Blackmagic Design ATEM Mini Pro ISO In Depth Review

g'day friends and welcome to another one of my videos today we're doing a deep dive into the blackmagic design a10 mini pro iso so if you want to find out how you can use this device well then stick around [Music] and welcome back now when i first heard about this device i was very surprised because it came in at a really really cheap price and it really sort of got me thinking about you know what was capable and what this device could deliver now the first generation which i tend not to get into i'll usually get into a particular product line in gen 2 when some of the bugs have been worked out and then some of the enhancements come out when people ask for you know changes in the generation one so very closely after gen 1 in this particular product we saw gen 2 come out which was the atem mini pro now when it came to the atem mini pro what we found was that it added the live streaming features and the recording features which was really awesome and i was about to jump into that model because i was looking for something that had more than three hdmi ports i was sort of using the roland that i use currently three sometimes wasn't it wasn't enough so i was looking for a device i could offer a little bit more before i could you know put my money down i heard the announcement of this particular device which is the iso now the iso is the next level up from the a10 mini pro which allows you to record the full streams of the video independently into a hard drive now just to clarify that you've got four hdmi ports and each video source can be recorded in 1080p individually which was mind-blowing because one of the reasons i was looking for a device like this was because i was getting sick and tired of recording each individual i guess video footage and each camera and then grabbing all the video and syncing it together you know in premiere and doing all the hard work there the thing that convinced me to finally take the plunge and actually purchase this product was its price it did not exceed fifteen hundred dollars which was here in australia and so it made it a practically a no-brainer because when i did the homework on what equipment i needed to have in order to record let's say up to four independent streams of video in 1080p you know each device was going to cost me like 700 800 so you know you're looking at quite a sizable uh investment if you're looking to record the independent streams don't get me wrong i'm a roland user i was using the vl one hd and that was a really good device but it does not record independent streams so let's have a bit of a quick look now i've set this up so you can see what i'm using in order to make this work it is a very compact device i'm going to switch over to camera 2 and here it is i've got the a10 mini pro iso connected to all my inputs and we'll run that through every single input and what it's meant to do for you but at the same time i also have camera 2 set up to so you can see the actual menu that comes with um the output port on with hdmi and then my uh camera four happens to be the atem software control which is loaded onto my mac and it is just another functional part of it now the device itself allows you to load media in there so you can have this very complete podcasting so when i first start my podcast i dig into the media and right now you'll see that it has like a typical podcasting scene then we cut over to this one and then obviously we can run through the different scenarios when it comes to um the device now it has some really good intuitive features and let's talk about the video first of all from a video perspective it has four independent hdmi inputs and one hdmi output now it can output and take in up to 1080p 60 frames per second and the way that the system sort of configures itself if you have it set to auto is that whatever you plug into the very first hdmi port it will take that as default so if your camera on port number one happens to be 1080p with 25 frames per second it will actually then set every other port to that and it will convert whatever you plug into it to that but you can also change it in the settings so if you want to default it to a particular setting 1080p let's say 50 you can do that in the software control so from a hdmi perspective it's quite quite useful so let me tell you also that the output is also controllable but it is not it does not offer a pass-through like let's say some other devices made hdmi out is primarily focused on showing you what you want to see in the monitoring screen so this screen that i have here is well segmented in order to give you a good indication of what's happening you've got the preview screen here you've got whatever is actually live in the program screen then you've got your independent cameras and also your media it actually lets you know uh if you're going live um it has uh your uh cache and your data stream and even tells you to which platform you you're podcasting to or live streaming to and then if you have a hard drive plug plugged into the hey to the usbc port in the back it tells you how much uh space you got left and on the last bit right there it actually tells you um your mic input levels which is quite intuitive i really like the fact that that particular output can be configured so you can actually uh have a good understanding of what's happening with your production so if you have someone that is doing your production behind the scenes they have this inbuilt menu that allows them to you know manipulate the scenes and and really see exactly what's coming up now let me give you another example so uh on this particular screen that you're looking at right now uh i can actually modify that so i can change uh what you're seeing so you can see camera 1 camera 2 camera 3 camera 4 or you can just set it to whatever is being recorded but then this is probably