#14 "Talking Tech & Trends" with Mike Szumlinski of PVT

Speaker 0 00:01 Welcome to the workflow show. I'm Meryl Davis, along with my cohort, Nick gold. And today we're talking with Mike Zemlinsky over at Provideo tech. Yes, Mike, cause I'm, Lenski good buddy of ours for many, many years. We're gonna talk with him about his perspective on the industry. He's very plugged in a very savvy guy when it comes to production, post production, technology workflows, and all of the fun changes that are going on. Um, talk a little bit about his company pro video tech, which we've been working with for many years now and working with Mike in various capacities for gosh, probably like seven years now, Mike, something like that sound bite, right? Speaker 1 00:41 Getting close to 10. Yeah. Somewhere in that neighborhood Speaker 0 00:44 That makes me feel old. So Mike is a distributor and representative for a number of the software and hardware products that we work with here at Chesapeake systems. So he's going to give us some insight on a few of the lines that he is basically the man for here in the United States. A lot of focus on archive media, asset management, and because of one of his lines. And it's, I think applicability to this new Mac pro that was just announced by Apple. And we're going to talk a little bit about thunder bolt and a lot of interesting, fun, new technology stuff as it relates to that. So let's start off with kind of you, Mike, you've been all over the place when I first met you. I want to say you were, are, were you the Aja rep for Chesapeake systems back then? Speaker 1 01:28 Yep, but we were, I was handling a Aja and facilitates and a couple other lines at the time a now defunct company called ADT X and a company, uh, called, uh, Silicon color, which you guys may know got bought by Apple and turned into the product color, Speaker 0 01:46 Which now is a like little bunch of features in final cut pro 10 and not a standalone product anymore. Speaker 1 01:53 Indeed. That was, that was a fantastic product too. It's kind of a shame that it's gone. Speaker 0 01:58 Well, Hey, I mean, at least you can say some of the technology, you know, it started off as like a $25,000 product. It turned into a 12, $1,300 product and final cut studio three, and now it's like little bitty pieces of it. RNA $300 product. I mean, maybe that's something good evolution of Apple software. So you were working for Aja as one of their reps with another long time friend of Chesapeake, John ladle for a while. What kind of interesting stuff, I mean, you were at, you were really involved with the Aja stuff. I think through this entire era of, of kind of the dare I say, commoditization of the nonlinear editing platform, but you know, what was your perspective when you were dealing with all their stuff? Speaker 1 02:41 No, the, the most interesting thing is I got to see the, the transition and work very heavily in the transition on the, in the NLP space, from standard Def to high Def. Um, you know, now there's nobody really doing standard Def anymore. I mean, you've got a few people out there still straggling along, but for the most part, you can't buy an SDTMV. You can't buy an SD camera. Everything you're doing is high Def and has been for quite a few years, but back in, you know, 2004, 2005, that wasn't exactly the case and people that were actually shooting HD had some significant workflow problems there. Weren't nice, uh, intermediary codecs like pro whereas back then there were extremely expensive solutions to be able to do some of the work that we now kind of take for granted. So I think the, the biggest thing I saw and the greatest thing I learned in working with Aja is watching that entire transition happening not only in post, but in broadcast. Speaker 0 03:35 Do you think we'll be saying the same thing about 4k five years from now, all the, all the camera manufacturers and folks like that seem to want to be cramming 4k production and post down everyone's throats just to keep selling people things. Do, do you see that transition happening similarly to the SD to HD transition? Speaker 1 03:53 I think it's going to happen a little differently when we go up into the greater than simply rasters, but the writing is on the wall right now last week was <inaudible> and Sony announced the PlayStation four and said that it's going to handle four K monitor output. The new Mac pro is going to handle four K monitor output at CES. There were several 4k consumer based monitors available. So now that you've got content delivery systems like Netflix going through something like a PS4 and into a consumer four K monitor, I think we're going to leapfrog broadcast in general and hop up into this new world of, uh, you know, ultra high resolution. And I think it's going to hit kind of like a brick, um, more than it did the smooth transition from SD to HD, where we had a defined timeline to go to digital broadcast and to defined timeline, to go to HD broadcast. Speaker 2 04:45 You know, it's interesting. I remember when the STD HD transition happened, there was a lot of these sort of two up shots where it's on the left, we've got standard definition and look at 10 ADP on the right now I saw something that has 10 ADP on the left and it says, well, you know that old HD here's your, your old broken HD, here's the new 4k. So it's, it's very interesting to see just how much clarity we continue to, to, to gain by jumping up to four K. And of course we're seeing a, a six K workflows on some of the high end production stuff. Very interesting to see just where we'll land, I'm excited for a 4k television, quite frankly. I think that's going to open up a lot of doors, certainly for a in house color correction and, Speaker 0 05:25 And all that kind of stuff. Yeah. I know I'm waiting to buy a four K TV when they come down in price and are basically close to what 10 80 piece sets are today. And, you know, I have one of those big old cathode Ray tubes, still 10 80. I HD Sony sets. They're great monitors, but I'm not really going to buy a flat screen probably until, you know, I can get a four K one for under 1500, 2000 bucks it's coming. So Mike, one of the things that you do as a distributor, you tend to forge these alliances. I'll call them more, maybe botique software development companies that are doing interesting things often at the forefront, one of them. And we'll talk about them in a moment was a, an archive and backup software company that, that you actually turned me on to, I think, before you were even well before you even kind of officially their distributor in the U S but we'll talk about that in a moment, but a few of the areas of interest that you seem to be kind of homing in on over these last