ATOMOS NINJA V || Things to Consider Before Buying in 2021...

what's going on everybody my name is jordan fowler and in today's video we're going to be talking about the atomos ninja 5 external recorder and a few things that you might need to know before you go out and buy one so let's get into it so we're not going to get too technical in this video about the ins and outs and all the technical spec of the atmos ninja 5 we will cover that in a later video and the best setup for it this is more just a few overall things to consider uh to see if it's right for you or not now the atoms ninja 5 is actually an external recorder as well as an external monitor now if all you're looking for is just an external monitor then i probably actually wouldn't recommend this one and i'll probably go with something like the small hd monitors because they're going to be a lot less confusing and much better much more user-friendly interface and they are just external monitors not external recorders now another big thing to consider right at the start is is if you don't want to be color grading your footage at all then this definitely isn't for you because the footage you're going to get out of the atomos is going to be extremely flat at first and you're then going to have to spend some time color grading in post-production to get it to look exactly how you want now as i said the atomos is an external recorder not just an external monitor so what that basically means is that when you pair it with a camera like the nikon z6 like i'm using here or the panasonic gh5 or the canon eos r you're going to be able to record in basically 4k 10 bit 422 in pro res hq or prores raw depending on what camera you're using now i said i'm not going to get too technical in this video but i will just do a quick very quick breakdown of what that actually means in case you're wondering so 4k obviously is your resolution uh everybody knows that so then 10 bit is basically the bit depth and the range of colors that you get so most standard dslrs they shoot in what's known as 8bit or also known as rgb now this has been standard across dslrs for years and what you basically get with 8bit is you get 16.7 million different colors in your display which sounds like a lot of colors but when you compare that to what you get with 10 bit and you get 1.07 billion colors in your display the difference is massive and the amount the amount of accuracy within those colors is a lot better which gives you a much cleaner and more realistic image so then the next thing is being able to shoot in prores hq or prores raw and whether you can shoot in hq or raw depends on what camera you have with the nikon z6 you can actually shoot in prores raw which is insane so basically what that means prores is a compression codec which was developed by apple now the most standard codec compression codec used is 8.264 also known as mpeg which everyone is used to and it's been standard for years now essentially what prores means is that you're retaining a lot more image quality a lot higher image quality and there's a lot more data and information stored per frame of video so prores as a compression codec basically compresses those massive file sizes down to a much more manageable file size which will allow you to actually edit it better in post-production but while doing that it doesn't actually lose any of that image quality so that's why prores is used now progress raw what that is is you get all the capabilities and all the features of having prores footage but now you can edit and color grade with all the raw data which gives you such a massive range of colors now we could go into tons more detail obviously about bit depth of colors and codec compression but that is not for this video so let's get back to the atomos ninja 5. so in addition to obviously being an external recorder it is also a 4k external monitor which allows you to view your footage in real time in 4k resolution and you can also actually apply your color grade to your atomos so you can see how the finished footage is going to turn out now that color grade that you applied to the atomos is not going to be baked into your footage so when you get it back to your computer it's not going to be in that color grade it's going to be in a very flat format which you then have to apply that color grade to but the beauty of that is you can actually see how your footage is going to look and how it's going to be colored before you've even got it back to the [Music] computer so that leads us on to the actual kit of the atmos ninja 5 and all the accessories that you're going to need because unfortunately the atmosphere when you buy it doesn't come with half the stuff you need to even get it going straight away all it comes with is a wall mounted power pack now obviously unless you want to be plugged into the wall all the time then you are going to need some batteries um the ninja 5 takes sony np f970 batteries or anything from that range i think it's a few i think you can get 950s basically these are big batteries they are pretty hefty and they do take a long time to charge now it's worth bearing in mind that the ninja 5 will actually burn through batteries incredibly quickly um so one battery will not be enough if you're on a day of shooting you can very easily burn through three if not four batteries um so make sure you definitely have a couple backups so the next thing is getting it talking to your camera so you're going to need an hdmi lead to connect it from your camera to the atomos now depending on what camera you have depends on what size hdmi lead you need uh on the nikon z6 like mine is a mini hdmi so you need a mini hdmi lead to a normal hdmi and i would definitely recommend a coiled lead so you don't have a load of excess cable going around all over the camera getting in your way so obviously this being an external recorder means that you're recording all your footage to the atomos itself not to the camera at all so you're going to need some form of storage and because the file size is so large you're going to need quite a bit of storage now the ssd card that atomos actually recommend you put with the ninja five is called an angel bird atom x now this is an atomos product and it is actually the only ssd card that physically won't overhang the edge of the monitor because they're quite a bit smaller than normal ssds now the obvious downside to this is that atomos charge you a ridiculous amount of money for this ssd card i think for a one terabyte card it's around 400 pounds and you're gonna need more than one terabyte card because you're going to get through that pretty quickly however on the flip side other manufacturers ssd cars will actually fit in your ninja 5. i use sandisk ultras and a lot of people use kingston's it's just worth noting that