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Atomos: Taking HDMI closer to SDI

Here at IBC Atomos is discussing its recent move to standardise HDMI for the professional video industry by focusing on ease of use and customer experience. With in-depth experience along with its technical know-how, Atomos aims to help define industry standards.

SDI has ruled the professional video space for over 25 years, built on a backbone of dependability and control. The prevalence of HDMI in consumer electronics and the DSLR revolution created by Canon’s 5D Mark II/III, Nikon’s D800 and followed more recently by Sony and Panasonic’s revolutionary 4K mirrorless cameras, has made HDMI the default connection for video professionals. Until now, however many of the advantages presented by SDI have been missing from HDMI.

One of the big advantages of SDI over HDMI has been auto triggering and timecode communication between cameras and external devices like monitors and recorders. Atomos has now made HDMI more usable and one step closer to the SDI standard by implementing auto start/stop trigger and timecode over HDMI. With this standard, users can connect using HDMI and automatically trigger functions on external devices from the camera itself, just as they have for years with SDI.

“We are very proud to be defining a new standard in such an established marketplace. We love HDMI, but as it gets more popular on the camera side we need to help make it work in the pro world,” said Jeromy Young, CEO and founder of Atomos.

“Historically this has only been achieved in the tech industry by creating an open standard, which is what we’ve done.”
Atomos was the first company to engineer auto HDMI start/stop and timecode communication with cameras, initially with Sony in 2011 for the FS100 followed up with Canon in 2013, for the 5D Mark III, 1DC and C100.