Episode Transcript
Speaker 1 00:08 It's happening. Hey Jason, how are you? I'm fantastic because like we have new theme music, which is freaking awesome. That's right. It's very eight bit. That is right. Yeah. I was feeling very video game mission because we work in all kinds of majestic ether world's technology. I figured we'd go with that theme at least for this month. So it's been a quite a year this month, hasn't it? You could say that again, we've, we've kind of been stuck in our respective homes and can I just say like, I feel like we're busier than ever, so that hasn't changed for us, but some things have changed in the last month for everyone else having PE. Yup. Yup. Everybody's been stuck at home. So this special episode of the workflow show, we're going to talk about that. Not that we haven't been talking about that for the last couple of episodes, but we thought it would be a good idea to bring together some of our good friends from Chesa and talk about how we've been helping folks get through it.
Speaker 1 01:08 Yeah. So for our listeners and subscribers, we have a special edition of the workflow show here and want to provide you with some workflow therapy and this coven 19 crisis because we need therapy now more than ever, I think. And, uh, it could be mental therapy, it could be workflow therapy. But, uh, today we're going to try and offer you a little bit of both, I think. There you go. Right? Yeah. So we have Peter Price. Hello, hello. And we have Curt Clawson, I, everybody and Tom Keane. Hey, how's it going? And we also of course have our own Ben Kilburg who is another one of our solutions architects. And we thought we would put together a panel of, of our solutions architects for our listeners and just kind of give them a little chance to sort of talk through what we've been seeing in the industry and, uh, and hopefully that offers our listeners some therapy about, uh, what they've also been seeing. So you know that you are not alone, uh, cause it can be very easy to feel alone with the way things are right now. So, uh, uh, I think with that, let's jump into some questions. Um, I'm going to sort of moderate this discussion and let our panelists talk through some of these questions. So I think the first one I want to ask is, uh, how's Chesapeake systems doing? Like how's covert 19 affecting Chesapeake systems? Peter,
Speaker 2 02:35 That's a good question. Um, I mean, I think one of the things that's been fortunate for us is that we're, we've been full steam ahead and in some cases busier than than we usually are. Um, I think as an organization, as support and technology organization, because of the locale of a lot of our clients being outside of the greater Baltimore area, we've already been supporting clients remotely for a number of years. So once the, uh, stay at home orders and the various States went into effect as far as our support operations, they just stayed exactly the same. And so, so far, I think from a, from a general operational standpoint, we've been minimally affected as far as rolling out services and supporting the clients.
Speaker 1 03:27 So we have, uh, you know, we have like a broad range of what we do for our clients. We have some that we visit on a regular basis in person and we have very, very many that we support and deploy projects remotely. Um, so things are kind of like going on for us, right?
Speaker 2 03:43 Yeah. It depends on what aspect of projects have been affected. Um, I think when it comes to our consulting work, our, our project work, uh, when it comes to workflow development and customization and any sort of software related activities, those have been for the most part, full steam ahead. Um, I think we've seen some, a little bit of hardware delivery concerns. I wouldn't even go as far as to say issues. And then some of our clients have, you know, put those sorts of things on pause because like, let's face it, we're at home, so we're not going to be taking in large infrastructure pieces like shared storage and network switches and things like that. Um, and it's mostly because a lot of these businesses, um, are now working exclusively from home. So there's not any particular need in the, uh, specific office infrastructure, at least in the immediate time for them. So, um, but yeah, project-wise things have been moving full steam ahead and it's been, you know, it's been really interesting.
Speaker 1 04:45 Well then, so if, if projects are moving full steam ahead and, you know, I've seen that too, projects support, everything seems to be, you know, going the way it's been going. How has, how have things changed? Like what has changed for us? What are people asking for? What problems are you guys seeing?
Speaker 2 05:03 Right? Yeah. I mean, I've sort of been looking at it from month to month. I think like March was sort of the shock enough period, right. You know, one day very quickly everyone was on lockdown. And so the common questions were really more triaged related. Like, what can I do today? How do I, how do I work from home today? And, and you know, depending on if they were an editor or a colorist or a producer, you know, each sort of introduces as a set of complexities. Um, especially when they're working from home and they have limited to no infrastructure to support that stuff. Those were so sort of a lot of the questions of like, do I bring media home? Can I remote into my office and grab media? Um, a lot of those questions were, were prevalent in March. Now that we're coming into April and we're seeing dates of coming back to the office extending almost on a weekly basis.
