Digital Production Buzz

December 25, 2014

[Transcripts provided by Take 1 Transcription]

[

to listen to this show.]

HOSTS

Larry Jordan

Michael Horton

GUESTS

Pär M Ekberg, Cinematographer, Coldplay, “Magic”

Kim Furst, Producer/Director, Kilo Foxtrot Films

Matt Abourezk, Director/Photographer, Talkingbox Digital Media Group, Inc.

===

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. Merry Christmas everyone, my name is Larry Jordan. We recorded this show on Tuesday this week so that our co-host, Mike Horton, and the rest of our staff can all have tonight off; and we have three excellent new interviews to share with you tonight.

Larry Jordan: We start with Pär Ekberg, a Swedish cinematographer who created the magical look for Coldplay’s new music video, called Magic. This all black and white film has a very retro look and we talk with Pär tonight to learn how he did it.

Larry Jordan: Next is Kim Furst. Kim’s documentary, Flying the Feathered Edge, is ready for distribution. We talk with her about how she plans to make money on her project, what’s working for her now and what isn’t and what her plans are for distribution and marketing.

Larry Jordan: Then we wrap up with a very talented videographer, Matt Abourezk, who got started with video back when we were creating movies the size of postage stamps. We look at the differences between shooting stills and shooting video, as well as how his career has grown along with the web.

Larry Jordan: 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. You can learn more at take1.tv and thanks, Take 1, for making this possible.

Larry Jordan: Next week, by the way, we are inviting all our regulars to join us for a live show on January 1^st, looking back at 2014 and sharing their projections on what’s happening for 2015. This is one of my favorite shows each year, getting all these experts together to see where we agree and where we disagree. It will be a fun show and one you won’t want to miss live next week, January 1^st, on The Buzz.

Larry Jordan: Remember to 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 for an inside look both at our show and the industry. I’ll be back with Pär Ekberg right after this.

Larry Jordan: Blackmagic 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 Blackmagic 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 Blackmagic production camera 4K also features an incredibly tempting price of $2,995. Learn more about the Blackmagic production camera 4K that is definitely priced to move, visit blackmagicdesign.com today.

Larry Jordan: Pär Ekberg is a Swedish cinematographer, a director of photography with a 20 year career in commercials, music videos and features. Most recently, he created the black and white film for the Coldplay viral video Magic and some amazing other visual images. Hello, Pär, welcome.

 

Pär M Ekberg: Thank you very much. I’m glad to be here.

Larry Jordan: You’ve been in the business one long time, a 20 year career and being able to still be working is a good thing. What got you started as a cinematographer? What caught your eye about light?

Pär M Ekberg: When I was a kid, I always enjoyed watching movies. I think that’s where it started. I was a big fan of Charlie Chaplin from six years old or something and growing up I learnt to enjoy stills photography, so I did a lot of stills when I was a kid. Having a dad working in the TV industry, I got interested in that too, but I actually started out educating myself as an engineer, soon to find out that that wasn’t on the books for me.

Pär M Ekberg: So I turned elsewhere and I started to actually do something that I enjoyed and it was a good call. I started to work in a really small company which was doing most industrial movies, and it was the kind of company that was small enough so you could get to do everything, basically. I can certainly say that was my school. I got to shoot and edit and do sound and everything.

Larry Jordan: Yes, I remember that. I worked in a couple of smaller television stations, which is when I was learning broadcasting and it’s amazing how much you learn when you’re forced to do everything, you see how it all fits together.

Pär M Ekberg: Yes, and as an editor in this case you had to deal with your own shortcomings if you shot the stuff. You had to quickly learn what works and what doesn’t.

Larry Jordan: I don’t talk about my past mistakes, I just simply learn from them, but there are a couple of clangers that I made that I don’t want anybody to know about, so I know exactly what you mean.

Pär M Ekberg: Yes, I have those too. There were a few periods, a few years on the side of the road.

Larry Jordan: One of the things that you created recently was just a stunning video for Coldplay called Magic, a black and white textural story that was just wonderful. Tell me about how you got involved and how you went about putting this one together.

Pär M Ekberg: It was one of those projects that was sort of coming and going a little bit. They moved the shoot and they wanted to do a video – this was with one of my main directors that I work with a lot, Jonas Faulkner. The media was happening and all of a sudden got pushed and we were shifting it back and forth a little bit.

Pär M Ekberg: I knew from the start that Jonas wanted to make it a longer short… type of video and there is actually a longer version coming out. We shot it as a longer short story where we also go back and forth from color to black and white, with the older characters telling the story so all the flashbacks are black and white and the rest is color.

Larry Jordan: Sort of like a Water for Elephants kind of concept, where we start with the old guy in the present day.

Pär M Ekberg: Exactly. That’s where we started and we wanted to find this circus show type environment to shoot it in and we quickly figured out that we had to build our own set, so we built it on a field right next to downtown and we wanted to have that quirky mix of old and new, because you can see the train tracks running there, you can see downtown, you can see all the modern parks of downtown Los Angeles and this quirky little world of the film, which was sort of antique and black and white, and all the stuff we connect to that feeling of the circus, all types of sideshow.

Pär M Ekberg: We were lucky enough to work with Emma, our set designer, and she built this awesome set and I knew from the beginning that we had to light the whole thing, get ready to shoot interior/exterior and I wanted to keep it as much to a night shoot as possible but still try and squeeze some magic hour stuff in there too. It was pretty much a full set – interior, exterior – so we could seamlessly move between the different tents and venues. From there, it was a big production set up. … is always a fight because… but we managed to put it together…

Larry Jordan: I thought the results were really, really stunning, but let’s go into some detail here. Did you know at the beginning that you were going to be shooting black and white? And, if so, how did that change how you lit the scene?

Pär M Ekberg: Yes, I knew it was going to be black and white for most parts and we talked about mixing the flashbacks with the other parts and mixing black and white and color, so I knew that for a fact. But when it comes to lighting, I wanted it to be somewhat true to the era with naked, quite harsh light and harsh shadows. There’s also a lot that happens on stage, so you would have stage lights like follow spots and really crude simple, straight on key lights, so that’s what I wanted to do and I think that high contrast works very well with the black and white medium.

Pär M Ekberg: I also wanted to be prepared to go back and forth between the color and the black and white, so I wanted to keep everything as true in color as possible. I’ve been talking about the LED panels I used for the project. They helped me a lot, but basically it was a really simple set-up when it comes to lighting. Every room had its lights fresnel or PAR cans or open source, like really harsh top light, and then I filled it in with smaller fixtures so it was easy to move them and they were still true in color.

Larry Jordan: Were you working with significantly different instruments? Or was it really just looking for more of that harsher look that was the big change between this and, say, a color production?

Pär M Ekberg: All the units themselves were basically stuff that I always use. I just don’t use them that way. We had PAR cans and we had the follow spots and the… and most of it was tungsten. If you look at the exteriors, it was a mixing of really true work lights, tungsten type and PAR cans… and the only new stuff I used when it came to lighting fixtures was the Area 48 LEDs and the smaller LED panels.

Pär M Ekberg: The Area 48s are a little bit different from what I was used to back then because they’re the remote phosphor type fixtures. You don’t any phosphor in the actual LED, it comes as a separate panel and you shift that panel depending on if you’ve got daylight or tungsten or whatever in between. They came in new for this project.

Pär M Ekberg: That was the unknown for me at that point, and I used them a lot because they’re dimmable, you can run them on batteries, they’re easy to move around and you can have a little shimmy or a bag on it if you want it a little bit softer or you can use it raw as a straight on LED panel. They gave me that little chill or edge or that little extra something I needed to make it something else than just the crude uplight style lighting.

Larry Jordan: What camera did you use to record all this?

Pär M Ekberg: For this project, we used the RED Epic and I did tests with the Dragon before we shot it and I wanted to shoot it on Dragon, but the Dragon was quite new and it was hard for us to source three cameras for this project. It was hard for us to source three bodies and have everything tested and the whole workflow and it was sort of a pressed time schedule too, so I couldn’t really make that happen. But I decided that the Epic was good too.

Larry Jordan: There were a lot of magic tricks that were displayed here. Was that stuff done on set live or was that all added in post?

Pär M Ekberg: We did a lot of the magic tricks on set while shooting and we had an excellent Swedish magician, Joe Labero. He was helping us with the magic part of the Magic video. He was there and Chris was rehearsing all the tricks and everything in the days before the shoot and that was a lot of fun. We had a big stage set up with all the tricks. Joe Labero had brought all these things there and we were watching him do it and it was like a little private show and Chris did it and it was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun. It’s amazing, being able to actually do stuff like that on camera rather than doing a post effect or whatever.

Larry Jordan: Did I hear you say that you were shooting this with three cameras?

Pär M Ekberg: Yes.

