Atomos Ninja V

I hope so. This is the best NAB announcement for me personally. I was also encouraged by the interview with rep where he indicates they will be aggressively pursuing shrinking their products now. Excellent! Bring on the screenless recorder, the smaller and lighter and thinner 7”, the next gen 5, etc.

Then again by that time prores raw internal may be standard on cameras and 5” high res OLED super bright displays may be built into many cameras off the shelf.

Still, in any case, ninja V is looking very nice today. I hope EVA1 gets HDMI prores RAW support just for the benefit of using this smaller tool.
 
filmguy123 said:
I hope so. This is the best NAB announcement for me personally. I was also encouraged by the interview with rep where he indicates they will be aggressively pursuing shrinking their products now. Excellent! Bring on the screenless recorder, the smaller and lighter and thinner 7”, the next gen 5, etc.
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Atomos and BMD had small screenless recorders in the past, but only for HD, where are the 4K ones?
 
Was anyone able to find confirmation regarding the new atom x miniSSD drives designed for the ninja V — these will also work with standard atomos recorders like the shogun inferno? With the addition of a “clever extension Handle”? That’s what the website says but the meaning isn’t entirely clear.

Little torn on investing in this. On one hand I’d rather invest in drives made for the smaller system because everything will shrink and that’s the future - no good having a stack of standard size SSDs that are obsolete if I want to move smaller ASAP.

On the other hand, now these are proprietary to atomos only...

Hhrrmmm... what would you do?
 
Kellar42 said:
It will do ProRes raw, though, right?
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Only if someone sends them raw over HDMI... at this point no camera does.
(or if an SDI Adapter becomes available)

My guess is that if raw over HDMI happens, it will be for new cameras only. Don’t expect your old cameras will be updated to support it.
 
Is HDMI->SDI going to be able to carry raw? Is there enough bandwidth on the HDMI end of things?
 
jbregar said:
Is HDMI->SDI going to be able to carry raw? Is there enough bandwidth on the HDMI end of things?
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HDMI 2.0 has a bandwidth of 18Gb/s, that plenty of bandwidth to carry raw multiple times.

Raw actually requires less bandwidth than cooked video given the same compression level.
 
The Atomos Shogun Recorders already take Prores HQ 4K 10 bit 4:2:2 at around 880mpps progressive from the GH5 or 4 through HDMI...with the announcement of Prores RAW I seem to remember Apple claiming the file will be lighter...so on the Atomos side one would think it can accept Prores RAW via an SDI/HDMI connection....the bottleneck isonthe camera HDMI side I would think and not something FWcould fix...totally speculating on this!
 
Mitch posted this in another thread regarding RAW over HDMI.

Panasonic is part of the HDMI consortium. This organization sets the standard for HDMI signals so that devices can talk to one another properly. RAW is not part of the spec, so there for it will not be output over HDMI.
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I think people forget that HDMI and SDI are not designed around ProRes or similar formats. They are designed for uncompressed video streams. No ProRes is not uncompressed. It is about a 6:1 compression. So yes raw is totally capable of fitting over HDMI and SDI. Raw is also made up of a single channel of data. The bayer pattern combines alternating red blue and green pixels vs uncompressed video that has a red channel, blue channel and green channel. That’s potentially 3x the data for uncompressed video. Raw can sometimes have less image compression but it has less data to compress in the first place.

The issue with raw over HDMI is HDMI is built around those uncompressed video standards and it requires a digital handshake between devices to say hey I have this video standard will you take it and the other device replies yes that looks correct I will take it. Step outside of the video standards and the devices are ordering car parts at McDonalds in English and McDonalds replies in Klingon.

So somebody needs to figure out how to update the HDMI specs to support a raw stream or trick HDMI into thinking it is sending and receiving a video standard and then the Atomos knows it is a trick and treats it as raw. So a camera manufacturer wishing to do the trick needs to figure out how to take raw data and pack it into something that looks like an uncompressed video stream and pump that out via HDMI as a normal video stream. The Atomos then can be set to understand that signal while looking like a video stream is really raw data and convert it back to raw data.

It’s going to be a process but not impossible.

