Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00 Welcome to the workflow show. This is episode number 35 and I'm your host Nick gold. We are recording here in the podcasting studio of Chesapeake systems, global headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland. And today our subject is the evolution of training and we have Chesapeake systems own Lewis Sierra with us in the studio. Hello Louis. Hello, Nick and Louis. You have now been a trainer with Chesapeake systems on two occasions that were separated by a couple of years, correct? That's correct. I have been. And when you first were our trainer, gosh, do you even remember how many years ago that was now to have to be at least 10 years ago. Yeah. Or at least when it began, it began, I'm sorry. Yeah, it did began about 10 years ago and things have changed in what our training program really even consists of. When we first started training, we were very focused on, sometimes it was onsite, but it was often out of our classroom facility here in Baltimore.
Speaker 0 01:04 Whether it was our old office cause we weren't at the church yet. That's correct. And the focus at the time largely was client side creative applications. We, for instance, I still remember we're doing a lot of cross training to get avid editors over to the final cut ecosystem. Yes. And there was also a little bit of focus on other client side applications. It could have been some color work, um, using a, well gosh that was when people were using apples. Uh, what was it called? Motion motion and color had just came out and uh, yeah, it was very application specific. That's right. And at the time going back then, there still were a lot of editors out there getting familiar with a new suite that was going to be kind of their main set of applications to do video editing and post production. Um, it's changed a little, hasn't it?
Speaker 0 02:03 And you've been back now for, what's it been almost a year now? Yes, a little over a year now. Our focus has just changed. We've again, evolved in what our focus of training is. First of all. We don't really do much in the classroom at this point, do we? That's correct. Yeah. The training has, has changed now and overall because what happened, I think between the first time you were with Chesapeake and now this, this, this second go around, is that many other options for training emerged for areas that are kind of specific to the client side applications, right? We've got lynda.com people just go to YouTube to search for how do I do this in after effects. Um, they, you know, uh, might get one of a hundred books on, you know, how to edit in premiere pro or whatever. Right. That we, we had a difficult time, frankly supporting on our ongoing training when it came to the client side application suite.
Speaker 0 03:07 Yeah, I got democratized. Um, autocross which is a good thing. I think it made it available for everyone and gave many companies the ability to hire many different types of editors. That's right. And, and you know, what we realized, however, was that very much the environments that we cater to still have training needs. Um, they've just changed a little bit, right? Yes. The need is different. I just mentioned you have a bigger pool of editors but you don't have the accent, that same skillset across, especially when it comes to workflow. So yes, workflow. So you know, a Chesapeake for many years we have put in kind of the shared resources that many post production environments rely on. Right? That's correct. We've been doing shared storage for forever. We have been doing media asset management and workflow automation, but I get, I really feel like heck, even six, seven years ago we had to kind of even still be telling people what a ma'am was.
Speaker 0 04:15 Something really started to change over the last five years. A lot of people either have one now or very much know where they need one. They know they need to kinda use a database to, that's correct. It's been a lot of people I've had have seen the need to implement that. They've seen the light, they have facts in the light and thing is the other thing that has changed is they have found that there needs to be collaboration going on. That's the word, right? Because I mean the moment you give an entire group of 50 or a hundred people the same hard drive that they're all connected to, correct. It's no longer really feasible for everyone to have their own way of organizing media data, naming conventions, folder, hierarchy conventions. Right? That's right. And then especially if you have a man and you know, okay, we need a certain class of users or all of our users to be tagging stuff, right?
Speaker 0 05:11 Well they have to follow the conventions, right? And that thing that, that uh, changing the industry is they have to go back to get archive footage, something for many years ago and now you're trying to bring in a company that will swallow other companies. They had to figure all they, they happened to have a library of, of a lot of media. And I'm not, we used to bring that media in, but you can't just bring in the media now you have made a data attached to it and many times you have to do that manually. So sometimes it's really a matter of teaching people about the conventions that your organization, your company, or even your just your work group uses to keep things organized. The conventions of the workflow itself. Where do we put things? Who's going to touch it at what points of the post production process?
