If you’ve ever tried recording in 4K, you know that recording uncompressed 4K needs some heavy guns. The most common solution is an Atomos monitor/recorder, and those are usually $1,300 and up. If you are shooting HD there are many capture devices out there, but for 4K… not so much. Epiphan wants to take a bite out of this cake and they launched the AV.io 4K. AV.io 4K is a small, pocket-sized capture device that conencts to your camera’s HDMI out on the input side, and to your computer’s USB on the output side. (most 4K capture devices use thunderbolt). This is an early bird, I guess, for a flood of 4K capture devices, but they’re curently one of the only options I’ve seen. Best, an AV.io 4K is around only $430 vs. the olmost quadrule Atomos.
Of course, the 4K.io 4K and an Atomos 4K are not the same device. The AV.io does not have a monitor, for starters, and there is no easy solution to mounting it on a rig, so portability will be a cumbersome thing, so I am seeing this mainy used as a stationary device. It does not have all the inputs, and it does not record at the same capacity as the Atomos. On the other hand it is around $900 less, so at least there are options.
Nitsan Simantov took this capture card for a pin and his impression are pretty good:
Here are the full specs on the device:
