Samurai Blade REC trigger with Sony XD-Cam

[Grant Peacock]

Hi all,

Wanted to share something, before I forget. This issue can be elusive - you're not sure if you should be focusing on feature sets of the recorder, or the camera. Also tricky because of the age of origination of camera and HD-SDI.... 'What trigger features did they have avail in SDI signals, back then?'

Here is how I obtained that sought-after 'red box' around the Samurai Blade screen (indicative of recording) - in my PDW-F800, I went to Maintenance menu, page M12, CAM CONFIG 1, HDSDI REMOTE I/F - changed from (whatever it was) to R-TLY.

I can't even tell you what all these sub-menu abbreviations stand for. Sometimes, you just get lucky. This is great for me tomorrow, as the camera will be up on the right shoulder for at least some of the shoot, and it's an almighty pain in the butt if you have to keep touching the ATOMOS screen to manually record. And you simply will not catch every shot under those circumstances. With this menu adjustment, the Samurai Blade will now follow the REC button on the camera (inside the Blade menus, it is set to follow Sony from amongst cam manufacturer choices).

Happy shooting!

Grant.

 

[NorBro]

There's more info about it on page 190 in the manual (if interested).

Every camera has a recording trigger control or you set it up in the Atomos hardware to trigger recording.

I hope you're recording internally too (if possible) because not being able to see and confirm it's working every time would make me apprehensive!

 

[cyvideo]

My experience has been that most early SDI cameras never had embedded SDI trigger information. That isn't a problem with a Ninja Blade. All you have to do is set the Ninja Blade TC menu as per the following images. Any SDI feed with embedded TC will then start and stop the Samurai Blade every time you hit record/stop button on the camera. Obviously, the camera TC menu setting has to be set to REC/RUN for this triggering to work, NOT FREE RUN. Once the TC is generating from the record button start on the camera the SDI embedded TC will then trigger the Blade to record. Once the camera TC stops turning over from the camera the Blade will then stop. To get this triggering method to work correctly you have to first go to the Blade's Timecode menu and set the trigger method as "Camera Trigger > None/Timecode" and then secondly make sure the "TC>0" icon to its right has been selected by tapping on it. When correctly selected this icon will turn a bright Canary Yellow color. The TC recorded in the Blade's ProRes/DNX files will now be the same TC as that generated by the camera internally. The same TC as you have on your XDCam disc as outlined in your example.

Chris Young

 

[Grant Peacock]

Very interesting! The only change I made which moved this rig from non-trigger to trigger was the one I mentioned above in the submenu choices of the F800 camera. So I think that there might actually be multiple factors in play, and the sum total of these may vary with the combination of camera and outboard recorder. It does keep it all quite engaging.