Larry Jordan: How did you assign what camera was capturing which shots?

Pär M Ekberg: I use two cameras a lot for main sets. We can get two different angles for dialogue or even if it’s just something happening, we can cover a wider frame and a tighter frame at the same time. Then I had a second unit picking up detail and all those little bits and pieces that help to spice it up. I had my… , he also works as a… operator so we’d send him in to brush it up and just pick up the pieces when we were done with the major set-ups, so it was like, “Ok, now we’ve shot this, we need inserts and we need this and this and this and this,” and we work so much together that we have good communication and it’s really easy…

Larry Jordan: Would you put those two cameras next to each other, one set wide, one set tight? Or would one be some distance away?

Pär M Ekberg: Sometimes it’s like that and sometimes it’s more like covering two different angles. It depends on what’s actually happening and what the location. Some of the locations were really, really tight, really small. There was a tent in which Chris was rehearsing the trick where he’s going to elevate his bad neighbor with a little teaspoon. That tent was really, really small and tight, so we were sort of crammed in there. There were a lot of times when we were side by side with two cameras because there was nowhere to go…

Larry Jordan: How much feedback, creative or otherwise, did you get from the band or people that were not the director? Were they behind this or were you having to fight an uphill battle?

Pär M Ekberg: This one was really cool and easygoing. I think everybody was on the same page when we started to shoot. It was a very good creative process. We didn’t have any standstills or any discussions. There was no drama. There was a very positive energy driving this shoot forward and Chris is wonderful to work with. We did so much stuff, since he’s playing both the roles. It was very stressful for him to go in and out of costume and in and out of character and all that. I think he did a wonderful job and it was a pleasure to work with him.

Larry Jordan: Was post production different because this was a black and white project? Or was post production the same?

Pär M Ekberg: It was basically the same, I would say. It wasn’t that different. We tend to send a lot of still over the telecine back and forth and discuss a lot and it was sort of the same process.

Larry Jordan: As you look back on it, what’s the thing you’re most proud of and what would you do differently?

Pär M Ekberg: I think what I like the most and what I’m most proud of is the way we set it up, the whole location part of it and the whole beautiful set that Emma Fairley built, together with us. The way we laid it out, it actually worked with… and a little yard in between, the whole set-up and the lighting set-up too, where we could move around a lot without wasting too much time.

Pär M Ekberg: Also squeezing it in within the budget, that whole set-up is what I’m most proud of, actually, that we made it fly and it was also a very well lubricated machine, thanks to my crew, of course. If I would change something, I don’t know, may I say it’s a perfect product? No, I guess not. If I would change something, I would want to shoot another day.

Larry Jordan: One more day of production?

Pär M Ekberg: Yes, one more day of shooting. That would have been on my wish list, to actually be able to make more out of it, because it was so beautiful, so much stuff we could have shot with all the extras. They did this fantastic wardrobe and there were so many details that Emma put in there. We could have probably done even more, brought some lions. I could easily have spent another day there.

Larry Jordan: Pär, you have an amazing portfolio, not just this one Coldplay video called Magic, but some of your other projects are just exquisite. Where can people go on the web to learn more about you and your work?

Pär M Ekberg: You should probably go to parekberg.com.

Larry Jordan: That’s parekberg.com and Pär Ekberg is the man himself that we’ve been interviewing, a cinematographer, a director of photography, a Swedish cinematographer with over 20 years’ experience. Pär, it’s been wonderful chatting with you. Thanks so much for your time.

Pär M Ekberg: It was a pleasure. Take care now and happy holiday.

Larry Jordan: And same to you.

Larry Jordan: Finding the perfect royalty free image or video for your creative project can be a crucial step in the film making process and, whether it’s for your website, publication or video segment, the experts at shutterstock.com can help you choose from over two million royalty free HD and 4K stock video clips, including time lapses, aerials, green screens and model released clips.

Larry Jordan: Sourcing over 12,000 brand new video clips each week, Shutterstock consistently offers the highest quality stills and video clips from professional film makers. Plus Shutterstock provides sophisticated search engine tools so you can search and drill down by category, clip resolution, contributor name and more. Also, use their great no risk try-before-you-buy option so you can see how their clips will look in your project before making a single purchase.

Larry Jordan: Try Shutterstock today – sign up for a free account. No credit card is needed and, as an added bonus to you, enter promo code BUZZ2014 before December 31^st to receive 25 percent off any footage package. Discover shutterstock.com. That’s shutterstock.com.

Larry Jordan: Kim Furst is an award winning documentary film producer, director and an editor. Flying the Feathered Edge is her fifth documentary on aviation. She’s now in the process of distributing the film and we want to learn what’s working and what isn’t. Kim, thanks for taking time out of your holiday preparations and welcome back.

Kim Furst: Thanks, Larry. It’s always great to talk to you. Appreciate the call.

Larry Jordan: We are delighted because the last time you were on the Buzz was in June, as you were finishing Flying the Feathered Edge, and now bring us up to date on what’s been happening since.

Kim Furst: We’ve had this incredible summer into fall. We did some wonderful film festivals and we went on the festival circuit and we also did some industry and private previews that were great, and we’ve just been building buzz for the film and showing it at festivals and we’ve had a lot of strong interest but we have not lined up a distributor. I don’t think we’ve explored every single option, but we’ve had very strong responses from distributors.

Kim Furst: It’s so funny because we’re at that point where I almost don’t want to say exactly who, but they’re not distributors who are going to take it on, but I would say that we have some very good people who have said, “Let us know how we can help with this,” but because it is a documentary, there are not a big theatrical release. Most distributors aren’t looking at that as something incredibly lucrative, and they’ve been very frank with us about that. They did say, “You could take this to theatrical and we could take it on,” but let me qualify that ‘We could take it on’.

Kim Furst: Nobody has said, “We could take this on.” They could say, “We could help with this,” but I don’t think anybody has said that that’s going to be a more financially viable solution for anybody involved than some other means of getting it out there, such as self distribution or going directly to Netflix or Amazon or any of those other ways that smaller pictures can be distributed.

Larry Jordan: Kim, it’s been said that a documentary is a great way to make a film without making any money. I was just reflecting, theatrical distribution really isn’t on the cards for documentaries, so assuming that you do want to make money on your film, what are the options? Is it broadcast? Is it cable? Is it self distribution? How are you going to get the money back?

Kim Furst: I’ll be really honest with you, I’m figuring this out as we go along. I’ve read a lot about distribution of docs and I’ve seen a number of friends do pretty well with self distributing their own docs and so with that baseline of information – it’s always changing too. I wouldn’t say things like Tug or Fandor or some of these are incredibly new, but there are a lot of dynamic ways that you can make a return on a documentary that aren’t what they were ten years ago. I’ve learned a bit about Tug. We actually aren’t necessarily doing Tug.

Kim Furst: One of the best things we’ve done was we got accepted into the Napa Valley Film Festival. We’ve had Brecon Ridge, Rhode Island, some wonderful festivals, but Napa Valley really blew me away. We were one of the ten documentaries in competition for Best Documentary and so they put me as a producer/film maker in the artists’ and residents’ program that they have there and they really brought us face to face with some unbelievable talent. We had meetings with Dan Quando from the Weinstein Company, the head of Tug was there to talk to us about that method, we had Ted Hope speak with us and tell us about Fandor and some of what they’re doing there, and it was just an incredible amount of information.

Kim Furst: What was incredibly encouraging is there’s a lot that could be done to distribute a film outside of the traditional theatrical means and we’re doing a lot of those things. The first thing that we did was we really had to decide if we were going to self distribute or put it up on Amazon or iTunes first, what were we first going to do? Truth be told, we have a passionate audience and we just wanted to get this out before the holidays for our dedicated fans, so we did a bit of… release, which we’re in the process of doing directly off our website at thebobhooverproject.com and you can purchase the DVD, you can purchase the Blu-Ray off that site.

Kim Furst: We’re manufacturing them in San Diego, we have a filament house in Las Vegas and Henderson, Nevada, and they’re being shipped. We created a website using Volusion and so we’re currently shipping DVDs. I would say, without a lot of effort from Black Friday to now, I think it’s close to 2,000 orders and that doesn’t mean 2,000 DVDs, that just means 2,000 orders. We haven’t even put out a press release yet, we haven’t really been trying.

Kim Furst: All we did was sent out the information to the people who have been tracking our film’s progress for three years, we’ve been grooming our friends and fans who have been signing up for our MailChimp program that people sign up for and they get newsletters from us as to when we premiered, when we had different screenings at the festivals and we just encouraged them to stay in touch, so they’re the first ones that we reached out to and just said, “Look, we’re doing pre-sales, we’re going to be selling this off of our website and you’re the first ones to know and thanks for your support and your interest in the Bob Hoover project.”

