#9 "In the Year 2525 . . ."

Speaker 0 00:00 Welcome to the workflow show episode one Oh nine, the year 25, 25 in the year 25, 25. Yes. I'm Meryl Davis, along with my cohort, mr. Nick gold. And today we're going to talk a little bit about that was good. That was good, man. We didn't even plan to do no, we totally locked eyes though. It was kind of awkward, I guess. I guess the, uh, the Genesis of this podcast episode came from Nick and I discussing about a PlayStation nine commercial. It sure. Did you guys remember that? You guys may remember this. It was one of my favorite television commercials ever back when the PlayStation two came out, it was actually, it was one of their launch ads from before the two came out and they had this ad and they, I was telling Meryl, I thought this was brilliant advertising because it's this ad for like the PlayStation nine, a hundred years out from now where you literally inhaling through your nose in a very kind of, um, drug-like fashion, these nano molecules that literally change your sensory perception and put you in this virtual internet reality. Speaker 0 01:08 And they're advertising this crazy video game system from the future. And then they're like, PlayStation nine, download it today or something. And then, then it was PlayStation two. Yeah. They just show this cool little, like it's almost looks like the obelisk or whatever. The monolith in 2001, it turns and it's PlayStation to beginning. It was really clever advertising at the time. You're like, Oh my God, I'm buying. I can make this future happen. If I buy this thing now, and it's connecting me with this cool set of technologies that maybe someday I'll get to live through. So anyway, we were watching this cool ad on YouTube. You can just look YouTube PlayStation ad and you'll be able to see it. It's awesome. So we started talking about, well, what's, what's coming down the pike for what we deal with. Yeah. You know what I mean? Speaker 0 01:57 We can Conject about next year or the year after whether or not there's going to be Mac pro what version of the iPhone. And, and we do do that from time to time, all that wonderful stuff, but let's, let's look like far reaching when you put it into perspective. The technology that we have today is something that was science fiction, 35 years ago, 10 or 15. And you know, just the other day I was playing my a Pandora station and Nick says, this is a great station. I said, you know, I've been training it for about four and a half years. And, uh, he commented, what did you say? I was like, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, if you were in like, yeah, I've been training my artificially intelligent internet based radio station software to really know exactly the type of specific, easy listening, eighties tunes I'm into. It would have been like, dude, what, what are you on? Yeah, but some Sapphire BS, but here it is on my iPhone. And it's my player. I think it's probably one of the best, easy listening. Eighties, artificial intelligence, radio DJs in existence. It is. And the name of the station is Betty Davis eyes. No, it should be Betty Davis AIS. Speaker 1 03:12 <inaudible> Speaker 0 03:14 Okay. Sorry. So how many years out are we projecting here? So let's, let's let's, you know, even though we're calling this the year 25, 25, let's let's enter the decade and end of the decade 20, the year 2020, what's going to be going on in the world of production. Yeah. We're going to talk about three areas, production we'll hit up some posts, post production delivery and consumption workflow and beyond and beyond, which is, you know, not a PlayStation, not in category. I insisted upon it. Nick was like, what's beyond. I'm like, you know, we'll get there, stay tuned. So listen to the end of the episode, because it's going to get wacky. How do we do things? How well first let's we would, we would cover the changes that have happened up to now. So obviously went to a tapeless workflow in the most recent years, obviously. Speaker 0 04:02 So there's there's video tape. Dare. I even say data tape. Well, no, I think they'll still be data tape, but as far as production side, like shooting a commercial shooting a movie, I mean, what's changed over the last few years. Let's project that forward. My iPhone has a 10 80 P camera built in it now, pretty decent quality. The sensors decent, the glass is actually relatively decent. I mean, it's obviously not a pan of vision set up, but I'm not yet it's serviceable. Uh, what, what I think we could say is that by the end of the decade, my guests would be you tell me if you think this sounds hokey or not. No, but that the cost of the I T aspects of the technology will have essentially reached the consumer realm. And the thing that will make your actual production setup expensive is the costs associated with like polishing really good lenses to professional caliber or the physical manufacturing of a rugged enough case that, you know, you, you can have it in, you know, a shoot under warm conditions or cold conditions, but it's, it's not going to be the it stuff that represents the bulk of the cost anymore. Speaker 0 05:21 It's going to be like the limits of physics themselves and though the ergonomics and the engineering. Sure. And maybe the, uh, the overhead in data, you know, we are seeing two K to 4k, you know, 10 K, where will we be in 2020? And let's say by 2020, I think the bill, whether or not it's been widely embraced throughout the production, post production and distribution pipeline. I think it's very easy to say anything we'll be able to do 4k data storage. Won't be an issue. The, the, the processing limits the device. I think that that's a fair evaluation to say in the next eight years, right. That an iPhone like device can do forecasts for KZ. I think that, I think that's a safe bet. That's a very safe bet. I'd put money on that. Bet. You know, I, I agree. I mean, and you think