Atomos Recorders: Why do I Use Them?

and this episode we'll talk a little bit about Ottomans recorders what you can expect them to help you with and what they may not help you with here's a quick summary for those of you that don't have a lot of time number one one of the benefits is that you get much better codecs with the Atomos recorders versus most cameras what I mean by this and how this helps in a practical ways first of all you get better quality footage and much higher bitrate codecs and codecs it can hold more color information I don't want to overstate that too much that is mostly helpful in cases where you have a lot of movement in the frame but for me doing interviews doesn't help a whole lot but where it does help a whole lot is in post when I'm editing and color grading having these better codecs makes it much easier to playback and edit and it also makes it easier to color grade if you're shooting a camera with a log profile the latest generation out of most recorders can greatly enhance the process of setting exposure for log that's a tricky process and having the features and the tools on the outer most recorders not only the Atom HDR feature but also waveforms and false-color and things of that nature makes it much easier to be consistently right on with your exposure you get a nice beautiful 7 inch screen which makes it a lot easier to nail focus every single time it also makes it much easier to work with all the tools like waveforms vector scopes and things of that nature so all these tools that many cameras nowadays have including focus peaking it's much easier to use on a much larger screen the latest generation Atomos recorders can also be color calibrated using an X right i1 display Pro which means you can trust their color a lot better than you could in previous generation and with other monitors the Adam s recorders also record to affordable SSD drives which are readily available all over the place in the market and the recorders are quite lightweight now that's kind of a double-edged sword we'll talk about that more in a second you can also load look-up tables or Luntz into the recorder so you can get a sense for exactly what your footage will look like in the end if you're trying to go for a specific look that can be really really helpful and finally there are a few things I'd like to see improved in the next generation of the atomos recorders number one I'd like to see a more robust case the plastic is a little bit worrying I thought they put the rubber bumpers on the newest ones that's helpful but it would be nice and I would pay more money to have a more robust case it's probably made out of some sort of metal I would like to see much better battery performance I understand that we're working with an HDR screen at this point and it can show ten stops of dynamic range and it burns through batteries pretty quickly so you do have to be on top of that situation be great to see if we could make some improvements there and also it'd be nice if the fan inside of the outermost recorders we're a little bit quieter they can interfere with sound if you're working up really really close to a microphone normal distances it's not a problem but it would be nice to see if we could improve that some too so there is the summary for those of you that don't have a lot of time and you are now dismissed so first off let me just say that I have been a long time out of most recorder user for a variety of reasons that we'll cover here and I'm not here to convince you to buy one but this is more for people that are considering buying one and kind of helping them to understand what you can really get out of an animal's recorder and maybe some misperceptions on what it will give you my first Atomos recorder was a ninja - it's a small recorder it's a great little device the screen is kinda awful to be entirely honest but it was bigger than what most DSLRs had the really great thing about it was recorded two pro res and DNX HD and also it provided a variety of focus and exposure tools which most DSLRs at the time didn't have and it did all this recording to an SSD drive so the battery life was really great the build quality was really pretty solid with an aluminum case and there was a lot to like about in fact I've used it even recently on a job where I was shooting just HD when I got my Panasonic gh4 several years ago the Shogun came out a little bit after that and I bought that as well and that was a tremendous help to my overall workflow I've really enjoyed working with that I still have it I still use it and it's been a great recorder at NAB this year I talked with some of the guys over at Atomos and I was curious about some of the HDR features and we did a previous episode where we talked about that and the benefits that can provide you and they were kind enough to send a ninja inferno out for me to test now all the way back to my ninja - and now up to the current versions of the Shogun inferno and all of them in between you can record up to 4k depending on the recorder and it will also record for - to color subsampling which is quite good in terms of color and it will also record 10 bit so and in some cases it will even record raw so if you're getting a lot more color information for certain now this is all dependent on what your camera can send it so if your camera is outputting four to two 8-bit it'll write that into a 10 bit space a 10 bit file but it's really only delivering a bit so it's not