Speaker 0 05:58 Yeah, that's correct. Who on the team does the archiving or is that fully automated? Who on the team is going to do the restore from the archive? If you need to pull back against something, uh, you know, archival material wise that you're reutilizing right. You have to have, uh, some kind of standard. Well, and that's the thing, right? And, and interestingly, despite all of the evolution that the industry has gone through, the technologies have gone through the fact that again, as you said, a lot of these collaborative technologies like shared storage or media asset management or even, you know, back end things like a server based transcoder or again, an archive system that a wide number of people can peer into. Even though those tools are out there much more, I continually get the feeling that a lot of organizations still haven't kind of fully adapted to getting their teams in that collaborative spirit of learning.
Speaker 0 06:53 This is how we use this thing. It's not everyone for themselves anymore. Right? That's correct. And the thing is, the issue with that that comes with that is the fact that, um, you have many different people doing their own workflows as you just mentioned. And that creates a habit, especially when it comes to media space or hard drive space or whatever have you. And things need to be organized and that's where it bites them when that's not put into place. So this is the premise of today's conversation. And let me go back and rewind a little bit. Um, you had a break for, gosh, what was it, probably about five years between your first time at Chesapeake and this second round. Correct. And in that time you continued to be involved with creative projects. You know, you been an editor, you've been a colorist, you've worked in the creative realms.
Speaker 0 07:47 Um, and then we brought you back in again to focus more on the workflow training side of things. What had you observed in that kind of time away from the Chesapeake family, if you will, um, that you started to see out there that you kind of reincorporated into your training repertoire. Were there any experiences that that kind of started to plant some seeds about the needs you were identifying that organization? Yes, yes I did. I, I saw, especially when, um, I'll get involved in production. And once I started seeing that, I started seeing that production impulse production sort of started coming together and therefore coming back to being able to have the proper Meda data put in there and all of that came in place and it will start going hand in hand. So I started seeing that that issue, especially in a, again, I hate to repeat myself, but again, the space and it sounds like it sounds like you know, star Trek in the space, the final frontier, but it is in fact everyone runs into that issue where they're always running out of space and they all have to try to figure out why you have, many times we have editors or even producers where bring in something in the improper place, although duplicated or whatever.
Speaker 0 08:59 Have you. So there again that we have the lack of training, what you need that in order to just maintain some kind of workflow where you minimize the amount of space that you've been that's been utilized. Well, you know, one of the other things that really has evolved over these last 10 years, and I think what you're talking about is that as the file based workflows completely took over, right? People aren't shooting videotapes anymore. Correct. The turnaround with which you could feed materials from production into host. I mean these days you've got your file transfer tools, the accelerators you, you might have production that is, you know, directly tethered, you know, via studio and direct, you know, to disc recording. I mean, people can actually be editing the video as it's still coming in. Yes. I was about to mention them that I've, I've been in instances where, um, you have footage being brought in and the demand is there to have some kind of live feed while actually live color grading the footage.
Speaker 0 10:05 And then there's other things too, right? Like these days, again, compared to a decade ago, internet video is so much bigger now whether you know, you're shooting a sport live or whatever it might be, or some event, you might have a team of editors who are just as an event is occurring chopping things up and posting them on social or whatever. Oh, here's a little clip of the award show. Here's a clip from the game while the game is still going on. Right. But ideally not. The thing is you have to keep in mind that that is, if everything's going perfectly well, if you have different types of frame rates coming in, what kind of code that you're using, so on and so forth, that is a, you know, kind of a learning process and you don't want to do the learning process while you're trying to do a live feed.
