Atomos Ninja Inferno Review - Get the most out of your camera - in 4k

hey guys got a brand new video for you today and today we're looking at the animals ninja Inferno and this is a 4k external recorder slash monitor and basically I'll get into the specs in a bit but first you know it the unboxing roll it alright so starting with the specs this has a 7 inch 1080p display it'll record up to 4k 60fps actually 1080p 120 fps 10 bit 4 2 2 the screen has 1500 nits of brightness those things like insanely bright I'm outdoors you can shoot with it and you can see basically in the Sun obviously it helps if you have a hood but it's still really bright not only is it 10 bit display it's actually an HDR display so you actually preview while you're shooting HDR content with this monitor records and 2 flavors of codecs so you've got Apple ProRes as well as DN x HR DNxHD it records two two and a half inch SSDs or hard drives I'd recommend SSDs just because they're faster and you can get the higher bitrate and transfer to your computer way faster as a built-in headphone jack and it's powered either by the adaptive you can plug into the wall or on the back you can actually plug in two of these Sony batteries or one basically if you plug in one and it runs out it'll switch to the other one but to save weight you just put one on it takes just a standard so many battery these are the NPS 9 70s you can put the smaller ones on it but I find they get more time out of these bigger guys so I've been using the recorder now for about 2 ish months ever since I got the gh 5 I thought that I wanted to get some better quality just because the gh 5s bit rate even though it's 10 bit it has a lot of compression in order to make use of 10 bit footage you need something like this to actually record it in a higher bitrate and that's until the GH 5 gets an update supposed to get some update that gives a 400 megabits per second but right now it's kind of limited to 150 megabits per second which is pretty over 10 bit footage diving something like the animals ninja inferno you can actually record in 10 bit 4 2 2 right up to 4k 60fps and have that higher bitrate in like ProRes or DNxHD UX that's what I've been recording in a lot because I'm editing on a Windows machine right now and that avid kodak actually is handled better than the ProRes codec but I'm shooting on a Mac Pro res is better alright so the first time using DN xhr you actually have to activate it with avid so you see the device ID at the bottom left there you have to go on the website type in your email address and that device ID and hit submit and then it generates an unlock code for you and you type that into the inferno and then it unlocks it and then you can use TNT xhr the menus are dead simple it's super intuitive it's all touchscreen it's very fluid the menus quick it's not like you're waiting for stuff to load the only time you kind of wait for things to load as if you want to play something back after recording monitor actually kind of like shuts down and resets itself into a playback mode and that takes a little bit of time focus peaking is insanely precise it's better than anything I've used on any camera I mean the gh 5 has really nice focus peaking so does Fuji Sony's isn't bad but I would say that like the gh 5 has a lot better focus peaking but this insanely precise you know when you're getting the outline around your stuff it's very very precise way more than anything I've ever used you've got waveforms you got zebras you got one-to-one zoom in so you can check focus you can move around on the screen and everything is just very fluid and smooth so one of the big things I want to talk about is being able to take a lot off of premiere export it onto the hard drive and put it on to the ninja Inferno and being able to watch your footage back while you recording it with the lead over top is amazing especially be shooting D log s log C log n e log profile you can actually load the load into this thing and then get your exposure settings proper so you're not like clipping highlights or screwing around with like shadows and stuff like that you'll be able to view it as the LUT on here it's not actually recording the light onto here it's recording it as log footage coming out of the camera but it's just kind of an overlay so we were shooting a promo video for our band and I actually recorded us making a lot importing the LUT and then using it on the shoot and let's take a look at that right now so we're using the sony a7s mark to recording it to the ninja inferno we're actually shooting this an s log to first time we're doing here is we're going to record a little bit of footage just so we can get some reference video to use take the hard drive out plug it into the computer and then we built our lot inside luma tree and then you export the LUT to the dot cube file and you save that right to the SSD that's going to go back in the ninja in for a moment once that's on there you can basically put the hard drive back into the ninja Inferno go up here load a custom LUT it's going to overwrite the old one but you click it once and then you click it again and then it'll load it in you can actually save up to eight custom Lutz [Music] some other cool features you get while you're recording is that you can actually load up the crops so if you want to shoot in like two three five or some other weird aspect ratio like just a square you can actually punch that in and it kind of graze out at that area and then it kind of gives you more of a visual representation of what it's going to look like even though it's still recording sixteen by nine alright so I just want to show you timeline performance editing with the footage coming off this thing the cool thing is you can actually take the SSD out of this plug it into a USB 3 reader and you can basically edit off the drive don't even have to import anything if you don't want to and it's cool because that's really fast especially with USB 3 and just want to jump into a edit right here on premiere and show you how smooth it plays back this is 4k footage 10 bit with let's load it up playing back in full quality and I don't have a problem with it so as you can see timeline scrubbing is really smooth I'm at full quality here for K 10 bit and I've got a bunch of let's loaded up on here as you can see it on the adjustment layer plus some corrections to the actual clip and if we go up here and check the properties of the clip I'll just show