months relates to an area that Merrill and I evangelize pretty regularly, which is media asset management, and this whole database driven approach to management of media files. Speaker 0 06:36 And all of that, let's start with one that you began repping and distributing here in the States relatively recently. And this is I'm going to try to pronounce it, how the Swedes do because it's a Swedish company <inaudible>, uh, does that sound about right? Speaker 1 06:53 You're pretty close. You know, it's interesting is that it's a Swedish company, but a, the word is actually Spanish. So it's kind of Timo, what does it, what does it mean it's Spanish for dancing? So it, it kind of doesn't mean anything. It's kind of like how they named cars or whatever, like, yeah, it's, it's, it's the 2015 to sell of a cause you wouldn't call that, you know, with its English phrase, you know, and here's our ma'am dancing, dancing. Ma'am, I've heard some pretty bad product names though in English. So at least it flows off the tongue. We tend to call it Speaker 0 07:27 Timo or something like that in any way. W you know, this is a man platform that we had been aware of at Chesapeake for a few years and had heard positive things about, they kind of had a little bit of a I'll call it not totally nailed down distribution strategy in the States. And just so our listeners understand there are often multiple tiers of middlemen in this industry, you know, Chesapeake and the systems integrators value added resellers being part of that. But there's also this next level up called the distributor, which is what Mike is, and distributors tend to be kind of the, the front man for a lot of products, especially when it's some of these more niche software companies. And, you know, Mike kind of becomes their guy in the United States. I think it's fair to say. And so when we found out that you were taking on the camp Timo and their portal product, we were really excited because this was a group of folks doing a nice ma'am that we really wanted to engage with, but didn't really have means to. So maybe you can tell us a little bit about your relationship with them and just talk a little bit about portal, which is kind of their, I don't want to call it entry level because it's a pretty sophisticated system to be sure, but it's a, it's kind of their more widely marketed product versus their enterprise solutions. Speaker 1 08:41 Yeah, absolutely. Um, you know, the, the cannibal portal product, I first saw it, uh, actually, uh, at IBC back in 2012, I'd heard of it quite a few times and a lot of friends that helped me out in the European space that do similar products and had hit me to the product. So they said, Hey, they've got a presentation at IVC. You should really go check this stuff out. And so I did, I went and saw a demonstration. They were doing at an Apple event and I was kind of blown away by what the feature set was and how, how clean the interface was, and the fact that it was all web based UI. So there was no thin client licensing or anything like that. And it was, you know, extremely accessible. Speaker 0 09:22 We could call it the Ikea of media asset management systems. Does that mean you get, like, you have to look at a map and it's very, very easy hours walking around in a circle with a little outline of a guy, the required tools, I should say. It's funny because out of all the ma'ams that we've ever dealt with and we have a portfolio of them, it actually does have some of the best documentation from a user perspective, from an administrator perspective, or even a third party, you know, like a, an integrator developer perspective, uh, you know, they have an SDK and set of API APIs that you can use to extend its capabilities. And it's, it actually is laid out as clearly as kind of an Ikea construction manual for that desk I'm sitting in front of or whatever. Speaker 1 10:05 Yeah. And the product itself is the extensibility is one of the things that I also found to be really intriguing is the fact that there was in, in the European market, there were all already four different companies that had spun up their full business model around this Canto product and building little applications. And ad-ons almost like this enterprise ma'am iOS store. If you wanted to think of it that way, where their livelihood was based off of these, uh, these commercial ad-ons to a product. And they were only able to do that because the richness of the system itself and the hooks that they had into it, and their ability to build these really great systems. Speaker 0 10:47 So like all ma'ams, you know, it's a web based user interface. It's not a standalone application. You access the platform through your web browser. It's, it's all HTML five, right? You, it supports a plethora of modern web browsers. So you're not locked into one app in order to get into the system. Correct? Speaker 1 11:07 Yeah, that's absolutely correct. And it's even got some intelligence in it where if even if you have an older browser, that's not HTML five compliant, or even something like Firefox, which is modern, but doesn't support HTML five video. There are hooks within the system to go backwards and we'll even load in things like flash players and things like that for, for legacy systems. So you really don't have a platform. You have to worry about if you want to log into it on a windows machine, running IEA right now, and then walk across the hall and pop up Chrome on a Mac and then walk across the hall and pop up Firefox on a windows box. Your UI is going to be the same across all of those platforms and your, your ability to manipulate the media, watch it, play it back. It's going to be identical. Speaker 0 11:48 So whose portal for give, give a few examples of the types of environments and the types of kind of basic rundown of features we don't want to get too in depth, but just some of the things that make it appropriate for a few different use cases. Speaker 1 12:00 Yeah. I mean, I think it's a pretty wide availability product. The interesting thing that, and kind of the, the standard that the guys tried to reach in developing the product was to have something that was more universally acceptable, uh, something that was more universally attainable. And then that had such a strong feature set on top of it for developers that when you needed those really specialized or specific feature sets, you could actually hire out developers to maybe help you do that for considerably less than buying some of the bigger systems. The entire team at Canto came from a, an enterprise asset management background. They were all developers for a product called <inaudible>, uh, which was then purchased by this RT and then kind of turned into big company