There are a few times when it would be really nice to have a wireless HD stream feeding back to a remote monitor. If your camera outputs a clean HDMI signal (Like the Nikon D800), it might also be handy to have wireless HD streamed to an HDMI field recorder. Previous HDMI wireless transmitter units (like the Teradek Cube) have relied on compression to send the HD signal across wifi spectrum. Other options are available, if you’re willing to Velcro batteries to consumer HDMI transmitters, but you’ll still have to deal with compression and size issues.

The Paralinx Arrow is the first option I’ve seen that has no video compression and an ultra small form factor. It’s also about half the price of the Teradek unit at $1199. It’s still not cheap, but much better then the $2400 price of the Cube.

Picture courtesy of fxguide.com

It’s hard to tell from this photo, but the transmitter is about the size of a large thumb drive. Each unit can be powered with either the included adapter or a usb battery pack. Paralinx also claims a 300 foot transmitting range line of site and a 150 foot transmitting range through walls and obstructions.

If you just need something like this for wireless monitoring there are more affordable options around, but if you needed something like this for wireless HDMI capture, this could be perfect. The example that comes to mind for me, would be an editor with a laptop capturing to h.264 format with a blackmagic box while the crew continues to shoot. The editor could continue to edit and evaluate the footage without causing any pauses for media change out. This method would also give you an extra eye on the footage coming in, making it a little easier to catch any mistakes while you still have the cast and crew on set. This also saves you the slow down in production caused by in camera playback.

The Paralinx site doesn’t have a whole lot of information up right now, so if I find anything else out, I’ll defiantly keep you posted.

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