since its your only codec
I would have thought something like Cineform would have been chosen as its multi-platform.
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Codecs are a minefield of compatibility, licensing issues and quality. Taking all things into account - and the fact that more people were asking for ProRes than any other codec by a big margin, that's the one we went with. But we can do others - we just have to wait until we've got sufficient commercial justification to do them.

Dave Shapton
Atomos
 
chancenorris said:
I would like to have the ability to capture to image formats like DPX, tga, and tiff for use with programs like Eyeon Fusion and PFMatchIt these programs are 64bit and do not play with 32 bit QuickTime. This would eliminate extra transcode step for VFX shots.
Click to expand...

Cineform avi's will drop right into both programs, it's a big part of my workflow. so yeah, another +1 for a cineform avi directshow codec over mov. Or at least the ability to choose the container
 
The first Ninjas are being shipped and delivered now. Meanwhile, if you want to see what Ninja footage looks like, just encode your camera's output to ProRes on a computer. Ninja's ProRes encoding is 100% accurate and is certified by Apple as being so.

Dave Shapton
Atomos
 
Do you have units out for reviews? I'd like to take it for spin with my AF101 but it would be nice to read something from an end user.
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The reviews are just starting to slip out now.

Here's one (but note that where he says that Ninja doesn't have a playback function, that's not strictly true. It DOES have playback but it's in "preview" mode only until the next firmware release):

http://blog.abelcine.com/2011/03/24/hands-on-with-the-atomos-ninja-recorder/

Dave Shapton
Atomos


 
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