marketing mess. Uh ma'am um, and they just didn't like the model of every customer having to be a brand new configuration and development effort on the part of the software where they really didn't have any sort of cookie cutter feature set, almost everything had to be very customized. And that made it very inaccessible to the majority of users that need asset management. And it's built into kind of a simplicity of the product where the goal of it was to be Google for your, your assets within your video work group, whether that's corporate video, whether that's post-production, whether that's broadcast. It really doesn't matter. It's aimed at the center and being able to manipulate video assets and flow them through a workflow. Speaker 0 13:32 Now in a post production environment, it has integrations for the primary Anneli platforms. Final cut, seven final cut, 10 premiere pro. And I believe you were speaking to those third party modules. I believe there's a third party module that allows you to bounce media assets between a portal and even media composer. Correct? Speaker 1 13:51 Uh, yeah. So right now we've got plugins that are just, uh, add on development to the system that allow us to talk to final cut seven final cut X, uh, full blown panel for Adobe premier. And we were actually showing some preliminary stuff with media composer at NAB. So we hope to have that shipping pretty soon. It was still in the early phases when, when we were showing it now I'm like, are these kinds of the add ons that are additional, or this part of the, uh, uh, the way that we sell it is this part of the kit and caboodle. Yeah. So it, it's a very extensible system in the way that you purchase things as well. You, you only purchase what you need, so you can get into the system relatively inexpensively compared to some of the other products on the market. And then you purchase what plugins and tools you need. Speaker 1 14:35 And then over time you can grow that with simple licensing. So if there are more fun, more functionality you need or more user licenses or anything like that, it's a simple license key and voila your, your system expands. And the core functionality of the system is based around the exact application stack as the enterprise product, which means that if you start as a small company and you grow relatively quickly due to your advancement and business savvy, you can grow the exact same system into a full blown multi-tier multi-site enterprise asset, ma'am by just adding license keys. Speaker 0 15:08 And that gives you things like high availability on the database server, kind of a grid and scalability on its transcoding element. Because one of the nice things about portal is it has its own media and coding and transcoding engine building. Those types of things are what you see in the enterprise version versus portal. Speaker 1 15:25 Yep. Correct. I mean, with the portal standard system, we support up to 60 clients. We sort of support up to a million assets in the system, but when you get beyond either of those two metrics, it's time to hop up to the enterprise product. We support one transcode engine, which could be a 16 core system. It really doesn't matter. It's just, we only support one formal engine. Speaker 0 15:46 Gotcha. Gotcha. Now portal is a platform that we build out for people. We put it on a server that they're hosting. You can either put it outside of your firewall in the so-called DMZ, or you can, uh, you know, allow people to get into it via VPN access if they're outside of your immediate local area network. But it's a, it's something that we are building for our clients and they are hosting within their facilities. Let's talk about another man platform that you're representing these days, which is a very different model than that. And this is media silo. Again, another media asset management solution that we've had some kind of on, again, off again with over the years. And we're very excited to hear that Provideo tech was, was going to be taking it on as, as a product that you guys helped to, you know, market and distribute. This is different media silo is media asset management in the cloud up with the care bears. Um, what is that, what does that even mean? And why is that even useful? What is that? Just bang cloud bandwagon he stuff, or does this actually serve some utility? Maybe you can compare and contrast with kind of a self hosted man platform. Speaker 1 17:00 So yeah, I mean the, the big difference between, you know, what I like to call land-based ma'am and a cloud based ma'am is a land based, man, generally speaking has really fast access to localized resources and, and high resolution media, but it doesn't do a good job of cost-effectively scaling across LA large geographies. Uh, and it's generally pretty cost prohibitive to scale up for a lot of different users. So with a product like media silo, the opposite is true. It's relatively inexpensive to add 50 or a hundred users within the system and a relatively inexpensive to, you know, have a presence worldwide with, with the system. Speaker 0 17:42 That's because it's in the cloud. Speaker 1 17:44 Yeah. You know, they're using Amazon's S3 backend for all of their storage and AWS for all of their, their front end, which means that you've got a worldwide synchronization happening of all of your assets. So if you're in Baltimore and you decide to upload an asset into the system, you're going to hit East coast servers in Manhattan. And as soon as that system hits that East coast server, it's going to go against the Amazon's backbone, which is faster than our heads would likely explode if we really knew what was going on there. And that media is automatically sinked across the pond over to the China host. And now you've got access to that media locally on a fast connection. Speaker 0 18:25 So it's not probably touching your production, sand or storage with the high res media directly though. I know that because part of what you're paying for with, with media silo is the storage space in the cloud. Uh, it's common for people to be pushing proxy versions of media that they've maybe already generated to VAT feeding some metadata along with the asset. And then what using media silo a lot of the time for what like review and approval processes versus direct interaction with the editing platforms, that kind of thing. Speaker 1 18:58 Yeah. Review and approve is a really very popular way to do it. The other place we've seen it be extremely popular is actually in scouting and doing location shoots to try to figure out what is usable to collaborate with a production team that may be in, you know, an office someplace else in the world. Um, casting is a very, very popular use case for