ATEM Television Studio HD8 ISO - Full Review & Walkthrough !

[Music] finally it's there we got it this is the new atom television Studio hd8 ISO from Blackmagic that we have purchased and today I am going to show you what it does how to get started with the device what I like about it what I don't like about it and how it compares to the very popular ate mini extreme switcher I will also try to go beyond just a simple review and make a short tutorial to help you getting started [Music] if you have never used an atem switcher before or if you are a bit new to the live production World let me explain this tool allows you to produce a live video edit from multiple camera and video sources you could either use it to live stream uh any kind of events over the internet on YouTube twitch Facebook Twitter whatever it can be a webinar a conference a church service a ceremony it doesn't have to be a live stream actually you can just make a video edit live on location but without any live streaming that could apply if you are filming a play a concert a show a festival but you don't have any budget for post-production so you want to make the edit on location during the show now you could do all of that with a computer software such as Vmax or OBS but when you start to add more than three cameras several outputs and you need a higher quality production software Solutions are not always the most reliable option this switcher takes up to 8km our inputs and is not destructive meaning that when you select a camera number on the panel it will route that exact inputs to the outputs that is on air a bit like a railroad switch as opposed to a computer which is like a big black box with loads of conversion and processing involved that rely strongly on the CPU in many cases a computer will crash easily now what is so special with this television Studio well traditionally you would need to stack many different equipment together to make your life stream possible using a hardware workflow you would need a switcher converters a control panel a video recorder a remote network switch an audio mixer an encoder to send the outputs to the internet which makes the overall system quite expensive and not that user friendly with this television Studio device Blackmagic has managed to shrink all of that equipment into one single device that looks very cool on the desk you just connect all your video video and audio inputs and it has all the buttons you need to switch cameras and to create your live stream you can also make your second edit for the venue video projector that is a bit different from the live stream you can control the camera settings such as ISO white balance Etc you can mix the audio you have compressors EQ gain it has a built-in encoder to stream directly to the internet a belt on SSD hard drive that can record the whole show and all the separate camera feeds plus the audio tracks you can make complex picture-in-picture layouts everything most people will need in one single compact professional device well I shouldn't say compact because it's quite bulky it's around seven kilograms and here's how it looks next to a 13-inch MacBook Pro just for reference anyways let's now see how you can get started from unboxing to live streaming in just 11 quick steps [Music] Step 1 bring power to the switcher so just like the other Blackmagic switcher there is no power switch so once I plug it in it will just uh turn on it takes just a few seconds and then here it's on to turn it off you just um yes that's how they work there is no on off switch it's worth noting that you do not have to use the mains power you can also power the switcher using a 12 volt battery and this 12 volt XLR input could also be used as a backup Step 2 connect any kind of monitor into the multi-view port at the back here so there is both an HDMI and an SDI Port you choose whichever we want step 3 connect all your video sources into the different inputs of the switcher a video Source can be a camera a laptop a drone anything this switcher only supports SDI inputs and outputs so if you have an HDMI camera or laptop you need to convert the signal using an HDMI to SDI converter also make sure you are sending videos in HD as this does not support 4K videos you can also connect your main audio inputs using the XLR inputs at the back this is usually be provided by the sound guy of the venue for the purpose of this video here I have three cameras one Top Shot One front shot and one side shot plus a fourth source which is a computer so I have four video sources in total on the multiview monitor you should see something like this so on the bottom part you can see your video sources on the top right window that is what we call your program video this window at the top right is what the viewers will ultimately see you can select which camera will be shown to the audience and therefore in this program window by selecting the corresponding camera in this line of button here or the red line so here you pretty much select which camera Will Go On Air at any given time this line of button here is called the program bus now depending on how many viewers will watch your stream this can be very scary so there is another line right below which is called the preview bus you have access to the very same camera the very same sources but instead of selecting a camera that will go live on air right now directly it is being sent on the top left preview window so uh when I select the camera here it will be sent to the left window and when you think you're ready you just press the cut button here and it will just send it on air so you choose your camera in the preview window and for example if I want to go on here I select my camera here and then I want to go on there press the cut button and it toggles between the two the camera that was previously on air will at the same time come back in the preview window