#28 Marquis Builds Video Workflow Bridges with Daniel Faulkner, Business Development Manager for Marquis Broadcast

Speaker 0 00:01 Welcome to the workflow show. This is episode three Oh four Marquess Marquess. That may mean absolutely nothing to you, but by the end of this podcast you will be familiar both with Mark West, one of our software vendor partners, Paul exsalonce. And it's not French though. It's not Mac key. It's Marquess. Well, we'll, we'll get into that. There's a backstory then. Okay. We're joined today by Daniel Faulkner. Daniel is based in Nashville. He is the U S rep and main dude for Marquess software. And for our listeners to get a frame of reference, Marquess starts to get very important with their product lines if you are using avid products. And so today we're going to talk about what their software does and how it can help your workflow. If you're using media composer, if you're using Avids ISIS storage systems, if you're trying to implement third party systems with an avid NLE environment, they have a lot of very neat stuff. Speaker 0 01:08 I've known Daniel for a number of years now. We've been plotting world of domination in the background here this whole time. And Nick never lets me in on these things. He's world domination. One of the new guys at Chesapeake, man, I mean maybe we've known you for a long time, but you're recently in the fold. You haven't crossed through the seventh gate of your initiation. Four or five, somewhere around there. Know we haven't made him put on the robe and go through like the dark hallway with dudes with candles. Right? Yeah. No, I haven't seen that. I didn't even know about that. Thank you. So I have that to look forward to. It's basically like the last episode of true detective where he's in that like caves and there's fine vines and weird skulls and dudes with impasses. Awesome. That's right. So Daniel, yes. Tell us about yourself, sir. Tell us about you and the history of Marquess and why, really why it's called that and not Mark Key. Speaker 1 02:13 You really want to start out on a very exciting note introducing myself. Um, hopefully people don't fall asleep straight away. Um, but, uh, I've been with, Mark was for about eight years now. Um, and the company is about, uh, 12 to 15 years old and started out working for actually SGL doing support for those guys working for a reseller here in Nashville. And Speaker 0 02:38 No, no SGL SGL makes kind of some high end and kind of expensive tape archive software. It, they manage tape libraries and the archive space, they have some very big installs and it's largely what avid environments have been oriented around. If you're doing a big tape archive system with avid, is that not correct, Daniel? Speaker 1 02:58 That is correct. That is correct. And so working for a reseller here in Nashville, selling all different types of solutions and um, we were on a install or whatever you want to call it in Bogota, Colombia. I can't go into too much detail about that. It was for the drug Lords obviously then. Oh, well we won't go there, but um, I think you did. Yeah, well, I'm taking it back. And so we met, uh, Jason Whetstone is a little red dot on his forehead. So we met the, uh, the founder of Mark was on, he was there for a similar reason. He was running guns for the Colombians at the time, similar chasing us and they wanted to work with a reseller to take on both the sales and support. Um, so we did that for a number of years starting, I started out in the support role and then about four years ago moved into the business development role and have been doing so ever since. Speaker 1 03:59 And so we've had products that move media and metadata around different environments for about 12 years. Very unique products that we'll jump into. So yeah, I've been in the industry for about nine years and you know, it wasn't my, uh, I didn't graduate, you know, grade school with a plan of working for Mark was broadcast. But uh, here we are and uh, I'm happy to be here and, and providing solutions for these, these challenging workflows is, it's pretty exciting and a geeky, nerdy way we like to say. I think we all kind of feel that way here as well. And so Mark was, is a British firm founded in the UK. Tell us a little bit about the company, its background, their CEO and his background. Cause obviously it ties into your guys' expertise. Our founder was ex avid and our CEO or chairman, Peter Davis, he used to run avid Europe. Speaker 1 04:57 Um, uh, I might say in the glory days in the nineties. So he was a big wig there. And so the company has been around for about 15 years and I think their first project was to move, uh, files in and out of avid environment to a grass Valley environment. And there was just, avid came to the CEO at the time, uh, Granby Patrick and said, Hey, you know, you're pretty smart guy, can you create some software to do this? And it was really a piggyback off of transfer manager cause transfer manager couldn't do that. Sounds like that was, that was a broadcast environment most likely than grass Valley, you know, video it infrastructure and they needed to be able to send files from media composer to like play out servers or or management system or something like that. Yeah. For ingest on the grass Valley system and edit, ultimately edit and finishing on the avid system and in playback or play out back on the grass Valley system. Speaker 1 05:57 So really the round trip of the media files and as you guys rightfully know, you know a lot of our customers today have still today have and want to have best of breed products so they want the best ingests, they want the best play out ma'am editing system and most of the time those are all from different vendors and so who have different wrappers formats, what have you. And so the software that initially was created for that one project has evolved into a larger software toolkit to be able to move those media files back and forth seamlessly and efficiently so that they can all play nice together. And you know, you can use those best of breed products that have the super nice UIs and easy to work with and you don't have to worry about the background processes of how these files get to from location X to location Y. Speaker 0 06:52 And you, you mentioned transfer manager, that's the avid tool that lets you basically send files out of media composer. It's a, it's a separate app from media composer itself. Correct. Speaker 1 07:03 It's an avid product that enables them to get files at a, at a limited fashion I might add in and out of the avid world. And so, you know, would they put a lot of emphasis on that product to get files out of their system? I can't speak to that. I can only hint to that. Speaker 0 07:22 Well, okay. And this, this brings up an interesting point that some people may be confused with, like, you know, for folks who are used to final cut seven and its lineage or the Adobe premier editing product and kind of its whole philosophy, we're making it sound like with avid there's these sort of maybe somewhat self-imposed roadblocks to easily getting files in and out. I mean, if I'm working in final cut seven or premiere or even final cut 10 I just, I just do an import and it's there, right? Right. Export. And we're using very standard formats and those, those software developers who make those nonlinear editors kind of go out of their way to expose the guts of, for instance, their project file formats. So it's easy to integrate with it and have plugins or, so Daniel, you tell us what's the reality in the avid worldview? Um, feel free to be politically correct, but um, you know, it generally is a little different on the avid side would you say? Speaker 1 08:26 Yeah. Historically, um, avid has been, you know, closed off kind of their own little silo, their own little ecosystem. And so it's in the last few years they have made claims and are, are most likely pushing towards to being more