- I've got a question for you.
Have you ever wanted to buy something
that you knew you didn't really need.
You kept checking it out and put it in your shopping cart
and kept putting it off.
And then like a year and half later
you're still thinking about that thing
and you still don't really need it,
but you're still thinking about it?
Because that's exactly where I'm at
with the Atomos Ninja V.
But as you may have guessed already,
the reason that I actually left my apartment
in minus 30 degrees Celsius is because we are headed
down to a camera store right now
to go buy one and we're gonna talk about it.
The catch with the Atomos and the reason
that it's taken me so long to pull the trigger
on this thing, is because it's not going to
technically improve my video quality.
It's not going to be something that noticeable.
It's only going to improve my efficiency
and my work flow and give me some things
that I didn't have before, as far as making videos easier.
Maybe there will be quality improvements
because I'll do more, or be able to see more,
but this isn't like a simple quality upgrade for me,
like going from 8 bit to 10 bit.
Or going from 1080 to 4K.
It's really all about my work flow and experience.
And sometimes paying for that efficiency
and convenience can totally be worth it.
Take for example my video that I made
called Don't Buy a Full Frame.
You guys loved that title.
That video was all about how I personally think
that for most people it doesn't make sense
to buy full frame, but do you wanna guess
how many times in there I talked about
the quality being better on cameras other than full frame?
It was zero; it had everything to do with
everything except quality.
Things like cameras being smaller, lighter,
cheaper, all of those kinds of things.
We don't just buy gear to improve quality.
So in this video I wanna talk about the reasons why
I'm buying the Atomos Ninja V,
some of the ways that it can make my life easier
for making videos and maybe you'll come to
the same conclusions as well.
Anyway, I'm freezing out here and that's enough talk,
so let's go spend some money.
It is so cold outside, that when I blow on my hands,
it actually feels too hot right now.
Definitely regretting leaving the house.
(upbeat music)
Big shout out to McBain Camera.
They're always so helpful in there,
but I was a smart guy and yesterday
I texted Gerald Undone and asked him
if there was anything that I needed
to make sure that I had.
He pointed out a couple of little things,
so there are some others things
that we're gonna need to get from elsewhere.
So one more stop and then we're talking about
this monitor, slash recorder.
(upbeat music)
All right, until I get home and realize
that I'm missing something, I think I'm good.
Okay, this is everything that we got today.
Let's do a quick unboxing.
(snap)
And then just one last step that everybody loves.
So this is it; we've got the Atomos Ninja V
monitor / recorder.
We've got the caddy that will then
hold the hard drive itself.
This is an adapter for the power supply.
And we've got the adapter for the hard drive
to be plugged into a computer,
so that I can read the files afterwards.
And then also a cable to connect to the camera.
Now hopefully, hopefully that's everything.
Been around the block enough times to know
that sometimes you go out and buy everything
you think you need, when really there's a little bit more
and you're missing something.
So, you know, hopefully, hopefully.
I've got batteries already for this guy,
so I'm gonna grab one of those now.
Slap that in there and get rid of this power supply.
Install the hard drive,
which apparently I need tools for.
Okay, hard drive is installed, slide it in there.
And now we're left with this.
Okay, so if you don't already know,
this is called the Atomos Ninja V
and it is a monitor but it's also a recorder.
It's been out for a little while.
It's not super new, so there are lots of reviews
and that kind of thing on YouTube already.
But it's a super powerful unit
that you can use to kind of enhance
your workflow capabilities.
Having a monitor is really handy.
I have a couple of those that I use sometimes,
but specifically on the Sony cameras
having a monitor takes away a couple of things.
This actually has some ways that fix that.
So you know what, before I get babbling on too much,
let's hop into the reasons that I bought this,
the reasons that this is going to be useful for me,
and it might be useful for you as well.
But first, coffee.
Space Goat Coffee (buzzer)
I got it in a little care package
from the Polar Pro Team.
So thanks so much to Polar Pro for sending me
something delicious to drink while making this video.
And speaking of Polar Pro, this is called
the Polar Pro Axis and I'm going to use it
to mount this monitor onto my camera.