about the last 10 years, I mean, I, when I bought, which was an excellent sort of, uh, entry-level three CCD camera, the Sony <inaudible>. Speaker 0 06:25 It was a, when the last DV cam cameras at a really sort of, I fancied before we went totally tapeless. I look at an investment like that. And even though I spent $5,000 plus on all this gear, I look at it in its case. And I say, wow, I'm glad at least to paid for itself because I couldn't possibly go on a gig now and reasonably tell somebody I'm shooting on DV cam and then expense them for the tapes that I'd have to go find somewhere in a warehouse in New Jersey, perhaps. So let me, let me an interesting idea just popped into my head. What do you think about this? So we've obviously seen a little, I'd call it a little bit of hype about stereoscopic production, but let's, let's look at it from the perspective I was just talking about where like the cost of actually building it into your equipment has probably quickly accelerated towards inconsequential can. Speaker 0 07:19 What if shooting with cameras that have many different lenses of different focal lengths that are focusing on different points of the picture simultaneously you're like shooting this multi lens, multi focused rig all the time. Even if you just want to create two D video, because then in post you'll be able to have so much creative control. It's kind of like when we switched to shooting raw or these raw like workflows, they give you a lot more control over the color and the color grading and color correction. What if actual, like your, your, your focal length of a shot or where you're, you're focused on actually is stuff I don't tweak. And I don't envision that as stereoscopic necessarily. It could even be like 10 lenses. Yeah. Well, I like the idea of having multiple lenses on the same sort of apparatus to perhaps, you know, get your wide shot and get your tight at the same time. Speaker 0 08:16 That's interesting to me, but I'm going to play devil's advocate here for a second. I'm going to say that I don't believe that 3d in its current form is really going to sustain. And last, I mean, we saw it go away in the eighties. We saw the first go round with 3d and that was kind of hokey. And even though there are some really cool things that you can do in 3d. And then in stereoscopic, I feel like if, if I were a betting man in eight years, it's not fully adopted and it's moving on. My guess is that, is that 3d in the in video games will grow because it makes a lot of sense when you're running around in a three dimensional environment for it to be three dimensional and not just mimicked 3d. I think in cinema when the screen is really large, there will be like today. Speaker 0 09:04 I mean, I think there's less stereo. I'm not going to see that high level of home adoption though. I mean, for the PS adoption, you just hit it. When you're looking at a, like a, even if it's a 50 or a 70 inch screen on the other side of the room, I just don't think it really has the same impact. Plus it really, you know, I saw Prometheus's in 3d. It hurt my head. A lot of people have, they struggle with it biologically neurologically. However you want to describe it. It's, it's nausea inducing. It makes you dizzy. I mean, that's not, that's actually more of my experience of stereo when it's using like a home stereo setup using the active shutter specs that are kind of flashing on and off left. Right, right. I, you know, it's interesting what they're doing though on the PlayStation three, you know, typically when you're playing a cop game with another person and you're sharing one screen, you can see your other player, but they have this really cool setup here where you, where if you put on glasses, you can see your screen and they can see theirs. Speaker 0 10:00 So it uses light. Let me guess it's using like the 120 Hertz. So like half of the frames are you're seeing and no way they have that now. Yeah. I'll, uh, we'll put, put a link in the show notes and looking at the same actual television screen through your LCD shutter spec that are literally synchronized one frequency cycle off of one another. So you're only getting half of the frames. They're getting half the frames. It's the other half of the frames that you're seeing through there. So you're looking at the same screen. I really wish I had that when I was playing Goldeneye crazy man, cause golden eye, which we were all raised on the best first person shooter ever even to this day. And then did you know that the game was designed by a bunch of guys who'd never made an FPS ever in their entire life? Speaker 0 10:44 You know, that just speaks volumes about how people coming into something with a fresh set of eyes just basically create the best thing ever. That's right. Fantastic. But anyway, that's just mind blowing to me. So you don't actually have to have little quadrants on the screen where you just look a little to the left and you're seeing exactly what your opponent's doing. I literally can't see that. That's, that's awesome. We'll find, we'll find some interesting tricks that come of like the fundamental novelty. It's still a novelty. And my, my prediction is in the year 2020, this is still going to be relegated to a novelty, to IMAX movies that, uh, are nature, uh, oriented and really, really large, big budget. But the idea of having multiple lenses, different focal length, basically different shots that just gives you a lot more flexibility in post to say, you know what I kind of, and it's the reason why people shoot large frame sizes. Speaker 0 11:38 Now, even if they know they're delivering high Def it gives you a lot of room in that frame to move around your shot or to zoom in and tighten it up without losing a lot of apparent quality. I mean, imagine if you had like, well, I want to take this one shot, but I want to see how it is with that as my focal plane. And that is my focal plane and do it