Blackmagic Design Announces New ATEM Mini Pro

Live Streaming and Recording

April 3, 2020

In a time of Coronavirus Blackmagic Design’s CEO, Grant Petty showed off firmware updates and a whole new ATEM Mini Pro. All of these announcements directed at Live Streaming Video. In my opinion, Blackmagic Design is stepping up to deliver the products many of us need immediately. In the case of updating the ATEM Mini and announcing the ATEM Mini Pro, Blackmagic has added features needed for Zoom meetings, Live Streaming over YouTube or Twitch, and any other video conferencing programs.

ATEM Mini Pro

The ATEM Mini Pro is a $595 four HDMI input camera switcher capable of live streaming without the use of a third party program like OSB. One may also choose to record to a USB device straight from the ATEM Mini Pro. With the ATEM Mini Pro, you can control everything needed for live streaming in the ATEM switcher app. This includes a YouTube stream key, recording, and selecting live on-air.

ATEM Mini Pro includes a new hardware streaming engine to allow direct streaming via its Ethernet connection to YouTube Live, Facebook and Twitch. That means customers can live stream to YouTube, Facebook and Twitch in better quality, without dropped frames and with much simpler settings.
There is also support for recording the stream directly to USB flash disks in H.264, plus support for recording to multiple disks for continuous recording. That means customers get very long recordings in the same H.264 video files with AAC audio that customers streamed, so customers can directly upload to any online video site, such as YouTube and Vimeo.
ATEM Mini Pro also includes a multiview on the HDMI video output that allows all inputs to be monitored on a single monitor, as well as live status of recording, streaming and the audio mixer.

Camera control is a new feature in the ATEM Mini Pro. Now, users can control the lift, gamma, gain, color, iris, and iso in connected Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Cameras 4K and 6K. Camera control gives a lot of flexibility and ease of use to ATEM Mini Pro users who are using Pocket Cinema Cameras, which were not initially designed for multiple camera productions. An important new feature? The ATEM Mini Pro can send TC to all four cameras allowing one to use DaVinci Resolve’s Cut page to sync up the four separate in-camera recordings.

In many ways, the ATEM Mini Pro steps in where the original ATEM Mini was lacking. Of course, “lacking” really is not the right word. We have witnessed a tremendous change in our world and what we need to continue to be media professionals. Before Coronavirus, the ATEM Mini was great. Now, Blackmagic gives us a product better suited for working from home, conducting interviews from home, and multi-camera shoots from home.