ATEM Production Studio 4K

Hi,

Just wanted to say that i have received one and have had a play with it, The product is brilliant but i have two faults with it. Only minor and things that can be amended for future products.

Firstly, the fan noise is considerable, and the actual ventilation itself is very minimal. Only containing several holes on each side.

Secondly, (and this is something on a lot of products) is the lack of a power button. If i was installing this permanently into a small studio for instance which requires it to be rack mounted with other equipment (some of which to be permanently kept on) then to shut it down would mean crawling round the back to power off or run some sort of additional power connection.

Apart from that, i am finding it a dream to work with, easy set up and able to receive my 4K streams as well. (working with trialing 4K point to point streaming)

Anyone else find these two to be problematic?

Thanks

Sam

I would agree with both of these statements. I am using this in a theatre setting and the fan noise was very noticeable. I decided to have a look inside to see if there was a quieter fan I could swap and found 3 fans! 2 are on the processors and one on the side of the case. Too bad they couldn't put a big heatsink on it and take out at least one of them.

We also purchased a Hyperdeck Studio Pro to archive shows and it has a similar fan noise to the ATEM PS4K. The lack of a power button on this unit is a big drag as we will not use it all the time and I don't want to listen to the noisy fans when I'm not using it!

Awesome products at fairly inexpensive price points, but the fan noise is definitely a drag! (Did I mention I'm a sound guy!)

Warren

For the power problem, i have gone down the route of wireless controllable extension cables. Its quite handy actually as it allows the permanent installation and control of power for 4 units. allows me to control monitor, hyperdeck pro, and ATEM PS4K without the need to keep unplugging all the time. Only issue this way is that i can see the control or extension breaking very easily

As to the ventilation - I'm personally not as much annoyed by the noise as by the poor cooling effect of the fans. I have the ATEM 4K rackmounted together with a Sonnet Thunderbolt PCI expansion chassis - that unit is also quite loud when in operation, but at least it keeps cool.
The good news is that the perceived loudness doesn't double when both units are on

The older ATEM models give several frames of black sometimes when there were weak signals. You would rather have "soft" errors, such as artifacts that appear distorting part of the video, rather that a fully black screen suddenly...

Does anyone know how a 4k handles weak/noisy incoming signals ?

Joris

Hi Joris,

I can only compare with the TVS, which I owned previously. For HDMI signals the cable length was limited to 5m and I could easily get dropouts if the cable moved.
The 4K, for its part, accepts HDMI cables of at least 10m in length, and the signal appears to be stable, though I haven't done extensive tests.

Martin

I can confirm Martin-Z's post. I have been using 4K 25P with 5m HDMI cables and runs fine. 10m with HD and that didn't flag up any problems at all. However, I haven't tried it with any panning or movement of the HDMI cable

Thanks, but I forgot to say I'm using SDI connections. Has anyone with a 4k tried long SDI cables ?
Can someone from BMD tell us if they made improvements with regards to weak signals ?

I currently use several ATEM 1 M/E 4K switchers, and can confirm the black frame issue.
Our HD-SDI cable runs range from 3 ft. to 350 ft.
When going over 300 ft., our HD-SDI signal flickers with intermittent black frames. There are never any artifacts in the picture, just dropped frames. When the HD-SDI run is more than 330 ft., all I get is a black screen. No flickering or any indication that the signal is there somewhere (visible on a separate monitor).
We've had to install SDI equalizers for any runs over 300 ft. to avoid the black frames.

it actually appears all your products are working exactly as designed !!!!

hdsdi 1.5 gbps which can encapsulate either 720p or 1080i is meant to run 100m give or take depending on the cable you use ... please see here:

http://www.belden.com/blog/broadcastav/ ... rmance.cfm

this is just for belden cable and is a fairly good reference for most quality cable manufactures ... have you put a scope on at the end of your 350 ft runs ? is this rg11 style cable ?? if not your lucky you got as far as you did!! many video scope can give you an sdi error count, waveform etc and you will be able to see if your runs are too long or not.

their won't ever be "artifacts" its a digital signal you either have it or you don't ... their is something called jitter but this can be overcome if your receiving device reclocks the sdi signal.

blackmagic sdi devices list their smpte 292 compliant so therefore they should conform to those standards which lay out the limitations of sdi signals on coax.

Brian has pretty much replied with what i was going to reply after reading your post ihaveli. HD-SDI signals are not meant to run over 100m, anything over that and you will drop frames and anything over 110 will just not work correctly at all. You would be lucky to get a signal through at all. If you need runs longer than 100m I would suggest using fibre and converting at the other end using a fibre converter (See ATEM camera converter supplied by BMD). Oddly enough I am actually using my 4K for 4K video at the moment and it is working a treat, only using HDMI at the moment as I have yet to buy the SDI multiplex 4K to try out the 6G SDI. Been using an F55 for my testing and the switchers works like a charm still.