Speaker 0 00:00:00 Hello, and welcome to the workflow show where we provide some workflow therapy and discuss development, deployment, and maintenance of secure media asset management solutions. I'm Jason Whetstone, senior workflow, engineer and developer at Chesapeake systems. And I'm Ben Kilburg senior solutions architect. We have a fantastic discussion today about embracing evolution, keeping an open mind and understanding that we never really done learning. But before we get to that, we have a few quick things to ask of you. Our listeners. First, you can reach out to us directly with questions and thoughts on anything we covered
[email protected]. And second, you have sought us out to better understand the secrets of media production technology. And we therefore Ben and I, and the shadowy figures that stand behind us require that. And in return you share some of your darkest secrets with us.
Speaker 0 00:00:56 We just want to know how you found our show and get to know you better. So again, email workflow
[email protected] or at Chessa pro on Twitter or carrier pigeon. If you're feeling like a shepherd, lastly, you will be pleased to learn that we work flow therapists are hard at work to produce content for you on a more frequent basis. So please subscribe to the podcast and please annoy all your friends and coworkers by insisting that they do as well. All right. So now we got that out of the way. So now joining us today, technologist and futurist, Michael <inaudible> of frame IO. Hey Michael, how's it going? It's going pretty well. So today we would love to talk to you about, uh, editing innovation and the cloud and workflows and the impact on the state of the industry. But I want to start with something that I know you're very passionate about. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about the relationship between technology, the tools that we use and creativity, the force that drives original ideation.
Speaker 1 00:01:55 Yeah. You know, it's a really great subject because what I learned when I was younger, when I was in school, is that the idea that, um, we are this, you know, these human beings with these brains that have these two different lobes, and you're told that you're either left brain or right brain, which is to suggest that either math and science comes naturally to you or language and music and art comes naturally to you. And while it's true that when you have an advantage over being either more dependent on left or right brain, certain things come easier, but I believe what we have done. And I was guilty of this as a child, as I started to use it as a crutch. And I started to make excuses for not being experienced or good, or, uh, you know, uh, expressive with math and science, because that didn't come easy to me.
Speaker 1 00:02:44 And so instead of giving it more time that it needed to mature, I started to say, well, I'll just do the things that come easy to me and then qualify myself as an artist and then say, well, there's, there's mathematics peoples out there and they can do that part for me. I believe that's a fallacy because I believe that the idea of being creative and technical in our industry, our industry is innately complex in technology. There is no way to completely separate art from tech. And I actually don't believe that's a new concept. I think it feels new because we've digitized so many things so rapidly, but there was so much technology in the creation and mining and, and development of paints and things like that. That was technology of the age and silver, you get cool colors like blues and greens were harder to come up with because blue is not as prevalent in nature. And so it was harder to generate powders and paints and pastes that could create these turquoise colors that we generally don't see in a lot of plant life. And so like there was technology about that, right? Of course, there's technology in the art. When you think about hieroglyphics, which is a extremely artistic and technically, uh, intense process of, of, of carving out these bricks and stones and walls like art and tech is not a new relationship, but I feel
Speaker 0 00:04:08 You have to understand the medium that you're working with.
Speaker 1 00:04:11 Right? Yeah. And so I think in the future, if you're thinking about how do you want to rise up and become an extremely unique and independent person inside of our industry, it means you have to start thinking about equal parts, creativity, and technology. You got to look at them as equal and whatever comes naturally to you, good for you. It means it's time to spend more time on the parts that don't come as easy, because those are the parts that you're going to end up being unsure about. You're going to create some anxiety about those areas, and you're going to have to rely on people that you may not fully trust innately. And that's, those are, those are things that all result in the most expensive element of making a movie. And that is compromised. That's the most expensive thing. Money holds no candle to the cost of compromising. That's what an artist fears the most. And sometimes we think the hardest thing to make a movie is the money. It's not it's to make a compromise because creatively you'll never live that down financially. You'll probably be fine. You'll work your way out of that hole, but, but creatively it'll eat at you for your whole life. That's why we have to think about beer. We need to think about living in those two spaces and giving them equal credence.
Speaker 0 00:05:25 Awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Jason and I are both musicians. So I think we both had the formative experience of learning the canvas as it were, and, um, having that being part of our formal upbringing. And that's really kind of what catapulted both of us into post production, for sure. Yeah. And I play the accordion. So that is an extraordinarily technological instrument. It's like carrying an organ or a, you know, a portable organ around it's really something. Um, and when you, uh, when you actually take the two halves of it apart and study how they, Oh, yeah. It's kind of crazy. It's kind of crazy that that's all happening while you're moving it around and, you know. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, let's talk a little bit about Michael, what you're doing now with workflow in the cloud. And that seems to be a really, uh, especially right now in 2020, it seems to be like right at the forefront of production. So let's talk about that a little bit. Like how have things changed recently? Because I feel like we've been sort of, you know, talking about this change, moving into the cloud and like, you know, moving content into the cloud and like moving workflows into the cloud. And it just ramped up really quickly in the last six months.
