The best external recorder (codec) for D800 + Windows + Premiere?

stokstad

Well-known member
Adding to the thread title;

How is the monitor on the Ninja 2 performing?

Price is also relevant.

Thanks
 
the Blackmagic shuttle will do dnxhd which would work great in Primere if you download the free avid codecs from their website. relatively cheap aswell
 
Nanoflash. It records XDCam in native .MXF format, meaning Premiere doesn't have to call out to a creaky Windows QuickTime API to decode it.
 
Ninja 2 also records in dnxhd.

That said I own a Ninja 2 and I was debating about selling it a week ago. I have since rescinded my sale and decided to keep it...but as mentioned, Dexter does not use them (but they also only really use them as additional cameras in hard to get to areas) and I don't believe Wilfred uses them either.

The quality of the monitor is just OK...Its by no means better than say a TV logic 5.6"

I think the only real advantage of shooting externally with this camera is being able to skip transcoding and shoot straight to pro-res or avid. As well as unlimited shooting time, should you even need that feature.

I figured...I already spent the money on it a year ago when it first came out. With the price drop and what not...not worth the hit. But if I had to do it all over again, I probably would NOT have bought it.
 
Ok, thanks for the info. Those are all valid inputs, and I might invest the money in a mosaic filter instead, and maybe an external monitor. But those Mosaic filters seems to be mighty expensive to import to sweden!
 
What if I want to record uncompressed? (don't ask why, but I need that)
The only one I've found, on a budget, is the Hyperdeck Shuttle 2.
Does it record 8-bit 422 uncompressed, or only 10-bit 422?
 
Start adding up mounts and all the extra crap you need for a hyperdeck and you hit close to the price of a ninja 2, even more so now that the price dropped to 795 (695 for a stripped out basic kit) PLUS you get the external monitor built in.
 
Yes, I do. And I'm even asking about 8-bit instead of 10-bit.
But I need uncompressed. I said don't ask!! :)
(it's not even for this camera, but since you're talking external recorders...)
 
Yes, I do. And I'm even asking about 8-bit instead of 10-bit. But I need uncompressed. I said don't ask!! :) (it's not even for this camera, but since you're talking external recorders...)

Well, you're always going to get 10-bit Uncompressed when a QuickTime file is involved.
 
So: any recorders able to record an HDMI signal without any compression at all, apart from the BlackMagic Shuttle?

The only other option that I am aware of would be a PC with an appropriate HDMI capture card and fast storage, such as a high end SSD or a RAID array. For a portable uncompressed recorder, the Hyperdeck Shuttle is the only game in town. I have one, and I'm fairly satisfied with it. It does the job. Just note that you'll need to be careful picking out an SSD that will be fast enough to capture 10bit uncompressed 1080i. It's pretty demanding in that aspect.
 
You do realize that any recorder you can plug up via HDMI is going to get 8-bit 4:2:2, right? And any signal besides what is going to be expected over HDMI isn't going to be compatible.
 
You do realize that any recorder you can plug up via HDMI is going to get 8-bit 4:2:2, right? And any signal besides what is going to be expected over HDMI isn't going to be compatible.

Yes, but it's still just digital data, in the end. I linked to a discription of the indieGS2K because it has an interesting way of recording 12bit raw and re-encoding it as a 10-bit 4:2:2 data stream that is output to a standard HDSDI port. You can then capture this feed via the usual means (Hyperdeck, etc.) but if you just tried to view it as-is, you would see a garbled mess, because the camera is only using the 10-bit 4:2:2 as a generic data container. Once you have the video stream in your computer, you use their proprietary software to reverse the encoding and get 12-bit raw as a result.

My guess is that the Magic Lantern devs might be considering developing something similar to that in order to get around the bottleneck of having to write all of that raw data to CF cards, or otherwise overflowing the buffer. Samuel, is that more-or-less it?
 
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