Digital Production Buzz

November 20, 2014

[Transcripts provided by Take 1 Transcription]

[

to listen to this show.]

HOSTS

Larry Jordan

Michael Horton

GUESTS

Barry Frechette, Director of Integrated Production, Connelly Partners

Kevin Railsback, Director of Photography, Filmmaking Naturally

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Voiceover: The Digital Production Buzz is brought to you by Blackmagic Design, creators of the world’s highest quality solutions for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries; and by shutterstock.com, a global marketplace for royalty free images and videos. With over two million royalty free HD and 4K video clips, Shutterstock helps you take your creative projects to the next level; and by Other World Computing, providing quality hardware solutions and extensive technical support to the worldwide computer industry since 1988.

Voiceover: Live from Ralph’s Maytag Museum and Podcast Studio in beautiful downtown Burbank, it’s the Digital Production Buzz.

Voiceover: Production, post production, distribution.

Voiceover: What’s really happening now and in your digital future?

Voiceover: The Buzz is live now.

Larry Jordan: And welcome to the Digital Production Buzz, the world’s longest running podcast for creative content producers covering media production, post production, marketing and distribution around the world. Hi, my name is Larry Jordan and joining us is our ever-handsome co-host, Mr. Mike Horton.

Mike Horton: Hello, Larry.

Larry Jordan: Mike, it’s good to see you back this week.

Mike Horton: It’s one week ‘til Thanksgiving. It’s one week. I’m doing the cooking dance.

Larry Jordan: You’re not really cooking. You don’t really cook, do you?

Mike Horton: I do, and my world famous turkey will be done next Thursday.

Larry Jordan: Oh, it’s going to be so cool.

Mike Horton: You should stop by for a taste. Then we will send you on way because I will not allow you to take any home.

Larry Jordan: Just carve a leg for me. That will be great.

Mike Horton: I will.

Larry Jordan: There won’t be anything left. What do you mean, you’re going to save some?

Mike Horton: If you stop by early, I’ll give you a piece.

Larry Jordan: Does Tuesday count?

Mike Horton: No.

Larry Jordan: Oh. Oh well, we’ll try.

Mike Horton: I’m brining on Tuesday. I brine on Tuesday for two days and then I cook it. It is just phenomenal.

Larry Jordan: I am anxious to hear the report of how it sounds. By the way, next Thanksgiving we are doing a new show. It’s going to be great, but it’ll be on tape, so those of you who tune in to listen to the live show, you don’t need to – we’ll have it posted just before the start of Thanksgiving.

Larry Jordan: But tonight we’ve got some great guests. We’re starting with Barry Frechette. He’s the Director of Integrated Production for Connelly Partners, which is an ad agency and creates media campaigns. But he’s also an independent film maker. Recently, Barry closed a successful Kickstarter campaign and tonight we learn how he did it.

Larry Jordan: Then Ned Soltz is an author, editor, educator and consultant on all things related to Mac Digital Video.

Mike Horton: We haven’t talked to Ned in forever.

Larry Jordan: Ned is coming back because, after too long an absence, he’s going to bring us up to date on the latest camera technology; and Kevin Railsback is a Director of Photography who specializes in nature and wildlife cinematography. His work has won awards at film festivals around the world and tonight he shares the secrets to getting great wildlife images.

Larry Jordan: Just a reminder, we’re offering text transcripts for each show courtesy of Take 1 Transcription. Now you can quickly scan or print the contents of each show, as well as listen to it. Transcripts are located on each show page. You can learn more at take1.tv and thanks, Take 1, for making the transcripts possible.

Larry Jordan: So big a turkey, Mike, do you get?

Mike Horton: 15 pounds.

Larry Jordan: No way!

Mike Horton: Really. It depends on how many people show up for a piece. I only give them a piece, because there’s nothing more wonderful than the day after, with leftover turkey – leftover turkey soup, leftover turkey sandwiches.

Larry Jordan: You’ve got people taking naps all through the weekend, don’t you?

Mike Horton: Oh, I just stuff myself with turkey and then I do it all again at Christmas. By the time I’m done with digesting turkey, I’m doing it again. Hello.

Larry Jordan: That sounds so wonderful. We’re going to fly out to visit family in the Midwest, so we’ll just have to dream dreams of what your turkey actually sounds like. Well, I know what it sounds like, it goes quack.

Mike Horton: It does. Just like the music. The music is quacking right in my ear right now.

Larry Jordan: Well, thinking of interesting quacking sounds, remember to visit with us on Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com; we’re also on Twitter @DPBuZZ, and you can subscribe to our free weekly show newsletter, it publishes every Friday and you can sign up at digitalproductionbuzz.com for an inside look at the show and our industry.

Larry Jordan: We have got a great show and we’re going to be starting with Barry Frechette right after this.

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Larry Jordan: Barry Frechette is the Director of Integrated Production at Connelly Partners, which is an ad agency. They create TV ads, videos, websites and other media products. However, what caught our attention is that Barry is also an independent film maker and he just closed a successful Kickstarter campaign for his feature ‘Paper Lanterns’, which we want to learn more about. Hello, Barry, welcome. Tell us what ‘Paper Lanterns’ is.

Barry Frechette: It’s a project of mine, a bit of a casting project… but it’s a documentary I’m putting together. It’s a story that really has two parts. The first one is rooted in a young man, Normand Brissette, who was a 19 year old airman shot down over Hiroshima on 28^th July 1945 and was actually… with 11 other PoWs in that part of Hiroshima; and actually, when the atom bomb was dropped on the 6^th, he and the 11 others were a mere thousand yards away from ground zero.

Barry Frechette: Normand was one of the two that survived that day and unfortunately passed away about 13 days later due to the radiation exposure, but it’s an amazing story and luckily enough I was able to come across a lot of documentation and his family members actually live very close to me. So this is a story that, frankly, has been around in my home town of Lowell, Massachusetts for a long time but not a lot of folks have known about it.

Barry Frechette: I read that story and got hooked on it, trying to picture myself as a 19 year old man with an unfortunate front row seat to one of the worst events in our history. The second part of it comes from a gentleman in Japan who was an eight year old boy in Hiroshima who survived. His name is Shigeaki Mori. He… survived but later in life, doing a lot of research about the bombing, came across images of 12 Americans and one of them was Normand and he took it upon himself to spend 35 years detailing these 12 men and how they lived their last few days and where they were killed and in a lot of instances their family members didn’t know what happened to them, because given the situation information was very sparse.

Barry Frechette: But in a lot of cases, he reached out to each and every one of the family members of the missing PoWs and provided a lot of closure, even right down to making sure that these 12 Americans were listed in the peace memorial as victims of the bombing. It’s a really fascinating story and it’s an interesting juxtaposition, listening to his story and what he has done for these Americans. He’s provided a lot of comfort and a connection to a lot of folks who have suffered a lot and lost a loved one there.

Larry Jordan: It’s especially touching, I think, because it affects families that are so close to where you live in Lowell. Why did you decide to fund your project using Kickstarter?

Barry Frechette: That’s a good question. I spent a lot of time going back and forth on it. I do have a few folks, and I was able to do a lot of the research, and get enough content and a trip to Japan to actually meet with Mr. Mori which I funded myself, but I just felt like it was an interesting story that I could gain at least some interest from folks out there because it is such a compelling story and I believed it in. I was telling everybody I could about it and I think there was a lot of interest there.

Barry Frechette: I looked at Indigogo, and I looked at Kickstarter and there’s a great community here in the Boston area of film makers. So I was able to meet with a lot of folks, and we’re very open about which way to go, and I just felt that Kickstarter had a very strong community, and I think for me getting it out there into Kickstarter and using that community to leverage, is a bit of a…. I spent a lot of time on it and I just felt like crowd sourcing would be something that would be very helpful to me.

Larry Jordan: Well, your write-up on Kickstarter was spectacular. It was a wonderful, personable, direct appeal for money and exactly what you were going to spend it on. Is this something you invented on your own or did you go somewhere for advice on how to write the proposal?

Barry Frechette: It’s interesting. We’re… advertising and most of my stories are 30 seconds or 60 seconds long in a commercial form, but I launched my Kickstarter at the very beginning of October. I fully intended to have the thing live by August, but I spent a lot of time actually planning it. I think one of the really interesting insights for me was the planning of it all and even being a little more patient, because I think I was in a rush to get it out there and get going. I think creating the content was really important and actually it helped me synthesize a lot of the things in my head that I had taken for granted. It’s all rolling around up there, but it really helped me get it on paper.

Barry Frechette: I created a website separate from Kickstarter to help support it, but for me the trailer was something that I spent a lot of time on. I think it’s version 22 that’s up there. I tried it a lot of different ways. I wanted to tell the whole story and get it out there and I had a lot of folks say, “Whoa, it’s too much,” and also too, I think… They said, “Listen, it’s got to come from you. It’s got to be in your voice and, frankly, you’ve got to have your face in it.” A lot of folks just said, “Listen, if you’re appealing for money, they want to put a face to it. They want to know who is actually making that appeal instead of it being someone behind the scene.”

Mike Horton: That’s a great tip. No-one’s ever said that, at least no-one that I’ve ever heard. All I’ve heard about Kickstarter campaigns is you’ve got to work 24 hours a day and it’s a lot of stress, especially as you get down to the last day and you maybe have not reached your goal and you go, “Oh my God, I’ve worked so hard.”

Barry Frechette: It was stressful. When I hit that ‘Go live’ button, I was like, “Oh my goodness.” Luckily, I think my sister was the first one to put some money in, so I at least felt I had made some progress. That was really good advice, to put my face in there.

Mike Horton: That’s great advice.

Barry Frechette: Yes, and I think it helped a little bit.

Larry Jordan: You had a $17,000 goal and when I checked earlier today you’d reached about $21,500, so you’ve more than met your goal. What are your plans for the money? Oh wait, before I ask that, time out, when did the money come in? Did it come in smoothly or was it all, as Mike suggested, in the last two and a half seconds before the clock is over?

Barry Frechette: It actually came in spurts. I sort of had a plan, as best I could. I have a day job, but for me I really set a goal that I felt was modest enough that I could make. I really hit my social media and hit up the folks from that network. Luckily, I’ve got a strong one and it’s everything you can think of – it’s friends, it’s family, it’s folks from the Lowell area that this appeals to, but also the production community here in  Boston, which was great.

Barry Frechette: I sort of started in that network and I made a lot of progress, and then I had to slow it down. I sort of went onto different networks and I sent it to folks in different areas who might have connections, whether it be in the New York community of production, the LA community. I actually saw a lot of progress from Japan. It got shared a lot and it ended up coming back through different networks from Japanese Americans who were really intrigued by it.

Barry Frechette: I felt pretty confident that I was going to make my goal as it got closer, because I had done a few things within the categories to donate that were not only personal donations, but some of them were corporate. So I had a few of the corporations or smaller companies, but companies nonetheless, that were able to donate in a little bit larger sums and that helped a lot. I found myself meeting my goal on Saturday, which was nice so I didn’t have to wait until Tuesday.

Larry Jordan: Now you’ve got 21,000 in Kickstarter. Walk me through the mechanics. How do you get your hands on the money and how much does Kickstarter keep?

Barry Frechette: Kickstarter keeps a percentage from the goal itself – four percent and then there’s also a transaction fee on the credits cards – so it adds maybe to, give or take, under ten percent, which is not awesome but at this point for me, if you go anywhere else, it made sense. Indigogo was a different way to look at it. I felt that plan could have gone forward, but if you don’t make your number, you still get some of the money but certainly some of it gets taken out.

Larry Jordan: Do they do a bank transfer? How long does it take for you to get your hands on the cash so you can start?

Barry Frechette: It’s about 20 days or so. It took a little while for me, I had to set up a different bank account separate from all the projects I was doing. That had to be vetted. You run that through Amazon. You get that set up and there’s a bank validation process, making sure the accounts are all locked up and secure, and there’s a process at the very end where you can actually have your entire project verified by Kickstarter, and I actually felt better doing that.

Barry Frechette: Everything was set up, everything looked right, but I then submitted it prior to going live to Kickstarter to be authorized. I got an email back saying you’re set, you’re good, everything there is set up correctly, and at that point I was like, “Great.” I felt confident about it and then it was waiting until I had everything ready. But it wasn’t a hard process. There are a lot of steps to it and it took longer than I thought.

Barry Frechette: This is a spare time job, but I felt good being able to go to Kickstarter and having them check my work and making sure everything was set. At this point, I got an email confirming that I had made my goal, which was a nice thing to get, and then folks at that point have confirmed that the money’s being transferred from their accounts to the Amazon process. There are a few instances where somebody’s credit card could have expired or whatnot, so within the system we can tell that and those people have been alerted. That’s the sort of process I’m going through now.

Larry Jordan: So their credit cards have not yet been touched, until you reach the goal, so that they’re basically making a pledge against a credit card but they’re not spending the money until you close the project.

Barry Frechette: Exactly right. It sort of sits there and waits and if I hadn’t made my goal, at that point Kickstarter would close down and no-one would have been charged. There’s kind of an all or nothing thing behind Kickstarter. It’s nerve-racking, it really is. You kind of go to bed thinking, “Oh my goodness. I’ve got to send out more tweets or I’ve got to keep pounding the pavement.”

Larry Jordan: All right, so let’s take the finance hat off your head and let’s put the director/producer hat on. What have you shot so far, and what are you going to be using the money to shoot, and what are you shooting with and on?

Barry Frechette: So far, I’ve shot probably six hours of interviews here in the Lowell area and those interviews include Normand Brissette’s sister, Normand Brissette’s best friend growing up and another family member who really has a good grasp of Normand’s history. His name is Tony … He did a ton of work gathering assets.

Barry Frechette: Through the Freedom of Information Act, he was able to gather an amazing trove of detailed records and certainly that in itself is incredible because I now have Normand’s enlisted reference, I have his medical records, I have the telegram that was sent back to his parents saying he was missing, I’ve got really important documents that the family’s been great about letting me have access to. …. and actually made connections with Mr. Mori and went out there back in February and shot probably, oh, I don’t know, I probably have about seven hours with him that is in the process of being translated from Japanese to English.

Barry Frechette: When I was in Lowell, we shot on two C300s. We used a local access studio up in… that a friend of mine let us borrow for the day. We shot two C300s, two camera shoot, and it worked out really well. My trip to Japan, since I was bankrolling it, I had big lofty dreams of bringing along a DP but it turned out to be me and a backpack, two tripods, my Canon 6D. I had an H4N external recorder with the lav that for me was a little godsend because I was able to go to Mr. Mori’s home for two days, and we interviewed, and we talked, and he showed me a lot of research he had, which was incredible, and the Film Commission in Hiroshima was so helpful. … out there, I made a connection before I got there. He was so very helpful, went with me to Mr. Mori, met with him and his wife, and talked about his role, and what he’d done and the PoWs.

Barry Frechette: The next day, we went to all the various sites and actually followed Normand’s steps where he was the day and the days after with Mr. Mori as he talked about it and we were very mobile. I just had a backpack and we set up and I shot as best I could. I actually wasn’t really planning on using a lot of that for the documentary. Even with the goal I set for Kickstarter, I was trying to be pretty modest.

Barry Frechette: I would love to have a lot of money for it but at this point I know full well that if I keep the goals modest, and keep my plans modest, and buy into the fact that I want it just to feel like a simple documentary, I don’t want to get too fancy, which isn’t quite the word I want, but I want the people’s stories to come out from the screen and let them tell the stories without trying to get intricate. I really just did very simple shots, and the content itself and what they talk about is so moving that at that point it’s really just letting them speak about it. It’s been really great to hear their stories.

Larry Jordan: Once you get it all shot, where are you going to post produce it? Do you have tentative release date that you’re shooting for, at the very least?