You could take the bayer data and just convert each pixel to its color value. So a green pixel will really become a green pixel. Your uncompressed video signal will be an ugly mesh of alternating color values and look horrible when viewed as an actual video signal. The Atomos can then take that ugly mesh and convert each pixel back to raw data.

HDMI can also send metadata and even supports Ethernet so there is plenty of potential to transfer the needed data with each pixel. Not a fun undertaking but again is possible. Atomos just needs the camera manufacturers to work with them to make a fake standard to trick HDMI into thinking it’s just a regular uncompressed video stream.

I thought typically HDMI could only carry RGB at 8 bit but really we only need the Y channel in YUV and just ignore the UV channels. The Y channel itself can contain all the bayer pixels which again will look like an ugly mesh of gray values but to the Atomos could be converted back to the bayer data. HDMI can even support 16bits per channel so that Y channel could match the bit depth of up to 16bit raw. I would say HDMI has enough there to handle raw.

What is tricky is the meta data like white balance but HDMI can contain meta data and it also supports Ethernet for a large data path. Maybe UV channels could be leveraged to carry a binary sort of meta data like a game using an array to build a map or similar to how a barcode works.
 
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Run&Gun said:
Mitch posted this in another thread regarding RAW over HDMI.
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When thinking of the spec itself he is correct. How I think Atomos plans on doing it is to piggy back on the uncompressed Y channel and convert each bayer pixel to a gray value. HDMI can support up to 16bit per channel and that is more than enough to pack in uncompressed raw data with a 16bit depth. The Color channels would be ignored. The Atomos then takes in that rather ugly looking gray video stream and knowing it is intended to be raw can convert each 16bit gray value back to raw data. Very easy to do and Atomos just needs the camera manufacturers to build in the ability to convert raw data to gray values and pump out a normal uncompressed YUV video stream. Atomos does the rest of the work by converting those values back to raw data.
 
Thomas Smet said:
When thinking of the spec itself he is correct. How I think Atomos plans on doing it is to piggy back on the uncompressed Y channel and convert each bayer pixel to a gray value. HDMI can support up to 16bit per channel and that is more than enough to pack in uncompressed raw data with a 16bit depth. The Color channels would be ignored. The Atomos then takes in that rather ugly looking gray video stream and knowing it is intended to be raw can convert each 16bit gray value back to raw data. Very easy to do and Atomos just needs the camera manufacturers to build in the ability to convert raw data to gray values and pump out a normal uncompressed YUV video stream. Atomos does the rest of the work by converting those values back to raw data.
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Atomos says that they will be able to connect directly to the motherboard so the SDi connection won't need any "translation", it would have been more convenient if it had directly sdi so SDI -> HDMI would have been easier ;)
 
Not saying it won't happen but as Canon and most of the other manufacturers have repeatedly shown us, NEVER buy gear with the idea that it MIGHT be capable of a specific feature or spec in the future. Sometimes improvements happen but often they don't. C300 MKII will never shoot 4K 60p. C200 will probably never gain a 4:2:2 10-bit internal codec. Prores RAW might end up over HDMI but according to Mitch above, it's not part of the spec, so don't hold your breathe. HDMI is a terrible connector too.
 
robert.shami said:
Atomos says that they will be able to connect directly to the motherboard so the SDi connection won't need any "translation", it would have been more convenient if it had directly sdi so SDI -> HDMI would have been easier ;)
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Yes and realistically your better off asking Atomos to make a version of the Ninja V with SDI then you are holding your breath waiting for somebody to shoehorn raw over HDMI. I'm not even sure camera manufacturers with HDMI only and no SDI connections would even consider this. There is a solid marketing reason why those cameras only have HDMI in the first place.
 
I wish they would have nixxed the HDMI out port and instead replaced it with a single 12G SDI port on the side. And then in software made either port setable to either in/out. And then you could do HDMI in to SDI out (and use an SDI to hdmi converter if needed) or SDI in to HDMI out (use converter if needed). Since most people investing in this small light model will not require the HDMI output while also using HDMI input - at least I assume - it seems a waste of space to have two full size HDMI ports.
 
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