Kim Furst: We have a Facebook page, a Twitter page, YouTube and we try to stay incredibly active with the social media and we just wanted to give back to those people who had been following us to release the film so that they could potentially get it or give it to someone under the tree for the holiday or before the New Year.

Larry Jordan: Which has been the most important emphasis? Is it marketing, to tell people it exists, or distribution, getting it in their hands, or working with Amazon or somebody to distribute the film? Where are you putting in the bulk of your work?

Kim Furst: We’re now at the place where we’re about ready to do a press release, so press will be incredibly important. Still, traditional press is incredibly important. We’ve had incredible help from aviation magazines, who we have gotten quite a few reviews in. We do have a good press book, we’ve been collecting our reviews. Those reach many more people than we can with social networking. It’s just a fact. You could get something to go incredibly viral, but that’s a real outlier.

Kim Furst: Making sure that you have good traditional press releases, you’re saving your clippings, we’re very fortunate in that we do have a subject matter, a gentleman who’s very beloved in the aviation community, and so he gets press. Bob gets press and we try to maximize that with tying into that when he has different things going on and so I would say at this point it’s really publicity and it’s treating your fans incredibly well. We’re trying to be very respectful of them and give them good updates and good product with getting the film to them on time and treating them well, and I think that’s how you build a fan base.

Kim Furst: I guess I’m in the middle of it now, so I’m saying I think that’s how. We’ll be able to tell you more about it later, but that’s the way we’re approaching it – take care of those who are really interested in your film and then try to get it out using traditional press to everybody else.

Larry Jordan: What we’ll do is we’ll check back in in about six months and see how it ended up.

Kim Furst: That sounds great. We’ll look forward to that.

Larry Jordan: Kim, where can people go on the web to learn more about you and your film?

Kim Furst: If you go to thebobhooverproject.com, you can find out more about me and about the film and you can actually go to our shop page and purchase Blu-Ray or DVD.

Larry Jordan: That’s thebobhooverproject.com and Kim Furst is the producer/director and editor of Flying the Feathered Edge, the story of Bob Hoover. Kim, thanks for joining us today.

Kim Furst: Thank you so much, Larry. Have a happy holiday.

Larry Jordan: And you too.

Larry Jordan: When you’re working with media, one thing is essential – your computer needs peak performance. However, when it comes to upgrading your Mac, there are so many different options to choose from that the process can be confusing. That’s why Other World Computing carries the best upgrades that let your computer performance and storage grow as your needs grow.

Larry Jordan: Since 1988, OWC has become one of the most trusted names in quality hardware and comprehensive support to the worldwide computer industry. With an extensive online catalog of Mac, iPhone and iPad enhancement products, as well as a dedicated team of knowledgeable experts providing first rate tech support, OWC has everything you need to take your current system to the next level. Whether you need to maximize your system’s memory, add blazing speed or enhance reliability, look no further than the friendly experts at OWC. Learn more by visiting macsales.com. That’s macsales.com.

Larry Jordan: He’s been called a pioneer of web video. Director and photographer Matt Abourezk was at the leading edge of internet video since before there was broadband. He also owns his own company called Talkingbox Digital Media Group. Although most recently recognized for his award winning television series, Kelsey On The House, which appeared on an NBC affiliate in 2014, Matt has produced video and photography work for a who’s who of famous brand names, including Apple, Amazon, CNN, The History Channel, Warner Bros Records and many more. Hello, Matt, welcome.

Matt Abourezk: Hello, thank you for having me.

Larry Jordan: Matt, tell me about your company, Talkingbox Digital Media Group. What do you guys do?

Matt Abourezk: Well, we’re not much different than your average video production company. Especially in this economy, you basically take any work that comes along. It seems like we are specializing in high end corporate work these days. For a long time, it was music videos and a variety of family type work but now we’re more in the corporate world.

Larry Jordan: Well, back in the old days, what got you interested in web video to begin with? It was not an easy everybody to begin.

Matt Abourezk: No. I started back when the 56k modem was the new thing. I was shooting with three-quarter inch, you had a 20 pound camera on your shoulder and a 30 pound desk connected by a thick cable and I used to be a professional musician and at the end of this last band that I was in, I was 30 at the time, and we were doing to do a farewell tour of Europe – we did pretty well for ourselves, we were on MTV, had three videos…

Larry Jordan: What was the name of the group?

Matt Abourezk: It was an alternative rock band named Thin White Rope.

Larry Jordan: Ok.

Matt Abourezk: In fact, Larry, if you want to buy our albums, you can still get 105 songs on iTunes. So the band was going to do its final tour, I’d been with the band for five years, and I thought, “It’s such an amazing experience, I want something someday to show kids,” so I bought a Canon X1 I think it was at the time, because I wanted to videotape this final tour. My girlfriend went on tour with us, so she videotaped the shows and I videotaped behind the scenes, what it’s like to tour, and for our final few shows the President of the record label came to watch our shows in Europe and asked what we were doing with the camera and asked if I’d be interested in putting out a documentary of the final tour. I said sure.

Matt Abourezk: I didn’t know that much about video or anything, but the next thing I know we had a 75 minute video on sale worldwide. From there, I got a call from Warner Bros and Geffen Records and Universal, MCA and I started doing music videos. After Thin White Rope broke up, I moved to San Francisco and went to work at Apple Computer as a software engineer and was just doing video projects on the side.

Larry Jordan: Now, wait, wait, wait. I’ve got to stop you. You were a rock musician and then a software engineer and then a video documentarian. I can’t think of three more disparate careers. I’m impressed just to begin with.

Matt Abourezk: Yes, well that’s the way my brain works. I’ve been told I’m very right and left brain.

Larry Jordan: Or something.

Matt Abourezk: Yes, and the stuff in the middle just gets lost. …the whole day to day stuff, so video and photography for me was a perfect marriage of technology and creativity.

Larry Jordan: Ok, so you’re working at Apple as a software engineer and doing video on the side. How did you make the transition into full time video?

Matt Abourezk: I started getting offers. I got a call from Proctor & Gamble saying that they wanted 120 videos, could I produce them? And keep in mind, this is the time where I would do a full on production video and I would be outputting a postage stamp sized video, because we didn’t have broadband. So I did 120 videos on weekends and evenings for Proctor & Gamble and then General Motors contacted me and they wanted 70 videos, and it just kept going.

Matt Abourezk: Finally, it got to a point where I sat down with my wife at the time and made a list of pros and cons. I was making a lot more money doing videos suddenly than I was working at Apple, although Apple paid well, and so we made a list of pros and cons and decided I was going to quit Apple and continue doing video, so that’s exactly what I did. Sold off all of my stock at $40 a share, which still hurts…

Larry Jordan: Yes, I believe that.

Matt Abourezk: …later and that’s how I got into video.

Larry Jordan: I was on your website, and I am struck by several things. One, your still photography is some of the most amazing, beautiful, artistic things I’ve seen with an incredible sense of depth of field and color and texture. The stills are wonderful; and then you’ve got video, which has an entirely different aesthetic, an entirely different look. When you’re putting your stills together, are you doing that for clients or for yourself? And how do you differentiate between the look of your stills and the look of your video?

Matt Abourezk: Well, I actually think that the look of the video is influenced greatly from my 35 years of experience as a stills photographer. It really worked well. When I picked up a video camera for the first time, I felt right at home because basically it’s just a moving version of a still image, right? You still have composition, you still have lighting, you still have things that to consider that are very similar between the two. Personally, I feel as though there’s a lot of similarity between my photography and what that brings to the video.

Larry Jordan: Do you look at a scene differently if you’re shooting it as a still than if you’re shooting it for video?

Matt Abourezk: A little bit, certainly because with video you have a passage of time in it, whereas a still image is obviously just freezing a moment. But a lot of the same rules still apply, whether you’re shooting film or video. You still have to look at what the lighting’s doing, how it’s interacting with the subject matter and you still look at composition. The rule of thirds plays strongly in video, just like it does in photography, so I actually think that it really helps in my video work by having such a strong background in photography.

Larry Jordan: I can absolutely see how the two of them would build on each other, and especially from a composition point of view. Stills are all about composition and video, you can sort of fudge composition because everything is moving, but the more you understand about composition, the better your video is going to be, so I can understand that.

Matt Abourezk: Absolutely.

Larry Jordan: You’ve talked about the fact that you’ve done projects for Proctor & Gamble and General Motors. What’s been a recent video project for you?

Matt Abourezk: Obviously, you mentioned Kelsey On The House. That was a pet project. Brian Kelsey and I started working together a while ago on a pilot and we hit it off as friends and this guy is a mover and a shaker and he was morning DJ for Martha Stewart on Sirius Radio for many years and he did a lot of pieces for HDTV. He wanted to do this project called Kelsey On The House and we started working on it and hit it off really well. It’s an interesting project in that it literally is one camera, we’re going to celebrities’ homes and interviewing them, the first time we meet them is when they open the door.

