Death of HDSLR part 2: All u need to know about the $995 Atomos

by Sebastian WöberApril 15^th, 2011

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By: Sebastian Wöber

In this 10 minute video David Shapton, President of Atomos EMEA, gives us an in depth look at the new Atomos Ninja hdmi to ProRes (HQ) recorder that will retail at $995. If you want one you should order now as this product will most likely sell like hot bread!

As I told you in my post yesterday a new camera solution for the low budget filmmaker is imminent and will replace the current line of hdslrs in professional productions. We’re talking about a setup that will cost around $5000-$8000 and provide an alternative to cameras like the RED and give you much better results and workflow than a 1Dmk4 or 5D2 can.

Yesterday we saw the Blackmagic Hyperdeck Shuttle, a portable device for just $345 that will record video uncompressed via hdmi or sdi onto a solid state drive. This is gamechanging! I will go more into detail in part 3 of this series of posts.

Now I would like to present to you the Atomos Ninja which basically does the same as the Blackmagic Hyperdeck Shuttle but will save the recorded feed as ProRes 422 instead of uncompressed. This is good because it will save harddisk space, recompression time and the amount of harddisks you’ll have to use/buy. That means you’ll also save manpower and money over the Blackmagic.
The harddisks you’ll be able to use with the Ninja are standard 2.5 inch notebook drives you can already buy for around 60 bucks. Let me break it down for you:

Blackmagic:
15 minutes uncompressed (1.6 GB/s) = 180GB = 180GB ssd drive = $480

Atomos:
6 hours ProRes 422 (HQ) (220 MB/s) = 2.5″ 640GB drive = $50

www.atomos.com

Thanks to Ralph Merzbach for holding the mic ;)

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