Speaker 0 00:00 Welcome to the workflow show. I'm Jason Whetstone, senior workflow engineer and workflow therapist at Chesapeake systems. And I'm joined today as often as the case by my cohost Ben Kilburg. Hello Ben. Howdy. Howdy. Ben is a solutions architect at Chesa senior solutions, our senior solutions architect. Okay, very good. And also a fellow workflow therapist. Indeed. And we would like you, our listeners to know that we at Chesapeake systems have our collective finger on the pulse of the industry. And that's why we've decided to bring you an episode of the workflow show to talk about the current state of the industry. Um, it's kind of a timely discussion because NAB 2019 just happened a few weeks ago. Some of you are listening, it might be more like five or six weeks. Uh, but today in episode 37 of the workflow show will tell you what a workflow therapist is, when we'll talk about solutions architecture and what that entails.
Speaker 0 00:59 And most importantly, we're going to be taking a look at the state of the media production industry in the time of early 2019. What's new, what's big and what's changing. So today in the studio to talk about these things, we have two amazing individuals and I'm not just saying that because one of them is my boss. Uh, let's welcome Andy Sheppard, director of professional services at Chesa. Hello Andy. Hello Jason. Hello. And let's also welcome Peter Price, director of solutions architecture at Chesa. Hi Peter. Hello. Uh, so Andy and Peter are also what we would call what Ben, workflow therapist workflow therapist. So what is a workflow therapist? What I mean by that
Speaker 1 01:42 You mean somebody who first has your wellbeing in mind, right? They want you to succeed in your job, they want you to have fun and actually get back to being creative. Um, and often the process that a business has gets in the way. Um, so we need a way of talking collectively about what issues we face together, what other people might have come up for solutions with in dealing with these issues and basically giving you some TLC so that you can get on to editing and doing the fun stuff again.
Speaker 0 02:20 Right? So it sounds a lot like any other kind of therapy really. You're bringing in an expert to sort of like, okay, well what's going on? What, what's going on with our, well, we have this, this thing that we do and it's really a pain. It's taken a lot of time and it's all just automated, you know, just process stuff and, you know, can we automate some of that? And, you know, not to put somebody out of a job really, but just to make sure that our people are doing, you know, the creative stuff that they want to be doing. Right. Cool. Yeah. Agreed. So we've
Speaker 1 02:49 Then kind of hosting these workflow therapy events from time to time. Louise Gable, who was, um, on our last episode, episode six, then everybody got to meet there. Uh, we've been kind of trouncing around the country putting together events with some of our partners from groups like Telestream and square box and cat DV and bringing both industry leaders as well as ourselves and sitting down with our clients and putting everybody in a room together and saying, so what's going on? And having everybody, you know, say, Oh, well, I can't get past this one specific issue. And everybody can chime in and say, Oh, have you thought about this? Sometimes we get to demonstrate new tools. Sometimes we just get to chew the fat and BS. Um, but mostly we collectively and consultatively solve a lot of really good problems. Cool. So it's group work flow therapy. Really. Exactly. Awesome. Well, uh, let's, let's get to our guests. So Andy, let's start with you. Why don't you tell us a little bit about, um, just start with like your background, like how did you get into the industry and then how did you get into doing what you're doing for Chessa today?
Speaker 2 04:03 I started off not really in the industry, uh, as a professional. Um, I began my career in computing in it and very quickly realized that that wasn't something that I enjoyed. It didn't excite me whilst at university I was always very interested in media media workflow and it was just about the right time for media workflow to be really considered as a, as a serious business proposition. I spent a lot of time and effort moving in into the industry. Um, moved down to London and, uh, began work as a systems administrator within a post hires gaining a lot of experience personally and essentially consulting, uh, and growing my knowledge after working full time in London for some time. Uh, I moved into a role where I was consulting independently. Uh, I helped building, designing and building out visual effects studios. Uh, I helped a lot with workflow and developing that sort of expertise for people to be able to sort of take control of their destiny.
Speaker 2 05:17 And then moved over here about seven or eight years ago over to the U S ended up walking in through the door of Chesapeake systems. And, uh, I've now been working here for just over six years. It was a Lark, right? It was like, Oh, what are these guys do? Yeah, it was, it was very much, Oh, there's this interesting building here. Uh, that's a church and there's this company in which business cars, uh, I'd like to find out more about this. And once I did, I realized very quickly that the find people at Chesapeake systems then included because he's been here forever and so applied for a and was hired a couple of weeks later. And since then I've moved through systems work through workflow work and I'm not a director of professional services here. Um, that role includes overseeing the project team, the professional services team itself as the professional services team.