Matt Abourezk: He wanted everything natural and real, so that’s been an interesting project and we ended up on an NBC affiliate and we’re going to start working on that again next year. Beyond that, several videos for a large international bank, instructional videos for a medical supply company, weddings, across the board. If you look at my portfolio, you’ll notice that there’s quite a variety of things. I’m not just doing weddings, I’m not just doing corporate work. There’s quite a range. I think I have eight different galleries of different types of work in my portfolio online.

Larry Jordan: I think variety is a very good work to describe your portfolio. It’s a wide ranging collection of subjects.

Matt Abourezk: Yes, I have a lot of interests and I get bored doing one thing for too long. I really do. I used to also offer a DVD authoring and website development on my website and at one point when the economy tanked, I realized the phone wasn’t ringing any more and I thought, “Ok, it’s time to re-tool in this economy. I’ve got to figure out how to play by new rules,” so I hired a company in New York to advise me on my media presence, how I could streamline what it was I was doing.

Matt Abourezk: They took a look and the first thing they said was, “You need to kill everything except for one. Make a choice, what do you want to do? Because if you offer photography and video, then people are going to be confused by it. A Vice President in Marketing who’s looking for a videographer is going to go to your page and see that you’re a photographer and think, “Ah, deluded. I want someone that specializes,”” so that’s been a battle for me. I dropped the DVD authoring and I dropped the website development but I couldn’t get rid of my two passions, which are photography and video.

Matt Abourezk: An interesting thing about that is I realized a while ago that there are two completely unique needs there. If some corporate client is looking for a videographer, they don’t want to hire an individual, they want to hire a production company. But if somebody’s looking for a photographer, they don’t want to hire a company, they want to hire an artist, a single photographer. So it’s been quite a challenge, trying to find a balance on the website that if people are looking for a photographer, they’ll find a photographer; if they’re looking for a video production company, they’ll find a company. It’s been an interesting balancing act to do and whatever I’m doing seems to be working – I’ve got more work now than I’ve had in years.

Larry Jordan: Congratulations on that.

Matt Abourezk: Thank you, thank you.

Larry Jordan: Our contacts at Panasonic have told us that you’re using one of their new cameras, the PX270. Why are you using that and how are you using it?

Matt Abourezk: Well, here’s an interesting thing – I was using the HDC200, another Panasonic camera, for a lot of years. Depending on the project, we always rank in cameras, but my go to camera for a long time was the HDX200. It was kind of a Swiss Army knife of cameras, it did everything, and then being a still photographer and using Canon gear, when this HDSLR revolution came, I jumped on board.

Matt Abourezk: I just thought that was the greatest thing ever, so suddenly I’m shooting exclusively video with my Canon 5D Mark II and 5D Mark III and obviously when you do that, you’re increasing the cinematic quality quite a bit. Overall, the projects looked better, looked less like video. But after a while, I realized there are some severe limitations to shooting with HDSLR. It’s a tool, it’s great for the right project. This year, I had had it with all of the problems with shooting with HDSLR so I spent about three months researching the latest cameras.

Larry Jordan: Give me some detail. What were some of the problems you ran into shooting video with an HDSLR camera?

Matt Abourezk: Well, a couple of things in particular. I’m a gear head, I love gear, I love my 15 millimeter rod system on my camera, I think it pushes all my man buttons. It looks so cool… and it’s very functional. I absolutely love it. But haul that thing around for a while and you realize, wow, this is not a good… to work with. The cinematography aspect of the image quality is great, the cinematic look is great, but you have to work for focus really hard.

Matt Abourezk: Every time you’re going to go do a shoot, you’re going to take two hours just to get the equipment ready, then bolt the camera onto the rig, bolt on the audio. It’s just a lot of extra work; and then the depth of field, which you can control to a certain degree with HDSLR that everybody loves – use it for that cinematic look – works against you when you start doing corporate work, your typical corporate job where you want to have by default more depth of field. That for me was a killer. I was offered a couple of jobs I just couldn’t do with my equipment because I needed to have more depth of field in natural light inside a building – they were very specific, natural light for a large corporation – and the DSLR’s not going to do it.

Matt Abourezk: You’re indoors, you can’t get much depth of field if you’re shooting with any kind of telephoto unless you’ve got 4,000 watts of light running. Just based on the depth of field limitations with DSLRs – granted, it’s a plus in the right project but it’s a minus in your average corporate job – I decided I needed a camera that was going to allow me to have more control over the far end of depth of field, I want more things to be in focus. I know that flies in the face of what the current trend is, with killing the depth of field, highlight your subject, have the background completely fall off, but when you’re doing day to day corporate work you need a camera that’s going to work with you and I felt like I was always having to fight with the DSLR.

Matt Abourezk: So I researched for about three months, actually intensive research, and when I learned about the 270, I kept thinking, “Ok, I’m seeing this checkbox, this checkbox, this checkbox.” I kept thinking, “Ok, something’s going to come in and make me go, “Oh no, that’s not the one either,”” but I didn’t find that problem. It checked all of the boxes of what I was looking for.

Larry Jordan: So what were you looking for? Besides more control over depth of field, what were some of the other key items you were looking for?

Matt Abourezk: First off, the most basic was a camera that I could pull out of the bag and start shooting without having to put it together, but also something that I could put on a rig and put the matte box on and follow focus and all the other accessories that you have. For starters, it was a good size. After that, it was the different formats that you can record with. First off, it has ten bit 422 recording in… 25, which is good for the green screen work. It has a really great 22 times optical zoom lens and even the digital doubler, which are usually just more of a marketing gimmick, looks good times two.

Matt Abourezk: There are three control rings on the lens for focus, zoom and iris. I wasn’t going to have to go into a menu system just to adjust something or push some strange little button. I had actual physical controls on the lens which, as a stills photographer, that’s my comfort zone. I like the fact that it had backward compatibility in that it has a full size P2 card slot so I could bring over my cards from my HDX200. I liked the fact that it uses the new micro P2 card slots and it also uses the standard SD card slots. Granted, Panasonic wants you to use the micro P2s, and I understand why, they’re brilliant, but you could also just run standard SD cards in this, so you have affordable media that you can use on this if you want.

Matt Abourezk: Other checkboxes were it has timecode in and out, gen lock in, has SDI out and HDMI out, so thing will fit into a huge variety of workflows and, with the variety of work that you see in my portfolio, I have a huge variety of workflows that I need to accommodate. So all these things even more, even just the fact that it has AVC-Intra 100, which I use and it’s amazing video quality, for higher end productions where we’re shooting to edit. Then I can switch the camera over to AVC long gop 25 and suddenly I have 128 minutes that I can record on a 32 gig card, so I’ve got two 32 gig cards, I’ve got 256 minutes that I can record without having to stop, which is great for presentations.

Matt Abourezk: I’ve used the thing a few times for three and four hour presentations and you can hot swap cards as you go. You’re writing to one while you pull the other one out and hot copying it to your computer. One thing that this camera does that I think is amazing is the fact that you can record to both cards at once and set one card to record a low bandwidth proxy while the other one’s recording AVC-Intra 100, so if you need to quickly just throw up footage on your computer just to see how the edits are working or see if there’s continuity from one cut to the next, you can do that. That’s pretty amazing.

Matt Abourezk: Overall, I have to say I think Panasonic did a really, really fine job with this camera. There’s a lot of competition out there and in every instance – I looked at Sonys and Canons and quite a variety in this price range – this Panasonic walked away from the other cameras in terms of overall functionality. That’s not just a sales pitch either, this is really what I discovered and in each case I would see a camera and be like, “Oh, that’s great, that’s great, that’s great. Oh, darn, big fail right there. Ok, it doesn’t do what I want there,” and I was actually surprised.

Matt Abourezk: I had not even heard of the 270 until I found it in an article when I was doing my research and I thought, “Wow, how is it that I have not heard of this camera?” I was thrilled when I got it and have used it quite a bit now and I just keep getting more excited about it. It just seems to work with me.

Larry Jordan: Matt, where can we go on the web to learn more about you and your work?

Matt Abourezk: You will find all of my work and everything you want to know about me at www.talkingbox.tv.

Larry Jordan: That’s talkingbox.tv and Matt Abourezk is the owner, the Director and photographer of Talkingbox Digital Media Group. Matt, thanks for joining us today.

Matt Abourezk: Thank you so much, Larry, it’s been a pleasure.

Larry Jordan: I want to thank this week’s guests, starting with Pär Ekberg, the Swedish cinematographer that put together Coldplay’s Magic; then Kim Furst, documentary producer, director and writer with Flying the Feathered Edge; and Matthew Abourezk, Director and photographer and well known web video expert.

