Jeromy Young is back, and he wants everyone to know. And Atomos is back, and he wants everyone to know that too. According to Jeromy, and the Australian stock exchange, the company slid into trouble while he was gone – or because he was gone. But he’s back now, and tells PVC that he has plans for new lines of Ninja and Shinobi monitors, big plans for Camera-to-Cloud and gives us details of the Ninja-controlled LED lighting Atomos will launch at NAB this year.
These topics and more are covered in this lengthy piece, but here’s a quick means of navigation…
- New Atomos strip-lights coming at NAB
- Possible 8K 60fps Ninja on the way
- Shinobi and Sumo to be updated
- Suspended shares to trade again soon
- Major firmware already announced
Young started Atomos in 2010, and when he resigned it was big news, and made the most of the national papers in his Australian homeland, though not necessarily for the right reasons. He was already on a leave-of-absence according to the then CEO Estelle McGechie, and had been pushed out of the CEO role in September 2021. He resigned from executive duties in November 2021. His resignation may have been about what was happening on the board, but may also have been influenced by his being caught traveling from a locked-down Australian state during the covid-19 pandemic. He took a luxury yacht from Sydney to Queensland to watch the Australian rugby team play France, and made headlines all over the world. The $4000 fine, which was less than the daily hire of the yacht, wasn’t much of a deterrent – especially considering the Wallabies won the match 23-21.
I met up with Jeromy at the British Society of Cinematographers Expo (BSC Expo) in London to find out what he’d been doing in the desert for the last few years, to see what he has planned next for the company he founded and to ask him how he’s going to get Atomos shares trading again.
Trust in me
‘I’ve been visiting all the major players on a big PR drive since I got back, so we’re in the US tomorrow.’ Jeromy told me. ‘We’re going to New York for four days to see the major retailers, and we’ll see Adobe, Apple and Avid while we’re there.’
‘So yeah, I’m just reconnecting with everyone, to say ‘hi’ and to let them know what we’re up to and what I need them to do so we can make things better for everyone. Atomos sits between the cameras and the software, and help to make things happen that couldn’t otherwise. Can you imagine a Canon and Apple joint product development meeting? There’d be 20 lawyers on each side and two product people. It’s never gonna happen, right, and they’ve all patented everything to the hilt and won’t want to share anything – so we sit in the middle. The camera and software companies give us their secrets so we can get the two to work together for a better end result. I’m proud to have earnt enough trust over many years that all the major players share their IP with us.
I integrate it at my end, and then encode that to Adobe, Apple and Avid formats and give everyone the benefit – so everyone likes it. We’re the Switzerland in the middle. We’re friends with everyone.’
‘Being friends with everyone is good for business, because it doesn’t matter if Canon is winning the camera war at the moment, if Sony is winning or if Apple is winning – we’re always on the winning side.’
‘Whoever isn’t winning comes to ask us what they should do, and I tell them what I think should happen. I went to the main camera-makers three weeks ago to ask them to do certain things for us. They in turn asked me what we are doing next, so I told them what I’m planning for the next generation. They all said ‘And which manufacturer are you seeing next?’ When Canon asked I told them I was going to Nikon next, and that I was going to ask them exactly the same things – and tell them exactly the same things. They all get the same information, and it’s up to them what they do with it. I started the trip with three cameras on the plan for Atomos support in the next six months, and left with 14 on the list.’
‘Personal relationships and trust are really important in this business, and when a new monitor/recorder manufacturer comes along they haven’t got that trust and the camera brands aren’t going to pay attention. They’d be worried about giving information away. They know they can trust me and that when the product is launched I’ll make a big noise about it. That way everyone’s a winner.’
Since you’ve bin gone
‘When I left Atomos I was planning on starting a new company working with some engineers I know from Japan and China. Obviously I didn’t want to kill Atomos, and I was a bit restricted, but I had a lot of ideas. I’ve been doing two main things while I’ve been away. I’ve made a Ninja to beat the next generation Atomos Ninja, but now instead of making a new business I’ve been able to bring that with me into Atomos. You’ll see that in the next six months. It has a lot of what the Ninja does now, but with some slightly different angles on it.’