instead of a hard cut you can also use a transition to that you first select your transition type here so for example a Crossfade is called mix and then you slowly move the t-bar here which will give you perfect control over your transaction so here it's here it's just the Crossfade but I can select other types of transitions here and you can see that with that t-bar I have perfect control over the transition if I want I can change here the pattern here so I have like several pattern to choose from I can take like a circle here and then it will have that kind of circle transition there so that was pretty much the most important part if you are new to the live video production World step number four set your project frame rate and resolution so to do that you just head over to the settings menu and here on the LCD you just uh press forward and here you can select which video standard you will be using so the switchero supports 720p and 20 1020p resolution up to 60 FPS so here we are using 1080p 25 set video standards it's already set and with the next Arrow you can also select the multi-view standard if you're using uh 25 or 50p so yeah you can set the two different outputs and then the video standard will be sent to all the outputs the item will automatically convert all the inputs to that frame rate for you so there's a down conversion involved however it's so good practice to make sure your camera frame rate matches this project frame rate because conversion can induce slightly choppy videos sometimes when you go from 30 to 25 so if you can have the proper frame rate already set in the camera then if we continue exploring the settings with the right arrow here you can adjust the brightness of all the buttons uh the labels step 5 connect any video outputs you need the streaming video signal will be sent through the ethernet port the recording can be made internally or using a how the hard drive plugged into one of the USBC ports at the back but what if you have other monitors what if you have a video protectors a customer monitor Etc well you can get a copy of the program output so what the audience sees if you connect a monitor to the PGM ports to one of the PGM port at the back for instance if you want to use a dedicated monitor just for the outputs also you can connect two additional devices in the aux one and aux 2 ports such as the venue projector for instance the cool thing about these two aux ports is that you can select where which source you want to send them on directly on the switcher with these buttons so if I select aux one I can send either camera one to it camera 2 camera R3 I can send the program or I can send like the multi-view so you could use aux1 for the venue projector for instance and aux 2 for the stage lighting designer at the back for instance or you can send him like a multiview of all the cameras so step number six start the recording for this you just have to press the right button here and you're done it's basically recording on the internal 2 terabyte drive and here you are you can now completely produce the live edit of a concert or a play and we call it on the built-in m.2 SSD if you want to access the recording you have to connect the switcher to your local network using an ethernet cable you could either connect it to the same network as your laptop using a router that's typically what I usually do or you could use a switch and instead of fixed IP address for your computer network Cloud so that it is in the same subnet as your item switcher so this is a bit more complicated I personally always use a router I really like the GLI net brand so a very compact switchers they're very fast they're really reliable what I did is I basically just connected the switcher here on this router and the laptop is connected to the same router using Wi-Fi so to access the recording I just go into the network uh of the mac and then here I have my recordings from there now if you want to do more than just a recording and if you want to also make your live streaming this is where you would need to connect a computer to adjust additional settings and this brings me to step number seven connect the atom switcher to a network that has internet access so I would typically recommend connecting into a router instead of a basic switch so in this case I would just connect the the it in internet connection of the venue in the One Ports here and the atoms which are here and then I can put a switch here you can do it differently you can also connect uh the venue internet line directly at the back of the switcher and then access the switcher settings using USB this brings me to step number eight which is setting the streaming platform settings in the atom software to do that you need to download and install the atem software control from the Blackmagic website launch atom software controller and then you will see your atom show up on the connection page here if it doesn't it means that your computer is not on the same network so you can also connect to the item using a USB cable from your computer to your item and in the output section here you will copy paste the streaming key that you get from YouTube twitch or any other platform and then as soon as you have entered the credential so the host and the key you just press the on air button here your stream will show up in the web interface of your streaming platform and you just have to start the live stream from there if you are streaming on Zoom teams or WebEx it's a bit different you can also connect the USBC output of the switcher and connect it to your computer and then select your item and the webcam list of the software as as if the item was just a regular USB webcam step number nine while we are in the atom settings uh you can also arrange the different cameras on the multiview and rename the different cameras so um if you want to do that you just press the Cog