Larry Jordan: There’s lot of history in our industry and it’s all posted to our website, digitalproductionbuzz.com – hundreds of past shows and thousands of interviews, all searchable and available. It’s always interesting to see how far we have come.

Larry Jordan: You can visit with us on Twitter, @dpbuzz, and Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Music on The Buzz is provided by Smartsound. Text transcripts are provided by Take 1 Transcription. You can email us at info@digitalproductionbuzz.com. Our producer is Cirina Catania, our engineer is Megan Paulos and on behalf of Mike Horton, my name is Larry Jordan. Merry Christmas everyone and thanks for listening 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

December 18, 2014

[Transcripts provided by Take 1 Transcription]

[

to listen to this show.]

HOSTS

Larry Jordan

Michael Horton

GUESTS

Julian Mack, Creative Content Producer, Nightjar

Felix Mack, Filmmaker, Nightjar

Benoit Fouchard, Chief Strategy Officer, ATEME

Michael Cioni, CEO, Light Iron

Kim Snyder, CEO, Panavision

===

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. My name is Larry Jordan; our co-host, Mike Horton, has the night off and I wish I did too. I’m suffering from a slight cold, so I’m going to be a baritone rather than a second tenor tonight.

Larry Jordan: We’ve got a great group of guests. We’re going to start with Felix and Julian Mack, the two creative partners at LA-based Nightjar, as they talk about their new Hilary Duff video and a killer new project they did for Xbox.

Larry Jordan: Then Benoit Fouchard sets our heads spinning with ATEME’s new technology that allows us to stream 360 degree video content live to a virtual headset or a mobile device. This is some really cutting edge video compression technology that allows us to see reality in real time.

Larry Jordan: And there was a surprising industry announcement last week as Panavision acquired Light Iron. Kim Snyder, the CEO of Panavision, and Michael Cioni, the CEO of Light Iron, give us the inside scoop, along with their thoughts on the future of both production and post. I’m not going to say this acquisition changes everything, but it does cause all the rest of us to stop and think.

Larry Jordan: 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. You can learn more at take1.tv and thanks, Take 1, for making it possible.

Larry Jordan: We had this wonderful time yesterday at our open house. We’ve moved in to brand new offices and brand new broadcast studios and invited anybody that was in the area to come by and take a look and we had dozens and dozens of people coming through to take a look at our new facility. It was just delightful to see the folks that stop by. I’ve had a lot of requests for those that live farther away than the LA area to share pictures of the studio with those that weren’t able to attend and we are in the process of putting a video together that takes you on a virtual tour of our facilities.

Larry Jordan: One of the things I really enjoy is putting together gear and helping to understand how that gear works, both to create programs and to explain what good choices are for you and why I made the choices that we made here at the studio. There are some really neat toys that we’re working with and we’re going to be showing you as part of this video and explaining more as the show continues on into January. In the meantime, we are continuing to tweak all of our gear to make the most of it.

Larry Jordan: Now, you need to remember that you want to visit with us on Facebook at digitalproductionbuzz.com. We’re also on Twitter, @DPBuZZ; and subscribe to our free weekly newsletter at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Now, this gives you a weekly inside look both at our show and the industry. Two features that I like are the Inside Insight column, a look at our industry from a different perspective, and a featured interview from a past show that you may have missed.

Larry Jordan: Tori Hoffkey is our newsletter editor and she does an amazing job of putting each issue together. Comes out Fridays around noon after the show and I encourage you to subscribe to learn more. I’ll be back with Felix and Julian Mack right after this.

Larry Jordan: Blackmagic 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 Blackmagic 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 Blackmagic production camera 4K also features an incredibly tempting price of $2,995. Learn more about the Blackmagic production camera 4K that is definitely priced to move, visit blackmagicdesign.com today.

Larry Jordan: Nightjar is based in Los Angeles and owned by two brothers, Felix and Julian Mack. They’ve been creating innovative content for video, sound and multimedia since 1999 and most recently they produced Hilary Duff’s music video for her hit single ‘All About You’, plus a mind bending end credit sequence for Xbox One’s ‘Sunset Overdrive’ and tonight we want to get the insight on how they did it. So first welcome, Felix.

Felix Mack: Hello. How are you doing?

Larry Jordan: I’m doing well; and welcome Julian.

Julian Mack: Hi, Larry, how’s it going?

Larry Jordan: Well, if you exclude a cold, things are going well; and if you include a cold, you guys are going to do much more talking than I am tonight, that’s for sure. Felix, I’m going to start with you. Describe Nightjar.

Felix Mack: Describe Nightjar. Well, I would say we’ve been around for about 15 years. We’ve always been multimedia and I would say that you should ask Julian to do that because he’s a much better person at answering that than me.

Larry Jordan: All right. Well, then, Julian, why did you and Felix decide to start Nightjar?

Julian Mack: I don’t know. It was actually something we just fell into. It was never really our plan to have our own company and run it for 15 years. It’s just something we started and did one project and we thought, “Wow, we made a couple of thousand dollars. How amazing is that?” We didn’t have to go anywhere, didn’t have a boss, and didn’t have to come in at 9am and didn’t have to do any of those things. We just did something directly with our name on it and we thought, “That’s pretty good. Let’s see if we can do this one more time,” and then it just kind of keeps on going somehow, miraculously.

Larry Jordan: Yes, I know that feeling. Julian, how do you divide up the duties? Who does what?

Julian Mack: Well, Felix is much more the visual mind of it and I’m much more the verbalizer of the whole thing, so we both work on concepts together like the straight up conceptualizing a video, what it’s about, that kind of stuff, but he is much more a graphics mind and I think much more in terms of verbally and music. So if there’s a script involved usually I will write most of it, though Felix knows how to do it as well, and he will generally do anything that has to do with After Effects, those kind of things all are his side and anything to do straight up with sound is just mine, and the rest we kind of share.

Larry Jordan: Felix, when you’re tackling a new project, when it’s still just a concept floating around in the air, do you tend to think about it visually and then present the visuals to Julian? Or does Julian come up with the script and then you have to invent visuals to go with the words? Which comes first, pictures or sound?

Felix Mack: I think pictures for me, definitely. For me, the pictures come pretty much, I guess it’s been like that since college, that I come up with a couple of looks pretty quickly in my head, probably in 30 seconds, and usually of those one of them actually ends up making it to the final product. Once I come up with those, I try to explain it and verbalize it to Julian, which is not always easy for me but I try, and he can then take that and present it to the client in a much more coherent manner than if I tried to do it. But at the same time, he thinks of things immediately as well and sometimes we sort of meet in the middle, depending on what kind of stuff it is.

Larry Jordan: I can hear that. Clearly, some people are better at speaking than other people are and some people are much better at visualizing, so I can easily see how the two of you could split the work. But after 15 years, don’t you get tired of working with each other?

Julian Mack: Well, not really because the luck we’ve had is that, first of all, because we share the duties, we’re not always doing stuff together. So although we sometimes do projects that take a couple of weeks, there might be three, four, five days in a row where we really don’t have to do anything with each other because I’m completely useless when it comes to animating stuff, I just cannot do it. I can edit video and I can shoot video but apart from that, any visual stuff, you can just completely forget it.

Julian Mack: So large stretches of time we’ll be working completely separately and otherwise we get along pretty well, and… we’ve had in our projects are quite different and over 15 years a lot has changed. There’s no more packaged media really, which is something we worked on quite a bit ten years ago. So everything changes and it’s actually pretty fun. It’s keeping us on our toes.

Larry Jordan: I throw this open to both of you – what are some of the projects you’ve worked on recently? Who are some of your clients and what projects? I want to talk about the Hilary Duff video and I do want to talk about ‘Sunset Overdrive’, but in addition to those two, who are some typical clients and projects?

Felix Mack: These are two video projects we’ve made. We did some corporate video just before that, basically explaining how these point of sale machines work, we’re doing some kind of ad work for their web stuff, basically straight up advertising for corporate style things, as well as one thing that we do quite a lot, which is streams for television and concerts which are essentially making the big screen content that is behind the performers, and that’s for television shows as well as live concerts. We do quite a bit of that lately.

Felix Mack: This year, we did some stuff that was on the Latin Grammies. We’re doing a very large show that’s going to be up on Christmas in Japan. That’s the kind of stuff we work on generally, it’s a real mixed bag, interestingly enough.

Larry Jordan: Well, let’s focus on this new Hilary Duff video that you produced, to the song ‘All About You’. Tell us about your involvement in the project. What did you guys do?

Julian Mack: The call was essentially to make a lyric video and generally they don’t include the artist, it’s just lyric animation. They’re released to YouTube and that’s kind of the new art form of making content, because people want to listen to songs but they need some visual stuff because they just use YouTube as a jukebox nowadays. But they wanted a twist and they wanted Hilary to be in it and the trick here was that there was really only nine days from when they called us to when it needed to be released. So then it took a further two days for them to say, “Ok, you guys look good enough to do this for us.”

