The ULTIMATE Video Recorder!

this is my DIY ultimate multicam recorder box in short it can record four cameras to hot swappable ssds with a single button press when I'm done I can stop the recording on all four cameras with another single button press and with a another button press I can switch all four of the ssds to my computer from the recorders and immediately start editing or backing up the footage all camera angles are time code link with audio and video backups and a multi cam monitoring switcher and in this video I'm going to show you how YouTube can build one of these insane multicam boxes and just make video recording super super easy but first a disclaimer no one is sponsoring this video that said this video is supported by those of you who have purchased my camera guides Luts and camera gear check the links in the description to learn more and thank you guys so much for the continued support finally yes I using a camera as a microphone handle so that I can quickly just grab this thing and start filming stuff and still have my audio hooked up okay let's kick this video off by demoing the case then I'll get into how to make it all work all right it is demo time I have the ultimate multicam whatever we're calling this thing on the desk I've got four cameras connected to it I already have it turned on Via the switch on the back which is right there one switch to turn this entire beast on we've got our four cameras plugged in via HDMI right there and if we come around to the front we can talk about how awesome this thing is so first and foremost we're going to be recording on these hyperdeck recorders and recording to ssds that are hot swappable in this 4 SSD Bay system here so let's say we want to film our YouTube video we've got a little display for each camera here and all of these are fed into an A10 mini so I can actually connect this to an external Monitor and monitor all of my cameras as well as add a backup recording if I need to so let's say we're ready to record our YouTube video all I have to do is press record on the first recorder here and each of the other recorders will automatically start including a mix pre3 that we have hidden down here on the right and all of these share the same time code so if I zoom in here and if we were to freeze this Frame you can see that time code is lining up so we've got a recording going let's say we're done recording same thing I just simply press stop on the first recorder and all of them will subsequently stop including the mix pre 3 down there now let's go ahead and import all of this footage traditionally I would have to go to each single camera and pull out the SD card insert them into my computer and start importing but not with this case there's a little button right here and this is going to switch all of these drives from these four recorders to my computer you can see on this one recorder here it says USB we're about to change that so I'm going to press this button switch it to number two which is my laptop so let's go ahead and press that right there over on the laptop we should get four drives there they are deck one through four when I'm done importing my footage I can simply eject it from here back on the device I can press this button right here and boom shows back up on the recorders and we're ready to go ahead and start recording once again so This truly is a one button system you press one button or switch on the back to turn everything on you press record once to start all the recorders you press stop once to stop all of the recorders then you press another button to send all of these hard drives to your computer and import and you're done it saves you so much time and if you needed to you could simply grab this SSD hand it off to an editor edor throw it in the mail and you have all of camera one on one easy to grab SSD and then when you're ready to record again simply throw it back in the case we have multicam monitoring just so many features and this thing has handles and you can actually put a cover on the front and back and transport it so it's not only great for Studios but if you're on the road and want a simple solution for multicam it really doesn't get much better than this so now let's get into putting this thing together and the parts needed and I want to start by talking about this case so this is a gator for you case and for you means there are four rack mount units here so you can see one here one here one here with the ssds and then the bottom is actually open because I have an A10 mini switcher and an audio recorder now this comes in two different sizes a short or shallow and a deep model I would recommend going with the Deep model I went with the smaller case here and and it barely fits all the stuff packed in here it's very tight so I would recommend the larger one or go with more rack units that would give you a lot more flexibility you'd be able to put more stuff in here and just have more room to work with wiring that's going to be a theme with this build but as it stands I do love the size of this thing it's very portable there's handles on the sides and actually I'll grab right down here the covers that can go over the front and the back and they just latch into place so super heavy Duty really really nice and uh we have the ability to mount stuff to the front and the back next we're going to talk about the recorders and there are four of them as you can see here in the first two uh rack units of this case and really without these recorders this project would not be possible so these are the Blackmagic hyper deck Studio HD plus I believe I'm getting that right very wordy but in short even though there's an HD in the name these can record up to 4K a30 so if you want higher than that you're going to have to get a much larger unit and if you only record in HD you can actually shrink these down to the non Plus