Atomos surprises at IBC with Spyder and its recorders

 

 

 

 

Atomos, developer of the well-known Ninja-2 and Samurai recorders, demonstrated the new Samurai Blade in Amsterdam.

AtomOS 5.03

One of the main advantages of this recorder is AtomOS 5.03, the software update that contains advanced audio features, with new tools for delay measurement and adjustment.

Now each of the 14 available audio channels includes metering tools, with peak, mid and digital clipping level indicators, as well as VU ballistics. The new meter is fully accurate from -30dB to 0dB (dBFS) and is displayed with alignment levels marked -18dB and -20dB. There is also a function to adjust any existing audio delay, digital or analog, on the Audio page.

On the monitor page (this option is found in Menu > Display) we can display 2 or 14 audio channels.

Samurai Blade features

Samurai Blade has a 1280×720 IPS touch screen with controls for gamma, brightness and contrast, plus full functionality for using different waveforms, including vectorscope and RGB parade or Luma.

Like its predecessors, this recorder/monitor/player allows the recording of 10-bit images directly from the camera sensor to HDD or SSD hard disks. It will do so using the Apple ProRes or Avid DNxHD codec families.

It includes three levels of focus peaking, and zebra, false-color and blue-only functions for monitoring.

According to Atomos, it perfectly complements its Connect and Connect AC converters, recently updated (Connect 2.05) to enable HDMI recording supporting Sony’ s new specification and improve the accuracy of RGB to YUV color space conversion.

Samurai Blade is priced at $1,295.

Ronin

The company also showed its Ronin portable recorder, a solution based on the Samurai design and directly intended for broadcast environments. It can be battery-powered or plugged in and includes standard HD/SD-SDI BNC connectors, as well as balanced XLR inputs and outputs.

Ronin is $1,995.

Spyder

Atomos also surprised us with its new calibration tool called Spyder. It has been developed in collaboration with Datacolor, since its operation will require software from Datacolor and holding Spyder pressed against the screen to be calibrated.

In this way, it measures the color output of the display, maintaining accuracy in field monitors, such as the Samurai Blade, and can be calibrated “with a single click” to the Rec 709 color space.

Atomos has announced that Sypder calibration will soon be implemented on all of its recorders and a Windows compatible version is scheduled for release in November for €149 (Mac is in development).

If you want to learn more about calibration and color management, here is a link to the next course organized in December.