Barry Frechette: I will go back to Japan in probably early spring and then I’ll do a shoot here in Lowell with some other experts. I’d love to get in the post production in the second half of the year and try to have at least a good cut by the end of the year. I’ll be posting it here in Boston. I’ve actually cut the trailer myself, but I’ve got some other folks here in town who will be helping me out when it comes to the post production, some great folks.

Barry Frechette: The great thing about this community here is they understand the story and, once they hear it, they’ve been really great about raising their hand, even just to help me organize footage or help me understand and ask a lot of questions.

Mike Horton: The images of the paper lanterns floating down that river in front of the Peace Museum must be spectacular.

Barry Frechette: It really is, and that’s where the inspiration came from for the name. The paper lantern ceremony is something that they do every year on the 6^th, on the anniversary, and it’s meant to symbolize the souls moving off and moving onwards. I haven’t been there yet. I would like to get back there. The 70^th anniversary is coming up on August 6^th 2015.

Mike Horton: Oh, so you haven’t been there?

Barry Frechette: No, not to the university, no. The folks in Japan have been great and actually they did send a crew and they’re going to send me footage of it.

Mike Horton: Actually, there’s a lot of good stock footage, because I’ve seen a lot of it.

Barry Frechette: Oh, there’s a ton of it. You’re absolutely right. It’s beautiful and I think that’s one of my big goals. It’s such a big anniversary coming up, I’m excited to try and get back over there because it really is hallowed ground for everyone.

Larry Jordan: Barry, for people who want to take a look at the trailer – and the trailer is amazingly moving – where can they go on the web to learn more and stay in touch with you about your project?

Barry Frechette: My website is paperlanternfilm.com. You can get an overview there and the trailer’s about halfway down the page or so. You can subscribe and I can keep people updated and keep it moving forward.

Larry Jordan: Very cool. The website is paperlanternfilm.com and Barry Frechette is the whole shooting match behind it. Barry, thanks for joining us.

Mike Horton: Thanks, Barry.

Larry Jordan: We wish you great success with the project.

Barry Frechette: All right, thank you very much, I really appreciate it.

Larry Jordan: You take care. Bye bye.

Barry Frechette: Bye bye.

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Larry Jordan: Ned Soltz is an author, an editor, an educator and consultant on all things related to the Mac Digital Video world. He’s also a contributing editor for DV magazine, a moderator on 2-pop and Creative Cow forums and a regular here on The Buzz, for which we are grateful. Hello, Ned, welcome back.

Ned Soltz: Hello, Larry, it’s good to be back.

Larry Jordan: It has been forever.

Mike Horton: Ned, I haven’t talked to you forever.

Ned Soltz: Oh, and Michael too. What a bonus.

Mike Horton: Yes, I am here.

Ned Soltz: With the new studio while I’m on standby, I can’t hear what’s coming before so I was surprised to hear that it was both of you tonight.

Mike Horton: Yes, we are here and we are grateful to be talking to you after so long.

Larry Jordan: You know, you never call, you never write.

Mike Horton: That’s right.

Ned Soltz: Oh, I know, I know, I know, I know. Yes, mother, I know.

Larry Jordan: Ned, what I want to do before we make you feel even more guilty for being such a stranger is take a look at some of the latest news in camera technology. What’s shaking?

Ned Soltz: Oh, too much is shaking, that’s the problem. I think there are simply too many cameras, and the choices are simply too great and they’re in all ranges. I am still impressed with GoPro, as I love GoPros anyway, and now the GoPro 4, with high frame rate, better quality 4K, this is amazing, and all the add-ons that are there; and Samsung has produced its NX1 and while it really is more consumer oriented in its 4K, it’s the only camera that’s actually recording to H.265.

Ned Soltz: The bad news, of course, is that none of the NLEs are understanding H.265 yet, so Samsung provides you a plug-in to dumb it down to H.264 4K so that your NLE can edit it. But that’s really the face of the future right now. Everything is 4K.

Larry Jordan:  Are you really saying that, in a year or so, we’re not going to be able to get a camera that doesn’t shoot 4K?

Mike Horton: How do you compete?

Ned Soltz: I think it’s going to be very highly specialized. I still think we are going to see the ENG style of cameras for a while. Note the fact that Canon is always the last to adapt and the only Canon 4K camera right now is the C500 and that’s really shooting just a motion jpeg internally and you really need an external recorder to get the optimum 4K out of it. But no, I think that virtually every camera is going to be 4K or UHD or have a 4K option and everybody’s jumping on the bandwagon.

Ned Soltz: Just this past week, in fact, at the CCW show in New York, JVC introduced three 4K cameras. The one that’s of greatest interest, I think, to our audience would be the GYLS300U; and, Michael, before you say anything, I may be a walking encyclopedia of Skewes but I actually do have the number right here in my notes. So don’t think that I spend my days memorizing model numbers, complete with all of their prefixes.

Ned Soltz: But that’s really a pretty cool camera because it’s got a full Super 35 sensor, it’s going to record UHD, which is the 38/40 variant of it. It’s got a micro four-thirds lens adapter so you can use virtually anything on that, including a sensor that automatically is going to detect whether you have a 35 lens on it or a Super 16 lens on it. It’s going to be rather a low data rate 4K, but suitable for the web and certainly for YouTube videos.

Larry Jordan: Ned, here’s the problem I’ve got, though. We may be shooting 4K, but if we’re compressing that down to an H.264 or, even worse, H.265, we’re throwing so much image quality away that you’re not even seeing the value of the 4K, I don’t think.

Ned Soltz: Well, with the 265 you’re not throwing away the image quality as much as the 264. The 265 is the higher compression.

Larry Jordan: Yes, but it reduces the file by another 30 percent. You’re still squeezing stuff down. The question I’ve got is are we seeing any kind of codecs coming out that are really focusing on image quality as opposed to small file size so we can actually see all these pixels?

Ned Soltz: Well, I would say it is the 265 because it’s also called HEVC, high efficiency video codec, and that really is the delivery format right now for 4K. The infrastructures and so forth that are all being created are for HEVC, H.265. That will be the delivery format, much as you can say that all the great HD that’s really being shot is being then compressed down to an MPEG2 transport stream to go over cable and satellite, so there’s naturally going to be compression.

Ned Soltz: The question is how to get the highest quality compression, because otherwise the other 4K that you’re really going to see is obviously then going to be in a theatrical sense, in a DCI sense, where that then is really going to be on disk with the whole DCI player protocol protection and the like, which is out to the big screens. But in the meantime, that’s what we’re working on right now, is the quality of delivery.

Ned Soltz: I think more and more this is going to be happening. We’re only going to be moving away from a world in which television content is necessarily going to be delivered by cable providers. We’ve talked about this before. More and more, this is really going to be IP based. We see it right now, that as we speak, for example, the President is giving his address on immigration, maybe it’s over by now, but the fact is that wasn’t being carried, as an example, on CBS, on the network. The programs weren’t pre-emptive. That was carried on CBS’s new web based 24 hour news service. We’re going to see more and more content moving in that direction.

Mike Horton: By the way, the President did mention, Ned, that you can stay in the country.

Ned Soltz: Oh, he did? He let me stay? I’m glad of that, I really am.

Mike Horton: For six more months.

Ned Soltz: And say thank you, me and the whole family… I am so thrilled to hear that.

Larry Jordan: That’s a really good point, first that you can stay in the country; but the second is that so much of the delivery of video these days is not going to be over broadcast or cable, but it’s going to be delivered via YouTube, Netflix, Amazon and Apple TV that really…

Ned Soltz: And there are the opportunities for 4K.

Larry Jordan: I was just thinking, because I was talking with Mike about this before the show, that’s exactly where The Buzz wants to go as well. We want to be able to take advantage of some of these new delivery mechanisms, because broadcast is foreclosed to us but that doesn’t mean we can’t do something else. It’s an interesting concept and H.265 is coming but is not quite ready for mass distribution, it sounds like.

Ned Soltz: Not quite ready yet, but all of the hardware encoders are being produced in that direction and I think that’s where we’re trending right now. As we see, for example, virtually every network show now is shot in 4K. It’s ultimately going to be delivered in HD, but it’s ready for the point where all of these shows can be repurposed for 4K.

Mike Horton: Do you know what’s really cool? I just saw a couple of weeks ago the Panasonic 35, which is a rental, it’s about $55,000 or something like that, but it shoots 4K, it shoots 2K, it shoots HD and you can get this option for RAW all at the same time.

Ned Soltz: All at the same time, right. You can have all of these simultaneous recordings going on at the same time, so basically you have your 4K that you’re putting away in a vault for repurposing…

Mike Horton: You’ve got your 4444 master thing and you’ve got your 2K. It’s incredible.

Ned Soltz: Right, and then you’ve got your proxies in there to edit and re-link, so it’s really pretty incredible. That was one of the cameras I was going to mention, in fact, was the VariCam because it’s really available in two forms. The record part head is the same, it’s the head that’s going to be different. One head is going to be for a high speed HD camera. The other head is going to be for a 4K camera and you maintain the same…

Larry Jordan: Hold it, Ned, take a breath. There’s so much to talk about. We haven’t even talked on camera accessories. Can we bring you back next week and continue this conversation?

Ned Soltz: Oh, absolutely. I’ve got a whole list of accessories to talk about.

Larry Jordan: Well, hush up for a minute. We’ve got to wrap it up. Ned Soltz, we’ll be back with you next week. You take care.

Ned Soltz: What a pleasure. Take care, guys.

Larry Jordan: Bye bye.

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Larry Jordan: Kevin Railsback is a Director of Photography who specializes in nature and wildlife cinematography. His work has appeared in programs on National Geographic, Animal Planet, the Discovery Channel, as well as theatrically released films and commercials. His work is described as a painting on film and his latest entries into the Cedar Rapids Independent Film Festival took home both the Gold and Silver Eddy Award in his category. Hello, Kevin, welcome.

Kevin Railsback: Hello, Mr. Jordan. How are you this evening?

Larry Jordan: Both Mike Horton and I are doing great and both of us…

Mike Horton: Hi, Kevin.

Larry Jordan: …are looking forward to saying hello. Why did you decide to specialize in nature and wildlife photography?

Kevin Railsback: I’ve always had a passion for nature and wildlife. I started off in the still photography end of things and one of the first photographs I ever took was of a walrus in Brookfield Zoo and I’ve always just been fascinated by nature and wildlife and that’s just kind of where my passion lies.

Larry Jordan: We’re going to talk a lot about how you manage to get the shots, but there was a comment that you made in your film, ‘The Standing People’, which is a film you released in 2012 about the relationship between humans and nature, which I felt was a very interesting perspective on why you even want to cover this stuff in the first place. Do you remember what that was?

Kevin Railsback: Was I talking about the connection between man and nature?

Larry Jordan: Yes, exactly.

Kevin Railsback: What really amazed me or interested me was that we mow down all of these trees and prairies and we put up shopping malls and housing developments, but we name them Oak Road and Cedar Ridge and things like that. So we still want to have this connection with nature in some way, even though we’re bulldozing it down to make a parking lot. I’m really fascinated with that connection of why is it that we feel the need to have that connection.

 

Larry Jordan: Which I think is a very interesting comment, because it infuses all of your work as you’re trying to show how both nature in and of itself and how nature interacts with people. Some of your images and your photography is just phenomenal. It’s just gorgeous, so pat yourself on the back. There are some lovely things here.

Kevin Railsback: Oh, thank you. I watch all the productions from BBC, on Animal Planet and things like that, and those guys raised the bar so high that I’m just thrilled to hear somebody say they appreciate my work.

Mike Horton: Yes, one thing that those guys all have in common, and I’m assuming you do too, and I’m assuming that if we want to get good at this sort of thing, we have to do this, but you have to have an infinite amount of patience.

Kevin Railsback: Exactly. One of the things that I like to do is I’ll pick the longest line in the grocery store and I’ll stand there just to be patient, because we’re in such a hurry, we have such an instant gratification society that we want results immediately and nature works on its own timescale. You can’t say, “Ok, it’s going to be 8.30 and I want a deer to walk through these woods.” It just doesn’t happen. You have to really have a love of nature because you spent a lot of time out there doing nothing, really.

Larry Jordan: Let’s do a nature shoot for a second. Are you building a blind from which to shoot or do you have special techniques to keep yourself awake while you’re waiting for the animals to fortuitously show up?

Kevin Railsback: It really depends on what I’m going after. One of the things I really love to do is show wildlife in its environment. So many of the hunting magazines and TV shows and things like that, they want in your face, they want that grizzly bear right in your face, and my thing is I always want to try to infuse a bit of the environment that the animal lives in. So one of the things that I really like to do is to go places where the wildlife is acclimated to people, places like Yellowstone National Park or Kruger National Park in South Africa. There, you can get natural behavior without really pushing the animals too much.

Kevin Railsback: Wildlife is under enough stress as it is with shrinking habitat and things like that, so I really don’t like to push wildlife that much. I like to go places where the wildlife is already used to seeing people or I will do things like go on the Mississippi River and eagles are used to seeing people in cars, so I’ll use my car as a blind. Sometimes I get… when I’m not expecting it. I could be going through a tall grass prairie with the intent of filming wild flowers and all of a sudden some wildlife opportunity presents itself. So you never really know but the best thing I like to do is to go places where the wildlife is used to seeing people already.

Mike Horton: So you’re not the kind of guy that goes up in Tibet in the mountains and stays there for eight days in the freezing cold waiting for a snow leopard?

Kevin Railsback: I would, I saw that footage that they shot and that was just incredible. I’m kind of out of shape, I don’t even know if I could walk all that camera gear up the hill.

Mike Horton: You do that with the ax.

Larry Jordan: That gets me to the question, what kind of camera gear are you using?

Kevin Railsback: I grew up in HD with a Panasonic. I started out with the Panasonic HVX200 and I ordered that before it was even announced. I think it was just a block of wood under a cloth and so I was one of the first ones to have had that. I progressed up to the Panasonic HPX170 and then the HPX250 and now I’m shooting with the Panasonic PX270, which I absolutely love.

Larry Jordan: Now, why do you love the 270?

Kevin Railsback: The 270, it’s smaller than the HPX250 and you know how with flight restrictions and things like that, weight and size are really coming into play, especially when you’re traveling abroad. It’s smaller than the HDX250, which I love, but the one thing I really, really love about the PX270 is it shoots 1080p/60p, so I can get some slow motion. The thing is that wildlife encounters are measured in seconds.

Kevin Railsback: You may just see a deer come out of the woods or a buffalo comes up out of the stream or a grizzly bear comes up over a ridge and you only have seconds before that situation changes. So when you’re shooting in 24p, that second is just a second, but shooting at 1080p/60p, I can stretch that encounter out a little bit in slow motion and really get to enjoy the encounter that much more.

Mike Horton: I was just wondering, you’ve been doing this a long time and now you’ve got this wonderful equipment, but ten years ago you were working with different equipment and you were getting probably different images. Do we need these very expensive cameras with the 600 millimeter lens with extenders and all this in order to produce the kind of images that we really want? Or does it really matter?

Kevin Railsback: I grew up in the still photography end of things before I moved into digital video and the standard lens was like a 600 F4 lens. Anything more than that, you’re really shooting through a lot more atmosphere so you start getting a degraded image. I love the PX270 because it’s a fixed lens, I don’t have to worry about back focus issues or dust or anything like that and I still license footage that I’ve shot in standard definition.

Kevin Railsback: A lot of my friends are shooting with REDs with the dragon sensors and all this, but it’s like article writing – it all comes down to content and if you shoot wonderful, incredible, beautiful looking content, it doesn’t really matter that much if it was in 4K or standard definition. Obviously, there’s a huge gap between standard definition and 4K, but I still license some of that stuff every quarter, so it’s still relevant.

Mike Horton: You had a great line in one of the articles that you wrote that says, “Hey, if you shot Bigfoot in standard definition, people are going to buy that.”

Kevin Railsback: Well, exactly. If I shot it with my iPhone, I’m probably going to be able to write my own check.

