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Filed under: Apple •compression •GentryMedia Sister Sites •ProVideo Coalition •Hardware •NAB 2011 •Production •

NAB 2011 - Recorders

Sound Devices PIX 240 main display with all data overlays enabled.

If NAB had an unofficial theme this year, it was “the year of compact on-camera digital recorders.” And the subtext? Suddenly, silently: ProRes everywhere.

I’ve got video coverage of two small camera-top recorders, the Sound Devices PIX and the Fast Forward Video Sidekick. The video shows the Sidekick’s features and interface pretty clearly, but I didn’t have as much interface detail on the PIX recorders. These devices use a selection of hard keys along with a side-mounted spinning knob to select menu items and options; in playback mode, the spinning knob serves as the jog/shuttle controller.

There plenty of display items to choose from.

ProRes422 from Proxy to HQ is standard; DNxHD is a $100 option.

Its’s from Sound Devices, so you know you’ll have great audio options.

The Atomos Ninja ($1000, HDMI only, shipping now) and Samurai ($1500, SDI, shipping in a few months) got a lot of attention: low-cost ProRes recorders from former Blackmagic Design folks. They lack the flexibility of the PIX and the Sidekick in terms of inputs and I/O transcoding (they offer HDMI only, or SDI only), but they have a very clean interface design and simple operation. The Atomos units come as complete kits with batteries, charger, case, and a playback station; add the 2.5” HDDs or SSDs of your choice.

The Atomos Ninja comes completely equipped; the Samurai will, as well.

The Ninja has a simple, friendly touchscreen UI.

Atomos Ninja in E-E display mode.

Dual Sony-style NP batteries power the Atomos recorders. The drive slot sits behind the screen.

And while the Ninja is shipping (a rarity at this NAB, where the most common refrain was “shipping in June”), it’s by no means finished: playback is rudimentary and pixellated. The engineers are working on moving playback processing to a second, underutilized FPGA; fortunately the Atomos boxes are easily field-updatable.

Of course, existing players in the camera-top recorder market haven’t been sitting idly by. Cinedeck (which has a nasty, CPU-gobbling, all-Flash-all-the-time website) has added Avid’s DNxHD and Apple’s ProRes codecs to their “extremely capable” recorders.

Cinedeck now offers the three industry-leading compression systems as well as uncompressed.

HDMI, VGA, analog audio, power, and TC this side; SDI on the other side.

AJA’s Ki Pro and Ki Pro Mini recorders, writing ProRes to HDDs, SSDs, and CF cards, were in widespread evidence. However, there is still no evidence that anyone has figured out where the “Ki Pro” name comes from.

Redundancy is good: this NEX-FS100 has both a Ki Pro and a Ki Pro Mini recorder.

Every one of the aforementioned recorders offers ProRes as a codec; on a couple, ProRes is the only codec available. Earlier this year (or late last year?) Apple apparently and with little fanfare opened up ProRes encode licensing to a broad array of third parties—not just the recorder makers I’m talking about here, but makers of transcoders, grid-based encoding systems, and so on. ProRes is rapidly becoming a de facto standard codec, even on Windows-based systems. As an FCP user, I appreciate its wider acceptance and availability, but I worry that ProRes remains a closed and opaque compression technology. I do wish Apple would submit ProRes to SMPTE… but I’m not holding my breath.

Next: is tape really, truly, finally dead?

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I think the Convergent Design Gemini is one of the best recorders with usable monitor.

It can record all the way up to uncompressed 4:4:4 at 10bit. Superior to any ProRes

It’s power draw is the lowest of all the recorders I have seen.

And it’s size and weight are excellent.

The only drawback is that it is not shipping yet - so one has to wait for final judgement.

The other problem for us is the price range of TRUE 10-bit output camcorders.

Posted by lightprismtv  on  04/26  at  06:20 AM

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