Speaker 2 06:17 We work on projects small to large from the tweaking a workflow for a client up to and including the consultative period of looking into somebody's business process, looking into someone's workflow processes or intended processes. Because really what our consultancy is a Byard is that business process on the potential workflow automation of it. It's not from the angle of let's automate people out of jobs. It's let's enable people to do what they were hired to do. And that's a really important thing for all of us. I think Chesapeake systems where we really want to concentrate on, on helping those people improve their workload positively so they can actually do not just what they want to do, but what they were actually, uh, employed by their employer to do in the first place. And we've got some great positive examples of that where people have been able to rise through the ranks of their organizations and work more on the direction of media management and supply chain in general because of what they've done, what they've realized with, with the work that we've done with them there. So it's a very positive consultancy effort that we put together and that we execute with clients. And then on the other side of things and more internally, I also work with the support team a lot to help make sure that they're furnished with the right knowledge and the right needs to support what we build out.
Speaker 0 07:45 And we, we talked with, uh, the manager of professional services, Marina Blandino in episode 36 a few weeks ago about the support team and about what a maintenance and support contract looks like.
Speaker 2 07:56 Yeah. And then beyond that research and development efforts, and I'm working a lot more closely with Peter and I are that he's on the team as well. Uh, with those, with those R and D efforts and the prioritization of those and, and making sure that we're investing the right time in those efforts to ensure that we understand not just where the industry is, not just the state of the industry as is the topic of this show, but also where things are going, where they're going to be at in a year, in five years, in 10 years potentially. Right, right.
Speaker 0 08:25 So the jobs, sorry to cut you off. I was just going to say, so that we still have jobs in all of our customers also still have jobs. Yes, yes, exactly. These winking. So these consultancies obviously would involve a lot of architecture of solutions and that's what I want to shift over to Peter at the moment and just sort of talk about, uh, Peter your background and, um, sort of how you got into the industry too. So start with that. Um, I came from the music industry actually, like many of
Speaker 3 08:56 Us, uh, I think in, in this space started off as either musicians or producers or recording engineers,
Speaker 0 09:03 Myself, our CEO, Jason. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 09:09 All of it. And it's a common thread. Um, so yeah, I started off, uh, in music and working in recording studios and I was the guy that built out pro tools systems that was kind of my, the same thing, gateway in right to the technology. And then that stemmed into setting up the email servers and the back office servers and becoming the it guy. And then when I got, you know, like realized that I couldn't make money being in music, I started shifting into video and focusing my it attention around those environments and then slowly picking up skills and editing and shooting and doing that creatively on the side, on top of supporting technology environments for video. So yeah, I had the opportunity to work with a number of really good companies like HBO, CBS, Reuters news, um, and then kind of peppered in there, some boutique post houses, both in New York and Los Angeles. And then, uh, eventually working for some systems integrators, which landed me over here, Chesapeake systems.
Speaker 0 10:08 Great. Okay. So, so you have seen a lot of different types of environments being that I've also had some experience doing solutions architecture that we can all say that if you have a question about it, we probably have seen it before, you know, so yeah. That's so, that's great. All right, so thanks for that Peter. Let's shift the discussion to what are we seeing in the industry these days? You guys recently went to nib. I wasn't able to attend, but let's start talking about, um, one of the things that we do, uh, you know, so much of is this mass media asset management, workflow, orchestration, platform, consultation, engineering support. Um, that's a huge part of what Chesa does and a huge part of the value that we bring to our clients being that we understand all of these solutions that integrate with these platforms. So what were we seeing at any be, um, for platforms like levels beyond reach engine or yellow flex or square box cat TV? Like talk about maybe Andy or Peter. Just take the floor for a moment and talk about some of those things.
Speaker 3 11:08 Um, well, was there a theme? I mean, did you see like a big theme? Yes and no. I mean, there's, you know, more ma'ams all the time, right? What's interesting that we're seeing is there's a lot of customer attention around, uh, transitioning these man platforms into the cloud. So we were taking a lot of attention around what ma'ams are, are in the cloud, what, which ones are heading to the cloud and, and sort of getting our own internal education around that. Um, and then, you know, of course we work with some usual suspects like cat, DV levels, prime stream, <inaudible>. Um, these are all partners that we, we like working with a couple of trends. One is sort of the multitenant environments, right? So the ability have, you know, multiple sites, service, uh, assets. So multitenant and multi location, multi location. Yeah. Those are, they can be the same base, but oftentimes they're, they're different. Right, right, right. They're different problems to wrangle. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, a lot of, uh, companies are looking to diversify their locations. We've got a number of clients that are bi-coastal and are trying to manage their assets centrally. So a lot of these ma'ams are answering those, those feature sets
Speaker 2 12:24 That that's a really good point on obviously where we're really looking forward to a lot of systems that are becoming very cloud centric but not necessarily cloud only. Um, there's, there's the discussion slash heated argument about whether the cloud is just someone else's computer. Uh, there's often, there's a desire to ensure that media is still localized while access is from the cloud. So there's, there's really, I see two big two, two tracks and I think with where things are going, it's going to be either hybrid cloud or it's going to be cloud first. And there are some really good examples of each. We're in this interesting place now with, with asset management platforms, and I'm not just talking about moms, but Pam's as well. And even even some dam solutions that we're getting into this situation where the market is increasingly crowded, a crowded, sorry, um,
Speaker 3 13:28 Cloudant as well. <inaudible>
Speaker 2 13:32 The market is increasingly clouded and crowded. Puns intended hums, absolutely intended, but it's also increasingly clear what the front runners are in terms of technology and in terms of the architecture of those solutions as well. Um, because it's, it's, while it's important to many clients that I want this neat cloud accessible from 10 for an asset management platform, I also want to ensure that it's properly built out. I'm taking advantage of cloud services using microservices, using perhaps services like AWS Lambda and moving increasingly towards serverless functionality, which, which we've discussed a lot, uh, unseen. Huge advantages potentially with, and obviously there's some things that you still kind of want to control a little bit more, um, in a traditional server kind of manner. But that's well beyond the basics of Shoreham. It's there. And then there's also the sort of the more traditional almost version of the mom where it's, it's kind of let stuff it in the cloud and let's put everything up there.