here on the bottom left and then here in the multi-view page you can select here which camera goes where and then here if I want to collapse or add more cameras here this will change change the multiview like this so I can have either um I can have the two big Windows here here I can change the positions of the camera so uh here we go so I'm changing the multi-view on the fly if you want to change the camera names also you can do that by going into sources here and then you change here uh the different labels of the camera and the outputs as well if you want to customize the buttons on the panel it's very simple you go you press the settings button here and then button mapping then you select which button here you would like to adjust so for instance if I take the first button here I select button one here and then I select here which camera I want it to be so if I wanted to be camera one which is the default it's gonna be camera one I can put camera two as well so these two buttons will have camera two so here I can put like a different types of color I can put a blue color and I also can also put the blue color for the label here so let's say you want just three buttons you just select button number four here and this will assign It To None So you select each one of them and then you go to the uh Toppers to the extreme position and you select none and then when you've done that for all of them you can see that you have just those three buttons here step 10 add your media if you want to add a fixed jpeg or a PNG that have transparency you can just drag and drop these graphic elements into the gallery of the atem and then from there once you have imported all of your media in the item you can just load them over to one of the two media pools so a media pool is just like any other video Source it's a source you can assign it's to a multiview position or you can make a custom button that will trigger media pool 1 media pool 2. it's just like any other source you can also add a media with transparency such as a logo and assign it to a downstream keyer so you first send that media to a media poll and then in the downstream keyer option you just select this media pool to be the keyer and then when you press one of these buttons here here it will just show the logo on screen actually you can even send the media to the item directly from Photoshop which is even more practical if you need to make adjustments on the fly to the text or the positioning of a logo what's very cool with this specific switcher is that you can also add animate in media too however you cannot just drop an mp4 file it has to be a sequence of still images and less than 200 frames which makes around 6 to 8 seconds so I tend to only use that for animated backgrounds like the Super Source background for instance if you need to send animated lower thirds on the Fly I would recommend using the h2r graphic plugin by John Barker or you could use something like Pro Presenter if you have a video based After Effects animations I have put links in the description if you want to dig further on how to handle Medias and videos lower thirds Etc Step 11 if you have black man actually cameras you will get many many additional features the atom can directly control many camera settings such as iOS ISO Focus Zoom shading and color correction and you can access these settings directly from the switcher using the built-in knobs so this is very new and I really like it so for instance I can select the camera which is right in front that you are seeing which is camera number three so I press the select button here and then here uh when I I can toggle between the different camera Pages by pressing the cam button and you can see here I can control so the iOS which is f 2.4 but I can adjust that I can control things like Focus uh gain but also things like um saturation which is here yeah you can do a black and white movie um we can control uh of course yeah the contrast to um and when we press this button here it will just reset everything we can control the ND filters if you have like pocket 6K Pro things like this um and basically all the camera settings here we can also make a primary color grading we can control Zoom Focus everything you need from this panel just with these small screens pretty nice if you are using black magic cameras the atom will also send a tally signal to the camera this light that becomes red when the camera is on air and green when the camera is in the preview monitor the atom will also send a returned program video to the camera that the camera operator can display on its screen by just pressing a button this is a very practical and you are doing Super Source or things like this or picture in pictures so that the camera operator can frame exactly where the camera has to be finally all the communications audio between the director and the team uh that what we call the TalkBack is also sent using this camera protocol now how do you activate this black magic camera control well if you have a studio 4K Pro a 6K Pro and Osa broadcasts and r70 pro you just connect the SDI out of this atom switcher into the SDI in input put of the camera and in the camera you have to set the proper 810 camera number in the setup menu if you have a pocket camera there is no SDI in input so you need to use a bit directional converter 3G or 12g that will convert the HDMI of the camera into an SDI in and an SDI out but if you are using Blackmagic pocket cameras and don't plan on making a lot of live streams the atem mini series might be a better fit for you talking about the atem mini I would now like to compare the ATA mini extreme to this atom television Studio because even though both have 8 inputs there are quite a few differences between the two the first difference is the size and weights um at almost 7 kilograms the atom television studio is more than 5 times heavier and