Hi. This is the Blackmagic A10 Mini Pro Iso and I've done a couple of videos on this on my second channel and but I've also done a teardown video of this an exclusive on my Odyssey channel so I'll link that in up here and down below and at the end. If you haven't seen that, I do actually do exclusive videos on my Odyssey channel so it's worth subscribing over there. I'm over like 60 000 subscribers now it's going Gangbusters anyway.

So it's a very cool bit of kit designed here in Australia because Blackmagic Design are an Australian company and they're famous for all their video uh, type switching gear like this and also their Blackmagic cinema cameras as well which are absolutely world beating stuff. Anyway, this is an incredible bit of kit. It's a production video switcher for want of a better name, but uh, it can basically switch are four Hdmi inputs Here it's got a Hdmi output which has extensive like on-screen monitoring stuff. It can do Usb direct streaming and it can also do Ethernet streaming direct to Youtube.

And I've done videos where I don't need a computer to stream live to Youtube. I can simply go stream on air, press that and I am live on Youtube and I can switch in all my different cameras and microscopes and different types of microphones and do picture in picture and fades and wipes and do all sorts of stuff. I can do green screen and things like that so not only can I stream in real time, I can record in real time and I can. This Iso model can actually record all four separate streams, including the separate audio and create edit friendly uh' files for their video editing software as well.

So it's just like an absolutely incredible bit of kit that would have cost. this is like 120th 130th the cost of what a similar video production switching system would have cost just a decade ago. It's absolutely incredible. Anyway, I actually managed to max this thing out with all four inputs or two audio inputs and there was some like uh, things I couldn't do with the internal like buses and you know stuff like that.

So um, that blackmagic actually saw that video and they took pity on me and they sent me the new one. Look at this. Oh what a Bobby Dazzler! This is the Atem Mini Extreme Iso, not the regular Iso. This is the extreme Iso.

The camera. there we go does a fitting shot. Just ah, Unbelievable. So this is their new top of the line one.

It's got eight inputs now that four input, uh rubbish. and it's got uh, two Hdmi outputs here and also what? Two Usbs as well. Um, because the previous one you couldn't stream and uh, record at the same time and it's got a ton more internal buses and I won't pretend to know all the video uh editing terminology. and so the amount of stuff you can do with this is just in.

Insane. And a video production switching unit that would have had this sort of capability once again, like a decade ago. It was like, you know, like in the pushing six digits this is like 150 of the cost or something. It's just mind-blowing Anyway, I've done a tear down of this little one over on my Odyssey channel.

We can now going to do a tear down of this one. Let's check it out. and as before, it's a nice, uh, solid bit of kit. It actually weighs, uh, quite a bit and there is actually a fan inside, but it's very low noise.

It really isn't enough to, uh, upset the apple cart. But anyway, um yeah. 50 watts. um power brick that comes with it.

So um, yeah, there's a little mini fan inside and well, there was one in the previous one, so I'm sure there's at least one in this one. So let's take it apart and see if it's just. I expect it's probably just going to be an expansion of what we saw in here. Is it just you know, duplicated? because we had a real expensive Zinc processor in this thing with like multiple cores and everything.

I wonder what's inside this bad boy? So this is 1800 Aussie bucks? None of that us rubbish because it's designed in Australia here Australian company. If you wonder why something like this like seemingly so small and you think, oh, it just switches video on that, why does it cost you know, eighteen hundred bucks And the little brother over here it was like eleven hundred bucks I bought this for which is a lot of Fiat. Um, but why does it cost so much? Well look at the teardown for the previous one. It's because the chips used in this thing are bloody expensive.

many, many hundreds of dollars each just for the main processor used in this thing. Oop, Can't use that. It's too deep down pays to have a set of deep, uh, posi drivers. Ah, it's beautiful.

Beautiful. Two separate heatsinks here. So obviously, like I thought, yeah, they probably weren't going to cut the master with just the one Zinc Fpga slash processor. It actually has multiple processors inside each.

uh, Zinc Fpga. But anyway, I thought, yeah, they probably can't. You know, push it from four to eight with the one. So I think, yeah, it looks like they got the two in there and that'll be, uh, directly on top of the chip.

