BTM_Pix

The replay is here for anyone who missed it. I've cued it to the start point.

I was looking to get an ATEM Mini a few weeks ago but thank God for stock shortages.

The timecode thing is big. Was hoping this Pro version would have multi-view though. Unless he's leaving that to the end ! EDIT>>> Hahaha...indeed he was!

Ah...now I see why ! Very smart new feature.

The ATEM Mini is great but I can't help thinking that if you're showing off a four channel video switcher it would have been beneficial to anyone who hasn't seen it before to have more than just the one source attached to. Particularly when you are literally surrounded by cameras.

Its about to start then...

It'lI never catch on

I'm not sure how many of us are really in the mood for product announcements at the moment but at least it might provide some potential distraction. Only 5 hours of speculation time available so get those guesses in early.

To be honest, I think we've had our fun with that type of stuff and Panasonic have tightened it up but on the off chance I'd start with examining what modes that the S1H has that the S1 doesn't and take it from there. FYI, though, I had a brief look at the S1H that @Andrew Reid had with him in Barcelona and the authorisation routine has changed so that will need working around as well.

1). My current most powered up camera is the Pocket4K but I wouldn't class it as most used as its purely for the development of that project. Not that any camera is really being used at the moment due to the total lockdown we have here so I will go for the one that was the most used, which is the Sigma FP with the 7Artisans 35mm f2. Sadly even that was only briefly as I'd only had it about a week before being locked down and even that period it was only used whilst wearing a mask! 2). The first "real" camera I had of my own was a Nikon EM that I got new in 1979 (yes, I'm that old) which had to be replaced three months later after it was broken when I was by pulled from a crowded city centre street by a Special Branch anti-terrorist snatch squad, held face down in their car and driven at high speed to some sort of warehouse and interrogated on suspicion of taking surveillance pictures of targets for the IRA. I am a survivor of the Hillsborough disaster and at the official enquiry the Police presented doctored CCTV footage of me escaping from the crush to support a fictitious timeline of the events that would absolve them of any culpability. I have some trust issues with the UK Police. 3). Indie/new wave from 77 to 85 with an honourable mention to Kraftwerk who sit outside of that genre but influenced a lot of stuff inside it. Sport as a fan would be Liverpool FC but I've also been fortunate enough to shoot the two greatest players of the recent era (and statistically in any era) in Messi and Ronaldo and you can't help but be a fan of both when you witness it at such close quarters. From other sports, shooting Mark Cavendish at the Tour de France when he explodes out of the pack to win stages was something special and even his sometimes "challenging" demeanour when trying to shoot him post race if he'd lost made him more endearing to me because of the honesty of it. 4). Unfortunately, it seems pretty clear that we will be presented with a new normal after all this and it will likely be one with less money for a lot of people. It could be that in the new normal film making and photography etc will be seen as frivolous but it is as equally likely that creative pursuits will be vital to keep everyone's mind engaged, as an escape from the bleakness but also as a reflection on and documentary of this next period. So for that reason, the forum can and should be a great resource and support network for that. Inevitably, with the expected financial downturn, it should probably have more features about doing more with your current gear than getting more new gear. That should not only call for more articles about DIY projects and lighting/composition tutorials etc but also for retrospective reviews on older gear that is still perfectly serviceable and how to eek everything out of that. So as well as sub-$200 film challenges maybe look at "$2000 camera vs $2000 complete setup" type of comparisons as well. Some stuff about sound design as opposed to just recording sound would be cool as well. 5). Family, obviously. But also that triggering of memories when you walk down particular streets. Mainly, though, I miss having a decent chippy. 6). I think I started contributing at the end of 2016 or early 2017 but was a long time reader before that. I first came across @Andrew Reid at a two day film making conference in London about ten years ago that was mainly devoted to using EOS cameras, where, if memory serves, he was barracking Phil Bloom from the audience about the GH1 being better than the 5DMarkii. I thought he was rude, opinionated and extremely disrespectful. Naturally, after seeing that, I felt sure this was the place for me

