to all Atomos, ext. recorder users....How?

[Jonathan Levin]

Hi all.

I am getting real close to to getting into an Atomos Ninja Blade or possibly Assasin.

My question for you is this: what is your workflow for offloading a SSD drive? On the Atomos forums, I was given a few suggestions which might work.

My sort of problem is that I am working with a mid 2010 MacPro Quad Core. It only has USB 2.0 but does have Firewire 800, which would be far better apparently.

If I read this correctly, to offload a 500gb SSD drive might take up to 8-10 hours!

So all of you using these external recorders in your production, how are you handling this? Shoot day, then offload some other time?

With the Atomos units, I know I need a connector/cable that goes from SATA to FW 800, and I found this:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1150900-REG/g_technology_0g04412_ev_series_firewire_adapter.html/c/product/#inpage:in+stock#inpage:shipping+:++$?gclid=CjwKEAiAgvyxBRDmuviAj67g-XQSJABTLMcHtfwvPT2ezx_oxwvBCdC6_UZPgV4TbVfCJGSO6HcEfhoC4g_w_wcB

I suppose if the SATA part of it works with the Atomos SSD drive in it's caddy, than that is certainly the way for me to go. I'm assuming USB 2.0 would not be the answer here, correct?

Thanks.

Jonathan

[Nate Haustein]

Depending on what you're shooting, 500GB is a lot of footage to shoot with one of these. HD isn't so bad, it's about 128GB for 90 minutes in 1080p ProRes HQ. 4K is worse. 90 minutes of 4K ProRes HQ is more like 480GB. I've been using ProRes LT for some 4K stuff and its working pretty well for fast turnaround stuff. For a full 240GB drive to my thunderbolt RAID it might take an hour or so to copy with USB3 - or just edit right off the drive if you need it NOW.

The fact is, FW800 wasn't really made for the kind of data were seeing in today's cameras and recorders. It's still pretty slow. Would you be able to get a USB3 expansion card for your Mac Pro? It seems like one could be had for just a little more than the cost of that FW800 adapter and then you'd have USB3 for everything else you might need to hook up in the near future. Not to mention the blade and assassin come with a USB3 reader in the box.

You should be able to get great speeds from the SSD to a RAID storage with USB 3, but it all depends on the speed of your archival/working storage destination. Going to a single hard drive isn't going to be all that much faster then the FW800 solution because your destination drive can't keep up.

[Jonathan Levin]

Nate,

Thanks for responding and the information.

I've been looking into the USB 3.0 pci cards and have come to the conclusion that maybe I should just go with some kind of FW 800 adapter for now. I've read that there are some issues with adapters causing problems for bluetooth, and that I'd also have to draw power from the second superdrive bay which is currently being used for a BlueRay burner/drive.

I think my MacPro is just getting a little old. But this leaves me with another question: With the new MacPro's (black cylinder) are people using thunderbolt or the USB 3.0 channels to connect external SSD's?

Would anyone happen to know if I do go the FW800 to sata connector, is FW 800 powered? Will SSD just plug and play?

Thanks.

Jonathan

[Jonathan Levin]

I now own a Ninja Blade and have been doing a lot of testing.

The Ninja Blade comes as a very nice kit and has everything you really need minus the HDMI cable, and SSD/HDD. It even comes with a battery, but I've got lots of those from other devices.

I am using a Sandisk SSD 240Gb drive and offloaded a bunch of Pro Res HQ video files just using the included Atomos USB dock. File transfer to my Mac Pro, while not blazingly fast, was acceptable to me. In real world use, I can't imagine filing an entire SSD for one project, 240GB or 2 hours.

Audio was out of sync but that was resolved with setting frame delay on the Blade to +4 frames. I am working dual system anyway, so not that huge of an issue, especially when properly slated.

[Nate Haustein]

That's great to hear that the USB is working out for you. It's a sweet little monitor/recorder. If you have any more questions, just ask!

[Jonathan Levin]

Well here s a question.

I am shooting with the Nikon D800 and Ninja Blade, latest firmware. It is advised that the compact flash card be removed from the camera before shooting with Ninja as recorder:

"Remove media from Nikon D800, when media is inserted and REC is pressed, output will be limited to 720p 50/60 " This according to Atomos.

However, in testing, I found that even with the card in the camera, the Ninja Blade still records to 1920x1080. I just didn't see any evidence that it was in anyway recording in 720p. So I called Atomos and after some looking into this, they say what is really happening is if there is a card in the camera, recording will stop after 29 minutes of recording. To me that's a long time for most of my work. Apparently it does not affect output resolution.

This would make more sense to me since the signal is not going through the card and then the Atomos.

The reason for my looking into this is that I will be using the D800 to shoot still as well as video and would like to not have to remember to place card in camera prior to taking stills. There is a "NoCard" warning that shows up in the preview so at very least that would remind me.

Any thoughts or anyone with a Ninja Blade and D800 that could concur?

Jonathan

[Patrick Baldwin]

I haven't tried this on my D800 recording externally but perhaps you could leave an SD card in and shoot stills to that. Worth a try?

[Jonathan Levin]

Thanks Patrick. That's an interesting idea.

I would love to see what you come up with with a few tests as far as my first post.

One thing I did notice is that if the little selector switch (that is part of the live button) is set to still, and the atomos is connected the image is most definitely cropped. But when switched back to video mode all seems ok. This with a CF in the camera.

I'm not even sure what that switch does. Even if I'm shooting stills, I leave that set to video all the time. Seems like it just affects live view mode.