#10 "To Upgrade or Not to Upgrade"

Speaker 0 00:00 Welcome to the workflow show. I'm Meryl Davis alongside my cohost Nick gold episode one 10. Today, we're going to talk about upgrades to upgrade or not to upgrade. That is the question, whether it is nobler to upgrade or not upgrade. So we're getting way too literary. We're not that smart. No, no. That's what none literary people do is they quote Shakespeare. Usually that single line. Yes, but we are talking about upgrades indeed. And what do we mean by that? Well, I guess we're talking more in the workstation centric part of things. When is it good to upgrade? We've seen a significant change in the landscape of just the workstation environment in the last three or four years. Well, three, four months, we've seen both extreme changes on the software front and for us Mac professional users. Um, maybe not a whole lot of changes on the hardware side, but now some whole new changed approaches might one want to use laptops instead of a full on workstation. Might one want to use an iMac. So there's upgrades to your hardware, to your core system, to the peripherals that you use. There's all these Thunderbolt peripherals coming online. There's massive upgrade possibilities with your nonlinear editing software. Now that final cut seven just continues to do nothing as we know it won't and it's like, it's like a zombie now, every once in a while. It's just <inaudible>. Speaker 0 01:30 But the funny thing is, is, you know, we've done this, this, uh, digital media user, uh, what is it, a survey via our website? An interesting factoid that's come to light is that a huge number of our clients are still using FCP seven. And yet we know that they are actively looking into what comes after that. But then there's a lot of folks who might be on FCP X or 10, and there's a lot of updates coming out for that. And should they do those minor point updates? Adobe always has updates coming down the pike. There's always operating system updates. Apple's doing S updates of a major order on an annual basis. Now we're just a wash in upgrade possibilities. I would say there's always a different type of person and the type of organization that'll drive, how you upgrade. I mean, we typically see the whole gamut from, from the folks that are still somehow managing to edit on a power Mac <inaudible> and are on 10.4, FCP five and going, you know what? Speaker 0 02:30 I am hitting my deadlines. I don't see what the issue is. You know, one of the fans doesn't work, but whatever we, you know, we got to work in and then you have the sort of the middle of the road, moderate folks who maybe they do a refresh maybe every three to four years, and then the bleeding edge folks just can't can't get enough. But somewhere in between, there is probably the right happy medium to what your upgrades. And you know, I'm going to speak to something. And I think we've talked about this and we agree on this. And, and you know, this is frankly generally Chesapeake's approach to things. I mean, we realized that we cater to clients who are in many different types of environments, individual users, all the way up through literal mega corporations and everything in between private sector, governmental, you name it, and let's look at that kind of conservative upgrade user. Speaker 0 03:16 You said it, I mean, some folks might have a system that's few years old, or a lot of years old, but you know what it's meeting their immediate needs. They may not be on all the latest software, but they've got a workflow or workflows or formats that may be aren't changing all that much. They from kind of a business development standpoint, kind of know how long it takes to execute certain types of workflows and processes on their computer, whether it's renders or ingesting or mastering or graphic design or finishing or color correcting, you know, they know what their system does. And they've developed a valid business model. That's profitable for them around that system. You know, we don't fault people in any way, shape or form for being very conservative in those types of environments and saying, you know what, it's that whole, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Speaker 0 04:11 And it's making me money and I've got my model that's based around this. And maybe if the system blows up, I'll have to make some changes. And maybe sure if new formats come into play that this system can't deal with because of hardware, software constraints, I'll have to deal with it then. But for the time being it's a work inform me typically the, in that scenario, the thing that pushes the, uh, the, uh, the conversation, uh, whether it be, uh, an OSTP upgrade that, uh, no longer renders their software useful or simply they are too far out of the, uh, the cycle that the software that they have been using is, is simply not applicable to today's workflows. The thing that brings them into the fold is when one day somebody clicked update or the next important thing came out and they simply are rendered unable to do the work they'll. Speaker 0 04:58 Hold on. You know, the other thing too, is we live in a landscape. We've talked about this, certainly where new formats of digital media, you know, whether it's cameras or Kodak's, or even the workflows themselves are so prevalent now, delivery, formats, you name it. Things are changing so much. It's so diverse and changing like every few months with new formats and such that you, as a producer, as a