The Atomos Ninja Star was announced at NAB 2014 and touted as a ProRes recorder for the GoPro. The immediate downside that everyone saw was that it only recorded to CFast cards.
CFast cards are great from a speed standpoint; however, a 60GB SanDisk CFast card still costs $650! That’s a tough pill to swallow for a $300 recorder. While some more recently released cards are lower, they are still well above CF card prices.
Atomos has come to the rescue with a 64GB and 128GB CFast card priced at $159 and $239, respectively. For further comparison, a 120GB SanDisk CFast card currently runs $1200. Yikes!
An important note for those shopping for CFast cards… The Atomos CFast cards are CFast 1.0, which max out at 100MB/s. The Atomos Ninja Star only needs 80MB/s to capture HD ProRes footage. Accordingly, these work fine.
Other manufacturers are producing only CFast 2.0 cars with max speeds up to 450MB/s. As new CFast-capable cameras are released, the CFast 1.0 cards will surely fall behind. However, if you want to grab HD ProRes footage with your Ninja Star, the Atomos cards are the cheapest route available for storage.
You can find Atomos CFast cards here at B&H Photo.
