HDMI Atomos Ninja Hard Disk Recorder 795$

As I said, Ninja doesn't have 3:2 pulldown, and Samurai does. If you use a format with the Ninja that doesn't require pulldown removal then you can absolutely go from recording to timeline.

Dave
Atomos
 
David Shapton said:
As I said, Ninja doesn't have 3:2 pulldown, and Samurai does. If you use a format with the Ninja that doesn't require pulldown removal then you can absolutely go from recording to timeline.

Dave
Atomos
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Right, please don't think I'm trying to rattle you here, just trying to get the right information. :)

You say it does record native 24p from the HDMI, however in order for that to happen you need to remove the pulldown from the 60i, which you then say it does not. So I hope you can see why we're a bit confused here.
 
Hi, I received my Ninja today and did test it with a PAL-GH2. It was easy setting the GH2 to show a clean HDMI1080 50i OUT that was instantly recognised by the Ninja. So we started recording only on the Ninja and took a couple of clips. GH2 stayed in standby mode. These clips look very good on Final Cut and can be quite reasonably colorcorrected even in darkish parts. Looks very nice !
BUT : some clips had strange mishaps: the upper part of the frame was from a different frame then the lower part, looked like a partial misinterpretation of fields beeing merged into one frame... This happened on about 50% of the takes ! :-(
Second bug: all clips get the same name and are each simply stored in different folders which of cause have differing naes. This is very very very bad ! Imagine that you need to open a single folder each and every time you want to check a clip in Final Cut or Media-Composer. We absolutely need the ability to get difering names and numbers for following clips and they must be stored in a single folder so we can access them all together at once when editing starts. I ran into this problem today and tried to copy all clips into one folder but this is not possible since they are all named identically. I am used to edit XDCAM-HD and there all clips get a unique number and I can choose a prefix corresponding to the camera. A similiar behaviour is urgently needed in the Ninja. We will use our two Ninjas mainly for Stereo3D and just imagine the hickups we will get with these non-unique namings!!!!!!
By the way we did not yet check the Lanc Control, this will come next. The monitoring function btw is nearly useless outside in daylight because the contrast is not good enough, indoors it is okay.

But first and for all the misreading of the fields in the coding MUST be fixed. I could upload a frame or a clip if needed...

Okay that's it for now

Matthias
 
Hi Matthias

Thanks for your feedback.

We haven't seen the issue you mentioned but then we've been testing with regular video cameras mainly. There are whole topics on this forum about whether you can get a clean output from a Gh2.

The sort of thing that this forum post was getting at might be relevant here:

First, a recap of the problem:
The GH2 sensor scans at 23.976P and embeds the picture in a 59.94i stream by adding 3:2 pulldown. Nothing unusual about that. But, when it sends this signal out the HDMI port, it adds in extra fields to make the signal a true 60.00i. These extra duplicate fields create havoc when attempting to remove the 3:2 pulldown. Plus, they throw the audio increasingly out of sync the longer the camera rolls.

But I'm guessing at this point. It is, I think, likely to be some issue with the HDMI feed from the GH2. I've passed your comments on to our designers, who might be able to shed some light on it.

As far as the folder arrangement is concerned, your comments make sense, but the idea was that you'd be presented with a nice folder structure when if you "import folder" into FCP.

We'll listen to feedback on this and make changes if necessary although I can't say how long that would take at this stage.

Dave Shapton
Atomos
 
Hi David,
I was testing a PAL GH2 in clean 1080 50i mode, so there is no pulldown etc happening. We get 50 fields in the stream. I checked that by doing a 50% slowmotion and I then got 50 differing frames. And this strange mishap did not show in monitor-mode on the screen but was then recorded in the clip. I hope you can ge hold of a PAL GH2 either in AUS or UK so your engineers can check. I think that the Ninja and GH" would be the absolute dreamteam for all of your customers.

In Regard of the naming system, I can understand the idea for the folder structure but in reallife this leeds to a lot of problems, if you simply gave every clip an ascending numbering in its name we could later move all clips in a folder on the disk for editing, but this leads at the moment to the situation where you end with just ONE, the last clip, every older clip is erased for ever!!!!! This happenend to me on the first trial when I searched for all clips in the folder and moved them to a new folder on the disk. This is really dangerous for all editing programms that would try to reorganize the editing material. And it is terrible as well when you want to sort clips in a bin.... etc.