post-production oriented kind of user may have a client or a project that calls for your ability to support a new format very quickly. You may need to be, you know, rapidly responsive if you want to get that job. And if you find out, Oh, crud final, cut seven, doesn't handle this codec at all or efficiently, or now I need to do a bunch of time consuming transcoding in order for my, you know, powerful system to even deal with it. Speaker 0 05:49 I need an upgrade in power. This is the problem, because now you may feel the need to upgrade for one particular reason, or maybe your computer breaks. And I need to buy a new computer, but oops, the new computers don't work with any of that old software anymore because it comes with a new operating system. It's these kinds of unpredictable needs. Be it a new thing. You need to be able to support an offer your clients or, Oh, crud something broken. Now I need to replace it. Ooh, but I can't exactly replace like for like, cause I can't just get another copy of that thing from five years ago, this may force you as a user into a corner where now you need to be quickly adaptable, but in order to deal with that one new thing, a whole lot of baggage may come along with that as far as Ooh, but this forces me to upgrade all of my logins or the operating system or the backend of the storage system, you know? Speaker 0 06:45 Yeah, yeah. If you're a sand connected user and your machine poops out, this is something we run into. And I don't think we're going to dwell too much on the whole, the whole sand infrastructure, but it's an important one because it affects many of our clients. You know, we do a lot of X Sans or StorNext fiber channel sands. And this requires that each connected client workstation be running a particular piece of software that allows that system to connect to this large block of work group storage. That work group storage is itself managed by server computers, running particular versions of particular operating systems and particular sand software. And that the client systems have to be running versions of those various pieces of software that make them compatible and jive with those systems that are kind of on the back end of that storage solution. And one of the rules of thumb we run into is that the clients in those X or StorNext, you know, storage environments, can't be running newer operating system or San client software than the operating system or sand management software that's running on those backend servers. Speaker 0 07:54 So if your backend servers are running at a slightly older version of software and your slightly older machine poops out and you need to replace it with a new one. And if that new machine doesn't work with the old versions of the software, because there's no drivers built into the old version of Mac OS 10.5, that work, you know, with a new iMac that you may want to have be your new client workstation. If your backend servers are themselves at 10.5 and the associated older version of the operating of the and software, well now you've got a client that isn't going to fit into the mix. And now that's going to trigger a bunch of backend changes that need to be made to the storage platform itself. And that may mean downtime, additional cost, GS having to backup your data before you do those upgrades because of potential problems that can occur on the upgrade process, it can be a large project. Speaker 0 08:50 It can, it can be something that many companies at times budget for and others are completely unaware of that as an even a consideration. I think that, you know, that at least partly is one of the reasons that equipment leasing can really be a benefit. If you're aware of the cycle that you use your computers, most guys, they might want to use a machine. That's like a bleeding edge for two to three years. And then, and then know that you're going to get another one upfront after your lease is over. Yeah, it's it's complex. And then there's like kind of the, the creation software side of it, where if you have a work group environment with multiple users who are collaborating and a machine breaks down and needs to be replaced, and that new machine that you got as a replacement, can't run the older versions of the software because it's coming with a newer operating system that isn't qualified to use those older production applications. Speaker 0 09:43 You may now have a system that's generating project files or generating media files of newer or different formats that your colleagues, a slightly older machines on their slightly older versions of software can't open or deal with. So in work group environments that are collaborative in nature or have work group storage, these upgrade issues become much more complex and much more dynamic and really need to be thought through and managed. And this is a reason why keeping your backend systems at newer versions of software that can accommodate different versions of client workstations, hitting them. That's important. You may have these background, you know, needs to upgrade or, or benefits for keeping at least certain systems upgraded. Even if that's not immediately clear to every last client who's connected to a work group system. So, you know, there are sometimes these kind of more subtle reasons why keeping on top of operating system upgrades, cycles, production, application, upgrade cycles, et cetera, is, is useful because the technology landscape is always changing. Speaker 0 10:52 Let me