Speaker 1 00:06:38 Well, you know, there's a phrase that says luck favors the prepared. And Oh, the important element of that concept is that we have to understand that so many things that become short things are based on triangulation. I think when people come across an idea or a concept or a potential, if there's one data point, that's when a lot of us feel that anxiety of, should I jump in this direction? Should this be what I do? But the fact of the matter is like, um, detectives will say, there's no such thing as coincidences, right? When you have several things, all confirming each other and pointing the same place, we call that a clue. Right. And what we need to think about is when you're talking about the cloud, um, COVID is not the jump to the cloud. It's actually one component of many things that are contributing to the cloud.
Speaker 1 00:07:28 It just happens to be the one that makes the New York times above the fold every day. Right? So it's easy to identify, but it's actually one clue inside of a series of things that we can triangulate. For example, we're looking at the we're on the precipice of five G, which was in process long before there was fear of a health crisis, right? Five G was on schedule and moving at rapid rate. We've got the development of the OTT platform where we have a completely new way of distributing content in video. We know that when we think about how the movie studios have changed their processes and policies about how they're collaborating and the fact we have distributed studios, LA is no longer the single epicenter of making productions. It's becoming more distributed. Those things are all, pre-dating a health crisis. And so when we look at the triangulation of those things and the speed that we expect to work, and we think of the development of the iOS platform and the Android platform with all these ways to integrate, moving everything in production to the cloud just seems like it's a good way to assume by triangulation.
Speaker 1 00:08:37 This is the right move. That's ultimately what brought me to frame IO is I wanted to work with people that had their eye on the prize for a future of total virtualization. I find it very unlikely that anyone will disagree with the idea that we are going to be a fully distributed and virtualized society, let alone an industry of motion, picture and entertainment. No, one's probably gonna argue with you in that the arguments are going to be how soon, how fast, and maybe some of the small details about like Willowby theaters or will it all be home theater. Those are maybe up for debate a little bit, but overall, everybody agrees that we're going to go virtual. So what I wanted to do is work with the team who's already past the starting line because some companies have only just are just starting this process.
Speaker 1 00:09:27 Others are way into it. And some are falling dangerously behind. Kind of just depends on what your company does or where it comes from. And as we move into the future, if there's one thing that I can be pretty sure of is that if your industry doesn't have a virtualized plan for its future, it probably has no future. Unfortunately, now that can be easy to say with like things like video and data. That's pretty easy, uh, cameras, stuff like that starts to fit. But think about things like manufacturing and think about things like medicine and stuff like that. That's a way harder, bigger jump to figure out how to virtualize those types of industries. And I'm not in those industries. And there's going to have to be some smart leaders in that sector to help figure that out in a way we have it easy because we already made a digital transition.
Speaker 1 00:10:16 Um, and we're already pretty experienced with that. And so now we're just taking it into a cloud iteration of digital, uh, but some industries have a longer way to go. So we have to figure that out, but that's why frame IO became the perfect home for me. This is a team of great engineers and great leadership and great minds. The CEO, Emory Wells identified so many of these touch points that now seem pretty obvious. In fact, a lot of my friends say, wow, when you went to Freeman ale, it's almost as if you predicted what was happening with the pandemic. And the answer goes back to what I said a moment ago, luck favors the prepared and that's, that's exactly what happens if you follow that logic.
Speaker 0 00:10:54 Yeah, absolutely. And it sounds like that might've been the thing that prompted you to go to frame IO. You've worked on some pretty amazing projects that light iron and Panavision. So was that kind of what led you to frame IO? Was that seeing that sort of a future coming in and, uh, that prepared?
Speaker 1 00:11:09 Yeah. You know, I come from a generation in which, uh, it's and I'm not the only generation, but I belong to a micro-generation, that's sort of like, <inaudible> sort of halfway between millennial and gen X and this small generation, the Kurt Cobain generation, I guess you could say, is this group of people that, um, essentially we really are kind of stuck between a previous generation that held onto jobs for a long time. And the generations after us tend to switch many jobs, many careers even, and we're sort of in that middle space. And, uh, it kind of might explain if you, if you're born in some of those years and what I said resonates with you, you might be nodding your head saying, yeah, I kind of fit in that space. Or you're like, I kind of want a long run. And other people are like, I can't work somewhere for more than three years.