HD version which is even smaller than these but at the end of the day these are a recorder and media playback they're often used for live streams and TV production and stuff like that but we're using them to actually record our cameras so the best way to think about these in my opinion and the way I'm using them is we're taking all of the recording capability of our camera and sending that over to this recorder so the cameras connected to this are just essentially a sensor with a lens and we're doing all the recording over here with these recorders now these things have a billion bells and whistles but the way we're using them is to control time code to control recording and there are two different media types we can use you'll notice here on the front we actually have uh two SD card slots per recorder so you could in theory skip the ssds all together and just use the cards and that would work just fine but you also have the option to use the USBC Jack on the back of each recorder to capture two ssds or all kinds of different USBC devices these can record h264 or as I'm using them prores so I'm actually recording in prores LT because I found that works just fine for YouTube videos and those are being sent to the ssds we'll talk about the SSD setup here in a second but to get these recorders mounted into this case I'm using another Blackmagic device it's um essentially a universal rack adapter so I can fit two recorders on a single U uh rack space using that thing and it's not very cheap I want to say it's around a 100 bucks um but it allows us to nice and tily get these bad boys all racked up here's the back of each recorder there's a ton of inputs and outputs which I just love on this there's so much flexibility and we'll talk about wiring a little bit later and getting these all connected but for now I want to move on to this SSD setup and talk talk about these hot swappable SSD dock I actually have custom made so you could go with black Magic's multidock which is originally what I was thinking of doing but even though that thing is just Wicked and awesome and I love it there's one huge issue when it comes to trying to use it with a setup like this that is that there's only two USB jacks on the back of the unit so you can't independently connect each SSD to a separate device two of the ssds will connect to one device but you can't use four like you see me doing so here and it's also very expensive at 500 or more dollars so I designed and built this one for around 50 bucks it uses four of these SSD bounts that can be 3D printed along with two rack mount ears you'll also need a 36 in Long 3/8 threaded Rod which can be cut in half and four 3/8 nuts simply stack the SSD docks together insert the two rods left and right rack ears and tighten everything together with the nuts next take four of these SATA to SATA adapters and bolt them to the holes in the 3D printed dock like so using a total of eight M3 by10 pan head screws you now have a sweet 4 SSD hot swappable dot so in the description along with all the parts for this entire project you'll find a link to be able to purchase the files and print your own we might sell completed kits uh as well if you want to pick those up instead of printing them from there you could simply connect each SSD dock to each Blackmagic recorder using one of these SATA to USBC cables but that would require you to have to disconnect each of these ssds and reconnect it to a computer to import and I wanted this to be as smooth of a process as possible so I finally figured out a way to instantly switch all of these drives from the recorders to my laptop using a simple USB switch to simplify this I'm going to just focus on one SSD setup at a time and then you'll just be able to duplicate this setup across all the ssds as previously mentioned I have the SSD connected to our DIY dot that DIY dot which has a SATA to SATA connector is connected to a SATA to USB adapter to connect this SSD to both my computer and my recorder I'm using a USB splitter switch which has one input and two outputs when you press the button the switch switches the USB Source from output one to Output 2 so the SSD is connected to the input the first output is connected to the recorder and the second output is connected to my computer so here's the final chain of connections and adapters to make this work for one SSD I wanted four ssds for my four cameras so I quadrupled this set which worked completely fine with the recorder end of things but I did not want to connect four separate USB cables to my computer so I added a USB hub inside of the case then connected a single cable to my computer so at this point we have four ssds they all work with the recorders uh you press all of the buttons and they connect to the computer but I didn't want to have to press four buttons to switch all of these ssds over to the computer so I came up with a hack that works phenomenally to have a single button do all of this for me so that usb3 switch comes with a little wired remote so that you don't have to press the button on the switch itself this way you got to hide the but box and press this button on the wi remote to switch from Destination 1 to Destination 2 so to get this button to work with all four ssds at the exact same time I took all of those extension cables cut off the connectors and soldered one button to four connectors so on one end we have the button that you can press to switch all the drives and on the other end I have four of those connectors all soldered up together this was a little fiddly but not too complicated as you essentially take the same colored wires and twist them together with either wire nuts or soldering or however you want at the end of the day this allowed me to have a single button which I mounted all the way over here on the left of the hard drives and I can press that and all four of those