all. Cause have you heard about this new camera? I forgot what it's called, but it looks like a stick of butter and it basically, no, I have no idea what you're talking about, what it's called, but you sh it's deliberately looks like a stick of butter and it's based on this technology that when it captures the data, it's not, it doesn't have a single focal plane. You actually can choose what to focus on in post through this, the analytic software that takes the raw data. Speaker 0 12:26 And you can say, well, I want that thing in the foreground to be in focus and then turn that into your single shot because, Oh, it's called a light field camera. Because again, it's kind of treating a light as a field of data points, I guess, versus individual photons that hit a sensor from a particular focal plane. So again, it's this ability to change many aspects of what the image looks like in post, because you've captured much more data. I think in fact, those light field cameras, the same fundamental technology is eventually going to allow you to look around corners with a camera because it's able to figure out which photons it's receiving in the F in the sensor, we're actually bouncing from like around a corner. And it knows how to figure out which photons that are hitting the sensor were from over there. Speaker 0 13:16 Even if over there was around a corner, cause those photons have really ricocheted around and are still hitting your, your lens. So that, that kind of like predictive well, it's like images of the ability to see things that the physics allows to be received and treated like data that is beyond what the human eye and the human sensory system is able to perceive. So basically what we're saying is cameras, they're going to get a hell of a lot better and cooler and stuff. That's like counter intuitive, like being able to actually construct a visual image of things that you can't see. I mean, look at today. I mean, like you talk about something as, as in the past, very time intensive stitching together a panoramic image. Now the full feature on an iPhone baby. So you know what another interesting trend, and you really turned me on to this one with your, your, your GoPro. Speaker 0 14:15 And you look at the GoPro thing, high quality cameras are getting much smaller, much more rugged and cheapest sin. So you look at the GoPro and these people will like have these nice little rigs for like half a dozen GoPros that they attached to a top of a race car and they don't care. They all get destroyed in the production process. And there was that Navy seals movie where they were using DSLRs where half the cameras got destroyed and production because they wanted to capture like machine gun bullets being shot right at it. And oops, we hit the camera. No big deal. It's a few grand, right? Yeah. Well, I think another trend of is going to be that the quality of cameras and their size and their ruggedness is going to continue to get so much better. They're going to get some parody here because you might have dozens of cameras that you deploy from every possible angle. Speaker 0 15:02 It'll no longer be a two camera shoot or a three camera shoot. There won't be any reason for it to not be like a 20 cameras. We're seeing that now, too. I mean, if you watch anything like, uh, um, uh, I'll give you an example. We were watching kitchen nightmares the other night. I don't watch that show. Well, you know, it's great. Cause I live it because we work at a restaurant. Didn't you guys know? I think I'm thinking of my kitchen at home, which Oh yeah. Just imagine if Gordo came to your kitchen at home. Holy hell. Yeah. Yeah. He'd he'd set you straight though. I've never seen your kitchen. I can. I only, I've only heard stories, but I think I'm more apt for an episode of hoarders or something and quarters. Yeah, no. Or like celebrity rehab, but first thing you gotta do is get really famous and then like bottom out and then I'm looking forward getting famous right now, man. Speaker 0 15:47 It's there you go. That's the workflow sheets, right? You know what? Dr. Drew, he's a great guy I'm told. Um, but uh, you know, on a show like, um, kitchen, nightmare, kitchen nightmares, they have so many cameras. They come into the room and they Mount one, right by the register. They Mount another one. On the other side, they put one in the freezer. They put one in everywhere that you can think to put one in the alleyway in the back. They, they, they Mount them, they suction cup them. And a lot of times jokes will seem in the shots too. But what, even now you're seeing this high level of just run them, let them go. And you know, we'll sort it out. But these days, a lot of them have time code problems. We talk to our clients all the time who are using these types of rigs for reality production. Speaker 0 16:28 So perhaps we're going to see, they'll just be more pro grade. They'll, they'll talk to each other wirelessly. They'll do wireless timecode synchronization. Maybe they'll do live streaming. So you can be ingesting them into your digital recording system while they're shooting versus even having to plug them into anything. So they'll self synchronize over Bluetooth, 6.0 or whatever, or wifi, the next generation you'll probably even have like a pan tilt, zoom functionality. You can have this, like in a control room. So you're streaming this all wireless from whatever GoPro or GoPro like, and I bet you, your camera operator will be wearing a little pair of glasses with a heads up display and have their in their iPhone or something. A little control application for the pan tilt, zoom and dah, dah, dah, dah. But again, you don't even have to make directorial decisions about which camera to take while it's going. Speaker 0 17:16 Cause you're going to have all of this footage and data storage is going to be so cheap by the end of the decade. I mean, it already practically is there's no reason not to have the 