Mike Horton: Exactly.

Larry Jordan: One of the things that the Panasonic 270 is known for is its low light sensitivity. Why is low light important to you?

Kevin Railsback: The reason why that is so important to me, and when I read Panasonic was coming out with that I really wanted this camera badly. Because wildlife is most active early in the morning or late evening towards dusk. So with the 250, as great a camera as it is, I would have to stop shooting at a certain point around sunset, but I have the 270 out on the tall grass prairie at a local nature center and I was shooting some wild flowers and I looked at the time when I started packing up and it was 17 minutes after sunset.

Kevin Railsback: That was incredible for me and that allows me to be more creative and more productive, because I’m shooting more wildlife when it’s active. Having the PX270 is really important because it does have that extra low light capability without adding additional noise, and that’s the key thing. You can always top up the gain if it’s something really incredible, but then you start degrading the image. Being able to shoot in lower light without additional noise is a huge thing for me.

Mike Horton: Have you seen those Sony A7s? Have you fooled with them, those low light ones? Boy, I tell you, what I’ve seen on the internet is that you can shoot bats in caves with those things.

Kevin Railsback: Oh, it’s incredible. It’s like you visually can’t see what it is that you’re shooting but the camera’s able to capture it. So the technology for nature and wildlife photographers is just really getting incredible.

Mike Horton: Oh boy.

Larry Jordan: What codec do you shoot? What video format?

Kevin Railsback: I shoot AVC Intra right now.

Larry Jordan: Ah, an excellent codec.

Kevin Railsback: It’s beautiful.

Larry Jordan: How are you recording?

Kevin Railsback: What do you mean?

Larry Jordan: Are you recording to a P2 card inside the camera or are you using an extra recorder?

Kevin Railsback: Oh yes. No, I’m going directly to the P2 cards.

Larry Jordan: I was just distracted by thinking of shooting Bigfoot on an iPhone. I had to just sort of get that image out of my head. Have you ever had a serious encounter with wildlife, running from a grizzly or something like that?

Kevin Railsback: I haven’t really personally had a serious encounter. I did have a situation in Utah where we were filming mountain lions and my ex-wife had a red 49ers jacket and obviously mountain lions must not be 49er fans, because the mountain lion was up in the tree and all of a sudden it locked on to her coat because it was red and so there was a little bit of tension there, that that was going to end really, really badly. Being the horrible husband I was, I was thinking…

Mike Horton: I’ve got to get the camera.

Kevin Railsback: …if this mountain lion comes out… I’m going to get some incredible footage.

Larry Jordan: This is a bad decision. Oh my goodness. What gear do you take with you on a shoot?

Kevin Railsback: Basically, it’s just a camera, a lot of the P2 cards, some extra batteries and a tripod. The thing is, nature wildlife photography or film making takes a lot of travel time. I need to be light. Sometimes I’ll carry a small 24 inch slider with me if I want to do something a little bit more cinemagraphic, but otherwise it’s just a camera, batteries, P2 cards and a tripod in a case and that’s it.

Larry Jordan: When somebody gives you a project, what kind of planning do you do? You can’t obviously cue wildlife, but what sort of pre production do you do?

Kevin Railsback: Usually I try to research the area that I’m going to and find out what kind of indigenous animals or wildlife are there, and then I do a lot of studying on behavior because wildlife film making is all about behavior. If you can understand the behavior of an animal, you’re more likely to encounter that animal during a feeding time, where it likes to feed, what it likes to eat, does it like to stay up low? Does it like to stay in the trees? Does it come out in the open? I usually try to do as much research as I can to learn the behavior of the animal and I think that really increases my chances of having a successful encounter with the animal.

 

Mike Horton: Do you have a favorite animal? Do you have a relationship with a particular animal?

Kevin Railsback: Wolves. I love wolves. I could film them forever. They’re just fantastic animals, they’re so misunderstood, but they’re so regal, so majestic and, yes, I could film wolves seven days a week.

Larry Jordan: Mmm. What do you do for sound?

Kevin Railsback: For sound? Usually, I just record whatever is on camera with the on-camera mic. Sometimes, if I need to do sound, I’ll have a Sennheiser ME66 or something like that that I’ll record to, but usually most of the stuff I license, they just want the footage and they’ll supply their own music or their own sound, their own foley.

Kevin Railsback: I really don’t concern myself too much with sound. The other thing is that you’d really be amazed how much nature lives in urban settings. So there’s probably not a huge call for a white tailed deer buck with a Harley motorcycle driving by in the background. There’s really not a big calling for that kind of footage.

Larry Jordan: Grant, who’s joining us on the live chat, lives in Australia and suggests that you need to go to Australia to film kangaroos, wombats and koala bears and stuff.

Mike Horton: Yes, Grant’s got tons of them right in his front yard.

Larry Jordan: I’m sure he’ll be glad to buy your plane ticket.

Kevin Railsback: I would love to go to Australia, it’s on my bucket list. Africa was on my bucket list and I checked that one off, but I would love to go to Australia, so if anybody wants to sponsor me to go out there, I would be right out there.

Larry Jordan: We will have Grant send you the money by wire transfer.

Kevin Railsback: That would be fantastic.

Larry Jordan: What projects are you working on now?

Kevin Railsback: Right now, I’m putting some stuff together for a local film festival. I haven’t entered it in a few years, so I’m just going through and trying to come up with some kind of idea. One of the things that I’m working on right now is on the theme of man’s connection with nature and that is trashing out nature. I spend a lot of time on trails, and natural areas and it amazes me how much trash, how many water bottles, and candy wrappers, and used diapers, and bowling ball bags.

Kevin Railsback: You wouldn’t believe the stuff I find. I really want to try to get to the bottom of why it is that we feel we need this connection with nature and we seek it out, but yet we treat it like everything else and throw our cigarette butts around and we’re basically just destroying it. That’s one of the projects that’s close to my heart right now that I’m working on.

Larry Jordan: One quick question, because we’ve only got about a minute left. How do you keep your gear warm when it’s below freezing?

Kevin Railsback: …in northern Minnesota, it was about 14 or 15 below zero and the LCD screen actually started to freeze. I take one of those chemical hand warmers and I take a rubber band and I put it on the back side of the LCD screen and that keeps it warm enough to keep it from ghosting and freezing.

Larry Jordan: Amazing stuff. Where can people go on the web to learn more about the projects you’re working with and keep track of the stuff you’re doing?

Kevin Railsback: My site is filmmakingnaturally.com and you can see what I’m up to, but my thing is also to teach people how to shoot better nature and wildlife film. So there’s also tutorials and reviews and things like that on there as well.

Larry Jordan: I’ve read some of those tutorials. They are extremely helpful and thank you for taking the time to write them, because a lot of people want to not only know what your shots look like, but how you went to get the shots.

Mike Horton: Yes, thanks a lot, Kevin, that’s awesome.

Larry Jordan: That was really cool.

Kevin Railsback: Well, thank you, I appreciate that.

Larry Jordan: Kevin Railsback is a Director of Photography who specializes in nature and wildlife cinematography. You can visit his website at filmmakingnaturally.com. Kevin, this has been fascinating. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Kevin Railsback: Thank you, I appreciate the opportunity.

Larry Jordan: And good luck, we’ll talk to you soon.

Kevin Railsback: Thanks. All right, bye bye.

Larry Jordan: Bye bye.

Larry Jordan: Mike, I don’t think I could be a nature photographer. I would stand on top of the hill with a bullhorn saying, “Deer, get out here, I need to take your picture.”

Mike Horton: I’m a nature photographer. Did you know that?

Larry Jordan: I did not know.

Mike Horton: If you go to my Facebook page and click on photos and start scrolling, you’ll see 1,000 pictures of elephant seals.

Larry Jordan: I was going to say, it has to be elephant seals.

Mike Horton: Yes, and some of them are actually good. I wonder if I can make any money on it. He’s making a lot of money on stock footage.

Larry Jordan: After a thousand pictures, you’ve got to get one of them good.

Mike Horton: Yes, exactly. There’s one of them in there, it’s really good.

Larry Jordan: What is it about elephant seals?

Mike Horton: I don’t know. Their personalities. Well, they sleep a lot.

Larry Jordan: They do, and they’re the size of…

Mike Horton: Which I can relate to. I look at them and I go, “Boy, I wish I was sleeping like that.”

Larry Jordan: I had a chance to see some about a year ago and they are some amazing animals.

Mike Horton: Yes, I go up there two or three times a year and I take thousands of pictures.

Larry Jordan: And some of them are good.

Mike Horton: I think of the same elephant seal.

Larry Jordan: Probably. Sand covered, with a yawning mouth?

Mike Horton: It’s the one with the personality. The one with the little smile on its face.

Larry Jordan: I want to thank our guests today. We started with Barry Frechette, the Director of Integrated Production for Connelly Partners, that’s an ad agency, but he’s also an independent film maker working on a Japanese/American film; Ned Soltz, the author, editor, educator and consultant talking about cameras. Ned will be back next week and looking forward to talking with him on our Thanksgiving show; and Kevin Railsback, Director of Photography and film maker specializing in wildlife.

Larry Jordan: There’s lot of history in our industry and it’s all posted to our website, digitalproductionbuzz.com – hundreds of past shows, thousands of interviews, all searchable and fascinating.

Mike Horton: Wow, Grant posted pictures of kangaroos in the chat. There are thousands of them in Australia. There are thousands of them, they’re like rats. They’re huge.

Larry Jordan: Visit with us on Twitter, @DPBuZZ. The Buzz is streamed by wehostmacs.com. Producer is Cirina Catania, our co-host, the ever voluble Mr. Mike Horton. Engineers are Megan Paulos and Ed… My name’s Larry Jordan, thanks for listening…

Mike Horton: I’m going to Australia.

Larry Jordan: …to the Digital Production Buzz.

Voiceover: The Digital Production Buzz was brought to you by Blackmagic Design, creators of the world’s highest quality solutions for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries; and by shuttterstock.com, a global marketplace for royalty free images and videos. With over two million royalty free HD and 4K video clips, Shutterstock helps you take your creative projects to the next level; and by Other World Computing, providing quality hardware solutions and extensive technical support to the worldwide computer industry since 1988.

Digital Production Buzz

November 13, 2014

[Transcripts provided by Take 1 Transcription]

[

to listen to this show.]

HOSTS

Larry Jordan

Michael Horton

GUESTS

Jonathan Handel, Entertainment/Technology Attorney & Labor ReporterTroyGould and The Hollywood Reporter

Josh Apter, Founder & President, Manhattan Edit Workshop

Philip Hodgetts, President, Intelligent Assistance

===

Voiceover: The Digital Production Buzz is brought to you by Black Magic Design; creators of the world’s highest quality solutions for the feature film, post-production and television broadcast industries; and by Shutterstock.com; a global marketplace for royalty free images and videos.  With over two million royalty free HD and 4K video clips, Shutterstock helps you take your creative projects to the next level; and by Other World Computing, providing quality hardware solutions and extensive technical support to the worldwide computer industry since 1988.

Larry Jordan: Live from Ralph’s Maytag Museum and Podcast studio in beautiful downtown Burbank; it’s the Digital Production Buzz.

Larry Jordan: Production, post-production, distribution.

Larry Jordan: What’s really happening now and in your digital future?  The Buzz is live now.  Welcome to the Digital Production Buzz; the world’s longest running podcast for creative content producers; covering media production, post-production, marketing and distribution around the world.  Hi, my name is Larry Jordan and joining us, our ever affable, ever handsome co-host, Mr Mike Horton.

Michael Horton: Hello Larry.

Larry Jordan: It’s good to see you here Michael.

Michael Horton: I’m so giddy, I can’t tell you why but I’m just giddy with excitement.

Larry Jordan: It’s going to be a good show

Michael Horton: It’s just one of those Thursdays where you’re just giddy; you don’t know why.

Larry Jordan: And it’s wonderful to see you again; it’s been a whole week since last I saw you.

Michael Horton: I know and you look different.

Larry Jordan: It’s the lighting; it’s all about the lighting.

Michael Horton: Your beard is greyer.  Did anybody tell you that?  Your beard is greyer.

Larry Jordan: Yes, it is longer and greyer and there’s more wrinkles.

Michael Horton: It is longer.

Larry Jordan: Recently, Neil Patrick Harris made news when he said that the writers for his upcoming variety show would be union.  However, the show producer is ITV, which has not yet signed any union agreements.  Jonathan Handel, Entertainment Labor Reporter for the Hollywood Reporter joins us tonight to discuss the implications.

Larry Jordan: Next, the video of an actress.  Michael, you may not have seen this.

Michael Horton: I have seen it along with two million other people.

Larry Jordan: The video of an actress, dressed as Princess Leia, silently walking through the streets of Manhattan, exploded this week on YouTube with more than 2.5 million views.  Josh Apter, the inventor of the Padcaster, is the force behind this movie and he joins us tonight to talk about how he created it.  And love it or hate it, metadata is essential to today’s digital productions; however, almost none of us are trained in how to design, enter or use it.

Larry Jordan: Philip Hodgetts, President of Intelligent Assistance, explains how metadata can organize all your projects, whether they’re simple or complex.

Michael Horton: I can’t wait to have that conversation.

Larry Jordan: It’s almost but not quite as good as Codecs Michael; it’s going to be great.  Stay with us.

Michael Horton: I’ll be out in the kitchen while you’re doing that.

Larry Jordan: Just a reminder that we’re providing text transcripts for each show, courtesy of Take 1 Transcription; now you can quickly scan or print the contents of each show as well as listen to it.  Transcripts are located on each show page; you can learn more at Take1.tv and thanks Take 1 for making this possible.

Larry Jordan: Mike, you got any plans for Thanksgiving?

Michael Horton: No, do you want to come over?

Larry Jordan: Yes, I mean, well I’ve had your cooking.

Michael Horton: Listen, I cook the best turkey in the entire world; in fact, they call it the world famous turkey.

Michael Horton: I do that for Thanksgiving and Christmas; it is my world famous turkey and there is no turkey in the world that is better than my turkey.

Larry Jordan: I cannot wait.

Michael Horton: So come on over.

Larry Jordan: I’ll come on over; do you have cranberry sauce?

Michael Horton: Bring Jane. No I don’t do that. What I do is, I just soak it in butter, just lots and lots of butter. People love it.

Larry Jordan: It’s not baked, it’s fried.

Michael Horton: It’s fried. No I don’t fry it, it’s awesome, it’s going to be really good.

Larry Jordan: Just as a reminder, visit with us on Facebook at digitalproductionbuzz.com. We’re also on Twitter @DPBuZZ and subscribe to our free weekly show newsletter at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Every Friday you get an inside look at our show and the latest news inside the industry.

Larry Jordan: It’s an interesting time for the industry, as we try to redefine whose role is what; which is what we’re going to be talking about next.  I’ll be back with Jonathan Handel, the Entertainment Labor Reporter for the Hollywood Reporter, in just a few seconds; right after this.

Larry Jordan: Black Magic Design is now shipping its Production Camera 4K, a super high resolution 4K digital production camera for Ultra HD television production.  Featuring a large super 35 sensor with a professional global shutter.  It also offers EF and ZE compatible lens mounts and records to a super fast SSD drive.  Capturing high quality ProRes files, the Black Magic Production Camera 4K gives customers a complete solution to shoot amazing high resolution music videos, episodic television productions, television commercials, sports, documentaries and much more.

Larry Jordan: The Black Magic Production Camera 4K also features an incredibly tempting price of 2,995.  Learn more about the Black Magic Production Camera 4K that is definitely priced to move; visit blackmagicdesign.com today.

Larry Jordan: Jonathan Handel is an Entertainment and Technology Attorney of Counsel at TroyGould in Los Angeles; he’s also the Contributing Editor on entertainment labor issues for the Hollywood Reporter and he’s got a blog at jhandel.com and Jonathan, this is starting to be a habit; it’s good to have you back.

