InBroadcast - September 2023 - 52

TM
52
www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 13 - Issue 9 | September 2023
InStudio
Atomos' Ninja Ultra is a
gateway to super-productive
cloud workflows
Atomos burst onto the scene in 2010, at a time when digital video had
jumped from tape to files and resolution (SD, HD, 4K, etc.) and was in
the early stages of an astonishing exponential growth curve.
With Paul Scurrell, Senior VP, Product, Atomos
T
alk about interesting times! The
entire history of Atomos has been
characterised by rapid change. The
earliest versions of the now iconic
Ninja were rudimentary by today's
standards, but, at the time, they
were nothing less than a handheld,
solid-state professional VTR that ran
off batteries - at a 30th of the price.
And it had a built-in monitor.
The Atomos team knew that for
the Ninja to be accepted by the
filmmaking community, it had to be
surprisingly
affordable but
robust
and reliable. It was a big ask because
the Ninja could hardly be more
different to a tape recorder.
Instead, it captured directly from
the HDMI output of a camera - that's
uncompressed HD video - into an
FPGA (Field
Programmable Gate
Array - a chip that can run software
at hardware speeds), where it was
converted into Apple ProRes. The
Apple professional editing codec is
visually lossless at sufficiently high
data rates but easy to process. It
reduces file sizes enough to store
useful amounts on hard drives and
is efficient for editing. It's a win-win
because if you can capture into the
same format you edit with, it's a
massive time-saver. But that wasn't
the only ground-breaking advantage.
For the first time, Ninja meant that
you could
record directly on to
affordable, removable computer
storage. It
was an extremely
compelling proposition all round.
As the recorder-monitor paradigm
established itself, Atomos evolved
and refined its Ninja, Shogun and
Sumo-branded
products
with
sharper, bigger, brighter screens
and vastly more powerful software,
incorporating entire toolkits to assist
during production.
The latest generation of Ninja is
lightweight, has a five-inch HDR
screen, and can record either nine
or sixteen times the resolution of
the original model. Which raises an
interesting question about the future
of the product: where does it go from
here? It's not higher resolutions. At
the point where the new Ninja Ultra
can record 8K30p video, it's by no
means evident that the next iteration
should record 16K. In fact, it's pretty
obvious that it shouldn't. Besides,
there are many
more
now,
Atomos
valuable
directions to go. And all of those
point upwards, towards the cloud.
Until
has
easily
persuaded
customers
to buy
its
products, which do what they say
on the box. Monitor recorders record
and monitor. But what does the cloud
do? The answers are as surprisingly
simple as
profound.
they
are surprisingly
The cloud is not a cloud
The word " cloud " is thrown around
all over the place, but it's not what it
seems. Instead of being a physical
thing you can reach out and touch,
it's more of a shorthand
for " when
you put
something in the cloud,
you can assume things
will happen " .
That's
a
long way of saying that
the cloud is something (or
somewhere) that provides
services you can use, from anywhere.
It's
Substitute " Hedge " for " Cloud, "
and that's a pretty good definition of
a cloud service. That service might
be as basic as storage. Throw some
data into the cloud, and you can
get it back on demand. You have
no idea where it's stored, but that
doesn't matter as long as you get it
back intact. And because the cloud
is on the internet, you can put
stuff in it from anywhere and
get it back from anywhere. That
makes it incredibly useful.
AtomOS 11
like throwing something over
your garden hedge - say, cupcake
ingredients, and - a few minutes later
- having a bunch of perfectly formed
cupcakes thrown back to you. You
have no idea what took place over
the hedge, but that doesn't matter.
All that matters is that
there's a
cupcake service available over the
hedge.
http://www.inbroadcast.com https://www.atomos.com https://www.atomos.com https://www.atomos.com https://www.atomos.com https://www.atomos.com https://www.atomos.com https://www.atomos.com
InBroadcast - September 2023

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