Speaker 1 00:11:58 That seems like an eternity to some people, none of these are the wrong approach. So just different perspectives. My perspective is my clock happens to be about five years now. I didn't realize this until the alarm clock went off every five years, several five-year iterations. So you gotta, you gotta take some trips around the sun to start doing the math. Right. What I realized about every five years, I feel, I feel like it's time to reset instead of just keep it <inaudible>. And I found that the five year Mark happens to be relatively consistent in my life where you accomplish something and the best way to accomplish your next goal is to actually start over. I think a lot of times in order to create something, you have to tear it all the way down and rebuild it again. When that's harder. It's, it's, it's actually very dangerous and hard because you have to, it's like destroying something beautiful.
Speaker 1 00:12:50 It's something down it's easier to just reshape it. So people say, well, can we take this shape that we have and just kind of round the edges and chew a little pain and then just reshape what we have. We'll certainly you can do that. A lot of people do that because it's faster. It makes more sense. It's familiar and you're already standing on a foundation you've already Nope, but you can't put back into a sculpture what's already gone, right? And so you can only subtract from it. And so that's why sometimes the best way is to tear the whole thing down and start over with a fresh block of granite and build something completely new. And every five years seems to be a reasonable rhythm, to which cameras, editing computers. A lot of those technologies, GPS, they seem to be on about a five year rhythm themselves.
Speaker 1 00:13:39 They all sort of sync up. I remember the MythBusters did this great experiment. One, it doesn't scale forever, but they did this great experiment where if you take a bunch of metronomes put them together, they eventually link up to each other because the harmonic it's in the movement, the tiny little movements of them with all these so close together, they might be on different rhythms. And then eventually they start ticking all together. It's so fascinating to see that. And it becomes a great analogy because if we're all interconnected in this web of media and entertainment, it means we inevitably sync up with each other, right. Even if we're in different sectors of the industry, maybe we were in, you know, different cities and States and countries and languages. We all sort of sync up. I find that sync up point happens about every five years.
Speaker 1 00:14:23 That's where everybody gets on the same page. And now we're doing that. And then we get out of phase and everybody develops. And then we get back in sync and the MythBusters show this great in a rerun you can find, and they set one off and they make one wrong. And it'll eventually, I agree with all the <inaudible> and there's always an outlier and there's always a few outliers in the media and entertainment business, but eventually we all agree. And the ones that don't agree have to just, they just kind of disappeared. We don't know what ha what happened to those people. I don't remember. They're gone. Right. Other ones get, they get instinct or they get acquired or they switch teams. And we all can think with each other. So frame, I always liked my fourth reset. And, um, so that's been, I've been at this almost 20 years and that's been about the fourth reset.
Speaker 1 00:15:12 Uh, we'll see how that holds up for the rest of my career. I don't know, but I tend to feel really strongly about these full resets and each one's pretty distinctly different from the other. Right. And that's the other thing when people ask about what should I, you know, people ask about career advice and business advice and there's no right answer. It's like a forest without a compass. And so sometimes that's just wandering is okay. But if I had to give some advice that I can say worked for me, it's that I like the idea of changing more than a two degree variation. In other words, if you're working in a particular business and then you ha and you just sort of say, I want to try something new. A lot of times people will just go with three degrees that way. Well, three degrees that way, in order for you to be in a completely different space, you have to walk a long way for that own to start to bring you to a completely different ecosystem.
Speaker 1 00:16:01 Right? Well, what would happen if you did a 90 degree pivot or a one 80 degree pivot now, all the sudden, every step you take is completely new and it's very, very different. And so I find every five years, I get in a little bit of a new space and I want to increase the degrees of variation time. After time after time, it doesn't mean you forget or don't apply what you used before. Because if you have a central starting point, you apply that to figure out and plot your map and oriented from a known, starting points. You keep that data with you. So I'm not saying you switched from politics to medicine to education. Those are, those are pretty bold. They might not have as many overlapping functionalities, but if you do 10 degrees, 15, 30, 40, 60 degrees, all the sudden you're getting a new perspective and you're bringing with you what you knew and it's revealing to you and giving you new skills.
Speaker 1 00:16:56 And so you're learning a Panavision. I learned, I knew nothing about optics, everything I knew about optics fit in a, in a shot glass. And by the time I left Panavision, I had so much experience just by being in that business to learn about optics. And that became a major component to how I think today. And I wouldn't have any exposure to the optical world. If I didn't work at a company that's built upon the best optics there is. So that's just one example that I didn't know, I would discover that I just took the risk of changing directions. And in changing directions, you discover resources that you wouldn't necessarily have done if you stayed in the same angle of attack. Cool.