pose a question to you though. Uh, I'll, I'll play devil's advocate here because one thing that you did say in your description of that fictional work group environment is there is a state approach. There, there are all these machines, they're all in the same configuration it's working it's it has worked. You can't scare me by telling me that I'm going to need to upgrade. Obviously I know you need to upgrade at some point, but like shouldn't I, if I run in there and then I upgrade my backend, for example, and then there's yet another oil change. And I just kind of do that twice in a row. Why not wait it out for two go rounds? How do you feel about the perspective? Well, so, and you make very valid points. My colleague Merrill, um, would, here's how you get a gold star. Speaker 0 11:38 Here's how I would answer that. It's not so much a matter of us ever trying to make our users feel that they're forced into a particular upgrade cycle or every year you have to do a set of upgrades or every time there's a new iOS update you should upgrade, or you should always be one major version behind, in both operating system and production application version than what is currently available. It's not so much there's any one right way to do it. That works for all users. It's to have a system at all, that's scheduled where you work it into your budget, you work it in as best as possible into your production periods so that you kind of have some time set aside every year, every two years, maybe every six months for smaller updates where you can kind of address all of these upgrade issues, potentially hardware, definitely some OS updates, definitely some production application updates, maybe even major transitions in your systems, both hardware and software oriented. Speaker 0 12:48 You have a plan in place. You have a general methodology, you have a general cycle. You try to adhere to it's accounted for in the budget. It's accounted for in your schedules. You make other decisions in the department with that kind of a system in mind where maybe you buy one extra machine when you're buying workstations in a work group environment of the same vintage as the other ones that you're buying. So if a machine goes down hard and it can't be fixed necessarily, or maybe it's not valuable to fix it, you have another machine that can be running all those same applications. That's basically ready to step in, and you're not forced into whatever the latest, greatest machine from Apple or whoever is. And it's various dependencies that it, it then forces on you. I mean, if you look at a cost analysis of having a scenario in which you either have one extra machine configured in the proper way, or having to put a new machine into the same place and to upgrade everything else outside of the machine, it's pretty clear. Speaker 0 13:54 And I think it's also important to note that upgrading and, um, and pushing on the bleeding edge in the other direction, isn't necessarily the best choice either. Yes. Definite pitfalls. I'm sure you can speak to some of those. I mean, having been an editor or whatnot, I mean was about some of the risks here. Okay. I'll give you, I'll give you a perfect example, which happened to me eight years ago, but still applies today. And it re and it relates to having a machine with avid on it and getting a brand new iteration of OSX to put on my machine. So this is a very important one because it's, it doesn't even enter a thought. I think, certainly not when you're like an edit mode and you're like, okay, but you know, I'm gonna upgrade my operating system. And you know, there's not necessarily a causal relation for most people when they're thinking I'm going to upgrade my iOS now. Speaker 0 14:40 And it's just a little smiley checkbox and you hit it and it goes, and it's done. You'd get coffee 15 minutes later, you're back. And then you try to launch Abbott. And it says, man. So I think avid is a good example. They are typically a little bit behind the curve. They do their software testing in a cycle that is not bleeding edge. And that it's usually at least a few months behind. I wouldn't say they're unique either. No they aren't, but it's, it's, there's this lag there. Is there a lag between when they Apple releases 10.8 0.2 and with Apple's compacted release schedule of, uh, operating systems, it used to be, you know, a little bit longer between these operating systems and, and the, uh, software developers would have some more time to play, I think. But, so that's a perfect example. So if you know that you have to edit on a certain O S platform, if you want to use avid in X way, that's just a scenario until they release a patch or an update, which will not be forthcoming the day that Apple announces the OS upgrades, same thing, same thing goes for hardware, device drivers, the little pieces of software we were talking about avid, right? Speaker 0 15:48 We'll talk about Adobe. When CSX came out, the all the Aja drivers that were working in CS 5.5, I mean, we had to wait a very long time to see those come into fruition on CSX. Again, two very large vendors who are developing four platforms on an international stage, but they did not get the OS compatibility until several months after. And you have to understand, you know, as, as an end user, as a creative, why are they taking time to support these new is because they know that they're professional users, most likely, I would say they ought to understand that hardcore reliability