#17 "Where are we headed?" - A conversation with Jeremy Strootman of JB

Speaker 0 00:01 Welcome to the workflow show. I'm Meryl Davis alongside my cohost, Nick gold. Uh, we're starting our second season of the workflow show. This is episode two Oh one. And today we have the special guest of Jeremy Streetman, who is the East territory manager over at JB and a JV and a J B and a. So maybe we should start just by talking a little bit about what J BNA is and how we work with them, uh, at Chesapeake. Speaker 1 00:26 Well, and we've actually known Jeremy for longer than this. We knew him when he worked for studio network solutions, makers of the sand MP driven sand system, um, was one of the first sands that we got involved with Jeremy was with them for awhile. They're based out in st. Louis area in the Midwest, his home stomping grounds. Correct. And, um, Jeremy now works with J B and a. Um, this is a distributor that we work with. So as many of our listeners may know we are a reseller integrator. There are manufacturers who make the hardware and software products that we deal with between often the manufacturers and ourselves is a distributor who has a lot of subject matter expertise in these various technologies. They warehouse a lot of the actual hardware products. They handle a lot of order processing and JB and a is what I like to call a kind of a value added distributor because they're very oriented around the pro media pro video. They actually have a lot of digital signage solutions. They do IP TV solutions and Jeremy kind of hopped over studio network solutions actually was getting distributed and still is distributed through J B and a, but you've made a hop from SNS to JB and AE to work directly for them to jump Speaker 0 01:41 Wow. All at once. And when tall guys, when tall guys skip man, watch out, cause they're going like 12 feet per stride. It's comical. Yeah. You're like the Hussein bolt of a, the same bolt of Harry and the Henderson. Yeah, we'll go with that instead. Cause his name is Hussein Hussein. And so anyway, um, so, you know, Jeremy has been dealing with a lot of Speaker 1 02:06 The same kind of solutions that we deal with for many, many years. I've known you for what, probably seven, eight years, at least now. Speaker 0 02:13 And so, uh, we still tolerate one another, I think, which speaks highly for both of us volumes about both of these partners in the room. Most definitely. So we thought, you know, we'll talk a little bit about some of the, the particular Speaker 1 02:27 Products and technologies and companies that your DNA and your you Jeremy are involved with. But you know, you've been dealing with many of the same type of customer scenarios that we deal with for many, many years now and thought might be kind of fun to have a little bit more of just an open ended discussion about, you know, our war stories. You know, what we've seen evolving over the last seven, eight years as we've all been in this industry, your thoughts about that, your thoughts about a lot of the challenges that people are addressing, you know, touch on areas that we've hit on in previous workflow show episodes, but also maybe with a little Speaker 2 03:00 Bit of a, an eye towards the future and where you see things going and the different types of environments that J B and a and your life as a rep for them, you know, put you into and sure. Maybe some interesting stories about funny, awesome clients you had to deal with. Speaker 3 03:16 Well, yeah, I mean, you, you know, as well as I do that, the, uh, you know, a lot of our client base are a lot of the people we're working with are in emerging businesses, emerging production facilities, and they're really driving a lot of technology and they don't necessarily always have the, Oh, the surroundings or the space from an infrastructure standpoint to put everything in. And it's not uncommon to see, you know, a show that's really taking off getting a lot of viewership, whether it's on, you know, any sort of a web based distribution or, or even, uh, television, uh, where you've got a bunch of editors huddled around a sand or a big storage array, all working, it's not always ideal. Right. So, you know, I've seen a lot of it out there and, uh, going into war stories, I do recall an incident where we were working with a shared storage solution that, that was feeding the editor. It was actually in a proper machine room. It was, it was feeding and editorial staff. And, you know, it was around seven o'clock every day. It would go down and, uh, you know, it w it would reboot and we would pull the logs and we'd look through the logs and we just couldn't seem to figure out why this thing was shutting off at the same time every day. And so finally it was a, you know, let's just get in the machine room and watch it. And it was literally the cleaning lady coming in. Speaker 2 04:47 I knew it, I knew it, Speaker 3 04:51 She was running the vacuum and she couldn't find an outlet. So she'd stick around, come around and she'd unplugged the sand plug, the vacuum cleaner in, it would, it would take about 10 minutes to vacuum that little section of the office space. She'd plug it back, plug it back in. It's one of those things that takes like, you know, a month to figure out until you're actually see it. Right. Speaker 2 05:10 You know, but that does kind of speak to how a lot of this information technology has been kind of shoehorned into an environment that wasn't suffused with it. And it practices a problem that room that had been locked. And that really sort of speaks to the sort of the change that we've seen. There was a, there was a time when being an editor was strictly editorial, being an editor meant being involved in the story production and the editorial creation. And then just about we'll call it the FireWire revolution. Right, right. The FireWire revolution hit. And really, it became a matter of having at least some kind of technical prowess before you, uh, make yourself insane. But these days it really is a requisite to have a, a full understanding Speaker 1 05:58 Of a technical environment as it relates to, to editing. I mean, even if you're a single seat editor and you're working in your own shop, I mean, you got to have that level of understanding and that's reflected all the way to the top. Yeah. Speaker 3 06:12 Yeah. That's absolutely right. I totally agree with you. And, and, you know, these people go to, you know, you go to school or your, your course on storytelling and that's really what is covered. Storytelling, how to tell a story inside of an editor. Right. And then you get out in the real world and it's like networking and <inaudible>, am I dropping these tapes? Yeah. So that's exactly right. And then, you know, now, even, I think one of the biggest problems today is storage management and managing the content on storage. Where does it go? And, and, you know, I think even four or five years ago, it was, you know, if we just get a big central repository where we can put everything, that's great. That solves every problem, but yeah. Throw everything on there and then we'll be set, right. And that's just not the case. Now we have lost things inside of the sand. Cause they're, you know, <inaudible> organizes things differently. Tens if not hundreds of terabytes all in one hard drive Speaker 1 07:18 Desktop. So it just exacerbates the lack of ability to enforce organizational practices amongst your work group. And part of that, I would have to say, has to do with how the current set of people are being prepared for the industry. We're working with a couple of EDU, some universities, a lot of times they have something like final cut server in there that which never fully implemented and never really integrated into their lesson plans. So the conversations that we're having now are we need asset management as an overlay for our centralized storage for our classroom. And in addition to that, we need to expose them to some real asset management, the thing that's lacking. I see. And