Cine Gear: Atomos Announces Affordable CFast Cards for Digital Imaging
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- June 9, 2014
Designed for Ninja Star ProRes recorders
By James DeRuvo (doddleNEWS)
When I was at NAB 2014, it was kinda difficult to get into the Atomos booth to check out their new hardware, because of the scantily clad booth babes in body paint ,which they used for models for video recording subjects. You can imagine with that visual, it was a very popular booth on the NAB floor. But the real “excitement” at the booth was the assortment of great devices, such as the $300 monitor-less Ninja Star ProRes recorder that they announced. Booth babes come a dime-a-dozen at a convention, but a $300 HD ProRes recorder? Who wouldn’t be excited about that! Well now, Atomos has wowed us at Cine Gear with a very affordable CFast card to go with it, and it’s designed just for those looking to make their low budget films with high budget production value.
Designed to use the new HD spec CFast, the Ninja Star is a very small ProRes recorder that is aimed at the independent filmmaker, and also the runner and gunner who would like to add ProRes to their DSLR or quadcopter aerial filmmaking. The Ninja Star is extremely light, about ?a quarter of a pound (110 grams), records in 4:2:2, 10-bit, and has a killer 5-hour battery.
It’s largely designed to connect via HDMI and to record in ProRes up to 2.5 hours on CFast cards. But Atomos has run into issues where nobody is making the CFast 1 cards anymore, which the Ninja Star relies on. So Atomos decided to design and make their own.
CFast 1.0 writes at around 100MB per second, while CFast 2 blows past 500MBPS, which is way too fast (not to mention expensive) for affordable HD recording that the Ninja Star relies on. And since everyone is focusing on CFast 2, Atomos saw wisdom in offering their own CFast 1 cards to support Ninja Star users. And in keeping with the affordable price tag of $295 for the Ninja Star, Atomos is pricing these CFast 1 cards at $160 for 64GB and $230 for 128GB. “It’s very affordable and goes right in the range of the Ninja Star,” says Jeremy Young of Atomos.
Additionally, they’ve announced an Atomos CFast Card Reader which will read both CFast 1 and 2. And to get users motivated for NinjaStar and Cfast, Atomos is bundling two 64GB Cfast cards and a CFast card reader for $300! That’s an insane deal. And while it remains to be seen if their cards can be used for Raw or 4K ProRes recording, for every day 1080p HD needs, you just can’t beat the price, especially in the bundle.
Atomos also announced a MiniHDMI to MiniHDMI card, again to support the Ninja Star and that’ll run between $20-30. For more information, visit Atomos.com.
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