the most useful view now one of the things that i wanted to make sure you understood is that um that particular output can be recorded so if you have a uh like an atomos ninja five you can record that output so if you want to for example just record screen one or camera one or two or three or four you can do that by selecting that and it'll output it or if you're going to be doing switching and cutting between one camera or another the actual atomos can also record that through that particular output now one of the things that was really cool about it is that it does output a time code so if you want to if you're worried about syncing and making sure that things you know work well and all are all synced up the time code natively is punched out and the atomos can pick that up it also has a usbc port and this is once again a multi-functional port so it can be used like i'm using it right now so i'll give you a look i've actually plugged in this samsung portable hard drive and i'm using it to record uh these tracks the iso tracks so every camera is being recorded separately onto that particular device you can either do just the video so as it's being recorded right now or you can do the video as it's being recorded but also the independent camera tracks as well so obviously that's going to take up a lot more space on the hard drive so you have to make sure you have something that's fast enough that's why i'm using the samsung t5 it's a fast hard drive and it allows me to get the the bandwidth or the throughput in order to record you know without it getting really jumpy and doing things like that now the other use for the usb c port is to connect it into your mac or pc and use this device as an interface so you can use it to record the video so it practically works like a webcam and you can plug any camera and then you can do the switching and they're gonna see whatever it is that you select so if you want to for example do a top-down shot or maybe you want to do a screenshot of what you're seeing on your desktop it has the ability to do that good thing about it too you know if you want to do something like picture-in-picture you can do that as well what i'm going to do is i'm going to turn the picture and picture on and whatever is in camera 1 is going to be what's actually displayed in that picture in picture mode so you can see me and that can i can be sort of shifted around you know depending on where i want to be in the in the screen so that's very uh easy to do just by pressing the buttons on the device itself and then you can just turn it off if you want to which is pretty good okay so so from a usb perspective it gives you that full control you either use it to record or you either use it to send so then the question will come up and say hey phone but what i want to do is i want to record and stream as well so obviously they thought of that blackmagic designers thought of that as well and one of the cool features of this particular device is that it's network capable so what i mean by that it does have a networking port in the back next to the power and what that allows you to do is control the device remotely but also it can be sort of networked to your pc in order to uh stream through the network which is quite amazing so now you're looking at my screen right now what i'm going to do is i'm going to scare you with my head on the screen but what you see here is that this is the control panel and now i've got it on cam 4 here and i'm going to switch it over to cam1 that gets rid of doesn't get rid of the picture in picture so i'm going to turn that off but as you can see i've got control of the device right through the ethernet port and that ethernet port also allows you to connect to other black magic design hardware so if you have media hardware you can actually pull media right through the ethernet port into this device if you want to do something like that you could take this device with you and as long as you got internet you can stream yourself directly from this device to the internet without having to worry about configuring a separate pc or something like that so i'm going to show you where that's done in the software we'll touch on it briefly but let me tell you i did a test so if you want to i'll put the link in the description below but i did a a live test on facebook on the technoramis facebook page so if you want to have a look at the quality of it it worked really well and it just took me a second to set up i was quite quite pleased and quite amazed it is a full encoder which means that all the input that is coming in all the video that's coming in all the sound that's coming into this is being processed internally in this device and that means that you don't have to worry about a separate pc or using your pc in order to record and sort of process the image it's powerful enough to do this all on its own good thing about it too and obviously it's the other main feature of this particular device is that it allows you to stream your content that you are capturing through the a10 mini pro iso straight to a streaming service so you can send it to facebook live you can send it to youtube you can send it to twitch and and even other uh services that offer this particular protocol so it's fully fully configurable okay let's talk about sound so this particular device has uh sound capture from every hdmi port so if your hdmi camera is capturing sound like miner so i've got one there one there and one behind me they all have microphones and that microphone sound is captured and then transmitted through the hdmi port now if your camera has jacks you can plug the camera sorry plug the jack in the back of the camera and let's say if you're using a lapel mic that will then send the sound through to the camera and it will then send the sound via the hdmi to the atm mini pro iso so you've got that sound covered through