open. However, that hasn't truthfully happened yet. Um, because you know, it's still difficult to, even with their toolkits to get files in and out of their environments in a very efficient manner. A lot of, a lot people still, and we used to actually, in the early days, we relied on transfer manager to get media and metadata in and out of the avid environment. And we saw straight away that that was not a great way to go forward because there was limitations with codex support, reliability of the transfer manager and as far as speed is concerned. And so we create our own engine to do effectively what transfer manager is trying to do. And we have a very wide range of codec support. We're very fast and very efficient Speaker 0 09:30 And, and I think, Oh, I was just gonna say, I mean to be fair, right? You look at like, you know I've, it's been around I think really even since the eighties they had NLP technology and then really came into their own in the nineties and given that, first of all just computer based desktop, nonlinear editing was much newer than lots of people were still doing a lot of tape to tape editing workflows at that point. I know when I was in college in the mid nineties I started college off with, you know, tape to tape you medic linear editing. And by the time I was out we were playing around with avid stuff. And so it was a newer set of technologies then. And I think at that point in time if you were the type of customer with the budget to buy this type of digital editing technology and the rest of the ecosystem that avid had, getting everything from a single vendor, you know from a supportability standpoint made a lot of sense. Speaker 0 10:26 Huge, very fair. I mean very fair to think that you don't want to stitch together your solution. Frankly, there just weren't as many players in the space at that point. It was a more nascent set of technologies and what's obviously happened in the last 25 plus years is that this space has exploded. It has exploded the utilization of it technologies through video workflows throughout all points, storage, workflow management, you name it has exploded. You have 50 times as many providers in the space and people kind of take for granted that you can stitch things from one vendor together with things from another vendor and just make it work. But the reality is avid still maintains a somewhat vertical arrangement and it's certainly always been a little easier to, if you're using avid media composer as your editing software to use avid storage, what used to be just the unity system and now it's called unity ISIS. Speaker 0 11:27 And then Avids production asset management and media asset management platforms that are interchangeably called interplay Pam and interplay ma'am and Avids broadcast servers, you know, you go on and on and on. And so that's why to me, you know, cause we've always had it Chesapeake, this idea that we want to be able to pick and choose the vendors that we want to work with. We want to be able to say, Oh you like that NLA but this is the storage we think you should have. But Oh look, this is the ma'am you're using. We've always prided ourselves on kind of building the solutions ourselves and picking from the best of class category best fits the customer's needs and budget. And absolutely. And the reality is people like editing in avid, it's the main draw to Avids platform that they like the editor. And that is perfectly fair and perfectly reasonable, but the fact that the decision an editor makes could then have such impact over like a hundred thousand dollars, $300,000 million dollars worth of the rest of your infrastructure. Speaker 0 12:35 That's kind of not how we like to operate. And so that's why to me, you guys were very interesting find, you know, in the sea of vendors and anyone can see when they go to NAB and just count how many thousands of booths there are or whatever. Um, you were really interesting fine because with avid, having you as a partner gave us the flexibility to give people the editor that they wanted, but maybe have more flexibility over some of the other aspects of their infrastructure. Not just get this out of the way. Daniel, what does Marquess mean and why is it not pronounced monitor key? Speaker 1 13:09 Um, um, it's not marquee. The company's British. Um, and just where we got our names sake from the founder of Mark was, uh, his father, uh, when he found out that he, they, him and his mother were going to have a baby and baby boy, um, he went out to the local pub and he got really, really drunk and actually got kicked out. Speaker 0 13:35 This is actually a more extensive version of this story than I've heard before. Speaker 1 13:38 Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So you can edit what you want. But, uh, when he was looking up from the concrete of being thrown out, he just looked up and saw that the pub he was in was called the Granby of Marquess. And so he thought, well, I'll name my first born Granby. And um, and so Granby, who is the founder of Mark was, you know, he obviously knows that story from probably before he could, you know, before he to talk. That is a pretty awesome story. And so as you can see what's coming, he, you know, when he started the company, he thought, well, I'll finish that little cycle off and named the company Mark was after that same pub. So, as you know, as luck would have it, British company named after a pub, um, for really no apparent reason other than a father getting kicked out for being too drunk one night. So Speaker 0 14:31 That's so much. That's so much cooler than Chesapeake system. I just have to say people are like Chesapeake systems that have something to do with that Bay. Are you located in Virginia? And I'm like, well yes and no. And we don't sell crabs or other seafood products. Don't come to us for your Maryland rockfish. We're not going to work on your boat so well you guys have a very interesting story and it is a very unique niche. Let's get into talking about some of the products that you guys have cause there's kind of a handful of them, right? Let's start. Yeah, kind of a little more basic and we'll work our way to more complex. Let's start with project parking and sequence parking. Because these to me, if you are in an avid environment on avid storage, if you've got an ISIS and you, you know, you know first of all that ISIS is not necessarily the cheapest storage system, dollar per terabyte wise that you can buy and you're looking to either bounce stuff off to a tape archive. You want to have a peer to fill up eventually, right? It's going to fill up. People fill their ISIS all the time. And if you want to have like a tier two that's like a file server that's less expensive dollar per terabyte wise that you'd not really using for production purposes, but it's just kind of a storage bin or you have a tape library and you kind of need a cash location to shift stuff to project parking in my mind becomes like a no brainer. So Daniel, explain it to our listeners please. Speaker 1 16:11 I would be excited too. So project parking as you said is um, is a product that really, you know, lets you take advantage and and man really manage your, your valuable edits, shared storage. Because you know, you've got, depending on what size of storage you have, whether it's 32 terabytes or you know, 200 terabytes, you're gonna fill it up. It's the nature of the beast. File sizes are getting bigger, people want to keep their storage online and accessible for longer. And so that space gets filled up quickly. And most of our clients work at a project per project basis. You know, they're working, you know, today's project, tomorrow's project. And so there was really no way, no easy way, um, to to archive at that same level. So project parking actually branched out of sequence parking, and I'll get to that in a minute, but project parking can essentially take all the media and metadata