NAB 2024: Atomos Talks Ninja Phone

Shawn Lam: 15 years ago we were here talking about the first Ninja, and here we are talking about the Ninja Phone. So what is it?

Jeromy Young: We've taken all our ProRes technology and all of our know-how and we've teamed up with Apple for not only ProRes, but also to utilize the phone's capabilities in both monitoring and recording and streaming simultaneously. So, you take your nice camera--this is for all the professional cameras, not the iPhone camera--and click our case on the back. Then you take the HDMI in, and audio with your wireless mic, and it encodes locked video and audio together in ProRes, and sends it over USB-C into the phone.Then you can record the ProRes that we send to the phone. Then the phone re-encodes it to 10-bit pipeline, and then streams it out to wherever you're logged into. So you just choose Camera to Cloud, YouTube Live, Instagram, iCloud. If you want to send it to iCloud and save it, you just save the files, or you can play them back to review them.

Shawn Lam: That's a streaming setup then.

Jeromy Young: That's right. And then once you've got it all set up, then you're recording to ProRes and/or H.265. So it records to the phone storage. It's HD-only because that's what the screen is. That's what you want to stream. And that means that you get around three hours of ProRes HQ 4:2:2 on the phone. So if you've got like 500GB left or 256GB of your 1 TBleft, then if you've got 512GB left, you've already got all your photos and stuff on the phone, then you'll get an hour and a half of recording in ProRes. But then you get three times that in H.265 if you want to record that.

Shawn Lam: And so that's requiring iPhone internal storage.

Jeromy Young: That's it. That's all it does is that. So we turn the pro camera and the iPhone into a really nice combination for professional recording and monitoring.

Shawn Lam: So I understand that this setup, you have NDI capabilities. Walk me through that.

Jeromy Young: That's right. So as it comes in and streams out the H.265, then you can choose NDI and wrap it in whatever NDI format that you want. NDI|HX 3 supported directly from this setup.

Shawn Lam: That's fantastic. So that then can be put into any NDI workflow, bringing in any camera that's not NDI supported and turning it into an NDI camera. Wow. Price point and availability?

Jeromy Young: So the Ninja Phone by itself is US $399, and the phone case is US $59. And so those two combined, and you're away on your beautiful camera, recording ridiculous 4K or 6K inside the camera. And then this is doing all your social media and your streaming. And if you want to go to social, you can just flip it to the side and the iPhone flips around and you've got all your functions there for all that sweet vertical video.

Shawn Lam: Fantastic. All right. Thank you very much, Jeromy.