Speaker 2 06:02 It's looking more longterm. And so now the questions and the discussions are becoming more lengthier. It's not about what do I do now? It's more of a question of, okay, we may not be able to get into the office until may or maybe even June or maybe even July. What's our longterm approach? How do I continue supporting my users that are editing all across the country, all across their homes? How do we manage, manage media? Should I be using the cloud now? For those that haven't been using the cloud, those sorts of questions have been, as of late in the last two weeks, been prominent in our conversations.
Speaker 1 06:41 Interesting. So are you finding that, uh, Ben, are you finding that people are asking for quick fixes? Like, Hey, I just need to work from home for now? Are they looking for like, we never want to have this problem ever again? You know, I, it's what's that like? Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3 06:59 I mean, um, as Peter said, we're in a triaged period, so it's a lot of how do I access my storage remotely and then talking through all of the pain points from, or I should even say, uh, all of the points from a to B or to aid a Z as the case may be between your storage or your ma'am or whatever infrastructure you have in the office and where you're working from at home. So that could be your Whan connectivity going out of the central office. It could be the switching between your respective hardware and that way can, and then that way on out to your ISP and how much bandwidth you have at home. Right. I think we've been seeing a number of solutions dependent upon what people have in their environment. So, primarily I think most people are using some sort of a remote desktop VNC client to access either their editorial workstation, if it's still on, if it's still running and or their storage that way to download whatever they can and bring it back home so that they can get some work done. And I think people have been struggling through but also surprisingly able to do enough work to get the job done,
Speaker 1 08:20 Which is great. That is, that's fantastic. Um, so this is a situation where, you know, when we talk about remote editing, we're not necessarily saying, Oh, you know, we want to have this material stream to us through our internet connection and be able to edit at home just like we edit on, on our workstations out at the office or at the studio. Right,
Speaker 3 08:42 Right. Yeah. So I think a lot of that is what I've been hearing, right. Folks who have some sort of storage volume that has a network attached storage component. It could be a sand with a nasty reshare or it just could be a Nass. If they have a VPN connection into the office, then they can at least pretend or not pretend, but actually be on the network for the office and, um, gain access to that storage and download what they need, be it at a very slow pace. Now some other strategies we've seen people employing are, um, being able to transcode lighter weight versions of assets or if somebody already has a ma'am in place and can download those proxies either through something like a web browser, web client for the ma'am or just mounting the storage that holds those proxies to drag them over locally to get an edit. That's fantastic. Um, square box just announced some cool new functionality yesterday. They just came out with a new version of their cat DV premiere panel that lets folks download proxies right through the premier panel. So that's really cool. And we've seen other folks doing a range of cool things. Um, Kurt, what have you been seeing on your end? I know you guys have expertise in more of the streaming proxies area. Maybe you could talk with us a little bit about that.
Speaker 4 10:11 Yeah, we've been seeing, uh, a lot of the same kind of activity that you were just talking about. You know, people accessing their editorial stations over, you know, some sort of a VNC client, uh, of some sort to be able to continue editing. Um, but we do have a couple of customers that have, uh, started to migrate to the streaming proxy solution. Uh, one of them in particular is, um, now using their system. They've, they've opened it up through their it security firewalls and, and uh, put in some other usage restrictions and now their editorial staff can actually log in directly over the internet. They can browse and package all of their content using streaming proxy resolution of the high brows. And then once they've assembled their edit, they effectively shoved that edit list back to the facility for a remote conform in high res. And that's been working very well for them with a number of the editorial staff out there doing that. Uh, the one customer that I'm thinking of has normally in house 12 edit suites and they still have somewhere between six and eight of the editorial staff that are still actively working on a daily basis and using that method.
Speaker 3 11:36 Now that's IPV, right?
Speaker 4 11:38 That is correct. That's IPV IPVs uh, been one of the, uh, the leaders in the streaming proxy, you know, kind of side of editorial work for a number of years. They've got a lot of background and a lot of history as to how works, you know, the guarantee frame, accurate editorial capabilities and frame accurate conforms back to the high Rose content. And uh, and we see that in a lot of the different areas where people are using that now that the finished product, you know, might as well have been edited in full Hybris. The conformance is ideal for uh, for this kind of a scenario. Wow. Nope. I want to get a, I want to get Tom in here. Oh yeah, I was just going to say, Curt, isn't that technology based on the old Adobe anywhere technology? Or at least that's what the IPV technology specifically.