Okay, so reason number one that I went out
and got this today after, like I said,
much research and sitting on it for a long time,
is just for its monitor functions.
It can be super helpful to have an external monitor,
something that's bigger and brighter
than the one that's on your camera,
so that it can be better to see what you're doing
and also they come with built in tools a lot of the time.
Now I have other monitors that I use
and most of those happen to be kinda of budget versions
and so they have some of these things built in,
but they might not be easy to access,
or they might not work as well as you want them to.
This thing, as far as I'm aware,
has everything that you could possibly want built into it.
It's pretty fantastic.
So you've got the ability d-squeeze like anamorphic stuff.
We've got guides here, shooting in different ratios.
Some more different kinds of guides.
We've got a two times punch in.
We've got a one to one punch in.
We've got false colors; we've got zebras.
We've got focus peaking.
And some of the tools that you might
be used to seeing when you go into the lumetri scopes,
got parades and such in here as well.
So you can see exactly what you're doing
when you're trying to expose your shot.
The A7iii that I'm primarily probably
going to be using this on,
has focus peaking, zebras, and a waveform.
(buzzer)
And I'm pretty sure that's about it.
But everything else is something that I could only get
by adding an extra monitor on to it.
Now you can do a lot of these things
with other monitors, like I have the Andycine
or you could get the Small HD, is another popular one.
But the next feature that I got this for
really makes this stand out against the others.
And that comes down to the fact
that it's also a recorder.
Hence why I had to put a hard drive in it.
But for me, this solves a very specific problem.
With the Sony cameras, excluding the 6600
and the A7Riv, when you plug in an external monitor
and you're using 4K, you lose your face tracking.
So for example, in this situation here
where I would be filming myself using my A7iii,
if I wanted to have an external monitor plugged in
to have some of those extra features
or just better monitoring, whatever it happens to be,
immediately I lose face tracking.
So I'm not 100% confident in my auto focus capabilities.
Typically how I would get around this
is I would actually just set a focus point
somewhere around where my face should be,
and then when I'm moving back and forward
it should be able to track that going back and forward.
But I think the face tracking will do
a much better job and now I can have the monitor
and the face tracking at the same time.
It basically has to do with turning off
the internal recording so that it's only
allowing you to record externally via HDMI.
Now speaking of this thing being a recorder,
one of the other points is that I'm going to be
able to record in prores.
If I'm recording internally with the A7iii,
I'm recording to a MP4 container.
It's XAVC-S format which is Sony's compression format
and it's great and all,
but because it's such a compressed format,
it's hard on your computer when you put it
into Premier or DaVinci or Final CutPro,
or whatever it happens to be.
When you put it in there, it has to decompress it
and then play it back.
And that's a lot of work on your computer.
Prores on the other hand, is a higher quality
and less compressed format, which means that
the files sizes are going to be significantly larger
but also it should be easier on my computer.
Now get this, right now I record internally
on the A7iii with the XAVC-S files,
but after that when I import them to my computer,
I'm creating proxys.
If you wanna know how to do that,
to make it a little easier on your computer,
I'll leave the link up there.
You can check out my video on it.
Now the files that are going to come out of this
are going to be even bigger than both
of those files put together,
but ideally it should be better because I can edit
straight off of these Prores files
without the need for converting to proxy files.
And the next thing, along similar lines
of being able to record in a new formant,
this also will record 4K-60.
Now I'm limited right now because the A7iii,
in fact all of my Sony cameras, don't record in 4K-60.
So I can do 1080-60 or I can do my 4K-24 or 30,
but the cool thing about this is that
it's kinda future proofing.
I'll be able to record on this with future cameras
that I might get, whether that be other brands
or new Sony ones when they finally come out with 4K-60,
maybe an A7iv, maybe an A7Siii.
So once I get 4K-60, I'll be able to use it.
We have a visitor, hello.
So this will be great because the work flow
no matter what camera I'm on will partially be
still there because I'll be using
the same monitor / recorder.
And with specific cameras, this will actually
shoot Prores raw as well, which gives you
even more capabilities.