Speaker 0 00:17:36 Yeah. Awesome. Um, how, how to respond to that? Yeah, no, that's fantastic. Um, yeah, definitely resonates. I would say, uh, the reset thing I have observed that you, Michael Choni know how to do a lot of really cool things, you know, we've we, uh, to prepare for this, uh, for the show today, we, we did a little bit of research on you and found all manner of, of wonderful things that you have done, which is just fantastic. I think it's awesome. I can certainly relate to that. Wanting to learn how to do new things, really get inside of the, of the issue of the problem, the challenge, and understand how the parts work, um, understand what you don't understand B and I'm quoting you on this because I've heard you say this being comfortable with being uncomfortable. I think that's a really interesting, uh, way to sort of frame that, that reset that you're talking about.
Speaker 1 00:18:29 Well, the idea of being comfortable with being uncomfortable actually comes from my mentor, Leon Silverman. And this is a lesson that he taught me early on because his experience was, uh, another phrase that he taught me is that in this industry, if you're really on the cutting edge, you're only the teacher is only one semester ahead of the student. And it's a myth to believe that there are these experts that are light years ahead of everybody out. What are you talking about? We're exploring that yet, right? We're all in this together there, the distance between an expert and a freshmen are way closer together than I think people would conveniently believe is the case, but that's the opportunity for entrepreneurs and artists and, and, and everyone that wants to jump in this it's regardless of your experience and your age is there's been these major reset opportunities, uh, which is actually one of the best environments for that are ripe for innovation. You, you need to make sure you work in an industry that doesn't have a huge gap between the new people and the experienced people. And I believe media and entertainment is a perfect space for that type of innovative mindset.
Speaker 0 00:19:35 Awesome. Uh, so let's talk about the cloud a little bit. Um, you know, for, for those of us who are listening, who, you know, might be working in a facility where, uh, well, I, don't now in 2020 with COVID, I'm not really sure who fits this mold, but those of us who might be working in a facility where everything's on prem everything's shot really high Rez, you know, we've got these massive files to move around and we can't really imagine how the cloud could be used for anything, but delivering assets, delivering content, um, delivering those MP4 is, uh, maybe, maybe some review and approve. I mean, I think many have seen the value for a while and, and an approval workflow, but what about like file sizes and the challenges that we think of? You know, I, I've heard Emery talk about this too. The challenges, scale file size security, you know, let's talk about some of those challenges.
Speaker 1 00:20:26 Yeah. It's a great point. You know, the problem that we all are facing, everyone listening here is going to have this problem. You have a closet or a shelf full of old drives, and you don't know what to do with them. They have power supplies that are mismatched. They have different transfer protocols that are extinct or near extinction, and you can't get yourself to delete throw them away, even though you don't turn them on either. This should be very familiar. And I'm, I'm guilty as is anyone nobody's immune to this problem, but shows you that there hasn't been a leadership role in how to actually manage data. It came on so quickly. We never figured out what the rules are, right? And so people are just buying new things. And they're not really learning how to do that. And you know, Apple is a good example of how to try to mitigate this a little bit because the number one thing people create in their personal life is photos.
Speaker 1 00:21:21 And those photos are now sinking to their directories, but photos are small. They're pretty easy to organize. You can tell it them with your GPS and things like that, so that they become reasonably easy. But photos are a very specific case where we actually have some automation that's making the behavior work for longterm archiving, previous to iCloud sinking and things like that. People were losing photos soon after taking them, right? So the problem is how do we take the principles of an automated sync system and apply that to video? Because in the video space that we're talking about, we're not talking about gigabytes. We're certainly not talking about megabytes. I wouldn't even argue. We're talking about terabytes. We're talking about petabytes and exabytes, and now exabyte is the best word in the world. If you're a data center, if the, when someone says the word exabyte, they go, Oh my gosh, we heard someone say exabyte, where are they find that person?
Speaker 1 00:22:17 Right? Cause they're looking for customers that know that word. Well, Hollywood is one of those worlds, people in M and E um, have a lot of data and it's going to add up over time and the ability to just store it on local on-premise discs is absolutely going to go away. So the first step is identifying that there is a need admitting. There's a problem, outline a solution and start to execute it. The missing component to this is what is the financial model. For example, if you back things up to date to LTO, it's going to cost you about 6 cents per gigabyte. That LTO tape is going to cost. You let's call it a hundred dollars us. So you have a hundred dollars, 6 cents per gigabyte. A hard drive is going to cost you three times that amount, it's going to be about 20 cents per gigabyte, but you can plug it in and use it all the time.