Speaker 0 10:51 So they're going to, going back to the training, you want to have a standard so everyone on board knows exactly what works best and you know, for that particular workflow and then you can deliver. So I think, uh, that I think has contributed to a little bit of the chaos on the ground that you speak to is the number of choices people have in their workflow. I'll, I'll throw a couple of examples out there. You might have these days a camera that shoots 4k, but you could also throw it into HD mode. And in either of those modes you might have different bit rate choices. You might even have whole different codecs that the camera just by itself supports. You might have some environments that still use a camera, but use the uncompressed output and feed into something like, you know, a Ninja or an Aja box to do a record as pro Rez versus the camera native codec.
Speaker 0 11:48 There's just so many choices. Even with a single camera these days, you end up with, if there isn't a cohesiveness to the workflow and there aren't standards and practices in place, correct. All of this different footage that doesn't necessarily play well in the post-process, or you might end up with an archive that has 50 different types of things in it, which again, does not contribute to a cohesiveness in reutilizing that content. You might say, Oh, we designed a sand to work with this flavor of HD and assuming that X number of editors are each, you know, using this many streams at once and we have this many editors going at the same time, right. And this frame rate at this, and there's some DP, you know, who thinks they're Francis Ford Coppola or something. It's like, Oh, you know, I gotta be shooting my stuff in the highest bid type of pay.
Speaker 0 12:44 You know, they always just go to like turning it up to the max, right? They, they, they learned post production from spinal tap. They just want to turn everything to 11 right? That's correct. And you know, there can be reasons for wanting to maximize the quality you're capturing footage at especially these days. You know, broadcast obviously hasn't gone full 4k yet, but people know that they might want a future proof. But then again you run into these situations where there isn't a cohesiveness of workflow. Again, I go standards and practices and so one organization has all this stuff going on and I think this is where we found we had a need to bring a trainer back into the organization, correct? That's correct. Because what you are often training on is the development of both format and workflow standards and practices and studying everything that happens from the very beginning to the end.
Speaker 0 13:41 So going through the entire process, making certain that all teams on the stand, everything that's going through and because many times you have departments going not against each other, but they don't understand what each other one coming from. So production doesn't understand pulse production. Then you have the it department as well. So you have the constant battle. You know, we, it says no, you can't bring that much space here. You can move these folders here, create this old whichever way you want. Then you have pulse production that kind of understands that, but they just want to bring you all as much medias and they want to keep everything, everything I know. And then you have the producers who really don't care. Yeah. Out of their hands. I just want to have everything. Everything needs to be there. And the thing is then they want to recall anything.
Speaker 0 14:29 Maybe a year later, I remember when we did that shoot at, you know, such and such date or whatever and now you have to make sure that whatever made a data was put in there and heaven forbid it was not, they wanted to be able to retrieve that and they want to be treated that quickly. And that's something that you need to have in place before that moment actually happens, which is what Chesapeake systems comes in because we specialize in that and making sure that workflow is put in place where we are able to recall anything. We're going to make certain that that is there. So one of the things, I think that's the interesting challenge that we sometimes run into, and I'd love to hear just again don't name any names, but you can speak to some experiences, is we will come in and often tell people guys, there's just too much of variety in the way that people are doing things.
Speaker 0 15:15 Again, could be a shop that you know, does, you know, five shoots a day and for no clear reason they're getting five formats of video back from these five different shoots. That's correct. Or they might subcontract, they might have, you know, freelance crews that are doing shooting and I've run into big, big shops that they're like, Oh yeah, we just never really know what we're going to come back with or what's going to be provided. You know, you've, I'm sure you've heard this one where we will go in, we're doing a workflow evaluation. Maybe we're trying to plan what kind of a storage system someone needs, how big an archive needs to be, how fast these things need to be, right? And we say, okay, what formats do you use? And have you heard this one? Oh, if you can think of it, we get it.
Speaker 0 16:08 That's true. But then again, we come back at them and ask them why that is. Well, and, and you know what I think, and this, I think we're getting to this tension that we experience, which is that we know that our clients are highly creative people. Right? And we know that creative people often feel that they can be the most creative when they are not constrained. Right? That's correct. And they don't want to be told you have to adhere to these technical practices in order for you to be useful to us. Because, I don't know, I just feel like we get this pushback when we say anything that a, a true creative might interpret as clamping down their creative possibilities. Right? Right. But now we have taken the approach where when we go in for a consultation or anything like that consultancy, we'll go ahead and let them know that this will speed up their process and we, we made, we made it.