Two separate heatsinks anyway. and then it takes over the heatsinks. Like this, curves around and the heatsinks go inside these plastic channels like this. Absolutely fantastic.

And of course, the heatsink fins are the right direction. You don't want to have them that direction because it'll just block everything so they've put them in the right direction. Beautiful. And the air comes around here like this.

and I've just got it sitting here idle at the moment. so as you can see, the fans are barely even turning. So it's got, uh, thermal control on these things. It's only if it's doing something really heavy, but I've even with like, streaming and recording, uh, stuff with my uh, smaller unit here.

It really. I never heard the fan were up. so obviously a lot of thought was put into the thermal design of this thing. Um, yeah, you don't just like engineer this willy-nilly At the end of it, you integrate the thermal design into like how the case is styled and assembled and everything else.

So that's absolutely fantastic. And these custom heatsinks. They don't look like they're milled, they look like uh yeah, there are cast those. So yeah, they of course blackmagic manufacture these enough volume.

Yeah, just get these things. uh, cast and save on cost. But as I said, each one of these processes is going to be many hundreds of Yankee bucks each. And attention to detail.

On the Rf side of things, all the Hdmi connectors like this very low impedance Rf path with the conductive tape like this, so that provides a very low impedance at Rf frequencies to, uh, the main shield down here and where the weight of this thing comes from. You know, they've got some decent heat sinks here, but also this, uh, complete metal chassis on the bottom as well that adds rigidity, uh to it weight. It is important because you don't want it like just sliding around the desk because this thing's designed to be desk mounted. It's got all these cables hanging out the back and there's all these tension on these uh, cables.

And if you don't have enough weight in your box, even if you don't need it from like, a shielding point of view, if you don't have enough weight, then the thing can just, I don't know, like sit up and just flap around in the breeze and just be generally annoying. And Ibm actually, uh, recognized this way back when they did their uh, original Ibm Pc. The original keyboard for that actually had a big metal plate in it to make it way more and just to stop the keyboard because when you type a knife, you don't want it like you know, moving around, you want a bit of heft in it. you want it to, you know, stop moving around.

So they added a big metal plate in it. So yeah, that's what they've done here. They've added some nice, uh, ballast to it and yeah, it just doesn't slide around. It's nice.

So I'll just briefly go over this because we went over in a bit more detail in the previous one and I'm sure it's absolutely identical. except instead of one Zinc processor, we've now got two. Uh, it makes sense because you've already developed everything to have a four channel, uh, switcher. all in that Zinc Fpga so you duplicate it of course, Like you know, they've added like an extra Hdmi here, an extra Usb.

So they've added a Hdmi and Usb uh chip extra over here. But apart from that, it's basically a a doubling up of the previous design. It makes absolute sense from just a modular design uh, point of view. but they haven't like just taken two separate ports.

They've actually engineered it onto one board and I'm sure there's you know, a lot of effort went into the uh, you know, controlling both of these Uh units together and syncing them together. So along with all the extra Hdmi chips and the extra memory and the extra Usbs and stuff like that and the sync process, you've probably like, you know, doubled your chip. Bomb cost. It's like that's why it costs like 700 bucks more.

By the way, I have heard that Blackmagic have a, uh, need of you know, good engineers like hardware, software, firmware, Fpgas and applications programmers and you know all sorts of stuff. So if you're interested in this uh, Blackmagic stuff and you've got skills in those areas, definitely hit them up. Tell them Dave sent ya. Just like the previous version, this is Hdmi input one, two three, etc.

and you'll notice that one and two use different Hdmi receivers to the um, other channels. So interestingly in the other design, it actually had only one of these and all the others were identical. This one has two like this and that has to do with, uh, some unique uh features that this thing has in terms of, uh, being able to do stuff from channels one and two as opposed to all the others. So yeah, they needed something different there.