Speaker 1 00:23:09 The LTE tape is kind of passive. It sits on a shelf. You can't look at it and hear it, but you know, it's there. And it's roughly four to six times cheaper, depending on where you store it and how you get your hard drives and things like that. Well, the benefit of both hard drives and LTO is it's a one time fee. And so you end up just storing it and it's there. The cloud people might say, I would never pay 20 cents per gigabyte. Wow, you'd be right. You pay 50 times less than that, except you pay. And then you pay again and you pay again and you pay again forever and, and ever. And so the problem with the cloud model right now is in perpetuity. So we have a solution that will always be available, but you're going to pay for it in a subscription.
Speaker 1 00:23:56 In the cloud subscription model to the average consumer is a new concept. And to the professional, it's a new concept. We are so used to having hard drives in raids that we love and know, and have tested and recommend to people. We keep them close to us, right? Those are one time fees, but they fill up and then they have a end of life expectancy cloud doesn't have that. LTO can last longer than a hard drive, but you can't look at it. So we have this triangle of problems, right? Keeps a long time has to be the right price, has to be active and not passive. And we have to figure out how to, you know, make all that work. And there's a triangle you could draw with that. And different companies put their token in different corners, right? Some try to be in the center a little bit of all three, some are very passive, but cheap.
Speaker 1 00:24:46 Some are very active but expensive, right? And so we have to learn about that modeling and we need to see the cloud companies start to respond to that word exabyte. When we're talking about megs and gigs, and even Tara's, we're not really dealing with the real problem, cause these problems are rounding errors. They're small. But when you think about this at scale, over the course of a lifetime with material that people shoot that will easily be multiple terabytes per hour. Well now we have an exabyte need and that could be a need that every person could eventually accumulate. Every human could accumulate petabytes of their own material over time. Right. Maybe exabytes in some case, I probably believe that that's arguable. Right? And so these are, these are the new things about the cloud. That's completely new territory. Most people talking cloud, aren't having the conversation we are right now because it's, it's so fresh.
Speaker 1 00:25:43 Right. And so sure we have to sort of also predict what are the behaviors of filmmakers versus homemakers, right? They're going to have different needs for that. And the cloud's going to say, well, if there's more people that are stay at home, parents, they're going to have a different need, but those people take a lot of photos, but it's just a photo, right. It's going to be hard to catch up to let's say, red code or Aerie raw or Sony raw. Right? So these are the different variables we got to figure out before we can fully see a massive adoption in deployment without any hiccups.
Speaker 0 00:26:18 We've certainly seen what you're talking about here at Chessa with what we do deploying, uh, storage, asset management, uh, media, asset management solutions, automation platforms, things like that. And as these platforms start to move more towards cloud subscription based infrastructures, we're starting to have the same discussions about, uh, you know, you're not purchasing that software as a onetime license anymore. Now it's a, uh, you know, it's, it's a subscription it's that you're going to pay for again and again and again. And that model is actually, it's actually good in many ways because that's how the company stays in business and is able to keep developing new features and adding new capabilities and things like that. Um, so in terms of a cloud software deployment, it's really interesting there too, because the process of upgrading and on-premise ma'am, it can be really, really labor intensive and potentially requiring new hardware and things like that. Cloud ma'am deployments, not necessarily, it might be a, you know, it might be the developer, the software vendor updating in the background and suddenly you have these new features and that's fantastic.
Speaker 1 00:27:20 Yeah, you're right. And you know, another factor to what you just described is the idea of capital expenditure, right? It's very CapEx intensive to start a lot of storage. So at Chesa you're going to have to have major checks cut in order to get that process going. The benefit of the cloud. If I started light iron, which I started in 2009 with my brother, uh, if we started it in 2019, well, we would have been able to rely on cloud a lot more because it's easy to get into the cloud because you don't eat the high cap expenditures in order to get going. Right. And so that's a major difference between these two worlds. And I think that's a significant benefit to getting into it now because you don't have to buy massive sand storage in order to be shooting a lot of material pay as you go costs more in the long run, but it's way cheaper to get going.
Speaker 1 00:28:14 Cause now I could have terabytes or petabytes at my disposal without any real expense initially, versus the expense of the hardware, the racks, the cooling, the setup, the it support, all of those things are factored into pretty inexpensive prices to get going. The problem is 10 years later, if we started light iron 10 years ago on the cloud, well, by today, I will can imagine what that bill would look like if we left everything in the cloud. And so that's the part that we're caught up to today. The cloud now is showing its face for the first time is I am going to be your repository for everything. Not just proxies, not just reviewing approval, not just distribution, not just the OTTs getting it to your home. That's a great use for the cloud, but it's going to be the source of all the original camera negative and all the revisions of every effect shot.