of their system and its ability to do the key job that earns that creative professional, their money to do certain types of projects. That's the number one concern. And not necessarily is it the creative professionals concern or it shouldn't be to get every last little cool new feature on day one that an operating system, uh, you know, maker may make available in a new iOS update, just cause it's kinda nice to have, but if that's not gonna in some way help a key objective to you and your business as a digital content creator, really, you need to be concerned about reliability and those device makers, those software developers rather do a lot of testing. Speaker 0 17:10 They do a lot of testing to make sure their stuff is going to continue to work. And even though they do get access to developer builds of these OSTP updates before they hit the public, they still want to do continue to testing and make sure that they've done all the testing with the final shipping versions of those operating systems before they go ahead and release their own updates to their users that are like, okay, we know this'll work. Cause they take a lot of heat when things break, they do, they do. And even if the thing that breaks isn't their fault, if it's just interoperability within us and it's a behavior that the OSTP has has changed since the last go around, actually a good example, an instance where, you know, this is typical, we're recording this podcast on a PreSonus audio box for four VSL, right? Speaker 0 17:57 And I've got 10.8 on here. I had 10.7, we did the update and we tried to do a podcast what three, four months ago. And the audio hardware just wouldn't be recognized digging on the forums you, you come to find, okay, well here, here is not an officially sanctioned, but unsigned installer, you know, we haven't released the 10.81. We're still going through testing, but you know, here for the, the super data, you know, here's the beta unsigned DMG install it. And that's what we're using now. And it's working just fine. But you know, this is, this is basically we're the worst possible example of how you should do what we're recommending. So, you know, we were kind of lucky there, but, but you know, live through us vicariously, Oh, listener, you know, don't, don't necessarily, you know, update to 10, eight, not having first check to see if your audio interface is going to work. Speaker 0 18:46 I'm saying, I'm saying, yeah, I learned from my mistakes and you, you did it purely to be an example of what not to do for your listeners. I mean, like it's planning, uh, but you know, so I think, you know, it'd be good. What are, what are some like indicators that may be, it might be time for you to upgrade your hardware? A couple of key ones, obviously, if you're still on anything that's pre Intel Mac desktop definitely write out. And I would even say, you know, macro ones, Apple has now broken even their Intel based processor machines into several camps, a 10.8, the operating system update has some of the earlier Intel max not supported any longer because of certain particularities in their architecture or Apple, simply not wanting to necessarily support such older machines because it required more resources for them. And maybe just, maybe they want to encourage people to buy new machines by, you know, eventually making sure their OSTP loses support for the oldest ones. Speaker 0 19:48 But even then, if you've got some of the earliest Intel max, I'd say it's probably time to update. Sure. So early Intel max, and we're talking 2005, 2006 at this point, and that it's about time for a new machine. Anyway, even if you had the top of the line at the time. Now, one of the things I do love about Apple machines obviously is that the, they have a, for me, at least a longevity that is, uh, unmatched second to none. Yes. You know what insert a requisite. I love Apple comment. Then we should say the following. And we hit on this, certainly in the Mac pro episode, you know, whether the Mac pro, if you want, have to update your machine right now, the reality is the Mac pros really haven't changed in over four years now. That's true. And yet an upgrade option that many of our clients are both considering and now actively moving for are using the highest end 27 inch IMAX. Speaker 0 20:42 These latest Ivy bridge generation processor, equipped with hardcore nice Nvidia graphics cards that the Adobe applications leverage for hardware acceleration, actually using the high end IMAX as Mac pro replacements. And that's a whole other upgrade challenge because they don't have PCI slots, at least not without a Thunderbolt breakout. Yeah. You can use a thunder bolt enclosure for your PCI cards via that get products from sonnet or magma becomes spaghetti jumpy. You have to do your research to see if your particular PCI cards are supported. We should say PCI express cards are supported by those third party enclosures. And so, you know, sonnet has these enclosures and you can look at their site and see, can I put my Aja card in there? Can I put my fiber channel card in there? And now have it be this external Thunderbolt device that connects to the Thunderbolt port in an iMac or who I'm on a fiber channel, San, you know, I need to learn how I can kind of get a thunder bolt fiber channel interface for an iMac. Speaker 0 21:44 You know, it's, it's very robust and there's really the sky's the limit when it comes to, uh, the peripheral for Thunderbolt. I think