Speaker 0 17:13 We make certain that they see the advantage of that. So not to make it seem like they were trying to tell them what to do and restrain their, the kind of work that they want to do. And usually once you sh you see you, they see the chronic quality they get and to speed, then they walk them it. Well, exactly because I think what some of this training entails is reminding people that you know, you, it may look like on paper we're giving you less choices, but frankly it's like a pretty technical little background thing that really shouldn't affect your ability. Well go into your point of less choices. I like to think of as giving them the best choices. Well, and exactly. It's almost like we're curating an environment that allows them to effectively use the infrastructure that they've made investments in. Right? Because again, the moment someone just starts turning in for CAG instead of HD, that requires four times the storage space on average, you know, if you're using the same Kodak, but just going from HD to forecasts, okay, four times as much space, four times as much bandwidth is required between, you know, the edit workstation in the sand or the storage system or the storage system in general, and now suddenly you're getting dropped frames left and right.
Speaker 0 18:30 Are you getting pinwheels are you getting this right? And then they start asking why that is and what I think, would you agree that a training challenge is often reminding the creatives that if they don't adhere to these practices, things that are even more annoying than sticking to a codec start to happen, which really get in the way of their creative. Right? And then so you let, I hate to say consequences, but you know, that's not a word we want to use, but you, you, you show them that different, uh, results. Well, you know it's interesting because I'm thinking back to how many times, you know, someone might say something like the S the storage isn't working and you look at it and then you start to realize, Oh that's because the storage system was designed to accommodate this many users, this many streams in this format.
Speaker 0 19:21 And somehow those standards just slipped over time. No one was enforcing them. That sand is now just not designed to keep up with that bandwidth. And, and the creatives don't necessarily know that there was a direct connection between formats changing and now their day to day experience of using say shared storage, not being supportive of them just being able to get their work done. Right? That's correct. So when you go in and you start to establish a rapport with a team and you have to kind of convince them that there is indeed a utility to um, adhering to these practices, who are the stakeholders in these organizations that you get immediate buy in from? Does management understand the need to do these things? Are they also sometimes resistant to that? Sometimes management is resistant. Um, cause it has to be justified to them at some points in time.
Speaker 0 20:24 Usually middle management is the ones that, that that fall that those procedures and pulse production managers come in and they're pretty open to it. But again, you have to show them what, but what the benefits will be. Well I think a lot of the time those people who's kind of sit between executive management and the creative staff on the ground in the trenches, if you will, they don't want to alienate those creative users that they interface with that is correct all day long, all night long, all weekend long. And they also know sometimes they're competing for good editors and they want to create environments that are fun and it doesn't seem like they're going to school. It seems like there's doing some cool editing job in the media industry and they don't want to be like, Oh we're the shop where everyone just is adhering to, you know, a very standard cookie cutter way of doing everything.
Speaker 0 21:19 Cause you know, it, it just, again, it feels like school and they feel like it's going to stifle their, their, um, their creativity. So do you ever have to find yourself reminding even more like upper management? Like guys, if you don't adhere to these standards, you're gonna have to spend a lot more money on a shared storage system to accommodate these formats, which has, which has happened and I have seen that happen where then they just, you just keep hearing them saying, Oh we need more space or more bandwidth. And you've tried to figure out, well why in the world is that we optimized this for you? And, but just as you said that once they go out of that standard, now you, you know, you've seen the different results. So what is the process by which we're doing this? Cause again, most of the training we do now is onsite.