it. So, uh, anybody that is sitting in a room in whatever major market that you're doing your casting and can immediately pop that little memory card out of that cheap little camera they've got on the tripod, doing the casting calls and upload that well, the next person starts to talk and is being recorded. And now the entire production team has access to see that has access to put it through a review process. If they want to has access to make notes on it, organize it, categorize it, rate them, you know, a three stars, four stars, five stars, that sort of thing. The other thing it gives you is the ability to have distributed VOD because the media silo system also has a very strong API. Any media that you send into the system, uh, you can allow based on metadata rules to flow into what we call a channel. And now you can create a web portal on your own website that you're not hosting all that footage. You're not storing it all on your web server. You're not paying for the bandwidth of it. It's all coming off of media silos, backend Speaker 0 20:21 Kind of like how you can embed a YouTube video within your website, but it's still sitting on YouTube servers. Speaker 1 20:28 Exactly, exactly. And MTV uses this heavily and they actually use it for all of their red carpet, uh, footage for all of the different awards shows that they go to worldwide. There's a website that they have published for the press where all of that red carpet interview footage and press footage is immediately uploaded available for high res for other people to use it's watermarked internally by their system. And then any press junk, Speaker 2 20:53 Use it. Mike. Now, would this be an appropriate configuration for, well, you know, I know there are, they're very few and far between, but like a stock house say you're a say your core businesses is generating content to then, uh, resell to others, uh, like, um, you know, uh, B roll services or what have you. Speaker 1 21:12 Yeah. And, you know, and above and beyond that, you would be able to build your own pay portal for that. Um, you would have to obviously have your own logic set up to build a pay wall. The media silo product doesn't give you that paywall, but based on permissions and based on that portal, you could build, it could automatically flow things in the media side of silo portal to say, okay, now give this user access because they've paid to the high rise content or move this content from this project, this project, because now it's licensed exclusively. They paid more to license exclusively for a term of one year. So no one else can buy it right now for the next year. Speaker 2 21:50 A followup question for that, Mike is just like, what kind of hooks in the API? And is there a as a robust scenario for a cloud based service, as there is on something that a, you know, as you're calling it a landmass? Speaker 1 22:02 Well, you know, I would say the big difference between the two there is if you do have a speed, a difference in the speed that you have access to the system. So generally speaking, the cloud based system is serving you proxy content for your review and approve. And then your high Rez is a download as fast as the pipe you have available to you at that time, if you even choose to download the high rise, whereas with a land based, ma'am your kind of always connected. And in theory, you have instant access or extremely high speed access to the media that you've got. So I think that depending on your workflow, there's actually quite a bit of room for them to be products in concert to add even more robust flows to the way that you deliver content to your customers. Speaker 0 22:54 Well, I know one of the things that we have talked about at Chesapeake is, is taking a system like cantaloupe portal. And from that publishing into a more public facing system like media silo, getting the pieces of software to communicate with one another kind of at an API level and, and push a proxy and some relevant metadata from media silo to this cloud hosted site, that's a lower cost per user. Maybe not quite as sophisticated, but again, to put your content in front of that wider range of folks, maybe your communications department or clients, folks who don't really necessarily need all of the nitty gritty functions that, that something like Canto portal provides, they really just need to be able to look at the stuff, maybe make some annotations and get some feedback to the, the post production folks. I know that's something we've talked about. Speaker 0 23:48 Obviously, if clients are interested in that kind of a system, they can talk to us about how we would work that integration and get the two products to speak to one another. But does that seem like kind of a along the lines of what you guys are thinking, Mike? Yeah. You know, at NAB this year within the media silo booths, the overarching theme of questions was love it. How do I get it to talk to my land-based map? And it just, so the listeners know Micah sang a LAN as in local area network, the one that's, you know, services, the folks on your network versus the public internet. I think you're saying that, right? Yeah. Okay. Now you're saying lamb, like, you know, he like the meat. I was thinking lamb chop. Yeah. You know, like from Sherry Lewis and Bram sock, puppets galore. Yeah. Speaker 0 24:37 That's right. That's an added feature of any media asset management, free sock puppet with every man purchase and an annoying song that you can't forget, which I won't sing because it's probably already in your head. This is the song. That's the one. Okay. Sorry. Um, let's, let's move on. Shall we, we've been talking a lot about media asset management. Again, listeners of our show will know that we often relate media asset management to this bigger issue, archive where your media may be, goes to retire, as I like to say, or put out to pasture Boca, Raton of your media. Yeah, yeah. Complete with all of the lots of Mav and buffets exactly. Back every Christmas and gets you a great sweater, right? Yeah. It's all, it's $5 checks baby. So, so archi where you turned me on to many, many years ago, back when you were working at one of our peer companies, I'll call them out of Detroit where you're based. Speaker 0 25:33 And Chesapeake had been looking for a vendor of software products that could do backup to tape or to spinning disc archive, usually tape a data synchronization software, to be able to kind of like clone a San or a file server or a drive to another one. So you kind of have that for disaster recovery backup. And we had gotten, this was years ago now we had gotten really sick with retrospect cause it was just garbage. We had experimented with brew and didn't have a ton of luck. It really wasn't as