Freya Black Posted October 8, 2011 Share Posted October 8, 2011 Okay, discovered this and wanted to share: http://www.blackmagic-design.com/uk/products/hyperdeckshuttle/techspecs/ It does HDMI AND HD-SDI, the big catch is that it only record quicktime uncompressed but I would argue that the falling cost of media will make that a non issue, and maybe even an advantage! The price is amazing tho. I'm seeing £225 here in the UK which is a lot cheaper than £1000 odd for a nanoflash. It seems to me you could slap one of these on an EX1 or a HV20 or some cheap AVCHD affair and suddenly have an amazing camera. No idea about recording times or cost of media right now tho. I'm wonderng if the sata ssd interface could record to a SATA hard disk instead too? Any thoughts? love Freya Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member Phil Rhodes Posted October 8, 2011 Premium Member Share Posted October 8, 2011 My review for BTL News is pending publication :) I won't preempt the review too much, but It is broadly speaking what it appears to be and yes it is very cheap. You can build the on-camera part of the recording outfit for under £500, assuming three 128GB (17 minute) disks which would cover a day's work on most of the sort of productions where these might see use. The problem comes when you want to build an actual workflow with it, where you need somewhere to do verifiable and insurable backups of the data.This almost certainly implies LTO mag tape, and the drives for that are over £1000 each, plus the rest of the computer, someone to do it, and software. But it's still pretty decent. Doesn't do RGB, sadly, although there are SSDs out there which would handle the data rate and it has a 3Gbps SDI port. Considering Red, Sony and Panasonic now have proprietary flash card systems which all cost much more than plain vanilla SSDs, and which require extremely expensive playback decks as opposed to any desktop PC, this starts to look like an even better deal. Edit: I'm wonderng if the sata ssd interface could record to a SATA hard disk instead too? No. Not even nearly fast enough. P Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freya Black Posted October 8, 2011 Author Share Posted October 8, 2011 (edited) Edit: [/size] No. Not even nearly fast enough. P Ah! I guess because it is uncompressed. I hadn't really thought it through. It still seems kinda amazing even with the cards etc. Yes you perhaps can't back it up as is, but on a low budget you could sort out your grading/chroma keying and then edit it with a codec like pro-res or that Avid thing with the N's and the X's (DNXHD or something?) and it would still be a big jump. It seems like it could be kind of game changing at almost all levels of working however. Please do post a link to your review here when you get it sorted Phil! Would love to know more! BlackMagic design seem intent on dropping paradigm shifts into the market place lately! love Freya Edited October 8, 2011 by Freya Black Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member John Sprung Posted October 10, 2011 Premium Member Share Posted October 10, 2011 There are over a dozen makes and models of these small outboard recorders. With the HDSR shortage after the tsunami, they've been a hot item. -- J.S. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member Phil Rhodes Posted October 10, 2011 Premium Member Share Posted October 10, 2011 Yeah, but this one is very cheap, very small, and does uncompressed. And it uses easy-to-find recording media. I like it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member John Sprung Posted October 10, 2011 Premium Member Share Posted October 10, 2011 It's small light and cheap because it isn't doing compression. It has a big enough bucket and can just pour the bits in fast enough. That makes things simple if you can afford enough drives. It pushes the problem into post. -- J.S. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member Phil Rhodes Posted October 11, 2011 Premium Member Share Posted October 11, 2011 It's small light and cheap because it isn't doing compression Well, exactly, although the same conspicuously can't be said for S2 and Codex, who also aren't doing compression. It is sad but true that this probably wouldn't displace either of those even if it did do 4:4:4 RGB (and F35 speed ramps, etc), because it doesn't cost enough, so we'll have to pay the crew slightly less so we can go Codex instead... Pushing the problem into post - are you characterising an LTO backup procedure as "post" in that context? There are a couple out there (Cinedeck, for instance) which do the compression on the CPU, as opposed to in an ASIC, which I have to query because it means you need some enormous x86 banging away in there at the cost of enormous amounts of power, heat, therefore noise, etc. I think ultimately the bucket-size issue will be made trivial by Moore, so this is certainly the future even if there are arguments that it isn't quite the present. I wince expressively at the amount of material that's currently being originated in formats that continue to enjoy support only as long as they're making someone money. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member John Sprung Posted October 11, 2011 Premium Member Share Posted October 11, 2011 Pushing the problem into post - are you characterising an LTO backup procedure as "post" in that context? ..... I think ultimately the bucket-size issue will be made trivial by Moore, so this is certainly the future even if there are arguments that it isn't quite the present. Yes, and either working with it or compressing it into a more usable format. Our shows are typically shooting half a terabyte a day on Alexas using ProRes. Make that three and a half, and just transferring stuff on and off SAN's, SAN storage, etc, -- everything gets way too big and slow. It's like driving a Euclid truck into town. Moore may be slowing down on us, but it would be a good idea to have something better than those archaic DPX files standardised before that future gets here. Something with more that one frame per file, sound, time code, etc...... -- J.S. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freya Black Posted October 12, 2011 Author Share Posted October 12, 2011 off SAN's, SAN storage, etc, -- everything gets way too big and slow. It's like driving a Euclid truck into town. -- J.S. Wow! Monster Truck! Love the picture! Theres something about the scale of the thing that is magnificent! Are they for mining or something? love Freya Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freya Black Posted October 12, 2011 Author Share Posted October 12, 2011 I actually think this is the most revolutionary thing to hit the market in a long time. Yes you have to re-encode in post at present but I think thats better than having the camera make the codec choices for you! It's a bit like having to return to the days of ingesting tapes really. I mean if you look at it just from the point of keying, you now have 4:2:2 and uncompressed video. That has to be waaaay easier to key. I don't think the stuff like codex is even going to be relevant at all the way things are going. I think the market is wide open for a device like this because the video codec world for cameras has become a shambles. What standards there are, are just plain bad. Going uncompressed allows people to route around this. So how many minutes could it record on a 64gb card? love Freya Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member Phil Rhodes Posted October 12, 2011 Premium Member Share Posted October 12, 2011 Eight and a half. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member John Sprung Posted October 12, 2011 Premium Member Share Posted October 12, 2011 Yes, they're called quarry trucks, used for gravel pits, open pit mines, etc. The standards for uncompressed are a bigger problem than for compressed -- DPX is basically all there is, and it's a silent dinosaur. -- J.S. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member Phil Rhodes Posted October 12, 2011 Premium Member Share Posted October 12, 2011 Most of the stuff I have is in AVIs. Usually YUV, because the common V210 RGB codec is broken. There's also R10K. I seem to recall about five years ago complaining to Mike Most on this very forum about DPX files being prehistoric and being slapped down, but then again that was Mike Most. Hyperdeck only records Quicktimes. Review is up: http://www.btlnews.com/crafts/camera/a-review-blackmagic-designs-new-hyperdeck-shuttle/ Didn't get to talk about camera stuff so much due to a technical snafu during the test, but the thing works. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freya Black Posted October 12, 2011 Author Share Posted October 12, 2011 The standards for uncompressed are a bigger problem than for compressed -- DPX is basically all there is, and it's a silent dinosaur. -- J.S. There are standards for uncompressed .avi's and quicktimes too. In some ways they are quite straightforward as there isn't a whole lot to them by their nature. It's kind of a shame that the hyperdeck codec doesn't have some very basic lossless compression like RLE or something but then if that would increaase the cost I'd rather it was just completely uncompressed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Freya Black Posted October 13, 2011 Author Share Posted October 13, 2011 (edited) Review is up: http://www.btlnews.com/crafts/camera/a-review-blackmagic-designs-new-hyperdeck-shuttle/ Didn't get to talk about camera stuff so much due to a technical snafu during the test, but the thing works. Been up a while and was really hitting high in the google stakes last I saw! I wondered if you had decided not to share with us all here in case it damaged your reputation as a unenthusiastic and depressed individual! ;) Great review! One thing it didn't cover tho is that apparently you need to have the right SSD's. Not just any SSD will do as some of them aren't fast enough!!! I'm wondering if you ran into any issues with this? I'm also wondering if you can bring in video from the HDMI in and then output it from the SDI out! I would assume that you couldn't but it would be very neat if you could! love Freya Edited October 13, 2011 by Freya Black Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member Phil Rhodes Posted October 13, 2011 Premium Member Share Posted October 13, 2011 We didn't test the HDMI. Frankly there's a lot of camera-related things I would have liked to have done, but there's a limit to how much time you can spend when you're begging a camera off someone. From what I understand if you play back a file it comes out of all the outputs, so it could record HDMI then play back SDI. I haven't actually done so. They supplied an SSD with it (a Kingston SSDNow V100 of 128GB capacity) which was fine. There is a note in the box about it but they mainly warn against the really cheap-end drives that use a lot of compression and assume all data will compress well when calculating the published speed spec. This obviously collapses terribly on video data which tends to be incompressible with the sort of algorithms used in that scenario, but it's only a factor with the really cheap crap. P Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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