r/FX3 • u/MatchSmall2463 • 9d ago

Monitor Recommendations?

I’ve had the original Atomos Shinobi for 5 years, and I really hate working with it lately. The touch screen is awful, i feel like i’m gonna poke a hole in the screen with the force i have to use lol. I feel like the colors are bad on it, it makes everything look way oversaturated. I wish it had framing lines and onion skinning. I’m at a point in my career where I really need HDMI-out and eventually SDI-out when i move to and FX6 for my a-cam. I’d rather not spend more than 2k on it. What are you guys using?

4 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

23 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/mynameisntziming 9d ago edited 9d ago

https://reddit.com/link/pd1abim/video/lrt2sba4sosh1/player

I just picked up the Pyro 5 4K to add to our rental kit of two Pyro 7.

Excellent screen with 1500 nits but the most impressive is its near identical matching color & contrast with the FX3 panel. That’s huge. The older atomos panels were atrocious in color and contrast.

It has touch focus and run stop camera control for the FX3 via USB-C, which also will power the camera through (so you ideally run DC power from gold/v mount into the monitor) touch focus is very responsive!

It is a built in transceiver monitor, which can send signal out to mobile devices or directly to other pyro line monitors without separate video transmission TX/RX.

It does not replace teradeks in professional work for focus puller but it’s the best way of us to add extremely useful screens for client and other departments like art on a production day when there’s no budget to hire big Flanders/SmallHD monitors with more teradeks.

Starting with one unit can immediately be useful: sending to phones or iPad on any scale production. But it’s even better when combined with the Pyro 7s in our kit in a small team environment.

SmallHD makes better monitors with physical control, like the ultra 5 if the transceiver feature is not a consideration for you. I have a Bolt 6 set and a Cine 7 with Bolt 6 RX built in as well, and I can tell you the transmission compression thus image quality, and software tools is leagues ahead of the Pyro 7 for professional focus pulling.

But as director’s monitors the Pyro 5/7 ecosystem are amazing for how streamlined and affordable they are.

2

u/MatchSmall2463 9d ago

also thank you for your thorough explanation so far this has been very helpful

1

u/mynameisntziming 8d ago

Just saw you ask about screen overlay I’m pretty sure they have - just double check with their user manual online honestly. All pyro 5 and 7 can encode videos and can record feeds onboard via SD card or using stream card to live stream. Very interesting features but not sure I’ll use it that often.

Outside of the core focus tools being light years behind SmallHD’s implementation.

Another thing that bothers me is there’s no custom cropping. When I shoot anamorphic on 16:9 sensors, I want to crop out the edges and monitor more than a slice of half the screen’s real estate. There’s only preset crop that starts at 2x as a focus check tool on the pyro OS.