Atomos Samurai

Agreed, I like the Ninja, mine was a hired unit and I had only the one "spinning" hard drive, I'm waiting to see reports on the Samuari before i decide to buy one or the other and I'll also buy one SSD plus a bigger standard drive
 
Yup, that's my plan too, if initial reports are positive. A spinning drive or two for regular shooting and a small SSD for handheld.

I would like to get the best out of my AF100 and while the built-in codec is good for general use, I do notice it losing it a bit sometimes especially if I need to do significant fixes in the grade. These are also the times when the built in codec is being maximally stressed by shaky shoulder-cam work etc. because I was likely trying to steal shots in less than ideal circumstances.

Cheers, Hywel
 
need this box

need this box

cant wait for this device (nov 1) would love to test it and throw it right onto a feature.
 
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mkfotos.com said:
Neat gadget, but even with the fastest CF cards available, it'd be willing to bet money that it's much too slow, not to mention having other technical issues such as uneven wear, inferior error checking compared to an SSD, etc.
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The Nanoflash uses CF cards and it supports 280mbps, which is equivilant to ProRes 422 HQ 1080 30p or 720 60p. 1080 24p is actually less than 280mbps. Also the KiPro Mini uses CF cards. The new Canon 1Dx that was just anounced will be able to write footage over 320mpbs to CF cards. It's entirely possible.
 
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Yes, directly to the card, without intermediate hardware interpreting things. If it's anything like sticking a fast MicroSD card into a simple SD adapter, and watching it crawl, this won't work. Until someone tests this, and for longevity and reliability as well, I'd still bet money it's a no go.
 
Hmm... what about buying the adapter from Amazon (or someplace else with a solid return policy), and mailing it and a couple of different CF cards to someone that'd be willing to put the setup through its paces? There must be someone out there with a Ninja that'd be willing.
 
This is a dumb question.. but I can't seem to find the answer on the website.. It says straight for use for Final Cut Pro

What if I don't use final cut pro... does it record on a codec I can use elsewhere? Like Premier
 
GrandLunar said:
I came rushing back to edit my post.. i totally found the answer on the website.. but what about CS4?
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Not sure, but CS4 was a dog, a memory-leaking mangy dog. But 5.5 is the one.... Why would even consider using it? The upgrade cost is minimal, and the benefits immediate and apparent.
 
powervideo said:
The upgrade cost is minimal, and the benefits immediate and apparent.
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"Adobe revamps upgrade policy for Photoshop CS6, other CS6 applications

Starting with Photoshop CS6, which is anticipated to ship in 2012, Adobe will be enforcing a new upgrade policy. The existing practice is to allow customers to purchase the newest version at the upgrade price if they own an existing version up to three major releases back.

To upgrade to Photoshop CS6 or any other Creative Suite 6 application at the upgrade price, however, you will need to own a license to the previous major release (in this case, CS5, CS5.1 and CS5.5 are all considered to be the same version). Earlier major version releases will not be eligible for upgrade pricing."

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/content_page.asp?cid=7-11667-12100
 
I have the Samurai on loan from a friend this week. I'm very impressed with it. It is both easy to use and seems reliable too.
I set up my Sony XDCam so that it stops and starts time code when it goes into record, and the Samurai will follow, so no need to even touch it--from an operational standpoint, it adds no complexity for the camera operator, which is nice.

The 10-bit color depth seems to make almost a whole F-stop available additional near the bottom end of the range. Footage has more detail than the footage recorded simultaneously to the Sony internal SxS card. I've opened both in the editor, synched the clips and enable/disable one layer to get a rapid look at the differences.

The footage has more lift in the shadows, and full color resolution in the vertical direction, ie., Samurai records 1080 lines of color information along with 1080 lines of luminance, as 4:2:2 implies. Things like red LED displays really pop out sharp on this footage, whereas they're pixellated and smeared in the SxS footage.

Footage has a solid look to it, none of that 'watery' shimmer that MPEG footage has.

The three data rates, LT, 422 and HQ are all way superior to the MPEG2. I can see a difference between them only if I apply ridiculous amounts of sharpening to the footage and magnify it 200%. Biggest difference between LT and 422.. slight improvement in HQ, which essentially has zero artifacts visible at 200% with sharpening maxes out (no one would ever publish video with that much sharpening, but it serves as a worst case tool for magnifying the most subtle artifacts. ProRes 422 at HQ is essentially flawless. I've pulled stills off the timeline that look as solid as RAW images from my DSLR.

My only (minor) complaint is that Samurai doesn't continue to increment the file names. If you pull some images off the drive, it will start again at the next available increment, so if you are searching for the files, you'll find multiple files in different folders with the same names! That would be a mess if you had archived a project and didn't carefully document the full path to all assets.

Now here's a surprise: Atomos says you need Adobe CS5.51 to use the files. Maybe that's for 'native' support. But I'm running CS3 and have only the patch for XDCam, which only lets me edit XDCam in Premiere. I can't edit XDCam in AfterEffects. Initially, I could not even mount the drive, but I found out Microsoft has a free update for XP that enables reading exFAT (FAT64) drives. Next step was upgrading Quicktime to 7.7xx. That brought the ProRes CODEC onto my system, enabling Premiere and AfterEffects to load the footage. It plays smoothly and edits just like XDCam footage. And it renders out nicely.

Now I'm wishing Blu-ray supported Deep Color, because compressing this footage to h.264/AVC is a real shame. It looses a lot of steps in the shadows and shadows get a bit of banding, just like XDCam footage has. The master ProRes footage has no visible banding in the shadows and you can grade the heck out of it and pull up details out of what looks almost pitch black areas of the picture. The rendered h.264 certainly benefits from the more solid images of ProRes, but now the shortcomings of Blu-ray are readily apparent to me. I now know why Hollywood crushes the blacks--it's to avoid the 8-bit banding problem.

The Samurai is wonderful, easy to use, media is cheap.. heck, the Samurai and a SSD hard drive cost less than a 64GB SxS card! Methinks I'll not be buying SxS anymore. I could sell some of my SxS and buy the Samurai instead. Definately love this little unit. Simplicity and excellence of operation. And that picture quality.. I can imagine a good prime lens on my EX3 and the Samurai at HQ mode.. unbeatable. Samurai is on my wish list at B&H!
 
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