Blackmagic Forum

Posted: **Sun Mar 19, 2017 8:03 pm**

It's possible to compress video with this format ?
h264 mp4 or mov format ..

Posted: **Mon Mar 20, 2017 1:11 am**

No, the Video Assist is ProRes or DNxHD only, to get high quality files that can be edited/processed in post.
Compressing to H264 would kind of defeat this. MOV is a filename extension for the QuickTime multimedia file format, which includes ProRes, it is not a video codec per se.

What camera are you using?

Posted: **Mon Mar 20, 2017 11:23 am**

Yes, .MOV is a file container (or wrapper) not a codec. For recordings made as either ProRes422 or DNxHD with the Video Assist you'll need to perform a transcode at a later stage.

Posted: **Fri Mar 23, 2018 7:14 pm**

Any updates on this? Not everyone wants to do postprocessing. All i need is screen external mp4 recorder that i can pop out sdcard, put in phone and upload to customers instagram account within 10 minutes. In my industry its very valuable, currently i could do this only with vitec hs60 over wifi and it doesnt even have a screen

Posted: **Mon Mar 26, 2018 11:37 am**

valtersboze wrote:Any updates on this? Not everyone wants to do postprocessing. All i need is screen external mp4 recorder that i can pop out sdcard, put in phone and upload to customers instagram account within 10 minutes. In my industry its very valuable, currently i could do this only with vitec hs60 over wifi and it doesnt even have a screen

The video assist is designed for a different market of users. Probably the biggest market is people shooting video with DSLRs who want to be able to save their video in a less compressed format than what they can get from their camera, specifically so they can do post-processing. The second-biggest market would likely be owners of cameras like the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema or the Micro Cinema camera who need an external monitor; the recording capabilities in that case are just a bonus (or are used as backups).

I'm sure there are other recorders that do what you want, but as noted above the Video Assist was designed to record uncompressed or lightly compressed (ProRes) video.

Posted: **Mon Mar 26, 2018 4:57 pm**

If you are waiting for BM to make one, not likely to happen, and their camera acquisition philosophy is to record files uncompressed or with very little compression as in ProRes or DNxHD filed. Their first external video recorder was the Hyperdeck Shuttle, and it was uncompressed only.

That said, BM makes a h.264 recorder box, that connects to a computer to capture h.264 files and for live streaming. It compresses the Video in the fly, but you will need at least a small laptop to use it.
Cheers