it's only now just to the uptick is real media asset managers, skill sets, as it relates to a push production workflow. Speaker 3 08:02 That's a great idea. I mean, yeah, absolutely. Speaker 1 08:05 Well, it it's its own expertise. I mean, I can probably count on one hand out of the dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of video clients that I've dealt with personally over the last nine plus years at Chesapeake systems. It's scary that I've been here now, but, um, I could probably count on one hand how many organizations I've dealt with and this even includes like mega corporations of, we deal with some big media companies and we deal with some smaller ones and everyone in between maybe one hand, how many organizations have someone who in their job title or in even just their clearly established set of job responsibilities is the media organization and management tasks for the work group, right. Or the organization. I mean, literally weekly I'll be in environments or having conversations where it's like, well, we all just kind of work together on this. And that means like, Oh, so, so basically no one's in charge of that. And it's probably not working out too well, which, you know, again, I'm not trying to kind of insult our customer base because I think they're, they're just the most charming darn people on the planet, but it isn't important. Speaker 1 09:17 Absolutely. But again, you do need to kind of realize that that is such an essential task these days, whether you're kind of in the file system based workflow or the ma'am database workflow, you do need someone or, or people of central authority who are kind of managing that system and the organizational principles that now everyone needs to, Speaker 0 09:41 I'm taking it to this, right. There's sort of the second a D to the production manager, right? Yeah. The post production manager rather. So, so you have your, your post production manager, you know, he's dealing with the top level fires, but you need that, uh, that support person who understands the entire post production workflow and understands the requisites of, of, you know, ingesting all this video and asset tagging it and doing all that, uh, you know, it's a really essential role. And, uh, as Nick said, I mean, like, there are very few people that, uh, that are really dedicating the time to it, but that's probably where we're seeing the most growth people are starting just now to open up their eyes and go, wait a second. You mean this a hundred hours of television that I've shot. That's going to turn into one hour. Speaker 0 10:26 Right. And I want that one specific B roll shot from that GoPro that was on the, the second set of pickups, uh, from the contractor camera person who worked only on Wednesday and Thursday, this is kind of sounding like a personal story. Totally. Well, you know, you know, you draw from what you know, but so, you know, not knowing where that stuff is. I mean, it can halt to production. Yeah. It's getting better. I mean, you used to be, you know, a few years ago that it really took, it was somebody in the organization who had a passion for this. Somebody who was like, I organized data in my spare time, you know, and it's always that person, me, uh, I got that side to me. It's that it's not my sexiest side. They'll tell you that you should look at the desktop on my computer. It's like 4,000 icons like spattered around. Uh, I'll go up and clean it here in a minute for you. That's great. That's great. He comes for podcasts. He stays with the cleaning. Just don't unplug anything, please. So, so Speaker 1 11:32 When we, again, first met and you were with studio network solutions. One of the things that made studio network solutions unique is number one, they had one of the very first sand systems that was even kind of compatible with the final cut workflow. Um, it was a volume locking sand and that you split it into multiple volumes and users could latch onto several at once, but only one person at a time can be attached to a volume over fiber channel, and then other people can read off of it. Right. And so you guys also really had that corner of the market for audio postproduction for sand technology's locked down because for many, many, many years up until like now that was the only sand technology that was even compatible with pro tools. And I know you guys wired up a lot of very interesting studios. You put sand MP, sand systems into a lot of neat environments, any, any interesting stories from back in the day about interesting scenarios you ended up in was you were doing that kind of work. Speaker 3 12:30 Oh yeah. I mean, when, when you're working kind of on the music side, I was in the music side of a lot of things in those days because it was the only pro tool solution out there. Right. So I did find myself in great studio surrounded by legendary engineers and producers and things like that. So that was a lot of fun. Snoop lion, uh, not Snoop lion, no. Uh, did find myself in, in daddy's house PDT studio. I think that, I think the crown jewel and I told you this one time Nick was the Beastie boys studio, which was a silver scope. When, when MCA started kind of like acquiring movies at Sundance and doing distribution for them under the Faciliscope name, they built a place in Tribeca that had, you know, half of it was the studio side and half of it was the business side of Faciliscope and that was just downright. Awesome. Did you call, did you pull up in like a mercury grand Marquis really slowly slide over your, uh, your hood <inaudible> I slid down the subway stairs. That was, that was about as cool as I got there. Speaker 1 13:44 You described it to me once. It's kind of basically like the ultimate clubhouse that you would imagine the Beastie boys. Speaker 3 13:50 Yeah. It was very much like you would expect, you know, uh, you know, VMA like, like moon, men and Grammys on top of the break room, fridge kind of thing, you know, just, just use them to bust, open a beer or something. I don't know what they use them for. I didn't, it didn't look like they were used for much of anything, but, you know, that was, that was, that was really cool. But yeah, I mean, to that, to that point, you know, that's where we started. We started out of a recording studio, final cut studio, uh, environment, and built a sand or bought a sand that didn't work because to what the point you were making before Meryl, that was those, were it assets that hadn't been pushed to the brink of production. Right. And after, you know, when we purchased it, it, you know, it didn't work and it was kind of one of those fix these or you're fired kind of things, and started, started hacking away on it and built it. And then of course, because it was a commercial Speaker 0 14:52 Facility, we were getting the attention of other customers coming in to do work when they were in st. Louis that's right. Because SMS really was an audio recording facility with, with some video capability as well. Yeah. And, uh, and so we had a lot of people in and out of that studio, they did a live radio broadcast from there. So there were some, there were some great names that came through there and they too wanted that same functionality because you were able to bounce from room to room and just have an open up your session. Right. Without having to copy things or shuttle a drive around or, or what have you. So, so that's really was the start of it. All you killed the Sneakernet man killed the sneaker. Yeah. So you guys started obviously getting more involved in the video side of things when you realized that this had direct applicability to video work groups. Speaker 0 15:43 Oh yeah, yeah. That's exactly right. There was, there was clearly more of an opportunity to, to serve the, the content creation world and video and effects generation and things like that. And that led us to go outside of just that software layer, that volume locking software layer that you mentioned CMP and got us into full turnkey solution server