Speaker 4 12:29 Yeah, it is not actually IPB many people don't know. But IPV has been around for years and years and years and they actually started out a manufacturing hardware and they manufactured OEM hardware with a proprietary, uh, streaming solution for proxy. And, uh, at that particular time, many years ago, uh, the primary user for that was avid and avid actually licensed the hardware and the streaming technology from IPV for many years. And then, uh, when avid kind of moved on and developed a lot of their own technologies, some replaced that, uh, IPV took the opportunity to um, expand in the other direction and say hardware is not where the future is, software is. And uh, they effectively designed the IPD curator system from there and have been, you know, kind of promoting and advancing that technology now for a number of years.
Speaker 3 13:33 So. Okay. Walk us through quickly, sorry to interject, Jason, I just wanted to make sure that we're talking through this, if I understand correctly. The way it works is that there is a central encoder that's taking the high res files and second by second encoding those streaming proxies to move them across. It's not like they've got proxies for everything that they're just playing back, right, Kurt?
Speaker 4 13:58 Correct. Yeah. I mean the technology is actually as part of the IPB ingest process. It takes whatever your high rise content is, it transcodes it to make two different versions of proxy resolution content. It makes an intermediate, uh, that can be used for a number of different things. It's, you know, kind of a mezzanine quality. A lot of people are actually using it to directly produce content for the web so that they don't have to go back to the high Rez. But then they also create an HLS streaming proxy resolution, which is only about 3%. The weight of what the original content was. So very lightweight by comparison for being able to move over the, uh, the land connections and that content along with the mezzanine content or all locked. They're frame referenced all the way across. And IPD is one of the few companies that for years has supported the idea that you can take that all the way back to source in the sense that if you record source content using time of day time code or some sort of a house clock, IPV references that exact same time code reference on the mezzanine proxy as well as the HLS proxy for streaming.
Speaker 4 15:17 So effectively you could edit even fully in HLS streaming proxy, do nothing but create an EDL and you know, similar to the old days, you could actually, you know, conform that directly using the a, the time code values to go back to original source.
Speaker 5 15:35 Well that sounds really cool. Um, all right guys, so, so that sounds like a really slick solution for those organizations who are able to, or want to have proxy stream directly to their remote workstations and remote editors. Uh, what other options that are out there. I mean, you know, that there's, that's not the only thing, right, Tom? Yeah. You know, the, the whole notion of of extending your desktops out, right. But capturing those screens and actually KVM extending the pixels themselves to remote locations. And that's, that's been a quite a popular way to go because instead of compressing the video and sending it in an uProxy form and then pulling it up in the NLE that's running locally, you actually just push the whole screen and all of your on prem infrastructure just stays where it is. So I've certainly seen and been suggesting to folks, you know, to use the terror DG base, either PCI cards that install on their workstations and then using a zero clients, which, you know, get installed at a users household where they have two monitors and a keyboard and some speakers.
Speaker 5 16:48 Um, the, the one hiccup IC and all this is that a lot of these systems are just for windows only, right? And so many of our clients use Macs, right. And there's been some, some folks out there presenting solutions based on actually bootcamping those Macs and installing windows and like basically turning them into a windows box. And so that's, it's very disruptive. It's kind of a sea change for the editors because they've been working max all their lives suddenly. Well, let's talk about that a little bit. Oh yeah. So when I was doing my research, I found that there are a number of companies that use the DG chip in there and their, uh, offerings, but they're all PC related and so, and they work well. I, you know, you, you know, use a compression algorithm that sends over just the pixels that are sort of changing and it does use like a UDP to send it the data. Uh, and so you're able to take advantage of, you know, the, the bandwidth that's available out there, the typical ISP, you know, 50 megabit, a hundred megabit, and it is dependent on that of course. So that is definitely something you have to look at when you're setting the systems up. But you know, if you want to use a Mac, uh, you were kind of left out in the cold. So, um,
Speaker 1 18:00 I was going to say, well let's talk about that. Let's talk about the Mac Mac versus windows issue for a minute. I know I don't usually like to bring that up because I think for some people it, it really depends on what their, uh, you know, what their employer is able to get for them or you know. It could be a personal preference thing if you're a freelance creative, but is it such a big deal, Ben? Any more that the Mac versus windows? When you're looking at premier, I mean there's key bindings out there and all kinds of things. What, what are your thoughts on,
Speaker 3 18:27 I think that once you're in the application you can't tell much difference. It's mostly end users comfort in and around how they're used to working and obviously what hardware you have in front of you in the moment. The clear differences. If you reference our last episode where we talk to our friend Dave Helmsley of Adobe, clear differences there are what are the underlying technologies the O S is using to do things like in code graphics and display graphics, right. If you're a fan of Nvidia and the Kuda stuff, then windows is still doing that. If you've got a Mac, then you were beholden to using metal, which is getting better and better and better. And we're seeing really cool things happening there. So, um, it doesn't quite matter, right? So long as you're in the application it's very similar. Sure.