Speaker 2 14:43 Let's get away from any form of traditional shared storage solutions that are fiber attached to people's best tops and things like that because internet connections are getting faster, the latency is lowering the price is often decreasing rapidly and enabling people to move to the sort of solutions where they might be shooting four K but they might also be okay with the ability to cut with proxies. Right. Maybe they're just using the 4k for archival purposes and not necessarily. Yeah, and there's, there's a lot of clients who do that. Oh, obviously we've got quite a few who we talk about that kind of solution with and they're like, well, you know, I'm shooting red and I, I want to be able to correct the role for tillage. Uh, I want to be able to apply law.
Speaker 3 15:34 That's one. That's one where that's one use case where it can, it can really change the paradigm of how we have to consider. Yeah. The asset management solution. Now they are pushing towards the fires themselves. Right? It could be, you know, we're seeing a vast majority of clients right now, especially like agencies or companies that are doing media in house or not, you know, coloring, uncompressed, DPX, 4k files, you know, they're doing HD proxies or they're doing HD files that are nicely sized where you can fit it up in the cloud. I think that these companies especially are less interested in committing to a large hardware footprint both from the workstation side and on the backend side. And so when they see cloud offerings, they see a lot more cost savings. But most importantly they see a less hardware and investment commitment while they can try things out because everything's in the cloud is like, you know, try before you buy kind of mentality and uh, and we're seeing a lot of that trending with these types of solutions.
Speaker 3 16:36 Sometimes it's budgetary as well. I was going to say there's the difference between the capex OPEX discussion. That's a huge thing for anyone who isn't familiar with that, that discussion. It's really the the, the question is whether a capital expenditure and expense would be something that you are buying and bringing into your organization and setting up and maintaining yourself or you know via a service contract with an organization like Jessa or an operational expense which is you're basically paying a vendor to do all of that for you and it's not necessarily in your building or it's not even really physically accessible to you but you're paying for that service has a service on there. Is there, there is some clarification potentially to that in terms of a professional services,
Speaker 2 17:22 So on and so forth and a subscription based model for example for an asset management platform might not negate the need for professional services. Absolutely. There might still be a lot of customization that our group requires to ensure the success of that platform. And really at the end of the day, the four of us are sitting in this table because one of the big drivers of that workflow therapy that we're discussing is to really drive user adoption and to make people want to use the platforms that we introduced for those clients. Not to, not to necessarily set policy in place that they're part of their job is it requires them to use it. It's to make people want to use that sort of system over managing that asset management via the finder, which is none of us like that. You know, it's not necessarily an effort which we've put in place at some organizations to make it impossible to do that. It's really about showing people that there's a better way to organize, to find, uh, and to get creative with the media that they have.
Speaker 3 18:38 Yeah. I think another area that people are starting to mature is the machine learning integration. You know, cause there's a lot more out there and the companies approaches to it is, you know, there's a lot of options. There's AI aggregators, like companies like baritone where they'll take different engines and you go to them and, and they sort of curate the engines that are required in your, in your technical requirements. And then there's, you know, the, the big companies, the Googles, the IBM's, the Microsoft, Microsoft, right? And they have all of theirs. And what's interesting is now, you know, I think up until recently I've seen a lot of media asset management systems where they just sort of cram this information into a metadata field, like a single metadata field. You can search it.
Speaker 2 19:25 One of the biggest issues that we're starting to see, and it's not even something that's consistent now, is over probably the next maybe five years or so, we're gonna see more of those asset management platforms, especially in that space where information overload becomes almost more of a feature than a bug. So will the challenge be to present that information in a meaningful way to the user then? I think partly that it's, it's also you see with, with some of the platforms that we know very well, why are there offering more and more ML services to ML machine learning? Yep, yep. Yep. I ought to clarify that for our listeners.
