Well, that ain't right!
Let's get undone!
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening, everybody? I'm Gerald Undone,
and I can only get it in on an angle,
and only on the third or fourth try.
So, today's video is really more of a bug report
that I'm hoping to get Atomos, and possibly Blackmagic to see.
I encountered this problem when I was live streaming
a little while ago, but, coincidentally,
I was also contacted about this by two other people
on Twitter recently who're experiencing the same issue.
You basically saw it already, in the intro, this weird,
distorted image with a green bar accompanying it.
But, I think the problem starts a little earlier in the chain
and it is more widespread
than just this very specific use case.
So, I'm going to walk through the different ways to produce it
and all the troubleshooting I've done already and perhaps,
we can see a firmware update in the future to fix it.
Now, admittedly, this issue is a bit complicated and only arises
in very specific circumstances, but now that I know I'm not
the only one who this is affecting, I think it's worth
talking about, since, as one Twitter user pointed out,
they bought four Atomos Ninja Vs for this purpose
and are quite disappointed to see this result.
Anyway, here's how it happens.
If you connect your camera to your Atomos device over HDMI
and then run another HDMI cable out of the output port
and into the Blackmagic ATEM Mini into its first input,
and your camera is set to a specific frame rate,
then you'll see that image that's all distorted
with the green bar along the top.
The frame rates that are affected are 25,
29.97 and 30fps.
All the other frame rates seem fine -
23.98, 24, 50, 59.94 and 60.
The reason why this comes up though is for live streaming
since 25 and 30 are popular for streams.
Now, I have a list of all the stuff I've tried
and the different ways the problem won't appear,
starting with if you use ports two, three or four
on the ATEM Mini, there's no issues.
And this is the weirdest result, but I suspect
it has something to do with the fact that port one
is how the scaling and frame rate is decided.
Whatever you plug into port one when you have the ATEM
set on Auto, that's how it figures out
what frame rate to set the rest of the ports to.
So, if you use one of the other ports that doesn't have
that auto-scaling thing, it doesn't seem to be an issue.
And this is why I wanted to loop Blackmagic into this discussion
because I also noticed that if you had the device
plugged into port one and you have the software control
up on your computer and you watch what the autodetection
is showing for the frame rates, when you choose 23.98, 24,
50, 59.94 and 60 out of the Atomos and camera combination,
they show up correctly in the ATEM Mini autodetection thing.
But if you set it to 25, 29.97 or 30,
it doesn't show up correctly.
25, for example, shows up as HD50 and 29.97 is 59.94 etc.
It doubles the frame rate
on those three specific frame rates.
So, clearly, there's some kind of scaling issue going on
when your frame rate is set to one of those
and it's downscaling it from 4K to HD at the same time.
And, it's also important to point out that this problem
doesn't just happen on my monitor.
My monitor is just previewing what the ATEM Mini sees,
but the USB output on the ATEM Mini, to OBS on my computer
also has the problem and I've tried other monitors
and other configurations and the problem always appears.
So, basically, it's whatever is coming out
of the ATEM, regardless of the device.
We'll talk more about different devices
you can connect to the ATEM in just a second.
Next up, it also doesn't matter about HDMI cables.
I tried swapping all the cables out, the problem still persists,
and it also doesn't matter what camera you use.
I have the problem with Sony cameras, I have the problem
with Blackmagic cameras, in fact, that's the one
that you saw at the beginning of this video,
which is kind of funny, because it's Blackmagic
going into the Blackmagic capture card.
So, obviously, it's probably because
of the Atomos in between that.
And I had the problem with the Z Cam
when I did that live stream a little while ago.
And, it's not specific to just one Atomos device.
The one at the beginning here was on the Shogun 7 but I have
a Ninja V here and I've tested-- I have two Ninja Vs
and I've tested both of them.
And the Ninja V is using the 10.4 firmware which I believe
is the latest and the Blackmagic ATEM Mini and the software
in my computer are both up to date as of June 26, 2020.
Shogun 7 is up to date as well.
And, the reason why I suspect it has more to do
with Atomos than other things is because I've had ongoing issues
with the HDMI output port on my Atomos for quite a while now.
I used to try to connect it to capture cards,
whether they're USB or internal PCI Express before I even had
the ATEM Mini and often, they won't even be able
to interpret or detect the signal coming out of the Atomos.
If I connect them from my camera to the capture card,
like, straight through, they work fine,
but if I go from my camera to the Ninja
and then to the capture card, these capture cards here
just won't even detect the signal from the Atomos.