Jonathan Handel: It is good to be back; some habits are very much the right thing.

Larry Jordan: Yes, some of them you don’t want to break.

Michael Horton: As part of the introduction, we should say that Jonathan drives a Porsche.

Larry Jordan: Well he drives a Porsche in the cat dishes, if you remember correctly.

Michael Horton: Well that’s right.  It was a viral video, I think.

Jonathan Handel: It wasn’t a very threatening … unfortunately.

Larry Jordan: Jonathan, Neil Patrick Harris made news this week; what did he announce?

Jonathan Handel: Well this week or actually this past week, I should say, he announced that a new show that he’s doing is going to be a union show.  What should I call it? I guess a talk show or something; a variety show maybe is the right word and have a ten episode order being produced by ITV Studios America.

Larry Jordan: Now isn’t ITV a UK based company?

Jonathan Handel: The parent company is, yes, ITV Studios America, as the name suggests, is US based but ITV in the UK is in fact not just a company, it is one of the major networks there and is the home, for example, of ‘Downton Abbey’.

Larry Jordan: OK.  So Neil announces that his show, which is a variety show, is going to be union, if I remember correctly.  Why is this such a big deal?

Jonathan Handel: Well it’s a big deal because, what ITV Studios America does, the business they’re in, is not the Downton Abbey type of business; in fact, they don’t even produce that show, it turns out.  The business they’re in is reality and so-called unscripted shows; shows for the National Geographic Channel, A&E, TLC and so forth.

Jonathan Handel: The Writers’ Guild is divided into two halves to literally act like two separate unions, west and east, and the Writer’s Guild East, for the last four years, has been trying to unionize these unscripted or you might call them thinly scripted shows; in other words they’re shows that to the viewer are not fictional narrative shows and people might assume, well there’s no script for that, people are making it up as they go along.  But, in fact, there are writers that write what the host on a variety show may say or the host on any sort of a non fiction show.

Larry Jordan: Now wait.  The Writers’ Guild East, which is one of the sides of Writers’ Guild, has been talking with ITV for four years?

Jonathan Handel: For four years and not making progress; and it’s got very bitter.

Larry Jordan: Why has it taken so long?

Jonathan Handel: Well, this really is, in a sense, the fault line between the way unionism and unionization work in Hollywood, which I sort of put in quotes, I could do air quotes but we’re an audio podcast, of course, and the way unionization works in the rest of the country.

Jonathan Handel: Now in Hollywood, meaning the traditional scripted business; scripted movies, scripted television shows, fictional shows; whether they’re network or cable or what have you, there are a variety of things that go on that don’t go on in the rest of the economy.  One thing is that, these shows are really virtually always unionized, in terms of the writers, the director, the actors; so there’s never any dispute.

Jonathan Handel: For instance, let’s say that I’m a producer and I produce a pilot, I buy a pilot strip and the network says we like it and there’s financing and then we produce this pilot script.  Later, it even gets ordered to series. Does the producer say, I do not want a union involved, I want non-union writers, I want non-union actors, a non-union director?  No, of course not.  In fact, even before they have signed any individuals to work on the show, they sign contracts; signatory documents with the Writers’, Actors’ and Directors’ Guilds.

Jonathan Handel: Now, in the economy at large, things work exactly the opposite.  First of all there’s very little unionization; unlike Hollywood scripted work which is virtually 100% unionized, the private sector of the US is about seven percent unionized.  A tiny, tiny number and it’s been a steep decline, really since the era of Ronald Reagan’s Presidency.

Jonathan Handel: Ironically, before being President, before being Governor of California, he was a President of the Screen Actors’ Guild.  But, one of the things that Reagan did during his presidency was, he broke the Air Traffic Controller’s Union; just fired them all when they went out on strike and really was very noted for helping to bring an anti-union climate to the fore.  If you look at the graphs, unionization was something like 35-40% of the private sector economy at that point.

Larry Jordan: Interesting that you say that, because Margaret Thatcher was very anti-union at the same time.

Jonathan Handel: That’s correct, she was, and Reagan and Thatcher, of course, were very much, you know, soul mates in terms of their political ideology; very close allies in terms of the way they dealt with the economy, regulation of business, their attitudes towards labor.  In fact, Thatcher’s approach to the Mine Workers’ Union was very much like Reagan’s approach to the Air Traffic Controllers and was the subject of a movie that came out earlier this year, on a gay group in London, supporting mine workers.  I forget the name of the movie, so my apologies to the filmmakers.

Larry Jordan: ’Pride’.

Jonathan Handel: What’s that, ‘Pride?’

Larry Jordan: Yes.

Jonathan Handel: OK, thank you.

Larry Jordan: It’s an absolutely brilliant film, by the way, for any of those who have not seen it.  It is an exceptional film.

Jonathan Handel: It really is; a very moving film based on a true story.

Larry Jordan: Alright, so let me get my brain wrapped around this.  We’ve got the Writers’ Guild is saying you need to be union and ITV are obviously saying we’re not union and what puts this sort of at the forefront of the whole union movement?

Jonathan Handel: Well, that’s right.  Basically, what you’re looking at is, you’ve got scripted Hollywood very union, but here’s unscripted Hollywood and it’s a struggle, just like it is in the larger economy.  You know, the companies say, “We don’t want to go union” or they’ll say, “Look, under the law we’re not going to go union unless the workers vote to go union and we’re going to fight it.  We’re going to lobby the workers to vote against it,” you know, etc, etc, etc.

Jonathan Handel: The ante has sort of been upped in the last six months or so with New York City Council hearings about practices and the union saying that there is wage theft going on; in other words that writers are working overtime and not getting paid overtime, not getting paid for the hours they work.  The union says that ITV is stealing $30,000 a year from each writer.  Meanwhile, the parent company saw their profits surge at least 27% last year; a lot of that due to the financial contributions of the American unit; of the ITV Studios America.

Jonathan Handel: Into this stepped Neil Patrick Harris.  His new show, which is not yet titled, is based on a British show.  Obviously Harris, who is going to be hosting the Oscars and has hosted the Tonys and the Emmys, you know, very much has a persona of a nice guy and a good guy; you know, not someone who wants to be the target of claims of being anti-union, for example, the way Joan Rivers was during the last, you know, few months of her lifetime, with…Fashion Police; which was not ITV but another reality show in which both the Writers’ Guild West and East were both involved.

Jonathan Handel: He stated definitively on Twitter last week that ITV had told him the show will be union and, if so, will be written by union writers period.

Larry Jordan: Now this is what you wrote about last week, you said that Neil had made this statement.  What’s happened in the last few days to either move this forward or move it sideways?

Jonathan Handel: So far as we know, well at least publicly nothing has happened.  Whether there have been meetings and discussions; there presumably have been some and, you know, it was a dramatic statement for him to make.  But what the course of those were, we don’t know.  That is currently where things stand, but it is such a definitive statement that it really does not leave any wiggle room.  You know, he says the show is going to be unionized.

Larry Jordan: Now, does this mean that Neil’s show could be union and the rest of ITV not, or does this force ITV America to be union for all of its shows?

Jonathan Handel: The former.  It could be that his show will be unionized and the others won’t be; but that creates a very difficult untenable kind of position for ITV.  What’s the standpoint that you’re making then?  If you’ve got a strong actor who demands that we’ll sign a union agreement otherwise we won’t, I mean, that would sort of be where they would be left.

Michael Horton: You lost me at the beginning when you talked about Writers’ Guild East taking this whole thing forward.  What is the difference between Writers’ Guild East and Writers’ Guild West and Writers’ Guild?

Jonathan Handel: There is really no such thing as the Writers’ Guild.  These are actually two separate unions, the Writers’ Guild East and West.  On major contracts they bargain together; so, for example, when they’re doing their negotiations for the studios on movies and scripted TV, they bargain together as if they were the WGA and they’re often referred to that way.  But there actually isn’t a single WGA.  In fact, the Writers’ Guild East is affiliated with the AFL-CIO, which is, as you know, an umbrella group that many but not all unions are affiliated with.  Writers’ Guild West is unaffiliated, they’re not affiliated with the AFL-CIO.

Jonathan Handel: East is somewhat more politically engaged.  I will frequently get statements from them about issues like net neutrality, copyright law, things of that sort; you know, political issues in play in Washington and Writers’ Guild West tends not to send out statements on those kinds of issues.  Writers’ Guild West, of course, has more Hollywood writers, more big movie writers.

Michael Horton: I had no idea they were completely separate.

Jonathan Handel: Yes.  Basically there were separate unions; there was a separate Television Writers’ Union formed at one point or Radio and Television Writers’ Union perhaps and, if I’m getting it properly, the Screenwriters’ Guild formed in LA and the Radio and Television Writers’, you know, eventually became the nucleus of these two separate East and West unions.

Larry Jordan: Gail, in our live chat, is asking; so when I register an idea with the Writers’ Guild, which Guild am I registering it with?

Jonathan Handel: You can actually register with either one of them; they both have online registries, they’ll both be pleased to take your 20 or 30 dollar fee, whatever it is exactly.

Larry Jordan: Is registering with one the same as registering with the other, or, I mean, is there a difference in protection?

Jonathan Handel: Well there’s no real protection from registering with the Writers’ Guild actually.  If you want to protect something, truthfully you register with the copyright authors, NBC.  The only protection that registering with the Writers’ Guild gives is that, when you put register at WGA on your script, people in Hollywood think it means something.

Michael Horton: Well we actually had this discussion before, I think, with Jonathan a while ago; but this is brand new news to me.

Larry Jordan: So, let’s just make sure we understand.  The two are talking, they’ve been talking for four years.  Neil Patrick Harris has stirred the pot by saying his show will be union and if his show is union, you’re saying that ITV America will most likely need to have all of their reality shows be union; because this is a foot in the water.

Michael Horton: No, that isn’t going to happen.

Jonathan Handel: I think that, if his show is union it just ups the pressure enormously on them to go union with all their shows.  Because it becomes, you know, what is the justification.  You can’t produce a show profitably if it’s unionized but you’re producing this one, you know, and it’s unionized.

Michael Horton: Well we don’t know what this show is right?  We don’t know if it’s a variety show, a reality show.

Jonathan Handel: Well it’s a variety show; it’s based on a very odd British show, whose name is also very strange.  I may have it for you in a minute or two.  But it’s not going to be a slavish imitation of it, apparently, so we don’t really know exactly what it’s going to be like.

Jonathan Handel: Neil Patrick Harris just came out with his autobiography and it was in the form of a ‘choose your own’ adventure book.

Larry Jordan: Choose your own adventure.

Jonathan Handel: Yes, in fact, the book is called ‘Choose Your Own Autobiography’ by Neil Patrick Harris and you get to choose, from page to page, whether, you know, you should go to band camp or theatre camp or something, you know.  Somehow, I suppose, you make the choices that correspond to his autobiography, if you really want to learn about what he was like growing up.  But I haven’t read the book or played it or whatever the right word is.

Jonathan Handel: But the show is called ‘Saturday Night Takeaway’; it’s actually called Something and Something Saturday Night Takeaway; but I don’t have those and it is a variety show.  Beyond that, we don’t know much about it.

Larry Jordan: Just to pull this back, clearly, the Writers’ Guild East is vested in this and ITV is vested in this.  Should the rest of us care?

Jonathan Handel: Well sure.  I mean, you know, the question always is, you know, in being involved in this business, what are working conditions going to be like?  You know, is there someone who’s going to have your back if you’re not paid for every hour that you work?  You know, is there going to be healthcare?  Is the business of audio visual production going to be a sustainable business for the workers; not just for executives or, you know, the head of a  network or the head of a content company that makes, you know, $50 million?  What about for the people that actually create the content?  This is a piece of that struggle; so it does make a difference.

Jonathan Handel: If ITV goes union, you know, is it going to lead to some grand immediate change in the way business is done?  I don’t know but, you know, the Writers’ Guild East is not just working with ITV, they’ve got others to sign and there are others yet, you know, to be discussed with I guess.

Larry Jordan: Jonathan, we’ve talked to you for several years now and I’ve never asked you this question, but you write on all this union stuff.  Are you pro union or you just write on this?

Jonathan Handel: You know, I’m a Reporter.

Larry Jordan: I know, I know.

Jonathan Handel: You know, what I think and what feelings I may have about something are sort of irrelevant to off limits, depending.  There was a time when I was blogging about this stuff, when I might have answered a little more freely or candidly.  But I guess what I will say is that, unions in the entertainment and the content businesses are a fact of life, they’re an extremely important part of the way content gets created; and understanding the strengths and weaknesses of unions and of union contract and of what’s going on, you know, is a part of understanding one’s environment and being literate in the business that many to most of our listeners are engaged in.

Jonathan Handel: That’s the importance here and the interesting part to me is the number of moving parts.  You know, it’s not, can we sit and have responsive readings of 2000 page contracts, or multi hundred page contracts I should say, you know, that put people to sleep it’s, you know, what do these contracts really mean and what do these issues really mean for real people and why are things as they are?  You know, why do we live in a world where a network executive gets paid $35-50 million and people that create content have to struggle to, you know, put kids through school.

Larry Jordan: Jonathan, where can we go on the web to read your blog and be really fast?

Jonathan Handel: The places to go would be jhandel.com.

Larry Jordan: And the Jonathan Handel himself, jhandel.com.  Jonathan Handel of Council of TroyGould and the Entertainment Labor Reporter for the Hollywood Reporter.  Jonathan, as always, we’ll have you back and thanks for joining us.

Michael Horton: That’s so much Jonathan.

Jonathan Handel: Thanks much, bye.

Larry Jordan: Bye, bye.

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Larry Jordan: The two minute video of Princess Leia silently walking through Manhattan in costume exploded on YouTube with more than two million views so far and Josh Apter is the filmmaker behind it.  Hello Josh, good to have you back.

Josh Apter: Hey, good to be here; how you doing?

Larry Jordan: We are doing great.  What is the story behind this video?

Josh Apter: Well, I know it’s a tough one, because we really decided to do this on our…You know, I work with this guy Gary Mahmoud and he and I have done a lot of work together.  We are about 85% of our way through a web series that we’ve been shooting and then we saw that this video, this woman walking through New York for ten hours video had 35 million views.  I mean it was kind of an insane amount of views for a very important topic actually but, of course, we said, well, since it’s sort of something that’s in the public eye, we might as well make a parody out of it; certainly trying to be respectful at the same time.

Josh Apter: We had a couple of different ideas, I think the one that was winning at the time was ten hours of a guy walking through New York, but every time a woman gave him the slightest bit of attention he totally veered off course and ruined the video.  It was okay but it wasn’t really coming together.  Then, you know, the idea just came up, like, well what if Princess Leia was walking.  I mean, I didn’t even know why every problem can be solved with ‘Star Wars’ but we agreed instantly, like that sounds pretty funny.

Josh Apter: We had done some other stuff earlier but with Lando Calrissian and…, we had those costumes.  Then, when our friends at Abracadabra on 21^st Street decided to loan us the costumes for Darth Vader, Boba Fett and the Stormtrooper, we said, “Well we have to do it now” and that was it.

Larry Jordan: It’s amazing in a variety of different ways; just in terms of how you staged it and I loved all the number of characters from Star Wars that you managed to work into the film.  Why did you have to blur their faces?

Josh Apter: Well in the original ihollaback.org video, it blurs the faces of the men in New York that catcall the woman walking through the city; so we just felt it was appropriate that we, you know, follow suit and blur out the faces.  Obviously everyone knows who these guys are, you know, it didn’t hurt that it concealed the fact that our people were pretending to be ‘Star Wars’ characters and didn’t really look like them.  But, you know, we also thought it would be funny to blur someone who wears a full face helmet just for no reason at all.

Larry Jordan: This wasn’t the first video that was a parody of that other video, they actually had a guy walking through the streets of New York City being catcalled.  That was before this one came out, correct?