storage solutions, which of course is Evo. We, we have egos out there in the field and it's, it's, it basically combines the storage hardware, the sand MP software, if you'd need to do volume locking sand technology over either fiber channel or ice Guzzy, which is basically a block level protocol that goes over an ethernet connection. And then, um, it also acts as a file sharing server. So you can, you can have that workflow going on as well. Now there's, there's some, are you able to talk about some of the interesting things that are happening with the San and P software and the evolution that's happening there? Speaker 0 16:44 Yeah. Yeah. I think I can, well, if, if, if the black suits don't start knocking at the door, when I start talking about this, I think I can continue. Uh, what's that weird little red light on your forehead. So a share browser now I w for the record, I wanted to call it universal browser, which of course would just translate the browser. Yeah. Hilarious. They're they, they, yeah, they're not, they're not taking my advice, my marketing advice on that. I could just see the logo for it too, but like a baby with a unit brow and one tooth. Oh. And union Brown could be like an eyeball with just a line over there. Oh yeah. Brilliant. That's actually not too bad. So it, uh, it kind of takes the sand management layer level to a whole new level. Right. So it does incorporate what was sand MP, but for all intents and purposes, to the end user, to the editor, to Speaker 3 17:50 The, to whoever's connecting to the shared storage that sand MP is going away. Right. So it is, you still have your capability of doing volume locked volumes for locked up DPX image, play out or locking for live ingest, or live playback, locking a volume to a performance pool. But all other storage types included the, including the, the NAS protocols or the file sharing protocols in the Evo are displayed. It will reach out and crawl around the network looking for other storage. So Exxon volumes would be displayed the store next volumes. Yeah. So it's all showing Speaker 2 18:29 No, no, I'll stick it really just think of these things as drives and less. It's not forcing you as a user as much to think of them as this type of volume, this type of volume, this kind of protocol. So it's, it's sort of removing that level of, uh, of, uh, determination from the, uh, from the end user. Like they don't have to, you don't have to necessarily know that you're connecting to a store next volume, or you're connecting to like a standard file share. That's correct. If you just fire up the app and then search for the, the drives and the network Speaker 3 19:04 That's right. A lot of that is abstracted by icons and naming conventions. You know, the avid bin sharing's, uh, shares would pop up there. All of that. It also indexes the network, all a, a light asset management type of a scenario where it'll index all of the, the storage harvest metadata out of that storage and place it in a SQL database on the eval. Right? So when the volume is removed, taken offline, or if it's not taken offline, you can go and search kind of like a finder on steroids, kind of a thing, Speaker 2 19:45 Talking about customizable metadata fields. So you can tag assets, Speaker 3 19:49 Not necessarily right now. We're really just looking at let's scour all the files, and you can leave out certain file names if you want distract whole volumes, if you want from this, but you can set up a search or an index any at any interval. And it just creates a database of all that stuff harvested. That's naturally embedded in the file. So we're not talking customized metadata, we're not talking proxy gender, Speaker 2 20:13 But you could get file creation dates. You could get the codec, the frame rate, the frame size that's wrapper, you know? Cool. And, and, you know, it really speaks to, I think what we tell our clients all the time and have lots of conversations about and find, you know, some of our clients are very much embracing, which is that, you know, this entire notion, I think of media, asset management, media, asset management, isn't a product you buy. And media asset management, isn't even like a particular technology like, okay, we're databases. Speaker 1 20:47 Now media asset management is like the absolute top to bottom holistic approach. You have to deal with how do you manage data and find the stuff you need to find? And what I like about this approach that the SNS guys seem to be taking here is that it's this idea of, well, we need to unify all of this stuff. It's not separate things. It's the storage systems, the searching for files, the metadata about the type of files. This is one thing. And yeah, there's different layers of it. Some of it's the drives and the networking, and some of it's the metadata and some of it's the database, but you really have to take this holistic approach and think of it as one big system that all interrelates. Speaker 3 21:34 Yeah, that's right. I mean, one thing that people do are they're there, they're not necessarily setting out, they don't make a business decision, but they start by trying to manage all this content inside of finder or windows Explorer. Right. Which is not what those tools were really doing, Speaker 2 21:51 Or even their project files themselves. Are you often extremely limited about, you know, the level of organization they provide. Speaker 3 21:59 Yeah. Yeah. And people are trying to manage them inside the NLE. People are trying to manage them on Google docs and things like that. And it's just like a, you know, you really need to think about what it is that drives that site. It would be as if you're running all of your accounting in all of your billing and all of that in, you know, like a note pad or something. Speaker 2 22:20 Sure. For me, that's a really, really great example. Right. I think one of the things that most of our clients, at least initially until obviously Nick or myself, get in there and have the conversation and shed some light on the scenario. But the initial impression is that it is not something that should be invested in over time or that it requires a good upfront investment. The way that we always talk about it is, well, there's more than just managing what you have now, right? So sometimes they have a hard time conceptualizing the fact that in three years of managing all your associated video data, you're going to have a robust and dynamic set of criteria to run searches against. And if you, for example, are generating reality, docu television content. Here's an excellent instance. Maybe you're in your second season, even right now, the value in investing in an all up front and spending the man hours to get it. Speaker 2 23:18 There is that when it comes time for you to do your, your season to recap and, and call back, and when you didn't get enough B roll and you still need that time lapse of the sunsetting and the, you know, whatever that you, aren't sending four interns into a room with a revolver and a single bullet and asking them to go find the footage that you're looking for. You know, the idea is that, Oh, Oh, that could be its own very interesting reality for interns in revolver, brewery interns. Sorry, but you know, so it's nice. The value, um, the value is, okay, we're gonna, we're going to invest in this and we're gonna put the, the energy internally within our organization to do this so that we don't have to reinvent the wheel. Every single time we have a requirement from network. When we have a requirement from standards and practices, when we have a requirement from an existing client, that's come back. Maybe, maybe it was an industrial, maybe it was something, you know, for another business. So there's all of these scenarios in which I makes more sense to know how to get to your stuff immediately. They're all hypothetical. They may never happen, but you can say the same thing about why do you have car insurance, Speaker 3 24:27 Right. Yeah, that's true. I think if you look at