fleshed out as we were looking for. And I said, I'm going to ask my buddy Mike Zemlinsky cause he probably knows something. And I think I had, you had had a little forum at the time that you were maintaining for us integrators. And I'd put that question out there. And you turned me on to this German software company called archi where, uh, a R C H I w a R E. And you said, Hey, check these guys stuff out. They have a backup product, they have a sync product, they've got a archive to tape product. And we looked at it and we've, we've really, haven't looked back generally because we've deployed it now to many, many sites. Tell us about RQ, where these guys that we've been now working with and through you that you are distributing and representing in the United States. How does that relate to this conversation and where do they fit in? Speaker 1 26:55 Well, for me RQ, where was one of those products that I kind of stumbled across? It was a friend of a friend that turned me on to them. It was a product that was it's. So utilitarian, it's something that every business, I don't care if you're doing rich media or you're doing print design, or you're doing bookkeeping, or, you know, everybody needs some sort of data management platform. They need some way to do disaster recovery and archi word did such a great job of it and did it at such a reasonable price point compared to a lot of the competition that I was just enamored immediately with it. It's possibly the most boring topic in the world to talk about backup and synchronization and archival, but it's a product that just does it extremely well. It does it simply. It's not difficult to get set up and it's, while it's not the cheapest thing in the world, it is a very cost effective product against some of its competition. Speaker 0 27:50 So they've got four main products, uh, and just to quickly review, they have backup, which either can back up your data either on a centralized server or across a variety of, of systems that you may have either to data tape or to what we call virtual tape library, which is basically a hard drive based storage system. But one that's essentially mimicking data tapes. And you know, another thing to throw out for our listeners, you may not realize this, but if you buy a tape library, tape robot, these are kind of interchangeable terms, but one of these tape drive systems for data tape typically LTO at this point, and they just came out with LTO six, which is like two and a half terabytes per tape. You need software that can talk to the tape drives and manage that tape library. The libraries don't come with that. Speaker 0 28:38 And the ma'am products don't do that inherently. You need this what I'll call middleware to actually drive the robot, as I like to say, or communicate and write data to the tapes through the drives, read data back off of the manage the sets of tapes. So they've got that backup. They've got archive, which is a more of a, like let's push this data in this form to a tape so we can kind of get it back. It's maybe finished projects, maybe it's kinda camera original footage, but we just want to make sure we got a copy on a robust medium, they've got the sink, which is kind of like, just take this file server or sand and sync it with this other one. Right. And then finally, there's another interesting one. And I think this really ties into what you were saying, Mike, about just like everyone needs something for backup, but often people think it's too costly or too complicated. Can you just speak a little bit to backup, to go backup, to go as I believe their latest product and their kind of main four product catalog. And it just seems like everyone should have a copy in any company environment who either is, or is not dealing with data backup for disaster recovery purposes, which an alarming few number of people actually have have strategies for. Speaker 1 29:52 Yeah. And backup to go was a kind of a new idea back, uh, when press store a or P P three, I guess at the time would be called. And in what backup to go is, is really to talk to clients that generally don't have a backup option. I kinda like to think of it as time machine on steroids. It allows you a rule based network based client backup, um, backing up servers. Uh, obviously there's a lot of things you have to think about and data types and file types and timing, windows and stuff, but it's generally easy. Cause servers are always at the same place and they're always on. So I can ask a server at any given time to send me data. And it will because if it's off some bigger problems happening, laptops and workstations are not quite so easy to track down. Speaker 1 30:40 You know, laptops are on multiple networks between wired and wireless workstations are on DHCP addresses. So they're changing every time they reboot, they could reboot in the middle of the day. They can reboot in the middle of the night. No one's stopping you from restarting the computer or closing the lid on it and walking away. So what backup to go provided was a way to reliably get data off of those computers in an unobtrusive way to the users. So oftentimes the users don't even know that they're being backed up. And then when they come to you and say, Hey, I lost that really important file. You can smile at them and say, Nope, you didn't. We have it. Speaker 0 31:15 So that's something that we can get someone on, even a relatively inexpensive file server. I mean, even a little file server appliance, you know, just a little thing that lives on their ethernet network or is bridge to their wireless network and install the backup to go kind of client side software on the main systems that they use in their environment. And you're just saying that kind of in the background, without people having to be aware of it, it's making sure that copies of the files are stored on that centralized server and not just on those internal drives in those various laptop or desktop machines that the actual users are in front of all day. Yup, exactly. And, uh, just a question on that. Of course you can, you can attenuate which time that that kind of backup action takes place, right? So if you have an understanding of, of, uh, what the workplace requirements are and between such and such a time, when the, you know, we just, we can't choke our throughput, you can, you can set this for nighttime or weekend scenarios, correct. Speaker 1 32:16 Well, for backup to go, you can set which timing windows based on templates. So if you have groups of users that, you know, come in later in the day, or if you have a specifically, if you have 300 users in your environment and they all come in at 9:00 AM while you want to probably stagger the load because otherwise 300 systems are