Shogun Flame occasionally stops recording

[Christopher Wright]

Hi everyone,

I've had my Shogun Flame for 2 years now and it's never been all that reliable. It doesn't happen often, but occasionally the unit stops recording and I get a yellow warning icon in the top left corner and the red border around the picture starts flashing. There's a link below that shows what this looks like. Most of the time I can go all day on and off with no trouble, but sometimes it happens several times a day. When this happens, I still get a picture and audio from the headphone jack, and all video passthrough connections still work - but I have to go into playback mode and back before it will record again.

shogunflame on Vimeo

This has only ever been used as a backup and my deliverables come from the camera card, but I'm working towards something where I need this to be a reliable primary recorder. When I first got it, I was recording to a 2tb HDD, thinking it would be fast enough since I'm only recording 1080/59.94i at Pro-Res LTE. When the above issue started to happen, I swapped that with a Crucial MX300 525gb SSD (the older MX200 is on the Atomos list of supported drives, up to 10bit ProRes Raw at atomos.com/drives). However the problem persisted with this drive.

Then last year I filed a claim with Atomos and sent it in. They said the unit seemed fine but (if I remember correctly) they sent back a different refurb unit anyway. The problem still happens.

Just looking at the icon, I would guess that indicates a write speed error, or maybe drive issue. Can anyone confirm this? I'd be surprised if the Crucial drive I have is not sufficient, but I would appreciate it if anyone could tell me for sure that a different drive is necessary.

Thanks in advance!
Chris

[Jack Zhang]

You may want to try a Samsung drive just to be sure. Make sure to do a secure erase before you use the drive, then try again.

Samsung drives of recent generations are both extremely good at random writes and sequential writes.

[Christopher Wright]

Sorry for the late reply.

Thanks for the tip. Would you go with the Samsung SSD over one of the Atomos partnerships like the G-Technology Atomos Master Caddy?

[Jack Zhang]

Definitely, a 512GB or 1TB 860 Pro is both good at sustained writes AND random writes. The random writes when data gets fragmented is what Samsung SSDs are really good at. Other SSD controllers fall apart when random writes start getting introduced.

[Christopher Wright]

Awesome thanks!

[John Wiley]

I'd say it sounds like a drive speed issue.

The Icon you're likely seeing is the "drive skipping" warning. It's a yellow triangle that looks like a road sign with a Kangaroo on it ("Skippy"... "skipping"... that's Australian logic for you).