how much money is being spent on going back in the past or losing things inside of storage or on the network, or what have you, there's a serious ROI case to be built around each and every asset management discussion. Speaker 2 24:47 It's true. It's true. I mean, what are some, when you are thinking about, and talking about ROI with prospective clients, folks you've worked with over the years, what are some of the main variables that you ask them to consider in that ROI equation? As they're looking at an investment, whether it's in shared storage, a media asset management database, or some kind of archive system, I mean, what are the things that you think media users need to calculate when looking at what they're going to, what value they'll derive out of making an investment in these types of technologies? Speaker 3 25:20 I mean, I really think anything that can be automated, right? So anything, any automation tool that can be implemented inside of an organization, if you're spitting out five trans codes for five different mediums, moving those and delivering those to different sides of the, of the, um, what, wherever they're being delivered. Right? Same thing on the acquisition side, moving renaming files copying over here, over there. So many people just sit there at the desktop and movie move and copy files and things like that. It's Speaker 2 25:53 Funny, it's, we're in a creative industry here and yet computers are very good at automating kind of boring, mundane, easily reproducible tasks. And in a creative industry, that's all about very human, creative narratives, storytelling kind of stuff. There's an inordinate amount of time, money and energy spent on doing things through people that are very good at being automated by software and computers. Yeah, that's right. Just to, just to transcode in general. I mean like somebody has a, uh, today has a final cut seven workflow that requires, uh, even though they're shooting on a better codecs and better cameras, but, uh, you know, they're tied to final cut seven for, for, for the foreseeable future because of budget or whatever. Right. So their workflow is to take everything, shoot, everything, they got GoPros, they got five DS. They got Panasonics, they got everything in the mix. Right. And the first thing that they do when get back to the office is Speaker 1 26:43 Have somebody sit down, do the ingest, and then immediately do an Apple ProRes transcode. Right. And like, why didn't that happen automatically when someone just drag those files on a watch folder somewhere, and then action kicks off. So what's, Oh, I'm sorry, but what's the, what's the type of equation. So it should a business owner or the managers really be looking at this in terms of, well, this much time in this type of person's day in my organization is spent, you know, staring in front of a computer screen doing these kinds of tasks that seem like they should be somewhat automateable, we're spending X amount of dollars per hour on that person's salary or part time. I mean, is it really just, Speaker 3 27:27 It really? Yeah. It really boils down to that. And it's something I've worked, you know, prior to getting into media and entertainment or anything in terms of content creation. I was in the software business on the other side, kind of in the data center. Right. And what I was responsible for is automation, testing automation, quality control, all automation on applications that were being developed. And the unfortunate fact is, is that I provided solutions that provided an ROI for people who were manually doing stuff. So unfortunately, it's one of those things where it's like that body does not need to be in that chair, but that body could be somewhere else doing something more productive. Speaker 1 28:12 Well, and given that we're in the creative industry, it strikes me that, okay, if you are putting robots, essentially, which is what this automation software kind of can be summarized, Speaker 3 28:22 I guess I've heard. Yeah. We stopped beating around the Bush. Speaker 1 28:25 So we, we, we, we basically replaced some tasks with an organization by putting a software robot in that position instead of a human, we can better use the human resources towards the creative tasks of narrative and storytelling and gathering great footage and more even asset management. Right. Oh, Speaker 3 28:47 That's right. Yeah. Good call. Yeah. Well, in, in, in next city is a good one in terms of ROI. And so we, well, let me tell you, well, next city is a dialogue search software, right? It is a server that scours through media video and audio content and creates a database of phonetic search capability. Right. So it's not taking something, taking a speech and translating it to text. It's creating a database that allows you to phonetically search inside Speaker 1 29:23 Fully encapsulated sound fragments or phonemes. Right, right, right. That's exactly right. All of the Jew. Speaker 3 29:32 So you can do, you can perform searches, right. And you don't have to spell it. Right. You don't have to, you know, it especially Speaker 0 29:42 Works in the world where you're, you've got last names and words that are not a part of the English language or any language for that matter. Exactly. So Webster doesn't know who <inaudible> is or what Stroup mint is. And, and really, cause last time I opened up a dictionary and looked up straight and it just says his face was a synonym for awesome ravishing. Good looks. So you do a search. Are you saying the search? Are you typing? You're typing the search into a browser, right. It's very much like you would on a YouTube or something like that. Speaker 1 30:17 It's kind of phonetically deconstructing. So it's, it's interpreting what you've entered textually and kind of understanding, Ooh, the word S T R O T M a N probably equals these types of sound fragments in, and then it does a, from what I've seen extraordinarily fast, I mean usually like a second or less comparison to that string of what it's interpreted as sound fragments with its database of sound fragments and boom. But so it's not, as you said, speech to text, it's not going to generate a frankly not terribly accurate transcript. Speaker 0 30:59 No, no, not at all, but what it is, how would you use it then? You would, you would have a script, you'd have a transcript. So say somebody shoot some documentary talking heads, right. And it's hours and hours and hours of it. And they got an intern and they've knocked out a transcript, which is basic, but you know, the time codes wrong, you know, it's just a disaster. You're never going to not pay the fee. You don't even have the transcript. I mean, again, you know, you can use the next city without anything and you can just, you don't, you don't need a transcript. Then some, some cases it might replace that even needing to transcriber. So if you had like a, if you had like a really diligent field producer who took good notes while he was asking the questions and like had some key phrases that he keyed on after, after she stated them, he would go back to the next city of dialogue search and he would say, well, you know, I know she said she really likes sunny side up. Speaker 0 31:47 Right, right. And so sunny side up, bam, Oh, there's my sunny side up clips. Okay. Let's put them together. It is. That's exactly right. So you're presented with a list of all your videos, whether it's, you know, 20,000 hours worth or two hours worth, right. All the video content comes back in different, all the different clips where Nick city interpreted that word in there. And there you can scale how loose or accurate Nick city is the most accurate results. You slide a little fader one way and it kind of narrows down the results. And you might end up with someone being like, dude, that was a really good strudel man. That's that's exactly right. Or all the, all the other funny names you were calling me out in the hall. So, okay. Speaker 1 32:31 And Nick idea as I'll share is obviously one of the pieces