‘I’ve also been working on some lights. I’ve got an engineering team in Japan I used to work with, who weren’t Atomos guys. I know they are really good and their skill-sets fitted those I needed. I also teamed up with one of my first bosses in the industry, Peter Barber from Blackmagic Design. He called me up and said ‘What’s going on with your former company, and what are you doing?’ I told him I was working on lights and some monitors, and he said ‘Well, we should do that together’, and then he said ‘You know what, we probably should use your old brand’, because we know how hard it is to make a new company – it’s like a 10-year journey. As you know, Atomos wasn’t doing very well, for lots of reasons. They’d just lost relationships and they’d lost the core essence of promoting together. You know we have to sell cameras – Atomos sells cameras because if there’s no camera there’s no Ninja on top of it. Our job is to sell the camera first and then ask users to put a Ninja on top, and Atomos had forgotten about that. They had made it all about themselves and not about our partnerships. It was never the strategy to be the leader. We’re a great number two. It’s our job to enable those cameras to do more. If we can’t do that we become irrelevant.’
Lights
‘We’ll launch the lights at NAB. They’re full sun-spectrum LED lights. We’ve come with a different approach, so these lights are for HDR and high-end results, but we’ve designed them so they are accessible to the masses. Right now there are three big problems with lights; lights aren’t waterproof, but ours are – it doesn’t matter if it starts raining, the lights still work. Lights are often difficult to set up and control, and you have to keep running back and forth between the camera to light to keep checking what the image looks like. Because of this a lot of people get tired of running and make a compromise, so their results aren’t as good as they could have been. People often just flood the scene too, because cameras are calibrated to sunlight and as soon as you shoot in light that isn’t sunlight they don’t perform very well. You’ve got to increase the brightness of the light to get more light into the camera, but all the LEDs in the world skew to blue and red and so the camera doesn’t perform perfectly. They’re just not calibrated to work that way. If you could go back to the factory and recalibrate the camera’s sensor for that light, then you’d get a good result, but that’s not going to happen.’
‘So over the last year and a half I’ve patented a bunch of technologies to make a group of LEDs that represent perfect sun spectrum to 99.1%. It’s the closest you can get and the cameras perform really well under them.’
‘I wanted to also solve this studio-style light flooding too, as creative lighting is soft and nuanced, and it is supposed to match real life. You know, when you’re in a good restaurant in ambient light you can still see everyone and your food, but the light is nice, soft and creative. However, the form factor of lights for stills and video is really restricted, and there just isn’t much choice. You’ve got Arri at the top and then you’ve got China crap – and me thinks there’s a hole in the middle. There’s a space in the market for a reputable brand that knows what it’s doing. I don’t want to make what everyone else is making, so I’ve got strips of lights that come in three, six and twelve-metre lengths – that’s 10 feet, 20 feet and 40 feet for the Americans – that you can mount anywhere. They can go behind the sofa, under the table you are sitting at and any area that would have normal ambient lighting. And, they can all be controlled by a Ninja – that huge issue of having to run around to adjust the lights and then come back to look through the camera will be eliminated. It will also mean people can use their light more and get more out of them, as they will be really convenient to set-up and use.’
‘Regular lights are really heavy too, but these aren’t. They are flexible PCBs with a six-colour LED arrangement that can match sunlight and tungsten perfectly. You can shape them any way you want – so you can whack them in a lamp so that the lamp can be lit and controlled correctly. It will also be matched and calibrated to all the other lights of ours that you use on the set. You can twist them into a dense spiral and put a diffuser on it to make a panel light, but one that’s much softer than usual – and you’ll be able to control it better. These lights will be COB replacements, and will replace the ambient lights around the room.’
‘Every 50 centimetres (20in) you can control the temperature, the colour and the brightness, so you can put colours and brightness exactly where you want them. And all those incremental changes can be made on the Atomos Ninja. We’ll also be using time code systems protocol so you can synchronise the lights to the sensor to avoid flicker.’