2025 ISOs and then make some decisions in post about what shots to take. Sure. So I think another thing that you see when you go to nav now and you, you see it at Brookstone, if you've been to Brookstone recently, a massage chair, no drones, this is true. You look at the AR drone, it's something like two or 300 bucks. It's this little quad copter. You have software that you can control it from your iPhone. He has put to hold on something like that to high Def cameras built into it already. You can get really high end production caliber ones for like 10 or 20 grand. You know, that's very interesting. Speaker 0 17:59 You mentioned that, um, earlier this year I heard a very interesting NPR report about these products and there's some airspace restriction scenarios, certainly changing United States legislation that Obama signed. So by 2014 ish, there will have to be a regulation system in place. This is just think about that for a second. Right? Tell people this all the time. I'm like, dude, you know, in another five years, cool wide angle shots of like the California coast that costs millions of dollars to helicopter shots. Rattled, Tammy will be able to do with his toy that he got at Brookstone or drone or something that catches a little bit of air. And you've got some gorgeous like studio quality. Oh, absolutely. Roll like that last scene in one of the versions of blade runner that they actually got the footage from, from the shining or it's like going over the highway and you're like, how does this even relate to the end of blade runner? Speaker 0 18:56 And, but I think it was actually from blade a blade runner originally. No, the footage was from the shining and the opening shot in the shining with the fall, the TRO extra footage from it at the end of blade runner. And I don't know why blade runner is my favorite movie. I just got the 10 ADP version on iTunes last night. I'm pretty much always thinking about Nick has 14 versions of blade runner that's I actually do. I actually, it's more versions than, than actually have been created. Somehow he's managed to get probably remixed a few of my own, you know, here and there. But, but as I was saying, the drone technology is not only going to get cheaper, better, more ubiquitous. There will be a legislation system in place in the next few years that make it much easier for people to have these things flying around. Speaker 0 19:39 But here's what I think is going to be really big about them instead of having to manually control all of them with a joystick remote or even an iPhone app, you'll easily be able to program certain level of intelligence gathering capability into the drone platform. So you can say, Oh, here's a person. Here's what they look like, follow them. And their face from this perspective with your camera or they wear a little invisible badge on their shirt and it knows how to follow them because it has a sensor that's tapping into that. I know a guy who's actually literally developing that intellectual property right now. His envisioning is for like extreme sports photography. So you can have the drone basically stay with someone as they're doing crazy skateboard tricks all throughout. And the drone knows to follow them and keep its cameras oriented around the perspective that you've told them to stay. Speaker 0 20:28 So by the end of the decade, this'll be, it's basically like, well, what you've described actually is, is just a really like a super cool version of mounting a camera on the side of a car during a chase scene, except now you'll be able to Mount the camera, hovering in the air, following the car, think about the types of really cool crap that this is going to allow people with significantly smaller budgets to do sure. And you know, the way I would, I would akin it to, if you've played the most recent grand theft auto game, you have the ability to control the camera in many ways that you, you can see it's, it's one of the great things about like Machinima and like all the video game based, uh, like, um, modeling engine, the stuff you really, you have full freedom to basically move the camera, however you want up and down through and places that they simply could not go in the real world. Speaker 0 21:24 Think about this. I wouldn't want to be at like a gym operator or a gym manufacturer right now. Isn't that what they call those things, James, the cranes, because it's like, you'll be able to do that with something that's just hovering there. Well, you know, the same thing sort of happened when the steady cam yeah. You know, that was something that was, was a significant piece of technology and the cost of entry was, was high. And this was for the big boys in Hollywood. And then solely over time, we have come to a place where having a steady cam like setup is totally reasonable for a low budget production. I think we'll be in the same place where we don't need to rent a helicopter for two days to get the money shot. You've got your little quad copter drone cost, probably like a thousand bucks each to do crazy stuff that these days only the government is using to, you know, lob missiles that people on the other side of the planet. Speaker 0 22:18 So let's talk about post we've. I think we've covered production, basically production. It's going to be a Saifai Wonderland of awesomeness, not cost you very much and start hashing out those creative ideas. Now, one more thing I would say about a production and it's gonna apply to post as well. At the end of the day, though, the tools don't make the project. You got to have a mindful director and producer, and I have good and creative, good people here and technical operators who are really up on these new technologies because they're not going to probably be absolutely trivial to use. And in fact, they may even require deeper levels of technical savvy than you typically run into for a smaller production companies. And that would be a smart thing