the hdmi port so that is i guess one level of connectivity so you're going to need cables and longer cables if you want to do it that way and uh the second method of getting sound into this device is the port so it's got 3.5 millimeter mic inputs in the back of the device so there's two of them so what i have here is the road caster pro capturing my audio and i've done a test of the sound i've did another video that you may have watched but what i was doing there was trying to test the quality of the sound that's being captured through the road caster and then out the back and into the 3.5 millimeter ports in the back of the atem mini pro iso now what i found is that the quality is awesome these two inputs in the back can be uh changed to either be mic inputs so if you want to put like a lapel mic uh or lavalier mic straight into the back of that that'll work fine but you can also change it in the software to receive line inputs like i have so i've told it you're getting line sounds from uh the road caster and and accept it like that so then you can do the you know the boosting or you can sort of amplify the sound in any which way you want once you've got it but if you're gonna be doing this as simple as possible just using the device just configure the ports in the back to mic and then you could actually use two mics directly plugged into the back of that now i was thinking if you wanted to you know get a little bit creative and if you had access to uh the rode wireless go device you could probably plug the receiver in the back of the a10 mini pro iso and then have the lapel mic from the wireless go on your person and then that way you'd be able to record yourself wirelessly so there's a million ways you could use it but what i found is that it does not obviously have xlr ports so you're going to have to figure out how that sound will be recorded now from my perspective i am lucky enough to have this configuration which does all the hard work for me but i there's no reason why i can't just plug in some cables in the back and um just use it just use some lapel mics uh directly to the talent and the person i'm interviewing so i mean there's there's quite you know a number of ways around it now that the audio configuration is quite good and we'll get into the software in a second but i just wanted to finish up with the device itself now when it's as far as audio is concerned uh the software allows you to monitor that but also as you can see we've got the monitoring happening here on the screen so as you can see i've got all my cameras sort of uh hearing me and so you've got all the the peaks are there now the mic one is right there now that's active so as you can see it has a tally lamp showing me that that's the mic that is active now these guys although it's monitoring the sound level uh they're not live so they're not being recorded at all now there's another really clean feature that's on the device itself and it's on every uh audio port it's the audio follows video feature now what that is for is to allow you to have clean sound cuts from one camera to another one so if you for example if you have one camera in a separate room and you want to capture the audio from there and then you want to mute the sound that's coming from the other cameras you can do that it's a really good way to make sure that your audio signal is not i guess all blurred into to one track i don't really have a use for that one of the features that i use on the roland is the video follows audio which is pretty cool when you're doing podcasting unfortunately that feature is not available in this one it would be cool but it's not available in this one so that's good so from a sound perspective it really has enough of what i need from a cabling perspective it does require a little bit of work in order to get the the sound coming from the right place now let's talk about software so this software comes packaged with this particular device it's called the atem software control and it is a quite uh intuitive piece of software that is a companion to this particular device now does the device work on its own yes it does it has limited configuration um everything from you know boosting mic volume to switching to cutting to different you know ways to you know sort of fade between one scene and another it allows you to go on the air and record uh and you know turn on the picture on pitch in picture in picture but it does not do everything for you so for example if you wanted to um do something like prepare the device to stream to your specific uh stream servers like facebook or maybe uh you know youtube you need the software in order to configure that so you can do that in two ways you either do it by plugging in your a10 mini pro iso into your laptop or computer and doing the configuration on the atm software control there or you can put the device on the network and then use the a-team software control which automatically finds the device on the network and you do it that way so both ways are absolutely fine it will allow you to do the configuration and you can't even tell that the difference between software or usb so you know it's quite quite good from that perspective but the software itself then allows you to do other things so for example load media and it gives you 20 different panels you can load it straight from your computer and load in the different type of stills so for example i've got a png with saying the podcast starting soon and then i've got another png here that says podcast ending so and the other thing too is you can also capture an image straight from one of the cameras if you really wanted to do that now the great thing about this is that you can have them all prepared and then you can load them onto the media player so they can show up ready for you to use them and i'll show you where it is so if you can have a look at this panel down