Atomos announce Samurai support for Avid DNxHD.

Atomos, creator of the Ninja and Samurai portable field recorder, monitor & playback/playout devices, is excited to announce that the Samurai will support the Avid DNxHD® production codec in addition to Apple ProRes. With so many must-have professional features in the Samurai, it’s not surprising that there has been a huge demand for Avid support at the top of Atomos’ product range. Now, editors can always use the best, and native codec for their editing system at the same time as increasing quality with higher bitrates and 4:2:2, 10-bit resolution: ready-to-edit from the Samurai’s HDD or SSD instantly.

Samurai’s clever design means that Avid DNxHD encoding, including Pulldown Removal if needed, runs at full hardware speed; effortlessly creating pristine-quality files ready for transfer to an Avid Suite or shared network storage.

With a choice of bitrates and 10-bit, 4:2:2 encoding, Samurai gives camera operators, editors and producers a choice of codecs hailed industry-wide as being easy to work with, efficient, and above all, indistinguishable from uncompressed video at higher bitrates.

"We always said we would introduce new codecs, and now we’re announcing the big one for broadcasters and video professionals throughout the industry: Avid DNxHD," said Jeromy Young, CEO and Co-Founder of Atomos. "Now, editors using Avid software will be able to feel the speed of the Samurai ready-to-edit workflow. All the benefits of capture-at-the-camera will be there: it’s fast, the quality is better, and production costs are dramatically lower because of commodity storage. Combine low running-costs, higher quality and the ability use any HD or SD SDI device from the past 20 years and you have a compelling productivity enhancement for old and new cameras."

The Samurai is ideal for camera operators who need better quality, a faster workflow with significantly lower costs, and for directors and producers who want a flexible portable playback and review system. In multi-camera multi-camera environments, record the ISO and video switch output versions live, and then edit later - with all original footage available instantly in Avid DNxHD or Apple ProRes.

With the addition of Avid DNxHD to Samurai, even more professionals can now benefit from the Atomos advantage.

Pricing and Availability
Avid DNxHD codec is expected to be available March 2012, priced at £89 / €99 / $149 USD and will be available as a software license for all Atomos Samurai users.