USB switch boxes will switch what device these ssds are connected to the last thing I did to finalize this setup was to remove the little button cap on each of those boxes so that they wouldn't accidentally get bumped inside the case and this was really easy I just grabbed them with pliers pulled them off now there's no way to press that button without using like a screwdriver or something wiring up the cameras is very simple there are HDMI and SDI inputs on each of these recorders so we'll talk about the connections on the back of the case later but I'm essentially running HDMI from the back of the case to each of these recorders there are HDMI and SDI inputs on each of these recorders we can now move on to talking about the video switcher which is right over here so we have our ATM Mini Pro ISO and what I did for this is I ran the HDMI out of each of these recorders and sent them into the ATM mini then I use the A10 Mini's HDMI output to run to my external monitor I have over at my desk this way I can quickly pull up each of these camera angles look at them full screen on a big Monitor and make sure everything is working okay the other thing I did is I ran the USBC and some other cables from the back of this ATM to the rear of the case so I could plug in a USBC SSD and record a backup audio and visual tracks on the ATM uh if I wanted to so it just gives you a lot more flexibility it's not necessary um but it's really nice to be able to have this guy right here in the case to mount this to the case I just Ed dual lock 3M tape so that I could easily remove this and set it back in and that's the same way I connected this audio recorder here on the bottom okay with that out of the way let's talk about the connections on the back of the case so there are so many different ways to do this but in short I went with a D series panel so D series connectors are very common in this industry in the audio industry as well if you just search for D series connector on Amazon or what have you you're going to find a billion different options it's just a standard that you can use to add connectors to something like this rack panel so that is one way you could add connectors to the back of your case and a way to plug those connectors into each of these devices uh they are somewhat expensive though so if you want to save some money you could go with Keystone connectors so keystones just kind of snap into place they're not as robust but they're so much more affordable so you could buy a keystone rack mount panel and then go out and buy keystones for HDMI USB you know ethernet Etc so I labeled and organized everything with my four camera inputs on the far left followed by all the audio connections to my mix pre3 so XLR 3.5 m mm Jackson that kind of stuff then I have an HDMI output from the A10 mini to be able to connect an external monitor followed by USB Jacks for the A10 mini and the master USB out so that USB Jack actually connects inside of the case to my USB hub or switch where all these USB you know ssds are connected so I can send one cable out to my laptop and finally there's an Ethernet Jack on the far end so that I can connect all of these devices to my computer and control them using black Magic's ATM software we'll get to that here in a second but right now I want to talk about power all of this stuff needs juice and the way I accomplish that is with a single oneu power strip on the back of the case this particular one has a single switch and has six outputs on the outside and six outlets on the inside this way I could connect all of my camera's power to the back of the case if I wanted to or really anything else and all of that will be controlled with one single power switch there's only six internal Outlets and I decided that's the route I wanted to go so I ended up using one of these Splitters to give me more Outlets inside of the case and also these short power cables which really helped keep excess cable Loops to a minimum then we have the rear cover of the case so I wanted a way to still have access to the cables somewhat easily but cover them up so they wouldn't be spilling out of the back of the case because there's a lot of them I had one of these covers laying around from another rack mount build so I ended up using that it has a hinge built into one side but I needed to cut out a little slot on one side so that the power cable for the power strip would stick out the back of the case with that done I now have a 2u cover for the rear of the case that can hinge out and give me access to the cable nightmare that is inside of this guy we'll come back to that a little bit later then we have the audio recorder which I have right down here now this is not necessary you know your audio will most likely be coming from your camera I love my mix PR 3 so I wanted to incorporate that I just Ed 3M tape to get it installed down here in the bottom of the case and ran all the connections to the back like we already talked about for power I kind of Jerry rigged my own power solution that connects to the back of this unit and I added a USBC connection from the mix PR 3 to that Hub that's built inside of this the USB hub or splitter so that I can go into the menu system of the mix PR 3 and turn on the file sharing so that I can import on my computer directly from the mix pre3 again totally not necessary like the switcher over here so you could actually maybe do a 3u version of this case uh without this guy okay next we have the time code wiring for this entire project now this is going to look a little complicated but don't worry it's really not that difficult so here's a wiring diagram showing all of the BNC connectors on the back of these recorders again this isn't really as bad as it looks so on each of these recorders you're going to find a Time code input and a Time code output as well as a reference or ref in and