Now, where it gets more interesting is that
if you add something else into the signal path
to, sort of, break this up, to test it.
So, if I, kind of, draw you a little illustration here,
if, instead of going-- move the capture cards here,
instead of going from the camera to the Ninja
and then from the Ninja into the ATEM Mini port one, which is
where we see the problem, if we take something else,
like an HDMI splitter or even an HDMI wireless transmitter
and put it in between the chain here,
this one has HDMI pass-through, and then say,
we go from the camera to the Ninja
and then from the Ninja into this transmitter and now,
from the transmitter into the Blackmagic, or conversely,
if we put it here, where we go from the camera into it,
and then it into the Ninja and then from this
into the ATEM Mini, the problems are gone.
And this is because the scaling is done elsewhere.
This transmitter already does HD scaling.
Now, the problem is gone but you'll notice that
instead of seeing the Ultra HD 29.97 or 25p,
whatever the problem frame rate is for you on the Ninja V,
instead, now you see an HD60 signal or an HD50 signal
because of the...
splitter or interrupter that's going in between there.
And then, we no longer have the problem where there's a mismatch
between the Ninja putting out 30 and the ATEM saying,
"No, that's 60" and then putting a green bar on the screen.
So, interrupting it with another HDMI device seems to solve it,
unless that HDMI device is just a straight pass-through.
I tried it with a capture card like this where I put
this in this order so it went from the camera
through this capture card.
I was using one that had 4K pass-through and the signal
went out of the capture card and then into the Ninja
and the Ninja still saw the same...
as if I was plugged in directly.
It showed Ultra HD 29.97 and then when I went from
the Ninja into the ATEM, we had the same green bar problem
where the 29.97 was showing up as 59.94
and it was all distorted.
So, it was almost as if the pass-through didn't exist,
which, I suppose, would be a pass-through working correctly,
if it doesn't affect the signal at all, but I was still having
the same problem where, if I use it on this side,
that the capture card just wouldn't detect
anything out of the Atomos and I've even had
that problem using Atomos' own Connect Converters
where they take HDMI signals and change them.
I've had the Connect Converters having issues
detecting what the HDMI output from the Atomos is doing,
and that's going Atomos to Atomos.
So, I really do think it's an issue
on the recorder's HDMI output ports.
The next thing that I tried to do was to daisy chain
multiple Atomos devices together,
so, for instance, if I went from the camera
to a Ninja V and then something like this Shinobi here
to see if I forced the Ninja V
to downscale to HD and then stick it in the Shinobi,
if the Shinobi would then have this problem on its own
without going to a capture card, and it didn't.
You can daisy chain pretty much as many recorders as you want
in a row and none of them have that green bar distorted thing,
regardless of what frame rate you're on.
But then, I decided to take the same Shinobi and make the order
like this, so it goes camera into the Ninja V, then into
the Blackmagic ATEM Mini and then instead of viewing it
on anything else, not putting it out to my monitor,
and not putting it onto the stream,
I just connected the Shinobi to the output port
of the ATEM Mini and looked at it here.
The Shinobi also had the distorted image
with the green bar.
So, anything coming out of the ATEM Mini
has been scaled down or scaled weirdly,
then, anything coming out it has that problem,
even if it is another Atomos device.
Anyway, that's pretty much it.
I don't have any useful conclusions at the end
of this video, but if you're watching this
and you've had similar issues using these devices,
please comment them down below, because, perhaps,
they'll be useful for diagnosis if Atomos or Blackmagic
are watching this video and reading the comments.
I also-- I don't have the ATEM Pro to test
and see if it persists on that device as well.
I haven't received mine yet.
If I had a theory as to what's happening based on
everything I've tried, it would seem that many Capture Cards,
including the ATEM Mini have difficulties understanding
the scaled output from the Atomos, and more specifically,
when that output happens to be at 25 or 30p.
It shows up as double the frame rate
and is distorted in some cases,
and with other devices, it just won't work.
So, here's hoping something can be done to improve this,
because it really is handy to be able to use your Ninja V
for live streaming. It lets you apply a LUT while the image
is still 10-bit before it ever hits the Capture Card.
You can monitor yourself and you can even record the 4K image
before it gets down-rezzed for the stream.
So, it'd be nice to have greater compatibility
and fewer issues using these devices in this way.
Thanks for listening.
But that's gonna be it for me. I hope you found this video
entertaining or at least helpful. And if you did,
make sure you leave it the old thumbs up
and consider subscribing if you haven't already.
But if you did not find this video helpful or entertaining,
try setting the playback speed to 75%.
Alright... I'm done.