to say overall, I think the days of not as we're entering into discussion about post production, the days of being involved in production and not having a sense of what the postproduction element entails, they're over right out right out. Speaker 0 23:15 Because now that it's all just data back and forth, they're I think they're more tightly linked than they've ever been. I agree. I agree. You gotta have a good sense of technology in order to feel comfortable in this environment moving forward. I mean, there's, there's just no question about it, but so let's talk about post reduction. Wow. Post 20, 20, 20 post production 2020. Well, I think with probably, I just felt like the cloud, I just felt was just, well, I don't necessarily let's back it up for a second. Um, everyone says the cloud, all of our clients are constantly like, well, what about the cloud? I just felt you ever see that movie accepted with Justin Long where he makes his own, uh, college. Oh, no, but I've seen the, the, the, the trailer. Yeah. It's pretty funny, but there's this one really funny? There's this, this like, uh, like anciliary character that out in the middle of nowhere, he just goes battle Royale. Speaker 0 24:07 Nice. And that's how I feel right now when you just said the cloud. Cause I have no idea why you said it. You just want it to say it. Huh? I don't know that the cloud is the future of technology. Right? That's what all the marketing people, they told me that about web 2.0 as well. And, and, and, and the Iomega jazz drive. So let's back up. That was pretty awesome. It was like your data cartridge, your data cartridge holds Omega serving all of you a futuristic data cartridge needs since 1994. Yeah. Yeah. But so I believe that nearer 20, 20, as far as codecs are concerned, we're probably going to be in a place where we're still going to have various flavors. I don't ever think there's going to be a way <inaudible>. I bet you, I bet you, there are more formats, more codecs, more rapper formats for files, more whole, you know, these days we have a lot of different variances of things, but there's a lot of stuff that's aged two 64 actual encoded material one way or another by 2028 to 65, which is an actual format, that'll be ubiquitous. Speaker 0 25:13 And maybe even the next generation of encoding technology beyond that. But I guess I'm guessing by the end of this decade, the logical followup of age two 64, which again, I think is age to 65 is, is going to be pretty ubiquitous at that point. I think there will be multiple streaming formats. I think you're right. It's going to be more diverse and more difficult in some ways. And I feel bad for any cultural archeologists who have to go back in another 40 years and even maintain or view, joke about that. But as you know, we have some dealings with the library of Congress and we know the folks at LOC who have this, this project that's ongoing too, to not only digitize their existing format of like films and things like that. But then, you know, continually bring in new stuff that's being created. Speaker 0 26:03 Cause they, they basically try to hold everything in their archives. You know, there's some, some metric like, um, something like over 50% of all the, uh, film that has been shot pre 1950 has been lost or has not been digitized. Oh yeah. And the other half has been, you know, like, there's you think about the last hundred years of technology and how much of our, our culture, we haven't even managed to get up to our current and these guys literally at LOC, they're having to think about, you know, a thousand years from now, how is someone going to be able to reconstruct this data? So forget that, how are you going to be able to wrangle all of these formats? I think the will have probably improved. We're certainly trying to do our part there by doing a lot of these workflow management systems. I wonder I'm just having an aha moment here. Speaker 0 26:51 I see the light bulb over here, shining bright. I wonder if, because we now are in a truly tapeless workflow world that in the next eight years, we're going to see a higher level of integration into the NLE of the data management, uh, and the storage. If there's going to be, here's how I would say a marriage of those one product, the tech, the tools will have evolved to the point where, and, and I think this is kind of what Apple's in some ways tried to achieve with final cut 10 and they may end up being more successful than some people think. Now that the actual creative user, the person whose job it is to tell stories successfully through moving picture and sound will not have to be as directly in touch with my data storage system, my media asset management system, my editing tool, my motion graphics tool. Speaker 0 27:46 I think some of these technologies will start to get more and more obfuscated or hidden from the actual end creative user. And the user interfaces will really be more intuitively driven about these are the tools or here are the interfaces. You need to do the next thing in your workflow that needs to be done, but it'll be much more streamlined around just here's what you need to have in front of your face. You know, I look at NLP software today, all of it, even final cut 10, all the final cut 10 is the best at this. And it shows you too much on the screen at once. Things should be much more hidden away from you if 99% of the time, you don't have to see it. If I don't have to be looking at it, I think it's it. It's too confusing to have it on the screen. I think a good analogy. I'm sort of thinking minority report. I'm sort of thinking how that's all sort of spread out onto a table. Speaker 0 28:40 Yes. Red rum, just, you know, cause you said the shiny anyway, bringing it all back around. So in many ways post-production is a puzzle. It is taking an entire puzzle and it is pouring every single piece out onto a table. And then it is trying to assemble it. And