of software that J B and a is a distributor for we're very friendly with them. It's a very cool, but so saying a tool like Speaker 2 32:40 That, that Nick city, a dialogue search, okay. We may have, sorry guys put some transcriptionists out of a job or at least maybe diminish the amount of stuff that needs to be fully transcribed, but we've now freed up individuals to spend their times doing some fun, creative searching of the actual audio dialogue itself to come up with some interesting storylines, maybe. Speaker 3 33:04 Well, not only that, but I mean, imagine if you had that capability 10 years into your archive, right? You have a member of your organization that has passed away or something like that. C C level executive, or top level executive, and you want to pull together Speaker 2 33:22 All time, Austin Chesapeake in employing that gold has on pasture. And, Speaker 3 33:28 And now we've created this montage of Nick's greatest moments or speeches on stuff. Speaker 2 33:34 Oh my God. I can't wait to see that. I mean, I don't want you to die, but like, I can't wait to see what that video would be. I just, it sounds like, you know, like, uh, defending your life. Who's like, let's see, big bear. And then the screen comes down and it's just like just the best hits of Nick. Yep. Hopefully we have at least another three or four moments. Oh, I get it. Ah, so, so this comes up all the time. What do we do about logging all of our, our archives. We've got 10,000 hours of finished projects and you're telling me for this media asset management system, we need to have people filling out metadata fields for everything in order for this to be useful. While in that kind of circumstance, dialogue search could maybe stand in for metadata. Cause it's not really metadata that you're searching on. You're actually searching in the real audio data. Right. But Speaker 3 34:27 The one thing it's not going to do is capture Speaker 2 34:30 Like, uh, like the, the, the, like the category of something it's not giving you the, you know, like, so this is sort of thing that you would use in tandem with media SMS, or it could be a first tier to save some time, maybe, Speaker 3 34:45 Please, by no means, is it the end all be all of asset management, but that coupled with your standard metadata, 2007, uh, conference two top sellers and there, and you've got some guy doing a presentation, keynote presentation, that's the metadata. No, one's saying that inside of that speech, well maybe at the beginning, welcome to the 2007 top sellers conference. Right. But that's not seeing being said multiple times. And if you're really retrieving that archive for some purpose, you're pulling that out of metadata. That's what you're watching. That's what you're looking at. But if you're trying to key in, on a key, on a phrase or something that was said, Speaker 2 35:27 Touchdown for sports video, I mean every time or go, or the phrase, the newest of the Baltimore Speaker 1 35:38 Ravens Nicholas gold, that's the phrase. That's probably not going to be spoken anytime soon. But, and the other thing about next city is you can push those phonetic results back into a media asset management system as textual metadata. Right? Speaker 3 35:52 Right. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It does. So it takes your search. It takes all the, the time code based markers where that word or phrase was said and can be exported into an asset manager can be exported into final cut, Adobe avid. You know, we were talking about it before. There's a, there's even premiere panel. That's being built where the next city engine will be right inside of premiere. And that is cool Speaker 1 36:20 Search all the video on my sand for the phrase, Nick is the best and boom, no verbal. I was just saying, wow, these are my friends, negative, negative one responses returned. Okay. Anyway, you wouldn't even have to leave premiere because they have this panel like their own little interface within premiere pretty soon it's coming out. Speaker 3 36:44 That's right. Yeah. I mean really, uh, Adobe did a great job of opening up the API to premiere and you're really starting to see all the cool stuff that people could put right into premiere. Speaker 1 36:55 One might say, it's the premier example of an NLA developer opening up their API. One might. Um, so let's talk about some other interesting things that you through JB and I are up to these days, we've been talking about Nick citio, we've talked about the studio network solutions. You know, one of the other interesting ones that you guys are involved with we're a newer partner of is a ma'am company. And everyone knows Chesapeake loves media asset management. And this one is called imaging from a company called Cambridge imaging. That's right. What I noticed about it is in right off the bat is not the same exact type of media asset management as a cat DV, a cantaloupe portal, a levels beyond reach engine in that, you know, there's a lot of high level functionality associated with the post production work group images, like on that other spectrum of ma'am where it's like, we want to create this large, very customizable looking portal into all of our video assets or, you know, presented out as a website that you can still do your metadata searching on. Yes, there's some workflows you can kick off, but it's actually like maybe something you would even open up to the public at large, or that you would, you know, you could use it to make your own stock footage site and completely customized look and feel. So it just looks like the rest of your website. Speaker 3 38:26 Yeah. That's it that's absolutely right. I mean, the, their approach, as you had said, there's, there's, there's almost two sides, tasks management, one that's internal one that's workflow related to a production group. And then there's the public facing one. And usually that production one feeds the public facing. Speaker 2 38:45 Yeah. It's, it's, uh, we've noticed some people want there to be one thing that solves all of these problems and do rule the rule. I keep doing it. Sorry. It's great. You got a great light movie announcer voice, man. I, you know, I mean, you know, if you ever get fired from JB cast, you should maybe get me work on my reel. So, but yeah, there usually aren't software solutions that cater to both sides of that ma'am spectrum simultaneously a hundred percent. Well, right. Some of it is pricing image and doesn't price based on how many individual users have logins to the system. No, no, because in a lot of cases, it is meant to go to the wider public, possibly the public at large, or maybe it's behind a little bit of a locking key, but maybe instead of a dozen or several dozen users, there could be hundreds of potential users or thousands for the public at large. Speaker 3 39:42 Yeah. I mean, imagine if a, if you know, the three of us are three separate entities who are spending our advertising dollars at this post facility or this ad company. Right. So they are creating a database of assets with separate usernames and passwords, Nick, Nick Goldco, or Goldco, right. Has a username and password and Nick and login and see all his different assets. But he can't see my assets as a different build customer. Speaker 2 40:10 So this is, this is a mechanism, uh, you know, when I see this oftentimes on a production company websites, it's the, uh, the login link. Right, right. Yeah. So they go in there and okay, well we've been hired and we'd just done a 32nd spot for you for, I don't know why KP toys was the thing that came to mind, KB toys. So KB toys, I gave them so many dollars for transformers when I was lying out in there. Like I would hang out at a coffee shop, but I do cross from the Suncoast, like accidentally start walking down the pink aisle and be like, Oh no, I can't be seeing that. So you're saying every mall from the Midwest of Baltimore are the same. Right. Cause that's exactly how it was across from the Suncoast. Yeah. Yeah, no question, no question. But