Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00 Welcome to the workflow show. I'm host Jason Wetstone, the cloud. It's here and it's going to stay. And many of us in the media and entertainment industry are endeavoring to understand the cloud, what is possible today, how should we use it maybe versus peers and other industries and what makes sense for our own individual organizations. We may be receiving pressure from other parts of our organization to transition from traditional costly on premise storage and workflows to a more cloud first or cloud centric infrastructure. Is this possible or will it be someday? Are the bandwidth speeds and pipelines to the internet really there yet? And what about security as our data safe? Some of us are already leveraging cloud based object storage for archives, delivery to other platforms and maybe even storage for co located workgroups. But what about during production and post production? And we've imagined a world where we can perform very complex edits, motion graphics and VFX work, audio sweetening and coloring without having a San or a NAS or an external drive attached to our workstations.
Speaker 0 01:07 So when is this coming and is it any good? Will we even need workstations. So let's talk about these and cloud editing realities and myths here. Today on episode 43 of the workflow show, joining us remotely over the internet, says creative technologist, Michael commis. Michael has been in the media industry for many years and you may have heard of his technology series five things at five things, series.com. That's two S's and we'll spell that for you later. Hello Michael, and welcome to the workflow show. Hey Jason, good to hear from you again. Thank you. Thanks for joining us. Michael is also director of business development for bebop technology and that's a group of creative individuals specializing in post production and cloud based media workflows and also joining us today as usual as my cohosts Chessa senior solutions architect Ben Kilburg. Hey Ben. Hi Jason. So Michael, uh, we'll get to the topics at hand. But first let's talk about you. I want to hear your story. So how did you get into the industry? What got you here? Um, you know, to tell, tell us where you came from.
Speaker 1 02:10 Well, I, uh, in high school I, I was the nerd that was playing with the camera, the video camera on the shoulder and editing deck to deck. And, uh, I went to college to be a director and I realized I had no talent and then I thought I would be a video editor, you know, a film editor at that time. And I realized I didn't have an original thought in my head. So I started working with audio and coming from a mom and, and stepfather who were both, you know, loosely tied to the audio industry and, and, uh, my mom who had what we would call golden ears. And my father who was a musician, uh, I seem to gravitate towards audio. So I ended up getting my degree in, um, uh, post production audio, uh, for film and TV, uh, from Columbia in, uh, Chicago.
Speaker 1 02:55 So not the Ivy league one. And, uh, after, uh, tooling around the Chicago land area for a couple of years, I realized I much more enjoyed talking to people and working with technology than having people look at the back of my head all day. You know, being in the chair, editing and mixing. And at that point, what I was doing was more triaged than creativity, right. With independent films. So, uh, I, uh, worked for what we call resellers in the industry, folks who take the technology that manufacturers are making and install it and sell it and train on it. And I worked my way up from being a bench tech at the time to an installer to a trainer and demo artist. And eventually I made my way to California. And, uh, I've been a creative technologist ever since.
Speaker 0 03:43 Gotcha. Awesome. I mean, there are several aspects of your story, actually, many aspects of your story that, that um, that sound familiar indeed. Right. So Ben and I also have audio backgrounds. We have very similar entries into the industry, uh, kind of, uh, you know, uh, enjoyed the technology and putting the technology together and putting the pieces together a little bit more than, um, I don't know, putting the pieces together on screen.
Speaker 1 04:10 Do you think it kind of holds true that you have one of two paths? If you go into audio and you're not a musician, you become a roadie. And if you're not a roadie, then you become a tech person.
Speaker 0 04:20 Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I still do my own. I actually, Ben and I both still do our own independent music production, but, um, it's like not, not really connected to what we're doing here at Chesa except for the, what we're doing right now for what we're doing right now. Exactly. We both kind of kind of run the TAC or soul and completely for going audio. Thank you indeed, indeed. And still have a nice little studio. Get down and funky with my guitar, good times. So let's talk about five things. I, it's really kind of a pretty amazing collection of, you know, just information really. Um, so before we get to the cloud, I want to talk about that. So, uh, when did you start working on that and what sort of inspired you to do it?
Speaker 1 05:05 I think it was around, uh, 2014, give or take. Uh, I'd have to look, to be completely honest with you, I've kind of lost track. I worked for a reseller keycode media who, uh, was just fantastic. But when you start getting into marketing, uh, especially here in the U S there, there aren't as many laws about marketing and, uh, you can not I to say bend the truth, but let's say accentuate the positives. And quite often the accentuating of the positives may cast a light or an opinion on technology that may not be right or maybe that feature isn't shipping yet or maybe there's an asterisk next to it. And as someone who was a former creative, uh, I felt like if I was going to pontificate on technology and I was going to share technology, um, I needed to be as forthright as possible, uh, without, you know, uh, you know, shooting a gun at a manufacturer or in public or even in private.
Speaker 1 06:03 So I went to the owner of a key code media and I said, I would like to take a lot of the information that I've gleamed from here and I would like to put it in, into a semi fund, at least. I think it's fun, a digestible format that folks who are not technical but creative can sort of grok that, that technical aspect of it. And, uh, I got his blessing and as long as I, you know, didn't throw anyone under the bus, it was fine. Uh, and so I started doing the series as a one man band. And to this day for the most part still is, I still have, I occasionally call in resources when there's something I don't need, but it's primarily a labor of love. And I try to do an episode every month. Uh, there's been a couple of times where I've taken an extended hiatus for various reasons. I've just come back with a new episode, which I think you may have seen. And it's a great way for me to reach out to those creatives and technologists who kind of walk the line and kind of the, the Venn diagram bleed over of both camps.
Speaker 2 07:05 Great. And I love that you said grok their water brother.
Speaker 1 07:09 Okay.
Speaker 2 07:10 Yeah. Good times. If nobody knows that reference, it's from a stranger in a strange land by Robert hind Lynn, the Dean of science fiction. If you haven't read that book, it's a really interesting kind of view into what the sixties were like from a science fiction lens. And apparently the myth is that hind Lynn got together with L Ron Hubbard as science fiction, uh, convention one year and they made each other a bet about who could come up with a better religion. And, um, Highland wrote stranger in a strange land and L Ron Hubbard came up with Dianetics, which is what brought us Scientology.