‘These lights only weigh 800 grams (1.7lbs) for the three metre one, so you can jam five in a bag and it’s only a few kilos, and we’re solving lots of problems for the user. They are battery and mains powered, and we’re going to do a receiver for DMX control so that a Ninja can control other lights if they’ve already got DMX built-in. I don’t want to take over the lighting arena, but I do want to provide a better solution that’s really unique to us for our pro-video, low-end broadcast and high-end influencer markets.’
‘I want to give them something really affordable too – it’s gonna be a third the price of the cheap China stuff. Because I can do a lot of processing in the Ninja I don’t have to do it on the light, and we’ve got all this technology already running. At the moment you control the lights from the Ninja, but if you plug a separate time code transmitter into the camera you’d be able to control the lights from the camera – but I need to work with the camera manufacturers to get them to add DMX controls first.’
‘They’re going to be great for theatres, weddings, school concerts, music concerts too, because they are very powerful. At the moment we’re getting between 400-500W for every three metres, but I want to pump that up slightly. I think 500W is good number, but obviously you can always turn them down if that’s too bright. You’ll also be able to put more power to one end so that will go even brighter as the drivers are cascaded through the line.’
‘I’m really excited about the lights because I want to make things easier and more automated for the next generation. You get these new people come into the industry and they want to be Stanley Kubrick or Steven Spielberg, but then they have to shoot weddings every week. I want to give them the kit that lets them do the bread-and-butter work that pays the gas bill, but to also give them the tools when they want to do their creative projects and film festivals. The worlds of pro video, cinema and the influencer are all combining, and we’re in a unique position to feed them better workflows to make them more profit and to give them more time for their creative work.’
Old dog, new tricks
‘I started the Internet-connected Ninja project before I left Atomos, and the team completed it while I was away. They’ve done a pretty good job, but it isn’t exactly as I would have done it. I wouldn’t have put so much capability into every Ninja product as there’s a definite place in the market for a standard $500 Ninja without all the extras. I would have put the Internet connection in the Sumo as well, which is one of the things I’m working on now. It’ll give the Sumo an upgrade and keep it relevant. It’s important not to leave customers behind, and I think Atomos has been doing that a bit. To rectify this I’ve just upgraded all the older Ninjas to the new OS and given people a really easy path to all the new features. $70 gets you everything. What some companies don’t understand is that when you try to eke money out of different product lines or different versions they make so much work for themselves. It also restricts customers who see a nice feature but they haven’t upgraded yet and now there’s a barrier. It’s hard enough to get users into you ecosystem and away from competitors, so you don’t want to make barriers. I’ve just upgraded all the Ninjas and all the Shoguns to the same level so that now everyone gets all the new features. People shouldn’t have to go buy a new version of a product they already have when it’s obvious that the new features would work in the older version. It’s contrived and it just says you want to hurt your customer. It doesn’t make long-term business sense.’
Camera to Cloud 9
‘Recently Atomos has only been promoting itself, as well as the idea you can do all your production on the Internet now. What does working in the cloud mean to the customers? They don’t understand what that is because they’ve still got to take the camera and their tripods, and set them all up and do the job. It doesn’t seem to make sense.’
‘So now I’m changing the message around the cloud services – they are add-ons to speed-up your workflow, make you more money and give you more time. If you can send files progressively to a Frame.IO, a Sony cloud receiving system, or an editor and editing package that can receive the file, you don’t have to take your discs out, manage them and go back to the studio. You could have your editor waiting for them on the day, and you’ll be able to turn that project around one to two to three days faster. Now that’s valuable. Your footage can be edited while the wedding’s still going on. Our Camera to Cloud service is 15 bucks a month. I don’t expect everyone to understand it or know why they need it yet, but if I give it to you now one day you’re going think ‘I’ll give that a try’. And when you do, and find that $15 bucks saves 500 quid a day for an editor, you’ll be pleased that you did. So, I’m giving everyone six months of Camera To Cloud for free to try it out.’