Speaker 1 00:29:08 They go through 40 revisions of an effect shot. You're going to have all 40 copies all in the cloud. Each of those copies is going to be 75 gigs, a piece, you know, that actually gets you to one more word. That is a terrifying word for Hollywood because we don't have anyone to really lead us through that. It is the word deletion letter word. And the idea of that just seems like nuts. And it's like, but really how valuable is the first revision of an effect shot that goes through 39 more revisions? It has no value, but the idea of deleting, it seems wrong. It seems like that's malfeasance. It seems, seems like it's, it's totally against what we've been taught, but that's because we haven't been taught how to delete there's no, there's no leadership and description and understanding of what that is. So we don't know. We've all been taught to keep our lawns, at least less than six inches or the neighbors are going to start complaining. We just learned that, right? Well, we haven't been taught through society and social channels, like what the delete. And so the answer is nothing. And that's a bad plan when you're trying to think about the financial impact of keeping stuff that has no value. Hey man, absolutely. Amen.
Speaker 2 00:30:25 Yeah. I think, um, the whole idea of ownership in our society is shifting right. As we get really used to just paying for access to things and use them as we need them. I think we're seeing that in some of the millennials and now some of the, uh, the gen Z is coming up behind them where nobody wants to buy a car anymore. Right. Everybody's taking Uber. Like, why would I want a car? But to me, like, why would I ever not have a car? It means I can go wherever I want whenever I want. So yeah. I think consciousness in the human creature is going to shift and around this topic and that's something we'll see in our lifetime.
Speaker 1 00:31:09 Yes. Right? We're not, I don't think each generation is any different than the previous. They, every generation thinks the one behind them is going to ruin the planet. And they're always, always wrong as they all say, they all say, right. And so it's just, every generation is just different enough that the behavior starts to shift across the culture. And of course, regionally, that's going to be different too. Right? In fact, regional differences between people is probably more significant than generation. In some ways you look at it. But the point is, there are certain things that are ubiquitous, no matter what they are and storage in the cloud and deleting the right things, doesn't matter where you come from or what color you are, how good your movie is. Right. It doesn't matter. You, you got to figure out what to keep and what to lose. And that is not a behavior we have a lot of experience with. Um, and so that's something, uh, that we're going to have to, we're going to have to explore
Speaker 2 00:32:03 Michael. I nominate you to be the Marie Kondo for the media and entertainment industry. Does that media spark joy for you? No,
Speaker 0 00:32:14 That's great. I think a lot of people listening might be thinking, well, you know, I just don't know if I, you know, maybe this revision isn't the right one. I don't make that decision. Some producer colorist or something makes that decision. And what do you see this deletion process as is this a cleanup after the finished production is done? Is it something more immediate?
Speaker 1 00:32:32 Uh, well, the way I look at it is not binary. So what I should clarify is that deletion and not deletion, not a simple binary decision, it is how to GORUCK and segmented. And so what can happen for example is when separate types of assets are created, they can be flagged with different types of deletion potentials, right? So there can be factors, a taxonomy affiliated with different types of file types. For example, in early form of a rough cut is certainly never going to see the light of day. So its value goes down much quicker, right? It's very valuable. The first week it gets released to the studios or the director, but over the course of multiple cuts, they become completely devalued and easy. Right. Right. And you have the effects shots, and then you have things to go to marketing, right? You have outtakes, you have behind the scenes, all these things move at a different cadence of what their deletion possibility or need is.
Speaker 1 00:33:27 And essentially a little alarm clock let's call. It can go off at different States. When the full thing is archived, let's say we delete nothing, but after it's released, the first comes up and says, well, guess what? Let's just say, this is taking up one petabyte of storage. There's 500 gigs that are rough cuts and things that weren't used. And you know, you just start looking at that, then here's all these things about like, um, the audio, the original, uh, you know, outtake stuff that wasn't in the final movie. That's just random audio stuff. It's okay. Let's lose that. Right. And let's look at rough cuts that never saw the light of day. In fact, a director would mostly say anything. That's not in cutting the movie. I don't want anyone to ever see it ever again. You know, I had a director friend of mine say when I'm long gone and people celebrate my catalog in the future, I don't want them to look at stuff.
Speaker 1 00:34:16 I cut out of my movies, what a terrible thing. Right. And he's right. He's right. He doesn't want people going back to that stuff because he's like, I made a decision to eliminate this to the movie. I don't want you going back and seeing what I didn't use that's right. So these can be on a cadence and different ways of marketing departments and delivery departments, exhibition, versioning formatting. They all need to have different rhythms for what is relevant to them as the time goes by those relevancies start to decay. And so you can delete at different cadences. Therefore it's not just a binary deleted or keep it like you're moving your house. And you're like, well, this is the big move. So what boxes are we keeping? What are we deleting? Nobody wants that pressure in terms of content. So you keep it all and you slowly delete what makes sense over time based on what category it fits into.