Speaker 0 07:46 That is an amazing segue. That's an image. Yeah, absolutely. I did not know that, but I know what it means. I didn't say, you know, to understand deeply and you know, uh, but uh, yeah, that's great. Yeah. Sorry. As you work, please continue. So I just wanted to, uh, yeah, five things. I just wanted to talk about, um, you know, just a couple of these episodes and I want to talk about one of my favorite ones, which, uh, you know, I'm very passionate about. Um, we have, we have an episode about black magic GPU and Mac minis versus final cut pro 10 Adobe premiere pro DaVinci resolve, avid media composer. It's just comparing all of these, um, you know, these, these technologies, YouTube tips and tricks for your media building a hack Antosz uh, building a Roku channel. Um, the truth about video editing software in Hollywood. These are just the titles of some of the episodes. Just some really interesting stuff here. Some very technical, but yet really distilling it down so that the creative professional can get into it and really sink their teeth into it. Not too techie. I'm very accessible to a wide audience. I find
Speaker 1 08:50 I do what I can. Uh, I mean I do want to get technical to extent mainly because, uh, as you know, in the technical realm, uh, everything is scrutinized and whether it be from, you know, just trolls online too, believe it or not, I get a fair amount of manufacturers who send me emails and say, well, you know, you didn't present this right and I respond to them. Yes I did. I just didn't put your marketing spin on there. Um, but I, I like to be, I don't want to say above reproach, but I don't want to get called out for being partisan or having an allegiance. So it, it's, it's very important to me to have my facts straight and my text rate and that takes a fair amount of research and having almost a peer review sometimes of the content to make sure that it's on the up and up.
Speaker 0 09:39 Awesome. Yeah, and I think you do a very good job. I certainly appreciate what you're saying about, you know, doing your due diligence to research and test and you know, make it so that if someone comes to you and says, Hey, you're like, no, no, no, this is really how it works. And people need to know that. So I, I mentioned my favorite one so far, which is entitled prepping for post audio. It's episode two 12. And, and listen, if you remember nothing else today, listeners, all of my video editing colleagues now, all of my video editing friends and even my not video editing friends, please watch this episode because it, it basically covers everything you would ever want to know to not really, really frustrate your audio post engineering
Speaker 1 10:24 Post audio. I'm sorry, post audio is so compressed, no pun intended to begin with in terms of timelines, again, no pun intended, if I have to, if I had to spend any more hours cleaning up an OMF and a cleaning up B OMF the fact that I have to do both of those things in 2019 just I don't get it. And I'm hopeful that some of the tips and tricks in there will get folks to, uh, not only, uh, limit the amount of cleanup work, but also stop exporting damn OMS.
Speaker 0 10:55 Right, right. And I mean, we're, we're, we're talking about things like, uh, sort of thinking of your timeline, uh, like it needs to be done in a DAW and a digital audio workstation. Uh, you covered things like if you have nested sequences, you've got to, unless those, because they're just going to show up as mixes to the AA. You know, this is all great stuff that I gotta admit. I watched it and I was like, I didn't even think of that. You know, that this is something that I did for many years. And uh, yeah, it's great information. So thank you.
Speaker 1 11:24 Nope, thank you. I appreciate you sharing that. Thank you so much.
Speaker 0 11:28 So let's, let's segue a little bit into the cloud part of our discussion. So the latest episode of, Oh by the way, five things, series.com. So there's two S's in there, five things, series.com please check it out. Everyone. The latest episode is called intro to using the cloud for post-production. And that's kind of why we're here today to talk to you. So let's talk through some of the things that I opened with, like what are people doing, what's possible today? I mean, I think it's worth mentioning, you should watch this episode. It's about 20 minutes long, but let's just discuss it a little bit. So investment strategies, capex, OPEX, let's start with that. I mean that, that's typically why we have somebody in our organization coming to us saying like, Hey, you're not getting a new sand this year. You're not getting a bigger sand this year. We got to start moving everything to the cloud.
Speaker 1 12:16 I think we almost need to take a little bit of a step back and talk about what's possible, because I think there's a lot of confusion. There's a, and, and the word cloud does not help. Cloud is, is again, no pun intended, very nebulous. Um, it's kind of a buzz word. It is. And I remember six months ago sitting down with our, with our VP of marketing and saying, what other phrases can we use? And we had a whiteboard just full of phrases. And all of them just were like, well, that makes sense to me. But that doesn't make sense to Jill editor or John VFX guy. It made no sense. Decentralized. Postproduction yeah, it just, it doesn't fly. So we're kind of stuck with cloud. So what's possible in the cloud? Can you edit video in the cloud? Yes. Are you gonna use it for finishing?
Speaker 1 13:05 Probably not. Are you going to new terms and conditions apply? Yes, exactly. We find it's best for, uh, creative editorial, uh, string outs. Um, we find a lot of three letter stations and I'll leave it at that who are launching streaming platforms. How do we repurpose our back catalog? Right? We need to cut down everything. We never provisioned to have an additional 10 editors in this building. We want to hire editors where the talent may be elsewhere in the country. So you can do editing in the cloud and there's a market for it. Finishing color, not so much. You can use the cloud to transmit video from one place to another, but, uh, you're never going to get that. Hey, I'm using a Sony BVM HDR monitor $50,000 and get that color fidelity playing from the cloud. That's not feasible with our meager internet connection here in the U S but video can certainly be done. Uh, audio, not so much. Uh, as I point out in the video, we talk about latency and whatnot and it just doesn't fly.
Speaker 0 14:12 That's a, I think a huge misconception. It's one that I like to clarify a little bit. Sometimes with the way like a doll works versus the way in and only works with the rendering and the way the frames are coming through. It's not really the same with audio. Right? Everybody always says all the files are smaller so it should, it shouldn't be a problem. Right.
Speaker 1 14:30 When we deal with, with video, we're dealing traditionally with an M going around here, so no one hammer me on frame rates 24 and 30 and 60 and we're dealing with those kinds of frame rates, 30 frames, a second frames per second, right? Yeah. When we're dealing with audio, we're talking about tens of thousands of samples and as an audio person you need to get in at that sample level and notch out a pop or a click or remedy a transition or a fade into this second take of dialogue. You need to have that kind of finite, not only control, but to hear it as well. And unfortunately getting the latency and sync at a sample level is not something that can be done currently. And that's one of the reasons why, you know, the, the big 800 pound audio gorilla, you know, pro tools that doesn't run in the cloud currently. And there's a reason for that.
Speaker 0 15:24 Um, I always, I kind of like to explain it as I'm imagine if audio was 30 frames or 60 frames per second. You would just hear it would sound like bugs or something. Um, more more like, um, our ears here closer to real time than our eyes. See, I'm not sure how to explain it, but the whole difference between hearing and seeing is very, it's a very big difference. So, uh, the way that the information is transmitted in a digital way is also very different. Right? Right. The simple fact that we can trick our brains into thinking something's moving by only showing at 24 frames a second. It tells you something, right? It's like watching car tires spin backwards. That aliasing effect. They're not spinning backwards, it's just your brain be in funny or it's your rear view camera or something like that. Right. What are some good things we should be doing with the cloud? I mean, we talked a little bit in the intro, I mentioned, uh, archiving. I think that's a pretty popular workflow for a cloud based solution would be pushing my stuff that I don't care about for now to the cloud archive. Right.
