Blackmagic Forum

Hi, my church is planning to buy 6 Hyperdeck Studio Mini for our live production.
However, we were told by our system integrator not to purchase the Hyperdeck Studio Mini as it has major unresolved issue like recording stopping randomly. He commented that as of now there is no solution even with the latest Hyperdeck Studio Mini firmware update (6.0) from BM in 2018.

My question is, if not Hyperdeck Studio Mini, what are the alternatives?

thank you

Blackmagic decks has been one of the most reliable I use. They are very low margin pieces from an integrator point of view. The traditional decks may have 10-20x the profit compared to BM so many integrators who under charge for labor are not interested in keeping up.

Obviously blackmagic has come a long way and their decks are quite fantastic.

I have 2/2 broken AJA decks, and 1/2 atomos that is super picky about format. The 6 blackmagic kits are used in breakouts for recording slideshows while the camera records internally. They are setup by the least experienced crew and have the least problems.

In integration we have many churches using the SSD based recorders, before switching to the SD card based recorders. Both are fantastic. Both can be controlled through the control touch panel we make for audio/video control. It’s great.

Your options are fairly limited at that price point. There's always the option of buying used Hyperdecks, most of the stuff we use has come off Ebay, and the only problem we've had with BMD stuff was with the one Decklink we bought brand new. You could get a reasonably beefy PC with a Decklink Quad if you need to record multiple inputs but I don't think that's preferable to a dedicated recorder. If you're planning on buying 6, are there none available for a backup master record?

I've only seen the HDSM stop recording when there were errors with the card. It's not a perfect device, but if you follow some basic steps (below) you shouldn't have random failures.

When you are taking a recording off the card, don't copy it. Move the file off the SD card, then format the card in the device before recording again.. Since I have started doing this consistently, I have not seen any failures. Also, because of how I do this I can check before formatting that the card is ready. When I put the card in I hit the play button. If it says no clips, then I know I am clear to format it. If it plays a clip then I know I have not cleared the card out and need to do so.

Hope this helps.