they will actually physically overhang out the end of your ninja 5 but it doesn't really cause any issues it's not in the way or anything it's just one of those things now like i said i use sandisk so currently in there now is a one terabyte sandisk ultra ssd card um now one terabyte i find is not enough so i have a couple of these i swap out when they get full but i would definitely recommend one terabyte as the bare minimum to what you buy 500 gigabytes you are going to be filling up very very quickly so i would recommend one terabyte at least to go along with your sd card as well you're going to need an ssd to usb adapter so you can actually plug your ssd card into your computer and get the footage off of it another thing you are going to need which could quite easily get overlooked is some sort of a mount now the ninja 5 doesn't come with any kind of mounts it just has a thread for a tripod so you are going to need some kind of conversion to link that over to your hot shoe on your camera or your camera rig now i use a mount from small rig these are quite inexpensive but it's just another thing you need otherwise you're not going to be able to mount it on the top of your camera another thing to consider is audio now at the minute if you're just recording audio through in camera um then you're not gonna be able to do that anymore because obviously it's recording straight to the ninja five there's not gonna be any audio so if you want to be recording audio then you need to be using an external microphone something like the rode videomic pro and you need to make sure you plug that into the atomos and not into your camera otherwise it still won't pick anything up now because you need to have all these accessories to get your setup working is quite a lot of hidden cost there when you look at just the cost of the actual atomos itself so it's definitely worth bearing in mind that you have to get all these other things and weighing up the price of ssds and multiple batteries because time you get all that you can be adding quite a bit to the price of just the initial screen record now that leads us on to our next point which is about storage and your pc now when you're shooting in prores whether that's prores hq or pro is raw the file size is absolutely colossal because the nature of what you're recording contains so much more information and data and bit depth and as a result the file size is just massive so especially if you're used to like 8.264 mpeg and codecs like that the file size is going to be massive so you need to make sure that you have ample amount of storage on your pc otherwise you're going to be running out very very quickly i'm not going to go into too much detail about comparisons of actual file size for this video but just so you have some idea i shot a 30 second sequence out of my window with the z6 uh one on 8.264 and one in prores raw just so you have an idea of the difference in file size so the 8.264 30 seconds was around 100 megabytes which is kind of standard than what you'd expect but that exact same sequence in prores raw was about two and a half gigabytes so you can see how quickly you're gonna mount up footage now this is not straight conversion 100 megabytes converts to 2.5 gigabytes or anything like that because it actually depends on the scene of what you're shooting it depends on the amount of colors and the amount of dynamic range in that shot and movement in that shot as to how big that file size would be it's just worth noting if you haven't shot in prores before the file sizes are going to be a lot bigger no matter what you're shooting um so it's just making sure that your pc can actually handle that and that your editing software can handle that because if your pc can't handle it or you don't have the storage for it you are going to have to upgrade your pc or laptop and you're going to have to buy more external hard drives to store that footage on so there there's even more hidden costs so it's just worth making sure in advance that your pc is actually going to be able to cope with that kind of footage [Music] for the pros and cons of using an atomos ninja 5 external recorder now depending what camera you're using this is going to be an absolutely massive upgrade in terms of image quality and color depth especially for cameras like the canon eos r the nikon z6 the panasonic gh5 these cameras all get a massive upgrade in image quality by using the atomos ninja 5 but it's just worth noting that there is all those other things that go with it it's not just clipping on the atomos and away you go better image quality there is other things to consider now if you've been used to shooting perhaps on sony and you transcode all of your footage into prores now with the smarts you'll actually be able to just shoot prores directly so that will save you a ton of time when you get back into post-production editing now i personally would say that recording directly to an ssd card is a pro rather than a con other people may disagree i'd much rather shoot to one of those it's more reliable plus you can have a lot more storage even though the file sizes are bigger you can get two three four terabyte cards and you can have multiple of those instead of having loads of little sd cards now that leads us on to cons of the atomos ninja five now it is another piece of kit you're gonna have to buy it's another piece of kit you've got a carry um and it does come out a reasonable price tag another kind of con is that the atomos actually runs on additional batteries obviously so it's another load of batteries you have to make sure charged and it burns through a lot of these batteries and they do take a long time to charge so making sure that you have them all charged the day before and you're gonna need sort of two three four of them depending on how long you're shooting for after considering everything if you think that the atmosphere 5 is for you and you're willing to spend the money to get it and all the accessories then it is a great bit of kit to have in your arsenal and once you start using it for recording you probably will find it difficult to ever go back because of the boost in image quality it is just it is an amazing bit of kit but there is a lot of pros and cons that you need to consider before you go out and buy one so that is it for this video on the atomos ninja 5 i hope you enjoyed it i will do some more videos on the ninja 5 and the setup and how i use it and how to get the best out of it but for now that's it i hope you enjoyed it be sure to leave a thumbs up hit the subscribe button and once you've done all that i will see you in the next [Music] video you

Channel: Jordan Fowler

Views: 28,049

Keywords: GoPro

Id: 7bJcfimq1bE

Length: 11min 58sec (718 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2021