Speaker 1 16:33 Definitely. I mean, the one thing you get with cloud is that storage is virtually unlimited. Uh, so it's a perfect use case. I think we're combating a few things. Uh, I think one of them is that, uh, there is a extreme aversion in the industry to the concept of subscription. Uh, and obviously Adobe, thank you, Adobe, seriously for, for beating, for being the pioneer to take all those arrows in the back. Uh, but they were one of the first ones to make that move. And I think, as you probably know, a lot of creatives, especially freelancers hate it because they're paying, whether it's and it's feast or famine in terms of getting a gig. But a lot of businesses like this because they're guaranteed to get the updates. It's a predictable expense and when you get to cloud storage, you're dealing with subscription. You're paying a low monthly fee, but it's always there and it's a lot like a drug dealer, right? The first taste is free. You can upload. Usually that doesn't cost much, but when you want to download, then you get egress fees, right? Then that's when they ding you.
Speaker 0 17:38 Another thing that's worth mentioning is like if you have an archive that's maybe, maybe it's on premise object storage or maybe it's LTO a tape-based. I don't know. I guess I feel like some people are under the impression, or maybe maybe you're accurately,
Speaker 1 17:50 That you have a little bit more control over that. I mean, it's something that you physically can interact with. The cloud is this thing that you know you're paying a subscription for. What if something happens to that subscription? What if we can't afford it anymore? What happens to our data now that you bring up a great point. And I think what's important to remember is that cloud availability is five nines or better. And you know for some of your listeners who don't know, a five nines is kind of a, a baseline for uptime and that's 99.9999% uptime. And if my memory serves, I think that's less than one hour of downtime a year. I think if that, that's the right number. And I don't know how many folks on prem can say that they have a San or a NAS. Oh, by the way, if I say on prem to everyone, that means on-premise, right?
Speaker 1 18:41 It's a nerdy term. I'm sorry, it's in your building. In your data center. Probably. It might even be in your edit suite. Yes. In your audio suite. But we hope not we, it's exactly, we hope not. But to have an on prem solution be completely available for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. That's, that's a tall order. And the cloud definitely gives you that. Right? And, and I mean, some of these platforms, as you mentioned in the video, uh, some of these platforms give you more nines, like 11 nines or something like that. And yeah. Backblaze I think is doing that. So, so when you, when you say there's more nines, essentially you're, you're taking that downtime down even then some, so I think you had mentioned in the video it was like five minutes a year of potential downtime, which is, uh, who, who can say that they're spinning disc or whatever their, their servers are going to be up, you know, and, and maybe down for up to five minutes a year.
Speaker 1 19:39 I don't know. I mean, it seems when you really crunch the numbers, uh, it does seem like it's, it's quite a bit more stable. It is more stable. I, we're also not just talking about availability, we're also talking about resiliency. So you may have a drive on premises that, uh, always spins up, but the one time it doesn't spin up well that's a failure and there's no recovery from that in the cloud. You're always going to have that recovery because there's multiple levels of backup and archive to get that data back. So it's not just a matter of availability, it's also resiliency, right? So you're paying for that subscription and it's covering your redundancy as well. So you're not having to like say make a second copy of all your data manually or with a workflow or something like that. Correct. Yeah. And I'm not suggesting that you have your local storage that you're using for, for local editing and just a cloud and that's it. I think there's still some good practices in play where you may have a second copy on prem because if you have archived, let's say five terabytes on the cloud, or let's say backup five terabytes in the cloud and you need to get that back, well a, it's going to take a little while. B, you're probably going to have to pay to download that much content. So it's still good practice to have an additional backup or even archive locally. Uh, so the cloud is not a replacement for a good backup strategy.
Speaker 0 21:03 Yeah, absolutely. So I see a lot of, rather than saying we want to transition our archive into the cloud, it's more of a, we want to add another redundant location to the cloud. Maybe we're only writing one LTO tape. Then keeping that on site and keeping our backup of our archive up in the cloud.
Speaker 1 21:17 Yeah, that's where I've seen a lot of the adoption is in that hybrid approach because you can have your Oh crap copy that's living up in the cloud and then you get the benefits of the geographic distribution and your offsite copy. But like you were saying to Michael, it comes back to your recovery time objective and whether or not you want business continuity on premises or how quickly can you get it spun back up to do your work. Right. That's what's important to people. You brought up a really good point and I'm glad you chose this word, is that I find that a lot of folks are looking at on-prem versus the cloud or back verse PC. Uh, and, and it's not that, it's, it's you exploit the positives of each platform. So, uh, if you can get the instant availability of stuff on prem, fantastic. But you need the horsepower of the cloud, great. Exploit both. You don't have to have one or the other. So, uh, I, the hybrid approaches you mentioned adding the cloud, uh, I think that's going to be the way to go and no one should ever look at the cloud as a, well, I'm just seeing everything that I have on prem and going purely in the cloud. Uh, that's not going to be a way to go either.
Speaker 0 22:27 Great, right. Uh, so let's talk security for a second here. Now there's, there's two different types of security I want to talk about. Uh, one of the things that I've heard some people say is, yeah, we're never going to get the buy in from it on pushing things to the cloud because their security is too stringent and you know, they just won't make it available to the world. So that's one thing. The other thing is just the physical security of the data. You know, in your building, you've got a data center. It may be protected by a locked door. It may not be protected at all. It may have card reader or some sort of a biometrics device. But at the end of the day, if you want your data to be safe, it's gotta be physically secure. The storage media, the servers, they have to be physically secure. So that's another type of security. So let's talk about that a little bit. Like what do you get from people who are concerned about this concept that like, you know, are, it isn't going to buy into it?
Speaker 1 23:14 Not that I want or disagree, but what I find is that when we work with corporate it, uh, when we look at larger it companies, the cloud, yes, no problem. We're in it. We're, that's, that's already been van was vetted years ago. We're good to go. It's where it's where I find media centric. It, uh, where media takes precedence over Excel documents. And I find that because a majority of media facilities are doing post production or even production, they don't own their content, right? They own someone else's content. So because of that, there's even more of a scare. Plus the fact that we've had these high profile, and I don't want to call them hacks because hacks implies a lot more forethought, but there's been a lot more leaks due to bad passwords or leaving your account unlocked on an open computer or,
Speaker 0 24:08 Or maybe social engineering or something like that.
Speaker 1 24:11 Exactly, exactly. If you were to take a look, uh, you know, some, you know, some of the movies we've seen where people are breaking into data centers and you know, diving under laser beams and, and that kind of thing. Um, that's not far from the truth. If you were to look into some of these data centers, we're talking about several layers of intrusion detection. We're talking not only here sign your name, here's a badge, but also retina scans. We're looking at fingerprint scans, we're looking at weighted plates on the floor when they get to the data center, even getting into the data center, which is separated physically, uh, with no windows, even getting into the rack for the machines are, is blocked. So there is, there are so many physical layers, you know, that's not really a concern that most of the clients I deal with have.