What a guy; what are you doing?
Wanna be in the video? K, bye
So again, getting this monitor and recorder combo
feels a bit like future proofing to me.
The next reason that I picked up the Atomos Ninja V
is because I want to be able to record
the screen of my camera and show you guys in videos.
For example, if I wanted to go through the menus
I can now actually record that using the external recorder.
Now I did have a work around and I've done this before
where I recorded it straight to my computer
using my cam link, which is for like live streaming,
but I think this is gonna make it way easier for me.
And I'm going to be able to actually show you guys
like settings on the screen and that kind of thing.
So hopefully that should improve the effectiveness
of videos where I'm talking about
what's happening on the screen.
I can actually show you guys what's going on in the menus.
The next reason that I got this is rather simple one,
to remove the recording limit that exists in the A7iii.
Now the nice thing is that on the A6600
and the A6400 there's no recording limit.
They got rid of it.
However on the A7iii there is a 30 minute
recording limit and sometimes is sit here
and chat at myself for an hour and it sucks when
I have to get up and go restart recording.
I have to set a timer on my phone
cause there's no signal telling me
that the recording has stopped; it just stops.
I mean for example, right now I've been babbling
for 50 minutes between actually talking
and you know playing around with things in here
so that I can know what I'm talking about.
So being able to get rid of that recording limit is great.
The only thing that I'm limited by,
is the amount of storage that I put on it.
Right now I've got a one terabyte SSD on there.
So one, it should be really fast.
And two, it should be plenty of storage
for what I need to do.
I totally forget to mention earlier
when I was talking about just the functions
of having an external monitor,
that the brightness on this thing
is much better than the one that's built onto your camera.
This has a thousand nits, so even if you're shooting
out in bright daylight you should be able
to somewhat see this.
You can buy an extra sun hood to put on it,
but I opted out for now to see how it works
and then if I need it I'll go get it later.
And speaking of functions of the monitor again,
the next reason that I wanted to get this
is because it allows for luts.
Now what I mean by this is, if I'm shooting
in something like slog2 or hlg,
I have the ability to input luts onto this monitor
so that it will display it with the lut applied.
Now it's not recording it with the lut applied,
it's just making it easier for me
to know what the end result is going to look like
with the current exposure that I have.
So I can see what it's going to look like
without the lut on it or with the lut on it.
But it only is recording without the lut.
So you'll have that flat profile
that you chose in your camera.
And the final reason that I got this,
actually kinda brings me back to something
that I said earlier, it may have been a little bit of lie.
I said that getting this wasn't going to be
an improvement in quality.
Technically, there is a small improvement in quality.
Internally on the A7iii I can record
eight bit color and 4:2:0.
Externally I can record ten bit color,
which I can't actually do cause it doesn't output
ten bit color so it's still gonna be eight bit.
But I can record 4:2:2 which is going to give me
a little bit more color information.
Now how much color information,
it may be negligible, but hopefully it gives me
a little bit more room to work,
especially if I'm using things like slog
where it's really difficult to grade
eight bit slog footage.
You just really can't push it around that much.
So hopefully having a little bit more information
in the colors should hopefully give me more room to play.
So, after a year and half of deliberation,
those are the reasons why I went out
and picked up the Atomos Ninja V.
Hopefully if you were thinking about
something like this, that might clear things up for you.
I'm very excited to use it and hopefully make
a review about it or at least kinda give you guys
some kind of an idea of how things are going along the way.
It has been out for awhile and there are
lots of reviews out there.
So I don't necessarily want to just repeat
a bunch of stuff that's already out there.
But if you do have questions,
make sure to leave 'em below.
And if something seems like it might make a good video,
then I will try and make that for you guys.
As always, I'll leave links to everything
here in the description.
So make sure to go check that out.
Go down and leave a comment,
lemme know what you think of the whole thing.
And on your way down there, make sure to hit
that like button, subscribe to the channel,
and hit that bell notification if you haven't already.
You won't miss anything that way.
Thank you so much for watching,
and I'll see you next time.