ref out in short we are very simply going to to be daisy chaining these devices so they can communicate together so I picked up a bunch of these cheap BNC connectors from Amazon and then started by connecting the time code output on our first recorder to the time code input on the second recorder so this first recorder here is going to act as our kind of time code clock and it's going to feed time code to all the other devices so next we need to connect our second recorder to our third recorder so we're going to go out of the time code output on the second recorder into the time code input on the third then we're going to take the time code output on the third and send it to the time code input on the fourth as you can see very straightforward we're just daisy chaining them lastly if you have something like an audio recorder or something else that takes time code you could send the time code out of the fourth and into whatever your next device is going to be so for me I bought a BNC to 3.5mm cable and use that to connect the fourth uh recorder to my mix PR 3 and now I have time time code on all the devices now we're going to do the exact same thing with the ref in and ref out so we're going to take the reference or ref out of the first into the reference input on the second from the output of the second to the input of the third output of the third to the input of the fourth just like we did with the time code connectors next we have networking this is not required but it's really really handy so each of these recorders and this switcher are all from Blackmagic and they all have an Ethernet Jack and you can actually update them control them and change settings all from that ethernet connection so instead of running what five ethernet cables out of the back of the case I decided to install a small Ethernet or networking switch inside of this case so I use I believe as a TPL link eight port and then I ran a short ethernet cable from each of these devices to that switch and then connected a sixth cable that runs to The Back Jack on the back of the case from there I can run a single ethernet cable from the back of the case to a computer and now I can use Blackmagic software to pull up each of the decks I can go in there and change all kinds of fun settings like adding Luts um for the A10 mini you can do so many crazy things with that connection so it's just really handy I'll let you research what you can do with all that stuff so not necessary but it's really really nice not having to stick cables inside of the case again I can just use a single Jack on the back and I'm done next we're going to pay attention to the settings of these recorders to get them all to communicate together so the first thing you're going to want to do is access and change the codec settings so on each of these recorders we have a menu button a set button and a jog wheel so I'm going to hit menu here and now I can go ahead and dial in my codec you can see here I have it set to uh prores LT so I can press select again go down and change that if I need to I have it set to HDMI and then you want to make sure your trigger record is set to time code run now I can hit menu to back out of that and then we're going to go over to monitor if you want to change any settings there like clean feed or 3D L but I'm going to go over to storage set and down we can format our media if we need to and you'll be able to see what media is connected here I'm going to hit menu again and go over to setup we're going to go in here and we're going to go down to our time code options so here you can on the first recorder set it to preset that's really important set your input under time code to preset on the first recorder over here on the second recorder I'm going to set that same setting the time code input to external and you need to do that on all the recorders that are not the first one so the first one you set to preset then two 2 3 and four are all going to be set to external since they're going to be accepting time code from the first recorder there we have frame drop set to default preset is just set to whatever the preset is going to be over here you're going to see preset is probably 0000 0 on the other ones we have our output set to timeline on all the recorders and that's pretty much it that should get you fully set up so that the first recorder creates time code and sends it to all the rest and they just read time code off of the first one it's also really important to try to keep all of your resolution and frame rates the same so on your camera set it to be all the same for me that's going to be 4K at 2398 when it comes to my frame rate and that can be found in the setup menu if we scroll down here we can find our default standard so you can actually go in here and dial in all of these different settings but just make sure they're all the same so for me again 4K at 24 frames per second with that done the last thing you could do is connect each of these to your computer over ethernet pull down Blackmagic hyper deck software and change the name of each deck so I've have named them deck 1 2 3 and four respectively ly and the last thing I did was format the drives in the decks and I renamed them on my computer to deck 1 through 4 so that everything is the same and I can see what's going on with all that Holy Smokes we finally made it through this whole build but there's a couple things I want to talk about some things I don't like about this case and you should be aware of so it's awesome don't get me wrong I've been using it for 4 months and it's been crushing it I love how easy it is to film videos and injest footage without ever leaving my desk however problem number one is going to be how tight this thing is if I show you the back it's a nightmare back there with all the cables it was super difficult to get everything to fit this case like I said