Speaker 0 24:57 But that may be a concern in your own facility or maybe it should be. It's just something to think about in your consideration for whether cloud workflows are gonna are gonna work for your organization.
Speaker 1 25:06 I'm sure all of you have seen sands or NAS is that were never provisioned for, and now they're in a closet with a fan or someone's office. Maybe, maybe you, maybe you stuck the intern in there. I don't know. But I'm sure you've seen this where it was never provisioned to have a secure area, let alone a room for all that gear. And that means anyone with a thumb drive can plug in and get what they want and unfortunately you're then screwed.
Speaker 0 25:33 Absolutely. So, uh, let's, let's move a little bit to what you call him, the video flopping power, right? Yes. I love that. It was, it's every time. Yeah. It's, it comes up a couple of times and I just, I love it. Thank you. Um, so w we're talking here about compute in the cloud, right? So, so talk about compute in the cloud of Liberty. I mean, I'm sure a lot of our listeners are very familiar with with running, running compute instances and, and you know, and all that. But, uh, when we're talking about a post production workflow, we're used to having these massive machines. You know, Apple just released the Mac pro and it's like amazing, but very expensive apples to apples, apples to HPS. It's pretty much, that's right. It is pretty much on the nose. You know, we all know what it takes to have like a machine that's going to be able to do all this high-speed rendering and everything. So we'll talk about some of the solutions in a little bit, but this is another, I think a selling point for a cloud based workflow as well. Right?
Speaker 1 26:27 Definitely. And I think we have to be very careful how we're preaching or sharing this. And here's why is because there's the freelancers, uh, who are going to buy a machine and then they're going to run that thing into the ground. And then there are facilities who are to buy it for a creative and then craves, are going to use it. And then in three to five years, that machine isn't going to be thrown away. It's going to be moved to an assist station or is going to be moved to an office worker or it's going to be used as part of a render farm and a news machine will be purchased. And I think both of those paradigms change, um, how you look at computing and what it costs when we talk about VFX and rendering, how many facilities need to have these massive render farms?
Speaker 1 27:12 Right? Traditionally it's VFX houses. Uh, but by and large, there aren't a ton of vastly expensive render farms. It's usually smaller facilities. You're looking at using the machines off hours, so you're repurposing them, right? And so with all that being said, with all those caveats in the cloud, these data centers are massively configurable. When you buy a Mac or even an HP, you're saddled with that, a CPU, those cords, that Ram, uh, et cetera. And you have to outlay more cash to upgrade those in the cloud. Traditionally they're upgrading every year, year and a half, which means without paying anything extra, granted you're paying every month you're getting more horsepower. And at the drop of a hat virtually you can say, I need another GPU, I need another CPU, but you know what, I only need it for these hours. So it allows you to, to cut very close to the bone in terms of how much horsepower you need and for how long
Speaker 0 28:10 And potentially scale up very quickly in case you get a project that's like really, really render intensive or something like that. Right.
Speaker 1 28:16 And that's what I don't wanna say worries me about these, these big juggernaut VFX facilities. But, uh, they obviously are paying for, you know, massive amounts of real estate, massive amounts of HVAC and electricity. And there's now these popup VFX houses that are saying, look, we've got artists all around the country or even all around the world and we just send the frames to the cloud, let it render downloaded. And then when the gig is up, we don't pay for it anymore. And so there's, there are a lot more of these pop-up VFX boutiques, virtual boutiques. You're going to start to see these large footprint, VFX facilities having to charge less, which unfortunately we're already dealing with. Uh, and we're going to start to see these popup boutiques are doing everything in the cloud, start to take the other VFX facilities lunch so to speak.
Speaker 0 29:02 Gotcha. So that's something else to sort of keep in mind is that as this, some of this gets easier and cheaper, it gives that, some could say opportunity, but also, you know, it changes the landscape a bit. Right. I'm reminded of like ride sharing versus getting a taxi, you know, and in a way, uh, so what was the last time you took a taxi? Yeah, exactly. I think
Speaker 2 29:23 Walking structurally through some of the ins and outs of the Clower we should say the ups and downs of the cloud, right? Like clearly it's your wind connection, your wide area network connection in, in, out of, um, wherever you are, whatever facility you're in. So that has to be really wide to handle the traffic. You need to work in the cloud. And that's for either if you're using the cloud as an archive or if you're using it for editorial, right? Need to know how much data you're going to be pushing through that link and whether or not you're going to piss off everybody else in the entire building because you're stealing everybody's bandwidth. It can't do any of the things that they need to do to back up the entire organization's footprint because the media group within the organization might be monopolizing the pipes because their data tends to be that much bigger than everybody else's. So, um, Michael and your specific journey, how do you talk to people about, you know, when connections and what are some other unknowns that you see that people aren't thinking about when they're kind of thinking and strategizing about how to get into working in the cloud more?
Speaker 1 30:35 I think that a lot of creatives and a lot of it folk have a snapshot in their mind of how working with a remote computer, how poor that experience can be. And, you know, I don't, I don't want to shat on something like team viewer, which is, you know, ubiquitous through the industry and everyone uses it. But tools like that are much more meant for it. They're not meant for media. And I think a lot of creatives have tried to use TeamViewer because who hasn't been home on a weekend and has gotten a last minute note and asked to remote into their system and change a title or something and they have to deal with that horrible audio and sync issues and, and, you know, extreme banding. Uh, and I, I think a lot of folks haven't seen what can actually be done in a tuned environment.
Speaker 1 31:24 And when you start moving away from these kind of one size fits all remote desktop paradigms and start getting into things like a PC over IP, which is a made by Tara DG, um, and you can see that you can get 30 frames a second and you can get, let's see, sub, uh, 50 millisecond latency on top of what you already have. And it is possible to work remotely without the common issues you've seen. And I hate to say this cause it sounds like I'm a pitch man. I it totally sounds like it, but I swear to you, every person that I've put in front of a, a zero client, which is a desktop, a unit that links to a cloud editing system has sat in front of it and said, I can't tell the difference. Right? You cannot tell. So this is,
Speaker 0 32:16 It's a system where you are not sitting at a, a Mac pro or a really tricked out HP, uh, you know, workstation with all the GPU is and everything. You're sitting in front of something very simple and it's like the ISD on line for the voiceover actor. You know, that you're basically giving them a KVM switch into the, the very powerful machine.
Speaker 1 32:38 One thing
Speaker 0 32:40 I like to throw out there is, and I'm gonna throw some math at ya, right? So everyone gets your pens. Uh, there's a, a website out there that you can even do this yourself and, and prove it for yourself. It's called a human reaction test. I forget the exact URL, but it flashes something on the screen. You hit a space bar, it tells you how long that latency is, how long it took for you to perceive a change on the screen, act on that change and hit a space bar. The average is about 210 to 215 milliseconds. That's a little bit less than a quarter of a second. Okay, so if what we're doing in the cloud, if you hitting space part of play and that signal getting to the cloud, the cloud computer determining you hit space bar, starting that play head and then getting that frame of video back to your desktop.