anyway, I digress. Speaker 2 40:57 Um, uh, and so we did this commercial for KB toys 2013. Um, and we would, as executives of KB toys, inc, would love very much to look at the finished rough cut, maybe the spot or a few different, maybe, maybe a couple color affected versions, you know, you know, different scratch tracks and stuff. So they log in, they go, Oh, six different versions. Okay. Let's take a look at them. I like number three, do your job, keep us in business. Thank you. Post a quick little comment, feed that back to the production company. And maybe these aren't the type of executives who are gonna want to like launch the full on user interface of cat DV can't demo portal, reach engine. Those are some fairly sophisticated post-production ma'ams with lots of features and could maybe be overwhelming to a non-media professional user, but imaging can be this gateway that lets anyone who can basically use YouTube search for video. I mean, that's kind of like a private YouTube Speaker 3 41:57 Private. Yeah, exactly. And to your point before, I mean, say we're in here doing like, like here we are, you know, Chesapeake came in and did this great renovation to this church to build offices and you're digging in the basement and Oh, you come across this gigantic film archive and you want to monetize it. Right. You want to be able to take that and post it to the web either for the greater public, just to some people are using image in a way where they actually open up the, uh, for the greater public to enter. Speaker 2 42:25 How did you know about the Roswell films? Speaker 3 42:28 So you find the Roswell films in the, in the, in Chesapeake basement and you say, I know that this happened somewhere in Roswell. Right. But I don't know. I don't know much more than that. So you put it out on the, on imaging and the greater public could come across it and say, Oh yeah, this was so and so person, this was in the public can actually enter metadata if you want. Speaker 2 42:54 There's quite an open source movement when it comes to things like creative commons and, and delivery of, uh, audio and video and written content, you know, there's, there's the archive.org. There's just so many that I couldn't even care to list. This presents a unique opportunity for them as well. Right. You know, if you, if you are generating and, uh, acquiring content, that's under a specific set of creative commons licenses and you want to then with proper attribution redistribute, this is an excellent platform. It sounds. Speaker 3 43:25 Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, the people who are using it now or gigantic sports archives, you know, IMG the, the, uh, world war museum and in, uh, in the UK. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, you know, those are huge archives that they've found and they're either making them available to the public or they're monetizing it. And that's the, that's the, that's the big thing. Because video, we see it every day, how cavalier we treat our assets and our video. Right. Speaker 2 43:53 But let's make some money off 20 years for the mantra, hip hop. We're so cavalier with our assets and video, let's make some money off of this. Just feel like call up the Beastie boys. Right. We're going to cut a track. One of the things I really like about imaging and it is a newer relationship for us, but, uh, one of their, their key us staff members name is Nick Southern instantly. Awesome. Uh, Nick Ashwin, but, uh, plus he's got a really cool Northern English accent, which kinda Nick, I hope you're not listening, but reminds me a little bit of bubbles on AB fab. It's very daring. Well, Speaker 0 44:32 He lives, he lives in Dallas now. So I always like to hybridize soon, but well, I always introduce him, you know, excuse the accent. He's from Dallas, you know exactly right. But they're, they're coming out with a cloud based version of imaging. Now, imaging was typically something you would put on a server and you're either opening up port 80 in your firewall to let the outside world in, or you're putting it outside your networks, quote, unquote, DMZ. So outside traffic can hit it where you're forcing people to VPN into your network so they can hit it. And that's, if you want to host it yourself, but now you can put it in the Microsoft cloud service called Azure, and you can basically pay a monthly fee to have your own cloud-based imaging set up and, you know, X amount of storage of assets associated with it. Speaker 0 45:21 And now it's just like in the cloud, on the interwebs, you don't have to worry about backup. You don't have to worry about all these things cause they're build your own dub server. I mean, geez. You know, so going back to what we were talking about before, you know, a lot of these people, these content creators, we did not go to IP school. Right. And they don't want to deal with what's in their internal network for web traffic and calls to simple caveman. I don't understand the cons. Right. So standing of a web server is so like 2002 it's it's the place where we are now. It's so crazy. You know, it's all up in the cloud with the care bears man. So, you know, a lot of people don't want to build out that infrastructure. So you're right, Nick, it's very easy way for a couple of guys who, a post facility or a couple guys who are shooting content to be able to get that up to the cloud and you can do your metadata tagging through the image in web interface. Speaker 0 46:18 You can use it as the creative user, but then it also becomes the publishing platform. And if you have an inhouse man, and you want to open this sea of assets and metadata to a much larger audience, we can have workflows that publish from your internal kind of production man, into that more widely facing maybe cloud hosted man like imaging that's right. It's pretty cool. Just with the metadata that really matters or is not proprietary or sensitive, right? Yeah. Maybe you don't want to have the note about, Oh, the client was such a pain when we put this scene together, like you don't want to have that get published into the public room. You, you want to just have selected fields that are relevant to that class of users. That's right. Yeah. So what other cool stuff you up to it J B and a distribution or as we like to call them Japan or Juba, if we're just really. Yeah. Well, I've got a question actually. Sure. And you know, we talked a little bit about sort of where we came from. We alluded to the FireWire revolution. You know, things have changed significantly in my perception. The next big wave here really is that native resolution workflow, you know, the 4k workflow and the six K Speaker 2 47:30 Of course it's a lot in the 5k man. Oh, let's not forget 5k other red stuff. See the like 5k, right. Four and a half. Well, you know, like the Red's got a six K out. So like, you know, it's crazy business, right? Dragon sensor. Yep. So as we enter this, enter the dragon. Yes. As we enter the dragon very much, like we saw the workflow significantly changed with the introduction of FireWire and then further with the introduction of FireWire 300 and certainly Thunderbolt has done a little bit for that. And we have fiber and 10 gigabit ethernet, always in the mix as, as, uh, as viable options available today. What do you see as sort of the next big end game when it comes to a working natively with either 2.5 K four K five K six K whatever. K as I keep on going up, I know Sony is looking at eight K they're starting to demo eight K systems, Speaker 0 48:23 Right? Japan, if I could draw from history again, when HD was coming out, take us back in the time machine hop into my time. We're talking about time, travel movies at lunch and it was great. 