So basically everything else is going to be exactly the same with the previous one, I'm absolutely sure. And there's our Hdmi outputs. There's our Usb transceivers, There's our Ethernet transceiver. So yeah, it's all the same.

Just more better as you'd expect. There's not much on the bottom, just your passives. and you can see by the cross arrangement that that's a big ass Bga under there. That would be our Zinc processor.

Maybe just a couple of regulators or protection or something else under there. But look at that. Isn't that a gorgeous board? Oh thing of beauty. Joy forever.

Behold, the Wonka mobile thing of Beauty is a joy. forever. For those who want to hack this thing, Jtag here. Jtag here so they haven't got them on the same uh chain? Uh, you know you could have.

Of course, you can whack as many uh devices on the Jtag chain as you want. That's the whole point of it. But no, it looks like they've got separate ones here for each. uh, Fpga And there's a rescue connector.

Hmm, that's interesting. It's another mysterious unpopulated connector here and here as well. It's a very symmetrical design. It's like, oh, as a layout, uh, engineer, you're just like, yeah, you just salivate over layouts like that.

Beautiful. The same battery as the other one for our real-time clock over here, and we've got all our memory tied into our Zinc Fpga So let's get these heatsinks off. See what this bad boy is? Is it the same one? identical? I assume it would be. Uh, because of course the previous design would have had.

um, ample space left inside the Zinc Fpga in there. So like you don't design right on the edge for stuff like that, then you can't expand and add extra features and they probably just duplicate it. So I'd expect at least the same performance. Zinc processor in here just doubled up.

But hey, I could be wrong. because like the the main operating system of this, which by the way, I've heard that it is a custom written. they've written all their own drivers and everything else apparently. So yeah, that'd cut down on the royalties and give you greater control.

But geez, imagine putting the Nre into that. uh, the non-recurring engineering into actually developing all your own drivers and your own real-time os for this thing and stuff. It's just, yeah, incredible. So yeah, maybe they're only uh, running like you know, heavy duty.

One like the main operating system, this thing might only be running in one and the other is like, like a master slave sort of configuration. but uh yeah, I don't know. But of course the extra one has to handle all the bussing. And of course you can do uh, you know, chroma keying and all sorts of advanced fading and all sorts of advanced uh, stuff with this blending and doing all sorts of like, it's just.

it's incredible what you can do with this thing. I haven't even scratched the surface of telling you what this thing is capable of and of course it would spread those uh, capability over the two things. but something's got to be uh, say you know, streaming directly. Uh, to the Usb.

It's not like you know you'd have both of these competing to like stream the raw video over and save it on the um, the hard drive over here, for example. So there's probably only one that does that say it's this one here, then it's got a funnel. uh, the data from this one into this one and then out to there as well. so I'm sure one of them is doing a bit more work than the other.

Somebody had fun with the thermal compound of course. The number One comment: Flame war trigger on any computer related video. Oh, shiny xylink, Zinc. Look at that.

Oh, if you have to ask the price, you can't afford it. Yep, no surprises for finding the exact same Zinc Fpgas slash Arm multiple arm processor in here. And yep, both of them identical. There you go.

So these bad boys, if you want to get them from your catalogue, supply a one-off ah, only 1 1466 Yankee bucks each each. Thank you very much. Zero stock. Of course you know it's in the global component shortage and yes, that actually does say 52 weeks lead time.

so if you get one of these in stock, I'd grab it. Now of course, these are really high-end Fpgas, although I've used ones that cost five to ten times. Uh, the cost of these, but you know, these are pretty specky units. There's a lot of silicon that goes into these things.

Very pricey now. of course you wouldn't pay this in volume, but like you know, these things would still be hundreds of us dollars each in volume. I'm absolutely sure if anyone does actually know like really proper volume pricing on these bad boys, please leave it in the comments down below. But yeah, you're not going to suddenly get these for 10 bucks, 20 bucks, 50 bucks like it's going to be many hundreds of us dollars each.