Julian Mack: They’d never heard of us before, of course, the record company at least; and then they liked our concept that we sent them that we made over the weekend and then we had to very quickly make a video and what we did was everything. We came up with the concept, Felix did the animations of the words and everything, we both filmed it – he’s camera A and I’m camera B. We got the studio ready. Hilary brought, of course, her own skill and makeup people and that kind of stuff, but that was it.

Julian Mack: We came up with a concept that was a very simple one, just her in front of a green screen or a black background doing the video in a sexy way so you can’t tell if she’s wearing clothes or not, but we’re not really revealing anything, and we came up with that concept because we had no time to make anything else, no sets, nothing. They liked it and I think it turned out pretty well. Basically, we did the whole thing from start to post production to delivery.

Larry Jordan: Now, I want to be really clear because I was confused when you first started describing this. You shot her as well as providing the lyric animation. It wasn’t just adding the animation over an existing video, you did everything from the video on up, correct?

Julian Mack: Correct. We shot, we were on set, we lit it out, we edited it. We did everything apart from the song and apart from what Hilary did.

Larry Jordan: Did you get any specific instructions from the client on how they wanted this presented?

Julian Mack: No. We presented them our idea in a PDF with some graphics, what we thought the look should be, and then they just let us run with it.

Larry Jordan: Ok. I have a creative question that I want to spend a little bit of time talking with you guys about. We’ll learn about the cameras and everything else in a second, but the question is involving the cutting. There was a lot of rapid cutting, a lot of fast dissolves, jump cuts, a lot of blurred out of focus shots that could have been anything. What was your thinking in terms of the speed with which you were cutting and the shots that you were selecting? It had a unique style, but it also was so fast that you couldn’t really see what was going on and in addition to the speed, the text was flying around the screen.

Julian Mack: There are a couple of things. First of all, the style of today is more everything, I believe. So you need to create a certain pace especially in music videos – they tend to be quick cut; and number two, the idea was that it needs to be interesting because there’s really just her and a black background – and Hilary does a fantastic job in front of the camera which really made it a lot easier for us to get useable footage because we had 60, 70 minutes to shoot this video and she was really good every take – and we wanted to confuse the people a little bit as to what they’re seeing, because basically it’s all just close-ups, so the idea that we presented in our presentation was that it’s kind of a tease.

Julian Mack: You don’t know, is she wearing something? What’s going to be revealed and what’s going to be dissolved into the background? There’s a constant barrage of that happening so it looks like it’s a real music video and not a person who is very good at it, but just a single person dancing in front of a black background could be a little bit boring for three and a half minutes.

Larry Jordan: Let me come back at you for just a second. One of the things that I teach my students – and I will grant you, it’s old school and doesn’t fit in with the ADD society that we’re in today, but many times we do extremely fast cutting to confuse the audience as opposed to help them to see what’s going on. Are you using the fast cutting to hide something as opposed to revealing it?

Julian Mack: Yes, to hide that there’s really just one person in front of a black background and that it looks like there’s a ton of stuff going on like this. Although we really only have a couple of framing options and we have no backgrounds or narrative structure or anything like that, so that was kind of it, to make it look as if there’s a lot of different viewpoints, really. That was kind of the concept here.

Larry Jordan: And to switch back out, because I’m not here to pick on you, but it’s nice to be able to ask this question because I’ve often wondered it myself – what kind of gear were you shooting with and what format and how long did it take you to edit it?

Julian Mack: I can have Felix answer the camera stuff, if you like.

Larry Jordan: Absolutely. Felix, what did you use for a camera and what video codec did you pick?

Felix Mack: In this case, we used a Blackmagic 4K production camera and a Blackmagic 2K production camera and we used all Canon lenses, I believe, at least I did, on my camera and the codec we chose was the ProRes HQ in this case because I haven’t worked with the RAW format before and with the turnout we had, I preferred to have something that we could just drop in and edit immediately as opposed to trying to figure out color spaces and all that without knowing anything about it. That was the reason for the ProRes, because it’s a format I’ve used extensively and I know it’s versatile and it’s going to be quick, so that was our option for that.

Larry Jordan: Well, that and the fact that you had almost no time to get this edited. You didn’t have time to spend a lot on the color grade either.

Felix Mack: Exactly.

Larry Jordan: There’s another really cool project – we’ve only got a few minutes left but I have to touch on it. You guys did the closing credits of Xbox One’s ‘Sunset Overdrive’, which has got to be the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. It looked like you were shooting posters on a wall and the credits were actually people listed in rock posters. Where did this idea come from and how did you do it?

Felix Mack: In that case, the game is a very punk rock style game and there’s a lot of punk rock music in it and they had the idea already set more or less that they wanted their names to appear for the game company in the form of these posters. But the rest was fairly fluid, so we had to figure out how many names, what the pacing was, what kind of band styles there are and how it would fit in with the game.

Felix Mack: Originally, I was doing some research and I thought most of the… could be black and white and photocopied and that sort of thing, but that looked way out of place with the colorful game style. So we opted to do it a lot more vibrant and varied and it’s a pretty crazy style so we were able to go all out on design and use lots of, there’s probably 5,000 different type… and shots in there, so there was a lot to do as far as visual graphics go.

Larry Jordan: Was that shot in camera with those actual posters? Or was that all CG?

Felix Mack: No, that is actually all in camera. That was also the 4K Blackmagic camera. We ended up printing all those out and using the street style techniques of pasting it up on actual boards and stapling it and then we filmed all of it.

Larry Jordan: It fit perfectly with the style of the game, it looked wonderful and so organic and not computer-ish, that it was really brilliantly done. I was very impressed.

Julian Mack: Thanks.

Felix Mack: Oh, thanks, Larry. Yes, it was quite interesting because that’s the Blackmagic camera with a 100 millimeter Canon macro lens on a monopod with the image stabilizer on and then it was in 4K and so we could move it a little bit afterwards as well as the real moves and kind of merge that digital and analogue world together to create something that it’s really hard to tell if it’s camera or not.

Larry Jordan: It was very cool. Julian, what website can people go to learn more about you and your work?

Julian Mack: They can go to nightjarco.com.

Larry Jordan: That’s nightjarco.com. Julian and Felix are the founders and, guys, thanks for joining us today.

Julian Mack: Thanks Larry.

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

Larry Jordan: Finding the perfect royalty free image or video for your creative project can be a crucial step in the film making process and, whether it’s for your website, publication or video segment, the experts at shutterstock.com can help you choose from over two million royalty free HD and 4K stock video clips, including time lapses, aerials, green screens and model released clips.

Larry Jordan: Sourcing over 12,000 brand new video clips each week, Shutterstock consistently offers the highest quality stills and video clips from professional film makers. Plus Shutterstock provides sophisticated search engine tools so you can search and drill down by category, clip resolution, contributor name and more. Also, use their great no risk try-before-you-buy option so you can see how their clips will look in your project before making a single purchase.

Larry Jordan: Try Shutterstock today – sign up for a free account. No credit card is needed and, as an added bonus to you, enter promo code BUZZ2014 before December 31^st to receive 25 percent off any footage package. Discover shutterstock.com.

Larry Jordan: Benoit Fouchard is the Chief Strategy Office for ATEME. Recently, they unveiled a groundbreaking 360 degree video technology for a live broadcast. Available as panoramic media for tablets, Smartphones and virtual reality headsets, this other worldly spherical device will be demonstrated to the US during the upcoming International CES in Las Vegas. I wanted to learn more, so we invited Benoit on to tell us about it. Hello, Benoit, welcome.

Benoit Fouchard: Hello, Larry. Thank you for welcoming me on the show.

Larry Jordan: Oh, it’s always good to have you back. It’s been almost a year, so we’re always pleased to have you return. First, give us a description of what ATEME is.

Benoit Fouchard: ATEME is a video compression company specializing in complex mathematical algorithms to carry digital video around networks, and we are focusing on the broadcast market to help send better, larger, nicer pictures around to all sorts of devices.

Larry Jordan: Now, I cannot get my brain wrapped around why a company specializing in video compression is capturing images. How did you make the step into 360 degree image capture?

Benoit Fouchard: I’m going to try to make it a short story. I think you’ve heard about the success of the Oculus Rift device and the attention that virtual reality is getting. A key to this success is the ability for the device to immediately react to any of your movements and display the new field of view. Now, this is only possible in modern devices and with modern networks if you send the entire spherical view to the device and let the device decode or interpret this entire sphere and only provide for your vision the field of view that you have selected through your movement.

Larry Jordan: So let me just see if I can get this straight. You’re sending the full 360 degree picture, but only displaying the picture in the direction in which we are looking?