Josh Apter: Yes, this one was probably the last.  We didn’t really think that this was going to make much noise.  I think, you know, the original video was sort of on the wane, so, you know, we said look, let’s do it; if we’re going to try to do this, we might as well do it quickly.  But we weren’t sure that it was really something that was still, I guess in the public eye or had that much attention.  Then it seemed to have hooked in just in the nick of time; so we’re probably the last one or at least one of the last ones out there.

Larry Jordan: Josh, for people that are on live chat and myself, I didn’t understand this was a parody video; in terms of parodying other videos that are out there.  What is the source video of this whole thing?

Josh Apter: There was a video posted for an organization called ihollaback.org and it’s essentially to sort of show the experience of a woman walking through New York for ten hours resulted in over 100 insanely rude, well not all insanely rude, but, you know, varying degrees of ridiculous catcalls.  And so they put a GoPro camera in someone’s backpack and they followed this woman around with the camera facing her as she walked around the city for ten hours, although, I believe it actually wasn’t a full ten hours, and they cut together a film where you are hearing all the different people in different neighborhoods saying stuff to her.

Josh Apter: It’s sort of shocking that, you know, someone who’s not wearing anything particularly revealing and just minding her own business would get that many people catcalling them.  It’s an incredible video and, again, it blew up I think 35-36 million times on YouTube.  Like I said, we’re not trying to belittle the situation, you know, we just felt it was something that people started parodying already, you know, maybe there was some room in there for us.  But it’s a huge, huge video and that’s what we’re parodying. It’s funny that my Mother didn’t realize it was a parody either, she just thought it was really cute.  That’s what she said.

Michael Horton: Yes, well it certainly brought the conversation to a forefront, that’s for sure.  It makes guys feel pretty awful.

Larry Jordan: Did you get any feedback from people about your parody, in terms of making light of something they think shouldn’t be made light of?

Michael Horton: Oh I haven’t read the comments section, have you read the comments section?  Do you actually read those things?

Josh Apter: I’ve read some of the comments.  I try not to.

Michael  Horton: I know, they’re awful.

Josh Apter: You know, I think there are people on both sides.  There was a woman who said this is really an awful thing to do about a really serious issue.  Then the comment underneath says, but it’s really funny, so, you know, just laugh for a second.

Michael Horton: Yes, Grant in our chat says, those comments can be brutal.

Josh Apter: Then there are ones that are absolutely phenomenal and great things of people catching little details that we planted in there, that we never thought anyone would catch.  That’s the thing, there’s equal parts criticism and then there’s people who really get it.

Michael Horton: I, along with everybody else say, disable the comments; don’t let people comment.

Larry Jordan: How did you shoot it?

Josh Apter: Well we originally were going to use a GoPro just to mimic the same workflow of the original and I had a remote app on my iPad and I was going to hold a Padcaster in my hands and walk forward and be videotaping it off my back.  A co-worker of mine, Dan Jameson, who’s actually Hans Solo in the video, in his infinite wisdom said, Josh, “Why don’t you just shoot it on the iPad and it’ll be so much easier for you to have it done that way and then, you know, it’ll be done?”  And so, that’s exactly what we did; we shot it on an iPad Mini with a Padcaster Mini and just grabbed it by the handles on the side and walked backwards down the street.  It was just that simple.

Larry Jordan: Walk backwards.  I was wondering if that was how you ended up shooting it.

Michael Horton: Well I’ve got to ask this though; did you have any real people actually catcalling this very attractive lady?

Josh Apter: Well, oddly enough, our first day out the guy playing Lando could only work on Friday, it seems like weeks ago but just this past Friday.  He was leaving for Atlanta so we had to shoot his stuff and the … stuff on Friday last week.  While we were shooting his, in one of the outtakes, she’s actually getting catcalled while we’re in the middle of a take.  It was a little frustrating actually.  You know, it showed how true the situation is and that’s what we really wanted to be careful not to, you know, … our noses at the concept of it.  We realize it’s a real thing.  I live in New York, I see it all the time but, you know, it did happen and we noticed it.

Larry Jordan: It’s a fascinating idea.  Where do you get your actors, by the way?

Josh Apter: Well, these are people that I’ve been working with for a couple of years now.  Our Princess Leia is somebody who did a pilot for a series; two or three different short Urban Dictionary films.  She’s also in the web series we’re shooting now.  She’s sort of like our go to because she’s super spot on, incredibly funny; and if you look at her walking and if you go back and look at the actual video, she’s really channeling the woman in the original video.  There’s something so, so similar about the way they carry themselves.

Larry Jordan: Josh, where can people go to learn more about your Padcaster and your work, quickly?

Josh Apter: Well thepadcaster.com.

Larry Jordan: thepadcaster.com.  Josh Apter is the inventor of the Padcaster and Josh, thanks for sharing with us today.

Michael Horton: Yes, great job Josh.

Larry Jordan: We’ll talk to you soon.

Josh Apter: Any time guys; thanks a lot.

Larry Jordan: Bye, bye.

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Larry Jordan: Philip Hodgetts is the CEO of Intelligent Assistance and involved in the technology of virtually every area of digital video.  He’s also a regular contributor to The Buzz and the man lives and breathes metadata; which is why we want to chat with him today.  Hello Philip, welcome back.

Philip Hodgetts: Thank you and yes, we all breathe metadata, because it’s how we know stuff.

Larry Jordan: Well I know, but you’re going to have to back that statement up, because I need you to explain what metadata is.

Philip Hodgetts: Well metadata is what we know about stuff.  It’s almost quite literally that stupid.  I mean, a little bit of metadata about me is actually my name; that’s the metadata.  Another piece of metadata about me is that I’m about five-ten, five-ten and a half on a good day high.  It’s stuff that you know about me.  So, if we transpose that idea and make it specifically more about the sort of work that we do in production and distribution, well metadata is what we know about the media.  It’s the stuff we know.  The technical specifications about the media. How big is the frame? What is the frame rate? What is the Codec? Which rolls out all of my favorite subjects together.

Philip Hodgetts: Then also, what we know about the content.  This is a shot that is assigned for scene three, shot two and this is take 14.  This is metadata, this is the stuff we know about our media.

Larry Jordan: Well, if metadata describes our media, why is it so important?

Philip Hodgetts: Because, if we didn’t have some metadata, we wouldn’t know what’s happening in the media; literally we would know nothing about the media at all without some metadata.  I mean, once upon a time we hoped that somebody would maybe scribble on a case or a piece of paper that this tape has got these shots on it or at least a shot on this day and this location.

Philip Hodgetts: Nowadays, we want the stuff to arrive in the interface when we want.  We want to have all of the notes and all of the information that we need, we need as early in the process as we possibly can get it; if not on the set but as soon in the process as we can.

Philip Hodgetts: Without metadata we would have no direction to go, no way to know which direction we should go with the media; it would just be a pile of blank icons sitting in some … space.

Larry Jordan: Then what did we do 20 years ago?

Philip Hodgetts: 20 years ago I had very badly written, because my handwriting is appalling, pages and pages of logging of what was on the tapes that I’d painstakingly generated after I got the tapes back.  Because without that, I would have no idea where to find anything on what I had and how to start to store it.  And people used transcripts; I mean transcription is a form of metadata, it’s a text version of the spoken word.

Larry Jordan: The software these days is reading all this information; it knows what Codec, it knows what frame size, it knows what frame rate.  Isn’t the clip name enough?  I mean, the rest of it’s done automatically by our software.

Philip Hodgetts: OK.  Randomly choose me which of this information has come from the file via the software.  Find say the shot of the launch that day or find me the 13^th take of shot 176.  I mean, unless you at least put some information into the clip name or the media file name, then you would never know that.  You know, as Michael pointed out, we just did that in the edit bay in the past and we used less of it probably.

Philip Hodgetts: The balance of production has shifted from scripted to non-scripted, we’ve gone a long way from where the majority of what was made, the majority of things that got budgets were written to a  script, because, we have to know what to shoot, because film’s expensive.  It’s only when we got into the more free form of the digital world, we’ve got masses and masses and masses and masses of media.  I mean, the recent ‘Gone Girl’ project, they had 600 hours of source material for, what ended up being a two and a half hour movie.  I mean, we have so much more to manage than we ever did; when it was film and when it was tape and little time what we could produce because we couldn’t handle it.  Now we handle large amounts of media via good metadata.

Larry Jordan: So, are you saying that there’s a relationship between metadata and the organization of your media?

Philip Hodgetts: Absolutely.  The metadata is crucial to the organization of the media.  Without the metadata there is no organization of the media.  As soon as you put something into a folder you’re adding metadata.  As soon as you apply a keyword range you’re adding metadata.  As soon as you put a favorite on something you’re adding metadata.  As soon as you say, this is a good tape, you’re adding metadata.  Every single piece of what we possibly think about our organizational structures are really metadata.

Larry Jordan: Well OK.  Terri in our live chat is agreeing with you that, she says, we’ve been dealing with all of this since digital photography; but since we started shooting video digitally on the card, we’ve just been making such a heavy focus on metadata and for good reason, since all the control and file detail settings etc is stored in the metadata.  It’s especially good for organization.  The problem is, where do we learn how to define what metadata we use and how to use metadata?  I mean, for people that are coming in, where do they go to learn more?

Philip Hodgetts: I really truly wish I had a good answer to that question.

Michael Horton: Oh good question Larry.

Philip Hodgetts: Yes, so, I think get a free ticket and get to take your problem home.

Michael Horton: Yes, really.

Philip Hodgetts: I mean there are some people like Shane…getting organized and posting a DVD out there.  I’m sure that within the Larry Jordan library there’s material on being organized.  But if you wanted to go and do this in a film school, no.  Apart from being in slate, you’re getting the proper information on a slate, there’s not really much focus on the rest of the metadata world.

Philip Hodgetts: I’d like to draw a quick distinction, if I may, between that technical metadata which we do get automatically from the camera; we get a lot more information.  Often down to the individual RGB settings that we’ll use on the sensor. We’re getting massive amounts of technical metadata that we can use to automate post-production processes, for a whole lot of good things.

Philip Hodgetts: We also have to get content metadata, that could be scene shot, tape, whether it’s good or not; but it could also be, you know, keyword ranges about the setting up of a solar panel if this was the launch day.  Equally there is parts of that.  So the content metadata is probably my primary focus is, I think that content metadata is what we really need to streamline the post-production process and we need to get that by whatever means; as early in the process and as easily in the process as we can.

Larry Jordan: It strikes me that there’s two issues here.  One, we need to use metadata to get organized and there’s a certain level of organization which is the same for one project to another.  But there’s also that which is unique to each project.  Someone doing reality is going to need a different set of organization and someone’s that’s doing it scripted or someone that’s doing a commercial would be different and a longer form.

Larry Jordan: How do we get our brains wrapped around how to get organized enough to even plan to use metadata?  Because I’ve found that metadata requires a lot of thinking before you start applying the first keyword.

Philip Hodgetts: That’s an excellent approach.  You’re right too.  The way you approach metadata does depend a little bit on the type of project.  Now scripted is very much focused on scene, shot, take and that’s the important metadata and we need to have things organized really by scene, because that’s the way it’s going to be used.  Which brings us to the key to this and the way we organize our metadata is starting with the end in mind.  We’re starting to say, “Well how do I want to use this information? “What would I like to have when they come to edit this?  What information would I like to log so I can find these things?“

Philip Hodgetts: You know, it would be the common keywords to ranges of an interview; so that the same topic will be found across 20 or 30 interviews.  It’s all organized in the keyword collection or organized in Subclips and a Bin.

Philip Hodgetts: This is the way you have to work with reality and documentary; you have to work and say, what other things are we going to be working with, so how would I organize things to get the result that I want when I come to edit?  A commercial tends to be a little simpler because, when you’re not getting with a lot of media, relatively small project, the organization becomes less important; but still knowing which are the good takes, knowing how you plan to use them, how you put them together so you can find things, it’s still part of being a good editor, it’s part of being about doing the job.

Larry Jordan: Where does the DIT, the Digital Imaging Technician fit into this picture and what about those productions that don’t have a DIT?

Philip Hodgetts: Well, in an ideal world, somebody would be on a set logging what’s going on; whether it’s a documentary shoot, whether it’s a reality show; and reality, there are tight production systems making notes as to where the stories are happening, where the fights are happening, who’s fighting who and what they’re fighting about.  I think there are more modern ways of doing that; I’d be silly if I didn’t mention our own Lumberjack System, which is one way of getting that metadata as it happens on the set, but also Adobe has that crazy Live Logger, which is another way of getting freeform metadata, not the scene, shot, take but the freeform metadata that documentary and reality needs.

Philip Hodgetts: These are two modern solutions that are designed to get this freeform metadata as early as possible so that the organization can start early in the process and help the whole edit to go smoothly; get started and get to the point where you have time to polish it.  You preached the message that we save time.  All these things that save time, so we have more time to be creative in the end of the process.  You know, an editor’s job is to polish the project, it’s not to be an organization, a data wrangler.

Philip Hodgetts: The DIT is one person on a set that can tap a few check boxes on and off during a shoot to perhaps log the material; perhaps it’s a production assistant that would otherwise being around.  That’s somebody doing another job.  Probably not a guy carrying the cameras, probably not a person who’s putting out a boom arm.  Their hands are kind of tied with those.  But in a lot of cases, there is somebody who can just click a few check boxes or tap a highlight button during the shoot; giving the editor a huge head start when they come to the bay.

Larry Jordan: One of the programs you mentioned was your own, which is Lumberjack, which is exactly that.  Basically it’s an onset logging tool to help us organize stuff.  How does Lumberjack fit into this picture and how does it work?

Philip Hodgetts: Lumberjack is simply because I needed to get some sleep.  Yes, it came out of a real need.  I had a project where we were travelling and shooting during the day and all the nights traditionally logging; there was no time to edit or sleep; you know, one or the other and, you know, I opted to sleep.  Ultimately, that general idea came to be Lumberjack, which is a way of key wording and getting our keyword ranges as we should.  It’s got an iPad version or a browser based version and you do just click a checkbox on or click a checkbox off to cover the range of time that a keyword would be applied to; and that’s what happens.

Philip Hodgetts: It’s like to find keywords in the edit, they’re going to be mashed up with the media later.  It’s kind of magical that we mash it up using time of day, but it’s a very well proven workflow now.

Philip Hodgetts: I think Lumberjack is just a way of getting a head start on the edit.

Larry Jordan: My experience with metadata is dating back a few years.  I mean, I’ve worked with a little bit, dabbled and so to speak, but I haven’t really been heavily into metadata and I remember years ago, how painful it was and how laborious and time-consuming it was.  It sounds like we need metadata but the tools that we use have gotten easier to use to make it simpler; to add the key logging information or onset information; that it’s become easier to use.  So if you haven’t played with metadata recently, you need to look at the new tools.  I think I’m hearing that; is that true?

Philip Hodgetts: Absolutely that’s true.  Yes, great sort of movie slates that will tie into that whole timecode value world of where you have matching timecode across all of the audio and video devices.  That metadata transfers straight into the NLE without having to do any work.

Philip Hodgetts: So there are great new tools; because we have the electronics.  There was no real easy way of doing time of day, matching up of media files and logging information.  There was no easy way of really carrying log notes with the tape.  Now, a lot of metadata can go into the file and carry … within the file.  My early attempts to do that was, I put my three quarter inch tapes into a big plastic pouch and then all the log notes in there.

Larry Jordan: Philip, Michael is laughing himself hysterical over here.  Gail is on the live chat and she’s asking, what was the name of the product that you’ve mentioned to organize metadata on set?  You’ve got your own which is by Intelligent Assistance called Lumberjack.  Adobe has got Prelude Live Logger. Shotgun is Imagine Products and Red Giant has got one that I’m blanking on for right now.  Bulletproof I think.

