August 2013
www.tvbeurope.com
“We are recording a minimum of five hours per day on SSD 500GB drives and we did not lose a frame so far”
solution for the price. Our requirement was to find equipment able to record directly in ProRes LT. Other brands propose LT codec, but Atomos was the best solution for several reasons: the touchscreen of both the Samurai and the Ronin includes all the needed details. It’s a real advantage to see the input picture versus other equipment without screens. Samurai and Ronin have exactly the same
or using a 7.2v Sony mode battery. The no break power supply is a necessity when you use a machine to record the feed of such a major event. Even a standard XDCam, P2 or HDCam VTR is not equipped with a redundant power supply. For the Tour de France we even go further in using a UPS on the 220v network.”
They did consider buying a Blackmagic HyperDeck, but as it
improved 1280x720 325dpi 5-inch SuperAtom IPS touchscreen that offers users gamma, brightness and contrast control, as well as vectorscope and RGB/luma parade features and runs the latest version of AtomOS, version 5 (which is only available for the Blade). Like its Ninja-2 and Samurai
predecessors, Samurai Blade records 10-bit 4:2:2 images using either ProRes or Avid DNxHD
“We extensively used the Samurai in the past and found the screen not good enough for viewfinder use. We expect the Blade to be better”
interface, a real advantage to work on both machines without noticing it,” he says.
Redundant power However, “the big plus of the Ronin is the redundancy of the power supply. You can plug to a standard 220v and plug an extra 12v input via a battery adapter
doesn’t support ProRes LT it wasn’t suitable. AJA’s KiPro does support the LT codec, but it is more expensive.
Atomos shipped its latest field
recorder, the €995 Samurai Blade, just as the Tour entered its last week, so although FreeLens has ordered two, they didn’t arrive in time. The Blade has a much
Edit space: Thanks to expanding sides, there was plenty of room inside the production unit, comprising three edit suites
Yann Figuet
editing codecs. It uses commodity 2.5-inch computer HDD or SSD drives. The Samurai Blade includes tri-level focus peaking, zebra, false colour and blue-only monitoring in addition to waveform, and has standard BNC connectors. “We extensively used the Samurai in the past and
found the screen not good enough for viewfinder use. We expect the Blade to be better, avoiding the need to plug in an extra monitor. Ronin is a great machine, we will keep them and use them extensively as deck recorders,” says Figuet. Three Samurai systems were used during the Tour, one on each of two ENG cameras, the other shared between the two fibre-linked cameras for any pre-recorded items. There were three cameramen (one from FreeLens and two from SBS), with each cameraman also doing some editing.
There were three edit suites in
the trailer with MacPro 12 core systems, but the cameramen also edited on the network using MacBook Pro laptops, so it could have up to five Final Cut Pro 7 systems plugged into the network at any time. It used FCP7 “as the crews are used to it and don’t feel comfortable with X,” he says. “We took the decision with SBS to go with FCP7 as everybody was much more comfortable with it and FCP 7 brings all the facilities for the kind of work we do here on the Tour.”
www.atomos.com www.freelenstv.com www.woodstv.com
TVBEurope 37 The Workflow
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