much bigger than the atom mini extreme also the television Studio costs almost three times the price if both the lower price and the compact size is super important for you then you should consider buying the atom mini extreme or the 8m SDI extreme otherwise it's really worth considering this switcher as it basically has everything the atom mini extreme already has plus many incredible additional features before I go through all the differences between the two I would like to say a few words about the sponsor of this video which is ourselves we are a live protection company but we also build software and Hardware equipment designed for live streaming based on our extensive field experience I recommend you check out our free middle control app for mac and windows which gives you more advanced control over your black magic cameras it can do things like start and stop recording on all cameras at the same time with a press of buttons show or hide the camera status view remotely or control all the camera settings and color correction with a stream deck and bit Focus companion things like this if you have a DJI gimbal such as the rs2 or S3 Pro you can pair this app with our apcr devices which will basically turn your existing Gimbal and Black Magic Camera in into a network control PTZ head and if you are always wondering how you could make your day-to-day workflow even more efficient you should check out our upcoming optical fiber Solutions as well now stay with me as I guide you through all the additional incredible features that I found in this television Studio which do not exist on the A10 minutes number one the look and the weight I think the television Studio looks amazing and highly professional since it is much heavier than the Ada mini that also means that the television Studio won't be moving everywhere when you have many cables connected number two LCD displays to me that is the biggest difference between the two the television studio is an all-in-one solution so you can almost use it without any computer it has several integrated LCD displays on which you can access 95 of the switcher configuration and features if you want to adjust camera settings or sound control on theater mini you do have a few buttons but but you can't really see what is happening when you press this or that button you don't have any feedback so with the switcher uh you have this LCD strip just above the rotary knobs for the audio and camera control that will give you precise feedback on what you are actually doing you also have the names of the different cameras just above the buttons you can scroll through the menus Etc and that brings me to number three custom button layouts naming and colors as opposed to the atom mini on which all the buttons are fixed and hardwired to input one to eight the atom television Studio camera selection buttons are completely customizable if you only have three cameras you can just create three buttons and the rest is just off and you can even change the color of each button and text label individually you also get to see the name of the camera right next to the button plus there are two rows of buttons one row for preview and one row for program overall the buttons are much higher record id2 so you are less likely to make a switching mistake it's a small detail but these deadly Fade to Black buttons and on their buttons have guards on each side as opposed to the A10 mini which means that you won't be pressing these critical buttons by accident number four the t-bar this lever here allows you to perfectly control the transition between two shots instead of having to deal with the fixed transition duration of the atom mini I personally don't use transition that often but when I use the one I use which is the Crossfade this t-bar is very very very handy number five 12 SDI outputs that is much more than the two outputs of the A10 mini extreme and the four outputs of the 8msdi extreme so it's a big step up however on these 12 SDI outputs you have to keep in mind that only two can be custom routed to any inputs the eight SDI outputs are hardwired to the program output and the multi-view output is hardwired to the multi-view I was happy to see that there is also an additional HDMI output for the multi-view it makes complete sense because most TVs and monitors are HDMI you also have buttons on the switcher to select which input goes into which aux outputs on the atom mini x-frame you could only do that for one output number six internal recording on SSD right after unboxing and powering up when I press the record button it actually started recording the program recording is stored into a two terabytes SSD inside that can be accessed over the network the fact that it's an end 0.2 SSD means that you can easily upgrade it later which is nice the iso version of the switcher will also record all the separate camera feeds and create a resolve project file for you so you can edit other cats what is completely crazy is that you can also sync the internal drive to uh Dropbox or Google Drive number seven audio control I have already mentioned the fact that you can control all your audio levels compression EQ gain and pan directly from the knobs on the panel which is very very convenient but that's not the only change that has been made with this switcher you can custom route any audio inputs to any of all the 16 channels of the program recording and SDI outputs so you can basically end up with a multi-track audio recording in one single video file this can be incredibly helpful when you have say one input which is a PowerPoint presentation with sound another which is a zoom speaker a third one which is a camera audio with quiet reactions and all of that is recorded next to the main mix and for me this is a big big step up in terms of audio because now if we use an SDI to audio converter from Blackmagic you can split the SDI