associated with your current project, bundle it altogether because the files are most likely scattered amongst the ISIS and the metadata is in different places. So it's a great way to bundle that all together and make a, a snapshot or a backup of that project in a nice organized folder structure and provides you with a safe, reliable backup. Speaker 0 17:35 It might be who've us to kind of talk a little bit about ISIS, avid storage system specifically because you said you might have stuff all over your ISIS. What does that mean exactly? I mean cause let me, you just say for folks that use a file server, a NAZ for their production storage folks that use a sand for their production storage like StorNext or Exxon, um, a lot of the time it's a single share or a single volume or drive that everyone is mounting and it's all kind of organized as a single thing. Granted, you have sub-directories and you have an organizational structure there, but you know, it's one volume. You're implying that ISIS is a little different. Yes. This is like the most leading question in the entire world. But um, maybe you can talk a little bit about how ISIS is different in terms of its organization, how you admin it and how you as a user are interacting with subsets of its storage space. Speaker 1 18:34 Okay. Well, yeah, ISIS is normally broken down into multiple volumes or workspaces for different departments. I believe it's recommended to have eight to 10 workspaces. Um, and a lot of times those are for in, in the broadcast realm. Um, there'll be workspaces with names such as feeds or news or sports or you know, what have you, whatever department you want to create. Speaker 0 18:59 That could be for different episodes of a show, different programs, different series that you work on. Different users could have their own workspace, audio, video, graphics. Speaker 1 19:09 Yes, absolutely. And so the idea is your media goes into your workspace. However, the greater idea is it's shared storage. And so some of the secret sauce that avid has with their storage, and I think one of the main reasons it's so valuable is the ability to share that media. So, you know, you don't have to duplicate it or, or what have you Speaker 0 19:33 Because multiple people can hit each workspace. So it's, it's not like a workspace is locked to an individual user. And one of the neat functions of a workspace is that if you have projects that are located on these workspaces, on the shared storage ISIS system, and you open up a bin, media composer and ISIS work together to do a system called bin locking. So different people can't corrupt the bins within their avid projects and it bears stating that have been in an ad in an avid project tends to be a more robust entity than what you might think of as a bin in a premier pro or a final cut project. A bin in an avid project because it contains both sequences and clips is almost more like a final cut seven or a premiere pro project file in and of itself. And then an avid project file is almost more like a higher level of of organization or structure than you even really have in final cut or even a campaign or something with a larger, larger container than project. Speaker 0 20:40 You could have an avid project file that's really for an entire series and different episodes of the series are divided into bins, each with their own sequences and clips as well as generic bins for like B roll for the whole series or your opening credits sequence stuff or closing whatever blah blah blah. So it's inherently a bit more, I wouldn't say bifurcated cause it's more than two, but more dispersed of a way of storing stuff than you tend to have in a file locking sand like StorNext or if you have, if you have a NAS that's a single share that everybody's hitting. And it's cool because you can on the fly as an admin of your ISIS, add more space to an individual workspace or subtract space from a workspace. You have a little slide dynamically changing and that's very different than a lot of other systems. Speaker 0 21:32 It makes icicle very slick. It's a, it's a very slick admin environment. The software for the admin side is very nice. It's really the guts of the system in many ways. But you know, you may, you know everything's locked in there, you tend to fill these workspaces up or you fill the whole system up so you can't carve out any more workspaces. And all of your existing workspaces are full. And so how does project parking come into play? What does it look like from an infrastructure standpoint and then what's kind of the usage of it look like on a day to day basis? Speaker 1 22:07 Well, from the infrastructure point of view is there's not a really easy way, like I said earlier, you know, these editors are working in a project per project basis. Um, there's not a real easy way to see, cause that's a lot of metadata, a lot of references to this media and um, you know, being able to see really how big your projects are or where the media lives cause it can live just about any, any workspace. Um, because it's essentially references, there's not a great way, um, within avid to, to understand these projects and how, who, who's taken up more space because it's very valuable space. And so editors are sometimes less than totally organized. Um, I just think, um, us as a human race is less than totally organized. But yes, I would say focused on getting the project done. And yeah, they, they, they, they don't need to worry about organizing their media and worrying about if there's enough space. You know, there, there's typically, not always, but um, somebody there called a media manager that has that major concern. I mean, let's face it, most of the time your editors don't want to be managing space. They just want to be editing. Yeah. And the editors, bosses don't want their editors to do that either. Speaker 0 23:27 Some of the analytical functions that the project parking software has, cause I know that's kind of usually the first thing someone does. Oh. And say like, how is project parking even installed? Where does it live? Does it live on an editing system? Does it live on a server? Speaker 1 23:41 Right. So, so project parking really can, can be on a PC that has storage connectivity. So as long as there's a cause with ISIS, you have to have an ISIS client that gives you the ability to Mount these volumes or workspaces. And so project parking would be installed on a PC. It could be an editor or it could be just a light basic PC that has the connectivity to the ISIS storage and PC. You mean a windows PC? Windows. Windows software, right. Got it. That's correct. That's correct. And so with that we would have access to all the project files that and by project files, all of the different files that the editors work on, which contain all the references and information about that project and the media that it references. And so project parking would look at that, those files, and keep track of all those references. Speaker 1 24:39 So it actually scans the project files first to see what media is being used where, yes, see to see what those references to the media to take reference of all of that. So it can actually show you how much space a particular product is using. Right, right. Because one, one of my customers came to me at nav several years ago saying, we were talking about this, and he said, well, I do that too. I can tell how big my projects are, but it's me going into avid, selecting the project, selecting delete and avid would come up with an interface saying, are you sure you're getting ready to delete 500 gigabytes? And they would hit cancel and jot that down. It sounds less than intuitive. You hit and you hit the wrong button and like suddenly you're kind of in deep dude. Yeah. If you have a Tourette's moment in you hit hit no or yes. Speaker 1 25:30 And you lost all of your media just trying to take notes of how big your project are. It sounds like it's also