Speaker 5 19:15 Now I did find a solution for sending boxes that are not running, you know, just windows. Like if you need to Linux box or windows box, this company will ambulate hockey, makes a, an external KVM extender, which does all the processing and external unit. So you basically will connect your video outputs, your audio and your USB to this box and then it extends from there. So all of that. So it's like KVM kind of a thing. It's basically a KVM over when it uses a PC EYP chip. But it allows you to use workstations that are not, that are like a West, you know, Miko S or or based. So there's been a number of clients that we have that are using this because they just want to be able to like push that screen and not have to move over to two windows to do it. So, so that was one off and that's actually the only option I saw out there to do that. Uh, and it's interesting because like, until until this virus hit, you know, this was not on anyone's radar per se, it was just, yeah. You know, we all had to jump in and do research like right away to figure all this stuff out. Well,
Speaker 1 20:22 Absolutely. I mean, uh, so, so Ben and I did, uh, back in November, we did an episode about the realities and myths of remote editing in the cloud as of November of 2019, you know, I mean, right after that is when all of this started really becoming an issue. You know, there's all kinds of theories about whether it was circulating before that, but I mean, let's, let's face it, we all started to learn about it in December, January. So, um, you know, it's interesting that that episode dropped really almost right as all of this was starting. Um, we recorded in November, but it didn't drop until a little bit after that. So I remember that episode being very good and fun. But also there was a lot of like, you know, Hey, it's not going to be exactly the same experience necessarily as sitting in front of your workstation in an edit Bay, except now you're on your couch. It's not going to be quite that. There's going to be some considerations and things like that and like, here are the realities of what we can do today. And we had to jump into those realities very quickly. Yeah,
Speaker 2 21:26 Yeah. I mean, I think what's been interesting from a research and development standpoint is there's a lot of these technologies have been around, like you said, and, and solutions we've been looking at. They just haven't been a priority. You know, when, uh, you know, the immediate asset management systems have been able to function in the cloud and, and retrieve and distribute assets in this way for a while. But it's now so much more important for everybody. And I also, um, what I found very interesting and actually I think Dave Helmsley mentioned in, in one of your past shows about how efficient people are getting from a data perspective. So, you know, before where people are grabbing high rise footage from, you know, cinema cameras, well they don't have access to those files anymore and there's a number of content creators out there that are having to still deliver product. And so they have to grab whatever they can around them in, in the house. And that may be a web gear, it may be your iPhone. And so now data footprint is not as much a challenge as it is mixed media. And that's become a really interesting challenge for folks because you know, I've seen um, one of the, yeah,
Speaker 1 22:41 We have seen, especially with the iPhone, with the iPhone footage in, uh, the engineering space of chess, uh, is that because we suddenly have a lot of, uh, creatives, a lot of DPS shooting footage on iPhones and then trying to import those into various man platforms and trans coders and things like that so they can work with them. Um, it, it all depends on how you get that content off of the device. If you get it off of, off of the device through a lightening cable, you might have one format. And if you get it off of the device via airdrop or uh, right, I don't know, text message or whatever, uh, there's another format that's that, that you have access to. And um, it's that HEVC and HTIC for images. It's very, um, it's been problematic actually, very recently for, for me as an engineer.
Speaker 1 23:31 So I think that's worth noting too. You know, in terms of workload therapy, this is something guys that we are seeing, uh, for sure is as, as people are, are using their own pocket devices and portable devices to get their work done. Um, we're even seeing issues with that because these are things that you wouldn't normally necessarily use. And, and some, some of our clients aren't having issues with it because they've been dealing with acquiring footage from artists and you know, all different sources of, of this footage, uh, for years, like, as for as long as we can remember. So they're, they're very much on top of this, this issue. But I think for, for some of us it's a new thing. Like, we're used to shooting with red cameras and, you know, all kinds of, all manner of really high end gear, and now we're having to use our devices. Uh,
Speaker 2 24:15 Yeah. Well, and I think, I think, again, sort of like editors and producers are tempering their expectations of what they're bringing in. So that introduces a good level of efficiency, especially when there's bandwidth constraints from source to destination. Um, people are not going to be able to download gigs and gigs of files and still be able to turn around some, you know, fairly short turnaround, uh, content that we're seeing on a day to day basis. And, and that's the thing, right? I think it's like we're not seeing a, a, a slowdown in content, and that's kind of our business, right? Like, that's who we support. Um, because there's millions of people all sitting down right now in front of screens on a constant basis. One would say that the content call is much higher. That I think equates to some of why we're so busy because nobody's sure, you know, we're not in the hospitality industry. Uh, we're not in the farming industry. Um, uh, we're not in the restaurant industry. These are industries that are getting impacted directly because it requires people to be in there providing for this business and for our business, which is media and entertainment. That's content consumption, which is very popular right now as we all absolutely at home in front of the screen.
