Atomos Samauri
 

Hello to all and Happy Holidays,
I have had the Atomos Samurai for about two weeks now and I am pleased to report that is works as advertised. We had the Indian Rocks Beach Boat Parade Saturday night and I had the opportunity use the Samurai and the EX-1 for that event. I am attaching a jpg of a frame taken from the video. This is straight from the camera and no color grading, the video is clean and clear. When I compared this years footage with footage I took in 2009 of the same parade with the EX-1 alone, I could see significant improvement. I am sure the 10 bit output had a great deal to do with that since the 2009 footage, which looked very good, was taken off the SxS cards.

Phil

Re: Atomos Samauri
 

Posting a jpg rather defeats the concept of us being able to see how high quality the image is. Could you post a PNG or a TIF? Thanks.

Re: Atomos Samauri
 

Can anyone comment on using the samurai with a windows pc and sony vegas?

The samurai would be a no brainer for me if I can use the files

Re: Atomos Samauri
 

If you have a recent version of QuickTime installed on your PC you will be able to play back the ProRes files but not encode to new ProRes files. On a PC, ProRes is currently play/decode only there is no encoding support.

However this means that you can still take advantage of the improved recordings on a PC, jut you'll need to encode to something else to export your finished production.

Re: Atomos Samauri
 

I dont suppose you have a small raw sample from the recorder you could send me Phil, or Alister just for peace of mind?

Re: Atomos Samauri
 

Hi Tom:
I shot the entire Indian Rocks Beach Boat Parade with the Atomos Saturday night and edited it today. It is a large file going up on VIMEO right now. I am concerned the file was converted to H264 and if that will still demonstrate the quality I saw from the ProRes QT file the Atomos generated. I will post the link once VIMEO converts it.

Phil

Re: Atomos Samauri
 

I will say working with ProRes in Vegas is tedious since you are guaranteed to encounter black frames at some point in the editing process. Not sure about the final render, but editing a big project in ProRes via Vegas isn't what I would recommend unless it's your only choice, and you can live with black frames.

This is the biggest reason I'm going with the nanoFlash. If you're an FCP user, the Samurai would be a workflow friendly alternative to the nano, but I wouldn't risk black frames because of ProRes in Vegas.

Final note: Big projects with tons of ProRes files tend to crash Vegas. Has already happened to me on more than one occasion.

Re: Atomos Samauri
 

i occasionally run into that with other formats (cineform, huffy, lagarith)

Re: Atomos Samurai on Vimeo
 

I uploaded my video of the boat parade on Vimeo. It was a huge file. I am seeing some starting and stopping but once it loads a bit it plays fine. Ironically, it played without any delays on my iPhone. Here is the link if you care to view.


Phil

Re: Atomos Samauri
 

On a Mac, did you see any corruption in your footage once you transferred the files to your computer?
The files seem to play fine in the Samurai, but when I play them back on my Mac Pro, Snow Leopard 10.6.8 I see many drop outs and freezes.

Thoughts?

Re: Atomos Samauri
 

How exactly are you playing them? Did you copy them onto your Mac's internal drive, or are you playing them from the USB-connected "caddy loader"?

USB would be too slow to transfer at real-time speed depending on the quality setting you chose, likely creating the freezes.

Re: Atomos Samurai on Vimeo
 

Nice, I downloaded the original 3GB+ file and it's very very clean. Did you do a lot of PP? Those blacks are so black...

Re: Atomos Samauri
 

No, thus far, the playback and editing have been spot on. Everything fast and as advertised.
Phil

Re: Atomos Samurai on Vimeo
 

Andre:
I did not touch a thing. This is how the recording came out of the EX-1 and onto the Samurai. Direct to FCP and that was about it.
Phil