very time consuming in a shop has lots of projects. Exactly. And so I think on that feature, being able to tell how big projects are, and it does this as like a big scan you typically do when you first installed the software, right? You go analyze my entire ICIS and every project and give me, cause you guys have like cool little graphs you guys tell people about what duplicate files you have. That might be the same exact file. You have orphaned files. Tell us about those kinds of things and the value that that provides. Right. So, so with understanding those references, we know which project is using which media. Okay. And then we go and look at the actual storage, what I would call a raw level because avid does look at the storage and so we don't utilize Avids tools like media tool or if enterprise is involved, they're indexer. Speaker 1 26:25 We don't use their database to actually see what media files are there. Because as we know, databases and index files can be incorrect or corrupted. Um, so we rely on just, Hey, what files are actually there? And so we go and look at each workspace and see media files are there to compare it to the actual reference files from the project. So we know if you know which project has, you know how many references there are, if there's media missing, like you mentioned duplicate files, we can tell if these files are duplicated and or orphan files. And by that I mean media files that are on this storage, but there's no project reference to these files. So they're just sitting out there silting up that space. And that could be throwaway takes or you know, it could be, it's a lot of times it's renders that weren't cleaned up properly or you know, somebody goes to delete and there's an option within avid to delete just the metadata and not actually the media files. Speaker 1 27:31 And so if you delete the metadata, it's not going to know any more about that file, but it's still there and you felt there. And those might take up a lot of space, right? Haven't you gone into certain environments and there's tons of orphans. There was a news channel in Atlanta that we ran this index against or analysis against. And in their ingest workspace we found over eight terabytes of orphaned files and 90% of them were over a year old. So they haven't been referenced in over a year. Did they? Did they trash them? Well, what we did, you know, cause that's, that's a large number. And so it kind of shoots me when you're thinking, you know, is there something wrong with our configuration? But we actually, cause they have interplay as well. And we can go in through web services interplays, you know, third party tool to check interplays index to see if they know about these files and interplay. Speaker 1 28:24 Didn't know about 90% of them. So we have this long list of orphaned files. And so I told them, I said, Hey, pick, pick your biggest largest 20 files from this list. See if you can find them yourself with all of your tools that you have within avid. And you know, if you find one that we are claiming as an orphan file, then I would say this is not a good reference of an indication of what's an orphan. And they go away, you might want to save it and back all these up somewhere. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they go and they couldn't find any of them because we went and checked all of Abbott's tools and against the list that we found. And that's, there's no way to find those files unless you go to the actual file system and look and somehow when you would normally do, and it would take years to do that. Speaker 1 29:14 And so we started day two of them. Having the software of moving these files off. So it's essentially, we called it a sweep. It's a clever marketing term, but essentially it's a windows move. And so we moved them off and what they were going to do is put it off to um, second tier storage or even a tape and basically label that tape, you know, November, 2014 orphan files. And so they have him on lower cost storage. If somebody squawks that they're missing media, which no one has. And so within a week of them having the software with our analysis tool, we were able to give them back eight terabytes of ISIS story. Speaker 0 29:58 And I mean that's many, many thousands of dollars worth of storage. You look at the price per terabyte. But the question I have, Daniel, is, are you ever worried that when you talk about sweeping away or trashing orphans, you're going to like trigger something in a potential customer who's actually an orphan? Speaker 1 30:18 Well, yeah, I've actually, that's part of my little sales speech when I go talk about orphans and I always say, I apologize. You go, excuse me sir. Ma'am, do you happen to be an orphan? Is your name Annie by chance? Because I'm going to change my whole presentation and so I don't know. It could get you in trouble if you weren't. Yeah, because you picture a big broom chasing these little kids. It's not, it's not ideal. And if you run across, like you said, someone that was orphaned at an early age, you know, it might be, might not be the best thing. So, okay, I haven't run across that yet. Or at least that they've told you. It's like this 50 sales, you can get 20 opportunities that they never purchased simply because of the orphan situation. Speaker 0 31:13 So sequence parking, uh, do we want to talk about that a little bit later about data moving part of the project? Parking. Parking is different because project parking is really allowing you to look at what Daniel both projects, which are the medic container, well workspaces kind of, but the projects on workspaces and then individual bins that are part of a project and take, if I understand it correctly, both an entire project's worth of the media files across all of the bins in that project or even on a bin by bin basis within a project to basically move that stuff from the ISIS to another tier of disc storage. Any other volume that the machine that's running project parking has mounted, whether it's a file share, a sand volume of local CyberCash or something like that. Exactly a cash that's acting then as kind of the pathway to take to tape archive, so you've got that level of granularity project's worth of files or bin level of files and you just can bounce to and from and back and forth and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and it's just a really slick, easy way that's frankly much easier than moving these files around on mass. Speaker 0 32:30 Then within media composer itself using its own tools or doing it by digging through the file system specifically because there's really no, you're creating to keep track of this stuff. You're having to keep track of it all manually by keeping it right and we know how well that works or doesn't for people. So that's how project parking works. How is that different than sequence parking? So sequence parking and one thing to touch on to add to your very nice description of project parking for your job. Actually obviously obviously I'm making me nervous. I don't know, I'm not going to play this to my UK friends, Speaker 1 33:06 But uh, so, so you can run project parking on a machine that's not an actual editor. And so the process of archiving and managing this space does not tie up the editors resources so they can just worry about using media composer doing their creative thing. Speaker 0 33:23 So it could be another windows desktop, it could be a windows server that you had remote access and it could be a desktop that does a lot of other things. It's not CPU intensive, it's not going to, you know, maybe it's a person who is the media manager's workstation. Sure, yes, yes. So they're on Facebook or you know, Snapchat and then they got project parking running. You've got a high regard for media managers? I say no, I'm just, I'm just teasing. Hopefully there's nobody takes offense to that. Oh, certainly. None of our listeners are immediate