This would be by far the bulk of the bomb cost for this thing and all the rest of it. Not to mention all the casings and the heatsinks and the metal work and the plastics and the keys and the membranes and the dark. You know, the list is the Leds and the list just goes on and on and on. So yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if the bomb cost of this is like 500 us dollars or something in in that ballpark.

And I do believe those are the same Tm 1681 drivers that we had in the previous design. They're lead drivers of course, because yeah, look at all the bunch of snd on there because uh, there are a lot of leads on this thing. A lot of these buttons. uh, light up.

There's none of that outer casing fan rubbish either. No, why not? You've already designed your own custom shroud. So yeah, just mount that straight on the board. Beautiful.

Oh, kind of disappointed they didn't do that in one membrane. I want to see one big ass membrane. Ah, you've let me down and you'll notice that there are multiple, uh, carbon contact points. I mean, the big buttons have got four.

all of the little buttons. They've only got two. but yeah, it's not like you know you push on one side and it does one function and one on the other. It's just because the button's so big.

they've got extra redundancy in there. And sure enough, they do, actually, uh, use all the pads like that. But as you can see, um, I think there's actually a lead. I think there is a lead on almost every button.

Some buttons around here at the top there. they don't have Leds, but most of the others have Leds in the middle there. and the big ones down here. they've got, uh, looks like multiple colors, not that Rgb rubbish.

They actually do run, uh, multiple leads on there, so like red and green. So there you go. There's a look at some of the leads and the contacts down there for the membrane board. Ah, there's a lot of work that goes into that too.

So there you go. I hope you enjoyed that look inside the Blackmagic Atem mini Extreme Iso. Have I got that right? They do actually have uh, different models of this going uh, right down to, you know, relatively cheap if your uh needs are quite simple, but this is the top of the range a bad boy. It wouldn't surprise me if there's 500 us dollars worth of uh, you know, bomb costs inside this thing.

So not to mention all the Nre of the design. Of course you know the hardware is. I'm not going to say it's it's simple, right? but it's basically two big Fpgas with some memory and some Hdmi switching and some Usb and Ethernet are transceivers and all the magic of course happens inside. Uh, the processors inside these.

And here's a look inside this Zinc processor itself and you can see there's actually multiple arm cores in here and it wouldn't surprise me if they're actually running these multiple arm calls to do different things like they might be one for like a you know, stream recording to the Usb right? Because you can record raw all of these videos Raw. plus all the audio raw directly to a Usb hard drive that you plug in over here Usb storage device. so you know you might dedicate just one core completely just to doing that, for example, and then the other one you can use for like, do another call for just direct streaming, then you'd have another core for doing, you know, all your miscellaneous housekeeping and doing, uh, your video switching and just your general bus handling and stuff like that. But of course, uh, doing a lot of the effects like the uh, Chroma Keen and stuff like that.

They're probably doing those inside the Fpga itself, otherwise you just use a big ass processor. So obviously they've got some Fpga hardware accelerated features in here. and of course you'd do that for latency and performance reasons and everything else. Anyway, it's it's an incredibly complex beast.

and um, as I said, they're looking for people. So if you want to work on cool hardware like this and you've got the skills, contact Blackmagic and tell them Dave sent you. So that's a fascinating bit of probably prosumer kit and the amount of software engineering that would just go into this, let alone the hardware. uh, engineering.

Absolutely remarkable. So hats off to Blackmagic who've revolutionized market. I don't think there's a competing thing on the market. Uh, that's equivalent to these atem, uh, mini.

leave it in the comments down below if you do know of any uh, direct, uh, competitors. But yeah, it's like you're not gonna see a cloned version of one of these anytime soon. Let me tell you that. So anyway, if you liked the video, please give it a big thumbs up.

As always, discuss down below and check out my Odyssey channel where I did an exclusive teardown of, uh, the smaller version of this one the four Channel Jobby and I've got high-res tear down photos as well over on Evblog.com I hope you liked it. Catch you next time you.