I repeat again: ALL CLIPS NEED A UNIQUE NAME

I expect this will be changed in the coming 1.1 Update.. right ?

Thanks for reading Matthias
 
Matthias

I've run the field issue past the technical people and this is definitely an issue with the GH2 footage. Can you make a VERY short clip that exhibits this issue so that we can look at it? I'm not promising anything but at least we can have a look to see if we can shed any light on what the camera is sending out over HDMI.

The Ninja DOES increment file names within a single take. You should be able to drag a take direct to the timeline and have all the clips laid out sequentially. Can you try this again and if you are still having issues write to me directly at Atomos?

Thanks,

Dave
Atomos
 
I would be great if at the camera stage, you could specify a clip name that would transfer over to the .mts file and magically to the .mov files on the ninja so they match. At the very least it definitely would be nice for ability to assign names to clips in the unit. But it's not a huge deal for to rename files when transferring.
 
Hi Dave,
thanks for replying so fast, my experience was that using the Ninja as is, the unit did not increment the filenames but incremented the subfolder names which led to tragically sending clps to Nirvana...
I do not know how to change the settings in the Ninja so that all clips of one setting land in the same subfolder and being named incrementally. Maybe i am just to #§ß< stupid for that ?
I will do the short clip for you on Monday, please send me the uploadadd. to my e-Mail Matthias_von_Mutius at t-online.de
If you want to keep this sort of betatesting more private we can discuss further over this mentioned Mail.

Thanks for your help Matthias
 
Hi Matthias, this isn't Betatesting but let's not fill up the forum with this support stuff - if we come to any firm conclusions we can post it here. I take your point about the 50f rate on the camera, but, whatever it is, it is behaving differently to other cameras we've looked at. We'll try to get to the bottom of it because, as you said, it would make a great combination.

I will email you separately with upload details.

Dave
Atomos
 
I remember some talk about the hdmi out being crippled with dropped frames when it was first released. Could this be the reason?
 
I remember some talk about the hdmi out being crippled with dropped frames when it was first released. Could this be the reason?
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From the GH2? Yes, it probably is. We don't see this with conventional video cameras and precisely this point has been made on this forum. We're looking forward to getting some sample clips so that we can look in more detail.

Dave
Atomos
 
von Mutius said:
Hi, I received my Ninja today and did test it with a PAL-GH2. It was easy setting the GH2 to show a clean HDMI1080 50i OUT that was instantly recognised by the Ninja. So we started recording only on the Ninja and took a couple of clips. GH2 stayed in standby mode. These clips look very good on Final Cut and can be quite reasonably colorcorrected even in darkish parts. Looks very nice !
BUT : some clips had strange mishaps: the upper part of the frame was from a different frame then the lower part, looked like a partial misinterpretation of fields beeing merged into one frame... This happened on about 50% of the takes ! :-(

Matthias
Click to expand...

Matthias,

I'm still waiting for my ninja to be shipped. Hopefully it will arrive on Monday so I'll join you soon with testing this tool with my GH2 PAL.

Does this fields misinterpretation happen only when the gh2 is in live view?
Did you try to push the record button first on the camera then on the ninja? I guess there is no point to record on the gh2 as well, but I'm just wondering if you gave it a try.
Thanks,
Diego
 
diegocervo said:
Matthias,

I'm still waiting for my ninja to be shipped. Hopefully it will arrive on Monday so I'll join you soon with testing this tool with my GH2 PAL.

Does this fields misinterpretation happen only when the gh2 is in live view?
Did you try to push the record button first on the camera then on the ninja? I guess there is no point to record on the gh2 as well, but I'm just wondering if you gave it a try.
Thanks,
Diego
Click to expand...

My experience with the GH2 and HDMI capture suggests that you should ABSOLUTELY be recording simultaneously to the camera. When the camera is in standby it sends an altered image out the HDMI with crushed blacks and clipped highlights. This goes away when the camera is recording to an SD card. The proper procedure is to roll camera first, then start the HDMI capture. And stop the HDMI capture before stopping the camera capture.

This will prevent any additional complications to an already non-standard signal.
 
Thanks Ralph,
okay will test tomorrow with recording activated. Are you sure that the signal of a Pal GH2 is really full bit 0-255 when recording ? On the first look the signal looked nicer, punchier without recording active. We will make a more scientific test on Monday morning European Timezone.

I'll post my results then...