Speaker 0 00:35:12 Yup. Right. Paul, that sounds like via the data. Yeah. Policy. Exactly. Yeah. That sounds like a fantastic way of going about this potential challenge. So just sort of expanding on the use of the cloud and say an editorial workflow. Um, you know, there are some challenges we've certainly seen we at chess, I've certainly seen with, um, with using the cloud. And I'm just wondering about, you know, your thoughts on some of these, you know, we see concerns. And then we also see the little light bulb popping up above heads. Uh, when we talk about things like machine learning and AI, because these things are in places where these machines can access the content. Now. So now that it's there, why don't we harvest all of this great metadata automatically from this content, right? How can machine learning and artificial intelligence help with the jump to the cloud in terms of advantage?
Speaker 1 00:36:03 Yeah, really the machine learning has many different facets. It's, it's, it's got long arms that go in different directions and because it's so fresh, different people have different opinions on that. So I can only talk about my approach to AI because I believe that for example, whatever the issue may be in the hands of good people is good in the hands of evil people is evil. And so I believe that AI falls into that category. We can use it for good things for creatives, or we can use it for bad things. And that depends on who's the architect behind that, just like, you know, weapons can be good and they can be bad. Right. Fireworks can be good and they can be bad. Right. And so we have to look at AI based on who's the person and what is their motive for using this technology?
Speaker 1 00:36:49 Because when people say AI could replace a lot of creative people's jobs, the answer is absolutely true. Absolutely. Anyone who wants to argue that a computer can't write a script is taking a huge gamble. Um, it's just like what they don't want to happen will just not happen. Well, you can do that, but hope is a bad strategy. So, you know, that's some people's plans, but, uh, what's a better strategy is to get involved with the AI so that it is a tool that enhances the creative process instead of eliminates or replaces it. There are some fine lines in there that gets very, very hairy. It's very political. It's very dangerous. But from my perspective, our design for AI in our early deployments, that frame IO is based around speeding up tasks that are mundane. And non-creative in nature. In other words, the utilitarian things that we have to do thousands of times a day, right?
Speaker 1 00:37:43 Those are the tasks that AI can really speed up and it can get the editors, for example, which I think a lot of this boils down to the editing process is a process of search. That's what editing is. There's even memes out there. They have like these pie charts and they have like one sliver that says editing. And then 98% of the pie is searching for music, right? Like that's editors. That's good. It's like, right. And that's what it is because an editor's co you know, part of the editing process is so much time spent looking for things. Well, what of AI could help speed that up and anticipate what you need and make the tagging. So finite, so high resolute that when you just start typing the word cigar, it's like, I know what a cigar looks like. I found everything with the cigars.
Speaker 1 00:38:30 Well, cigar plus, um, Robert DeNiro, Oh, you want those things? Well, plus Robert DeNiro plus restaurant, I know what a restaurant looks like. I'm pretty smart. I figured that out. Right. And all of a sudden the editor is now whittled down 2000 takes to two. And then all of a sudden, the editors, like when that director's like, Hey, don't we have that shot of Robert in that room. It's like, give me two seconds and we're there. Right? And that's the type of thing that allows the creative process to keep going instead of the utilitarian tools or processes to hold us back and slow us down. Right. That's just one example where the AI being fed into the creatives can be enabling them and not replace. It's not replacing an editor, it's making an editor edit. Like that sounds good. Right. Right. Sure. And so things like that, you can do that with color correction.
Speaker 1 00:39:22 You can do that with tracking. You can do that with effects. You could do it with locations. You can use the AI of your entire studio binder of how you're going to shoot the movie to do a better job of figuring out what order should we shoot the movie in? Cause there's some rules and formulas. What ordered you shoot a movie or a TV show in, but AI can examine this thing in ways that humans cannot and actually say, actually here is a better way to shoot this because I'm able to compute these actors schedules and flight times and the delays and the possibly, if you have to fly through O'Hare the chances of being delayed is like 96%. So it's like they get a computer, can factor all that in and make sure that you're shooting the movie in the right order, based on all these elements, not just what day the locations available, right.
Speaker 1 00:40:10 Or what you thought it would be, uh, would be a good order. These are all utilitarian things that can speed up the creatives, not eliminate them. And at frame IO, that's really one of the paramount approaches that we're taking to our machine learning is to really filter it into the existing creatives so that they can be more successful and move quicker and make better informed decisions that the computer can't make. Right. And so, yeah, our ideas we're, we're not trying to replace a person we're trying to make sure the computer is enabling that person to be who they are and show that through better
Speaker 0 00:40:45 Well said. Yeah. One thing I wanted to talk to you about was the blog, the frame IO blog. It's fantastic. There's so much really great information there. I can't tell you how many times I've Googled some production terms, some post production terms and media term, and first five or 10 hits is an article from frame IO, his blog. So that's fantastic. I mean, you know, we hope at some point that the workflow show becomes close to, you know, somehow shines a candle to the audio version of that book.