Speaker 1 25:37 Let's take a moment and shift away from this remote editing discussion and talk a little bit about some of our customers who are not necessarily an active production right now. Maybe, maybe some of our customers are or you know, any, any production companies out there, content creators as it were, they might have taken a pause or they might be in a situation where their production volume has just gone down because of the situation. So, uh, what are we seeing from those folks? What kinds of of work are they doing? They haven't just completely stopped working. What are they doing?
Speaker 5 26:09 No, well, I think, I think they had a lot of, they had a good backlog of work they were working on, right? So that's, that's still ongoing. There will be, I think a slowdown because of productions of stock. That content will then not be created and not be delivered to them to actually craft, edit or, or do a promo on or whatever. Um, but the content is still coming in and a lot of cases because it's just coming in through different means now like through iPhones or it's just lower quality. Although I gotta tell you when I, when I look at some of the programming that I know is being shot on an iPhone, it doesn't look that bad. So it's a great, uh, it's great ad for the quality of the phone. 11 pro has, if you can get access to camera, it really does, couldn't have had better timing for the eye for what those things are capable of now because, uh, and I'm sure that will have lasting impressions.
Speaker 5 27:01 You know, a lot of them seem to be silly busy and still have a lot of work to do. I think it's, it's mostly maybe some of the folks that are doing like features cause those are put on hold. I mean all of the shows, right? The cold bears, you know, the real time, the Ellen show, all of those things are still carrying on because there's an audience, like Peter said, Oh, the eyeballs are there. So like it will find a way. So those folks are still as busy as ever. It's just now they're all working remotely and trying to figure out how all that works. Uh, so what about, um, uh, what about some of our, some of our clients, partners, friends who maybe have some lagging software versions or you know, they've got some bugs they want to work out of the system. What kinds of opportunities are we seeing there?
Speaker 4 27:52 I'm seeing a lot of stuff from some of our customers where, um, for example, one of our customers who is focused in the sports side of the business, well, you know, nothing much is happening if anything in hockey, basketball, you know, in baseball coming up, a lot of those kinds of things. So their normal high production levels have been cut way back. They're still doing, you know, some of the talk shows, some filler type material. Uh, but what they're asking us to do during this time when they're slow is to take advantage of the system to do system upgrades and software. Um, you know, minor changes to workflow processes, any number of other things to improve their processes so that when they do hit the ground running again, when they come back on site, their system has been fully tuned up, patched, upgraded, ready to go, and the Redditers and staff can hit the ground running because there's been several of our customers that we've had to deal with for, I'll say multiple years or certainly multiple seasons depending on what the sport happens to be. If, if it's in that arena where they haven't allowed us to do system upgrades, even though there may have been new copies of software or new abilities that we could bring to the table for them, they're just so busy, they just say, we, you know, we can't afford a half a day of downtime on the system. We can't afford to take three days if it's an architecture change.
Speaker 5 29:31 Yeah. So this, this isn't even a, this isn't even a question of budget. This isn't even like we can't afford the new version of StorNext or whatever it is. We just don't have time. We can't bring the system for a weekend
Speaker 1 29:42 Or you know, a day and reschedule that work.
Speaker 5 29:45 Right. They can't spend the ultimate currency. The ultimate currency. Yeah, exactly. Well but, but then it is ironic that even though this is the perfect time to do it and you should use this time to take advantage to say some hardware upgrades, software upgrades, they don't want to spend the money because they're afraid to be because it's the regular streams. So it is just, Oh just do those upgrades and those firmware updates and things like that, which don't cost a lot of money. It may be just part of a managed service agreement that you're going to do anyways as part of it. But, uh, I mean speaking from a systems integrator perspective, but um, it is interesting cause this wouldn't be the perfect time to do hardware upgrades across the board. No one's there. Um, but uh, a lot of folks are like, let's just keep everything where it is. We don't want to touch anything because it's going to cost money. And we're, we're watching every penny. So that's great. It's cool world.