Thunderball has gotten a lot of flack. And I think that at least from a consumer level, their value hasn't been necessarily the best demonstrated. I never really was a consumer technology. You know, I'm concerned. It was always for the pros. I don't disagree and you're starting to see the consumer level adoption in the LASSI or prosumer. I wouldn't call it, but, but here's the thing about the IMAX and this addresses some of what we were talking about earlier, the latest IMAX will only ever run 10.8. So let's say your hardware is feeling long in the tooth, and you're a final cut seven user. Well, the new IMAX can't be downgraded to an earlier operating system because it's the OS itself that contains the hardware drivers for the various hardware subsystems in that computer, like it's motherboard and processor and internal chip sets and GPU accelerator and all of these things. Speaker 0 22:42 And so it has to be a 10.8 machine. Here's the problem with software is that Apple with their operating systems kind of has these three categories that they put their older applications into as far as how they are supported at an operating system level. And there's the, we are going to make sure that this software continues to work with newer operating systems category. That's the one that's the best, right? There's the middle category of, we're gonna try to make sure that when we update the operating system, we go out of our way to not break anything in the old software, but we're not actively supporting it. So to speak either. And then there's this third category of, we don't care, screw it. You know, if it's drinks something it's so big that that was so old, we don't care. And here's the thing. Final cut seven, the latest versions of final cut seven are now in this third category. Speaker 0 23:35 And as of 10.8. So if you have a new iMac that you buy and that's your hardware upgrade for your CPU and you get the right Aja interface, you know, that has a Thunderbolt port on it. And you know, you migrate all, you're not using FCP seven. Well, you can, what we've seen at this point, I don't think almost any of our clients are running FCP seven on a 10.8 machine, from what we gather, nothing is necessarily broken at this point, but it's our understanding that potentially minor functionalities are effected. And even if they're not apples could release a minor point update that just totally destroys final cut seven. And now you are Sol and need to like think of a whole new editing platform that you want to adopt. I think it's important. This is a good segue cause you're talking about the software itself. Speaker 0 24:21 So we've said, you know, obviously if you're dealing with old Intel hardware or old paramedic hardware, that's, that's one thing, but also our art, is it a 32 bit application FCP seven, a good example. There is no 64 bit ver version of FCP seven. And if you are relying on core, uh, like a core group of programs that are still 32 bit, that is a clear indicator that things need to change for you probably very soon. Well, let me, let me spell something out for our listeners. Cause you know, terms like 32 bit and 64 bit get thrown around and they can be, those terms are used often in several different capacities. And I just want to summarize a little bit here, why that's useful for a creative professional user. So usually usually when we're talking about 32 bit apps versus 64 bit apps, we're talking about the amount of memory or Ram the actual solid state Ram chips in your computer, that out of your total Ram, how much of that Ram can an individual program actually make use of at a given moment. Speaker 0 25:25 And the general rule of thumb is, is that 32 bit applications can really only utilize two gigs of Ram total per application. And the way, what that means is you may have a system that has 16 gigs of Ram, but if you're in final cut, most of the time, all day long, okay, maybe your operating system is using about a gig. Final cut can use a couple of gigs. Maybe you've got a couple other programs open and those are using a gigger too, but you're probably not fully utilizing your Ram. And the problem with that is Ram as a short term storage system within your computer, that's kind of managing what you're doing at a given moment on your computer. Whereas the hard drive is the longterm storage. Your Ram is really holding data. That's involved in what you're doing right then. And there Ram is way faster than hard drives. Speaker 0 26:17 And so you want as much as possible to utilize the full set of Ram that you have because it's gonna make your computer run much, much faster. So if you're using an old app on a 64 bit capable machine with a bunch of Ram, a 32 bed app, isn't going to use it all effectively. And you're going to be doing things slower, whether it's rendering or your realtime video previews or many actions associated with digital content, a 64 bit app is usually much faster because of the Ram it's utilizing. And I think this is what you you're relating to yes, premiere pro and meet the latest versions of media. Composer are 64 bit. You may have a current generation Apple machine, but if you're running final, cut seven, you're not taking advantage of your hardware. You're not taking advantage probably of multi-core processing capability that you have. Speaker 0 27:08 You're not taking advantage of your graphical processor unit, the GPU that Adobe apps, for instance, heavily leverage mercury playback engine. Yeah, the