HDMI Atomos Ninja Hard Disk Recorder 795$

Oh and on another note. Its really clear that Atomos are very interested to hear what we want in these products and with the way their firmware operates there are some interesting things that can be done. Ive obviously told them what I'd like to see on the ninja, but Im one guy and work in the way I do. So throwdown lest say top 5 functions you'de like to see. I cant remember exactly what I said but included

- Blue only mode with contrast and brightness control.
- 1:1 pixel mapping

Basically what I was getting at were monitoring functions.
 
Noel Evans said:
Oh and on another note. Its really clear that Atomos are very interested to hear what we want in these products and with the way their firmware operates there are some interesting things that can be done. Ive obviously told them what I'd like to see on the ninja, but Im one guy and work in the way I do. So throwdown lest say top 5 functions you'de like to see. I cant remember exactly what I said but included

- Blue only mode with contrast and brightness control.
- 1:1 pixel mapping

Basically what I was getting at were monitoring functions.
Click to expand...

We're taking these requests for monitoring enhancements very seriously!

Dave Shapton
Atomos
 
Noel Evans said:
I had a chance to sit down with Jeromy Young from Atomos and have a chat.

From what Ive been told Stripper should be available soon and from all accounts its going to be a straight forward solution.
Click to expand...

So are you saying the ninja will only record interlaced with pulldown for 24p material and will require an additional post step and generational loss? Is it a cross-platform solution? Sounds like a no go to me. I am really not interested in a recorder that will work for 1080i, but will need a bunch of work and re-encoding in post for 24p, and wont even work with 60p.

Recording commonly used HDMI video modes natively is infinitely more important than implementing extraneous monitoring features.
 
nyvz I certainly can see what your saying. Theres only one other HDMI only recorder which is the Sound Devices Pix 220, which may be better for you. The pix 220 can convert to 24P. (This from their website) "For instance, some cameras set to record 24ps send 1080i 60 over HDMI or HD-SDI. PIX recorders can be set to convert the 1080i 60 stream back to 24p with no loss in quality."

So as you can see the pix doesnt even record 24P over HDMI natively - it "converts" the 60i input back to 24P. But it does do this real time whilst recording, so when you get back to your edit suite your material is ready to go in 24P no conversion time. But theres a large RRP difference as the PIX 220 is $1795.

The end result will be exactly the same. One is cheaper but requires an additional step in post. I think its good for the market to have both options.

FWIW however - I dont think youre ever going to find a HDMI recorder thats going to be able to record 60P. I think most companies will work around that by just using the tried and true HD-SDI.

Able Cine did a list of the current recorder crop which can be found here: http://blog.abelcine.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Recorder_Comparison_Chart_051611.pdf

Actually if I were in your shoes on making a decision - Id just go to Able Cine and talk to the guys.
 
The Nano is also an HDMI recorder that can do 2:3 pulldown removal to record 24p-over-60i as native 24p with no generation loss.
 
Recording commonly used HDMI video modes natively is infinitely more important than implementing extraneous monitoring features.
Click to expand...

Not everyone thinks that extra monitoring features are extraneous, even though I agree they have nothing to do with the capabilities of the system as a recorder. I also wanted to say that no-one can record anything other than what comes out of the camera. You can't flick a switch on an external recorder and make the camera do something it is not intended to do.

And it all depends on your workflow. If you absolutely must have material delivered in the shortest time (ie, without any post processing) then you're probably going to be using an SDI camera anyway. If you're not, the longer workflow might be a perfect balance between cost and speed. And don't forget that a (now) very large number of Ninja users are happily working without any form of post processing. It all depends what your priorities are.

Dave Shapton
Atomos
 
Pulldown removal on the nanoflash was added much later through a firmware update and Sony also added 24psf output to the EX1 through firmware much later. Which one followed which I don't know. A reencode for pulldown removal is necessary I believe for any recorder material if your camera isn't outputting a 24psf signal. Correct me if I am wrong but any recorder that removes pulldown on the fly needs a 24psf signal from the camera.

David I think we just want clarification that even with your stripper program that you can equal what sound devices is saying here:
"Conversion between interlaced and progressive, as well as frame rate conversion is available in realtime. For instance, some cameras set to record 24ps send 1080i 60 over HDMI or HD-SDI. PIX recorders can be set to convert the 1080i 60 stream back to 24p with no loss in quality."

Obviously you're not adding realtime to the ninja but how about "no loss of quality" with the stripper program, which is key to most that shoot 24p and have cameras that output 24psf (sound devices brochure is using 24ps which i think is them saying 24psf) from HDMI like the sony ex1. If the camera can't output 24psf through HDMI then I assume a post reencode is the only option for any recorder including the sound devices or the nanoflash. What kind of quality difference will there be if any?
 
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I am 98% certain that the NanoFlash's pulldown removal doesn't require a 24PsF signal. You can feed it a 60i signal with 2:3 pulldown embedded, and tell it you want to strip out 2:3 pulldown, and it just knows how.
 
Obviously you're not adding realtime to the ninja but how about "no loss of quality" with the stripper program
Click to expand...