‘I think all Ninja owners could use the Camera To Cloud service and save themselves the hassle of the drives and the cards. What takes a big workflow change is that you don’t need to mess around with the files on the media – they’re hash-checked and they’re sent. Yes, you can do proxies if you if you want, but while proxies are good it doesn’t take that much longer just to send the ProRes or the RAW files. Maybe the ProRes files will take twice as long as the proxies to load to the cloud, but if the proxies of your two-minute shoot take two minutes to send we’re only talking about another two minutes for the ProRes files. What does that extra time matter? It’ll take you an hour to pack up your stuff anyway so, by the time you’re finished packing up, the files are already up there. So there’s a huge workflow improvement for something so simple. If you’ve just shot on six Ninjas you have to label all the media and download the files in the studio – or you connect the Ninjas to the cloud and have it all loaded automatically and organised with metadata. You can send the files directly to a NAS as well, and we’re working on a list of providers that accept our protocol and growing their numbers – we’ll announce that at NAB too.’
‘The second part of the internet connectivity is live TV-style production. When grandma can’t be at the wedding because she’s in hospital she gets a single locked-off YouTube version. For five bucks an hour you can do an 8-camera shoot that has titles and graphics, as well as VTs in there on the history of the couple or the location. You just have to add it on to your price list. For three hours that will cost you 15 bucks, but you can charge an extra 500 quid on top of the normal fee. You don’t need an OB van for every event, but if a lot of the family are abroad that’s another service you can offer. And you can try that for free for six months as well.’
‘We’re promoting these two services, but we’re not going to become a subscription-based company. People need hardware, and so do we. Why do Google make phones? Because they need to be a hardware company too.’
Sore BRAW
On a recent ‘Atomos Live Stream’ on the company’s YouTube channel presenter Photo Joseph asked Young whether it would ever be possible to record BRAW on a Ninja. The question seemed like a set-up and designed to wind-up Blackmagic, but I’m assured it wasn’t. So, could it ever happen? ‘It could for sure but that’s up to Grant (Grant Petty, the CEO of Blackmagic Design). Grant is a genius, but he likes to work on his own and doesn’t like dealing with other companies, while we feel part of a team. To make this happen he needs to tell us how to pack the RAW data from cameras into the BRAW format. We don’t have a license, or the information to pack it into Blackmagic Raw, to do the processing in the right order and to put the right file container on it for Resolve to read. Alternatively, there are ways around the problem of getting ProRes RAW into a format Resolve can work with, but they aren’t ideal for the customer. From RAW you have to go to a standard video file, so ProRes RAW to ProRes 444 would be an option – in fact I made a tool that might be a good for this at the start of the ProRes RAW ecosystem. It’s 90% finished but was never released. The files get big though and you lose about 10% of the creative flexibility of the image, but 444 is the Arri ProRes workflow and you can still grade the hell out of it. Of course you can use third party software to convert ProRes RAW to BRAW, but that needs to be made easier and maybe automated so it just pops out the other end. So, there are workarounds, but like I said, they aren’t ideal for the customer – users just want to have a file they can work with. Or you could go the other way and incorporate ProRes RAW into Resolve, but again that’s a decision for Blackmagic. We know Apple wants everyone to have ProRes RAW. It’s not a secret, and it’s not exclusive to us. I last asked Grant a couple of years ago, but we don’t really have dialogue – I’m not his favourite person. I’d be happy to have this conversation with him, as I’ve always respected him – he was one of my first bosses and I learnt a lot from him. He’s a great pioneer of do-it-yourself, not compromising and of using technology to solve problems, and he’s built an amazing and huge company. We’d love to record Blackmagic RAW, and we’d love him to put ProRes RAW into Resolve. Everyone wants that.’
8K 60fps: What’s Next ll
‘The next generation of Ninjas will be doing wider dynamic range for better HDR, and the screens will be leading again – the Chinese have almost caught up with us because no one at Atomos has really been paying attention. The Chinese manufacturers don’t know what to do next, but we do. They’re not quite there yet, but I’m gonna run away again. There are some amazing technologies out there, like transparent screens – the brighter the sun, the brighter the monitor. How good is that? They’re made for tablets, but they’re perfect for video production with our processing, RAW input, awesome colour and brightness.’