sometimes there are more pieces in the puzzle then you need, so you gotta try them and then maybe they fit. Maybe they don't, but you're taking them out. You're putting them in and you have basically a workspace. And then all this other stuff that we have in the NLE today is kind of like, it can be overkill. I mean, when you look at avid avid is an NLE that was designed with its Genesis in analog film editing, there was a Ben because there was a big bins for your little snippets of absolutely. No. And then, and then final cut seven and pre FCPX. Speaker 0 29:35 Isn't the icon for the cut tool. And most of these applications still a razor. It is still racer. I think the question is, you know, what elements of these paradigms are legacy and, and putting all of that complexity in front of the user and let's face it. Folks cutting video is mostly selecting an end point, selecting an outpoint, arranging them in a sequence, just imagine some level of filters and effects. Imagine if you just had a full touch interface for that, which in which you only interacted with the video components and you simply drag them down and selected them with your left finger and your right finger then went whoop. And let's be honest here, despite all of the criticism of the direction they've taken with their quote unquote pro editing software, which of the three big A's in the world of a video editing software seems like they are going out of their way to push us towards this. Speaker 0 30:24 And to the degree that people often joke about being able to envision the iPad version of it. It's Apple final cut, 10 it's certainly Apple. And you know, it might not be successful. It's people are comfortable with the things that they do. I personally like editing on a, on a keyboard, but if this was 20 years ago, I might be a different guy saying, well, I like to cut analog film. So I really think it's, it's a matter of what you learned on gestural interfaces. We've just seen the beginning in the iPad and things like that are a sign of it. But the fact that even you have to touch something physically, I think the next generations of gestural interfaces and this isn't even new technology, the Nintendo entertainment system in the mid eighties had touch head gestural interfaces that you didn't have to touch anything. Speaker 0 31:15 You may remember these little setups where you could wave your hands around. And there were these little bars that I think they used infrared and they knew what your hands position in space was across three dimensions. And I think that minority report type of interface you're describing where you're waving your hands and you're pointing at things and you're grabbing virtual objects in space by 2020, I would not be surprised if there's a decent chance that more and more of those types of what seemed like radical science fiction, user enforcer mainstream. I think we're sort of going back to our roots in a, in a sort of a new perspective. I was walking in target the other day and I see the stocking stuffer, which I think is hilarious. It is an old phone handset with, I've seen a, a plug for your iPhone. So you can walk around with your iPhone, which is a wireless cellular telephone. Speaker 0 32:03 And speaking to a handset like back when that was the cool thing, of course I haven't had it's Bluetooth, right. Or something, you know, you plug it right into that. I've seen, I've seen Bluetooth headsets that just look like old school telephones that you'd stick on. Perhaps we're, we're heading towards a steam punk future it where, you know, I'm ready to put on my, my bomber jacket and my goggles. I'm going to have touch augmented reality user interface. We're going to have like, um, touch rotary phones, slide your finger. It's amazing that things have changed. You know, the other day I was, I said to a young relative, could you roll down the window? Hey, look at me, roll down the window, rolled down the window. What an antiquated phrase. Right. Because when's the last time, what are you rolling anymore? When's the last time you had to sit there and go like, unless of course, you know, or dial the phone. Speaker 0 32:54 Right. I mean, yeah. All of these things and you designing user interfaces that that mimic kind of outmoded user interfaces is called skeuomorphism, Apple's often usually attacked for doing it. Like why does their calendar app actually have little like leather stitching in it? And why does their CA sure. I don't know if it's good or bad, but you know, we seem to want to embrace to want to remember the past in a way that we can embrace a future. Someday we'll be dead. And the kid whoever's like the, you know, the people that will be like, what's leather, what's a cow. Or, you know, I can't believe they didn't have, they had like screens that weren't touch interfaces. What did they do before everyone just lived their entire life in a pod and plugged the internet into their brains? Six months. I was thinking about this the other day, actually, the idea of watching a series on Netflix versus purchasing the Ray or the DVD, the number one deciding factor that popped into my head. Speaker 0 33:47 And this maybe is an indication of how lazy I am, but it also is an indication the way the market is going that I thought I would rather watch it on Netflix because that meant that I didn't have to get up to change the disc when the, when the first disc was done, you know? Wow. Of course there's also other things, things like, you know, on Blu-ray, but you're absolutely right. I was over at my friend's house, watching movies the other day, and we were all sitting around and we're kind of being lazy, but my buddy was like, uh, we were trying to decide whether we were going to do on demand through Comcast or not to watch a movie or turn the Netflix for the we on. And like, it was this big ordeal that he didn't want to have to get up to literally click one button on the front