Speaker 2 20:16 Yes. Machine machine learning services, machine learning services, um, where they're getting integrated directly into an asset management platform. We've seen some where live transcriptions can be synchronized back from proxies being sent out to our Google or Amazon or wherever we've seen, uh, others where you can type in English into one field on a real time translation. We'll come back one of those services into another field. So you're not necessarily looking at proper grammatically correct translation, but enough to get by for a team that's working in another language or another country to be able to understand that. Now all of those ideas are phenomenal in terms of being able to leverage, you know, drive that user adoption to leverage the content that people own. To be able to get that kind of granular information is fantastic. But the real worry that I have personally is that that w at what point does that get into information overload to the point that somebody who we've worked with to drive that user adoption is scared of using shores intimidated by that asset management platform because of just the sheer amount of data that's just thrown in their face when they log into the system.
Speaker 2 21:43 Are they searching for an asset? Is that um, we have a million assets in our system and we do a search and we get a million results? Is that that I don't think it's not necessarily, and obviously there's a lot that the asset management platform providers can do. There's a lot that we can do as a systems integrator to sort of filter that information into an easily digestible set of information that's actually useful to the user.
Speaker 3 22:11 Well that's the key factor, right? Or the client part of, you know, like as a solutions architect, part of our job is to identify those datasets that are, that are meaningful to the user and that part, sometimes the user doesn't even know that. So we have to throw out examples. Shore looking use case. So
Speaker 2 22:31 That's a process that we have with a lot of projects that we do.
Speaker 3 22:35 It's part of the therapy. Exactly. It's part of the therapy. Yeah. I didn't mean to cut you off. No, it's fine. I don't mean to cut you off, but one of the things I did want to talk to you about Peter was what does a solutions architect do? It's a lofty thing, but like what are you doing? Are you, are you, uh, are you just kind of going around and nodding and everything? The sales guys saying no. <inaudible> it actually works. Yeah. Well I didn't say nodding up and down. You know, we're like investigators, uh, you know, we go in and uh, we're the technical arm of the sales person, but really from a client engagement perspective, we are like a therapist. Oftentimes we were the ones asking very specific use case questions around the environment where the ones that identify the environment, you know, there's two ways to approach it. One is if a client comes to us with the specific problem, we're tasked with providing a solution to that problem. Sure. But there are a lot of situations where we may just meet a client and we'll go to a client site and part of our job is to identify areas where we could help this client further in their business. And that's kind
Speaker 2 23:46 Of where like the therapy kicks. Right? Right. And that part is just like interaction, right? Like just having a conversation. And I'm sure also part of that involves, uh, you know, what do you already have, like what's working in your organization? So let's talk about that a little bit. Um, and, and you know, you, you might have several fiber switches. Well, we just bought those a year or two ago and what are they, how many ports are available if we're adding equipment, like all of those kinds of really picking you in technical details that are all apart of an engagement. Yeah. And I think it's important, uh, it's, it's, it's important to understand that sometimes, uh, these, these quotes that go out to clients can take a long time to generate because that's all part of it. It's all a part of like, what does the big picture look like?
Speaker 2 24:25 What does the whole picture look like? That's actually a really good point because you know, we, we, we have internal conversations about the amount of time it can take a court to get out sometimes. Yes. We, we have, um, we, we occasionally have a concern from a client. We have a lot of expectation management around that because whilst it's really important for us to do that solutions architecture, uh, in the presales process, there's also a huge part of that workflow therapy that migrates into the post sale process when it becomes part of the professional services engagement. Where we continue on that we refine it. We go from, I like to really define the difference between the two almost as, as a solutions architect, you, both Peter and Ben is you're coming up with the design, the overall design for a system in the professional services engagement.
Speaker 2 25:24 Even at the workflow therapy stage. We in, in the post sale group, as those professional services engagement spin up, we're really more structural engineering there and we're getting down to the minutia of, okay, so you want this house that's going to look roughly like this. How many windows do you want? And it's, it's not necessarily black and white questions like that, but it's, it's getting into the detail of, okay, what metadata do you want to see and how do you want to see it and where does it come from? And so talk to Peter's point about oftentimes those users really don't know what they want is we have years of experience, uh, on that consultancy team, on that post-sales consultancy team where we've spent months, sometimes at a time in front of clients working with them to define what they need. And so we have a really good starting base to go from of if you don't know what you want, we can help you get there with that.
Speaker 2 26:32 And we're not going to just slap something out and say, here you go. Like it where we're going to sit down. We're going to demonstrate, we're going to refine, we're going to come back the drawing table five or six times during that process potentially. But we're going to make sure that we take the time and the effort to get through to that point of understanding for the end users as well, what they need to be able to see to improve their job and to improve their buy-in in that system. And so that's a really important part.