going to hit the server all simultaneously and try to start backing up and it's going to be a bad experience for everyone. So, you know, having, uh, we, we do have some rules where you can say, okay, only backup when this system is on a wired ethernet, as opposed to wireless or only backup when the system is plugged into the wall, as opposed to on battery power or only backup the system from the hours of X to Y. And the really important thing to note about backup to go is that the client system, the computer that is actually running, that the backup is coming from is the system that's kicking off the job. So the server is actually just sitting there listening for clients to talk to it, as opposed to a traditional backup environment where the server is calling out to the clients and saying, okay, it's time to start our job now. So this means there, there is an applet that's required on the, on the front end, on the client machine. Yes. Yeah. You install the press store service on the client machine and it's pretty much unobtrusive. It sits in the background and does nothing unless it needs to back up. So Speaker 0 33:35 The thing I want to talk about with RQ, where again, let's talk about archive because it's just a hugely overwhelming issue for all media organizations at this point, because they're not shooting to videotape. They don't have that little tape in the, just sitting on the shelf of every shoot that they do. They're oftentimes shooting to expensive, solid state media, or even onto the hard drives directly and recycling those things. So almost from the get go, things are just a file and often getting pushed to some kind of drive, but not really a long term type of medium. And I can't reiterate enough just how many places we go into with the shelves or walls of FireWire drives that just make us grown and slap our foreheads with our hands and just say, you know, these things, aren't going to spin back up. If you leave them sitting here for five years, but they have this archive product, it's got a nice little user interface. Speaker 0 34:29 You actually, again, kind of like can't demo in some of these other platforms you go in through your web browser to administrate the system and you can kick off the archive jobs right through the press store archive interface. And it's a, it's a pretty straightforward system. It even has what I'll call like a little mini ma'am built into it, where you can kind of add a few metadata values to your assets. But one of the things that we've done with the archive product again now called <inaudible> archive as of the release of the press store five or now P five, that just came out a few weeks ago is that we often integrate it with a media asset management system. So the archive software talks to the ma'am directly and users can kick off, send to archive retrieved from archive operations without even having to go into the slightly more up to tape archive software user interface. They just do it through a button click in there. Ma'am that's happened already to integrate the, the, the P five archive from marquee where with can't demo portal. Correct? Speaker 1 35:33 Yeah. Um, so, uh, one of our partners in Munich, Andre, Alec, a great guy, he's developed a piece of middleware between the Canto product and the archi where P five product, where you can completely drive the <inaudible> system from Canterbury. So sending content into archive, recovering it from archive, all happens right through your asset management system. But what's interesting about it is that we have the ability to send all of your metadata to the <inaudible> system. And also if you choose to low resolution preview movies or proxies. So if you ever choose to move away from Cantimur, your archive is not stuck in a state of not being easily searchable and finding the data that you need. Because if there's one thing I've learned about archive is that archive is forever and it's a longterm data storage method, which means that you may go through several different systems in the lifetime of a single archive system. When it comes to post-production, you may move from one NLP to another, and you may move from one man to another man. You may move from 14 different types of storage's and to 25 different other types of storage's. But if your archive isn't searchable, it's pretty much useless. Speaker 0 36:49 So this, this is a way that people can have the archive system essentially be self contained, not dependent on their choice of media asset manager. It keeps the metadata, it can even keep its own copy of the proxy that the ma'am has probably generated. And you have that system and maybe some users are navigating the archives through the archive software, because it has that searchability. At that point, it does have some of those metadata terms and the, and the proxy movies that you can view through the web interface, but maybe another set of users is just going through the mammon or face cause it's a little more streamlined and maybe end user oriented. Yep. Cool. So we've been talking a lot about software, but you deal with hardware as well. And I believe this next manufacturer, which is one that the Mac faithful have been aware of for what like 15, 20 years now is sonnet, who you are a rep for, which means you're kind of like suave pitch man for sonnet. Is that, is that a fair description? Speaker 1 37:52 Yeah, I mean more, more or less. Uh, we worked directly with sonnet to help they have a direct sales channel already, but, uh, we work with them to help show people what their product line is capable of and get a feel for all of the different products that they have. Cause it is quite a hefty list. I believe the sonnet price book is in the 200 plus products. Speaker 0 38:13 My first exposure to these guys was probably in the mid nineties and sonnet was one of the couple of companies that are, if I remember correctly, a person could go to for a processor upgrade for their Mac back when people even thought to do this crazy thing where you could like buy it, uh, G4 and get a faster G4 later on, you know, sonnet was one of the manufacturers of those CPU upgrades, right? Speaker 1 38:42 Yeah. They were actually one of those guys in newer tech. And actually there was a point at time where sun was the number three consumer of power PC chips in the world behind Apple and IBM, Speaker 0 38:57 But there were only three. No, just kidding. Just kidding. Speaker 1 39:01 Well, you know, Nintendo had them in a super Nintendo and GameCube. Speaker 0 39:05 Yeah, no, no, it was quite popular back in the day, but we don't typically do that as much anymore. So what areas has sonnet gone into that people should be aware of and, you know, wink, wink, nudge, nudge