of the television to change the input channel over to the we. Speaker 0 34:31 So we could see what was on Netflix because it meant having to walk eight feet across the room. So I made a big w Oh, I'll do it, man. Here, give me some gears. So I could go on this expedition across the room. And ah, so, you know, of course he felt kind of embarrassed. There's lard ass kind of way, but no, I think you're right. I think people make these kinds of cost evaluations now. And it's like, well, the less I have to do, you know, it's like that talk I gave to the, you know, that industry group, it was like a year ago. It was the American media manufacturers association no longer named that, but that's really what they were. And I was like, guys, the idea of physical media, if that's what your business model is based on when we're now like coming to true four G cellular technology and being able to beam something at a gigabit speed from anywhere you are. Speaker 0 35:18 And I think that, you know, it's like that's, what's coming. And I think physical objects to convey ones and zeros is right out. It's out. It is out. I mean, I remember having the argument when I was younger, who's going to get up and flip the laser disk. Right? So you and me, you realize we were the only people with laser players watching are imported Japanese animation LaserDiscs and downloading the English translated scripts online. Dude, we agreed that we would not talk about this on air. Um, is it air when it's going across the internet? Oh, how clever view. Um, but yeah, so, so we're going to see a lot of change in post. I don't think we're going to see a significant change in post in the way that we're going to see a significant change in production in the same time. But here's the thing that I think will change. Speaker 0 36:04 Just looking at the trajectory of internet speed increases available at reasonable prices, no physical delivery to the networks anymore. Physical delivery. That's an interesting question. Well, I, I agree as far as end product that's already happening, there are lines happening. You might have your Aspera link to your, your, your provider or your, or whatever, but, or, or just FTP it or whatever. But I'm, I'm saying that by the end of the decade, that will be the way you get your content to someone. So only be online. The idea of delivering a master tape will probably seem kind of quaint, no master tape, no master videotape, no master data tape, no couriered hard drive. You will give them a copy of files across your internet connection. Well, so here's a question for you. So I'm supposing this. I don't really know the answer to this. I don't think either of us do so with all this technology sort of pointing towards again, tapeless data that we're already handling in some physical manner. Speaker 0 37:06 Are we, now maybe we can talk about the cloud or the concept of a cloud or the concept of really what we're talking about here. Third party hosted servers that are internet connected at a very high rate of speed that you can upload and download your data quickly. So does that mean if this becomes the norm that we're going to see an Emily platform, which has zero local storage and where she literally edit off of the cloud? Well, Merrill, I will tell you this, that a phone call that I was on less than two hours ago with one of the big three A's of the video post production world was talking about them doing this. And in fact, the branding of it has actually already been established. They've already started talking about it and it's Adobe anywhere. And you may remember to the event that we did with avid, that they're talking about avid sphere, which is remote based editing. Speaker 0 38:03 Now, not all of these technologies imply that the master quality footage lives in the cloud per se. It may still live on a centralized storage system that you have under your control. However, the idea of this is, is that an actual editor on their computer editing doesn't necessarily have to contain the master quality editable material on their local storage of their meta-data, their edit lists, all the things they can generate pointers to things, let a computer somewhere else, do the heart, generating all of the associated data. But that data is not the video data. That is the overlay data that is the, the ins the outs, the transitions. So I'm willing, I'm willing. You're absolutely right. I'm willing to say this by the end of the decade, to do certain types of tasks in the post production workflow, that today require for lack of a better term oomph on the processing side media and coding, rendering trans coding data storage. If that oomph is kind of a, the, the actual storage of the, the high quality data itself. Whereas the vast majority of that is being done on the client side or in a server in your facility, on the server rack, whether it's the cloud or maybe a more centralized facility that you're tapping into that that may be is still under the control of your organization or company, maybe it's your private cloud, but I'm willing to bet Speaker 0 39:29 The weight has shifted where the bulk of those heavy duty it tasks are not happening in your local facility. Even if you are the user of those tools, by the end of the decade, more people than not will have those tools somewhere at a distance from them outside of their actual geographic location. There's a, there's a bet I'm willing to take, you know, well, here's another question for you. I'm just thinking about outmoded technology, technology, recurrent, you use technology that maybe we like because we have a nostalgia associated with it. Do you think in the next eight years, we're going to see film still as the primary source for movies that are finding mistake in the shift already occurred. I mean, there's still a high rate of there's a lot, but I was up at Postworks recently. I was talking to one of their principals. Speaker 0 40:17 I