Speaker 3 27:06 Yeah. Oh yeah. I was just going to say, so like one of the things that was interesting about NAB was that yeah, there's now moms are, of course moms have been capturing this data, but presenting it in a meaningful way and a lot of people are kind of going in the direction of, you know, some sort of visual timeline like approach. So something like prime stream exchange, they had looked at how do you take this ancillary information, whether it be transcription data or or comments from a review and approval process. This is all time-based. It's all time exact temporal metadata. That's exactly it. Metadata
Speaker 2 27:43 Is it? I feel it's a word, a really critical juncture that any system that you need to look at almost needs to have that temporal metadata because people are finally understanding the importance of metadata and the importance of making sure that their assets are tagged appropriately, but then also very quickly realizing that if I can't tag something by timecard or almost frame accurately, then where's the use in it? Like where's, where's it really going to be useful for me? And I'm not talking about the ways that there are services that have existed for at least a decade where they can accurately tie time-based metadata together with with a play head so that you can search for tree and it will, it'll show up markers for every occurrence of a tree throughout the shop that you're looking at throughout the assets in that asset. You have to have the ability to inspect within that to search within and not, you know, in the way that you, you go into your asset management platform and you search for a broad term and then you refine it and then you drill down into what you're really looking for.
Speaker 2 29:02 You need to be able to have the opportunity to, instead of searching down search across that asset and say maybe someone wants to leverage a transcription service to be able to search for a certain phrase, UN an actually jumped where that phrase occurs in a tiny line and why anybody would want to do that just absurd. Full right? Or somebody wanting to search for, you know, maybe if it's more stock footage libraries that they're looking at to, to search for, you know, a certain visual element within that. If you're inspecting the assets in that sort of way, but it has to also be presented then in a digestible format, right? So where it might be one thing to get a transcription and put it in a large text field and that's it, right? That's searchable, that's searchable. Is it searchable? It's attached to the asset.
Speaker 2 30:01 It's, it's, it's potentially really useful for at least finding that piece of content. But then finding the actual point of that content where that element that you're searching for exists could then take hours. Because it could be that, let's say someone's, you know, someone's got a live feed of something that's been 10, 15 hours long and you're searching for when somebody said this and that occurs three times within that 10 hour stretch and you're like, Oh great, this isn't going to take any time. It's all to figure this out, right? So you need to be near producer saying, Oh, but we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on this media asset management platform. Like, what do you mean you can't find it? Like in 30 seconds? Why is it going to be in a corner? Right? Uh, so, uh, the other, the other thing that occurs to me that, that seems to be a relatively new thing within the past year or two is the idea that metadata isn't just for assets.
Speaker 2 30:55 So metadata could be attached to user or it could be attached to a workflow or a workflow instantiation. We were talking about this a little bit earlier. It's, it's going from viewing the sort of traditional, uh, metadata can apply to an object or it can apply to a group of objects, call them, uh, uh, collection or production or whatever. It can apply some, one of those two. But beyond that, it's the model essentially that there isn't a static model that metadata can apply to anything within that system. Uh, whether it be a frame, whether it be a user, whether it be an object, whether it be nothing in particular at all within the system. And it's just almost a configuration element that you're able to call upon at certain points in a workflow, for example, or in automation. Right. And the reason we're talking about these things is because people are asking for them.
Speaker 2 31:51 So if you are a developer vendor or whatever and you're listening and you're saying, Oh, we don't have that, chances are one of your competitors probably does say you might want to get on it. Some people have it, some people don't. Some people have ideas and designs of how to do implementation. And I think the real win with this scenario is taking that traditional model of metadata needing to be tied to an object and just throwing out the window because the more flexibility that we have, the easier it is for us to assist in the adoption of a system because we can make that data more easily digestible to the end users and we can drive user adoption that way. Awesome. So let's
Speaker 0 32:40 Shift the discussion a little bit to storage. So we talked a lot about you know, media asset management, workflow orchestration, that kind of thing. Let's talk about storage a little bit. So really when we talk about, you know, without bringing up any particular vendor or technology or whatever, what we've kind of talked about before was that storage really falls into these days of file, system based shared storage or object storage like, and I'm sure all of our listeners know what a file system is. If you haven't, we have a workflow show episode about what a file system is. You should listen to it because it's pretty awesome. The difference between a file system and object storage. So isn't is object storage. A lot of people here object storage and they think of, Oh it's in the cloud. It's, it's you know Amazon, maybe it's Google, maybe it's Azure,
Speaker 2 33:26 B and I think there's two clear paths here as you said with it's a file system or it's a object storage. The object storage can be cloud based or it can be on premise. Really the distinction with that generally revolves around capex versus OPEX as we mentioned earlier in the episode and also with where you want that redundancy to a car where you're happy with that data living in terms of its accessibility, there are benefits and drawbacks to both of those approaches. Whether you choose to go with an on premise solution or if you choose to go with a cloud based object storage. One of the huge advantages right now is that a standard has been born which most organizations are adhering to and that's actually really useful from the consumer perspective because it means that we can help them leverage on a more agnostic basis what storage they're pointing out for.