here that is where it's actually being prepped and i can shift between that and one of the other cameras now back to the software so once again the audio features a pretty good so you'll be able to monitor each uh different camera on individually the last thing i want to touch upon is these areas of configuration so as you can see we've got the live stream area we've got the record stream area you can also capture stills if you want to do a thumbnail uh time code generator and there's lots and lots of different things you can actually do here so i am quite surprised by the i guess powerful uh features that this little compact device has when it's all combined together with the software so you're in the market for a powerful capture mixing device for video and you have a specific use case whether you're doing multi-camera control whether you're recording meetings or places of worship or you want to have multiple cameras or you want to do like a little live gig but you don't have enough room to set up you know a lot of the equipment or if you're just looking for something budget that's going to give you enough flexibility all of the above this particular device can do it one of the things one of the caveats i'm going to put on my review or my take on this is that it does lean very much towards the video side and not fully integrates audio as much as other devices do now what i'm talking when i say audio i'm talking xlr i'm talking you know you know professional audio equipment that needs to be done in a separate device but black magic design is a company that is you know video centric and obviously they make awesome products that are leaning leaning towards video from my perspective when i was eyeing this device was because i wanted to capture all my video cameras at the same time because i often make mistakes when i'm in doing a podcast and i may not get the right angle or the right camera at the right time and once it's um you know hard-coded on into an mp4 or or a video then it's done there's really not much you can do about it so what i wanted to do is have that flexibility now when this recording is done i'll have the master track which is what you're seeing today but then all the individual tracks and as well as the ability to easily edit this in blackmagic design software video editing software davinci resolve now it gives you all the time codes and it allows you to change when the actual cuts happen it can allows you to sort of change the transitions if you want to do it in a different way so the software itself is very powerful uh in conjunction with the recording that's been recorded onto that hard drive now if you're live podcasting obviously you won't be able to do that but if you're recording it and then live streaming it post the fact then obviously you can do a lot of the pre-editing before you stream it live for the second time now i am really really content with this device what are some of the things that you got to watch out for all right so one of the things you got to watch out for is the fact that you to get full control out of this device you need it plugged into a computer or you need to plug it into a network and the computer loaded with the atem software control you're not gonna get all the features out of this device straight from the device the device itself is designed for you to do those basic functions that you're doing while you are actually recording video or you're doing a live stream directly on the go and everything from turning mics on and off uh sort of switching cameras doing transition mixing picture in picture all that sort of stuff can be done on that device very quickly but by no means it's the be all and end-all and it cannot control everything that this device can do it works together with the software so what's my final take on this if you're looking for a device that records four independent streams plus the master output this is probably the only device in the market of this nature that can do it now i know there are some monitors from atomos that can record the different streams on the monitor now that is a different device i'll put some links on for them down below if you're looking at the sumo recorder for example that can do it on the monitor itself it can record all these different streams but it requires different types of plugs now the beauty about this because it's more prosumer it allows you to plug hdmi you don't need any other plugs in order to get the video input so it makes it nice and easy so it is a consumer device because they make it as easy as possible to jump in and use this but it's also prosumer because when you add the software on top of it it just makes it into a more powerful device and if you've got a second person an operator working behind the scenes to make this happen for you i think uh it's a done deal you don't have to look anywhere else so if you are that type of person looking to have full control of video that you're capturing uh or you're like me that occasionally makes mistakes and you want to try to correct those mistakes and you're only working 1080p well then this device is the right device for you so that's it friends hopefully that wasn't too long for you guys but that's my take on this particular device i will be very very happy to use this in the future i'm going to continue to use it for my live podcasting i think it's uh it's a wonderful feature it works really well with my other peripherals and i can't wait to set it up and have it ready to go anytime i need it so thank you very much for watching the video if you haven't subscribed please do so your support does count hit the like if you like the video and until the next time ciao for now

Channel: Fern Lecaros

Views: 19,109

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Id: vG3zAuTj6w4

Length: 31min 17sec (1877 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 27 2020