I've been using the Blackmagic Hyperdeck Shuttle 2 with my D800 for a few days. Here is my initial review/impressions...
After receiving the shuttle I downloaded and flashed the 2.5 beta firmware, which added support for .MOV quicktime wrappers around the DNxHD files. Version 2.5 supports both uncompressed video or the DNxHD 220Mbps codec (no other compression levels are supported), in either the MXF or MOV wrappers. To use the DNxHD files on Windows, download the Avid Quicktime codec (http://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/en_US/Download/en423319). You configure uncompressed vs DNxHD (and wrapper choice) via a small Windows utility included, which communicates with the shuttle over USB. It appears to do this without needing to explicitly install a USB driver (at least for Windows). It appears Blackmagic just released a new version (3.0) of the firmware but I haven't tried it yet.
I've only used the .MOV wrapper thus far and have run into a couple issues with Vegas. First, Vegas 9 lets you drop the .MOV onto the timeline but without any audio. Vegas 11 doesn't recognize the .MOV wrapper at all. The files work in Quicktime without any issue (including audio). Not sure if the problem lies with the shuttle's wrapper or Vegas. I've been able to work around the Vegas 11 issue by re-wrapping the file with ffmbc. The command line I use is "ffmbc.exe -an -i source_video_file.mov -vcodec copy dest_video_file.mov". The "an" tells ffmbc to ignore the audio. If I don't use that option then it complains about the audio codec, it's probably something simple that can be fixed with another cmd arg but I haven't needed audio yet so I've ignored it for now. The re-wrapped file can be successfully dropped into either Vegas 9 or 11.
The shuttle does not come with a PC-dock like the Atomos Ninja. I bought Thermaltake's eSata USB dock from Amazon for $32 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001A4HAFS/ref=oh_o00_s00_i00_details). My motherboard has an eSata port which is what I'm using with the dock. It works well and runs at full SATA speeds as expected.
The shuttle only supports the Apple HFS+ filesystem and cannot format a drive on its own. For Windows users they do not include a utility for handling HFS+ volumes and refer you to Media Four's MacDrive website, which charges $49.99 for the utility. I downloaded their free 5-day trial. It works well except it doesn't handle device removal very well - the Windows driver stack doesn't expect removal of SATA devices and so there is no elegant way to eject/dismount a volume. If you remove the SSD from the dock or power the dock down then MacDrive's driver gets stuck with a kernel I/O that never completes and requires a forced reboot to recover. This doesn't occur with NTFS volumes; if you hot-plug remove a SATA drive with an NTFS volume then Windows will gracefully remove the drive from the system, so it's clear the problem is with MacDrive. As an alternate (and free solution) I've switched to using VMWare's free VM player with an Ubuntu VM. If you configure the VM so that the SSD is a raw pass-through device then you can partition, format and read/write HFS+ volumes within the Ubuntu VM. I've confirmed that an HFS+ partition/volume created under Ubuntu is properly recognized by the shuttle.
The shuttle powers on very quickly without much lag. There are three LED indicators: battery level, SSD activity, and video signal detect. The SSD activity light flickers quickly when playing/recording video. The video signal detect tells you when an HDMI signal on the input side has been detected and synched. It takes the shuttle about 2-3 seconds to sync to the D800 after entering Live View. The shuttle properly detects all of the D800's HD modes I've tried so far, including 1920x1080 30fps and 24fps and it appears to properly encode it as progressive as well. I can tell this because when I convert the .MOV wrappers with ffmbc it reports the video stream characteristics and it's reporting the proper frame rate and progressive attribute.
To configure the D800 for overlay-free video I did the following: Setup->HDMI->Advanced->"Live view on-screen display" to OFF. I don't think I changed any of the other settings. You don't need to remove the flash card in contrast to earlier reports. To record video you simply keep the camera in Live View and press record on the shuttle.
The shuttle has an output HDMI port which you can use for monitoring. So far I've only used it with an LG 40" LCD TV and it seems to work well. By default the shuttle doesn't pass-through to the output port; to enable it you need to press the stop button (sqaure) once. I've noticed a 1/2 second feed lag between what I see on the D800's Live View LCD and what I see it outputting over its HDMI port (happens even without the shuttle); not sure if this is normal/typical for video equipment. When you're done recording you press the stop button (square).
The shuttle is rated for 1hr of battery life but I've mostly used it tethered to its included AC charger.
You can play back movies on the shuttle to your attached HDMI monitor, including cycling through multiple files, but without any on-screen file listing/feedback...it's barebones but it works.
I haven't done any intensive IQ comparisons between the HDMI output/DNxHD and H.264 (internal recording) but I suspect there's nothing unique about the D800 in this regard.
