Blackmagic UltraStudio Mini Recorder Question

[micster]

Recently I've been looking at Blackmagic's Mini Recorder. It's a pretty small device costing around £100 which accepts an SDI in and HDMI in into a Thunderbolt port. Then using their software you can capture the video stream that's going through the device.

The idea I have for it would be hooking up my camera to the device and then recording the video stream uncompressed straight onto my Macbook Pro, bypassing H.264 compression and getting better quality footage. It wouldnt be ideal for outside filming, but for interiors and studio work it would probably work fine. It'd act sort of like the Atomos Ninja/Samurai but a bit more clunky and a lot less costly.

There's not a huge amount of reviews or feedback on it, so I was wondering if my idea sounds like it could work or if anyone has any experience with the device.

 

[ItDonnedOnMe]

Haven't used that particular device, but it sounds like that's exactly what it's intended for. What camera will you be using it with? The main issue would be having a clean output over hdmi without any overlays - most camcorders can do this, many DSLRs cannot (although it's becoming more common).

You'll probably want to skip recording true uncompressed video and use something like ProRes, which will be much higher quality than h.264 but keeps the file size and data rate more manageable.

 

[micster]

I shoot on a Nikon D3200, I can get a clean output on my monitor through HDMI so should be no problems there. Yeah I'd get it in ProRes, I already transcode all my footage into prores just to aplease FCP and have seamless editing.

Only problem is the price of Thunderbolt cables! Didnt expect them to be so pricey and limited in size. Would like to see if anywhere hires these things out so I can do a comparison, to see if it'd be worth the cost.