Matthias
 
Okay first results today:
1. Do never ever with this firmware version record when the Pal GH2 in 1080/50i mode is not recording, you will get the strange mixed fields upper lower effect in almost 95% of the takes. In recording mode of the GH2 we got probably no wrong takes with one case where we are not sure wether the camera was running or not.
2. There is no Audio-Out on the GH2 in either mode so you need to rig a soundsystem to the Ninja, which we did not yet test today, we just hope to have decent sound/picture sync...
3. Probably by user fault we got a situation where we lost access to clips on the harddisk. Suddenly when checking the clips on the Mac we just could find the last recorded file on the disk, all other subfolders and their content had vanished . What we did before is maybe take the disk out of the Ninja before it had definetely turned off after shutting down or and maybe as well we did push the disk in the docking station which was still connected to the Mac by the Firewire800 cable. We decided to reshoot some test then and after the first takes were shot, when going into playode the former clips reappeared magically except those clips that where overwritten when recording before play. They got into subfolders in the middle of the previous lot and replaced some other clips. So we are still puzzled what happened here but we seriously think that if the Ninja can restore a broken FAT, like it probably did should'nt it do this at every start ?
4. The clips look very good and are much better for colorcorrection then native GH2 clips. No Mud, no artefacts from a codec, very clean looking stuff !
5. In fact each and every clip is named 000 and sits in its own subfolder which then has a differing name. I found no way to change this nonsensical behaviour. I am sure (irony on) that your engineers can count further then zero don't they ? (Irony off )

Thanks for reading Matthias
 
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Thanks for the feedback.

I've never lost a clip on a Ninja so I think your explanation may be right - give it a few seconds to spin down, clear the cache and sort itself out.

The reason for the folder-per-clip is simply that to get over the 4GB filesize limit, QT has to break up the file into 4GB chunks.
When you look at this folder structure from within FCP, you will see the entire clip, reconstructed from its parts. If you look at it outside of the FCP ecosystem, you will see individual clips, one folder per take, and multiple 4GB chunks within a folder for longer takes. If you didn't do this then you would have individual chunks from one take overwriting similarly named chunks from other takes. When you know how it works, it works pretty well.

If you don't make clips bigger than 4GB, then you will see what you see. So, it's not madness, but simply the way it works, dictated by the IT, not the video industry.

I realise this seems odd when you first look at it, but it is a standard way of doing things, built into FCP.

Dave
Atomos
 
Matthias,
thanks for testing this thing out. I'm happy to hear that everything works properly when you record both on the camera and on the ninja.

Did you have the chance to compare a footage shot with the GH2 set in live view with 1 shot with the camera in rec mode? Apart from the weird fields behaviour, it would be nice to see if the quality of the two footages is exactly the same.
I hope it makes sense....

Thanks
Diego
 
David Shapton said:
I realise this seems odd when you first look at it, but it is a standard way of doing things, built into FCP.
Click to expand...
But how does it work for the huge user base that doesn't use FCP? How will it work for Premiere Pro CS5 users, or Avid users, or Vegas or EDIUS or SpeedEdit or any of the other NLEs out there? What about higher-end apps like Flame and Smoke and all those? Does this filesystem work for those NLEs already?

I don't mind so much for the Ninja, but for the Samurai you should definitely make sure that you have a file/recording system that works effortlessly with at least Premiere Pro CS5 and Avid. (maybe it already does, I don't know, I've never tried using files in a structure such as the Ninja records).

The P2-compatible Op-Atom MXF system supports spanned files on FAT32 recording media, using a metadata file system that points to the previous and next clips. It is supported on every NLE (excepting, of course, for Sony's proprietary Vegas software) and every high-end compositing app, and is a native format to Avid. If you're going to add other codecs to the Ninja/Samurai for Windows compatibilty, I highly recommend you look into a system that either a) uses NTFS (which allows relatively unlimited file sizes in a single file and can be read by both Windows and Mac systems) and/or b) uses a filesystem like the Op-Atom MXF system, which already handles file spanning on FAT32 and is supported by every major NLE.
 
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Everyone is making good points here, but please understand that these are early days in the product's life-cycle and if we were to build in every facility for every user in every conceivable circumstance, the product would probably never get shipped. We've gone with the most-requested codec for the most-requested NLE. It's great to get feedback on alternative approaches, all of which we will consider on their technical and business merits.

Dave Shapton
Atomos
 
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