ATOMOS CEO interview is.. just sad!

[ND64]

When I opened the link I thought the most alarming thing in the video is that how fast Jeromy is gaining weight! Then I saw a comment by a random user claiming to be former employee, was making fun of him referring to his smoking of white powder in his office, which CineD deleted. But the real sad part was the technical subject. When asked about the future, or "why people should buy your next product?" in a polite way, he had no answer but "higher frame rates"! He can't explain why external recorder is needed, in this day and age that even a $2500 camera records 6k60p raw internally. He just begs the camera makers to add even higher fps to the specs that their own outdated 14nm chip can't handle, assuming they're stuck with that node forever. Here we have a CEO that doesn't know what to do next, and is very honest about that (probably because his tech bro vibe overtakes his financial ego). 

The reality is that hardware part of the industry is becoming like the Hollywood part. As we now have either $100m budget movies or $500k ones, and everything between is gone, you either get the high end most expensive gear, or get the cheapest available that is good enough. Basically SmallHD vs. any hard to pronounce Chinese brand. We can't have middle ground when someone who's supposed to make money from the middle ground can't tell us why it should exist. 

 

 

[Andrew Reid]

I am curious how he came back to head the company?

After all that's happened.

[eatstoomuchjam]

Why should people buy any Atomos product?  They shouldn't.  Atomos is a terrible company who moved a while ago from selling customers a working tool and supporting it to trying to build new revenue streams from their existing customer base.

The whole reason to release a "new" Ninja V model seems to have been to release the same hardware again, but with a few licenses that were an additional cost on the original NInja V (such as H.265), but that nobody in their right mind was going to buy (why would I get a Ninja V to record in the codec that my camera already uses?)...  difference in price for the new monitor?  Basically the cost of buying those add-ons for the original.

It's also why getting the activation code for ProRes RAW for the Ninja V went from a simple basic website where you entered a serial number and it gave you an activation code - now the site forces you to register and wade through a bunch of ads (for things like add-on software licenses) before you can register it.  Meanwhile, you take the Video Assist 12G out of a box, plug in your camera, and start recording BM Raw.

And that's all in addition to the bad press, sexual harassment allegations, covid fuckery, etc.

If Atomos are struggling, they have only themselves and their own terrible choices to blame.

[ND64]

16 hours ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

And that's all in addition to the bad press, sexual harassment allegations, covid fuckery, etc.

People would still buy their products with all the reputation wreck behind the brand if the product had a good value proposition, just look how Elon still manages to sell expensive cars.

[Ilkka Nissila]

14 hours ago, ND64 said:

People would still buy their products with all the reputation wreck behind the brand if the product had a good value proposition, just look how Elon still manages to sell expensive cars.

I think most customers only care about what they are getting for their money and not about the ethics of businesses. Those things can affect some people's decision-making, of course, but usually it is only the purse that they look at. Also if Atomos were to leave the market then wouldn't Blackmagic effectively have a monopoly? That would not be good for the consumer even if it were temporarily good for Blackmagic owners.

I don't have an external recorder but things that would be nice to have (and I believe are available from Atomos) include more physical connections, a larger, HDR capable screen, larger and less expensive storage per TB, less risk of overheating than internal recording in high quality, the option of recording to two media at the same time (e.g., Nikon cameras don't support video recording on two cards simultaneously but this can be done using external recorders by recording both internally and externally), custom LUTs, streaming accessories with wireless capabilities, tally indicators etc. I don't see how these products would become obsolete even though the quality of internal recording has improved. Most professional video setups I see at large events (such as sports events and concerts) use external monitors and often there are streaming setups as well. How competitive a particular brands' products are at a given time is a bit beside the point because if there is only one major manufacturer, prices will go up and development will slow down.

[Clark Nikolai]

One product they could make that would stand out in the marketplace would be something like a Ninja monitor-recorder that records internally to ProRes but has analog inputs for standard definition NTSC and PAL. A big thing with artists now is to shoot with old video equipment but most analog recorders save only to MP4.  The Ninjas only have HDMI and SDI inputs.

I've looked but can't find anything like it out there. Has anyone heard of something like this?

[BTM_Pix]

The Atomos stuff can be a bit fussy sometimes over its HDMI input source but this would do the trick to get it into a Ninja for example if you were using composite or s-video sources.

 

Alternatively, if you are using component output gear then this one would do the job.

 

[Clark Nikolai]

23 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

The Atomos stuff can be a bit fussy sometimes over its HDMI input source but this would do the trick to get it into a Ninja for example if you were using composite or s-video sources.

....

Alternatively, if you are using component output gear then this one would do the job.

....

 

Thank you. I do have an old 1080p Ninja and have looked at these kinds of things. From what I can tell they first one upscales and deinterlaces to 720 or 1080. What I want to do is have it output in the native format of the camera, so NTSC interlaced 720x480. Then I could record that with the Ninja and do my own upscaling and deinterlacing later in post. (Giving me more options and control over that.)