signal into like 16 XLR cables and give that to the sound engineer number eight three separate audio monitoring outputs first we can find the traditional director headset output now it's not the traditional headphone jack but instead they have put a five pin XLR for headsets that have a microphone built in like this goes a noise reduction headsets I think Blackmagic should really make an adapter for all of us who use traditional headsets now what's new is that we also have two additional stereo outputs one which is called control and one which is called Studio what's very cool is that for each of these three outputs you can adjust the volume level the program level the intercom level separately for each output and you can also quickly mute each output with a press of a button on the panel also you can now adjust the microphone level of the director which I think wasn't possible with any other atem this can be very practical when you have have different people monitoring the audio for instance if we have a director a sound engineer and we also have Studio speakers they will all have very different mixes number nine Maddie in and out Mary is a digital protocol which lets you add up to 64 inputs and outputs of audio to your item it is less popular than Dante but at least offers an option to use the atom as a powerful audio mixer in the future Blackmagic has also released this 8 microphone converter which allows you to add four XLR inputs of audio through the Mali protocol it's really really good but I think it can be improved I will talk about that a bit later in the video number 10 remote streaming to any of the inputs by default each of the eight inputs will receive the corresponding SDI in signal that is connected at the back of the atem however you can also assign any inputs to a remote Blackmagic camera over the Network or a remote item somewhere in the world that is definitely something very new that could not be done with any other item until now even the most expensive one number 11 TalkBack output on the television Studio we can find the same five pin XLR TalkBack connector as the atom constellation Series so you can use one of these headsets that have a microphone built in to talk to your team just as I said before if you are using a studio camera 4K Pro you can also connect these headsets to the camera at the back of a switcher there is a connector that allows you to connect that TalkBack system to any intercom device and this is very very good because uh for example we made our own adapter for the EOTech ultralight Series this means that the director can hear both the camera operators and the program at the same time in the same headsets pretty cool number 12 additional Connections In addition to all the previous features this atom has a few nice connections like four Burton ethernet ports instead of one time code in and out and additional stereo audio inputs and two balanced your outputs for speakers number 13 there is also a countdown overlay that is built in the switcher it can be cool to show it at the beginning of a live stream or to just show the current time but it is hardwired to the AUX one output and you cannot really choose a custom font so I don't really see myself using it just yet and that leaves me with number 14 last but not least animated Medias as opposed to the atom minis which only supports still images in the media pool you can hear load animated videos in the switcher it is a bit cumbersome because you cannot really load an mp4 file it has to be an animated sequence of images and has to be less than 200 frames which is about 6 to 8 seconds but I use that all the times on the constellation switches to make a custom loopable animated background for the Super Source so for this kind of use I think this is a very cool addition I probably forgot other differences but as you can see there are quite a few important features that have impact into this switcher and it is way way more capable than an A2 mini or the previous television Studio versions so it's more than just a small updates however with all of this being said I did notice a few downsides that are worth mentioning and I want to share all of that with you the first and most important limitation of the switcher is that we still need to use a computer to adjust some settings I think the main LCD display is under utilized I really wish we could use that display to adjust 100 of the switcher settings and not just 90 percent for instance if you want to set which camera goes where on the multi-view and change the labels you have to use a computer you want to adjust streaming or recording settings you need a computer you want to preview your media Stills so you need a computer to see the media all of these kinds of breaks the concept of the all-in-one device that does not require any computer this LCD could also do so many more things like control the Blackmagic camera menus remotely also a sort of status page with the current streaming and recording status it would be really cool and it would be even better to bring that to the existing atem Advanced panel as well because they have the same limitation there are some settings that you cannot access with the panel the second downside for me is that there are no HDMI inputs I have almost always at least one HDMI Source on every single live production I did who uses a Mac or PC with built-in SDI outputs whether it is a laptop for presentation a zoom speaker a camera that does not have SDI like the Blackmagic pocket camera 4K and I really think that today with those HDMI optical fiber cables that can run hundreds of meters with zero issues HDMI is gaining ground in the professional world too I don't actually know how many HDMI ports would have made me happy but I think at least two for instance just for this video I have an HDMI computer and two pocket cameras so that is three HDMI sources since the