Speaker 2 34:30 Let's say their archive object storage is commonly considered as archive storage, partly because you know, you can't point Adobe premier at it for example. Right. Um, so you can't really use it for a sort of live edit kind of scenarios. But using archive as an example, you can say you make a decision of whether you want not to be on premise, I'm local to you so you can see it and look at old pretty flashing lights on the front of it. Or you can look at putting it in the Clyde and with the inherent redundancy improvements that that's likely to have, including geographical redundancy if you need it. Obviously asterisk additional charges may apply, um, but then not becomes a big discussion as well. If you do choose to move your archive into the cloud or whatever you were planning on putting on object storage, it's, it's then much more of a discussion about, okay, what's my entry cost, but also what's my, what's my ongoing costs?
Speaker 2 35:34 Ultimately almost most importantly, that a lot of people are now beginning to consider is what's my egress costs if last meeting, if I have to get that content back, if I ever want to move all of my data out of one cloud provider and put it into another, or I want to take the object storage and actually build an on prem solution, what's that going to cost me to just retrieve my stuff? Or wait a minute, I, I have a backup in the cloud and my primary storage just went down. Yeah. What does that look like? So then are we talking about pulling everything back? Maybe just the stuff that we were working on recently. What does that look like? So it looks like a protection racket. Yeah, I bet. And it can, what I'm hearing from this or what I'm understanding from this is that, um, maybe the cloud isn't necessarily for everyone and everything or object storage in general.
Speaker 2 36:24 I think there've been several good statements that I've heard up to and including very recently about, you know, the cloud is a solution. It's not VI solution. Right. Along with the relatively trite statement at this point of it's just someone else's computer. Okay, fair enough. Like there needs to be, there needs to be a conversation that you can have and be comfortable with the fact that you're storing data inside another business on. There can be huge privacy concerns with that and that's, that's really something that you know, we can only help so far with people being comfortable with taking potentially very sensitive data and storing it on someone else's computer. But what's I think what's really interesting is we've got one client in particular that's a really good example of this that they actually use one of the larger cloud providers and they send a copy of all of their data that they archive currently to LTO tape that they archive locally within their headquarters.
Speaker 2 37:35 And a copy of all of that data is also sent to the cloud. So the cloud is a backup of the archive. Exactly. Second, it's almost like another tier of their archive and that's the way we've designed it and that's a common way it's designed is in this day and age. It's a really nice idea because the ingest costs are minimal. The the retention costs when it's in a more archival state within that cloud service means that it is relatively cheap to store and because they have a primary tier of archive on premise that has all of that data there, they can retrieve that data for a far lower cost if they ever need to know that particular client as an example. They're looking at replacing that tape library with object storage. Right and keeping that on prem because that affords them huge other opportunities and this is a really good, I think turning point for talking about object storage is while generally we are going to consider right now that it's not necessarily your first tier of online storage, right?
Speaker 2 38:50 That replacing, especially replacing a tape library with object affords you so many other opportunities for using that data, especially if it's kind of on prem and you're, you have a decent internet pipe and that sort of thing, so you have a lot of the costs already covered that you can leverage that data in ways that you wouldn't have been able to before. One of the examples, multi location maybe. Partly. Yeah. But one of the other things that we were looking at multi location, geographic distribution of the archives is really potentially important because they can throw copies of that data with no effort, no lift on their part to other locations because that's the way the system is designed. It's designed to sync the objects on the object storage across the different nodes that make up the cloud and based on the cloud or a virtual private cloud and based on what levels of redundancy you one and data safety, you can, uh, you can make that storage work for you in the way that you want it to, to, to have as many replicas of those objects as necessary for you to feel comfortable.
Speaker 2 40:02 But in terms of new and exciting opportunities for use of that archival data, if you think about it from the case of let's say client X has 30 years worth of content that they would love to monetize. And you know, I have this great idea for a video on demand service and people sign up Netflix style for you know, seven 99 a month or whatever Netflix are now are charging like 15 bucks or something like that. You pay a monthly subscription fee and you have access to a library of content. That library of content could be pooled from object storage. So you're not necessarily a, and obviously with this example, there could be benefits to doing this own an actual cloud platform. Sure. But they're also afforded the ability, if you have that archive on prem and you have a decent internet connection that you're not saturating on a daily basis with production usage that you could almost proof of concept, that sort of thing.
Speaker 2 41:09 Without that large commitment maybe of petabytes worth of data on a cloud service where you're actually able to make those things pretty readily available despite still being in an archive. So while you could accommodate and achieve the same thing with a tape based archive, the buffer time is going to be insane. Yeah. They're not going to go for that couldn't seal. So okay. That, that really I think covers a lot about the object storage side of things. What about shared storage file system? Anything new there? I mean, you know, at the end of the day when we talk about shared storage, the thing that we always say as you're talking about the hard drive on icon on the desktop, which is the way most creatives, you know, why would you need to look at it any other way? It's either there or it's not right. So yeah, I mean I think there's a,
Speaker 3 42:00 There's some trends going in the, uh, area of high performance NAS devices. So a lot of people are transitioning away from the traditional sand file systems and you're getting at a point now where 10 gig environments can perform as fast, if not faster than fiber channel in a way for, you know, when you're looking at high performance or, or media rich, like color correction, visual effects, you can do all that stuff on NAS, which you couldn't do. Um, you know, a couple of years ago it was, it was always notoriously slow to do that.
