Atomos Samurai

Nice review. I have a Ninja (needed it when the Samuari was still in development stage) and while I wish it had more solid connector, it has been a good tool for green screening and locked down interviews. And like, you,I agree the incremental naming convention they use is definitely not something you want to interject into a workflow. Also the 4.78 gig file size because of the use of Fat32 formatting makes for some extra work in post as well as making the files all look alike. I find myself having to rename all files once I get back into the studio after a shoot in order to keep things organized and if you're shooting a long piece, it can get quite tedious going through all those files. If I have time, I'll combine them all on a timeline and output them as one file, but that adds a lot of extra steps and time in the process. It's my main gripe about the Atomos hardware.
 
Good to know

Good to know

That's good to know when I upgrade to the Samuari. One other interface issue I have with the Ninja is that on the monitor screen, it has a red recording circle when it's not recording and a white square when it is recording. Completely opposite the norm which almost always gives a heart attack when I look at it during a shoot and think it's not recording no matter how many times I've used it. :-)
 
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.
Click to expand...

With the Samurai you can set the 'Name' of the device. I name it as per the job name (eg. 'jobd1' = job day 1 or date) and that becomes the Prefix in the file names.

The device comes named as "Samurai' - Change it .

You can also change the Scene and Slate #s.

You can also bulk rename your files after you load them on your local hard drive.

FWIW - I like to have my filenames match the file names on the SD card to make EDLs easy to use. To do this , first up...we roll bars on the camera without triggering record on the Samurai . That records 0000.mts to the SD card alone. This gets rid of clip "0" because the Samurai quite logically starts and increments from clip #1

All subsequent takes are dual recorded and that effectively gives us files that are referenced the same. eg 0037.mts = 'jobname'_T37.mov
 
The particular Samurai unit that I am trying out has exFAT, so there's no practical file size limitation, which is great, because I don't have to deal with the '17-minute' audio glitch that Adobe Premiere puts in XDCam footage over 4GB--no need to convert to MXF, render the audio, throw away MXF and marry the new 'clean' audio to the old XDCam track. Samurai tracks should be free of these segmenting glitches, and file management is less of a nightmare on longer takes. Of course the file space becomes a new challenge due to its size.

I realize that you can rename the prefix, and I suppose that would solve most of these issues, though it would be nice if there were an automatic and unique identifier to each file name, freeing me up for creative work as opposed to twiddling a menu for five minutes to dial in a unique name.

I was just outside shooting some ProRes HQ mode footage.. going to load it into Premiere CS3 now and see how it looks...
 
Fcp6

Fcp6

Anyone have compatibility issues with the Samurai and FCP6? Thinking of buying the Samurai and wondering if I need to upgrade to FCP7. I was hoping not to have to switch to FCPX.
 
Shooter said:
Yikes..CS3....you will be lucky!
Click to expand...

That was why I asked my friend for some test footage. Instead, he loaned me his unit! So I've tested all three quality levels. All load fine into Premiere CS3.

I'm finding that I no longer need to sharpen my footage to have it look as sharp as the most high budget Hollywood BDs. I had added my usual sharpening to this footage, and the rendered h.264 looked great on a 4K monitor, but on a 1080P HDTV it's banging up against the resolution limits of the display so hard that everything 'buzzes' as the camera pans across bare trees in one scene. I had to turn down the Detail to "-6" on my Oppo player to get the footage not to alias on lower resolution HDTV displays. So now I'm rendering some new h.264 output with much less sharpening. It's probably still too much, but I'm testing to see what the max limit is that doesn't annoy HDTVs too much. But the Sharpen @ 18 footage looked great on an upscaled 4K display. No aliasing there at all, and detailed as heck. My Spears & Munsil test BD reference footage looks soft by comparison. I only wish Adobe's encoder would preserve the 10-bit detail. Rendered files have some banding introduced in the darker shadow areas. Hollywood usually crushes these to pure black, which is probably why they do it.
 
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