managers. I'm sure you know. No one who deals with managing media listens to the workflows. Speaker 1 34:03 So, um, sequence parking is, um, like you said, project parking is at the project and Ben level of management sequence parking where we actually have a tool that ties directly into the media composer. And so we had a lot of our customers that we can, and we'll touch on Medway, I'm assuming shortly, but we, with Medway, we can, uh, take sequences and consolidate them out as a single file. Speaker 0 34:31 You mean to actually do the render and spit it out? Speaker 1 34:37 Avid would do the render because they have their own effects and we're not a render farm. But when it comes to taking all those clips and you know when you go to export a file, um, maybe it says a quick time or whatever via avid. Avid does that. He does, it's renders of its effects, but it also has to do the consolidation cause there's multiple clips. It has to stitch them together and create a single file. So midway can do that in the background and saving loads of time with that process. But cleanse, parking, but sequence parking, what that does is it takes the sequence and basically it creates a snapshot of the sequence. So it takes the affects, the media files, the metadata about all the media files and where they go. It exports the sequence, everything together and rendered, not consolidated. So the sequence as it is, okay, Speaker 0 35:35 Right. All of this you need to derive it, but still in a highly manipulatable format, right? Still have handles on all the media files. You can still manipulate parameters of effects because really you'd be opening this up as a sequence in a bin with all of those settings associated with it in a non rendered form. So this, this me with my audio background, this, this sounds kind of like the, a very similar thing to like making an OMF or an a file that gives you a, you're basically consolidating everything into one file, but it's still got your sequence information, your hands, all that stuff. Right? Speaker 1 36:09 So, so yes, it, it grabs all the media files, all those ope Adams puts it together into a bundled file and puts it off to a second tier storage. So you can say, okay, I'm done with this, this sequence today, but I may need to be able to lift an effect or change some things change at times. Yeah. Yeah. And so when you go to restore the sequences, it doesn't have to come back to the, you know, the, the same editor. You can ship it off, you restore it and you have all of your media plus handles. You have all of your effects that are not rendered so you can change some things. And so we really sequence parking. When working with third party media asset management companies, they really jumped on the idea, send the media asset management a flattened file with metadata, but also that same sequence parked and so you have the sequence as a flattened file and then you have the sequence in a condition or format that, like I said, is able to be restored and manipulated. Speaker 0 37:20 No, you kind of implied is that actually triggered from within media composer, the editing software itself? It is. It is theirs. So that's very different than project parking, which is a separate application on a separate machine. Right, right. And totally in the background Speaker 1 37:35 Sequence parking, well actually there's, there's two ways to trigger a sequence park or sequence export. We actually have a drain icon that can be configured to do this and so there will be a client that runs on the actual editor. There'll be a drain icon that's always on top because avid paints the screen. But we have this little drain that you can drag your sequence. Speaker 0 37:58 I mean you're talking like a literal drain like yeah, we're going to be sweeping these orphans down the drain. No, that would not, orphans don't go down the drain. Okay. They usually, yeah, but you really have all the sequence. Very sad imagery. Very dark. Depressing. I mean the company's named after like getting kicked out of a bar after like places starting in drawl, someone died like, like someone died in that fight. I go, lives were lost. No lives were lost in the creation of this company. So story. Anyway, so if you don't like the drain icon, which everyone, but Speaker 1 38:36 If you don't, if you're offended by it, um, we actually can do so within the avid, um, sin too. Speaker 0 38:43 And that's only available on windows the drain. Right? Cause Mac doesn't let you have metal floating icon over everything. Right. Speaker 1 38:50 Right. Mac doesn't allow that. And so we have us into a menu option. Speaker 0 38:55 So is there a server component that this client side application on the media composer workstations is talking to and that server itself actually does this stuff or is it all happening on the desktop level? Speaker 1 39:08 Um, recommended would be a server to, to take that load off the editor but it can work. So it's passing some sort of a command off to that server. Yeah, it's basically what happens is it's an AAF reference file that gets exported and that describes all of the media and our guys have figured out that AAF reference and so they can go and grab the media in the background. So the server would have an avid storage client connection software to be able to access the storage. Again, we go and grab the media and you know, however it's been configured, um, we provide the output. Speaker 0 39:45 Does now with the case of sequence parking, obviously project parking is very oriented around Avids own storage platforms, but is sequenced parking a little more agnostic or is it also really for use in an ISIS environment? Speaker 1 39:58 Um, it's, I would say it's agnostic. We actually have it for final cut pro as well. Um, okay, cool. Yeah. Yeah. The, the goal was slash is it hasn't been finished, but to archive a sequence maybe in, um, avid and then restored that same sequence into final cut. But we looked at that and the reason why it wasn't finished because we have a product that's called bridging and so instead of archiving and restoring with sequence bridging, you can go straight from avid final cut pro seven Adobe premier seven and basically start, maybe you start in final cut pro and you want to finish in avid. You started sequence. Speaker 0 40:42 Is that multidirectional? Can you really bounce between any of those in any direction? You can. You can. So it's kind of like there used to be a thing called automatic duck and that was kind of discontinued because at least at the time the guy who wrote automatic doc got hired by Adobe and that product line kind of went away. But you had to buy the individual components. I want to go from avid media composer to premier or from media composer to final cut seven. But bridging kind of sounds like a much more advanced version of that. It is, you know, it was kind of just to go any direction between any of the supported products. That's pretty cool. Speaker 1 41:22 Yeah, and it's a client server way of doing so. So it's, it's background process and so you know, it, it, and it works. It's basically both the sequence bridging and are subsets of Medway. And so a lot of our midway customers are using these products within the Medway software, um, to do these tasks. And so it's a nice little way midway Speaker 0 41:48 I was about to say what does midway mean? Damn. I guess I can, I have a guess. Media media highway. Yeah, very nice. I didn't know what cat DV meant at one point. Like I guessed that the DV meant digital video, but I was like, what does this have to do with Phoebe? And, and someone was like, catalog you numb skull. And I was like, what does this have to do with the JC Penney catalog? And there were like no catalog as in database, which is what British people call databases. Right. And I was like, Oh, and it was written by a British person, Molly gold. Okay. So media highway, we've gotten to the pinnacle of your