After receiving the shuttle I downloaded and flashed the 2.5 beta firmware, which added support for .MOV quicktime wrappers around the DNxHD files. Version 2.5 supports both uncompressed video or the DNxHD 220Mbps codec (no other compression levels are supported), in either the MXF or MOV wrappers. To use the DNxHD files on Windows, download the Avid Quicktime codec (http://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/en_US/Download/en423319). You configure uncompressed vs DNxHD (and wrapper choice) via a small Windows utility included, which communicates with the shuttle over USB. It appears to do this without needing to explicitly install a USB driver (at least for Windows). It appears Blackmagic just released a new version (3.0) of the firmware but I haven't tried it yet.
I've only used the .MOV wrapper thus far and have run into a couple issues with Vegas. First, Vegas 9 lets you drop the .MOV onto the timeline but without any audio. Vegas 11 doesn't recognize the .MOV wrapper at all. The files work in Quicktime without any issue (including audio). Not sure if the problem lies with the shuttle's wrapper or Vegas. I've been able to work around the Vegas 11 issue by re-wrapping the file with ffmbc. The command line I use is "ffmbc.exe -an -i source_video_file.mov -vcodec copy dest_video_file.mov". The "an" tells ffmbc to ignore the audio. If I don't use that option then it complains about the audio codec, it's probably something simple that can be fixed with another cmd arg but I haven't needed audio yet so I've ignored it for now. The re-wrapped file can be successfully dropped into either Vegas 9 or 11.
The shuttle does not come with a PC-dock like the Atomos Ninja. I bought Thermaltake's eSata USB dock from Amazon for $32 (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001A4HAFS/ref=oh_o00_s00_i00_details). My motherboard has an eSata port which is what I'm using with the dock. It works well and runs at full SATA speeds as expected.
The shuttle only supports the Apple HFS+ filesystem and cannot format a drive on its own. For Windows users they do not include a utility for handling HFS+ volumes and refer you to Media Four's MacDrive website, which charges $49.99 for the utility. I downloaded their free 5-day trial. It works well except it doesn't handle device removal very well - the Windows driver stack doesn't expect removal of SATA devices and so there is no elegant way to eject/dismount a volume. If you remove the SSD from the dock or power the dock down then MacDrive's driver gets stuck with a kernel I/O that never completes and requires a forced reboot to recover. This doesn't occur with NTFS volumes; if you hot-plug remove a SATA drive with an NTFS volume then Windows will gracefully remove the drive from the system, so it's clear the problem is with MacDrive. As an alternate (and free solution) I've switched to using VMWare's free VM player with an Ubuntu VM. If you configure the VM so that the SSD is a raw pass-through device then you can partition, format and read/write HFS+ volumes within the Ubuntu VM. I've confirmed that an HFS+ partition/volume created under Ubuntu is properly recognized by the shuttle.
The shuttle powers on very quickly without much lag. There are three LED indicators: battery level, SSD activity, and video signal detect. The SSD activity light flickers quickly when playing/recording video. The video signal detect tells you when an HDMI signal on the input side has been detected and synched. It takes the shuttle about 2-3 seconds to sync to the D800 after entering Live View. The shuttle properly detects all of the D800's HD modes I've tried so far, including 1920x1080 30fps and 24fps and it appears to properly encode it as progressive as well. I can tell this because when I convert the .MOV wrappers with ffmbc it reports the video stream characteristics and it's reporting the proper frame rate and progressive attribute.
To configure the D800 for overlay-free video I did the following: Setup->HDMI->Advanced->"Live view on-screen display" to OFF. I don't think I changed any of the other settings. You don't need to remove the flash card in contrast to earlier reports. To record video you simply keep the camera in Live View and press record on the shuttle.
The shuttle has an output HDMI port which you can use for monitoring. So far I've only used it with an LG 40" LCD TV and it seems to work well. By default the shuttle doesn't pass-through to the output port; to enable it you need to press the stop button (sqaure) once. I've noticed a 1/2 second feed lag between what I see on the D800's Live View LCD and what I see it outputting over its HDMI port (happens even without the shuttle); not sure if this is normal/typical for video equipment. When you're done recording you press the stop button (square).
The shuttle is rated for 1hr of battery life but I've mostly used it tethered to its included AC charger.
You can play back movies on the shuttle to your attached HDMI monitor, including cycling through multiple files, but without any on-screen file listing/feedback...it's barebones but it works.
I haven't done any intensive IQ comparisons between the HDMI output/DNxHD and H.264 (internal recording) but I suspect there's nothing unique about the D800 in this regard.
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