so-called mercury playback engine in the Adobe applications that are now in Photoshop and after effects and premiere pro, they all use your GPU final cut, never even used your GPU to accelerate any types of video processing tasks. So what about just since we're in a professor, Nick mode here where's, hyperthreading come into play here. Well, yeah, this is the multi-core. I mean, hyperthreading is, you know, you have a CPU and these days CPU is, are multiple cores, which means it's kind of lots of little baby CPS built into one. And the latest Mac pros can have up to two CPS each with six cores, each for 12 cores, but Intel who makes these chips has a function on their CPU is called hyper-threading, which means that every core on a CPU can actually basically handle two tasks at once. Speaker 0 28:11 So a six core CPU kind of acts like a logical 12 core CPU, which means a 12 core total machine with two six core CPU actually acts logically like a 24 CPU machine. So think about that, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, we just had one processor and now a high end Mac pro basically acts like a 24 processor computer in one because of hyper-threading. But in order for hyperthreading to work effectively, to accelerate the speed at which you do things in order for you to even get any benefit at all out of all of these processor cores, you need software that's, what's called multithreaded threads or the various individual activities of which there may be many running in parallel per program you're using that are basically the actions that are taking place in the computer system to do what it is you're doing. Speaker 0 29:06 If programs are of an older variety that are single threaded, you can only take advantage of one processor core or one of the two tasks per core and a hyperthreading core that's possible. And all your other cores may be sitting there idle a reason to upgrade in addition to getting 64 bit applications that can gobble all the Ram you've got in addition to getting GPU acceleration, you know, for premier pro or after effects in the machine, that's got a nice Nvidia card in it is that the newer software is multithreaded. So you finally get to take advantage of all of this distributed parallel processing power that these greatly multi-core CPU architectures offer. So, you know, these are all really good reasons to evaluate either a hardware upgrade to get hardware that has these functionalities, but even more so maybe just moving up to newer or alternative versions of production level software. Speaker 0 30:08 Sure. Like moving from FCP seven to premiere pro or FCP seven to avid media composer, because these pieces of software now actually allow you to take advantage of hardware. You may have had sitting in front of you for a few years. So yeah, that's a good example, very good driver for evaluating upgrades. Even if your current system seems to be doing what it needs to do today, to get the job done, maybe you could be getting the job done twice as fast and doing twice as much billable work per year, just by upgrading your piece of software. So these are things I'm going to point out marrow that I think we've talked about, we're going to try to start doing some actual benchmarks that we published to our website, that users, I love benchmarks because in smart, you know, what we could do is we could generate a sequence with a bunch of different effects and transitions and whatnot. Speaker 0 30:56 And on the same machine show, how quick it is to render in final cut seven, then, you know, have it running and premier pro on that machine or media composer. So people can evaluate, Ooh, maybe there's a benefit to just switching out my core piece of editing software because now I'm taking better advantage of my hardware and it's way faster. I mean, even anecdotally we're talking to a four year old Mac pro, maybe it's an eight core, that's still with a 32 bit, you know, FCP seven, right? You've got a whole workflow, maybe that's, uh, that involves a transcoding to, to Apple pro Rez and then editing in this 32 bit application by virtue of maybe, I don't know, Adobe has a CSX getting premiere in there, right. Just right then and there you've eliminated a transcode process possibly. Yeah. Because depending on your workflow, premiere is better at handling these native codecs without having to turn it into something like a pro Rez, then final cut seven ever was again, because premiere can use the full extent of hardware. Speaker 0 31:59 You probably already have something in front of you, whereas final cut, seven can not. And then of course, outside of being able to read the native codec, you have a program that is designed to at least take, take advantage of a course. Yep. So those two things simply by making sure that you have UpToDate software can really change the landscape of the work that you do well. And then let's, you know, again, you may have been happy in final cut seven land with an ATI graphics card that came with your system. Um, you know, even if you've just bought this system in the last couple of years, you know, Apple's build to order options have really been pretty oriented around ATI cards for a couple of years now and the newer Adobe software with this GPU accelerated mercury playback engine that accelerates all manner of video oriented and graphics oriented tasks really only works with some of the later Invidia cards, which you can get as third party cards that can replace