Speaker 1 30:42 So, uh, let's, let's talk a little bit about something that probably, um, I know maybe a lot of our listeners and maybe a lot of us don't really want to discuss because it's a pain, uh, security. Uh, Kurt, you brought this up a little bit earlier. Um, shouldn't we just open up the access if we're going to for, for all at home or even remotely? Like, isn't it easier if we just turn off all this, you know, turn off all the security so we can all just get to our stuff? We
Speaker 4 31:11 Could, it would make life so much easier. But you know, there's so much intellectual property out there that is really the, the staple of what these businesses are, are doing. You know, they're, they're creating this, this proprietary IP that they can sell, they can package, they can do any number of things with, um, and the, you know, the, the biggest concern has to be how do we protect that? That is our business. And for those guys, you know, we're, we're seeing a lot of questions even from the it groups internally of is VPN secure is you know, giving you remote access to your desktop. Really a secure mechanism for being able to let you work. And you know, to the credit of a lot of the production it groups in some of these facilities, they're definitely stepping up to the plate and they're helping find solutions and mechanisms for being able to make this happen.
Speaker 4 32:08 Uh, but they're also willing to make small concessions here and there in order to be able to keep things alive. You know, we have a pretty broad selection of customer bases. Everything from commercial customers to government based customers. The commercial customers are obviously a little more flexible in terms of what they can do, how they can get it done and how quickly they can make it happen. But you know, we still have a lot of government customers that for all intents and purposes, they're just shut down because their systems have no connectivity outside of the production land. It policies and security restrictions don't allow them to bridge it off to anything outside accessible. Um, so those guys, if they're not onsite, they're not working. Uh, but the good thing is they're also, this sounds horrible, but they're also a lot of government activities, which we already know are kind of shutdown.
Speaker 4 33:09 Um, so it's not like, you know, not like the processes are necessarily still going with the expectation that, you know, they have to be producing new commercials or they have to be producing new training materials or something else. I mean, a lot of the locations that we deal with are just, you know, what, we're on hiatus for the next six weeks, so we'll deal with it, send it back. So the reasons for needing that content have sort of been put on hold for the time being. So we're, we're just waiting until, yeah. Until that access opens up again. Gotcha. Does anybody else want to add on to what Kurt was saying?
Speaker 5 33:44 Oh, I was just gonna add that, you know, for the media entertainment industry where you've got the MPA relations about feature films, you know, trailers, things like that are being produced. It was always that those systems had to be in a room that was card key accessed no internet, no ability to plug in like a USB drive, whatever. So I imagine that those regulations are going to have no choice but to evolve because if, if you have the desktop extended to your home or if you're streaming proxies, the data is now out of the protected kind of Faraday cage, uh, of the office. And you know, uh, it was funny, I was talking to one of the clients the other day and they were like, well, what do we do? Do we, do we have each of our editors like enclose a room and put a camera in it and have key card access in their house?
Speaker 5 34:36 Well, what about people that are work live, like live in a, in a, just a, a two bedroom apartment in the city that don't really have the ability to set up a makeshift office. And so it's just interesting. He was telling me how he would get on the conference calls and you'd see people, they have an office in their room and it's right in the living room, you know, and then the wife and kids are there and watching TV and you know, he's editing and stuff and it's just like we're all on top of each other. That's not really sustainable. So it's just interesting how all of these challenges popping up. They're kind of being, you know, looking at looking away at the moment, but they're going to have to be dealt with. Yeah.
Speaker 4 35:14 On the security level, good news is when we're talking about technologies like Tara DGS, PC over IP, the files aren't leaving the building. It's just like you're watching a show of the work you're supposed to be doing.