Speaker 0 22:09 You tend to kind of embed with these organizations. What does that look like? Is it rigid training classes? Is it one on one instruction? Is it all of the above? I mean, give me, give me some examples from some of the more recent engagements. Live in bed inside there. I'll take a look at all the workflow. I'll have a conversation with all the users as well and the decision makers at different points and then gathered the information and then um, yeah we'll get in there, try to see what their workflow is and ask them. I say, well if you did this will just be any better for you. Does that work better for you if you haven't entered the Meda that at this point in time, anything that will not get in the way of the creativity. And usually they'll, they'll see what the benefit is and then we drop the cut documentation from that, submit that and they'll say, okay, yeah this, this, this is great.
Speaker 0 23:01 You know, we would take it from there. So I want to talk more about documentation. In fact, you thought it was perfect segue cause that was literally the next thing I wanted to talk about. We often too, I think are sometimes surprised, especially kind of, and sometimes even with our existing clientele, but, but especially when we're coming into a new environment and we might say, okay, do you have any of your processes documented? And we might ask questions about how they onboard people or if they rely heavily on freelancers, you know, uh, what resources do you make available to your freelancers so they can quickly kind of get schooled on the way we do things. Do you find a lot of environments kind of throw up their hands and say, yeah, the typical answer is usually no, we just don't have that. Oh, there'll be some something to the effect of, Oh, well we used to have it a few years ago and then as time went on, we no longer upkeep it and whatever the case is.
Speaker 0 24:01 Um, and, and that's, that's why it has come to, but yeah, typically the answer is no. Now it's, it strikes me that the kind of documentation we would want to generate is almost like a little primmer. Right? A little a summary of, you know, when we're doing this type of project out of this studio, we use these formats. You set your camera up in this way, so it's generating these types of files and then you know, these people ingest them say either into the ma'am directly or into premiere, like even though steps aren't on a piece of paper for someone to read through. That's correct. It's, it's stuck in people's heads and occasionally on people's heads. Well, exactly. You do have you do you have your typical Renegade that'll forgive, just forego all that and then they'll just drop everything to the local drive thinking, thinking in their minds that that's going to be faster, but once they try to ingest or export out of that, then they get, that's when they hit stone.
Speaker 0 25:02 It's like, why is this taking two days where they would have use demand or the dam then that would have been ours. Do you think there is a hole in the way still, even in the year in 2018 2019 which we're now in that let's say, you know, someone goes to school to learn to be an editor. They're definitely, you know, learning how to edit. There may be learning the Adobe suite or pieces of the Adobe suite. It strikes me that at this era when in many environments someone is going to be an editor in, there's these other systems, they're not being trained in school necessarily on those kinds of systems, right? That's correct. That's correct. So the Meda data tagging, anything like that, I mean many exist and they have no clue. Many schools with even heavy calm and video programs don't necessarily have a ma'am that a student's ever even exposed to.
Speaker 0 25:56 Right? Yeah, that's correct. So sometimes when you're training with one of these say editors or post-production work group, um, do you find still even in this era that, that some people in that group haven't ever seen these things? Literally let them know what D a M stands for? M a M stands for, so they might not have ever seen this. They've never seen that kind of workflow put in place. They really have not because they've been trapped in desktop workstation mode or laptop. But like again, the things on, on the client side, as we say, the suite of programs they use to do these tasks but not the backend systems they have to interface with when they're going into a larger environment. That's correct. What do you experience when someone is getting educated into these types of backend platforms who hasn't been exposed before? Maybe a younger editor, maybe they're in their early to mid twenties, they're more recently out of school.
Speaker 0 26:51 This might be their first or second real editing gig in a real media shop. Do they tend to like these tools? Are they interested in them? Are they fascinated by them? Is it a bore? Is it a drag? Is it just more boring stuff to do that gets in the way of doing the fun part of the day? Typically at the very beginning, they do give you a little bit of a pushback. Uh, but once they see the benefit of it, then they welcome it. Well, one of the things I've always been curious about, I'd love to get your opinion on is that, you know, I look at a program like Adobe premiere pro or DaVinci resolve, and those are very complex programs. There's a lot of complexity to the editing options, the creative options, there's a million menus, there's a million settings, pages, there's a lot of this stuff.