like suddenly you're getting so much more color information now it is more than most internal codecs that your camera will write to files that they'll write to but it's not necessarily as night-and-day a difference as you might expect so it's important to keep your expectations in check there now the nice thing about the Panasonic gh4 and gh 5 is that can deliver 10 bit 4 2 2 color out of its HDMI port so that's really great so that on these recorders you can actually take advantage of all that additional color so it's important to keep in mind though even with that extra color it's not alike again suddenly your footage is going to look absolutely amazing much you know worlds better than it ever looked recorded directly into your camera so if that's the case then why do I bother why did I spend $2,000 on an atomos Shogun why did I spend $800 on a ninja 2 back when that originally came out and why would I now spend $1,000 on a ninja inferno well the first thing is it can record to ProRes or the DNX avid codecs so these are much better codecs than typically what you're going to get in most of your cameras so for example the Panasonic gh4 the present time you're supposed to have a firmware update soon but at the present time it can only record up to 150 megabits per second and that's for the 4k with for 2 to 10-bit colors so because it's recording so much more color information it's kind of having to make some sacrifices now if you record to ProRes you're going to reclaim a lot of that and you'll be able to use a much higher bitrate so you can capture all that information and all the benefits that come along with that this is especially important when you're recording fast action because fast action really kind of stresses a codec it requires a lot more information to maintain the highest fidelity possible so if you are doing a lot of action shooting then there is no doubt in my mind that recording to ProRes or DNxHD consumer slash prosumer cameras but for me I'm mostly shooting interviews so you might be thinking well what why you bother then well one of the things I really like about the Codex here I use ProRes is that the ProRes post workflow is so much better than h.264 you can edit without doing any sort of transcoding you can just bring it in even at the very high bitrate codecs you can bring it in you can edit it 4k it runs back buttery smooth on my what almost three-year-old iMac so it does really really well for the Edit so it saves you some time in post and maybe you have a computer that can already play back the you know h.264 that you're writing in your camera smoothly and that's great if it can but this is a much higher bitrate of course with pro res and it's still buttery smooth so it's kind of a really nice mix between highest quality and the ability to edit very quickly and easily on the newest out of most recorders with the Atom HDR feature this is a fantastic feature if you're shooting a camera with log profiles and I did a previous episode you can check out up here if you click in the upper right hand corner you'll see an older video that I shot that explains that in a lot more detail the reason I like this is that I'm much better able to dial in the exposure exactly where it needs to be to get beautiful log footage they can then be color graded and I do end up getting another probably one and a half or so stops of dynamic range my Panasonic gh4 so that's a great feature can I do that even without the Animus recorder yeah but the tools on the Atomos recorder make it a lot easier the seven-inch screen on the Atomos ninja inferno and the original Shogun in fact and a lot of the recorders in that range is absolutely beautiful seven-inch makes it very easy to focus because you can see so much better in terms of detail the newest versions also have HDR capability so they actually can display up to 10 stops a dynamic range so what that means in practical terms is not only will it help you when you're shooting log footage like we mentioned in the other video but it also makes it very easy to see and work with outdoors which is a huge benefit as well in the past with the Shogun you got kind of difficult to see that outdoors and you could buy a hood with the hood was a little monkey and difficult to work with now I don't have to worry about that and I can see beautifully outdoors again they all have focus and exposure tools which make it very nice now your camera may already have focus tools and exposure tools for the example the Panasonic gh4 waveform and vectorscope it also has focus peaking but to be honest on that tiny little screen at least for my eyes which are getting a little bit older now it's hard to work with especially the waveform and while I think it's really great that Panasonic concluded that the waveform on the ninja Inferno is so much easier to work with again you're working with a much larger high-resolution screen so it's a lot easier to really kind of dial in your exposure because of that even with focus peaking on the inbuilt screen and the viewfinder on the Panasonic gh4 I still found that in some cases I was missing focus where the focus peaking looked like I had things right on when I actually look at it on the a demo screen it's clear that I wasn't right on so it's always better to know that during production then get back to your computer and then realize oh I missed focus a little bit so with the animals recorders that's kind of a thing of the past now back to the codecs