life flagship product. It is. You live for it? I do, I do. It's, it's very, um, it's very intense. It's very workflow centric product. So let me ask you this. If you have project parking in sequence, parking in and bridging, do you have midway or does midway give you more than that? Speaker 1 43:00 Sequence? Bridging and sequence. Parking can be subsets of midway. They can be their standalone products or they can be all tied in with midway project. Parking's a different form. Different beast. Got it. Which as I've told Daniel, I think, you know, it'd be cool if they could. Yes, yes, it'd be cool. I know. Bridge these lines of code development. Yeah, I know, I know. Well those two developers don't get along. So they don't fight at bars. Lots of fights in bars and injections and stuff like that. So you got it right. You win. The prize is short for media highway. And so basically like what Al Gore invented. Yes, he was just behind the internet. And so what Medway does as I'm with customers buying different products, maybe it's editing, maybe it's play out, maybe it's archiving from different companies or a media asset management system. Yes, yes. We like those. They're very nice. And so most of the time, so the very nice, I should have my picture as I dressed up as him for Halloween a couple years ago and it was, I could see that it's actually scary how a few minutes of that on TV that day. I forgot just how creepy tents and experience Bora. Yes, yes it is. I mean like one of my finer moments. Oh, it's good stuff. Very nice. Very nice. Or away midway out. How that segwayed into bore at, I'll never know, but uh, Speaker 0 44:45 That's just kind of how this audio podcast goes, Daniel. Speaker 1 44:48 Yeah, yeah. I figured it would. So with these best of breed products, different products from different companies, their struggles with file and compatibilities repetitive highly user interactive processes and these processes need to be sped up and automated. And so what Medway can do is a lot of these different systems have different file formats and wrappers and Medway can basically rewrap trans code and w the media files back and forth again in the background. So the actual demo of the software is painfully boring because it's a progress bar, Speaker 0 45:30 But all it is, it's really just a progress Speaker 1 45:37 Under the hood. You know, some of the, the difficulties of re wrapping in and Speaker 0 45:43 What's behind the progress. It's a platform, right? That's the thing there is there's little bits of a gooey cause as you and I have talked about to send things from media composer into Medway, thus to get it into some other system like a third party, ma'am, a third party archive platform, a third party playout server. You might use the drain paradigm if you're on windows or the menu option on windows or again as a Mac client, you're running that Medway client software that runs on your individual workstation but gives you the menu option to kind of publish back into Medway, let Medway do the actual rendering of the sequence on its own engine and maybe give a copy of that on rendered version of the the assets or whatever and then pass that to the other system for whatever reason, including moving of the files, transcoding of the files, interpreting between the avid quote unquote metadata or project formats and the third party metadata formats that you need to register something in. You guys might come up with something to talk to their API, their application programming interfaces through the Medway servers. Is this all remotely remotely, you know like reality showing you a nice little progress bar, which is really like, it's, it's actually huge. Like it, it seems you say it's boring but like everybody wants that progress bar. It's, it's huge. It is in, in, Speaker 1 47:13 In with, you know, one of the, one of the, when you know it's been, it's been around for several years, us being able to do export down the drain. What editors like about it is, um, it's almost like that shop on TV or whatever it was, set it and forget it. You drop it down the drain and the idea was the dark and dreary idea was as you don't have to worry about the plumbing. We have workflows tied behind these, these drains where let's say this drain goes to play out and they're done with, they know they send to play out and they just drag their sequence onto the drain. It's an instantaneous process. They can actually shut down their system because they don't have to wait for avid to do its consolidation and export. We can have a uh, um, a dialogue popup if you want to add with your favorite media asset management company. If you're sending files to that system and you want to add some metadata because metadata is pretty important these days. And I don't know if you were playing, you know, playing along there, but Speaker 0 48:15 Do you want to, do you want to be able to find anything after you put it down there? Anything about it's history of believers in metadata? Daniel, let me tell you, we are so meta, we're like well ring above the entire world. One of the things that we find is that a lot of our, a lot of our clients like to rely on the sort of file system hierarchy of folders and files and how they organize their folder structure projects type of metadata is one type of metadata. So when you ingest that into a ma'am like reach engine or cat TV, you know that, that that file system metadata becomes searchable metadata. So I would think in an, in an avid environment it would be even kind of, you know, more important because you don't have, you don't have control over the file system. Like you wouldn't have, you know, like you would with the premiere workflow. Speaker 1 49:04 When you're exporting from an avid environment, you're creating a new asset and when you send it to a media asset management system, you need to have metadata that comes along with it. It just, it just needs to happen. And you know, who knows more about that asset than the editor when they finished it. And so we can, when you drag it on the drain, we can have a popup dialog that's completely customizable. So we can pull any of the avid fields that described that, that those media files, and then we can have any fields that you want. I mean, if you want to put your dog's name or the editor's name or whatever added to this, this metadata about this new asset, Speaker 0 49:43 The name of the pub your father got thrown out of 25 years ago, sorry. We can make these Speaker 1 49:48 Fields required so that they can't export it without populating. At least you know a few things about the file, right? And so that goes automatically into the ma'am systems. They're looking for these metadata files and they can say, Oh, this file, this XML file that's very open and generic, here's the metadata. That means that there's a file going to be in location X and they create a proxy and you have all your information and you have your files. Speaker 0 50:16 It goes the other way too. Right? Right. Let's say you have a third party ma'am, and that's where your assets first get ingested into and it has its own and people are tagging things with metadata in the, ma'am, describe a workflow where maybe you would send from that platform to media composer for editing purposes. Speaker 1 50:39 Absolutely. So you have all of these files and you have a lot of our main vendors we work with have a proxy editing feature within it and you can actually create a shot list or an edit decision list as we like to call it to where you've grabbed, you know, portions of these files and you want to send that to an avid system or final cut pro or Adobe for mastering. And what Medway will do is when you create that shot list and you hit a button within the media asset management world that says send to avid, they'll actually generate metadata to describe, you know, the ins and outs of the clips that are referenced. We go and grab Medway goes and