ACADEMY HOWTOWEBCAST
11. TRY PIONEERING ATOMOS TECH
They may have started out as monitors that can also record, but some of the latest Atomos products have now been upgraded to become 1080/60p multichannel recorders and switchers. A free firmware upgrade updates the £1318/$1299 Shogun 7 and £2394/$2495 Sumo 19 into switchers that can record up to four SDI inputs and act as a touchscreen switching unit. The Atomos units then not only output the switched signal so you can use it as a live stream, but also record that output signal as a fifth stream, with all the fades and cuts you made included in it. Take this edit in Final Cut Pro or DaVinci Resolve, and all five streams are there so you can re-edit the programme by changing the cuts. Having only SDI inputs is OK if your camera has these outputs, but for cameras with an HDMI output, you would need a reliable converter such as the Atomos Connect Convert unit, which is £102/$99 per camera. Plus thecables toconnectup, of course. Eachcameramustbeoutputtingthe same frame rateandresolution. Theremust also be a camera plugged into the number-
one SDI socket, which provides the time code for the whole broadcast. The Atomos doesn’t have fancy fades or overlays, but you can use one of the inputs from a laptop, for example, with some PowerPoint or Keynote slides or other graphics. For that, you also need an HDMI toSDI converter that scales the signal to the right size. The £234/£248 Atomos Connect Convert Scale HDMI to SDI is ideal. To switch between inputs, you just tap on the screenanda redoutline showswhich of the feeds is being outputted as the main programme. You can set up cuts to be either hard cuts or dissolves, and you can adjust the dissolve timing in the menu. However, these are not viewable in the live output, where your viewers only see hard cuts. These dissolves are only visible when you view the project on your NLE and output it fromthere. An alternativeway of switching is to set up so that you tap the source you want to switch to, whichputs a green frame around it and shows it’s all cued up. Then when you’re ready, tap again and it turns red, and becomes the output channel.
For audio, the unit can be set up to either stay with one separate audio input, such as from an external mic unit or audio mixer. For this, you need an Atomos breakout cable to allow you to plug your XLR feed into the Atomos. Alternatively, it can take the audio from each camera that you are switching to. So, one might have a reporter with a handheld mic, for example. The beauty of the Atomos Shogun 7 especially is that it’s not an extra bit of kit, but one many filmmakers will have or could find lots of uses for – for example, as an external camera monitor or recorder to convert your camera output to ProRes Raw or ProRes.
“You can set up cuts to be either hard cuts or dissolves, and you can adjust the dissolve timing”
ABOVE Live switching on location is easy using one of the latest Atomos monitor recorders, such as the Sumo 19. You just tap the screen to select the camera angle you want
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PRO MOVIEMAKER SUMMER 2020
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