Pro Res: Atomos Samurai Vs Software Conversion

[Mark O Toole]

Hello everyone, first i want to apologie if this question has been asked before but i searched around the forum and couldn't find an exact match.

Basically i'm cutting an upcoming music promo that will be shot in 4K on the Scarlet & the end platform will be web only. We have an Atomos Samurai at our disposal and i was wondering which would provide the best video quality:

A) Using the Samurai to record to ProRes and using that for the edit or
B) Shooting in 4k and converting to ProRes in REDCine-X

Is their a difference and which would be the preferred option?

Thank you for your time.
Mark

[Chris Kennedy]

There's a difference, if you want more quality I'd always go with RAW.
As long as you'd make sure all your settings are close to how the final product will look i.e. white balance, iso, etc. it would look fine; since you loose a lot of that flexibility shooting in RAW and everything is baked in.
Sure you'd save some time shooting straight to a Samurai, guess it would depend if you'd sacrifice a bit of speed over quality & flexibility shooting in Raw for post & downsampling from 4k down to 2k.

[Ryland Jones]

Does the Atomos recognize the start and stop on the Scarlet and carry over metadata like the PIX240? I didn't think it did. If it did, then you could save time by having prores files with the same clip names as your r3d's. This would be faster as you would have them right after you where done shooting. If not though, you would have all different clips that if you edited with, wouldn't match back to the raw r3d's if you wanted to color with them later. Also you would not be able to do a one light with your footage in RedCine X. You would have to cut with uncorrected footage. Either way would work, just depends on how you plan to finish.

[Chris Kennedy]

I'm not sure if it recognizes the start and stop from the brain.
It does carry over Timecode & I'm sure that's about it.

[Mark O Toole]

Thanks for the advice guys, very much appreciated. I think the way to go might be to shoot 4K raw, adjust the footage in terms of white balance & exposure in RED, then convert to ProRes for the edit.

[Robino_J]

To answer the TS question. I don't have the samurai recorder to test but yesterday I did a test using a blackmagic ULtrastudio 3D to capture ProRes 422HQ and ProRes 4444 sdi feed and then exported the R3D file with RCX to ProRes 422HQ and ProRes 4444 using many debayer settings to test for quality etc..The ULtrastudio capture was of higher quality in the lower exposure areas and the encoding was finer throughout. The export for RCX had less details in the lows.

See image. This is channel extraction in AE with the saturation boosted to 20.

http://www.shareimage.org/images/z78...zpajnlxvpw.jpg

[Matt Gerard]

If you've got the time, shooting raw is always the best choice. But why not shoot both? We just got the PIX240, and shoot that as a backup to the raws, sometimes if we get the look tweaked in enough we edit from the prores files off the 240. But the raws are always there as a fall back.

[Dane Henry]

The Samurai is triggered to Record Start/Stop, carries TC and Audio BUT does not use the same file names. It's fairly easy to sync with TC in the edit though. The Samurai has worked flawless for me for Broadcast clients who want a direct to edit codec and want the footage immediately after shooting.

another recent plus for Scarlet users (fw 3.3.3) is the Samurai records full sensor FOV out the SDI port. Giving your glass wider FOV..nice little option to have at your disposal

-Dane

[Ryland Jones]

The Samurai is triggered to Record Start/Stop, carries TC and Audio BUT does not use the same file names. It's fairly easy to sync with TC in the edit though. The Samurai has worked flawless for me for Broadcast clients who want a direct to edit codec and want the footage immediately after shooting.

another recent plus for Scarlet users (fw 3.3.3) is the Samurai records full sensor FOV out the SDI port. Giving your glass wider FOV..nice little option to have at your disposal

-Dane

Good to know! Thanks.

[Mike Garrick]

From my under standing Atomos are issuing a software update, somewhere in the future, so the pro res. files carry the same file handles as your RED camera. This is the only issue that has stopped me buying a Samurai .

In regards to no Ist light CC using this work flow . You can set your "look" with in RCX then transfer the "look" to in camera & record it to the Atomos. This workflow appeals to certain jobs/clients it is similar to Alexa in what you shoot is sort a what you want in the edit suite & it hasn't done Arri any harm.

P.S. I find the expanded FOV. using the look around mode now enabled within Scarlet as a HUGE PLUS . This makes this unit, or the pix, even more appealing.