grabs the high risks of each clip, referenced stitches. It together, creates a sequence file for avid and sends it over to the avid storage. And if interplay, which is interplay Pam, um, is involved, we can actually check those new assets into interplay automatically. Speaker 0 51:43 Could it just be full clips as well? And it was just a collection of clips, not so much a sequence per se, but just references to clips. Speaker 1 51:50 Yeah. And what will happen is if it's just full clips like that, um, we'll actually still create a sequence because we're stubborn that way and, but the sequence will come in describing the clips and each individual clips will be brought into the bin. Speaker 0 52:04 Now, if your clips were in a format that was like a camera native format but wanted to turn them into the avid media composer preferred format, which is again one of these MXF of a certain type called an Opie Adam using their DNX HD Kodak, either at one 45 or two 20 or whatever the options are. It can also as part of that process, generate those avid native versions of the media files and have those be what gets plopped onto the storage that the avid editors have access to. Correct. Speaker 1 52:39 Right, right. And you hit a, uh, a large pain point that we're seeing in the industry is so many different camera, just formats. I mean, they're in, they're continuously growing and being able to take those files and transcode them into a avid friendly or final cut or Adobe friendly format all in one fell swoop is, is very, um, very efficient. Speaker 0 53:05 Well there's like 15 that are just alone, that are camera formats that are based on impact two and another like 37 now that are based on age two 64. And it's like there's a new one every other week and it's like even the ones that are the same are like still slightly different depending on the camera and yeah, which it's a, it's a pain Speaker 1 53:26 In the ass but you know it's also why we're around because with so many different camera format, there's also so many different platforms that content is being delivered to Speaker 0 53:36 Well and again unlike some of the other editing platforms, avid either doesn't allow you to use these native formats. They do have some plugins and a software system that's part of media composer called AMA or avid media access that allows you to do editing of some camera native formats in their original form without turning them into DNX HD. But in general, it's not as preferred and as efficient in media composer and so you don't get the same level of real time previewing of effects, the same speed when rendering things Avids whole engine is still highly optimized around that DNX HD format wrapped as an Opie Adam MXF file. And you guys are one of the few people on the market who speak that Kodak and rapper format fluently, both to and from right, which is a hugely valuable asset for, for these environments where this is the story of the day. Now let me ask you this, and if you don't have the answer immediately available, but we talked earlier about how like ISIS storage is implicitly kind of split into many workspaces. How would you choose which workspace to spit either the original media files into or the newly generated DNX HD MXF ope Adam files that was part of this like send from ma'am into avid storage workflow. Like where, where is Medway talking? How does it getting that list of workspaces? Speaker 1 55:08 That's a great question, Nick. I'm glad that you answered, asked it. That's a very appreciate this. But, uh, no. Um, there's a few ways that we can handle this. One is a manual way, which you know, saying that word manual is, is never super positive. But if you created a shot list that you wanted to send to a workspace, uh, we, we can actually provide a list of workspaces that you could then take within our interface, our progress bar interface. It has a source and a destination side on it. Um, so on the left is your sources. So we would see a list of your EDLs or edit decision lists from the ma'am and you could simply drag and drop to your desired workspace. Another way of doing it is putting some automation behind that and we could have essentially watch folders for each workspace. And within the, ma'am you would have a button that would say, you know, send to avid and then you could have a kind of a dropdown workspace, you know, X, Y or Z, sort of a watch folder based system where you can starting out with most of our ma'ams, that's what we do because it's just easier and it's very, very efficient. But we have to Speaker 0 56:24 Manually like tweak those config files if you create a new workspace or can it kind of pull the full set of existing workspaces on the fly and keep that list updated? It would be a manual process. Okay. Okay. Well it, it seems like, you know, with all of that stuff and you know how this ties into conversations that you and I have been having Daniel, that Chesapeake and you guys and maybe some third party solutions. We might have some interesting stuff to show off perhaps in the maybe NAB timeframe if we can get our stuff together. I think that's what we're talking about. Um, can't tilt our hands now too much, but I know that us and you guys are very anxious to kind of give some real world examples of this. Absolutely. And again, you know, we, we were a very multi-platform organization and this just feeds right into, you know, giving users the choice to have avid, which is still very much kind of heavily involved and even some of the highest ends of editorial work that's being done. Speaker 0 57:24 I mean it's, it's still is the editing software. Most major theatrical productions are done in much of broadcast television, et cetera, et cetera. But this set of capabilities really offers people who are oriented around that platform. Just a lot of other options. Then taking that totally vertical approach with media composer. Um, so this is really cool and again, we may have some interesting things to start showing off relatively soon or at least hopefully by NAB. So. So tell us kind of what's been new, what's kind of taking a lot of the development resources and you know, maybe where things are going a little bit before we let you go today. Speaker 1 58:02 All right. Um, with, uh, with Medway or with that technology, um, as you, as you know, we can move, we understand the avid world quite well as we've discussed, uh, for a little bit now. And, um, as a lot of our customers are adopting, uh, new workflows potentially with premiere, we've developed a premiere panel that enables you to utilize avid interplay in avid storage for edit in place. And so with Adobe premier you can actually, and the Mark was panel, which I don't have a proper name for it yet, but um, you can actually search interplay, request an AAF within the panel within premiere. And so we'll actually be able to edit in place the avid MXF opiod and files on the premiere. And so those customers with avid interplay, most of them already have premiere just because they have the Adobe package and premier comes with that. Speaker 0 59:12 Or they may have another work group that's like the promo work group or the graphics guys who do a little bit of premiere work. Speaker 1 59:18 Right. And so they can easily with this, with this panel, look into the avid world and, and get what they need. Not having to go through, you know, call the avid guys or the media manager and bug them. They can say, Hey, I can just edit in place. And then once they're finished editing, maybe it's with the avid files and some of their own, they can actually within the same panel publish back to ISIS if they want and create a new asset and check it back into interplay. Or they can publish to play out server or to archive or whatever they want to do and add metadata and tie it in with the ma'am system as well. Speaker 0 59:55 You know what this all reminds me of? Is it a song? Well it is actually. I thought