[Ari Golan]

Hi Josh,

We are a production company that has been doing multi-cam for 27 years and have owned and used Grass Valley, Sony, Panasonic and Blackmagic Atem switchers. We have also been forced to use Tricasters by some of our clients.

Currently, I feel the Blackmagic offers the most power and flexibility especially for the price. It really depends on what features you need beyond cut, dissolve and graphic overlays. The BMD does not currently do virtual sets, but it is planned as a software update via macros. It also, as mentioned by others, doesn’t do video playback. Personally, I like to separate this function anyway to a separate operator and leave the TD to cut the show. We use Playback Pro, which is the AV industry (as opposed to OB)standard for playback. Very powerful and flexible interface for creating play lists and correcting color, geometry and audio.

The other high-end option for graphics and playback is ToolsOnAir’s Just Play. It does graphics and playback at a level comparable to a 90K Chyron at 1/10th the cost.

The Tricasters offer a lot of functions and features- too many for one operator in my opinion, and no option for network distribution of functionality as you can with the BMD and ToolsOnAir systems. I also prefer dedicated “appliances” for live production switchers rather than systems running on Windows. I have had Tricasters crash on me in the middle of production numerous times. To date, the other systems discussed have been rock solid.

Both BMD and Just Play allow multiple operators to log into the system and simultaneous control various functions. For example, with the BMD, while the TD is cutting the show either on a physical panel, or a laptop with the software interface, another Tech can use an additional laptop to be loading graphics directly from Photoshop into the media pools, setting up keys and stingers, etc.

The Just Play system doesn’t have the modification tools for correcting improperly formatted video that Playback Pro has, but that is not usually the same issue in Broadcast that it is in corporate AV with clients handing the TD all sorts of mis-formatted materials at the last minute. However, beyond that, the Just Play system is infinitely more powerful in terms of it’s graphics capabilities. It comes with a separate application called Composition Builder, which is a simple GUI (user interface) similar to After Effects- but much easier to use for creating the graphic compositions. More elaborate templates can be created in Quartz Composer (Apple’s free graphics composition language) but this requires a specialized skill set. (We offer this service of creating custom templates.) Elaborate sports packages can be created including items like countdown timer clocks, score keepers, animated player exchanges, logos or country flags that
automatically swap out to follow team changes from a database, etc.

As a disclaimer for full disclosure, we are a Blackmagic and ToolsOnAir Reseller. However, as I mentioned, we are also a Production Company that uses all these products in real world broadcast environments.

If you’d like more info, or to see some demos on these products, feel free to contact me.

Best,

Ari

Ari Golan
Atomic Imaging, Inc.
1501 N. Magnolia Avenue
Chicago, IL 60642 USA
(312) 649-1800

[Ari Golan]

Thanks for your response. Did you ever find a way to recover the data or “fix” the partitions without reformatting?

The strange thing for us was that after removing the SSD from the Hyperdeck, at first it did work on one of our Macs, then subsequently had the problem… perhaps the Hyperdeck created a very “fragile” partition. We’ll try rolling back to the previous firmware and see if that helps.

Ari Golan
Atomic Imaging, Inc.
1501 N. Magnolia Avenue
Chicago, IL 60642 USA
(312) 649-1800

[Ari Golan]

Hi Pat,

We are having the same problem. Did you ever solve it. What cradle are you using? We have the U-Speed E-sata/USB 3 cradle and Sandisk Extreme Extreem 480GB SSDs.

When we first finished recording, we checked the drives on one of our Mac Pro Edit systems and everything was fine- so the problem was not immediately evident. We then lent the drives and the cradle to our client so they could off-load and they called us with the “disk unreadable” error. When we got them back, we had the same issue, even on the machine that read it before. Tried machines running both Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion with no joy. The files are still viewable on the Hyperdeck.

We are currently on the most recent firmware 3.7.1 which was installed just prior to the recording.

Ari