The Ninja Assassin is the latest addition to the Atomos line of monitors/recorders. The Ninja Assassin is a 4K ProRes recorder with many of the same features as its big brother the Shogun, but with HDMI input and output only, no SDI.

At the recent LA stop of the VII Evolution Tour, the topic of video compression was brought up in relation to using an external capture device instead of recording internally to the camera.

There's been yet another major firmware update to Convergent Design's Odyssey7 series of external monitors/recorders. This time the focus is on monitoring, routing/distribution and, especially, LUTs (Look Up Tables).

As you might know, we offer a variety of workshops on DIT & Engineering topics, and we are often asked about what you might find on a DIT cart. Speaking with many DITs and building on my own experience, I put together a souped-up cart for demonstration purposes and created this video series on the Anatomy of the DIT Cart. On the cart you'll find a variety of hardware used on set today, including scopes, routers, monitors, and storage.

I visited the Panasonic booth at NAB to look at some new products. The first one is the VariCam Extension Unit, a modular system with a recorder and a head that can be separated. This extension unit allows you to send the data from the head back into the recorder and allows you to go up to 5 meters away.

I stopped by the Codex booth today to chat with Sarah Priestnall, VP Market Development, about their new VariCam V-RAW Recorder.

Sony has announced a new firmware update to the FS7 that will be available free of charge on March 15. This update includes great new features and improvements, including support for 4K XAVC-I recording, the ability to encode and write ProRes files to a single internal XQD card, and 4-channel audio recording capability.

Data archiving is not something most of us want to think about, but it's a reality that all filmmakers have to face today. The demand for lower compression and higher resolution material is increasing, meaning that we all eat through hard drives much faster. On the bright side, archiving is getting easier and more affordable all the time. The LTO tape format has become the standard for data archiving in our business, and the new LTFS (Linear Tape File System) makes it easy to use. One downside of an LTO deck setup is that it is usually tied to a full computer workstation. That's where mLogic's mTape comes in.

The Sony PXW-FS7 is causing a lot of buzz, and with good reason, since it can acquire multiple resolutions and codecs. The XDCA-FS7 is an extension unit that attaches to the back of the FS7, providing inputs and outputs, as well as the ability to export Raw for external recording.