you proof here that it's intended yeah basically have no problem playing it back or scrubbing through the timeline and I don't quite get this kind of smoothness from anything that I get off a camera using compressed mp4 files all right so this video could go on forever there's a lot of things I could talk about but I basically want to tell you now but the things I love screen quality the brightness the tools waveform zebras focus peaking everything is just on point and way better than anything that I've ever used built into a camera it's intuitive playback you can play stuff back in slow motion you can actually reverse Clips if you want to and play it backwards being able to use cheap SSDs well they're not that cheap but being able to get an SSD that's like 500 gigs or a terabyte compared to something like a UHS 2 card and trying to get the same amount of footage or even C fast C fast cars are really expensive this is a way cheaper option and like I said you can actually plug this into a reader and edit right off this working with dn xhr footage is amazing it's the same with pro res when you're editing on a Mac but it's just high bitrate smooth playback amazing detail in color especially when you're shooting in 10-bit and another cool thing which I want to show you right now is that I've actually used this as a secondary monitor plugged into my computer and I can view back the footage on this as a playback window if I want a view back HDR content or 10-bit footage because my monitor actually doesn't have 10-bit so I'm able to view this out in 10 bit all right so like I do in all my reviews here's some things that I don't like first of all the weight it's kind of heavy it's kind of thick especially when you get a couple batteries loaded up on it it's pretty heavy on the gimbal and I shoot a lot with the gimbal so it's something that you might want to keep in mind it also has a fan built into it which is somewhat noisy when it's recording especially if you were to have a mic beside it that's something I didn't even know when I bought this thing but it makes sense this thing is basically a computer when you think about what it's doing with the touchscreen being able to do 10 bit footage it needs to be able to keep it cool so it does have vent it does put out quite a bit of heat and that's something that I actually never noticed in any review until I actually got the thing it doesn't have the most amazing battery life it's not too bad I did do a battery test if you want to check that out let's view it now so I was using the Sony NPF 970 battery only one of them just to see how much time we can get out of it I'm recording a DNS HR 4k 24 fps at around 30 minutes the red light came on with the battery indicator saying it was getting low you get a couple of warnings throughout just telling you that it's getting low and then at around 52 minutes it actually died so yeah the weird thing is when you're recording and this is what I've noticed already is that after 30 minutes the battery goes right down to red and then it's flashing red but it stays red for like 20 minutes or a little bit longer even and so when you're filming you're kind of worried that it's going to die on you but once you have some experience with it you know that once it's in the red you still have quite a bit of time alright so my final thoughts if you own a gh v this is the perfect companion because the gh 5 does shoot 10 bit internally but it's at a really low bitrate right now until they do the update to it if you want to have 4k 60fps 10 bit 42 you definitely need this recorder the camera will output it if you own a sony camera it's awesome especially if you're shooting vlog because you're actually getting a higher bitrate coming into this camera than you are recording to that camera as well being able to edit this footage is a breeze I have no problems in the timeline and premiere if you add it with final cut you shouldn't have any problems especially if you're recording in Pro res you get all the professional tools like waveforms focus peaking zebras and stuff on a really intuitive menu system the overlays are nice you can actually make them full screen if you want to something that's really nice especially waveforms it's sometimes hard to tell when it's little tiny and in the corner of the screen you actually blow it up full-size on this being able to shoot and log with a camera and then being able to load a load into this and see what it's going to look like once it's graded and being able to make your adjustments in camera sometimes it's hard to judge the proper exposure when you're shooting log and being able to load the light into here you can properly set your camera up and know exactly what you need and then the other thing if you own a sony camera you know when you're shooting 4k that you have some issues with the screen going a little bit dimmer this is going to help with that if you need a screen obviously spending $1,000 on it but you're getting a really nice screen and recorder at the same time with all the tools and you don't even have to touch your camera I guess I'm thinking mostly when I'm using the gimbal you're shooting with a six to three hundred at a six - 500 no headphone jack on that camera but if you're coming into this through the HDMI you get an actual headphone jack and you can monitor audio anyway this video might have been long I don't know until I edit it but there's a lot of stuff that I had to cover and even then I didn't cover everything basically this monitor is a thousand bucks already said that and it's a great tool it's a great companion for the gh 5 it really allows you to get the most out of that camera and record in a higher bit rates obviously I've mentioned that gh 5 is coming out with a update that brings it to four hundred megabits per second but that'll be on an SD card and recording - SSDs are a lot easier and cheaper so if you think about getting money I'll put a link in the description where to pick one up and if you like this video give it a thumbs up if you just like to give a thumbs down twice I'll see you next one [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Lee Zavitz

Views: 47,442

Keywords: gh5 10bit, panasonic gh5 atomos ninja inferno, a6300 review, gh5 review, a7sii atomos ninja inferno, atomos ninja inferno review, atomos ninja inferno, ninja inferno vs shogun flame

Id: d-Xy399uhIw

Length: 12min 20sec (740 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 30 2017