[Tim gregory]

Does anyone here have a Blackmagic Hyperdeck Studio.

Looking into the write disk rates, it looks like it should be fine to use a 2.5" 7200rpm drive rather than an SSD when recording compressed HD or SD.

Anyone tried this?

I have spoken with Blackmagic support who think it should be possible but haven't tested it.

I am looking to buy one and using hard drives will save me a lot of cost.

Thanks

Tim

[sleepytom]

I should be able to test this for you this week.

I will let you know as soon as I've tried it.

We use spinning disks in our atomos ninja without issue, but I've not tested them in the hyperdeck yet.

This post has been edited by sleepytom: 19 January 2012 - 01:01 PM

[Tim gregory]

Great! Thanks for that...

How much Blackmagic kit do you have!?

We have just ordered the ATEM 1ME Switcher and Broadcast Panel so waiting for that to arrive...

Tim

[slim_mcslim]

very keen to hear of your results on this. would like to get a couple, if only atomos did a rack mount samurai!!!
I agree that 7200rpm spinners should be fast enough for the unit, my only concern with the hyperdeck is it will produce huge 10bit files, at 12min's per 128gb, these might prove a bit unwieldy to edit quickly.

p.

[Tim gregory]

 slim_mcslim, on 22 January 2012 - 10:13 PM, said:

my only concern with the hyperdeck is it will produce huge 10bit files, at 12min's per 128gb, these might prove a bit unwieldy to edit quickly.

I am fairly sure that using the DNxHD codec that is now on the latest firmware update, your file sizes should be a lot smaller than that.

By my maths (which could be wrong) you should use about 19.5gb for 12 min's.

Tim

[Tim gregory]

Hi Tom,

Any luck on trying this? I now have an opportunity to buy one but want to be sure of the media cost first.

Thanks,

Tim

[sleepytom]

They are supposed to be sending me one "this week" I will let you know as soon as I have it here.

[Tim gregory]

 sleepytom, on 02 February 2012 - 03:50 PM, said:

They are supposed to be sending me one "this week" I will let you know as soon as I have it here.

Thanks for your help Tom,

I have got a chance to buy one at a good price and can't seem to get a demo at the moment - that may change after BVE.

Tim

[sleepytom]

well I've been able to record DNxHD onto 7200rpm spinning disks.

However currently you need AVID Media Composer to make use of these recordings. None of the normal tricks with rewrapping the mxf files work (at the moment) so you cannot import into finalcut or premiere.

I've yet to try making DNxHD mxf to put on the hyperdeck for playback, I'm not really an AVID guy so I'm kind of poking about in the dark a bit.

I will post a full review of the Hyperdecks on atemuser.com early next week.

[Tim gregory]

Hi Tom,

Thanks for testing that. BMD support reckoned it would work but had done no testing and Holdan seemed adamant that it wouldn't work.

At the moment we are working in SD so the Avid codec is not a major issue, providing it is going to be possible to convert in future, or another codec is added...

We received our ATEM 1ME last week and I am putting together a PPU case. I hope to add two Hyperdecks to this, one for playback and one for recording, unless there are any better rack-mount options.

Tim

[sleepytom]

There is no SD Avid codec - SD is uncompressed only. (DNxHD - is HD only!)

For the money the hyperdeck studio represents super value. Knowing Blackmagic they may well add functionality to improve it in the future, but even now as it stands its the best rackmount recorder you can buy for less than £4000 - even with the cost of a couple of fast SSDs it is still a superb bargain (comes in around £1000 with 2x 240GB SSDs - enough for 40mins recording of uncompressed 1080i or over 4 hours of SD).

As with the ATEM these products are all very new and their are a few bugs to be ironed out, I crashed the Hyperdeck by jabbing away at its buttons like a mad man! But in normal use I've not seen it wobble at all.

[ferretwrangler]

We were going to install 6 of the Hyperdeck Studios into our OB truck, however after much research we have decided to go with the Atomos Samurai. Mainly because it records at variable bit rates in Avid and ProRes and can happily record to spinning platter drives and its about £850+vat.

Id have preferred the blackmagic solution but its very storage hungry, SSD drives are very expensive and Im not certain that DNxHD is the answer to reduce storage requirements.

I suppose the point is that spinning discs (good ones) should be fast enough - but I prefer a solution where the manufacturer says they WILL work.

Real shame as we have gone with Blackmagic ATEM 2 Switchers and Hubs etc.

[sleepytom]

Did you try both products first? I've had a Ninja since they came out, and am happy to of replaced it with the the Hyperdeck. The touch screen on the Atomos is not very responsive and it's menu system is a poorly thought out design. The BMD products have buttons, real buttons that offer positive feedback to their operation. It's much easier to see the state of a hyperdeck with a quick glance as it has big glowing / moving LED lights which tell you if it is paused, playing or recording. And it supports RS422 so you can build a properly integrated system.

Atomos say a lot of things about their products - but they have had trouble living up to the promises in my experience. BMD are kind of the opposite, playing down the possibility of using spinning disks as not every laptop hard drive is fast enough.

If you view the SSDs as a temporary file cache and intend to backup / dump the files onto a raid storage system (the only sensible way of managing tapeless workflow IMHO) then the total cost of the Hyperdeck Studio system is similar to the Samurai.

For use in a truck the mains power ability of the Hyperdeck is also an important consideration. The Samurai runs on batteries (only) and if you hard mount it somewhere you need to access the rear of the unit to change the batteries, the front to use the touchscreen, the right hand side to operate the power switch and the left hand side needs a gap as wide as the unit to enable you to remove the media. This is not a problem on-camera, but in a truck 8 of them will be a real pain to manage!

[ferretwrangler]

I have played with both. The Blackmagic Box is great but as I say flawed. I don't say the Samurai is the perfect solution either but it is better for us. Ive found the touch screens to be great - inputs etc all work fine. As you say installing them is a touch tricky but we have made a rack mount solution.

I suppose its a case of whatever fits best

[sleepytom]

The latest public beta (2.51) version of the HyperDeck software has added DNxHD .mov file recording giving full compatibility with all quicktime editing applications. They have also added embedded SDI timecode support and record trigger via SDI.

These upgrades wipe the floor with the Samurai, which currently only offers prores (and when they roll out DNxHD they will charge for the upgrade).

I don't understand why you say the HyperDeck is flawed? That would seem to be a somewhat unfair assessment to me. The HyperDeck Studio is a decent product with a design far more suited to use alongside vision mixers than the Samurai. For direct records on-camera the Samurai is the winner, but for studios, PPUs and trucks the current Hyperdeck Studio is better, and if BMD carry on improving it in the ways which seem likely then it will be miles better than the Samurai, for example there is a network port on the Hyperdeck Studio, which would seem likely to be used for integrated control from the ATEM pannel at some point in the future (this is 100% speculation on my behalf, not based on any inside knowledge!).

I'm happy to have the choice between the ninja and the hyperdeck, but I can see the ninja getting used less and less as the hyperdeck matures and improves.

This post has been edited by sleepytom: 17 February 2012 - 11:22 PM