thunderbolts. Speaker 1 39:18 Yeah. You know, sonnet really has always been kind of a hardware engineering company. And when the processor stuff started to kind of go away, when it no longer made sense to, to be in that market, they really start focusing on inventive pieces of hardware that nobody else was really making. And if you look at their hardware, you know, their hardware line by and large, the majority of the product they have does not have a competitor in the market space. They are the sole creator of a lot of very interesting host bus adapters for all sorts of different connectivity. Be it East Satta, USB three FireWire 800 combo cards, media readers, things like that. But when Thunderbolt came out, they were one of the actually initial four that had access to it. Obviously promise had the first access to it before any other company did. The next three were Aja black magic and sonnet. So they've been in the Thunderbolt pool since day one. And now we're making some really, really cool products to allow you to take, you know, existing PCIE cards and put them into Thunderbolt chassies or my personal favorites, the X Mac mini server, which in the post X serve era allows us to take a Mac mini and turn it into a one R U rack Mount server with two PCI cards. Speaker 0 40:37 So tell me how that works. Give an example. Cause that's an interesting one. We don't have a Mac server anymore. There are certain use cases. We're running a piece of Mac software on something that's a little more of a ser server form factor would be good, but the Mac minis obviously don't have expansion card slots. What's that device do exactly. Cause that, that sounds pretty cool. Speaker 1 40:57 So essentially has a thunder bolt outpour on the back of it where we tap the Thunderbolt port on the Mac mini and we bring that into a two PCIE card bridge of the Thunderbolt. So you can put two full PCIE cards off the back of the S of the Mac mini and it's all enclosed into a single power supply. Uh, it moves all of your connections for the Mac mini to the back plane. So it looks and feels very much like a small pizza box. What are you server with a couple of cards in it. But what this allows us to do is start to get back into the place where X serves were great. So if building, for example, a tools on airplay out surfer, generally speaking, it's much preferable to have one are you have space with your AIG Kona card in it and your storage adapter of choice and the software in the Mac mini running than it is to have a Mac pro that takes up eight are you half with, and you have to put a shelf in place. And all of the things that come with that, Speaker 0 41:54 Well, one of the other, and it's kind of along those lines, let's take a machine that has Thunderbolt, but give you the ability to use a PCIE card. They have a line of enclosures that you throw one or even a few PCIE cards in, and it basically turns them into external boxes that you plug into your system with a Thunderbolt adapter, and it sits outside of your system instead of being a PCI e-card, that's living inside of it. One of our clients who have I've referenced before in my recent blog post about the new Mac pro is Butler film. And what they do with Dave Butler does, is he puts a red rocket card in the sonnet Thunderbolt enclosure in a little box now, and he plugs it into his retina MacBook pro laptop. And he uses his red rocket card to great effect on the laptop system to process red footage, red, red code footage. I mean, these types of things are kind of important now that we've got this Mac pro that doesn't have PCIE cards anymore, right? Speaker 1 42:58 Yeah, exactly. You know, you've got, you've now got the ability to do a nice small Mac based rack based system for all of those specialty pieces of software that are Mac only. Speaker 0 43:11 So what do you think about this Mac pro you've you've been in the Apple kind of creative world for a long time? Didn't you even kind of have like a contractor gig at Apple at one point, or does the ghost of Steve jobs have to kill you if you, if you mentioned that? Speaker 1 43:26 No, no. I actually used to work for a Apple higher education doing field systems engineering and things like that. This is going back to 99, 2000 ancient history. Yeah, yeah. Back before iOS 10. So I was, I was with Apple for the launch of a little product called iOS 10 and a little product called final cut pro. So it was some interesting times back then, Speaker 0 43:49 You've seen the evolution of the desktop Mac workstation for many years now, the G three days, the G four days, the G five days, obviously the Mac pro days, which have been with us for a while. And for what, like 10 years, these desktop Macs have just been that big silver aluminum box and something very different hit what a week or two ago, a at worldwide developer conference, Apple has finally unveiled their new envisioning of, of a desktop professional workstation machine. And I heard a funny name for it. Some people will remember the cube from Apple will, this new thing is this black cylinder. So we're going to call it the tube. That's funny. Speaker 2 44:32 I kind of felt like it was like R2D2 going through like his leg golf face. Yeah. I see that. I see that it kind of also looks like a trashcan or something, but what do you think of it, Mike? I mean, what do you think about this direction? You've been supporting the Mac professional creative user for many years. I'd love to get your insight on where you think this, this is going to take us. Obviously the sonnet stuff really relates to it because it gives you a lot of capabilities through Thunderbolt that you're going to need. Probably if you've got a bunch of PCI cards sitting around or you want to continue to use them, but I'm curious just to garner your general thoughts about this. Good, bad indifferent, wait and see. Speaker 1 45:08 I think it's actually pretty great. I've been waiting a while for something interesting. Again, I've always a big fan of the cube. I actually still have a cube it's it's sitting about eight feet away from my desk, right? Yeah. Speaker 2 45:19 We have one about 20 feet away from us right now. Yes. Speaker 1 45:22 I'm really interested to see if they can pull off the power that they're claiming and the form factor they're claiming, because it really is a game changer. There's a density there just given the way that they're doing the thermal stuff. That's almost a whole new world when it comes to workstation class computers. And I think expandability is something people have talked about forever and they're like, Oh, it doesn't have, you know, removable video cards. I can't buy that or, Oh, it doesn't have this or that. You know, most users don't use much more than