The latest products for 4K workflows

 

 

 

 

 

There have been some great new developments affecting the 4K workflow lately, with more options for everything from cameras to storage systems to handle the bandwidth required.

RED

Red stood out at NAB for its 6K footage from the Dragon sensor. Among this footage shown was “Closed Set,” a short film by Mitchell Amundsen that was projected from 70mm 15-perf film on an IMAX projector.

The company is working to get as many Dragon cameras and sensors out as possible, but they also had a few tricks up their sleeves. One example is the Red 4K Broadcast Module ($6,950), which adds YCbCr 4:2:2:2 video feeds to the Red Dragon. Users get 4K out the back of the camera at up to 60fps over the 3G-SDI connection, with timecode and genlock.

With this option, Red is trying to enter the broadcast market. At the moment the launch date is not known but they have said that it will be very soon.

Blackmagic Design

Blackmagic Design introduced the new ATEM 2 M/E Production Studio 4K, offering 20 independent 6G-SDI SD/HD/UHD/4K video inputs, each with a full-frame sync.

This new switcher ($3,995) includes Blackmagic’s SuperSource multi-layer processor, a five-layer switcher with four picture-in-picture DVEs and four keyers that can be assigned to any video input.

Also still available are the ATEM 1 M/E Production Studio 4K ($2,495) and the ATEM Production Studio 4K ($1,695).

Promise Technology

Promise Technology showcased its two new Thunderbolt 2 shared storage devices, aimed specifically at users looking for 4K workflow solutions.

The new Pegasus2 M4 is designed to be the most portable of the Pegasus2 RAID models, reaching 4TB of capacity using four 2.5″ 1TB drives.

This device features Thunderbolt 2 connectivity and, like the rest of the Pegasus2 collection, supports OS X 10.8.5 onwards (including Mavericks) and can work with the new Mac Pros. According to the company, support for Windows will arrive in a couple of months.

Promise also showed the VTrak G1100 NAS Gateway, a 1U file server that allows multiple users to connect to the VTrak A3800 shared storage system via 10GbE (Gigabit Ethernet) for simultaneous video editing.

The new SANLink2 10GBase-T is an adapter that allows Macs to connect to 10GbE networks via Thunderbolt2.

Promise announced that its new products will be available in the second quarter of this year.

G-Technology

G-Technology surprised us with the new G-Speed Studio and G-RAID Studio, Thunderbolt 2 shared storage devices using 7200 rpm hard drives with capacities up to 6 TB.

The G-Speed Studio is a four-bay RAID with transfer rates up to 660MB/s in RAID-0 mode. It ships with four hard drives, holding up to 30 hours of 4K ProRes 4444 footage in a RAID-5 configuration. G-Tech claims it can be used to edit three compressed 4K streams.

It is compatible with Mac OS 10.9 and above, and launches this month in 12TB ($2,200), 16TB ($2,700) and 24TB ($3,600) versions.

The G-RAID Studio, with two disks configurable as RAID-0, RAID-1 or JBOD, can handle transfer rates up to 360MB/s. It also launches this month in 4TB ($650), 8TB ($850) and 12TB ($1,500) versions.