Speaker 0 27:40 And yet your average editor, you know, doesn't bat an eyelash at sitting in front of a program with that level of complexity every day. Whereas your average media asset management platform, even if it's like integrated with other systems like trans coders and archive and you know, media supply chain stuff or whatever, like let's be honest, those are not nearly as complicated as your average nonlinear editor. That is true. So do you find that once people realize this is actually a really simple, you know, other piece of software you're going to have to learn, but it's by the way, not even close to as complex as that other main thing that you're in front of all day. They warm up to it a little bit. Like maybe they think the burden's going to be heavier than it actually ends up being, right? They, they, they typically, um, welcoming, especially if if it's integrated into the application that they're utilizing.
Speaker 0 28:37 So if you have a, if the speak about a premiere for now, if you have a premiere panel, that's usually a plus for them because it keeps users in the premiere environment and they now have just a little window that's an interface into the mat. You may see them more and more companies are doing that where they're implementing themselves into the premiere panels themselves, creating panels for the application. So people do not have to step out to another separate application. And usually that, that makes them more welcome to them. Oh, we've noticed this definitely. Whereas you know, some ma'ams have better panels than the other ones or just more mature or just more streamlined and, and again, if you can keep that user really sitting in say premiere but still get a little extra capability to find, you know, stuff out of a huge archive that actually, again they realized I think speeds on the creative.
Speaker 0 29:27 So user interface is very important. It's very important. So UI development can make or break a company nowadays. Well you know, it's funny you say that because again I think some of the, the systems vendors that we've dealt with who really work closely with creatives or have done that for many years, they've worked with production, they've worked with postproduction, they've worked with the supervisors. They know what I guess you could say the right level of involvement that they can reasonably expect of a post-production user in the ma'am is, you know, they don't want to say, Oh of course we support versioning, here's the 18 steps you have to go through to do checkout and check in. And things are locked. And like, I think with editors, like if you're getting in the way of the speediness of them turning around an edit, they're just going to dismiss it.
Speaker 0 30:21 So if you can kind of show them some extra power they're going to get, but it's really like as few extra keystrokes as possible to get it, you're going to be more embraced, right? It is. Yeah. The whole team will come on board much, much quicker. And I think this is something we would instill in a lot of our listeners to pay attention to. If you're evaluating a platform, I mean, again, we, we've always been very, I guess you could say heterogeneous in the platforms, right? Because we don't have just a mem vendor we work with. We have several, we don't have just one shared storage system or one archive system or one trans code system. You know, we always want to be, I think the outfit that has multiple options, but that means I think when we're evaluating an environment and even coming up with what proposals we're going to offer, we and our clients need to be very realistic about what is asking the right amount of their users, what's asking too much of the users.
Speaker 0 31:19 Again, as far as the investment of time and energy into learning or even just using this thing might be easy, but if it's like eight extra steps that they do have to do 400 times a day versus four extra steps that they have to do 400 times a day, they're going to be more likely to embrace the one that takes less steps. Right? That's correct. Cause we've run into this, I mean, again, not naming names, but platforms that have really cool features that when the kind of described people like, Ooh, ah, well they really do that, but they don't necessarily think through whether that's something that truly will be embraced by the users. Right. But is it asking too much of them? You have to be realistic about what your users are going to tolerate. Right? That's correct. And, and, and in some instances they're, sometimes they're afraid of what the users will say.
Speaker 0 32:21 Oh, how will they will embrace it or not embrace it? It's funny, I, um, we had the last conversation on the last workflow show, um, with, uh, Emily hops in Hill from Ooyala, uh, on the Ooyala flex team. And it was, she had a very interesting piece of feedback. Um, she came from the software development world more around, you know, just traditional enterprise software platforms. It could be for the banking industry and you know, databases that do all this workflow stuff, but again, for corporate needs. And she said, one of the things that, you know, did kind of surprise her when she started working more in the media world is how much more attentive the users were to how would they use a system? What do you run into with media people? I mean, they, they're, they're, they're much more fixated on how a tool gets used, right?