Speaker 1 00:41:14 Yeah. So I think it's great that you've found the blog to be helpful. Um, we have a wonderful writer named Lisa McNamara who is, uh, really spearheading a lot of the content that's on there. And it's also contributed through another partner, Ben Bailey and then another partner, Jonas lubers, and essentially you're dealing with is this idea that being able to get access to information is so critical because everybody's stories are a slightly different perspective. And so we publish a lot on the blog because it incorporates a lot of different perspectives and we try to be very, very deep in it. The Premio blog is actually way deeper than most people think there's some real nuggets in there. Pretty regular. It is not a trivial thing, but
Speaker 2 00:42:00 I've been watching the remote workflow series, which has been fabulous. Um, so kudos for that. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:42:09 Likewise, we wanted to embody some of the components of that and make it consumable for specifically remote workflow needs that happened throughout the spring and summer of 2020. And so that became really important to us. And when you are going through a new process, the way that we've gone through it, the truth is we ended up discovering things that we wouldn't have done on our own. We wouldn't have discovered these. If we didn't go through this process, we're living history right now. I know that's such a corny coined term, but we're actually living history. And we, first of all, I like to document things I find when I look back in my life, I always say, I don't have a photo. I don't remember that very well. I didn't remember what I was feeling that day, but, you know, I wish I had better documentation of that.
Speaker 1 00:42:53 And so, because we're going through COVID right now, part of what we want to do is document it in that process of documenting it. It said, well, let's tell people what we've learned and share that with the community. And then as we're doing it, we're like we're learning new things as we go. And it became kind of a meta show. If you actually watch the entire series from wall to wall, we reference ourselves a lot, which this was completely made up on the fly. That show had an outline that was like five seconds long. And we just kind of did it. And it was feedback from the community and listening, keeping our ear to the, so the railroad tracks and trying to figure out what are the needs, what are we hearing and what do we think we can do to help? And what do we think we can predict from this?
Speaker 1 00:43:37 The show actually gets more and more organized and more and more intense in some ways over the episodes. Cause we got, we learned more and then we got more passionate, our final episode, um, which, which is episode 13, uh, actually is an opportunity for us to really call out our major predictions. And we make some very specific predictions to the community and we make some call outs to key contributors that have to address certain issues if we're going to capitalize on this. So one of the things that's really interesting about bad situations is that it's easy to get bogged down by the badness, the horrific mess of it and our country and our planet is got a lot of bad situations right now. And the problem is it's easy to let that, uh, kind of hold us back, but I believe no matter what the situation is and you look history, horrible, horrible things can happen, but good people emerge out of that and they create good out of bad.
Speaker 1 00:44:39 It happens all the time. And I hate to use that other dumb phrase. You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs. People have heard it, you know, and it's sort of like what that phrase is not is the ends justifies the means. It's not, that's not what it's saying. It's saying you created something new and maybe something better because something had to be destroyed. And whether we have to destroy a thought process, whether we have to destroy our own security, whether we have to destroy our own beliefs, our own biases, whatever we were destroying, we have the opportunity to create that's what destroying does. We talked about that earlier today, right? Is creation comes out of destruction. And so workflow from home is a series in which we're now trying to say what we've learned. We need to all be responsible. And there's some specific groups that we call out. So watch the show. It's like, there's some destruction that needs to happen in order to enable some new creation. And that's really, really important to the story
Speaker 2 00:45:39 And this story doesn't end here. In fact, there's so much more of this conversation. We're going to turn it into two episodes because I didn't want to cut out a single minute. So stay tuned for part two, where Michael tells us his story. I don't know about you folks, but Jason and I agree learning about how someone got to where they are now is always one of our favorite parts of the show. And Michael story is not one you're going to want to Ms. Michael
Speaker 0 00:46:07 Joanie global senior VP of innovation for frame IO. Thanks for joining our workflow therapy session today, Michael, thanks for having me. It was really a great time. And also thanks to my cohost chesses senior solutions architect, Ben Kilburg. Thanks, Jason. And thank you, Michael. And I'm Jason Whetstone. Chessa senior workflow engineer. The workflow show is a production of Chesapeake systems and more banana productions. The show is recorded and edited by Ben Kilburg and here are the CTA is again, folks, if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe to the workflow. Show, tell a friend, a coworker, or a client or a vendor partner about us and let us know what you think. Send a carrier pigeon to workflow
[email protected]. We're at Chesa pro. Thanks for listening to the work flow show. I'm Jason Wetstone.