Philip Hodgetts: I don’t think Bulletproof is onset workflow.

Michael Horton: Live Play from Light Iron’s got a really good thing.

Philip Hodgetts: Yes, Live Play’s got some of that elements to it as well.  Lumberjack System is now an independent company of Intelligent Assistance; oh it’s the same two people involved but just to be technical about it, you know.

Larry Jordan: No.  I want to give people good information, so I appreciate the correction.  Let’s shift gears out of a specific product back into thinking, getting our brains wrapped around planning.  How do we organize our thoughts to get metadata into our project?  In other words, how do we organize, before we start shooting, so that when we start shooting we know how to log this stuff?  What point of view should we bring to our metadata work?

Philip Hodgetts: Well, it does come down to keeping the end in mind; what metadata may be used for when I come to put together the story; what are the stories that we’re covering, what are the key themes?  You know, for example, on a documentary I’m still trying to finish but I have logged, the key themes were about top skill, about drag racing, about multi-engine cars and so, I found that, those things were consistent; so I have some key words that I ultimately only logged two or three instances of and that’s probably a case of overlogging.

Philip Hodgetts: It’s really a balance to try and find the distinction between under logging and overlogging.  If you under log something you still can’t find anything.  There’s nothing worse to have like a 20 minute interview or several 20 minute interviews and say, I know I heard a quote and it’s the most important quote, I know I heard that somewhere, and you spend the next 40 minutes scanning through these interview clips to try and find that quote.  Whereas, if you played through it once or you had the key themes or the key thoughts already logged on it, you’ll be able to go straight to those key thoughts and find them in much less time.  That’s what we’ve been talking about, where we can use content metadata.  Once we have, you know, select with names with metadata, the world is at our feet, we can do amazing things with it; and we will.

Michael Horton: Actually Philip did a Webinar for me over at Moviola and good keywords for metadata.  There was a lot of really good tips and tricks, because that’s it, it’s keywords.  What are the right words?

Philip Hodgetts: Yes.  Well think about it.  It’s not a million miles different from the way we might have organized things in the past.  If you think of the sort of things that you’d use to name a Bin, that probably is also a good keyword to use.

Michael Horton: I don’t trust myself for a second.

Philip Hodgetts: Well, I’m not sure that we can necessarily help there Michael.

Michael Horton: No, you’re supposed to argue with me.

Larry Jordan: The other thing I think it’s important to note is that, metadata is changeable; I mean, you can always add more keywords, you can always reorganize.  The key is, if you’re going to jump on it, by starting earlier, it just helps to get things organized faster.  You’re going to end up having to get it organized one way or the other, it’s a question when that organization occurs and it’s much better to do it early when you’ve got the time than when you’re under deadline pressure.

Philip Hodgetts: Of course, you want to do it early, because then you can get the benefits from having it.  If you do it too late, you’ve already done all the work the hard way.  The metadata way is so much easier when you get religion on it; because, you know, it’s really the same religion as being organized.  An organized editor is a productive editor, an organized editor gets the second gig and the third and the fourth; and metadata is the key to organization.

Larry Jordan: And for people, Philip, that want more information on the web about what you’ve got for metadata organization, where can they go?

Philip Hodgetts: We have a lot of really great metadata based tools at intelligentassistance.com and we’ve also already mentioned Lumberjack; that will be at lumberjacksystem.com.

Larry Jordan: lumberjacksystem.com and intelligentassistance.com and Philip Hodgetts is the President of Intelligent Assistance and Philip, thanks for joining us today.

Philip Hodgetts: Thanks for a great introduction.

Michael Horton: Bye Philip.

Larry Jordan: Take care, talk to you soon, bye, bye.

Larry Jordan: You know Michael, it is an interesting show today.  The metadata is so important.

Michael Horton: I know it’s so important, it’s so boring and laborious.

Larry Jordan: I know it’s boring and it’s hard work.

Michael Horton: If I have to do this I just get you to do it, because you’re more articulate; your vocabulary is much, much better than mine is.  You can log all that crap if you want to.

Larry Jordan: Well the thing that Philip said, that I was impressed with, is that, adding metadata has become a whole lot easier and it used to be really cumbersome and companies like Intelligent Assistance and Adobe are looking to find new ways to make it easier to add metadata; so you don’t have to spend your life typing.

Michael Horton: That’s true.

Larry Jordan: And nobody wants to watch you type.

Michael Horton: No, no, no, no.

Larry Jordan: This would be bad.

Michael Horton: No and my typos are world famous.

Larry Jordan: Thinking of world famous, our guests are world famous.  I want to thank our guests this week, Jonathan Handel, the Entertainment Labor Reporter for the Hollywood Reporter; Josh Apter, the President of the Manhattan Edit Workshop and the inventor of Padcaster; and Philip Hodgetts, the President of Intelligence Assistance.

Larry Jordan: There is a lot of history in our industry and it’s all posted to our website, digitalproductionbuzz.com.

Michael Horton: It’s all metadata.

Larry Jordan: It is not all metadata, some of it is hundreds of past shows and thousands of interviews, all searchable, because of metadata.  You can talk with us on Twitter @DPBuZZ and Facebook at digitalproductionbuzz.com.

Larry Jordan: Music on the Buzz is provided by SmartSound; the Buzz is streamed by wehostmacs.com.  Text transcripts are provided by Take 1 Transcription.  You can email us at info@digitalproductionbuzz.com.

Larry Jordan: Our producer is Cirina Catania, our Engineers are Megan Paulos and Ed Golya.  On behalf of Mike Horton, my name is Larry Jordan and thanks for listening to the Digital Production Buzz.

Michael Horton: Goodbye everybody.

Larry Jordan: Take care.

Voiceover: This Digital Production Buzz was brought to you by Black Magic Design; creators of the world’s highest quality solutions for the feature film, post-production and television broadcast industries and by shutterstock.com; a global marketplace for royalty free images and videos.  With over two million royalty free HD and 4K video clips, Shutterstock helps you take your creative projects to the next level; and by Other World Computing, providing quality hardware solutions and extensive technical support to the worldwide computer industry since 1988.

Digital Production Buzz

November 6, 2014

[Transcripts provided by Take 1 Transcription]

[

to listen to this show.]

HOSTS

Larry Jordan

Michael Horton

GUESTS

Jonathan Handel, Entertainment/Technology Attorney & Labor ReporterTroyGould and The Hollywood Reporter

Dror Gill, CTO , Beamr

Jessica Sitomer, President , The Greenlight Coach

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Voiceover: The Digital Production Buzz is brought to you by Blackmagic Design, creators of the world’s highest quality solutions for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries; and by shutterstock.com, a global marketplace for royalty free images and videos. With over two million royalty free HD and 4K video clips, Shutterstock helps you take your creative projects to the next level; and by Other World Computing, providing quality hardware solutions and extensive technical support to the worldwide computer industry since 1988.

Voiceover: Live from Ralph’s Maytag Museum and Podcast Studio in beautiful downtown Burbank, it’s the Digital Production Buzz.

Voiceover: Production, post production, distribution.

Voiceover: What’s really happening now and in your digital future?

Voiceover: The Buzz is live now.

Larry Jordan: And welcome to The Digital Production Buzz, the world’s longest running podcast for creative content producers covering media production, post production, marketing and distribution around the world. Hi, my name is Larry Jordan and joining us is our co-host this week, the ever affable Mr. Mike Horton.

Mike Horton: Excuse me, let me swallow. I’m done.

Larry Jordan: It is good to see you back again, sir.

Mike Horton: Nice to be back at the beautiful Larry Jordan studios in the Maytag Museum again, as I look over the sea of washing machines.

Larry Jordan: Well, you know, the thing I like best about the bay window behind you as opposed to in front of you is the view that we have of Burbank. It’s always fun to look out and see all the traffic going by.

Mike Horton: And I can see the washing machines and you can’t.

Larry Jordan: If you haven’t joined us in the live chat recently, do make a point to check it out. It’s a chance to add insult to injury and talk to us while the show is going on. By the way, thinking of wonderful things that are happening, Jonathan Handel, the entertainment attorney of Counsel at TroyGould and entertainment labor reporter for The Hollywood Reporters joins us to talk about how live web streaming is causing major union jurisdictional issues between major actors’ unions, and the reason this is important is, for those of us who want to do more streaming, we need to pay attention to what’s happening here.

Larry Jordan: Then Dror Gill is the Chief Technology Officer at Beamr Video. He talks with us from Tel Aviv about their new technology, which recompresses already compressed video to retain image quality yet reduce the file size, which makes a major difference in reducing bandwidth cost.

Larry Jordan: And Jessica Sitomer, the President of The Greenlight Coach, has some ideas on how we can overcome our complacency and power our careers to the next level.

Mike Horton: Looking forward to that one.

Larry Jordan: I am too. She’s always fun to talk to. By the way, just a reminder that we’re offering text transcripts for each show, courtesy of Take 1 Transcription. Now you can quickly scan or print the contents of each show, as well as listen to it. Transcripts are located on each show page. Learn more at take1.tv and thanks, Take 1, for making the transcripts possible.

Larry Jordan: Mike, I’m looking forward to talking to our guests tonight because it continues to illustrate the challenges we have in coping with new web based distribution formats.

Mike Horton: Yes, all this new technology. What are we doing here?

Larry Jordan: I was just wondering how you as an actor deal with the blurring lines of what used to be the difference between traditional media and the web.

Mike Horton: Well, I’m actually looking forward to hearing what he has to say, because not only is the Met New York broadcasting to theaters all over the country, but now some 99 seat theaters in Los Angeles will be streaming to the web, so it’s going to be an interesting thing. Everything is changing.

Larry Jordan: Are you involved aside from The Buzz with web stuff?

Mike Horton: Digital Production Buzz, yes.

Larry Jordan: That’s what I said, aside from The Buzz, are you involved with web stuff?

Mike Horton: Yes, I am, Larry.

Larry Jordan: Man, I tell you, it’s so hard to get from Point A to Point B.

Mike Horton: Your questions are just so hard to answer.

Larry Jordan: Remember, for people who want easy answers to question, visit with us on Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com; also on Twitter @DPBuZZ, and subscribe to our free weekly show newsletter at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Mike Horton’s taking his shoes off to allow him to count past ten and we’re going to be back with Jonathan Handel talking about the intersection of traditional media with web streaming. It’s going to be cool. Be right back.

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Larry Jordan: Jonathan Handel is an entertainment and technology attorney of Counsel at TroyGould in Los Angeles. He’s also the Contributing Editor on entertainment labor issues for The Hollywood Reporter and has a blog at jhandel.com. When it comes to labor and the law, nobody understands it better than Jonathan. Hello, Jonathan, welcome back.

Jonathan Handel: Well, hey, Larry. Thank you.

Larry Jordan: It is good to hear your voice. It’s been way too long since last you checked in.

Mike Horton: Yes, it has been a long time, hasn’t it?

Larry Jordan: We’ve got to get you back more often, that’s all there is to it. Jonathan, there are three different issues that I want to talk with you about. All of them relate to live events and web streaming. The first is the confusion, you could almost say conflict, between Actors Equity, which are theatre actors, and SAG-AFTRA, which are film and TV actors, and producers who want to stream live theater productions. The second is the impact of all the money the New York Metropolitan Opera is making in live streaming events, which is now in the millions of dollars; and third is SAG-AFTRA’s new media contract, which last time I looked was still in progress.

Larry Jordan: But the one that I’m most fascinated by is the conflicts between Actors Equity and SAG-AFTRA and producers involved in live streaming. Set the scene for us.

Jonathan Handel: The effort to live stream stage plays was pioneered in 2010 by a company now called VirtualArtsTV and they live streamed a play called Better Left Unsaid and found that some things indeed were better left unsaid. Weeks after the production closed – and they did that, I should say, under an AFTRA new media contract – Actors Equity sent the actors a letter threatening disciplinary charges for participating in an unauthorized production.

Larry Jordan: After the show closed? After the streaming was done?

Jonathan Handel: After the streaming was done, that’s right. To set the stage, no pun intended, what these things tend to look like – and maybe ‘tend to’ is the wrong phrase, because there have just been a few experiments – is they look like stage plays. You go to a little theater, you sit in the seats and watch a 99 seat stage play, but meanwhile there are cameras often fixed in place, two or three cameras with operators, and back in the video village someone is editing it or cutting between cameras on the fly, just like in live television coverage of any other event. It’s mostly wide shots, sometimes relative close-ups – there are artistic choices, are you going to make real close-ups and make this look like TV or are you going to stick with wide and medium shots so that it’s more of a theater experience but streamed over the internet? – So it really combines disparate talents.

Jonathan Handel: You’ve got everything that goes on in a stage play with the usual tech stuff, lighting, video if they’ve got video projected, audio, blocking the actors, all of that, and meanwhile you’ve got a live streaming component with all the expertise and specialization that that implies.

Larry Jordan: What’s the significance of the 99 seat house?

Jonathan Handel: There are a couple of ways to answer that. One is the focus that some of what’s going on is experimental, although there have been Broadway shows that have been streamed, not over the internet but live streamed to cinemas, the same way the Met is streaming to cinemas, as we’ll talk about in a couple of minute. But the other thing is that, in Los Angeles at least, the under 99 seat theaters, if you do an Equity show, you essentially don’t have to pay the actors anything. You pay them $15 a day or a performance and the idea is that the actors are getting professional exposure. Of course, the irony here is that, with live streaming, the actors get even more exposure and there is the potential for profit sharing with the actors so that they’re getting more than just tips and car fare. But Equity is very concerned – as has been expressed to me in the past and they’ve refused to comment on what’s going on now, which I’ll get to in a sec – about the primacy of live performance.

Larry Jordan: Hold it, hold it, time out, just a second. Let’s back up a step. Actors Equity is the union that represents theatrical actors. So the reason the Actors Equity is involved is because they’re in theaters, web streaming a theatrical play.

Jonathan Handel: Exactly.

Larry Jordan: And the reason SAG-AFTRA is involved is because why?

Jonathan Handel: Because it’s web streaming a performance and SAG-AFTRA is the union that represents actors in performances that are mediated through media, through the internet or television or theatrical motion picture.

Mike Horton: Are these 99 seat theatres web streaming for profit or are they sending out there for free?

Jonathan Handel: No, for profit. It’s pay per view. To put this concretely, I’ve just written a story in The Hollywood Reporter – you can see it at thrlabor.com – and it’s about a performance that is opening this weekend in LA. It opens tomorrow, they’ve already sold out their Friday but they’ve got three more performances over the weekend. It’s called The Noir Series and the production company is called Heretick Theater Lab and they are live streaming it, so for 20 bucks you can buy a ticket to be in what they refer to as the studio audience, but it’s at a typical small LA 65 seat theater. Or, for eight bucks, you can buy an online pass and watch a performance online; or for 20 bucks, you can watch the whole weekend’s worth of performances online. They’ve got that option as well. The producers are obviously happy with whatever choice you make. Actors Equity? We don’t know. As I alluded to, they’ve refused to comment on this. The show is under a SAG-AFTRA new media contract.

Larry Jordan: Well, we’re going to talk about the new media contract in a second, but it sounds like there’s a real issue of defining whose jurisdiction this is. Up until the light hits the lens, it’s Actors Equity and as soon as it goes into the lens of the camera, it’s SAG-AFTRA. It sounds like they’re having a hard time deciding how to divide this up.

Jonathan Handel: That’s right, and the woman in New York who pioneered this stuff spoke to me and said that, in the years since that initial performance where Equity had sent the threatening letters then backed off, that Equity has often vetoed attempts to do this sort of thing, even under a SAG-AFTRA agreement. She said there are situations where SAG-AFTRA has said, “Ok, but we’ve got to check with Equity,” and then they call back and say, “Sorry, Equity says no.” Sometimes Equity seems to have a veto right; other times, Equity seems to be saying it’s ok. It’s not clear what the rhyme or reason is to that.