Speaker 0 33:29 If you can do that in under 200 milliseconds and often under 150 milliseconds, which is considered superhuman, the end user won't know or they might notice, but it's like sitting down at someone else's machine. Of course something's going to be a little bit different and they acclimate to it. And I know there's folks who will say, well, I can certainly tell, okay, but does it impact your ability to edit? Is your ability to have more family time? Is your ability to sit at home and your tee shirt and jeans and cut at home aside from driving an hour to work each way. Does that slight delay if there is any, is that worth that? And we find that more often than not. Yeah. Yeah. It's completely worth it. Absolutely. So this is, it's worth mentioning here that this is a, this is a departure from the traditional way that we are used to working with, uh, where, um, maybe if someone is asking to sort of temporarily or be able to work remotely with, uh, editing proxies or something, they might be able to Mount a remote storage device like across a VPN or something like that.
Speaker 0 34:33 So like I connect to my office, I Mount the storage and then I can get to editing just like I was there in the building. We're not talking about that. We're just talking about transmitting what you're seeing on the screen, what you're pressing on the keyboard, what you're mousing on the mouse, right. And then that's the connection. So I just want to make sure everybody understands that like this, this cloud and workflow is, it's almost like a misdirection of sorts, right? It's just different than the way we're used to seeing a computer setup essentially.
Speaker 1 34:58 And there are different paradigms. Uh, obviously the, the approach I'm talking about is something that I just call all in where everything is in the data center. And as you pointed out a few minutes ago, it's a remote KVM. It's a long HTMI cable. It's a long mouse cable, it's a long keyboard cable and you're just controlling that computer in that data center within, you know, a couple hundred miles. There are other solutions. Um, obviously avid has been doing this for years with a media composer, cloud remote, and don't hold me to that name because it keeps changing, but the, the ability to have an on premises avid interplay, I mean, avid media, central UX system that, uh, delivers proxies in real time from your work facility D delivers these proxies to where you're cutting remotely. That's a completely different paradigm. Adobe anywhere did it.
Speaker 1 35:47 And, uh, you know, now companies like, uh, IPV and our vital Bertelsmann are taking that same approach that avid uses and Adobe anywhere used to have and use that for premiere. So instead of having everything in the cloud, your, your housing, everything at your work, at the place where your bosses work, uh, and then streaming those proxies to where you're editing remotely. Uh, and so you're using your local machine, right? Right. So this is a situation where we're just using the cloud. Basically we're just using the internet part of the cloud, not necessarily the cloud compute and the storage and all that. It would be a transmission medium. Exactly. Exactly right. And I'm not saying one's better than the other. I think if you're looking to control your own costs, uh, then doing it on prem, uh, I think is a wonderful solution. I think obviously we talked about security and if you do it on prem, will you have to bolster security.
Speaker 1 36:41 It also means you have to bolster your up and download speeds your internet connection. It means you're gonna have to hire an it person that knows what they're doing. This isn't something an assistant editor can learn and be a CIS admin on something. You're looking at hiring a full time engineer to handle these sorts of things. So there's, there's a lot of considerations for doing it on prem versus having a managed service handle all that for you in the cloud. And then all you do is sit down and work. So I have a question about that because I totally agree with you and I'm totally with you on hiring someone. Um, what kind of qualifications would you expect that person to have? I mean, uh, a lot of, you know, a lot of larger organizations that are looking for, for someone to manage a networking or something like that would probably be looking for like maybe a Cisco certified engineer or something.
Speaker 1 37:28 I'm talking about somebody like that. Are we talking about somebody with a more broadcast background? I'm asking because, because we run into this in our industry a lot because as everything becomes more focused on IP and less on broadcast and IP and internet protocol, um, there's like, there's a gap there a lot of times and this sort of expertise, no, you're, you're completely right. Uh, in terms of avid, uh, avid obviously has been doing this longer than anyone else and, and they, uh, I don't wanna say stranglehold because, uh, the, with the price point of what, uh, interplay and now media central UX costs that it's not like there's 10,000 of these all around the world and you can find a job anywhere. Uh, but avid obviously has their own certification program. They've had their one Oh one and one 10 and two 10 classes where you can get the purple stamp of approval and the, and the purple tattoo on your back all day long.
Speaker 1 38:19 Um, but when we start getting into things like, uh, Adobe, uh, and our vital Bertelsmann and a IPV, that takes a different kind of beast. A creative can certainly learn it, but you have to have computer chops. And what I find typically is folks who are administering these on prem solutions, um, also have to know the it portion. So it's not just how does media central UX work and how do I assign a workspace and how do I sign permissions, but also how can I configure this VPN, you know, to handle these different clients and what's my aggregate throughput and how's that going to be, uh, set on this separate V LAN. There needs to be an it component to that as well. So I don't think there's one course you can go to college and take and come out ready to know how to do this, but it's gotta be someone who understands video workflows but, and certainly understands it.
Speaker 0 39:12 Absolutely. Yeah. And that's, we've talked about this on the show before actually somewhat recently about that sort of gap in the industry of, uh, we, we've kind of come to the conclusion that there needs to be like an educational program that people can learn some of this end because it seems very niche at this point in our history. But, uh, I just see it getting more and more needed as time goes on as these things get more and more sort of prevalent in the industry. And they will,
Speaker 1 39:35 You had mentioned a few minutes ago, Ben, you know, what, what do you come across that maybe you didn't know or what, uh, end users didn't know and we find in the creative industry that a lot of people like using Macs. I can't complain. I have a, I'm talking to you on a Mac. I have a hacking Tosh on my left. Uh, I love the Mac iOS. I love working in its ecosystem. Uh, and despite the fact that, uh, you know, the pricing of the new Mac pro is, is close to an HP. Um, when you start getting into cloud editing, there really isn't a Mac solution. And I know someone will say, well, there's MacStadium and there's all these other Mac data centers around the country. Yes. They, however, are not scalable in the way PCs are. Meaning I can't say give me another GPU.
Speaker 1 40:22 No, you have to use a whole new machine at that point because you can't configure max like that. Uh, or the Apple OSTP or I'm sorry, the Mac iOS, Apple EULA says that you're a, it is for, it's illegal for you to run a Mac iOS on that, on non-Apple hardware, right? So this means if you're working in the cloud, you're going to use windows or Linux. That's how it's going to be. And a lot of creatives balk at that. And I can't disagree if that's what you like to work in. That's what you'd like to work in. But you gotta admit, once you're inside media composer, once you're inside Adobe, once you're inside and these other VFX applications after effects blender, et cetera, it's the same interface on Mac or PC. And once you're in there, and I, and I hate to be the, well, if you don't like it, find another job because there aren't a lot of facilities that do that. But there is definitely a, it's not just you, mr or mrs creative. It's the rest of the company and our viability as a longterm player and staying, staying relevant. We have to make these fundamental financial moves. And if it means that you don't, you're no longer getting your doc, you're getting a start menu. That's how it's got to be.