21 gigawatts molar. Speaker 2 48:42 Good. A dark ground right there. I have to say though, probably I'm probably, I probably am seen as about that. Same on a date. Speaker 0 48:52 What did you just say? All I know is doc Brown, Speaker 2 48:57 This, I see crossing my fingers here. You know, like we're tight. So is it gonna be like the scene where you, you, you and him you're in the same room, you touch each other. Like it's a, Speaker 0 49:08 Whoa, Whoa. I mean like in time cop where the dude versus the guy, that's what we're talking about. I said, you know, I haven't seen time cop in like years, but I went back a few months ago and watched it. And I'm like, okay, aside from the shirtless fight scene, which was a little awkward, right? Yeah, it is. So you need, you need that. I mean, the man has when I'm alone, alone by, by myself in the dark. So I'm kind of like creepy, but, and so aside from that and the horrible CGI thing that happens at the end, the amoeba that or whatever that era, it was awesome at the time. It was that plot stands, man. And the thing about time cop really is that it's Speaker 2 49:54 Probably one of the only modern time travel movies that really takes into account being in the same place at the same time and causing a rip in fabric and time. Speaker 0 50:01 Well, there was a little known phone called back to the future that touched on that subject, but I've never seen it. Is there any guy who played in that? Oh wait, we were just referring to it moments ago, Nick. You're friends with doc Brown. You're right. No, you're right. I love the, uh, I did. I love that movie and you're right. The same person, same time kind of thing was a great concept, but HD right? The ranking of HD and going back in time. Well, no. So the thing was, you know, obviously when I was young, young boy on the farm selling sand solutions at studio network solutions, that was the thing like, like, Oh, we've got to build these infrastructures for uncompressed HD. Oh, it's going to blow up, you know, what are we going to do? I only have ethernet a lot of that. Speaker 0 50:48 The software's accommodated for that. Right. I mean, they accommodated for HD workflows to still enable great workflows inside of <inaudible>. Right. We're evolved to take better advantage of multi-core CPU, GPU, large amounts of rapes, a bit Ram memory addressing. Right. And I think that same thing is going to continue on, you know, we, we talk about 10 gig and we talk about six, 16 gig and all of that. And, uh, we'll need all that. Maybe we will, maybe we won't, but when does it end when they release a new Mac pro Ooh, that's it? No, yeah, this is, there's a reason. It looks like the monolith in 2000 and it's just going to end everything, man will suddenly start beating each other, like a rang. What really that's the first stone thrown in the, uh, in the new sort of era of four K and above workflows is the way I see it. Speaker 0 51:52 Right? Yeah. I mean, you're going to need all the processing power and all that to handle that. But I think it's more in the software in the processing and making sure the NLS can, can handle this native native codex. That means no longer using final cut. Seven listeners final cut. Seven is done. Should we, should we tell them about the viruses that we've been putting on their computers make final, cut seven, stop working in another, it's called a 32 bit code base. So I do like harping on this, by the way people give up your final cut seven clues for the love of God, we can help you. It's okay. The, yeah. So the, uh, that's enough berating of our paying customers for one day, you guys are so mean. I really think that the premiere and, and, and all of that, these guys are good. Speaker 0 52:46 They're keeping up with, with these codecs as they come along. And if not, there's going to be a plugin or something, but I don't think we're going to need, you know, massive, huge infrastructures to work in 5k workflows, the trans coding, the amount of trans coding. We were just talking earlier about the new Mac pro, not earlier as in like a minute ago in this conversation, but like an hour ago. And you didn't realize how physically small the new tower was. No, you know, I glanced at pictures. I was kind of half watching the announcement and all that, watching Sean, Claude van Damme, pectoral muscles, and time cop in the dark. Don't forget that call fire. This is so true. Uh, yeah, you're right. So I didn't realize how small it was and we're looking at you're right. It was just like this large, giant black cylinder, the size of the existing Mac. Speaker 0 53:37 I called the existing Mac pro the scoliosis maker. I mean, like, there was many, many a time when somebody said to me, could you move the Mac pro? And I'd be like, there's going to be a worker's comp claim, everybody. Seriously. Thanks. So freaking sharp, angry looking box. Isn't it, it really made the handles like painful to couldn't. They have put like a little rubber razorblades on the side with a child, cause a LACOE run around the corner and hit his head on him. Right. That's exactly right. The new Mac pro from Apple will be childproof. No, it's the size of the old cube. It's like a, it's like a beer can, right. Well, it's not that small a beer can you might drink, well, you know what it is, it's the two by fours, you know how, like some of the Japanese beer comes in the big cans, Sapporo and the steel cans. <inaudible> okay. So think of that size, right? And then, you know how you can get the little like mini mini kegs of Heineken. Imagine a cylinder that's right. Between those two sizes. I can picture it now. That's the new Mac pro let's go drinking, speaking my language. Yeah. Let's get a beer beer time. Speaker 0 54:48 So, so if I gather from what you're saying is basically there's not going to be a total reinvention of the wheel here, just like, as we feared, there might be a total reinvention of the wheel before we have existing infrastructure. The things that we're doing now are changing the way in which we deal with the data and deal with the processes. Right. But we can just, like, there was a certain amount of overhead through ethernet until all of a sudden when there was a change in the way, things were at a time and there was more overhead in it. We'll see that come probably through the Thunderbolt to spec and through all that. What also a lot of, Oh, I'm sorry. Go on. Well, I, the network infrastructure, the existing infrastructure, I don't think will wildly change. It's compressed 4k, compressed eight K is still probably a lot less of a data rate than uncompressed HD. Speaker 0 55:36 And we solved that problem a long time ago, right? Yeah. There was another big scare, like Duquesne is coming in a world in a world, ruled pipe to cave video. David, are you going to take all the times he does that and cut it together and like string for us. That'd be great. That'd be great friends torn by workflow. We can use next idiot dialogue serves. We, you should take it. You put it all together. We'll make our own promo for the workflow. So, uh, so there was that same scare with the two K like, Oh my God, what's gonna happen. And, and then it was like, Oh, low and behold, two K fits inside of this data spec. Right. Yeah. And so I think there's a lot of that going on. It's up to the asset management solutions, the transcoding solutions and all of that. And the, and the Annelies to natively Speaker 1 56:23 Play back, you know, what a lot of people don't realize, they don't realize that in the world of it, hardware always seems to lead software. Yeah. That's a good point. Hardware has always been ahead of software. We've always had more powerful hardware and all. And I mean, I started using computers since the Apple, Apple, Apple two era and like kindergarten, the hardware has always been a number of several stages sometimes ahead of the software development, just because Intel releases a new chip or we've gone from two gigs of Ram to 64 gigs of Ram or a graphics processor unit with 20 shaders and vert cores to a GPU with a thousand cores. And oops, now you've got two GPS each with a thousand cores, or you've got a CPU that's has 12 cores, like the new Mac pro one is going to top out at that because of Intel hyper-threading acts like 24 cores. Speaker 