what they need Thunderbolt for. I mean, I am an extreme power user and I am jumping for joy every time I opened up my Mac book pro retina, which I can't change it, damn thing on, but it is such a good machine right now that I have gotten no complaints whatsoever. And when it comes time in the future that I might need to upgrade it, you know what, I'll sell it. And I'll how I'll buy whatever I need for the next sort of thing. And hopefully get some of that money back. But I think the Mac pro itself is something that, you know, three true Thunderbolt buses, Thunderbolt two 20 gigabit. I mean, we're talking about some significant expansion capabilities. It's just not in a form factor that most people are used to. Speaker 2 46:31 You know, and that's interesting. I mean, like, uh, if there was anything that I, I read in sort of like the immediate response to WWDC was that most people wanted, you know, it was almost about cable management. It was like, where are they going to fit the same form factor? Is, is it going to look the same? I mean, like, I don't want to have six devices Daisy chained about, I don't feel that way. I frankly feel like you'll get what you need. You'll probably have one to two devices if that, for the basic user. But there seems to be one of the questions as to, as to how I would imagine maybe even sonnet or some, some other manufacturers might come up once we see more clear details about the Mac pro, just exactly how this is all going to be managed. Are we going to have some sort of intermediary Thunderbolt device that allows us to sort of figure out how we want to connect it all and keep it maintained in an aesthetic manner and perhaps in a functional manner as well. Speaker 1 47:23 There is something telling that nobody's talking about the functionality of the system. They're just assuming it's going to work. And instead, they're talking about how they're going to have it. Look when it's sitting on their desk. I mean, that tells you the thing's gonna sell like hotcakes, Speaker 0 47:36 Right? Well, sonnet has the, I don't believe it's shipping it. Mike, you can tell us when to expect it, but I seem to remember that there's a rack Mount form factor, PCIE, thunderbolts expansion chassis, that sonnet is going to be unveiling. So this is a way that you could have your PCI cards sitting on a rack somewhere or in a closet run a longer Thunderbolt cable. And those are coming folks, the optical Thunderbolt cables, which will work with the existing thunderbolts systems, just fine are soon to hit. And so you'll be able to have something in Iraq, like, you know, a hundred, 200, whatever feet away, what are you saying? We can have our PCIE and need it to, Ooh, I see. I see what you did there. Yeah, yeah. I mean, when's that device coming, Mike? I seem to remember seeing that on the sonnet website just the other day when I was kind of wondering about all of these things. Speaker 1 48:27 Yeah. So it's a, it's the echo express three and what that device is, it'll be late summer that that'll actually be shipping, but that system is actually a three slot PCIE card chassis that works over Thunderball, but it's actually not just racking them on a amenable. It's also desktop audible. So you can actually convert it from one form factor to the other. There's a custom case that it slides into for the rack where it takes up about two thirds of the rack. And then we actually give you two, five and a quarter inch drive bays over on the side of that same rack. So if you want to have eight, two and a half inch drives there, or if you want to have a couple of tape drives or, you know, anything that you can fit, there are a couple of sonnet. <inaudible> all being driven by this chassis. You could do that in the rack. Speaker 0 49:12 I'm looking at it on the site now it's, it's really cute. It's got that stylized sonnet S on the front of it. And I think these things are probably just harbingers of more interesting Thunderbolt peripherals that are aimed pretty explicitly at the pro user and maybe this, this new class of Mac pro user, uh, over the coming months. Now that we know that this is the reality, right? And I wonder out loud as well, because certainly have this right now for, for HTMI extension, but is it even possible? Or when will we see that sort of wireless Thunderbolt spec over, you know, 50 to a hundred feet and is that viable, but that might, uh, that might open it up in a lot of ways. That would be really exciting. And I, I will use this as a reminder for our listeners that we are, of course, a happy sonnet reseller. Speaker 0 50:00 So, you know, as you're evaluating what this peripheral infrastructure is going to look like for you moving forward, now that again, we seem to be in the post PCIE era, as Mac users are concerned, we can help you out with this. Again, we have some experience with it. There's there's change coming. We know this now, at least we know what it is, and it's nice to have both a highly knowledgeable and technical rep for a company like sonnet that we can plumb the depths of in terms of his knowledge. So if customers have questions very specifically, that even we can't help you with Mike continues to be a great friend and resource for us and, and you, our listener by extension. And, um, I just wanna thank you so much for coming on today. Mike, now you tend to take a direct hand sometimes when we're doing like a web demo of say cantaloupe portal. So if folks are interested in this platform learning more about it, they'll probably have a chance to interact with you directly, right? Speaker 1 50:56 Yup, exactly. And if you guys need to, I also have a little, a it's completely unrelated to the work we do from a sales and distribution perspective, but there's a blog, uh, at Provideo tech.org. There's just little notes and things that I find around the, uh, the video community and interesting scripts and, and fun little things. And you know, anybody that wants to check that out or contribute to some of the projects we've got going there. I'd welcome you to join in Speaker 0 51:22 Again, that's pro video tech, P R O V I D E O T E C h.org. Mike, thank you for coming on today, man. We appreciate it. You've been a long time buddy. Oh, Chesapeake. And so we, we really want to extend a lot of thanks for you coming on and sharing your wisdom with us today. Speaker 1 51:39 Yep. I appreciate you guys having me Speaker 0 51:42 As always, if you guys have any questions or comments or you want to yell at us or tell us how great we are, uh, you can reach out to us@chesapeakesystemsandwewelcomeyourquestionsandcommentsatworkflowshowatchessa.com. And again, Mike, thank you so much for being a guest today. Absolutely. Thanks guys. Take care. Bye bye.