Speaker 2 41:36 Yup. So that's interesting. That's a good segue into some of the finances of being able to do this versus you know, if I'm going to drop anywhere from 10 to $50,000 on a really high end workstation, what does it cost to run editing, editing an editorial in the cloud and you know, to do it on a yearly basis versus a machine.
Speaker 1 41:57 I can give you numbers. Would you like that? Do it? Okay. Um, what we find, uh, and I used the Royal we, what I find is that when you're spinning up things in the cloud, it's best for gigs. It's best for projects. If you're looking to say we're going to move to the cloud and it's going to be a permanent solution, that's when the numbers really, you really have to scrutinize the numbers because there comes a point in time where what you're paying in the cloud is going to equate to what you could purchase on prem. And then at the end of that term, three years, five years, whatever, you still have the hardware. So there's definitely a tipping point. But if we're looking into storage, and I'm saying this as of December, 2019 if we look into storage at the big three, so we're talking AWS, we're talking GCP, we're talking, well, Azure really doesn't have a three letter acronym, but if we're talking about Azure, those three, right?
Speaker 1 42:54 We're looking at about $150 a terabyte a month for edit worthy storage. So this means if you're editing video in a cloud, in the cloud, off a VM in a data center storage, that's going to give you hundreds of megabytes, a second reading, right for renders for editing video is going to be about $150 per terabyte per month just for the J bod. You then need to add a server. Anyone who's worked with Exxon is probably familiar with the fact that you have the J Bob, the just a bunch of drives the array and then you have a server that spits it out. The cloud dings you for both. And that's about 150 bucks as well. So you're looking at about $300 per terabyte per month for edit, where the storage in the cloud. When we then look at what is our compute time, okay?
Speaker 1 43:44 Uh, cloud providers traditionally charge you a per month in terms of storage, but when it comes to compute, they charge you per hour. So list price for a 16 core machine that is 2.3 gigahertz with 122 gigs of Ram and a 16 gig GPU that runs around. And I got to say around, because it varies about $2 an hour. So if you took that to up to a dollars an hour, multiply that by 40 hours in a week. Because I know creatives only work 40 hours a week, and then you multiply that by how many weeks in a month. That's going to give you a ballpark number as to what you can expect. What we found is that a lot of the fortune 100 fortune 500 companies, uh, when we, when we talked them, when bebop talks to them, they say, well, we're not going to pay your rates.
Speaker 1 44:35 We have a scratch. We have a sweet deal with Amazon. We're, we're paying a buck 50 an hour. Cool, great. You corporate America, you pay that fee that you've already negotiated and then you pay for the additional glue services that something like bebop would handle. And we find that that brings the cost down drastically because they're already getting those, those cost savings. Um, and to that end, uh, as I mentioned earlier, there's three big data centers. The, the three biggies. If we increase that to four, we get IBM and then we get what we call data lakes or private data centers where companies, well, I'm not going to name companies, but they're companies who are building one-off data centers that can drastically undercut all the biggies. Uh, and you can save a ton of money if you're located in that area.
Speaker 2 45:21 Hm. I was really hoping we could get through the episode without mentioning data Lake. Right. That's just, again, somebody else's storage kids. Somebody else's storage. Exactly right. And one other thing I thought, um, while listening to you talk, Michael, um, GCs, Google cloud service, right? Just in case somebody doesn't know the acronym. Yes. Uh, GCPS and GCP platform with cloud platform. Right, right. Thank you. VM virtual machine. Yeah. So that's that computer running somewhere else. That's not a real machine, right? I mean it is, but right. So it's a, it's an abstraction layer where you've got multiple operating systems acting like individual computers running inside a central computers platform so that you can have maybe eight machines running on one machine and maybe that one machine as 28 cores and you subdivide those by a certain number of workstations.
Speaker 1 46:21 I would encourage anyone who is still on the fence, will the cloud be there for media? There was a massive announcement, I think it was two months ago between Microsoft and avid and Disney, about a March to the cloud where all three are going to be working together on Microsoft Azure to start moving, uh, and uh, adding the cloud to collective media workflows. And, and what's important about that is once Disney starts to do that, that means the Disney tentacles and all the different companies that are supporting Disney are going to have to do that. And within about a month of that announcement, uh, we had calls from everyone doing QA and QC to people who are doing foreign language dubs and all their questions were, we have no idea how to approach this. Disney's already calling and saying, we're going to start delivering everything in the cloud. You need to work there. So,
Speaker 2 47:18 So talk us through some of that and how you coach others, right? Because clearly there are cloud buckets, which is a strange terminology to use, but those are the object based storage, right? But what we're talking about for editing, which is essentially somebody else's file server up there in the cloud that would be mounted on the virtual machine acting like a desktop, right?
Speaker 1 47:44 You're, you're completely right. Uh, just like when you're on premises, you have various tiers of storage and, and for those who aren't really, uh, we haven't spent much time in this. Don't worry, I've done enough for all of us. You have your tier zero storage, which is yo your fast SSD or NBME sitting in your computer. And then we have your tier one, which is usually a sand, maybe let's say high-performance NAS, but I'm not gonna get into that argument today. Tier one is usually a sand, then you have tier two as a NAS, and then tier three is your LTO, et cetera. Uh, and they all vary on, uh, accessibility and availability. When we start getting into the cloud, the same paradigm applies. We have the object storage, as you pointed out, and that's more of a tier two. Tier one is usually a file system.
Speaker 1 48:34 Uh, AWS calls it EBS and it's a, that's a way of delivering content fast. Uh, from spinning disc or SSDs without using the, uh, the underpinnings of object storage. Object storage is fantastic for resiliency but sucks for latency. And so what we're finding is that there are companies, uh, I won't name any of them, but there are companies who are saying, well, we can just put fast cash in front of the object storage and you can edit off that. And I tell people to run from that as fast as possible because you don't get the performance you do from a, your tier zero or tier one and you drop frames and you don't know why. Exactly. So we have a lot of clients who are saying, we're going to move everything to object storage and then we're going to selectively move things or sync things from the object storage to the fast editing volumes in the cloud. And we're going to do that in a methodical ways. So we're only spending the minimum that we need for the fast storage, but keeping everything else on slower and thus cheaper storage.
Speaker 2 49:38 Interesting. Sounds like a, it sounds like a great cost savings, but maybe, uh, at quite a cost of just efficiency and, uh, frustration of, of users potentially.