The second one (Portta) says that it doesn't scale. That might mean that it'll output the NTSC interlaced signal out of the HDMI port. It doesn't seem to do composite or S-video input though.

 

[Andrew Reid]

I'm genuinely interested to hear Atomos customer's opinions and feedback in the comeback of Jeromy.

Good or bad? Indifferent?

Their Apple recruit Estelle was treated extremely badly if you read what was reported in the media.

In my opinion Atomos gear owners must feel a bit like those who have bought into the whole Tesla trend, spent $$ on a car, only to have Elon out himself as a drug addicted far right incel. It would make me want to sell it.

Whether it be alleged substance abuse or bullying or sexual assault at the top of an organisation that relies on team work - THAT is a recipe for a serious downfall. Look at the declining fortunes of Red Bull's F1 team since the Horner sex abuse controversy. Staff CVs been going out all over, the team moral is on the floor.

We of course only determine stuff second hand via journalism so I don't know what happened with Jeromy for sure other than the covid law breaking incidents that are a matter of absolute fact.

None of us were there, but it leaves a very bad impression that he has been allowed back into the fold especially parachuted back into the most senior role there is.

[eatstoomuchjam]

If owning 3 Ninja V's counts, I'm an Atomos customer.  I still have them because the resale value isn't great - though I should just get a quote from MPB to see about swapping them all out for a Video Assist 12G.

At this point, it's hard to imagine Atomos releasing a product that I would buy, both because the CEO is fucking awful and for the other reasons I outlined abovef.

[FHDcrew]

I’m technically an atomos customer cause I have a Ninja V and a Ninja Star. Only have them because I still shoot with a Nikon Z6. 
 

The Ninja V is a fine product, just seems unnecessary for any new camera anymore. Yes beneficial to mine but I don’t feel like I’m getting a better image than a canon r6 r7 or r8 going straight to the card. 
 

The Ninja Star is awesome but discontinued and I doubt they will ever make one again. 
 

Resale value is kinda lame on the Ninja V, Ninia Star I could probably flip because they are very hard to come by. Again, they work well but I don’t love Atomos as a company. Needing to activate ProRes RAW and tell them the date I purchased the product etc etc is just weird and unnecessary in my book. 

[Andrew Reid]

1 hour ago, eatstoomuchjam said:

If owning 3 Ninja V's counts, I'm an Atomos customer.  I still have them because the resale value isn't great - though I should just get a quote from MPB to see about swapping them all out for a Video Assist 12G.

At this point, it's hard to imagine Atomos releasing a product that I would buy, both because the CEO is fucking awful and for the other reasons I outlined abovef.

The product is becoming irrelevant

On the codec side, the camera does it all now. There's no gap for Atomos to fill, not even ProRes RAW.

On the monitoring side, we could do with going beyond just 3.2" screens... So it's still nice to check focus on a bigger screen. This is an ergonomic benefit, but speaking personally I have always disliked the trade off... It feels like one step forward for focussing, 10 steps back for balance, size, handling, battery life, simplicity, stealth, reliability, weather sealing, robustness and weight. So I'd rather just eyeball the EVF instead.

I am convinced that Atomos customers mainly bought into the product because it was the cheapest way to make a mirrorless camera look professional in front of a client.

The actual practical benefits are very questionable in my experience.

So can Atomos now pivot from the dying market, into a big growth area, or will Jeromy be captain of a sinking ship?

It wouldn't be the first time he's been on trouble on a boat.

[Andrew Reid]

43 minutes ago, FHDcrew said:

The Ninja Star is awesome but discontinued and I doubt they will ever make one again.

The Ninja Star was relevant in the old days when electronics needed a larger box and more power simply to do a 1080p ProRes recording,

Now we have such insane power in our portable cameras and even iPhone, the market for this has completely vanished.

In fact it wasn't really much there in the first place because with the Ninja Star - yes you got ProRes - but no you still didn't look proper at work, because you'd be turning up with a tiny GH2 and no chonky cabled up gigascreen to pimp it out.

So it didn't sell very well and that's what makes me think that the codec capabilities offered by Atomos were never the main reason for their original success... It was the $500 bolt on that gave a basic rig vague credibility on a hire.

[FHDcrew]

3 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

The Ninja Star was relevant in the old days when electronics needed a larger box and more power simply to do a 1080p ProRes recording,

Now we have such insane power in our portable cameras and even iPhone, the market for this has completely vanished.

In fact it wasn't really much there in the first place because with the Ninja Star - yes you got ProRes - but no you still didn't look proper at work, because you'd be turning up with a tiny GH2 and no chonky cabled up gigascreen to pimp it out.