‘So I think the next generation of Ninja will offer 4K 240fps, 4K 120fps, 8K 60fps and beyond or we use the wider bus to have, let’s say, 16bit HDR – or 12bit of 14bit or whatever’s coming from the camera. When that happens you will need a new Ninja to step up to that new workflow. Otherwise I don’t want to sell you a new one if you’re happy with what you have and it’s still cranking out projects and making a profit. I don’t want to sell you something you don’t need, or make you buy something you don’t want. That’s why we’ve got the following we’ve got, and why even after a couple years in the wilderness, when the company wasn’t really delivering on what Atomos is about, the business is still super strong. Most customers are still using the Ninja V and don’t even know that I was gone – and that’s fantastic.’
I ask about camera control in the Shinobi. ‘Watch this space.’ Young says. ‘How long do I need to watch this space for?’ I ask. ‘About three to four months. There’s a hardware change required so it will be a new Shinobi – but you can expect Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and USB controls. That will link to the Ninja straight after that. If you are controlling lights and stuff, you’ll want to control the camera at the same time and automate how that all works together. So that’s a focus for me – and before I left I asked the engineering team to fix this, but it hasn’t been addressed.’
Return of the Native
‘Coming back to Atomos and into the industry has been humbling; people are genuinely pleased to see me – internally and in the trade. Me leaving was a board move – they didn’t want me on the board anymore so I resigned. Someone thought that they could do it better and they just weren’t the founder. Tech companies need a founder leading the business because they understand all the little nuances and what the customers really want. I’ve just added a three-year warrantee because people were worried about service. We weren’t getting back to people quickly enough, so I’ve beefed up the ‘getting back to people’ team. That’s what matters to customers, along with explaining the cloud thing better and going back to the camera manufacturers to tell them we still love them. Not many people will need the three-year warranty as our failure rate is about 0.2% and if it’s going to go wrong it will do in the first week because of transit – but it shows we stand behind our products.’
‘The chair of Atomos is a really cool guy called Paul Greenberg. He’s a serial public company chair who’s known for billion dollar deals where companies not only grow but really thrive into a bigger player. He understands people, he’s a calming influence and doesn’t want to go near the executive stuff. The previous chair, who was the architect of me not being at Atomos anymore, thought he could do the job himself, whereas this guy just wants to support. So the board is Paul Greenberg, Peter and me. The previous board was bit stale from what had happened and the decline in value of the company. Also, the staff weren’t founders, so they just made these little mistakes everywhere that aren’t obvious, and they didn’t really understand the DNA of the business. It’s so important for me to be there because without me the DNA isn’t there. You have to understand the reasons why the products are built, how they work, who they serve and how they fit in everybody’s workflows. How many other CEOs are doing demos on their booth? I’ve been doing it for 12 years, but most CEOs think that’s not their job.
You learn so much talking to users on the booth, and you have to lead from the front.’
Share and shares alike
‘Yes, our shares are still suspended, but I can answer the question of how we fix that next week. You absolutely should buy some when they come back on line. We’re discussing with the exchange (ASX – the Australian stock exchange) because there was a note from the auditors in February last year that said they were worried about the going concern of the company. The company never got its stuff together to refute that at the same time, but we’ve just done that. I don’t have any shares anymore, so I need to get on the share register otherwise I’d be better off doing other things. So we’re going to raise some capital to kick this off – we’ve already been raising investment interest, so that will happen within the next one to two weeks. As soon as the exchange says they’re satisfied – and we’re right at the end of that process – the shares will trade again. If anyone from the ASX is reading this, we’re ready to build a big awesome Australian company. We need to re-establish trust in the management. People know I’ve done it all before, so we’re really confident that you’ll see shares come back on soon. And they’ll be a better price than six-cents a share.’
I ask Young why he’s back at all. He reportedly cashed $10-million shares when he left Atomos and could have ridden off into the sunset to spend the rest of his life at leisure. ‘I missed it. I’m a workaholic and I missed it, and I missed all my mates and coming to shows like this (BSC Expo). It’s been a fantastic show, and every two minutes I see people I know. I’ve been coming here 20 years to do this stuff, so yeah, it’s my family. I built Atomos and it felt really wrong not being in it. So now I’m back.’