Speaker 1 49:49 Well, you know, just like we talked about having a full time it person, uh, when you're talking media management in the cloud, that's a little bit more tough because, uh, and I hate to sound like an old man here, but there's nothing for you to grasp onto. There's no LTO tape on a, on a shelf or an XD cam disc on the shelf for no spinning disc you can point to, it's all via a webpage. Uh, so I completely understand that that is weird and foreign to some people, but, uh, I think it's a necessary evil and something that we're going to have to make that move to be able to handle.
Speaker 2 50:22 Gotcha. So are you guys building any automation platforms to help people do this? You know, I'm just going to get into that. So I'm thinking like I'm a client, right? And I know, you know, maybe I'm a big fortune 100 company and I do some um, external com stuff and I only need to set up these edits with um, freelancers that I bring in. Maybe I've got one in house video guy, but I bring in a team of freelancers and that every few months I might have a big project for some product announcement or something. If I have something like a bebop account, how do I spin that back up again quickly so that I can get my folks editing quickly
Speaker 1 51:01 When it comes to bebop, bebop, certainly handle something like that where you use it as you need, you pay a subscription every month, you use it for as many workstations as you're paying for and then when you don't need it, you spin it down. And then we use a couple of different tools. We have our own rocket we call rocket transfer, which allows you to sync media from one location to another, whether it be on prem to cloud, cloud to cloud or cloud to on prem. And that certainly can be used when it's needed. But in terms of storage, that's obviously something you can't not use. So that's when we tend to either use rocket to move media, uh, move content to object storage or we talked to the end user about a ma'am a dam, uh, Pam and can that manage your media? And a lot of fortune 100 fortune 500 clients do have their own dams, ma'ams and PAMs and it's just how much has the cloud been integrated into those solutions.
Speaker 2 51:55 Gotcha. So with our media asset management platform, we might be able to build some fancy automations to say, let's spend something up and bebop and get back to work.
Speaker 1 52:05 Cool. Yeah. It's quite, and quite often because cloud is expensive for storage, but great for editorial, a lot of ma'ams dams and Pam's will generate proxies, automatically push those proxies up to the cloud, uh, to your object storage. And then when it's time for the editors to edit, it'll selectively move it to the EBS or fast storage if you're on Amazon, obviously. Uh, and then when you're done, it moves everything back. So it keeps your fast storage at a minimum. Uh, it keeps your costs down. Uh, and a lot of times these asset management systems are tracking all that media in real time. So you have an on prem solution that's tracking all that as opposed to something esoterically in the cloud.
Speaker 2 52:42 Cool. And EBS elastic block storage, right? Versus something like what is it, the elastic file system, EFS. And if we're talking about uncle Jeff's magic buckets,
Speaker 1 52:54 Who's Jeff and why does he have a bucket? He's got all the buckets, got all the buckets, all the blankets. I like it. I think if you were to take a look at pricing, if you look at pricing now for storage, you'll see that it's, I don't want to say stabilize for the past couple of years, but uh, the storage cost per gigabyte cost per terabyte has kind of stabilized a little bit. And I think we're going to start to see that dropping probably mid to late next year as more, I'm going to say it, data lakes pop up and these, these private centers pop up because they're able to undercut. If you looked at Backblaze for example, they don't do any compute. It's all storage and I think they're what a quarter of the cost of I think AWS or GCs or or whatnot. The, the, the, the pricing is so inexpensive so we're going to start to see that happen a lot more.
Speaker 2 53:44 They're not charging you in this same way for egress that some of the others are the same thing with wasabi as well. Those are a couple brands that people really like. Um, because of their, you know, their billing models are very different than some of the traditional cloud vendors. The big three as we mentioned earlier.
Speaker 1 54:02 And another point to bring up in this divergence kind of, but in my mind had been, I'm keeping a continually go over something you brought up earlier, which is what are folks not realize or know, what have they not thought of? I mentioned earlier the concept of latency and you know, we, we can do it faster and you won't notice it. And, and I realized I should probably put a little asterisk next to that. Um, if you look at the speed of light or try to look at the speed of light as it shoots across the country. Um, if you are in New York, let's say, and your trying to edit with media that's sitting in LA, that is in increased latency, that's going to be 80 milliseconds, give or take. And when you add 80 milliseconds on top of, uh, what your computer is doing in terms of processing the cloud is doing in terms of processing, that's when you may start to hit issues.
Speaker 1 54:52 Um, that's why trying to farm out editing overseas is very difficult because your media is here and that means you have to push all your cloud media overseas and then sync up between the two places. So when you start looking at decentralizing and having people all around the world edit, there comes a point in time where you say, okay, I need to have a co-location of data centers. I need to have media in a bucket maybe between the two. So sitting in the middle of the U S so it's equal latency for both people in LA and New York or we're going to replicate things. And I can give you a great example of how that worked. We were working with a client who had the, uh, shall we say lead edit in LA. Uh, and the assistant was out in the Philippines, the, there's no data center in the Philippines, so we had to spin up a data center in Singapore. So the editor would take all the raw content in the United States, do a selects pass, then media manage just that select pass to the data center in Singapore, which the editor and the Philippines will then edit and then return the edit list back and they would reconfirm so it can completely be done. You just have to worry about what the latency is in each location.
Speaker 2 56:04 Right. And make sure you've got wicked good file acceleration going all over the world. Yes. Right, right. Yeah, that was a great example of how a workflow like that could happen.
Speaker 1 56:13 I can give you an even cooler workflow and this is a client that I can actually name because they just got a spread in I think nerd weekly or something. I can't remember what the publication was. But uh, in HRA, the national hot rod association, they have races all around the country and they have shooters that are going out and recording all these races. They're then uploading that content using Sony C. Uh, so when you see is the asset management system that Sony has, which is all in the cloud, they upload that via Sony C, Sony C, then geo locates where that media needs to be, drops it in an archive bucket, but also they have a panel, uh, that the editors out here in LA can load up in premier, pulled down the clips and keep working with them and then deliver everything in the cloud. So the physical hard drives don't have to be swapped. The graphics and video people are always accessing the same content from the same asset management system and it's being tracked the entire time.
Speaker 0 57:08 Nice. Yeah, that sounds really cool. It is. Yeah. Yeah. I think we've taken enough of Michael's time. There you go. I'd like to ask you a few questions that we have. So, uh, I have five depending like it strikes me that a question a lot of people would have would be, so can I edit a video on my laptop over a wifi connection?