No, I'm going to give you an excuse to buy THREE more of them.... If you get the Atomos Shogun 7 you can plug them all into it and use its new switcher functionality. This functionality allows you to live switch the four cameras off the touchscreen to its program out and then out to the internet via your chosen route (the Teradek Vidiu Pro for example is ideal for a computer free route) but in addition it simultaneously records all four cameras individually and the switched version that you've output. The icing on the cake is that it also produces a multi cam xml file of the switching that you did so that you can pull the whole project into your NLE and re-cut it. That means that say you were doing a live stream of a gig, you could be switching from the Atomos but then afterwards make another saleable product for the band with different cuts, colour correction, better sound etc from the same cameras. This demo is primarily on the Sumo but it has the same functionality on the Shogun. And this one is more focused on a real use using the Shogun. If they launch a four channel switcher thats cheaper than the ATEM Mini then I'll buy you it myself I'm curious whether they have maybe done a quick turnaround cheap single channel or dual channel product (ATEM Micro?) to address the current needs of journalists in lockdown, which would be great as the vast majority of them seem to be using the in built camera on their laptops even if they are working for national broadcasters. And a sub section of those also appear to have smeared those cameras in vaseline.

Its a tough call. On the one hand, demand for these services will be much higher after this but on the other, supply will also likely be much higher too as so many video creators are looking to at least semi-pivot to it to meet that demand. Scalability is going to be important for anyone wanting to provide services, as you can see from HereToRecord's channel that I linked to above as you might be getting asked to live stream anything from a single camera talking head of a company boss announcement to different branch offices up to a full blown multi camera job for a live gig etc. From that point of view, the ATEM Mini is a safe purchase, particularly at the price point. It means you can make it affordable for a single camera job as you haven't got big $ tied up in something like a Newtek Tricaster that you need to charge accordingly for and at the same time its capable enough to handle more elaborate jobs when needed. Where you need to separate yourself out from everyone else who is about to start doing this is likely in terms of how much production value you can give as a single operator because the other new reality is that whilst demands for the service may go up budgets for everything are going to be much smaller and price cutting will get more desperate to match because you will have more people after a slice of a smaller pie. One element where you yourself will be able to score is on the audio side where you will not only have a big leg up in terms of experience but also in the fact you already own the equipment so won't have to plough money into that. It won't take many jobs before the customer realises that two cameras and great audio is far better than four cameras with bad audio. On the camera side, in a similar vein, having two lower tier cameras that match perfectly in terms of look and quality is far more preferable to a mixed bag of four that are all over the place. How these elements can then controlled by a single operator in terms of live control of pan, tilt, zoom, exposure, focus etc to mitigate not having multiple camera operators will play a big part in what you can offer a client within their budget without compromising the production value. For this reason, I am definitely plan to devote a portion of my widgeting development time after I've finished the, erm, "secret project" to providing some solutions for that.

I'm pretty sure the idea of a single room film making challenge undoubtedly predates the internet itself let alone YouTube but we were ten days ahead of the curve by specifying it had to be done while a real life zombie apocalypse was raging outside your front door

The Mevo Plus has a 4K sensor to be fair. https://mevo.com/mevo-plus/ Livestream themselves have a very sophisticated product called Studio that can switch multiple Mevos but can also do the multi angle crop trick on external cameras. Not sure it does the auto stuff though. Its free for subscribers to Livestream/Vimeo as well but that is a $70 a month cost if not. It does the multi cellular device bonding trick as well but only when streaming to Livestream itself. https://livestream.com/studio

It is definitely a skill deciding in the moment, rather than retrospectively, what should be the focus of attention but also anticipating that so you are ready to switch to it. Livestream make an interesting streaming product line called Mevo which essentially are wide angle cameras that through software can create different shot sizes to create a pseudo multi camera setup. https://mevo.com It can emulate zooms, pans and even does follow shots. It has an autopilot feature that does this automatically to do all this live without you having to touch it and its decision making works better than you might imagine! Something like this might actually be a product that finds a bigger audience in the new world of home broadcast because it is easy to setup, fully integrated with the streaming platforms and and the autopilot function makes it far easier to use solo to make a cohesive show. Price wise as well its very affordable, particularly when you take into account that its the camera, switcher and encoder all rolled into one. Its a pity that they don't do a software only version so that you could use your own camera as its that that is the weak link in the package. To be fair though, in a trade-off between absolute image quality and cohesion of the actual content, there is an argument where the tradeoff to 'adequate' on the image quality is the right call. No point plugging four high quality cameras into an all singing all dancing setup if you stumble over switching to the right one ! This is a good overview of the new Mevo Start incarnation