Benoit Fouchard: That’s exactly right and that is why this new application puts so much strain on the compression, because all of a sudden you’re not sending just a picture that you are looking at, you have to send all the surroundings in order to be able to immediately react to any movement or any touch on a touch screen and change the field of view accordingly.

Larry Jordan: So from the end user’s point of view, they’re not looking at this spherical weirdness which is showing the 360 degrees, it’s like the way we see with our eyes – the world surrounds our head but until we turn our head or turn our eyes, we only see what our eyes are looking at at that instant.

Benoit Fouchard: That’s right, Larry. In fact, we will show at CES a spherical display so that you have the ability in that demo to see the entire sphere that is captured, but this is not the default way of offering 360 degree video to end users. It’s rather more the interactivity that is interesting.

Larry Jordan: Did you need to invent new codecs to transfer this? Again, I’m thinking back to your strength in video compression. What new technology did you need to invent to pull this off?

Benoit Fouchard: No, we didn’t need new codecs, but the latest codecs will be a tremendous help to get this application mainstream. Because it’s so demanding to send a lot more pixels to the end device, it makes the latest codec, HEVC, all the more required in order to have mass deployment of the 360 degree video technology.

Larry Jordan: So this is an application of the new H.265 codec, which is a way of reducing the bandwidth that the video requires?

Benoit Fouchard: Exactly.

Larry Jordan: That is very cool. What is it exactly that your company is supplying? Are you capturing the image, transmitting the image or displaying the image?

Benoit Fouchard: We are certainly not in the display business. We are showing interesting display types and we’re partnering with multiple display related companies to make our demos. What we are doing right now, like in any emerging application, even though we are a specialist in video compression, we actually have to become a systems integrator and provide end to end solutions for our customers in the broadcast industry to get this market started.

Benoit Fouchard: While we normally focus just on the compression that will enable this application, at this moment in time we get involved in the capture, we qualify camera systems, we get involved in the streaming, so we are able to assist broadcasters to experiment with this technology end to end all the way to the client application in the receiving device, be it a PC, tablet or a virtual reality headset.

Larry Jordan: Is this a theoretical breakthrough or have we seen a practical application for it?

Benoit Fouchard: Well, we’ve had several practical experiments recently with broadcasters. A few broadcasters in the US have done experiments and there are other companies that are then supporting this 360 degree video development, fortunately, otherwise there wouldn’t be a market, really; and what we can talk about in Europe, we’ve recently been covering the Independence Day of Finland, the Presidential party with a lot of VIP guests. We brought the capture of the 360 degree video right in the middle of the crowd partying, interviews and musical performers and we’ve also had an example in sports recently that was very successful. I’m not sure which one you’d like me to talk more about.

Larry Jordan: Sports is probably better, I think.

Benoit Fouchard: The sports example, this was done by the Swiss television company TPC. The Swiss are very fond of ski racing and there was a major ski racing event, the Lauberhorn race, taking place on a week day and that’s when they thought that probably over the top streaming would be a very good vehicle to bring this event to people who could not be in their living room watching TV.

Benoit Fouchard: So they covered the race with a 360 degree video capture during the whole four hours of the event, because ski races can span a long period of time, and they actually attracted 74,000 viewers over that event, and that’s a lot for Switzerland. For a regional broadcaster, by the way, because TPC is the German language part of Swiss broadcasters, I think that’s a very encouraging result.

Benoit Fouchard: We know that other broadcasters have enjoyed success recently – I think ABC News is having a lot of success with its broadcasting of traffic surveillance cameras hanging from a helicopter, and that’s also a 360 degree capture of Los Angeles traffic.

Larry Jordan: You’ve mentioned broadcasters exclusively. Is broadcast the only market, or is the technology so expensive that only broadcasters can afford it? Or can this be available to people who are not broadcasters?

Benoit Fouchard: This technology is about to become mainstream, just like GoPro’s action cameras have become mainstream. The next style of action camera that everybody carries everywhere will probably be 360 degrees, so there are a lot of applications. I could name a few. In France, the police have found that if they capture some crime scenes with 360 degree cameras, they can actually save a lot of cases of reconstitution, that the judges would not call for reconstruction or restaging of the crime scene, because they had access to the 360 degree capture and could browse at their leisure inside that video.

Benoit Fouchard: Of course, there are teaching applications, there are medical applications, but we at ATEME are just focusing on broadcast because this is where, when you try to reach thousands or millions, the efficiency of the compression of that stream will be paramount.

Larry Jordan: How are you pricing this?

Benoit Fouchard: That’s a difficult one, because it’s still fairly experimental. You’ll have a camera system and you can imagine a camera system, if you want broadcast quality, you’re going to be at broadcast camera pricing. You have a server system, which is the centerpiece, which creates the stream and that is typically comparable to a broadcast quality encoder, so it’s in the tens of thousands of dollars. And then hopefully there is no cost on the display side, except if you want to build a custom application around it, which can be quite nice.

Larry Jordan: So you’re still figuring out the whole infrastructure and pricing part of this?

Benoit Fouchard: Yes, I’m not very much at ease on the pricing side because we’ve only done a few trials so far and we’re still trying to understand how to put this in the hands of larger audiences. But at the moment we could not support too many clients in parallel.

Larry Jordan: Where can people go to see this technology?

Benoit Fouchard: The next show where we will be showing this is at CES in Las Vegas and we will have a suite there and people can see many demos there – the spherical view on tablet, on a spherical device, on a virtual reality headset and we are even going to show it as you could experience it in your living room, decoded by a set top box and you’re using the remote to change the field of view, so browse around the sphere with your TV in the living room. People are welcome to meet us at CES.

Larry Jordan: And for people who can’t make it to CES in Las Vegas, where can they go on the web to learn more?

Benoit Fouchard: We have a small website dedicated to this application. It’s livesphere.com.

Larry Jordan: That website is livesphere.com and Benoit Fouchard is the Chief Strategy Officer for ATEME. Benoit, thanks for joining us today.

Benoit Fouchard: Thank you for having me join you, Larry.

Larry Jordan: When you’re working with media, one thing is essential – your computer needs peak performance. However, when it comes to upgrading your Mac, there are so many different options to choose from that the process can be confusing. That’s why Other World Computing carries the best upgrades that let your computer performance and storage grow as your needs grow.

Larry Jordan: Since 1988, OWC has become one of the most trusted names in quality hardware and comprehensive support to the worldwide computer industry. With an extensive online catalog of Mac, iPhone and iPad enhancement products, as well as a dedicated team of knowledgeable experts providing first rate tech support, OWC has everything you need to take your current system to the next level. Whether you need to maximize your system’s memory, add blazing speed or enhance reliability, look no further than the friendly experts at OWC. Learn more by visiting macsales.com today.

Larry Jordan: One of the industry’s most respected companies, Panavision, just acquired Light Iron. Kim Snyder, the CEO and President of Panavision, and Michael Cioni, the Founder and CEO of Light Iron, both join us today to give us the inside scoop about what this means for the post production industry and their two companies. Hello, Kim, welcome.

Kim Snyder: Thank you very much. Hello.

Larry Jordan: And welcome, Michael, it’s good to have you back.

Michael Cioni: Hello, Larry.

Larry Jordan: Kim, you won the short straw today. Tell us first of all why Panavision decided to acquire Light Iron.

Kim Snyder: Well, Panavision is a company that stands for customer service. It is our mission to provide equipment and services to our customers who are producing motion pictures such that they can be very efficient and very productive on set. What we really want to do is to give them the tools so that they can feel productive and utilize these tools and not have to worry about the technology, rather use the technology to really create their vision. We’ve been all about that for many, many years but we started to think about where the business of motion pictures has been developing, particularly in the digital age.

Kim Snyder: It became very clear to us that our customers are looking for an end to end solution. They’re looking for equipment and services from capture all the way through to delivery, and that was something that became clear to us, as I said, and we got very excited about. As we started to think about how that might transpire and how we could enter into that space, there were a variety of things we considered but we had been watching Light Iron for many years, since their inception, we’d been very impressed with the company – very entrepreneurial, very creative.

Kim Snyder: Michael and his team have really set the bar high and have delivered very interesting solutions from a workflow perspective – so we began this discussion with Michael and are very pleased to have Light Iron join the family.

Larry Jordan: I can understand from Panavision’s point of view the idea of providing an end to end solution, especially because so much of media is now being captured digitally as opposed to traditionally on film. But this is new territory for Panavision. You guys specialized in production, not post. What makes you feel secure that you can pull this off?

Kim Snyder: Well, I think a lot of it relates to where production is moving in this new digital age with so many of the services that are actually moving on set and when you think about the likes of having a mobile lab available to the film makers so that they can look at their dailies on set or near set, make some color corrections. On set has really been our space for many, many years.

