Ninja gets a Blade

Atomos have announced a new version of their compact hard-drive video units, the Ninja Blade.

The various Ninjas are all designed to be attached to camcorders and offer better quality recordings than the camcorder itself. Helpfully, they also have a screen so you can view what you’re filming and playback your recordings directly on the Ninja.

The new Ninja Blade goes one better than before as it now offers a much higher resolution display – 1280 x 720 – along with loads of helpful functions such as zebras, false colour, and a vectorscope or waveform monitor.

The unit is powered by two hot-swappable Sony NP-F type batteries as found on camcorders such as the Z5 and NX5. It records 4:2:2, 10-bit colour which means way more information than your average camcorder and therefore better for colour keying eg green-screen work or post production colour grading.

Ninja uses a 2.5-inch hard disc or SSD as media and stores video in either Apple’s ProRes or Avid’s DNxHD format. Excluding hard drives, the Ninja costs a – we think quite reasonable – £595 GBP excluding VAT.

The company is also now offering a separate, portable colour calibration unit to ensure your Ninja is operating to spec while out on the road.

More info at www.atomos.com or in this video: http://vimeo.com/87548577