There is a cost involved to use the Sharelink bonding service but you can either do pay as you go on demand or pay monthly so its pretty flexible and not too expensive. https://teradek.com/collections/sharelink For live streaming to YouTube it would work out at around $1-1.50 per hour on the PAYG rate but obviously that is a billable cost that can be passed on to a client. The other advantage of Sharelink is that you can have the cellular phones you are using to bond with to have SIM cards in from different providers so it provides redundancy in areas with no coverage or over saturation on a particular providers network. A lot of this stuff will become moot when 5G rolls out everywhere but that is some way off yet.

If you decide later on that you want to go a bit further and use something like vMix, the ATEM Mini will still not be a wasted investment as at the very least it can act as a 4 into 1 camera switch input into the computer as one channel while you can also then bring in other sources on the others. Also, because it is idiot proof, you can dry hire it to people who are doing conferences and what not. This channel is excellent not only for product reviews of affordable products for live work but also in detailing how he implements and scales his kit for differing jobs. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-6rohWvTkl4mzvoDbxDGxQ/videos

My first thought was that the Sony sounded bad enough to the point of being faulty. I've got a feeling there will be a lot of people who own that particular model running their own tests today !

One of the advantages of the ATEM system (which the Mini has too) is the ethernet control port which enables a range of remote control solutions to be used to operate them. As well as apps these can include simple hardware solutions so, for example, MIDI footswitches can be used by a presenter so they can switch cameras themselves unseen etc

I don't think you can really go wrong with the new BM ATEM Mini for that sort of thing. It takes 4 HDMI inputs, has an easy to use control surface and has a webcam compliant output. That last part is really crucial as it means you don't have to have an encoder or any messing about to get it out to the internet as the Surface Go would just see it as a webcam input and can then stream it to YouTube, Facebook etc or even Skype if you are using it for business type streaming. Its tiny as well in terms of physical size and price as its under €350. This is a good end to end demo of it from inputs to streaming output. The big weakness with the ATEM Mini versus its bigger brothers in the ATEM range is that it doesn't have multi view preview output so you can't see all four inputs on an external screen. This can be got around with some cheap HDMI splitters for the camera and a cheap 4:1 HDMI multiviewer should you need it. If you were to use your gaming laptop with a software switcher such as OBS or vMix, that issue wouldn't be there but obviously using a software solution you would need four converters to take the camera HDMI inputs into it in the first place and good ones can easily run to not far off the cost of the ATEM Mini for just one. The big advantage of the laptop route is that something like vMix can do more (virtual sets, bring in Skype calls etc) and is more expandable, particularly if you embrace the NDI standard for bringing in cameras as you can then have unlimited sources as long as they are on your network but you are in to significant extra cost and complexity. To make any solution fully mobile then you can do that using the Teradek Vidiu Pro which is a standalone HDMI encoder/streamer that as well as ethernet and wifi connectivity also has a bonding function to gang together the data bandwidth of several cellular devices (including phones) to provide high quality streams when no 'real' internet connection is available. https://teradek.com/collections/vidiu-family

To save me making a massive post (though I sure do have the time right now ) what sort sort of setup are you looking for? Do you want single cam or multi-cam? Self-operated or separate operator ? Fixed location, portable or fully mobile?

Yeah, I hadn't notice that this one has the far more acceptable bluetooth keyboard option as well https://apps.apple.com/us/app/teleprompter-premium/id941070561#?platform=ipad

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You Trump hating fake news motherfu...... Sorry, wrong thread. Here is a guide to iOS versions, some of which can be used with games controllers which look like OK options if you have a PS4 controller around etc. There are a few whole kits on Amazon with the shoot through glass but who knows when they will be able to deliver. https://telepromptermirror.com/ipad-teleprompter-apps/

I'm sure everyone who is familiar with the calibre of his designated successor Dominic Raab can unite in wishing Boris Johnson a swift recovery.