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The Atomos Shinobi II is here, and this is a dedicated monitor for your camera for when you wanna upgrade from the tiny little LCD that's built into your camera to something a bit bigger. I'm PhotoJoseph, and I got to use the Shinobi II on a shoot; a little mini documentary about my friend's new bar that's just opened up. And if you haven't seen that yet, you should definitely watch that mini doc. It is part of a entire series that this video is a segment of. And in this video, we're gonna be talking about, of course, the Shinobi II. We're gonna run through its specs, I'm gonna show you its features, and talk a bit about my experience using it. So let's just dive right into the specs of it so you can see exactly what this thing looks like and what it does. This is the back of the Shinobi II. The front is just a big screen, so not much to look at there until it's turned on. But you can see from the back that it can first of all be powered by an NP battery, or it can also be powered by USB-PD. Now the thing is, if you're powering it by USB-PD, then you are probably not getting camera control, which is the single coolest thing about this. And of course, we'll get to that. You'll likely be powering it with an NP battery, or using an NP DC port adapter like this one from Atomos. Now this is the standard one. You actually have another one that has a little stand on it, which is really cool. You would attach this to here and then it has a little pop out stand. Pretty slick. I need to get one of those. In a way you can use that to power it or a battery. And if you're powering it with a battery or with one of these, I'd say a V-mount attached to that, this will actually supply power to your camera. Now the same USB-C port that is going to supply the power to the camera is the same one that brings back the camera's data so that you can have camera control. And again, we're gonna look at all of that. But it is really cool that you can actually power your camera from a single battery. Say like this NP battery from SmallRig. I can go ahead and slap this guy on here. Now this battery is gonna power this monitor and the camera. This of course assumes that your camera can be powered over USB-PD. On the back here, we'll also see the HDMI input. Now the HDMI in can be 4K DCI 30p or 1080p 60. The display itself is 1080p. However, it will take in a 4K up to 30p signal. The display is also a 1500 nit display, making it super, super bright. And it can display Rec.709 or HDR Rec.2020. So if you want to view in HDR, you can do that or in standard SDR. On the side here, you'll see we have a headphone port and a remote port. That is a LANC port. Some cameras that won't be controlled over USB-C can actually be controlled over the LANC port as well. Then on the other side here, we have the power and lock button and an SD card slot. That is for loading firmware updates or for loading LUTs onto the display. You can actually load a custom LUT in here. So if you're shooting in Log, you can have whatever look you want on the monitor. Finally, on the bottom, we have a standard 1/4-20 port for mounting. All right, let's go ahead and rig this up. Now you could of course build a very simple and lightweight rig, which is part of how I did the shoot in the interview. You'll see actually in some of the BTS in that interview that I was shooting the B-roll with a very lightweight handheld rig while I shot the actual interview with a much larger built up rig, which is what this one is here. So I'm gonna go ahead and put this thing onto here. I'll start with the NATO rail on the bottom of this. Then let's get my GH7… pug in USB, plug in HDMI, And plug in the NP power adapter. Put some power into there, and we're ready to go. Looking at the display, you'll see there are a lot of controls down across the bottom. We're going to run through all of those. We're going to start off with the very first one. If I enable that, all you're really looking at here is a simplified display. You have your time code, you've got a waveform monitor, audio level meters, battery status, and then your settings. From within the settings, you can adjust your input. You may or may not have to manually set the camera that you're using there. You have under the control, it'll verify what camera it's seeing. You can see it actually sees that it is a GH7 on here. Then you've got under audio, simply headphone levels adjustment, your battery status, and your info where you would see things like your firmware version. It's also where you can calibrate the monitor, which we'll talk about a little bit later. I'll jump out of that mode and go to the most important new update on here, and that is the camera control. So now that we're in camera mode, you can see that I've got my white balance, shutter speed, aperture, and ISO. And all of these I can control from the Shinobi just by touching them. There's the ISO. Let's go ahead and bring that up a little bit, for example. Maybe I want to adjust my aperture here, adjust the shutter speed, and even adjust the white balance. Now, you'll notice that I am in shutter speed, but those who are regulars to the channel might know that I usually prefer to shoot in shutter angle. This is a limitation. If you're in shutter angle mode, you will not be able to adjust the shutter angle from the monitor. And that's specific to Lumix cameras. I don't know about others. And this is actually not a limitation of the Shinobi. It's a limitation of the control protocol in the Lumix camera. Once you go into shutter angle, it cannot be externally adjusted. So I don't know if that's something that Panasonic might be able to update in the future. I know I'm asking for it because I always prefer to shoot in shutter angle. Then up at the top here, you'll see a camera battery and a record time status. Now, the camera battery right now is reporting a huge number of 65,000 something. This is because I'm powering it from this external battery, and I think the camera doesn't clearly know how much juice it's got left. So I don't know where that number is coming from. If you're using a standard camera battery, it's going to report the battery level of that. If you are actually powering the camera over USB-C because you've got something like an NP battery plugged into here, then the camera is just going to report 100% until… Well, until this starts to run down, but by then this will have