Speaker 5 35:28 Right. At least there's that. Yeah, absolutely. But the notion that somebody would be there, like with a, with an
Speaker 1 35:37 IPhone on a tripod, sort of do it. Like, you know, it's your wife and her child. Come on, that's how, that's other show we'll eat. It was your wife, she did it right. Or your husband, I just don't see that happening. But you know, in a perfect, uh, you know, in, in a zero tolerance world, they were trying to eliminate that threat and that's where they're going to have to make a concession. It's like you're gonna have to trust and trust your employees a little bit more, make sure the NDAs are like more Bulletproof and, uh, you know, that's interesting, right? We'll probably going to see families having to sign NDAs, right? Significant others can, like, we could, yeah, we could totally see the organizational India, right. Family don't work. They'll work it in there somehow just to protect themselves. They killed <inaudible> to be able to work on this content. I will show you media. Right. You cannot tell in the one. So guys, this is happening right now. Do you see like things drastically changing in the future? I mean, this, this crisis is really, it's really changing how we work in general and, you know, across all industries. So what do you see like changing in our industry, uh, after we can all go outside and interact with each other again? Yeah, I think that, um, what
Speaker 5 36:59 Folks are looking at or even talking about now is, you know, how do we make sure that we're prepared? Right. Um, it's also going to push people off the fence when it comes to cloud-based workflows. For sure. When you think about the evolution of, of things go into the cloud, right? First it was the mail servers, you know, next it was archive cause that was easy to push there. Then any kind of a database application up to and including like ma'ams the last part of the road for me I think is like production, storage and then the workstations, right? So where people live in kind of wavering is like, well I, I don't want to push all my workstations up there because you know, again, they may have their reasons for keeping them on prem, lots of reasons, security and otherwise and also the production storage because it's very expensive.
Speaker 5 37:52 So I think what people are probably going to be doing, at least from some of the initial conversations I've had, is looking for ways to extend out all of the hardware storage and workstations from their on-prem location through is like a charity she taught thing. And that way they can keep them in their server room. So they're going to look at longterm ways of doing that. And then there's a hybrid approach, which would be all over the on prem stuff with sort of cloud options. So there could be storage up in the cloud, man in the cloud and in some workstations in the cloud or they could kind of hit through, uh, like a soft client or a hardware zero client. And then there's the all cloud approach. I think it's going to be the on prem, the hybrid and the all cloud, uh, with maybe the ultimate realization that it will all be cloud at some point.
Speaker 5 38:44 But then again, when you think of the cloud, it's somebody else's server room, right? So you can set up your own cloud, you know, so there's going to be just depending on you know, folks, philosophies and way of approaching it. What is going to be all kinds of options here. I think in all sort of approaches but sort of on prem cloud is what you were just mentioning that we see because because we have the virtual private cloud, which could be, you know in AWS or IBM cloud or Google or whatever and then you've got like an on prem cloud, which is sort of the same thing but it's behind your own corporate, you know, security. Yeah. Okay. It's like everything in a air conditioned redundant room and you just access it from endpoints and and like see zero clients playing a big role in this.
Speaker 5 39:30 And those are our clients would live on prem. If you're coming in the work, you just have a zero client, your office and you hit any one of the workstations you want. That's very convenient. But also when you get home you can hit that same workstation from, is there a client that's just sitting in your home office? So that to me sounds like where we're headed. Um, I, and again I was talking to another client who was like, we're thinking about moving to another location that has less seats in it. It's more of like a server room and that's where all of our stuff is. And maybe there's some workstations or edit suites in there, but not as many as we used to have because we're now thinking of setting up editorial personnel where they live and now we can hire a guy in the, anywhere in the world, all they have to do is send them a zero client.
Speaker 5 40:21 They set it up, make sure it's working properly, and then they just work from wherever they are so they can take advantage of, you know, talent that's wherever they happen to be. Like if somebody is in Minneapolis and they want some talent from LA, send a zero client over and they're an employee that now works in their home. Uh, I think that's always been out there and available, but I think that's going to start to accelerate for sure. That seems like it makes us a heck of a lot of sense. Yeah. That's my take on it. I think
Speaker 4 40:46 Tom made a comment that, uh, that I'm really saying in a, in a lot of the customer attitudes now, uh, and that is that this entire kind of Kobe 19 situation is forcing people to kind of get off the fence when it comes to cloud versus on prem, you know, versus something else. Cause we have a number of, you know, ongoing opportunities that haven't been deployed as of yet, but they're in the, you know, kind of developing the architectures and how are they actually going to work and do things. When the customers started the engagement, they were very, um, you know, centric about the idea that we wanted on prem. We want everything secure. We want it, you know, inside of our four walls and we things to be under our control. And pretty much every one of those customers has come back to us now and said, so we're thinking hybrid cloud on prem storage kind of scenarios where they still feel comfortable about the idea that their content is physically within their four walls and you know, if necessary somebody can cut the cord and go, okay, we're secure. You know, we don't have to worry about it. But they're recognizing now that that moving into the cloud and having that accessibility from a number of locations through a number of different devices, um, is really not a bad option at all. Uh, and a lot of them are starting to, you know, open up about that and you know, kind of move in that direction. At least that's what I'm seeing in the, in our pipelines.