Speaker 0 33:12 Yeah, yeah. Are the windows dynamic? Can you change the size? Can I change the font? Can I change colors and so on and so forth. So I like how scrolling works versus, I mean that's, can I use hot keys? Yeah, keyboard shortcuts. Can I crew, can I customize it in any way? What do you think, again, you're so embedded in these environments, what do you think the pressures in the media industry are that make the average media user much more fixated on how a tool works than in other industries? Is that because they just don't have the time for a few extra mass clicks 400 times a day? Like why is the average creative much more tuned to how the tool works? That is true. I think they have a lot of pressure trying to meet some kind of fixated timeframe in their minds, whether it's given to them or not.
Speaker 0 34:06 And that's the very deadline oriented industry. It is, right. That's what I was about to say. That's what it has turned into today. But again, they have that embedded in them. Even if you tell them, you know, you have a few days full days and their mind is like, no, this has to be done tomorrow because someone else can have this project done by tomorrow. And so whatever I'm working on will be old news. We, uh, I want to, but before we wrap up, talk just about one more area, which is the kind of before and after. Um, I'd like again, just think of some environments you've been in where there was a little, let's call it workflow chaos or format chaos and you've gone in and we've done our thing and it's a combination of, again, a group level training. You know, it's usually on site one-on-one, the generation of documentation and, and, and actual curriculum and resources for people to kind of be able to go to and look at and say, Oh, this is how I'm supposed to do these things.
Speaker 0 35:09 What have you noticed in the environments that we've taken them through those processes? Uh, just, you know, the before and the after. Well, what I have seen from their past documentation, if, if, if any, if any has been there. It wasn't user friendly, so it was someone or people or maybe a group that created that documented documentation or the training and the trainer or the trainees had nothing in common with them that couldn't absorb anything that was saying means set to them. And that's the issue that I've seen with that. Um, so I will tell them, you know, when I, when I consult with them, I will see what, and I will, I would say, look, I followed it step by step and I literally didn't understand what you're telling me is that because maybe these were materials that were put together by a more technical systems admin.
Speaker 0 36:02 It may have been maybe even an administrative administrative person who has nothing to do with the workflow itself and that has no understanding of it. Maybe someone just dictating to them what, what's being said so they don't understand why it's being done. You know what if they were to take a look at it, they just reading it. Dave wouldn't have any scope of whether that's correct or not or whether it makes any sense or not. So that's the difference between Chesapeake systems. And another place that checks be system has been doing this for a very, very long time. So, you know, we're, we're an authority in this. And so when we look at it, we can come in from that point of view. Many of the people in Chesapeake system have been end users in the past. Well, again, look at our trainer. You've been an editor, you've been a colorist.
Speaker 0 36:48 That's correct. Yeah. That's been in these creative environments. So even myself, when I look at it, I see it from that point of view rather than seeing it as a trainer or someone you know, on an upper level, whatever have you. So I look at it as an editor looking from their, from their side. And if it makes sense and that way, then I know it's going to be something that would be productive. And as we worked very well welcomed and that has in one of the jobs that we did, um, one in the past clients that we've performed these services for, we saw that what it was welcomed when they, they, we took their documentation, we took their training sessions actually that they even had online and we went through them, we review them. Once we gave the feedback and they agreed to it.
Speaker 0 37:32 Then when they have the training sessions, all of them were great, all of the trends and, and the day got far more productivity from that point till to now than they had in the past. And they've always said that, I said, all our editors are our editing much quicker. Our ma'am is on the control and we getting everything out on time and we're not running out of space. And yeah, exactly. And that's a big one. We can actually predictably plan what our investments are going to do for us. Again, I'm buying a 250 terabyte storage system today. I need it to last this many years before an upgrade. And if you actually adhere to these practices, you can plan predictably. Correct. So it's, it's funny, you know, for many years I feel like we've helped a lot of organizations, uh, bridge a gap, if you will, between the video teams and the it teams where because we kind of are translators and we speak both languages and we can kind of see things from both of those perspectives, we can kind of actually bring those groups together better than sometimes they were able to do themselves.