died. So I guess you'll just see 100%. But if you are using a camera that you're not powering over USB-PD, then that display is going to be extremely useful. The remaining recording time is blank. Let's just start and stop recording real quick so that the camera can update and feed back to the monitor how much is left. And of course to start and stop recording, we simply tap that record button as you just saw. That brings up a red indicator box around the display, which is extremely convenient, letting you know very clearly that you are actually recording. And then to stop again, we just tap that one more time. All right, that's everything for camera control. Let's jump out of that mode and take a look at all the rest of the options that we have down here. Up next, you have a zoom. You can do a 1X or a 2X zoom in for critical focus. That really allows you to zoom in and see what's going on. Of course, you can pan around the screen there. We have false color. For those who like to do their exposure adjustment via false color, you've got that option there. This next display is pretty cool because it actually shrinks down the video and gives you a whole bunch of other information all at the same time without overlaying your video display. You've got your waveform monitors, levels, vectorscope, audio level meters, and you can adjust the brightness of those meters as well. Next up after that, you've got your standard waveform monitor, which you can change the size of by simply tapping on that. You also have some other options for control over this. If you go into the gear menu right here, you'll see that under the waveform, I can change the brightness of that waveform there, get that down to a level that makes sense. I can adjust the opacity of that and so on. I can also switch between a luminance wave and RGB wave, or if I just want to look at a histogram, I can do that as well. Next up you have your zebra striping on here. So if you want to monitor your exposure with a zebra, you can see that over here. We have a dedicated vector scope. You have focus peaking, very, very important. And from the focus peaking menu, you'll see that not only can you do standard color focus peaking, but you can go into a grayscale or peak only mode as well if you want to. There are frame guides, so if you're shooting in something other than a standard 16x9, like maybe a 9x16 crop, you can set up the frame guides in here so you can see exactly what is going to be in frame. You have a grid overlay, and you have anamorphic desqueeze. And what's really cool about this is you actually have options in here that are missing even from the Lumix cameras. For example, 1.6x squeeze is something that you don't have natively in the Lumix cameras, but you kind of need because some of the SIRUI lenses have a 1.6x squeeze. If you're shooting without a monitor, the closest you're going to get is a 1.5x on the built-in display. Here we can go to a true 1.6. And it even also has 1.66 and a few other options in there as well, all the way up to a 2x squeeze. Then you have your standard action and title safe guides as well. I said earlier that you can load custom LUTs via the SD card. Let me show you how to set those up. If I go up here to where it says Rec.709 and tap on there, you'll see that I have different ways to set up my monitoring. I can monitor SDR native, which is going to be log in this case. I can switch this over to HDR, HLG or PQ if I want to. There is a standard built-in 709 LUT, or if I had any user LUTs installed, they would show up right here. This is where you manage your LUTs by simply again inserting the SD card. You'd copy them over on here. And that's the tour of the Atomos Shinobi II. So who is this product for? Well, I said in the beginning it's for anybody that wants to have a bigger display than their built-in LCD on their camera. But what does that really mean? Well, first of all, any filmmaker, any cinematographer, content creator and so on is going to want to take advantage of that nice big display. Being able to mount that right on top of your camera for either standard handheld shooting, maybe down low or up high, or even front facing. If you want to flip that camera around at you instead of having that tiny little LCD that might be a little bit far away to see, you can have that LCD that you can rotate around. But you can also position the monitor wherever you want. It doesn't just have to be right on top of the camera. You can get yourself a nice big magic arm, position it wherever. Or if you have a long HDMI and USB-C cable, you can position it quite a bit away from the camera. So you could maybe just sit down in the lawn chair looking for that perfect sunset moment while you're sipping on a beer and letting the camera just sit there and waiting for that moment to come by. Or maybe you're in kind of a camera trap situation. You want to set up the camera a bit camouflaged, be a little bit out of the way and wait for that cute little creator to come up to get its photo. Now, one thing about taking pictures on this, I will say, while we can start and stop recording from the monitor, we cannot at this time trigger a still photo from the display. Now, this is a limitation right now of the Shinobi, and I don't know if it's something they will be able to update. It is certainly something that I've requested, so keep your fingers crossed that that gets added in. So that's the Shinobi. Super small, super light. 7.4 ounces or 120 grams. 5.2 inches. It's about the same size as an iPhone Pro, so not a whole lot bigger than that. And overall, it's a pretty cool little device. If want to learn more about it, click on some of those links down below. Thanks again to Atomos for being part of this microdoc project. Again, if you haven't seen the documentary, be sure to check that out. And one of the next videos in the series is going to be about the memory that we used shooting internally ProRes RAW on this GH7. That's the OWC memory, so make sure you don't miss that video. And then, of course, we'll also be talking about the workflow of shooting with ProRes RAW internally on the GH7 and then editing that ProRes RAW Resolve, which doesn't do ProRes RAW. So you'll want to see that one too. Make sure you click on the playlist that's popped up somewhere around here to catch all the videos. And if you're watching this when it first came out, those videos might not be out yet, but they're coming. Talk to you soon.