at the beginning of the video I would recommend going with a deeper case or a larger taller case so may be a 6u or 8U or just something completely different there this is pretty tight and it was really difficult to get it all installed in this smaller case the next problem is heat this puppy makes some monster heat on the inside of the case if I put my hand on the top here especially right in the middle uh it is pretty darn warm now I've not had any issues with that nothing has broken there are fans on these to keep them cool so I haven't had anything break and I've had this thing run for about half a day um without any problems so I don't know how long it would handle a 48 hour stream but it it does get warm now you could solve that by maybe instead of having these devices here at the bottom you could put a fan in there uh to suck cool air in and spit it out the back or something like that um but keep that in mind again going with a larger case will help with this and give you more room for fans and ventilation it does get warm and the next thing is going to be noise um these have fans I don't know if you can really hear them I'll stick the microphone right up in there I've really not noticed them with my particular recording setup at my desk and keep in mind this thing's been just off to the side of where I sit when I film but I've not really had any issues with that uh but if you have you know a less than an ideal microphone placement you might pick these up so again not a huge deal but something to keep in mind and the last con is this thing is really heavy even though it's small it's so dense uh so I wouldn't want to be lugging this thing around a lot and that brings me to version two so I love this thing so much I can't understate how amazing a single button to control recording and ingesting your footage is however I want to take all those cons and fix them in version two so I'm actually going to be building a new version of this with a computer install and it's going to sit over by my desk so it's not going to be as mobile as this this is awesome because you can pick it up move it around throw it in your car um this other setup is going to be a lot more permanent but in that newer version I have a couple things I really want the first is going to be a larger size so I can fit a computer in there as well I'm thinking of switching my entire Studio to SDI instead of HDMI so that'll be a big part of this case on the new unit I'm going to have a cooling system or at least better cooling than this comp compact version and finally I'm going to install a UPS or a battery backup so if the plug gets pulled or something happens all these devices keep recording even though there's no power so that's the setup I use for my computers but I want to install something like that for this guy so I'm editing this video I also have a cold sorry uh but I just realized I never talked about pricing so let's take a look at a spreadsheet where I kind of group different setups together and we can talk about what this thing could cost okay so I have a simple spreadsheet here and obviously the price of this thing is going to very wildly depending on what you put in the case but obviously we need a case and power so I'm going to check that box and that's around 200 bucks for the case and the power strip on the back next we have the recorders which is about 750 per recorder that includes power cables SDI cables and things like that so you could start with one single recorder and build this up over time so let's take a look at that we're also going to add one of these rack shelves to be able to mount it in the case and then the SSD switch system that's around $40 to add the button and all the stuff we need to wire that up then you can choose between D series and Keystone for your connections on the back and the price I have here is for you know like 5 HDMI and a bunch of other things so as you can see D series is more expensive Keystone is more affordable let's stick with the budget oriented build and then we have the ATM mini ISO and the mix PR 3 both are not necessary and mix pr3 is 900 bucks and this would get you up and running with a case build now over time you could add more recorders so let's go full send here we'll do four recorders we need two rack shelves for that four SSD systems let's switch over to D series instead of Keystone and now we're at $3,500 roughly so this is what things look like when you add all four cameras and of course if we want to go crazy we can add the a to mini for around four grand and the mix PR 3 I just realized networking is not on here but that would only add 30 to 40 bucks so this is what you're looking at for price pring obviously not cheap but you can start with a single recorder and for around $1,000 get up and running so that wraps up this insane project all of the links to everything mentioned will be down in the description below thank you guys so much for the support by purchasing gear via those affiliate links by buying my Luts and my camera guides and our custom gear like this super sweet thing which is coming out soon the cine back Pro for the fx3 I cannot wait to get this thing out to you guys it's got power all kinds of cool features so stay tuned for a video on that that's going to wrap up this what I imagine is a freakishly long video thank you guys so much for watching if you have any questions hit me up in the comments below hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and we'll see you in the next video

Channel: DSLR Video Shooter

Views: 346,668

Keywords: camera recorder, ultimate, multicam, recorder, case, box, rack mount, caleb, pike, calebpike, dslrvideoshooter, dslr video shooter, blackmagic, hyperdeck, hd, plus, blackmagic hyperdeck studio HD Plus

Id: wH2nFKRydUw

Length: 28min 42sec (1722 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 17 2023