Speaker 2 42:38 I'm a lot of that stuff's improved to the point that it is usable. There's a couple of caveats still to those sort of situations where you're, you're seeing switch bandwidth increase, you're seeing even end workstation bandwidth increase, but then you might be up against certain limitations of things like pull max with higher than 10 gig even at attachment that cannot run higher than 10 gig. Exactly. Imagine that because the driver stack is literally limited to that. I think that's the road
Speaker 3 43:09 Block with a lot of these solutions. Right? That's, that is the qualifier when we're looking at these storage solutions are how are these vendors, uh, developing around those roadblocks, especially with <inaudible>, right? Like how do they get around it and some of them do a really good job. Some of them do a really bad job.
Speaker 2 43:28 Yeah. And I think part of that with with the driver limitations with the network stack limitations, that's, that's a problem that several of our vendor partners have seen where there are literally coming up against a limit of we can take this Thunderbolt three device and we can plug it into a PC running windows 10 we can, we can scream with it, but then we plug it into any form of Mac and we're up against limitations and I see that being something that they're the like this has to be something that's addressed this year and with the increasing threat of things like Microsoft surface product line getting so much better. The surface studio being of viable option for an all in one workstation, VHB Z Z series like there are some really compelling other options. A lot of people are sort of finally getting towards that like, well let's look outside. Let's see what other people are using. See let's not necessarily stick in the mindset of the Mac is the best tool for the job because the Mac is the thing. I know that could be a dangerous mindset to get into in the starter things, but we really are at a point where for a lot of those potential applications it might not be there when you're looking at the full sort of end to end solution that the Mac is really the viable product on the user's desktop.
Speaker 3 44:59 Yeah, well the Mac is becoming less and less the creative workstation of choice, especially for high end work color correction. Everybody's on, you know, some sort of non Mackintosh platform, whether that be Linux or windows machines and then visual effects has transitioned over to that. I think really like graphics and not visual effects but graphics and maybe even to a certain extent motion graphics and editorial workflows still are married to the Mac, but I think that's really just because the users are more familiar with it.
Speaker 2 45:33 I mean it's, it's a mixture of the users are more familiar with it and the walk home drivers don't suck. Like visual effects. You get into that area and the the amount of, I feel like literal screaming, icy on the internet about, I can't do this thing because these walk drivers suck because they're trying to, they're trying to, they're trying to be a whack-a-mole. Yeah, sure.
Speaker 3 46:03 I don't know. Sometimes you just have to, sometimes you have to, I can say from my own personal experience, being someone who's looking for a replacement for my 2011 Mac pro. Yeah, yeah. I, I don't hate windows like I thought I would. It's really, it's, it's, the operating system has gone a long way. It really has. Those 10 is like pretty slick
Speaker 2 46:27 Computer sitting right here, 13 inch Mac book, jewel Burt's with windows 10 I have a windows PC at home. I, it's nice. I, I use that on a daily basis. Doesn't bother me the way that windows used to because all of those little issues that I used to use to come up with, which were very typical, primarily Mac user, occasionally using windows, those, those kind of, those kind of issues. But they've all gone and it's become when you sort of corporate manage your own systems or it doesn't force a windows update occasionally and randomly restart the computer at three o'clock in the morning when you're actually still working because that's something we do occasionally. Um, that once you get those honestly tiny little annoyances out of the way, it's not a big issue.
Speaker 3 47:18 No. And the Macintosh is actually a, a really nice windows machine. Like actually do it well. I did like a benchmark test just for fun. I had an old 2013 iMac and I was running a DaVinci resolve on it and so I did a render on DaVinci resolve. It was like a five minute timeline and I did it on the Mac boot. Then I switched over to windows and I got 25% increase in performance on that render running windows on the same machine, which was really kind of surprising. I didn't think that that would be the case. Um, so E it's windows is actually taking advantage or at least the, the software that's developed around windows in this case would be DaVinci resolve. A lot of these applications are much more in tune. Adobe runs a lot faster or could have drivers. Yeah. Uh, yeah, that's on the Kuta drivers. Exactly. Yeah. I
Speaker 2 48:13 Mean that's, that's one of the biggest issues that I see today. I mess around with photography and drawings and all that good stuff. And if I, let's say this weekend just paused, I shot some footage with my camera on. I came back and was like, I need to do some stuff in after effects with this. Didn't even think about using a Mac, not just because I have a 13 inch Mac book pro or a desktop PC, but I, you know that desktop PC has a current gen Nvidia card 28 in it. That thing I could put in an external GPU case with the Thunderbolt cable attach up to the macro pro and it wouldn't do anything. There are no drivers available for it. There will be no drivers available for it in case anyone listening is not familiar with the issue there. There are not and may never be drivers for anything beyond high Sierra for Nvidia cards if you happen to care, which I think all of us sitting here do and it's kind of a big cause, but at the end of the day when you look at even dabbling in maybe not what your primary use case is, even if you're somebody who who does the majority of our work in Adobe premier or something, you can see a benefit from having graphics cards like available to you and I'm really interested, see where AMD is going with the GPU business they purchased called ATI back in the day and see where they can go with that.