1 57:24 Okay. We've got this glorious hardware, but it took a number of years for the software developers to release products that can actually take advantage really astute point. And so we, we have like more resources already on our desks than we maybe realize. And we just, as you were saying that the software guys gotta like, just make sure they enable, what's kind of sitting there and then we're going to be able to deal with it. That's absolutely right. I mean, 10 grit, 10 gig has been around forever. And I don't know of a driver that utilizes it to its maximum potential. It's just driver technology at the risk of oversimplifying this. I mean, like, just think about, uh, think about it in terms of video games, right? What does a launch PlayStation three video game look like versus last of us or one of the games that's been in development last year and came out with the last two months. Speaker 1 58:16 That's crazy because they learn how to tweak it out. Speaking of video games, there was some game cube games. The Nintendo game cube is what, how old now a decade. And he had a power PC chip in it. There was resident evil when the new resident evil games came out for it. They look better than a lot of games that are like coming up today on video games, since they just looked glorious because the developers really learn how to utilize the hardware and just eat the last little ounce of performance out of it. It's like, well, we tell people that if you've got a Mac pro that or a laptop or even an iMac that was like released in the last four or five years, and you're still using final cut seven, jeez man, get, get premiere pro, get the latest version, convert over to it. And you're going to like, feel like you just have you instantly inherited a computer. That's like four times as fast. We'll be able to utilize all your Ram for rendering process GPU. Also a lot of folks don't realize, you know, you're going to invest in a new MacBook pro retina. You're going to max it out with Ram and then you fire up a final cut and it's still taking a sweet ass Speaker 2 59:22 Time. And the reason is, is that you're not, you're not taking advantage of what the hardware has to offer because the software itself was so old, you know, and, and the, the real time effects that are happening in right Speaker 3 59:34 Premiere now, I mean are amazing some of the stuff that they are doing and both latest media composer seven and CSX, I mean, amazing stuff. And if you're not taking advantage of it, I mean, it's just, it's kind of a shame. Speaker 2 59:47 No, it's great. It's great. And then, you know, you throw something like Sapphire on top of that, and you really have like a really robust motion graphics pack that five, six years ago, you know, you had to buy like a $250,000 claims system. You got to write that stuff out and you know, but it's all totally like usable and key frameable and you can fire it up within the interface of premiere and just do what you gotta do. Right. And if you do have to render you render it out, it takes, it takes some time, but not nearly as much as it does if you had a, you know, the oldest stuff. So it's, it's a brave new world, but I'm sure in another six years, we're going to be sitting here going God, you remember when we had to still render our effects? You know, like I hope I hope that's the case. Speaker 2 00:31 Cause you know, well, given all of these years that we've been seeing all of these trends come together, you know, again, you sit as the interface in some ways, between a lot of these very interesting cutting edge software and hardware development companies, the end users, the interesting integration folks like ourselves, wax visionary for us, if you will, about, you know, again, what you think is going to be eating up all of our time in this industry over the next few years, no pressure. And you have to be a hundred percent accurate and we will put you on the record in the future. What's exciting Speaker 3 01:09 Is the accessibility of content creation to more people who are creating it. Right. I mean more and more people are creating content with their phones, the inexpensive two K camera's even now that are coming out that are actually within a budget for kids to get a hold of. Right. We had the like Fisher price pixel. Yeah. I mean, we just wanted so bad to like frame for frame redo Indiana Jones. Right. There was a kid who did die. There was a bunch of kids who did that. Yeah. And it took like 20 years or something good for them growing beards. And then they go away. Right. So, so the fact that people have access to that and the, the, the tools and the effects, the editing tools, the effects, the, um, live broadcast switchers and things like that. And the ability to broadcast and actually have a forum through the internet is what's most exciting. And I think you'll see more and more and more and more of that. Speaker 2 02:12 And it's funny, cause that just echoes exactly what I tell a lot of people where I think that video is going through this transformation right now where, you know, I relate Speaker 0 02:20 It to like typing back in the fifties, when you watch mad men, it was a professional class of people who typed documents. I, and there was like, you got paid to do that. And it was like, someone's creating it and someone's consuming it and much like with video where you had, and we will always have the very professional, highly polished video creators and then the consumers, but it's getting, you know, democratized, the access is getting just, you know, out in everybody's hands. That's the other really exciting part. It's becoming a communications medium that anyone can take part in. Yeah. That's absolutely right between iTunes and Netflix and all these other avenues. You know, I, I, we were talking about breaking bad or like I caught up to breaking bad through all these avenues. And before I even realized, Oh yeah, I actually subscribed to AMC, you know? Speaker 0 03:14 And there it is, it's on my TV too, you know? So I have all these, these avenues to consume this great. I'm in. Imagine if we could go back in time, even like when I started working for Chesapeake nine years ago and say, you can shoot an HD video on your cell phone, upload it to the internet wirelessly from almost anywhere you are within moments and put it in front of every single person on the planet with an internet connection, all in the span of like less than a minute, you could even do the editing with some effects on your cellphone, right. Press a button. It's on YouTube. It's on Facebook. I mean, you wouldn't even believe it. They would go to you. What the hell is YouTube and Facebook. So that's the thing is people are now like it's actually like field packs for broadcast are going out there where it's like live on the sea, live on the scene, you know, channel, whatever news are sending this up, not over satellite, but over load balancing across multiple cell phone towers from multiple providers to beam that content back to the home base. Speaker 0 04:27 And they don't have to like spend several billion dollars to launch a satellite. Right. Or, or crank that thing up to, to, you know, the microwave. Okay. Exactly. Well, it was a pleasure having you on today. It was a pleasure. I think we've, we've informed and simultaneously alienated a huge number of our listeners. But no, we really do appreciate you coming by you. I mean, you're such an excellent resource to us. Our partnership with JB and is a, is so strong. Maybe we work closely with you for the next eight years. Yes. Thank you so much, guys. It's always a pleasure. And again, love you guys and can't wait to see you again soon. Can you just say like in your movie voice, like thank you for listening to the workflow, share, go for it. No pressure. Thank you for listening to this edition of the workflow show God. We're going to have you just as a guest to do this every episode, this is the most fun episode I've had ever. Thank you folks. Alright. You guys.