Speaker 1 57:31 Yes. And let me, let me explain in terms of Washington supply their terms and conditions, because you're editing eight K great. If you're editing, and I'm not saying VFX, if you're editing, are you at again an AK display? No. So you're already seeing it in a scaled version. So if you're doing this in the cloud, that's going to apply as well. Most people in the cloud work with either HD or 4k gooeys so already you're only seeing a quarter or half. So sure, you can certainly do that if it's running at 30 or 60 frames. If you're looking at a premiere interface, you can certainly see 30 or 60 frames a second at the resolution in that preview monitor. My concern is how long did it take you to upload that at cave file? Right. And how much you paid for it, right? Couldn't you accomplish the same thing by creating an HD proxy, cut that proxy and then download the EDL or cut list and reconfirmed the AK?
Speaker 2 58:27 Yeah, and it's like you mentioned earlier, right? Maybe the first step in that might be uploading the high res original and migrating that over to something like glacier where it's going to be safe as houses because you know, everybody has a vested interest in maintaining the best quality and making sure that those files are guarded and hopefully geographically distributed across multiple data centers. But you want to create that low Rez HD proxy that's easy to stream and it doesn't take too much out of your wallet.
Speaker 1 58:59 And that that brings up a good point and even more robust workflow is uploading the AK, having a transcoder in the cloud, then create your proxy and then move the AK elsewhere. What I should also mention is that any remote editing protocol worth its salt isn't going to try and deliver an AK payload, uh, while streaming. They're only going to change the pixels that have changed from one frame to another. So you're never playing full AK resolution, uh, down the pipe to your computer. It's always playing what's visible on screen and what's changing from frame to frame.
Speaker 0 59:34 All right, awesome. Awesome answer. Question number two, the name bebop. Where did that come from?
Speaker 1 59:40 Uh, one of our co founders, uh, actually is a gifted guitar player and he's into jazz. Uh, and so, uh, bebop was kind of named for that. Also, if you look up the definition of bebop, it's improvisational. And I think when you're working in the cloud, you have to be nimble. You have to be able to improvise on the fly because technology is always changing.
Speaker 0 00:00 I love that answer. I love that whole answer. That's awesome. So next question. Question number three, what goes into a five things episode? And I already know the answer to this.
Speaker 1 00:11 I think there's an episode of five things about what goes into a final episode that's really awesome. But Hey, we've got you here with us. So yeah, I was hard up for material that month. Uh, uh, it's, it's approximately 40 hours per episode and a lot of that's me writing it. That's then me, uh, uh, you know, sitting on it for a day and then going back and checking my zeros and ones. I then if you've noticed, I do a lot of cutaways to movies or shows or, or things that I like, and I then have to find out is there a way I can weasel in the word sand as a joke and then find a movie clip where someone says the word sand. So there's some investigative journalism to find those clips. I then have to shoot that, uh, which I do and I'd explain what cameras are using, what lights I use and what sound I use. I then cut that together. I then do a color pass. Uh, and then I have a myriad of exports, uh, because I do closed captioning for everything. I like to make sure that I create streaming versions of different platforms. I have a Roku channel, so I have to create an output for Roku. So it's tough.
Speaker 0 01:19 There's a five things episode on that too. Yes, there is. That's awesome. Great. Um, yeah. And you said investigative journalism, which is something that I consider all of us here in a way where we also kind of have to put the investigative journalist hat on when we're trying to learn about how people work because you've got to ask all kinds of interrogative questions. You know, it's an audit audit. Exactly, exactly. So it's a, it's also a therapy session too. There's, you know, um, okay. Uh, next one. Next one is for Ben.
Speaker 1 01:51 Yeah. Yeah. So on your website you've got some of the interesting creative work that you've done and one of the things I noticed on there were three Slayer videos. That's pretty awesome. How did that happen? Uh, yeah, that, that was very interesting. As I mentioned, I kind of transitioned from, uh, being a full time creative to being more technical. And there's an editor, a very talented editor here in LA, uh, by the name of ed marks. And ed marks is also Chicago guy. So we kind of bonded over Italian beef and deep dish pizza. And he knew that I used to do audio and he said, Hey, I have this, a project coming up and it's a Slayer and it's going to be a trilogy. And working with BJ McDonnell who has done some fantastic stuff. Uh, I did the cut the first one, uh, of the music video, which is kind of the bookends, shall we say, because of the, the central portion of the video is obviously the music and then there's a story that goes through all of them.
Speaker 1 02:47 Uh, and so yeah, I did the first one and they didn't hate it. And so the second and third one I did as well. And recently that was all wrapped up with a, an ending piece. So now it's like a final concert film. And that was released not too long ago, so it was received real well and it was, uh, it was, I like to cut an audio project a year just to see how bad my hearing has gotten and to make sure my chops are still there and they didn't hate it. So I guess I'm okay.
Speaker 0 03:16 Awesome. That's awesome. Yeah, I certainly enjoyed it. It brought me back to the days of my heavy metal youth Slayer was actually the pit, the first pit I was ever in, which is a good memory for me. I'm glad I could assist. Yay. Awesome. So last question as a fellow glasses where I have noticed that you have some very unique glasses frames and I would like to know what brand they are.
Speaker 1 03:40 That's a real good question. Uh, they, they're called, uh, Mo M with an O and like a, uh, accent Mark above it. Um, lot. Yeah, they're there. I honestly, uh, and, and, and you'll probably get a kick out of this as, as you look at my previous episodes and you'll see that I went for the traditional white guy, black nerd frame, and I realized a, they didn't step in my face real well. And second of all, I look like everybody else. So I went to like, uh, no kidding. Three different eyewear stores in LA and happened to find this at a place called Linden optometry in LA. And insurance covered them too. Even better.
Speaker 0 04:22 Yeah, even better. That's always a bonus. So I think they were 150 bucks maybe. That's great. Yeah, they're, they're the, uh, four one, five M if you want to try and look them up online. Okay. Yeah. I went into a designer frame store once and quickly realized that I couldn't afford anything and none of it was covered by my insurance, but they had some really cool stuff in there. I mean, you know, and, and I actually had run into a friend and I looked at her glasses and I was like, I know where you got those. And she was like, Oh yeah, yeah, I got them. They're awesome. Well, this has been great. Michael, thank you so much for joining us today on the workflow show.
Speaker 1 05:00 Thank you so much for inviting me and letting me talk tech with you too. Thank you.
Speaker 0 05:04 Absolutely. We really enjoyed having you. I would also like to thank my cohost Ben Kilburg, senior solutions architect here at Chesa for his expertise. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. We hope you like listening the podcast as much as we enjoy creating it. If you have any questions or concerns or stories about media, asset management, cloud storage, cloud workflows, media infrastructure integrations, or any of that technology, we would love to hear from you. So email us at workflow show at <inaudible> dot com and as always, you can visit our website at any time. chessa.com the workflow show is produced at the Chestnut church, our home office in Baltimore, Maryland. The show is co-produced by my cohost, Ben Kilburg and Chestnut sales operations manager, Jessica Matha. Thanks for listening. I'm Jason Wetstone.