your ATI graphics card. Speaker 0 32:59 And so maybe you've got a Mac pro from a year or two ago, and maybe you've already been running premiere pro, but just the upgrade of one graphics processor card could dramatically accelerate your processes. Because now you've got this mercury playback engine capability, don't throw the baby out with the bath water just yet. Yeah, I think is what Nick's saying. You only have a new baby. I do. I do not thinking of throwing it away with the bath water or, you know, I'm thinking of upgrading him with like cybernetic arms and wings. You'll have the first like Invidia powered child with the mercury platelet. He does. Hyper-threading in his diaper. Speaker 0 33:38 Wow. Yeah, Marilyn <inaudible> is a he's good. But um, uh, you know, the, the other thing about making a decision with regard to upgrades, I think we've talked a lot about the technical aspects and the little bit of the budgetary aspects, but I think ultimately this is decision, obviously that should not be taken lightly, but it's one that needs to be a part of your, your strategy. You simply cannot go blind into the world of the work that you do without having a little bit of a sense of what's going on. You have to be informed. Absolutely. And even if you don't have immediate pressures bearing down on you to do an upgrade, be doing your research, try to keep abreast of WhatsApp all up to what's HP or rain computers up to on the hardware front. What's Adobe up to, I mean, Adobe is pretty blatant. Speaker 0 34:29 Now. There's pretty much going to be a major creative suite upgrade every year. It's probably gonna hit right around the NAB meetings and convention in April that happens every year in Las Vegas. You know what I like to call those now, now Mao. I said, now, no NAB, Oh no. I said, do you know what I like to call those? Meaning the upgrade cycles at NAB? No. Yeah, no, I call NAB NAB, but uh, no, I like to call them the Maddens of, of the software world. Oh, like the Madden football man football there's one every year, every year. And it's always basically the same damn game with a couple of new stats and models. Uh, every once in a while they revamp it, but it's not a new year unless there's a new Madden game and there's a, um, and it's out to play and actually the same thing with the call of duty franchise now, frankly, but you keep coming back to duty. Speaker 0 35:19 Yeah. Call of duty. Uh, indeed. But, um, that's dut, Y that's the same way now. So, so we saw that, uh, starting with <inaudible> most of these, these production software developers, they want to be able to kind of release a flurry of press releases usually once a year. So we know in the video industry, many of these are timed to coincide with the, the annual NAB, you know, events. So count on those know that know that new hardware tends to come out every nine to 12 months for the most part. I mean that hasn't been true for the Mac pro for awhile. I'm frankly, expecting something to happen. Interesting. This year, we'll obviously keep our listeners informed, but stay abreast. And I will say this, I think we'd like to say this regularly, but we hope people consider it. Think of us as a resource we're geeks. Speaker 0 36:11 I go home every night and I like spend two hours reading about the same geeky crap I was looking at and talking all day long. Don't tell him, I know it's true. I have dreams about this stuff. I have no life people a little more than I used to, but very little right. No, no, it's good. I, you know, I actually read technical manuals while changing diapers. I often have been sitting in a bath reading either white papers, just imagine lights and like manuals, like actual like candle light, everywhere. Bally shot comes in. Nick has got his hair up and he's, he's got his highlight around. He's going through the tech. I've got like a manual in front of me for like, Oh, Barry white is playing it's Rose pedals floating on the water. Totally with some, some, Oh, nevermind. We just described a set of like a, um, um, a meatloaf video. Speaker 0 37:02 We should, we could make that video. We could, well, I will do anything for you, but I won't do that. And what does it upgrade? The sand, something like that. But anyway, so we've digressed, but use us as a resource. If you're not now sufficiently freaked out by us personally, call us even if you are <inaudible> to ask us for help. Well, we'll prove that we're actually more normal than we come across in this. I don't know about that, but call us, email us, please. We won't use us as the geeks. We are, we will use us. We will be, we will be there for you. It's kind of like that Eurythmics song. You know, some of them want to use you. I'm thinking of different used by you. Well, we, we want to be used by you. Are you saying we're sweet dreams and we're made of this, something like that. Speaker 0 37:54 Okay. But anyway, I think we've wrapped this up. What do you say? I think we've kind of gone into most of the considerations that we either talk to our clients about, or people voiced to us about various types of upgrades, core hardware, peripheral hardware, backend storage, hardware, minor operating system upgrades, major operating system upgrades, minor application upgrades, major application upgrades, or transitions. We've covered some bases and it is complex. Keep it in your mind and we're here to help you. That's right. So be sure to check us out next time on the workflow show. Thank you folks.