for just a minute ProRes and DNX those codecs can actually help you improve the quality of your footage in certain cases in those certain cases are most particularly when you're doing a lot of high action so things are moving around in the frame a whole lot you can use higher bit rates and just by virtue of the fact that you're using higher bit rates and you're using these high-quality codecs you will get less artifacting in your footage so if you are doing that kind of action then that may be helpful for you it's a trade-off because these monitors again seven-inch screen are fairly large so if you're doing action and you're trying to keep the camera as light as possible you do add a little weight with these monitors although they're fairly lightweight surprisingly so actually with the newest ones that I think it's definitely worth the additional weight for the benefits you get another thing is very nice on the latest generation of Atomos recorders that they've also put a lot of effort into color accuracy and in fact they've partner with X right so that you can you now use an i1 display pro color imager to calibrate your monitor it's also nice you can record to SSD drives SSD drives have become our more affordable for large capacities lately in terms of you know enough space to record these higher bitrate codecs it's really nice you can buy them kind of in the open market there are lots of options available at almost is also very good about identifying specific drives that they've tested with their products so you can rest assured that you're going to get a good experience I do have some thoughts on the build quality of the outermost recorders I think the newer generation are better than the original Shogun I wish that they also offered an option with more than just a plastic case something a little tougher I'd be willing to spend a couple hundred dollars more to get something that was a little bit more robust in terms of build quality that wasn't plastic but the newer generation ones a ninja inferno now how these sort of rubberized bumpers which make it a lot easier to use and my original Shogun I actually was so worried about it I actually haven't bought a cage for it a very big metal cage which added a lot of weight but it did at least put my mind at ease in terms of what would happen if I did drop it so the newest one seemed to be a nice compromise it kept it very lightweight with the case that it does come in and it now has these rubberized bumpers so if you do drop it there's a somewhat of a decent chance that you won't completely ruin it now the newest generation with the HDR screens are power-hungry little recorders so that's a little bit of downside I think there is some room for improvement there if hopefully in the next generation Atomos can find some ways to make them a little bit more power efficient obviously that's difficult to do when you're using an HDR screen HDR screens because they can produce such brightness levels that haven't been possible in the past they're using more power so it's kind of a trade-off you get those benefits and you can actually dial the brightness way down in cases when you don't need it for example when I was shooting a concert a couple of weeks ago I was able to conserve battery life by cranking the brightness way down after I got everything set up and rolling so I was able to get a lot more record time by dialing that brightness back in addition to the atom HDR feature that allows you to use kind of the default nuts for various cameras to view log footage so you can see what the final piece may look like you can also load your own custom loads which is a nice feature as well so if there's a particular look you're going for and you know that up front you can load that LUT into the recorder and be able to actually view it on set and I find it very helpful that the monitor is big enough to kind of use as a director or produce monitor when I'm doing my corporate shoots one other wish item for future generations of the animals recorders I'd like to have something with a quieter fan in it or perhaps a metal heatsink so perhaps they could solve two problems may be making a metal case that has some sort of passive heatsink design that would be really awesome or if that's not possible based on the thermal properties of the overall design maybe just a quieter fan would be nice now I don't find that to be a problem when I'm in normal working distance like this for a talking head type of video or an interview it does become a little bit of a problem when I'm doing a product shot and actually kind of interacting with a product and I have to have the recorder and the microphone up close to each other but normally again in talking head and interviews type situations it's not an issue so overall I hope that was helpful for you in terms of understanding the benefits of these Adam O's recorders what they can do for you and making sure you have the right expectations going in if you are considering buying one go ahead and leave any questions you have down below and if you've not already subscribed make sure you do that and we'll be sure to get you more great videos on how to improve your lighting and sound for video talk to you soon [Music]

Channel: Curtis Judd

Views: 163,430

Keywords: video, film, record, recorder, Atomos, Nija, shogun, flame, inferno, camera, shoot, how to

Id: jrUPDQCYZEU

Length: 14min 48sec (888 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 29 2017