Speaker 0 38:40 And I feel like a lot of this training stuff is a way to almost bring management and the users closer together because we are helping an organization embrace a bit of, you know, again, the procedure that management needs to have in place in order for them to make sound business decisions, investments, have those investments pay off in the way they expected them to. That's right. But also keep things as smooth as possible for the users and not impede the creative process. That's correct. That's correct. And again, it's very welcomed by them once they see they see the results. The other thing about that sets us aside, um, is that we will follow up to see if anything is coming to the future. What are you planning in the future? Is this going to be a regular workflow that you want to have for the next 12 months, 16 months or so on and so forth.
Speaker 0 39:31 And usually they'll say, no, we're going to experiment with this. We'll keep in mind that if you go from four K to eight K now, okay, we're going back to the space. You know, what are we doing here? We help them plan ahead and there's so much change that we're still seeing. You just gave an example of one or an organization that might be experimenting with three 60 video. Okay. VR and correct. You know, they might not have thought through can our systems even deal with this stuff? And you know, again, the testing, the documentation, the training, the planning, I think it frankly allows organizations to experiment but in a way that doesn't jeopardize their existing investments, their existing workflows, existing product. Because everyone's experimenting with new forms of products and that's, you have to, it's a necessary evil nowadays. You have to keep on top pesky internet just made too many things as possible.
Speaker 0 40:23 Too many things box. Can we just turn it off? Can we, can we go back to like, you know what I fantasize about composite video dude, when it was just like the one yellow, it was like, you know, beta SP can we just go back to like every shop just has beta SP decks? No, the answer is we can't now we'll get bored. Can you think of how many orders of magnitude of more complexity there is now than even 20 years ago in India? That's very true. I mean when I started at Chesapeake almost 15 years ago, we still had composite video. It occasionally run into S video and maybe component or SDI, right? Like now it's like 300 camera formats and you know, hundreds of codecs and dozens of ma'ams that are out there. And it's just, then you multiply these by each other and there's like millions of possible setups.
Speaker 0 41:21 Right. So it makes sense that you can't necessarily expect an editor who you've just brought in to instantly fit into your workflow like the days of old. That's correct. The evolution is, is that there's so many workflow and format options now that you have to have some cohesiveness. Someone needs to be kind of brought into how you do things, right? Yeah. You need to normalize, normalize. Okay. Well, I don't know if we're the best people to be talking about normal. You and I, we may not be, but at least when it comes to workflow, we, that's the only area in our life normal. Um, well Lewis, I want to thank you so much for talking a little bit about the training and documentation needs. I will encourage our listeners to think about whether cohesiveness in your environment may be something you would benefit from. And we can have Lewis and other elements of our staff and resources, do evaluations, figure out where those gaps are in the workflow and is there any cohesiveness we need to bring in and what's the right level of standards and practices for what you're trying to do that isn't asking too much of people but is actually gonna make the day to day much easier for everyone.
Speaker 0 42:36 So Lewis is available and this is something we care a lot about as an organization. We look forward to doing it more and I'm sure the training needs will continue to evolve, right Louis? That's correct. So we want to stay on top of it and frankly we're always interested in feedback. So if you feel there's types of training and workflow and collaboration, maybe it's because you have remote users and that's something new that you're experimenting with or you know, a freelancer who might be editing in a cafe and Starbucks in Zanzibar. I don't know if they have Starbucks, but you know, whatever. That might be something new for you. If you need some evaluation and you know, again, training and how to, to really make this work for you. If you want to introduce collaborate collaboration in your process, we will send Lewis designs box. Right. All right. Thanks again, Louis and everyone stay tuned. Thank you for having me for the next workflow show episode. Take care everybody.