Speaker 5 42:29 Yeah. I'm thinking that folks will, for the hybrid approach, we'll, we'll do like a bi-directional sync between their on prem and cloud so that if you're on a, you know, you're hitting like a virtual workstation and you upload content through that to the cloud storage, it will then sink down to the on prem for all the folks that are there. And if the on prem data goes into that storage, it will sync up to the cloud. Um, I think that's quite simply a way to approach the hybrid. I mean it's going to be costly sure. To maintain that on cloud storage, but maybe not if you use wasabi or something like that where their fees are waived.
Speaker 1 43:04 And also, you know, whatever workflow engineer using it seems like most of these workflow engines have the capability to at least mirror like on-prem storage to a cloud location. So, uh, on ingest that's, you know, either a builtin or, or it's something that can be customized in a workflow to be able to push content to a cloud so that you at least have it in a cloud, whether you're using it for archive or you know, in production for people that are not on prem, uh, that those possibilities exist. But it seems like that's what people are going to be wanting by default maybe in the future. Sure. Oh yeah.
Speaker 5 43:36 And Peter, you and I and Ben were talking about how shooting is going to change to a point, especially with five gene, you're going to be recording not to a local drive or you may be, but that's going to be your backup. Your primary storage location will be the cloud and the data will stream directly to that. Yeah. So imagine, imagine a day when you're shooting, you've got a 5g kind of radio and turn on air and it's, it's actually recording directly to your cloud storage and somebody is doing a growing file edit of that file as it's coming in over the air. That that's going to be reality. Yup. We'll get there, but now we're going to get there quicker for sure. And maybe next year it's going to be, imagine the radical change in conversation. We were just talking about when we, when we were setting up to
Speaker 1 44:28 Do this show, we were talking about how we would be coming from the Navy today. It was actually happening. Yeah. So we definitely won't be talking about 3d television, right?
Speaker 2 44:47 Yeah. That was a thing, right? Right. No, I think, you know, the, from a timeframe perspective, it's, it's going to be incremental. We're, you know, we're in this for the long haul. It's, it's going to take a while and so priorities, especially from on prem to cloud are going to change drastically. I think, uh, when you look at the different processes in the media supply chain, right? Like from a capture perspective, we're going to see a lot more IP solutions that are going to be remote, accessible, remote capturable. I mean, you look on the news right now and what we're looking at in our RingCentral screen is what we're seeing on television for the vast majority of the correspondence as they're safely reporting from their wonderful, uh, living rooms, which is what we're usually seeing. And so we'll see a lot more of those kinds of capabilities, encoders, decoders that are going to be coming in.
Speaker 2 45:42 And like what Tom says, being able to capture those streams in real time, being able to edit that stuff in real time. I mean the whole control room to output infrastructure could be potentially cloud based and there are solutions out there doing that right now where we could have a director sitting in one location while we have the tape op person playing out reels from another location and then have someone as a couple of correspondence talking heads each from their homes. Um, and someone having all these streams centrally coming in and doing live line cuts of that stuff. And then sending those to an editor that's then cutting all this stuff in real time and pushing out packages. I think from an industry perspective, it's like, you know, that was a news model. They're not talking about starting to trickle sports back. We may not be able to watch live sports, but they're certainly going to bring sports back from the sense of having the games air. And we're going to be living in a world where we're still going to be in, in lockdown, but we'll be able to watch the baseball games and the basketball games and such. And that content is going to need to be cut and edited and distributed all over.
Speaker 1 46:54 It's going to be a whole new job for, uh, for, for editing in cutting in, um, canned crowd noises for sports events.
Speaker 2 47:01 Yeah. So it's, you know, it's, we'll see some incremental changes. We'll see some longterm changes. BCP and BCP business continuity plan and cloud strategies are a no brainer now for most people. Um, and I think it's safe to say from talking to all our customers, they don't ever want to be in this type of situation. Again, from a preparedness perspective. So we're learning what we can do and how we do it technologically. So for, for us as technologists, it's an exciting time because we're seeing some really interesting solutions we've wanted to see come to fruition, and now people are really pushing the limits to try and make it happen. So yes, and next year is going to be crazy. Hopefully we'll be able to go, maybe scared, maybe scared to go go. Absolutely.
Speaker 1 47:55 Well, with that I would like to thank our panel of solutions architects, Peter Price, director of solutions architecture. Thank you, Peter. Thank you. And Tom Kean, senior solutions architect for the West coast. Thank you, Tom. You're welcome. Curt Clawson lead solutions architect from Denver. Thanks Jason. Thanks to everybody and I want to thank my cohost, Ben Kilburg, senior solutions architect East coast. Thank you Jason.