Larry Jordan: What do producers take away from this? Clearly, The Buzz is deeply vested in web streaming. Is this something that we need to start to pay attention to? And, if so, what should our go to steps be?

Jonathan Handel: This fits in the context of the Met, and of other live performances being streamed, and the fact that people today want to see things on their phones, on their screens of whatever sort. Hopefully, it’s additive or creative rather than cannibalizing existing live revenue, so you get more viewers, and this does represent an opportunity, I think, for Buzz folks who are involved in the various aspects of streaming. The theater company here in LA, for example, is actually using a streaming services provider that normally streams sporting events and they’re actually out of Colorado, so they’ve flown into LA for this. It’s definitely a business opportunity, to put it in those terms. The union issue, you definitely want to deal with SAG-AFTRA rather than trying to get an Equity contract and you want to take the position that this really is a hybrid. It’s both a dessert topping and a floor wax, so to speak.

Mike Horton: I know we’re talking about The Digital Production Buzz, but The Buzz goes out for free. If it went out for profit, people would have to pay for this thing, does everything change?

Jonathan Handel: No. It isn’t a question in Equity’s mindset or in the rules and regulations as to whether it’s a free stream or a paid stream. That’s just not the issue. There’s nothing in the union agreements. For that matter, if you wanted to make a theatrical motion picture and make it available in theaters for free, there’s nothing in the union agreements that says you can’t do that. But obviously here, the opportunity is to make these productions perhaps more financeable by creating an additional revenue stream and the Heretick Lab folks here are hoping to build a company around this, both in the sense of a corporation and theater company, so that they’ll be able to finance additional productions and rely on a revenue stream that works.

Larry Jordan: Well that, I think, leads directly into what the New York Metropolitan Opera is doing. If my notes are correct, they did something like $22 million on live streaming of opera to theaters, where you go to the theater to watch rather than watch on your computer.

Jonathan Handel: That’s right.

Larry Jordan: How does that relate to what’s going on so far with Equity and the 99 seat theaters?

Jonathan Handel: It doesn’t direct relate to Equity, because Equity doesn’t have jurisdiction over opera. Another union called AGMA – American Guild of Musical Artists – does and my understanding was that before the Met was able to do the work they’re doing, they did have to work out an agreement with AGMA. I was also told in one instance, going back to plays for a minute, that one play was treated as a SAG-AFTRA production in the morning and an Equity production in the afternoon. It really is dancing on the head on some very fine pins, but the relationship between these two and the Broadway experiments – there have been several Broadway plays that have shown in theaters this way also. I spoke to the head of the Broadway League and she said this is really just four or five companies dipping their toes in the water.

Larry Jordan: How are they handling residuals? Really, it all comes down to money. Actors want to be paid for their craft and they want to make residuals. How are they handling that?

Jonathan Handel: Again, from Equity’s standpoint, it doesn’t just come down to money. Equity doesn’t like this at all, it seems, but in terms of the money question the new media agreements explain in their usual opaque fashion how residuals work. From the standpoint of the new media agreement, the fact that it was originated before a live studio audience and has the characteristics of a stage play doesn’t matter. It’s a new media production and ever since the language established after the Writers’ Guild strike in 2007/2008, there is new media language that talks about residuals for pay per view and for ad supported and so on and so forth.

Mike Horton: Do these Met live stream productions eventually go to DVD and do the performers get residuals?

Jonathan Handel: I don’t believe that they go to DVD. I don’t know how compensation works there, whether there are residuals or some kind of a profit pool or any of that.

Mike Horton: So these live streams are one offs and that’s it?

Jonathan Handel: Well, the Met has a continuing series. That’s one of the difficulties and differences between theaters versus the Met. If you’re putting on a Broadway stage play, they have done one-offs, basically, but the Met has a continuing series, because they rotate lots of different productions on their stage.

Mike Horton: Yes, you can also go outside the Met and watch it if it’s a full house. You can watch it on a big screen outside. You don’t have to go inside, you can watch it on a big screen outside. They’re doing all sorts of really cool stuff for us poor people.

Jonathan Handel: And for their own poor people. The Met is very challenged budget wise and 22 million, which is not a lot of money in the movie business, is actually a lot of money in the opera business and it makes a real difference to them. The National Theater in London has been live streaming plays over the last, I think, year or so around the world and that too is an interesting effort. In England, there’s a single actors’ union that represents both live stage and media. Also interesting, there is some work being done experimentally around the world, and this isn’t a union issue but I think it’s of interest, of putting on plays where the actors themselves are in different locations and are conjoined using Skype or Google Hangout or whatever.

Mike Horton: Oh wow.

Larry Jordan: Before we run out of time, there’s a third thing I want to talk about, which is the new media contract that SAG-AFTRA is working on. How is that holding up right now? What’s going on?

Jonathan Handel: To tweak that a little bit, they’re not actually working on a new media contract right now. What they’re working on right now, what they’re negotiating is the so-called front of book contract for daytime television and syndicated TV, things like unscripted shows – and also unscripted shows even in primetime. The host of ‘Dancing With The Stars’ or something like that, a soap opera, the host of a game show, those kinds of things are covered by this contract and the current one expires in about ten days. So they allotted just a short amount of time to negotiate because there really aren’t any particular difficulties anticipated, it seems.

Larry Jordan: Here’s a question. I had a brainstorm for this really cool idea that I wanted to do and I decided that what I would do is I would go to look at the SAG contract to see if I wanted to become SAG for this really cool idea for a show. The new media contract runs exactly eight, maybe nine page – I was really impressed at how short it was – except on page seven it says: ‘We are including by reference the entire SAG contract, which is 208,000 pages long’. Two trees died as we printed this thing out. As a new media producer, where do we go to figure out what the heck is going on and what we have to pay attention to?

Mike Horton: Call them up. They have an 800 number.

Jonathan Handel: I would say that what you want to do is be sure that your team includes an entertainment labor lawyer. You’re absolutely right, the new media agreement looks like it’s a lightweight thing, but what it’s incorporating is actually literally about 700 pages or so of contract.

Larry Jordan: You’re not cheering me up here at all.

Jonathan Handel: This is definitely the friction side of working in a unionized business. There are a lot of very strong positives about unions. Without residuals, for example, a lot of actors wouldn’t be able to afford to stay in the business and then, great, you’ve got Tom Hanks in your movie, but where are you going to get an actor to play the waiter that brings him his dinner? You need a professional core of actors. But there are downsides and there are frictions that come with it and one of them is just how detailed and abstruse the union agreements are.

Larry Jordan: Well, ok, so ‘Son of Friends’ is going to have to wait a while longer before I start to put this show together. Jonathan, where can people go to read this incredible article? I had a sneak preview and I really enjoyed what you wrote. Where can people see it?

Jonathan Handel: Thanks. They can find the article at thrlabor.com and they can find more about me at jhandel.com.

Larry Jordan: What’s the next blog you’re working on?

Jonathan Handel: Oh…

Larry Jordan: See, you’ve been sloughing off again. You’ve been writing articles for The Hollywood Reporter and you get nothing done on the J Handel site and we are bereft of new information.

Jonathan Handel: I’ve got a few things up my sleeve.

Mike Horton: Thanks for doing this. This is an important topic.

Larry Jordan: Jonathan Handel is an entertainment and technology attorney of Counsel at TroyGould. He’s also the Contributing Editor on entertainment labor issues for The Hollywood Reporter. He’s got his own blog at jhandel.com. Jonathan, thanks for joining us today.

Jonathan Handel: Thanks very much, guys.

Larry Jordan: Take care, bye bye.

Jonathan Handel: Bye bye.

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Larry Jordan: Dror Gill is the CTO, that’s the Chief Technology Officer, of Beamr Video. This is a company that has found a way to reduce the costs associated with storing and transmitting media files. Both the company and the technology are brand new, which is why we’re talking with Dror today. Dror, thanks for joining us.

Dror Gill: Thank you very much for hosting me.

Larry Jordan: What is Beamr Video?

Dror Gill: Beamr Video is a perceptual media optimizer. We take a video stream and we reduce the bit rate of that stream by up to 50 percent without having any effect on the resolution or the quality of the video stream; and best of all, the stream remains in the same format that it was before this innovation. If it’s an H.264 AVC stream, we output to an AVC stream. If it’s an HDVC stream we output to that format and the only change you will notice between the output and the input is that the bit rate is lower.

Larry Jordan: Basically, what you’re doing is you’re taking an existing file, keeping it in its existing container and just pulling out bits that aren’t necessary?

Dror Gill: Exactly. We’re removing bits that cannot be perceived by humans and this is actually based on a patent pending perceptual quality measure that we developed and that we use in the optimization process.

Larry Jordan: How can you have a bit that our eyes don’t see?

Dror Gill: The way video is encoded is that the encoder tries to produce as little a bit as possible to represent that video and the decisions that the video encoder makes at any point in the encoding process is based on a lot of empirical data that has been gathered. But at no point in the video encoding process does the encoder look at the output frame and compare it to the input. This is what is unique about our method. We actually take the output frame after our compression optimization, compare it to the input and, using our quality measure, we verify that no artifacts that are visible by humans exist in that output frame and this really ensures that we do not hurt the quality of the video. We’re actually taking advantage of redundancies that have not been utilized by the previous generation of encoding.

Larry Jordan: When you’re doing this kind of comparison, you pull the input frame, you compress it, then you compare the result with the source. This has got to be time consuming, so how much time are we investing to have this kind of file reduction take place?

Dror Gill: Yes, it is time consuming. Overall, doing the optimization using our method is about twice as CPU intensive as regular video encoding, but the benefits of doing it outweigh by an enormous amount the effort that you need to put into the optimization. If you think about it, if you take a video clip that is viewed thousands or millions of times and the bit rate is lowered by half than the original one, then you save a lot on your storage costs. But even more than that, you save on your delivery costs to those thousands or millions of people. A one time investment in optimizing that video really pays off in the long term.

Larry Jordan: Help me understand where this fits inside the compression process. I’ve just finished editing my piece in my non-linear editor, whether Premiere or Avid or Final Cut, and I’ve exported a master file, so I’m sitting with a DNxHD or a ProRes 422 file which we’ll say is 75 gigabytes for the master file on output. Do I compress it first and then give it to you? Or do I give it to you and Beamr compresses it? What’s the workflow?

Dror Gill: There are two possible workflows. The more common one that’s worked for our customers today is an optimizing streaming file. You take your file, you encode it through various resolutions and bit rates that you actually stream to the end user and typically you record to several of them if you use adapted bit rate streaming; and if not, you encode to different resolutions because you want to support different types of devices. These are the streams that will actually go out to the users. After encoding the streams and before packaging them or trying any DRM, you optimize it with our technology and then the bit rate is lower and you use those optimized streams to do the packaging of the actual streaming to the end user.

Larry Jordan: Ok, we edit and export the file as normal, compress our file, reduce it in size as normal, then optimize it to get the smallest possible file size with the least damage to image quality after the compression is complete using your product.

Dror Gill: That is one workflow. The second one, which is more relevant to people in the production industry, is actually optimizing the master, optimizing your ProRes file. The ProRes takes up a lot of storage, as you know, you mentioned 75 gigabytes, and then it is, of course, possible to encode it into H.264, into AVC. The problem is that you don’t know what bit rate to use because it depends on the content, on the resolution etcetera. What we have is an automatic flow of ProRes to H.264 transcoding that creates an MP4 file with an AVC or H.264 video stream. It has exactly the same quality as the input ProRes and when we do this, because H.264 is much more efficient than ProRes at compressing video, you get a file that is three to four times smaller than your original file but still retains the full quality of the master. In this… case, we encode to ALL-I Frames. The H.264 stream would be on ALL-I H.264 stream, which would still enable editing, but the file size will be much lower than the master ProRes that you had before.

Larry Jordan: So in this second example, you’re taking the master file and taking it all the way down to final distributed compressed file and at the same time optimizing it.

Dror Gill: Yes.

Larry Jordan: And it works?

Dror Gill: It definitely works. That’s what our customers are telling us and they’re using it today for optimizing a lot of titles in… services and soon we will start optimizing for some of the studio customers of Blu-ray titles, especially for TV series, because they want to distribute less discs with the same content so optimizing the Blu-ray… makes a lot of sense.

Larry Jordan: Is this a product that we buy? Or is this a service that you provide?

Dror Gill: We have two models. One of them is an on-premise license. This is Linux software which you install on your server and it has an annual license fee. The second model is a web based service, a cloud service, that you access using a REST API, so you upload the files to us, we run the processing for you on Amazon EC2 and then we return the optimized files back through the same API. Both models are available.

Larry Jordan: The cloud model, it seems, would work best for a compressed source and the on-premise license would work better, it seems, for stuff that you’re compressing from the native ProRes file.

Dror Gill: Yes, that’s right. It depends. If your workflow is already in the cloud, it might make sense to send the files over, especially if you’re working on Amazon and it’s compatible with our system and the backbone is very fast. But if you’re doing your ProRes on premise, it really does not make sense to upload those dozens of gigabytes to the cloud and get the optimized file back, so in that case an on-premise solution will be better.

Larry Jordan: How is this priced?

Dror Gill: The price of a single instance of our software is $2500 annual license fee and the number of instances you need depends on the number of titles that you want to process to save time. It also depends on the turnaround time that you’re looking for. If you buy more instances, even a single title, you can segment it into various parts and optimize them in parallel and that really shortens your turnaround time.

Larry Jordan: With the optimization of the master file, the ProRes down to H.264, what kind of performance are you getting? Two times, real time or three times or what?

Dror Gill: It depends on the CPU power you have. On a very strong machine, you can get it to two times slower than real time, so one hour would take you two hours to optimize.

Larry Jordan: It seems that for film makers who are creating, say, a project a week or a project a month, a single instance is more than sufficient. You wouldn’t need multiple instances because you’re not doing dozens of files a day. But as your throughput increases, having more instances, having more servers able to work, allows you to just simply process more files. Is that true?

Dror Gill: Right. As you process more files, we’ll process a single file faster because we have this mechanism of segmenting the file into small pieces and processing each one of them in a separate core in their computer. If you have more instances available, your computer can work faster in optimizing even a single file. Again, if you’re producing one file every few days or weeks, then a single instance would be enough.

Larry Jordan: Is this released or is this still a technology preview?

Dror Gill: No, it’s already released and being used by customers. It was announced in September 2013 at IBC in Amsterdam and in September this year, we released version 2.0.

Larry Jordan: Congratulations. Where can people go on the web to learn more about Beamr Video and your products?

Dror Gill: Www.beamrvideo.com.

Larry Jordan: That’s beamrvideo.com and Dror Gill is the CTO of BeamrVideo. Dror, thanks for joining us today.

Dror Gill: Thank you very much. It was my pleasure.

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Larry Jordan: Jessica Sitomer is a job coach who helps people find work. She’s also a regular on The Buzz, which is one of the highlights of our week. She’s the President of The Greenlight Coach, but what we like best about Jessica is that she is really good at providing really helpful career advice. Hello, Jessica, welcome back.

Jessica Sitomer: Hello. It’s good to be back.

Mike Horton: And Jessica is also very good at wardrobe choices when she does webcasts.

Jessica Sitomer: Ay-yi-yi.

Mike Horton: I saw that. It was awesome.

Jessica Sitomer: Oh boy.

Mike Horton: Did you see that? She did a webcast just recently and she posted a picture of her on the webcast. Well, she wore this outfit which just basically revealed skin.

Jessica Sitomer: It was a wardrobe malfunction. It’s a dress that I wear very often when I’m at live events because it’s very colorful and eye-catching. However, it has a little thin strap that goes to the center of the chest and then it’s just across the chest and the web cam goes from your head to the top of your chest, so all they saw was shoulders and I just looked like I was sitting there naked.

Mike Horton: It was great if you’re a guy.

Larry Jordan: You were just trolling for votes. That’s it. You were just after links.

