User manual

Atomos Samurai. User Manual V1.01 2
Thank you for choosing the Atomos Samurai: your 10-bit HD-SDI
Recorder/Monitor/Deck. It’s the most compact portable recorder
available, with extremely long battery life, a high-resolution screen,
uncompressed-quality playout and real-time pulldown removal.
Samurai preserves the pristine uncompressed video quality from your
camera’s sensor by directly encoding it into Apple ProRes
®
or (optionally)
Avid DNxHD
®
as it records to HDD/SSD, making it instantly compatible
with your NLE timeline. The Samurai’s revolutionary ‘Sensor-to-NLE’
workflow is the fastest and best quality available today!
The reason that Samurai exists at all is because of the relentless march
of technology, and the way that this changes the economics of almost
everything. Most of all, though, it changes the way you use storage.
Built-in (or card-based) camera storage is a miracle of science; but
that doesn’t stop it being expensive when you use it with HD video.
Uncompressed HD video takes a prohibitive amount of storage and is
unmanagable – making compression necessary.
Even though MPEG compression like h.264 and MPEG-2 are very clever
technologies, they’re nowhere near perfect, and they certainly weren’t
designed for the rigours of editing.
Samurai solves this by using production quality codecs. Apple ProRes
®
and (optionally) Avid DNxHD
®
are much kinder to your video; significantly
reducing the compression and increasing quality. By using much lower
compression ratios, and intra (instead of inter) frame encoding, these
codecs are superior for editing. Every frame is encoded in full, which
means that there’s no need to “reconstruct” missing frames from
adjacent frames. This eliminates the need for log-and-capture!
Because it doesn’t compress as much, Samurai needs more storage.
With the plummeting price of hard disk storage, the 2½” disks used by
the Samurai are very cheap; the cost of storage is no longer an issue.
Buying a disk for the Samurai is just like buying a tape – except that with
a disk you will have instant “non-linear” access to your video.
The Samurai’s one-touch TFT-LCD interface is intuitive and simple to use.
There are no complicated menus or difficult to find functions – everything
you need is instantly accessible from the home screen. Refer to ‘Using
your Samurai’ for more information.
Software updates for your Samurai will be issued regularly. Registering
your Samurai now will ensure you are kept abreast of any updates.
Software updates and information will also be available at:
www.atomos.com/Samurai.
We hope you enjoy your Samurai
Your Samurai comes with a standard 1 year warranty on all parts and
accessories. You can upgrade to a 3 year warranty on the main
Samurai Unit alone (excluding TFT/LCD) by registering your Samurai
online at http://www.atomos.com/registration.xml. This will enable
us to let you know about updates to the product and other important
information surrounding your purchase.
Introduction