There's a danger here with making an absolute statement that is actually capable of being interpreted in several ways. So I'll be precise when I talk about what I mean by "no loss of quality".

In Stripper, in 3:2 pulldown removal, there is a mathematical loss. In other words, you could show, if you understood it enough, that there is less information present after the "stripping" than before. But this mathematical loss is so small that no-one could possibly notice the difference and it will never be an issue in practice. ProRes is a state-of-the-art codec that's designed for extremely high quality and the only issue with Stripper is workflow one and absolutely not one of quality.

BTW - just for the sake of clarity: the NanoFlash records to MPEG-2 and not ProRes.

Dave Shapton
Atomos
 
Thanks David. I understand the difficulty in answering that question.

Regarding the stripper program. For non flagged 24p footage when I used cinema tools for FCP I had to find the cadence structure myself by stepping through the footage a frame at a time looking for the progressive and interlace frames. Can you say if the stripper program will do away with this process and figure it out for itself?

Regarding the monitor functions, and I know this is a tall order, it would be great, if possible, to have peaking for focus, false color for exposure, different frame guide lines, and the ability to do real color bar adjustment.
 
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mico said:
Regarding the stripper program. For non flagged 24p footage when I used cinema tools for FCP I had to find the cadence structure myself by stepping through the footage a frame at a time looking for the progressive and interlace frames. Can you say if the stripper program will do away with this process and figure it out for itself?

Regarding the monitor functions, and I know this is a tall order, it would be great, if possible, to have peaking for focus, false color for exposure, different frame guide lines, and the ability to do real color bar adjustment.
Click to expand...

I think our intention is to detect the cadence automatically where possible. Thanks for all the suggestions for Monitor functions: we'll be looking at all of those.

Dave Shapton
Atomos
 
Kenn, Im not sure thats a relevant question to this particular thread, but cases Ive heard of usually pertain to a sloppy conversion method from one codec to prores.
 
Kenn Christenson said:
Has anyone encountered the noise that ProRes seems to introduce?
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The answer to that is "no". But let me be more specific about that. Since ProRes is Apple's codec, only those manufacturers who have been through Apple's rigorous certification program are allowed to encode to it. Anyone with that certification therefore creates "ProRes", which meets Apple's specification fully.

Apple's own documentation describes ProRes (in the higher bitrate versions) as "visually lossless". Therefore, encoding to ProRes does not introduce visible noise.

Mathematically, (and invisiblely) there may be artefacts that one could describe as "noise", but this will be orders of magnitude less significant than the improvements normally gained by encoding to ProRes in the first place.

Dave Shapton
Atomos
 
Hi,
I'm new to this forum, I just bought a 500GB hd with Atoms are very satisfied with the choice also because no more SD transfer FCO, the only thing that I noticed the display part that is not the best for prewiv, I saw Ninja that the very hot, everything is normal? designed to improve the quality of the monitor to make use of it as a monitor?
Sucs for my English is not very great!
I use the Ninja with a Panasonic AG HMC151E 1080.25p registration system.
Thanks and congratulations to the forum
Rosario
 
videoarte said:
Hi,
I'm new to this forum, I just bought a 500GB hd with Atoms are very satisfied with the choice also because no more SD transfer FCO, the only thing that I noticed the display part that is not the best for prewiv, I saw Ninja that the very hot, everything is normal? designed to improve the quality of the monitor to make use of it as a monitor?
Sucs for my English is not very great!
I use the Ninja with a Panasonic AG HMC151E 1080.25p registration system.
Thanks and congratulations to the forum
Rosario
Click to expand...

David from Atomos has said that a firmware update is coming to give better playback/preview quality.
 
videoarte said:
Hi,
I'm new to this forum, I just bought a 500GB hd with Atoms are very satisfied with the choice also because no more SD transfer FCO, the only thing that I noticed the display part that is not the best for prewiv, I saw Ninja that the very hot, everything is normal? designed to improve the quality of the monitor to make use of it as a monitor?
Sucs for my English is not very great!
I use the Ninja with a Panasonic AG HMC151E 1080.25p registration system.
Thanks and congratulations to the forum
Rosario
Click to expand...

No problem with your English! Thanks for buying a Ninja.

1) Display quality: This will be fixed soon with a firmware upgrade. Quality will be as good as when you monitor the incoming HDMI signal.
2) Temperature: The Ninja is supposed to get quite warm. The aluminium case is the Heatsink - so if it gets warm, it means that it is working properly.
3) What is the make and model of your 500GB disk drive? We only recommend using Western Digital and Hitachi drives. We have found that some other drives do not perform as well and some (eg by Samsung) get very hot in operation.
4) We will be adding features to improve the usefulness of the Ninja as a monitor.

Dave Shapton
Atomos
 
Hey David, I just received the Ninja for my AF100. LOOKS AMAZING. Thank you for creating such an awesome product! I was able to really push the CC really hard and it handled it much much better than the native codec.

One simple request/suggestion for a firmware update: Can you give us the option to flip the image on the screen so that we can orientate the screen upside-down if we need? I find that I want to have the HDMI cord face inward towards my camera when it is mounted off to the left, and the cable sort of sticks out.

Thanks again!
 
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