So it didn't sell very well and that's what makes me think that the codec capabilities offered by Atomos were never the main reason for their original success... It was the $500 bolt on that gave a basic rig vague credibility on a hire.

Agreed.  Despite them being useful for the camera I currently own, I agree they are pointless in a lot of circumstances.  Even my current setup right now, if one were to buy a used Z6 and a Ninja V, it would be approaching prices of cameras that can do an identical image internally.  My setup made a lot of sense in early 2021 when I bought it; I already owned a Ninja V so the Z6 was the cheapest way to get 10 bit full-frame 4k and phase-detect autofocus.  Very different landscape now.  I really do agree that the market for external recorders is shrinking rapidly.  I probably won't sell my Ninja V if I upgrade to a camera doing internal 10-bit; the resale value just makes me prefer to keep it.  Besides, at least it will help me get Prores RAW out of a variety of cameras, which I can convert to CDNG if I really want to.

[IronFilm]

On 9/25/2024 at 11:25 AM, ND64 said:

When I opened the link I thought the most alarming thing in the video is that how fast Jeromy is gaining weight! Then I saw a comment by a random user claiming to be former employee, was making fun of him referring to his smoking of white powder in his office, which CineD deleted. But the real sad part was the technical subject. When asked about the future, or "why people should buy your next product?" in a polite way, he had no answer but "higher frame rates"! He can't explain why external recorder is needed, in this day and age that even a $2500 camera records 6k60p raw internally. He just begs the camera makers to add even higher fps to the specs that their own outdated 14nm chip can't handle, assuming they're stuck with that node forever. Here we have a CEO that doesn't know what to do next, and is very honest about that (probably because his tech bro vibe overtakes his financial ego). 

The reality is that hardware part of the industry is becoming like the Hollywood part. As we now have either $100m budget movies or $500k ones, and everything between is gone, you either get the high end most expensive gear, or get the cheapest available that is good enough. Basically SmallHD vs. any hard to pronounce Chinese brand. We can't have middle ground when someone who's supposed to make money from the middle ground can't tell us why it should exist. 

At least he's self aware enough to realize that mainstream 8K capture is not happening any time soon. 

So all that's left is for him to push the case for high FPS. But the people who regularly need 4K 240fps / 480fps (& even higher????) is a very small niche indeed.

The heyday for external recorder manufacturers (of which Atomos was arguably number one, with Convergent Design and AJA etc the smaller players) was the era of the Panasonic GH4 and Sony a7Smk1. As by the time the GH5 and a7Smk2 (or similar-ish cameras of that era, such as the S5 or firmware updated G9) rolled around, even though these cameras still benefited also from external recorders, it was clear from the writing on the wall that external recorders are going to become a lot less relevant. 

That's why the likes of Convergent Design and AJA are now gone, when it comes to playing in the recording / monitors space. Yes BMD jumped in late into this, but they've managing to make a space for themselves by keeping prices low and having a great value proposition. 

Atomos should have seen this writing on the wall and done something about it such as:

1) moving into the up market premium space, which to be fair I think they have kinda done (or is it just simply them raising their prices?)

2) focusing on delivering excellent monitors (without recorders), which they've kinda done. (btw, SmallHD wasn't always a premium brand!)

3) pivot into another different niche of filmmaking, which they've kinda done. (such as with their purchase of TCS Ltd, but since then... they've done nothing with it?? Or heck, worse than nothing? Arguably Atomos has made the timecode space worse since their purchase of TCS Ltd)

I think Atomos' biggest problems is they've tried to ride out the wave of recording monitors for too long, without truly trying anything different to diversify themselves, or they have been trying (kinda?) just haven't been able to do it well with any success. 

[KnightsFan]

I don't see how the external recorder market can be sustained. I used a Ninja Star around 2015 with the 5D3 and whatever A7 version we were on, and even back then with the clear visual benefit of ProRes, the ridiculousness of using a HDMI cable and bolting a box on the camera was apparent. At that time, anyone could tell that external recorders were a short term investment--never more than one or two generations ahead of internal recording specs. If I worked at Atomos, I'd push leadership to build some new products.

Edit: I suppose Atomos does make decent monitors which will continue to be a market. However, I wouldn't call them the top of the tech game, even for that, compared to a lot of the monitors with builtin wireless these days.

[Phil A]

The only product I'd consider would be the Shinobi II because they made it smaller and it seems decent for the price. Critical focus and exposure are sometimes hard to judge on the small screens of mirrorless cameras. Comparable products from other manufacturers are not that much cheaper. But let's be honest, what we really want is a monitor like the new BMD PYXIS monitor, that we just plug in with one cable, no battery and be done. Most monitors for consumers/prosumers are thicker than they should be and have borders that are way too thick (incl. the new Shinobi).

Having external recorders always was a dumb idea to me because I don't want different formats/bit depth/color spaces depending on if I shot that part of the project with or without the recorder.