was talking to their head of technology. There are owned by the same parent company as Technicolor. And they were showing me their, their, the, the actual, uh, I guess it's not technically a teleseminar if it's not, uh, turning it into a videotape, but it was the scanning system because they still shoot 30 rock on film. And 30 rockets turned into files, and that's what they use the digital intermediaries for the post production process. And they were saying, that's one of the last few we're getting that's on. That's being shot on film. They said many, many fewer things are coming into their facility. These days on film, those machines are getting less and less use. And it's all about the digital workflow area. Alexa, you know, obviously read even the DSLRs, even video cameras. And I'm sure plenty of new ones that are coming online with large sensors, narrow depths of field, you know, all that fun stuff. Speaker 0 41:08 But I think the, I think maybe the minority is actually being on film now, as far as television, I would agree, but, uh, I, I think there's still a very large contingent to in feature firewood raise. I would change your question up. I would be willing to make the, the rhetorical question. Will anybody be shooting film by the end of the decade in eight years? Will anybody be producing cinema outside of, kind of artisinal use of film because I think it's a cool medium to work in, but for like the bulk of the actual industry, nobody uses, if we're looking historically, nobody shoots on a Polaroid anymore, you know, unless you're the ones who do exactly except for the hipsters and they have their little Olga cameras or whatever, with their 110 film or whatever. But, but now, now we have Instagram to simulate the exact. Speaker 0 41:57 So that's a, that's another one I would be willing to bet that for true kind of commercial entities, nobody is using, they don't, they don't shoot that. And speaking of commercials, they don't really do that in commercials anymore either. So there's like Harry took over everything, man. People were so comfortable with Arie and Kodak. They went bankrupt last year. Yeah. So it's, you know, I think that for true commercial purposes, again, not just shooting of commercials, but like commercial production world, you know, cinema, Hollywood television, what have you, I don't think people will be using film anymore. I think it will be hipsters of the year 2020 and at school, I think it won't go away entirely. There always be those pockets. There's still vinyl still, you know, and especially, you know, any Hollywood film with a big budget where, you know, Heidi Toya director may want to do it. Speaker 0 42:49 That'll probably still happen. I doubt it. Cause Scorsese's still shooting on film, I believe. Do you think he's really going to be making a lot of movies in eight years? Um, maybe, but these guys are getting old. Yeah. But, uh, but I don't mean the hoodie toady guys that are old. I mean the hoodie toady guys that are middle-aged. Yeah. But that again, I think that the economics of shooting in that medium will be so weighed against you, your finance Sears will not let you do it. I don't disagree. But I also know that there's, you know, logic and cost really don't have much to do with a Hollywood budget these days. So Merrill, because we've spent a lot of time talking about all of the fun changes coming in production and post. I think we should table the discussion on beyond the distribution consumption and beyond and do a whole show on it. Speaker 0 43:37 Well, yeah, I mean, I could, I could, we'll do part B of the, the talk about what I think might happen in eight years without any sort of reference or backup for another hour. I mean, I kind of get the feel that our listeners may actually get the sense that we're extraordinarily geek refied when it comes to thinking about this stuff. Yeah. No, it's very, it's very exciting. It's going, wouldn't be true peaks. Yeah. You know, but I think it's important to be forward-looking with this kind of stuff. I think it's also important to be receptive to, to the possibility of change. If we are not at least open to the idea of entertaining, to changes in, in, in workflow and things like this, just imagine where we would be. We would still be working on real the real, I think it's important to be aware and be hopeful and be receptive. Speaker 0 44:21 But at the same time I have a job, man, you got to, these days are the dynamics of our current economy. I mean, you, everyone worries all these jobs that have been lost and this and that. It's like, I'm sorry, folks. But the realities of the, just how easy it is to find people with skill sets that you need to achieve, whatever you're doing for a commercial purpose. It's so easy to connect with people. You have to differentiate yourself. You always have to be several steps ahead and you have to think in five years out, you have to be to that end. You can't just be a production guy. Now, no, you can just make your money in that, but you need to be fully aware of everything that is, is in the circle of production life. So it can't just be, I shoot it. Speaker 0 45:04 And then I'm done. You need to be aware. You need to be aware of the delivery of the format. You need to be aware of how it's going to be cut and who's going to cut it and what's it going to be cut in. And, and, and the entire scenario in the year 2020, I think we're going to see everything that we see right now, just bigger and better and, uh, or maybe not better. And I'm going to have a bigger tool girlfriend. You're going to have virtual girlfriend. You can download, you know, different versions, be like that. A future round episode with Lucy, Lou, I think we should probably end on that now. Okay. The year 2020, when you can download Lucy Lu as always, if you have questions, comments, or feedback, send us an [email protected]. Alrighty. Thanks guys. Stay tuned for next week.