name is hd8 I really hope to see a 12 or 16 input version of this switcher with something like four SDI inputs that also have an HDMI input next to it just like the multiview but SDI HDMI is an never-ending debate so feel free to give your opinion in the comments on this I know that the racquetball item constellation are all 100 SEI based but we don't really mind since we usually have space inside the rack to add the number of HDMI to SDI converters we need and actually we don't really use um SDI that much now that we have moved all of our workflow to optical fiber we are soon going to release a rackable one new fiber module and fiber stage boxes so feel free to check these out if you're interested I was also disappointed to see that the 8 SDI outputs at the back of the switcher are all hardwired to the program output so it doesn't really behave like the constellation Series where all the outputs can be custom set to any inputs and it acts like a video Hub in the switcher here there are only two SDI outputs which can be set to any inputs and these are called ox1 and ox2 another limit station that was already there in some constellation items and the atom mini switcher is that you cannot set any border for the Super Source that is really a bummer because we use that all the time and I wish it could be updated in a future update there's also the fact that the switcher is not 4K and only HD that is not really an issue for us since we still do most of our stream in fact all of our streamer in agency however I really wish the multiview output would have been in 4k because uh with all the small Windows Etc it really makes a difference to see which ones are actually in Focus next I do have a comment regarding the built-in recording feature of the ISO model when you record internally or on an external drive the separate camera feeds can be recorded at up to 17 megabits in h.264 which is quite nice but the program output is recorded that the streaming quality settings which is most likely closer to three or four megabits than 70 megabits that is really really low and I wish it was much higher I actually wish we could recall called prores just for the master program this ISO recording feature is so good that I would really love to see a device from Blackmagic that would allow us to make ISO recordings with the constellation switchers and save the resolved project files Etc I also found that despite the improvements that have been made on the audio sites like custom embedding of the 16 channels of audio there are still a couple of things that bother me the first one is the fact that whatever you do all the outputs of the switcher will have program audio and you cannot even mute one of the outputs so uh you cannot send for instance camera 2 audio and to aux one it will always send the master program audio in every output also despite the Maddie microphone converter being a very solid addition I find that four XLR inputs is simply not enough and uh they should have put outputs on this converter I wish they will come out with a microphone converter that will have more inputs and outputs another thing is that you cannot rename the Maddie channels and you also cannot rearrange the different audio channels like uh an X32 mixer for instance which means that even if you are only using three or four channels of audio including Madi audio you have to toggle through the different banks so I would really love to see the options of hiding audio channels that are not in use actually you can already do that with the cameras and the camera control page but that is not possible for sound my final comments is that the headphone jack is gone what you can do instead is to use the headphone jack output of a TV monitor or use a headset that has a 5 pin XLR inputs like this both active noise reduction headset but Blackmagic if you are watching this please just make an adapter uh just an adapter that extracts a headphone jack from the 5 pin XLR TalkBack I'm pretty sure so many users would instantly buy it so I've listed quite a few limitations but to be honest in a nutshell I think this is a really fantastic switcher and I expect it to be very popular what sets it apart from the other switchers and makes it really unique is that it's an all-in-one self-contained device so you just bring your monitor you power it up and everything is just there it also has many many features that the atom minis were missing to the point where I really dreamed Blackmagic could bring all of these additions to the existing switches in the atem constellation lineup so if you are running a small studio if you are making educational contents tutorials if you make undergo live stream but you want an all-in-one system uh this switcher could be a very very nice fit for you however you have to keep in mind that it also means the system is not very modular so if you are looking in the system that you can upgrade over a time and add custom converters or building blocks for an optimal workflow you would probably be better off with a wreckable setup and make your custom rack from there finally I would like to say that this is not a long-term review so I cannot say much about stability and reliability yet the item products engine oil are known from being very stable and highly reliable and are differently devices you can trust in the long term so I am very confident that this will be a very solid Choice that's it for today thank you very much for watching and as I said in the intro this review was not sponsored or endorsed by Blackmagic since we purchased the switcher so I gave my honest opinion I hoped you liked it feel free to share your thoughts in the comments and see you very soon [Music]

Channel: Middle Things

Views: 62,753

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Id: w4ixzY2zM0w

Length: 39min 35sec (2375 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 28 2023