it might be, well, I was first thinking of kumbaya and like how this is really like the workflow version of just everybody, no matter your race or your creed, getting together and holding hands and singing kumbaya. But then even more so, what was that like 1980s Coke commercial where Nelson, it was like everyone, like on a Hilltop holding hands. We are the world. It wasn't we are the world, but that's kind of like this too. You were always on my mind. What was it? What was the song and the Coke ad? It was like, if I could teach the world to sing by blah, blah, blah, and smile. I mean, you know, you guys are like the workflow version of that just harmonious kind of like utopia of workflow. Mm Hmm. You like that? I do. I do. That's what you could call that new product utopia. What we're thinking about calling it Nick Gold's panel. I like that. I mean it's really kind of one in the same. Yes. You know, utopia and utopia. Utopia gold. Speaker 0 01:21 Yes it is. I can think of a dozen other nicknames. You're probably right. Let's cut that off right now. That's new in the midwife technology Speaker 1 01:33 World. Um, and then with project parking we've added a, an addition or even a second product to really become, and I know there's backup softwares out there, but an ISIS backup tool, right? That it runs on a server, it backs things, backs, media and metadata up at a workspace level. And the kicker point of this is having the project parking, intelligent restore. And so you have your backup, um, of your workspaces and your project files, um, removing any duplication that there might be, um, with other software. And then let's say the worst happens, you lose your ISIS and a storm of some sort or an earthquake. I don't know what it might be, but, or just a power failure. Yes, yes. Godzilla. Yeah. We don't want that. Like in the back of 92 Speaker 0 02:31 <inaudible> monster attack. Yes. And so Nashville wiped off map. Ah, actually that happened. Speaker 1 02:40 So you've lost your biases, but you have, you know, workspaces with, with workspace parking or whatever the name is, you can actually pull back individual bins and projects to your individual workspace and start working straight away versus if you were just working on when the disaster. Yes. Because they actually, there was a company that had, you know, an ISIS backup on tape. Um, it was as a Danish radio station actually, and they would, okay, let's do the disaster recovery test. And they said the good news is the file's coming off the tape or it was a Danish news station. Um, the files coming off tape are good, they're usable. The bad news is it's going to take us two weeks to get everything back. And so it's a news station in two weeks that media is going to be irrelevant. So it's not an ideal, it's a good backup. But the restore process is terrible. Speaker 0 03:34 Well, and that's, you know, people don't think about that enough one's going to sack up. It's the business continuity planning. That's just as important as like saying, Oh yeah, we've got a system packing things up. We, because very frequently have the discussion with clients about like how much money they're willing to invest in a backup system. And they, and they, they kind of think of it as Oh well we know whatever's the cheapest. Not, not all the time, but you know, that's what our, what are our price options and, and our responses will w what's your business continuity look like? I mean, how, how, how long could you be down if you, if you lost your progress. Like we say, for instance, data tape is a really good disaster recovery backup system from the perspective that it's very easily transportable offsite to a separate geographical location because when Godzilla walks through your primary production facility and steps on your sand and your ISIS and you know, it's like, remember Bambi meets Godzilla and we're like the foot lands on Bambi. Speaker 0 04:32 Well imagine that's your lead editor and not Bambi. And now how about your ISIS? Where your ISIS, it's probably all of the above. It's pretty big feet. It's true. Um, you know, it's like, well, okay great, you have a copy in another geographic location, but how long is it going to take to get stuff back from tape and goes, get those tapes in your facility or get them in a new facility for people who need business continuity and quickly get back up and running, but short of your facility getting stepped on by Godzilla or a flood or a fire or whatever, you know, you might want just a disc to disc replication system. So it sounds like that's what we're current kind of talking about here. It would be great if you could use this to prioritize, let's get back immediate projects that we were just working on. Yeah. And then we can kind of be a little more leisurely at bringing everything back online to our production volume once it's fully up and running and everything. So yeah, that's, that sounds really useful from a business continuity planning. Speaker 1 05:30 That's right. And we've had, we've had customers and resellers tell us, you know, because ISIS or are most of the time mirrored, right? And so if you get this backup and you feel confident in it as we do, could you restripe your ISIS? I don't know. Um, it's a pretty interesting thought because then you would gain 30% of your more storage on the ISIS. So yeah. Speaker 0 05:56 Lot of different stuff. You guys are up to avid workflow, utopia Ville. Speaker 1 06:03 That's where I live. Mailing address. Speaker 0 06:06 And you're like the only one, it's like you trapped on an Island. It's very lonely. There's not too many people in avid workflow, utopia film, but there would be if they were more engaged with you guys through your wonderful integration reseller partner Chesapeake systems of course. That's right. I think this is the breakout year for really bringing this podcast, bringing more people into utopia. Yes. Cool man. Well listen, thank you kindly for being our guest today. Thank you. This has been fantastic. I'm sure a lot of our listeners will be very interested in this given there's really such a vacuum for information when it comes to melding avid stuff together with anything else. It seems to be a very big black box and the thing is you guys have the boxes to make that work, so thank you Daniel. If obviously anyone has questions about just taking a look at your stuff. You guys have a lot of really good demo videos up work. Where can they go to learn more? Obviously in addition to talking to us here at Chester. Speaker 1 07:07 Yeah. Talking to you guys first, but our website is Mark was broadcast.com and there you, like you said, you could see videos of specific features of products, not the whole product product itself, but Speaker 0 07:20 It's great. You guys have done some great down and then again that's M a R Q U I S broadcast.com. Yep, that's correct. And uh, listen, well we will see you soon. I'm sure we bumped into each other regularly enough and if anyone needs like actual in person demos, you are obviously available to help us out so they can reach out to us and we can put them in touch with you when it comes to any of this stuff. Uh, questions. I've just found that the guys at Marquess frankly know the avid ecosystem and its ins and outs better than most people at avid. So they are a tremendous resource if you're having any workflow issues of that nature. Well thanks again Daniel and this has been another episode of the workflow show. Thank you mr Whetstone. Thank you mr gold. All right everyone, thanks so much for listening. Take care. Speaker 2 08:17 The workflow show is a production of Chesapeake systems. We welcome your comments and suggestions for upcoming episodes. You can email [email protected] that's workflow [email protected] and if you'd like to talk with a member of our team of experts about your particular digital media workflow needs, email [email protected] that's pro [email protected].