Speaker 2 50:00 But it still remains at this point that you just can't come close to the performance. And that's a hugely important part of a lot of people's workflows because at the end of the day we can have a tangent of hours of talking about server-based transcoding and conform and all of that kind of stuff that a lot of platforms are increasingly taking advantage of. The ability to do that. The server room, server, farm data center level, but they're still, um, I'd say a majority of users are the sort of people who are going to need to jump between a couple of platforms. They might need to do a quick render of something. And when you're looking at anything beyond the basic complexity, the AMD GPS don't really kick it, don't really kick it. I'm down with the kids.
Speaker 3 50:53 Please come on out or, or at least their lingo. So, uh, think about windows, I suppose is one of the things that we are talking about windows. Give it a chance. Give it a chance. Yeah. You know, I, from my own personal experience, the Nvidia situation is one of the reasons that I am considering a windows machine as my replacement for my 2011 Mac pro. I have a nice, you know, nine ADTI card and it's not going to work with Mojave. So yeah. You know, that's the thing is with the new operating system probably being announced next month, June for the worldwide developer conference, there's going to be some really interesting developments around that. We're supposed to be some significant changes that could affect us.
Speaker 2 51:38 We haven't seen any hint of lockdowns on a driver level or being able to sign, drive internal extensions and so on and so forth. Not nothing like
Speaker 3 51:48 Nothing like that at all. I mean, this size or like it could very well could be, uh, the nail in the coffin for the professional user as far as transitioning to windows. It's kind of sad because we, you know, I, you know, personally, and I'm sure a lot of our listeners feel the same way. Like, you know, we, we were there using those products back when Apple was still a garage band, you know? Yeah. Seriously. I'm going to play devil's advocate here and say that whatever mysterious thing they have hiding behind the curtain, like the iPads you have sitting in front of you, being able to round trip it and work between the two, that is very true within the walled garden. You're right, it's limiting, but it's still going to be very functional and it's really interesting
Speaker 2 52:34 Testing to see where some of that stuff's going. Like Adobe, 100% Adobe delivering a full version of Photoshop on the iPad.
Speaker 3 52:43 Right, right. Did they deliver that yet? No, I am guessing it's WWC DC when it's going to come out. I was still holding my breath, but yeah, cause that would have been bad. Oh yeah. Well you're right. I mean not because the iPad is a compelling hardware machine. That's powerful. I mean, I think they're benchmarking this thing faster than Mac book pros right now and the nature right and the unified OSTP. I think it's, it's gonna be if you're, if you're in the Apple ecosystem when you're using final cut pro X, when you're using logic pro X when you're using Mac OS and iOS and all this stuff, it'll all work together and that's great. The question for us is professionally,
Speaker 2 53:26 Is it enough isn't enough? Is it, where is it where those pro users can go and I think we're going to straddle the market somewhat in terms of there's going to be two sets of of user groups. There's going to be saying that. Yeah, but it's going to be splintered more than it is today of we're going to have one set of users who are perfectly happy within that walled garden and I think quite a few of us at Chesapeake will, will also be kind of happy in that walled garden. But there'll be the occasion, a mobi at an entire user group that we cater for today and we'll continue to expand that service of catering to the people that camel live within that walled garden because they have needs that don't fit into Apple's very specific use cases for, for what you can achieve with our platform.
Speaker 2 54:25 Agreed. And then you may need some workflow therapists to help you figure it out. We have, we have several nice couches and efficiency you here, secret doors in and out of the walled garden that we might know about secret doors in and out of the walled garden. Okay, well you heard that here from the workflow therapist on the workflow show and I'd like to thank my cohost Ben Kilburg, senior solutions architect here at Jessa. Thank you, Ben. Thank you Jason. Andy shepherd, director of professional services at Chessa. Thank you, Andy. Thank you, Jason. My balls and thanks to Peter Price, director of solutions architecture at Chessa. Thank you, Jason. My balls. You're in the bus at me. For more information about the technologies and products and services you heard about today, or maybe to schedule your own workflow therapy session, please reach out to your Chesapeake systems account manager. We love hearing from you, uh, whether you're a client or a partner or you're just curious about workflow therapy, you can email
[email protected] thanks for listening. I'm Jason Wetstone.