Jessica Sitomer: So do that and you’ll be successful, everyone.

Mike Horton: Absolutely, and that’s not being complacent at all.

Larry Jordan: Shameless hussy. It is good to have you back and I want to start by backing up a little bit. In a blog you posted in September, you wrote about inventing your career. What does inventing your career mean? I mean, Mike is a well established actor. What has he got to invent?

Jessica Sitomer: You have to invent the career that you want. I’m going to give a little tough love tonight because this is a subject that has me very fired up. People have this dream of what they want to accomplish, they have a dream of who they want to be, they want to be an A list star, they want be an Academy Award winning editor, they have these dreams and yet when I look at what they are doing to accomplish these dreams, they might be very busy but they’re busy being busy. They might be networking, but just because you’re at a networking event doesn’t mean you’re actually networking. My problem is you have hundreds of thousands of dreamers but they wake up each day and they are going through their life as if it’s just a dream, as opposed to it being an actual career goal that they are focusing on to become the top percentage of their industry.

Larry Jordan: Yes, but wait, wait, wait. Life interferes. We’re sitting here and there’s so much stuff we’ve got to do just to be able to survive from day to day. How do you focus?

Jessica Sitomer: Have you looked at any other industries that have successful people in it? Have you looked at our industry that has successful people in it? Life interferes with them too, but that doesn’t mean that the things that people are doing or not doing to generate work is any different. People should be every day spending at least three to five hours on their business. If they’re not, what are they doing? Most people go to work every day and they have to punch in and punch out. Well, in our industry we don’t, which means if you’re not committing three to five hours of business work, then you’re just dreaming. During that time, you should be creating target lists of the people who you want to meet, you should be looking at your contact list – who do you know? You should know at least 200 people. If you don’t, you don’t know enough people. Of those 200 people, who can give you referrals to the people on your target list? If they don’t know those people, you should be getting mentors. If you’re not getting mentors, then what are you doing? At least go visit some sets or go visit some post production facilities. Go to the places where opportunities will be created. That is what I mean by invent your career. No-one’s going to do it for you. If you have an agent and you’re waiting for your agent to do it, they get plus ten percent for a reason. They’re the icing on the cake. They can’t take care of every single one of their clients like they were the only client they have and you shouldn’t expect an agent to. An agent has responsibilities but your career is 100 percent your responsibility and if you are not doing these things, if you are not making phone calls every day, if you are not reaching out in direct ways – and I don’t mean just spending three hours sending out blind resumes and cover letters to things that you see online; that is just cold calling. That is not effective. That is not how people become successful.

Mike Horton: Yes, we’re not talking about just the entertainment industry. We’re talking about anything that you’re involved in.

Jessica Sitomer: Exactly.

Mike Horton: Exactly.

Jessica Sitomer: I deal with people in the entertainment industry, I deal with these dreamers and they keep saying, “I don’t have enough time. I can’t do this.”

Mike Horton: I had this argument with my son the other day, I really did. No excuse.

Larry Jordan: I am completely convinced that you have a new passion in your life, so I’m just going to throw a few questions in every few minutes and I’ll just let you go. But this brings up the issue of complacency, because we are so busy putting out the daily fires in our lives that we don’t have time to take action for the future. It’s all easy to say spend three to five hours working on your business, but get specific. What should we do?

Jessica Sitomer: It doesn’t have to be three to five hours. It could be 20 minutes. I had a reality show where I was the head judge and I would do career coaching for them in the morning before their challenge. It was ‘Top Chef’ meets ‘The Apprentice’ for the entertainment industry. We had 15 people in all different classifications and one of their challenges for the very first episode was, after getting coached for an hour on how to get a mentor, to get as many mentors as they could in 20 minutes. In those 20 minutes, the person who won the challenge got 11 mentors. Others got three, five, eight, and I was expecting to everyone to throw up and freak out and cry and have breakdowns, because every time I tell someone to get one mentor they freak out. But these people were on a television show, so there was a different level of commitment. So my question to the people who are listening is, what do you need to be motivating you to get that level of commitment? If you took 20 minutes to do what these people did, you could get mentors. That’s what made the drama and the show, because I didn’t want to make anyone look bad, so the drama came from having a short period of time. I know that everything I teach can be done in short periods of time. What is stopping you?

Mike Horton: I love that idea. That’s a lot of fun.

Jessica Sitomer: What are the action steps that you need to take? If I say, “What do you want to prove to yourself that you can accomplish this month and what action steps will it take to accomplish this?” I know everyone on this call can write them down. They can write down the answer to that. The difficulty is implementing the actions and my question is why? What are you saying to yourself that makes them hard to implement? What are you doing? Because the only fears you were born with were the fear of falling and the fear of loud noises, not the fear to make a telephone call, not the fear to post something on social media. Those you create along the way. You’ve got to get to the bottom of what’s creating your obstacles, because if you don’t it’s going to be five years from now and you’re going to find yourself in the same place, only worse because you’re going to feel badly about yourself and you’re going to feel frustrated that nothing works, when in reality you’re really not doing the things that it takes to make it.

Larry Jordan: It sounds like the biggest obstacle is our fear of making a mistake or our fear of people thinking less of us? What fear do we have to overcome?

Jessica Sitomer: It’s different for a lot of people. For some people, it’s fear of success. For some people, it’s fear of failure. For some people, it’s the fear of rejection. For some people, it’s the fear of the unknown. Every person has their own variation of what is causing their fear, but the bottom line is fear is just that, something that you’ve imagined, that you’ve created. Maybe it’s happened once and then you generalize it and say, “Well, that didn’t work.” Well, maybe it didn’t work on that person and maybe we need to look at why it didn’t work. How did you ask for what you wanted? I made a huge mistake when I first moved out to LA and I approached my first mentor – I used somebody’s name without their permission. I didn’t think about it because that person had introduced us, I’d been to this A list actress’s house, so it never crossed my mind that it would be a problem to use her name. As soon as I found that out, I never made that mistake again. But you know what? I also never stopped pursuing mentors. Other people would just stop and say, “Oh gosh, that felt horrible. I got reprimanded for that, so I don’t want to do that again.” No, I just changed the way I was doing it; and when I coach people, I have them learn from my mistake so they won’t do that. If you ever use someone’s name, you ask permission before using it.

Mike Horton: This is all wonderfully idealistic. If we do everything that you’re saying for us to do, we do it every single day, we keep doing it, we get our mentors, we get everything that Jessica tells us to do, and it’s not working, nothing is working. At what point do we just give up?

Jessica Sitomer: First of all, I will never tell you to give up.

Mike Horton: No, of course you won’t.

Jessica Sitomer: I watched a ‘60 Minutes with Dave Grohl’ two weeks ago. The guy said to him, “When do people give up? You see them on these singing shows and they tell them they’ve got no talent, they shouldn’t be doing this,” and Dave Grohl said, “Yes, you know what, what if Bob Dylan got on there and sang a song? He would have been told, “Never sing again.” Tom Petty, you know?” So I would never tell anyone to give up, but what I would say is I’ve coached over a thousand people one on one and when I worked at the Camera Guild, from one year to seven years, I saw the people who did everything I was telling them to do every day and for those people, for some of them things happened in a month, depending on the people they knew, and for the one who were starting from scratch, the maximum it took was two years. That was the maximum. For those who had really big fears to overcome but were still willing to put in the work, it took five years, but I’ve never had somebody not accomplish their goals who were doing the things I was telling them to do.

Mike Horton: But come on, some people are just not good at what they dream of. They’re just not good.

Jessica Sitomer: But that’s who I’m talking today. I’m telling them to wake up and make a decision that today is the day they’re going to stop this crap and stop fooling themselves.

Mike Horton: No, no, no, I mean they’re not talented. They’re just not going to make it. It just isn’t going to happen. They’re just not good.

Jessica Sitomer: How do you… who…

Mike Horton: I know it’s subjective.

Jessica Sitomer: It is. I can name quite a few actors right now who are not very talented, but I won’t, and they’re still doing it.

Mike Horton: Yes, but they’re cute. They happen to have the right genes.

Jessica Sitomer: Well, you know what? I don’t know what to tell you. If somebody has a dream, I’m going to help them work at it and we will look at it. I’ll tell you, the few people who are doing what I was telling them to do and were not doing well at it, it was usually a personality problem and that is something that either they want to work on, like either they are just egotistical or they are just socially troubled, and some things I can help with and some things I can’t. Look, talent can get better. You can always get better, you can always get feedback. I’ve seen plenty of people who were dialing it in and then their career started going in another direction and then they started acting, they started writing and they started doing the right thing. Talent can be improved. This is art that we’re doing, these are skills that we’re doing. It can be improved. You can always be learning and that’s why you need mentors. I’ve seen people in acting class and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, what in the world are they thinking?” and then five years later you see them again and you’re like, “Wow! What happened?” They had a breakthrough.

Larry Jordan: Let’s just take a step back. On many occasions, you’ve talked about the importance of a person who wants to get up in the industry developing a mentor. What should a mentor do?

Jessica Sitomer: The mentors I’m talking about are for business advice and guidance. You are not asking them for work, you are not asking them for their Rolodex. You want to learn. In every industry, there are successful people…

Larry Jordan: Ok, hold it. I’ll give you an example. I would say at least once a day, probably two or three times a day, I get emails from people asking for me to be a mentor to them.

Jessica Sitomer: And what are they asking for specifically?

Larry Jordan: Well, what I’m ‘trying to figure out is what should I be? What does a mentor look like?

Mike Horton: Like Larry.

Jessica Sitomer: A mentor looks like three conversations, minimum of ten minutes each either in person or by phone over a 12 week period where you are giving them things to do. You find out where they are, where they want to be and what they’ve done so far to get there and, based on that evaluation and based on what you know since you’ve been in the industry for so long, you give them some action tasks to go out and do. If they come back for that second conversation, you now have somebody who you are excited about because 50 percent of the time they don’t come back after that first call, and I learned that through the mentor program that I created at the Guild. Then you’ve got your 50 percent who come back the second time. Now you trust them a little more. Now you’ll give them a few more things that maybe you wouldn’t have before. Maybe you’ll invite them to something, like some people were invited to set. Maybe you’ll invite them to a networking party because you can tell from your two conversations that this person’s on the ball and they’re not going to embarrass you. Maybe you’ll give them a referral to somebody. By the third conversation, you’ll have really gotten to know what this person’s strengths are, what their weaknesses are. You really start to figure out what they’re gravitating toward and then it’s up to you to decide. You give them more things to do and if you choose to continue that relationship, which many mentors do for those people who make it through three conversations – and it’s rare. As I said, I had over 100 volunteers at the Camera Guild, worked there seven years. Some of the mentors were Academy Award winners. If I was at that guild, I would have written to every single person on that list, because who knows who could help and who knows how? Every one of them’s successful, so you’ve got something to learn from them. You should be reaching out to a minimum of 20 mentors, a minimum.

Larry Jordan: Wait, wait, wait. You’ve shifted the role again. I don’t want to know what the person trying to get better is, I’m trying to figure out what the roles are for the mentor. Where does a mentor figure out what being a mentor is?

Jessica Sitomer: They can call me. I just basically gave it to you – three conversations, minimum of ten minutes each, either in person or by phone, over a 12 weeks period where you are giving them action advice that they can go out and implement and then it’s their job to prove to you that they’re going to do these things.

Larry Jordan: What would be a typical piece of advice?

Jessica Sitomer: You can tell them a place where they can go to network and meet five people there. For example, for camera operators, what the camera operator would say is, “Go over to Panavision and practice on the wheels. There you’ll have the opportunity to meet people. They’ll see that you’re interested in doing things and you can volunteer to help.” That was a good thing that camera operators could advise.

Mike Horton: That’s a great idea.

Jessica Sitomer: Yes. They can say, “Try and get a set visit and meet people and see what happens behind the scenes so that when you book a job, you’ll know what to expect once you’re there.” You can tell them to make a target list of all of the different shows that they’re right for. If you’re working with editors, what are the 20 shows that you want to be editing? Or who are the 20 film directors who you want to edit for? And don’t pick Steven Spielberg because everybody wants to edit for him. Who are the people in the one to ten million dollar budget range that will be moving up through the years? They’ll be mentoring you as that’s happening and then you might get a break with them one day.

Larry Jordan: We’ve got our live chat going and Grant from Australia sends me this link: www.mentorset.org.uk. They’ve got a nice set of definitions, as well as what Jessica’s talking about, in terms of what you can do from the mentor’s point of view. Jessica, because I know everybody wants to keep track of what you’re doing, what websites can they go to for you?

Jessica Sitomer: They can go to thegreenlightcoach.com.

Larry Jordan: That’s thegreenlightcoach.com and Jessica Sitomer is the Founder and President of The Greenlight Coach.

Mike Horton: And she is my mentor.

Larry Jordan: And she is amazing. Jessica, we wish you great success, as always, and we cannot wait for you to come back. Thanks again for joining us.

Mike Horton: Yes, missed you.

Jessica Sitomer: Great to be here, guys.

Larry Jordan: Take care. Bye bye.

Jessica Sitomer: Bye.

Larry Jordan: The thing I like about Jessica is she’s got so much great advice and I like the idea…

Mike Horton: Do you actually get a lot of emails asking you to be a mentor?

Larry Jordan: Well, a lot of emails asking for advice, what do I do? Part of it’s technical, but part of it also is how do I get a job in the industry or how do I get a better thing, and that I think is…

Mike Horton: I get a lot of those too.

Larry Jordan: I’ve often wondered, what am I supposed to do?

Mike Horton: I always respond. I don’t really know how to respond, but I do respond.

Larry Jordan: Now I know, I’m going to put a homework assignment together. I can do homework assignments. That one I’ve got down.

Mike Horton: I know, you get three or four hundred emails a day with this kind of stuff. You can’t respond to all of them.

Larry Jordan: I do.

Mike Horton: Do you really?

Larry Jordan: I really do. I make a point.

Mike Horton: You never respond to my emails.

Larry Jordan: Well, I respond to people that I like.

Mike Horton: Oh, ok.

Larry Jordan: Ta-da!

Mike Horton: Nice comeback.

Larry Jordan: Oh, it was quick, yes.

Mike Horton: I set you up for that one, didn’t I, Larry? You were waiting for that set-up.

Larry Jordan: I didn’t see it coming.

Mike Horton: And the comedy team of Michael and Larry.

Larry Jordan: Michael, we’re going to have to do this again. You’ve got to come back again next week.

Mike Horton: Yes, I’ll be here next week.

Larry Jordan: I want to thank our guests this weeks: Jonathan Handel, entertainment attorney of Counsel at TroyGould…

Mike Horton: Yes, I’m looking forward to the article tomorrow. Hollywood Reporter.

Larry Jordan: It’s a great article, you’ve got to read it. Dror Gill, Chief Technology Officer at BeamrVideo; and Jessica Sitomer, the President at The Greenlight Coach.

Mike Horton: She’s my fave.

Larry Jordan: There’s lot of history in our industry. It’s all posted to our website at digitalproductionbuzz.com – hundreds of articles and past shows and interviews, all available, searchable and fascinating. You can talk with us on Twitter, @DPBuZZ; Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Music on The Buzz is provided by Smartsound. The Buzz is streamed by wehostmacs.com. Our producer is Cirina Catania, engineer Megan Paulos. The handsome dude at the other end is Mike Horton, my name’s Larry Jordan and thanks for listening to The Buzz.

Mike Horton: Goodbye, everybody.

Voiceover: The Digital Production Buzz was brought to you by Blackmagic Design, creators of the world’s highest quality solutions for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries; and by shuttterstock.com, a global marketplace for royalty free images and videos. With over two million royalty free HD and 4K video clips, Shutterstock helps you take your creative projects to the next level; and by Other World Computing, providing quality hardware solutions and extensive technical support to the worldwide computer industry since 1988.