Kim Snyder: There is equipment at play to provide these services. We are an equipment provider. We are also a technology company. So I think all of those things will work very well and complement working with Light Iron to deliver the services that customers are looking for. It really isn’t the environment any more where people are saying, “Ok, I’m going to go somewhere, I want to get a camera somewhere, lenses somewhere else and then I’m going to go to another entity or even another place to look at my dailies and then finally somewhere else to finish.”

Kim Snyder: All of those things are moving much closer together into a place that we have experience in bringing that technology to bear, so I do feel that we have a lot of opportunity and transferrable technical experience to bring to the situation.

Larry Jordan: Michael, the very first thing I saw after I picked my jaw up off the floor when you and Panavision announced the merger, the first thing I thought was, “If Michael can’t survive as an independent, then nobody else can survive either.” Do you think this sends a message to the post production industry, that it’s just impossible for the small company to survive?

Michael Cioni: That’s very clever, Larry. Very interesting, because there is a lot of evidence that might be a takeaway from how this works, but the truth is it’s actually not a story that small businesses can’t survive at all. In fact, the amount of small businesses that are growing internationally that provide the same types of service for digital cinema that Light Iron does are actually growing at a very, very significant rate and I get a lot of feedback on my international travel that that’s the case.

Michael Cioni: It’s the larger companies that typically are the ones that are shrinking and there’s a tremendous amount of evidence that suggests that is factual as well. But the truth is, only specifically for me, and you know this, I’ve always wanted more and I’ve wanted to expand the information and the capability of some of the tools and techniques that we have. Your show and resources and circles that you and I travel in, that’s been one of my biggest missions.

Michael Cioni: The fact of the matter is Panavision has an amazing history and a very wide reach and the truth is, from a totally selfless perspective, the acquisition of Light Iron by Panavision is, for me personally, the ability and opportunity to expand the messaging that you and I both believe in to a much, much wider audience.

Larry Jordan: But at Light Iron, you’re the guy in charge and now all of a sudden you’re a piece of a much larger company. That is not a small transition for a small business owner to make.

Michael Cioni: Yes, that’s true and that’s something that I’m really excited about as well. But the truth is we’re going to focus on different sections. We’re breaking it down into very, very small pieces and we’re letting that be based on the priorities of film makers. One of the number one priorities that film makers have is to simplify workflow, and that usually is stemming from the set. The visual effects community’s doing ok, sound community’s doing ok and distribution community’s doing ok.

Michael Cioni: Right now, it’s mainly the production community and that transition into editorial. We are a small company getting coupled with a much larger one, but we’re breaking it down into small parts and you’ve got to look at it not like a Wal-Mart acquiring a small candy manufacturer. You’ve got look at it that the way Panavision runs their business is based on people and each individual project is a specific type of sales and marketing and technical group at Panavision working directly with the people that have to make the films.

Michael Cioni: When you break it down into that bite sized perspective, what Light Iron is here to do is improve the workflow for each of those people. Panavision doesn’t look at its customers as one big blob of customers. They look at each individual person as a problem and solution to the problems that they may have or challenges they may face. Light Iron’s exactly the same way and, when we break it down, it really doesn’t matter how big or small Light Iron is. In fact, most people think Light Iron’s a lot bigger than it actually is because of the messaging and the impact we have and the physical side is a lot less important than the impact that it really has on the community.

Larry Jordan: Kim, as I listened to you describe what attracted you to Light Iron and as I listen to Michael talk, it sounds like there are actually two pieces to the puzzle. Yes, Light Iron is post production and finishing, but the really attractive part of Light Iron, it seems to me, was the digital Outpost, their DIT solution. It sounds like that intersection of set with post, that transition from one to the other, is what really captured your attention. Is that a true statement?

Kim Snyder: Yes, that’s very accurate. I think that, given our experience on a set and what we want to do in the future with respect to creating very innovative and new solutions for film makers, we want to be game changing here, from an efficiency point of view and a creative point of view; and you’re absolutely right, the biggest attraction was on set, but there are a lot of things across the spectrum from end to end that we also think we will leverage with this marriage.

Larry Jordan: So what’s your plan for the Light Iron Outpost solution? Is that going to continue or are you going to subsume that into something else?

Kim Snyder: It’s absolutely going to continue and, in fact, we plan to have a Panavised Outpost and locate those in all of our offices around the world.

Michael Cioni: We think, Larry, that as workflow becomes more and more challenging because of the amount of variables that are applied to a production community, the community is interested in a more ubiquitous solution, and again that goes back to the reach that Panavision has and the fact that Outpost now has a carrier that can take it and deliver it to all these film makers.

Michael Cioni: But the fact is we’re inventive people and we are going to be reinventing this process. The next iteration of where we’re headed – and you’ll be one of the first to see it when we’re ready – is going to be in that arena where we’re innovating on a level and on a line that other people aren’t and when it comes out, everyone will have another ‘a-ha’ moment when this is ready to deploy and those are the types of things that get people really excited about working in the digital arena.

Larry Jordan: So, Michael, what happens to the existing team of people and resources that are now Light Iron?

Michael Cioni: Everything with Light Iron stays exactly the same. If you’re a Light Iron customer or a Light Iron Facebook fan, everything stays the same there. What we’re doing is basically mobilizing the Outpost and Lilypad sections into Panavision, because Panavision is not technically getting into post production. That is something that Light Iron provides and will continue to provide and it’s something that allows us to apply our research, our color science up the food chain.

Michael Cioni: Panavision and their customers become a beneficiary of Light Iron’s color science department and our back end workflow and archiving groups, but ultimately it’s going to stay exactly the same and it’s the Outpost side and the data management on set that is going to be moved inside of Panavision, where it ultimately belongs. Look, Larry, there are two ways – I’m really cutting this very black and white – to go about the future production. You’re either post that rents cameras or you’re cameras that rents post and from a far enough view, that’s basically a picture of the future and people are sort of doing it both ways.

Michael Cioni: Some people are post people that rent cameras, some are camera people that want to rent post. I believe that the latter is better. It is more conducive to the existing production community for camera rental groups and production specialists to add post production to their service provision, as opposed to post people trying to integrate the accessory world of cameras into theirs. Does that make sense?

Larry Jordan: It makes sense, but why? It sounds like you’re saying cameras are the harder of the two to learn.

Michael Cioni: Ah, interesting. I wouldn’t say cameras are the harder of the two to learn. I would say the specifics of inventory are more complex to acquire and in the post world, Larry, we have our little book of tricks but most of those books of tricks are limited or manifested in ways of software, and you need limited hardware to date, that obviously wasn’t true ten and 15 years ago, but today software tends to drive most of what we do in post to be nimble. In production, it’s hardware.

Michael Cioni: Custom accessories, different component pieces, even just changing out lenses to be more customized to a specific shot or a specific movie or commercial, those are the types of things that require inventory and that’s something post houses don’t have.

Kim Snyder: And I also think that it goes back to this topic we were discussing about wanting to be mobile and where the services are moving to and towards in terms of where they are completed, and so the idea that Panavision is working with customers from the moment of green light to say, “What are you trying to accomplish? How can we do that and assist you with your vision on the camera and lens side?” We will now be able to include, “How can we do that on the workflow side?” and do it on set, near set and even in post, should they desire to do that, so I think some of it directly relates to the movement of where the services are happening and how the customers desire that to transpire.

Larry Jordan: Kim, you use this as a transition in services, but are you also seeing a transition in technology that Panavision hopes to take advantage of?

Kim Snyder: Oh, absolutely. Light Iron has an amazing breadth of technology that it will bring to Panavision and we are also a technology company, so I think the combination is going to be very powerful. Michael will be working with us as we develop equipment to bring to the market and we will marry that up with the workflow, so I’m very excited about the technology.

Larry Jordan: So, Michael, you’re not heading out to some remote Caribbean island to put your feet up in a hammock someplace?

Michael Cioni: You wish! I wish! Boy, I would go crazy if I didn’t have a computer in my hands and a keynote to deliver. But you know what’s important for the listeners, Larry, is what this really means for them. We’ve had some good talks here and you ask some tough questions, which I like, but what does this mean for the listeners?

Michael Cioni: I believe that if you look at the birth of digital cinema in the late ‘90s, think of that as like kindergarten; and then it started to get a little more mature with something like the Viper, which had the first pseudo log approach to capture and that was like grammar school; and then we moved into, when Red came out in 2007, P2 in 2006, this was more like junior high and the cameras got a little more sophisticated.

Michael Cioni: Now the question is where are we headed? I believe there’s specific benefit to people that like Panavision and Light Iron, that’s obvious, but it sends an important message that we’re now going to get into our adult years and basically digital cinema is growing up and it’s figuring out who it is and what it needs to be and how it needs to work. It’s less of an experiment today and it’s now becoming more mature. I believe that this is a picture of what cinema is going to look like for a lot more people as we go five and ten more years into the future.

Michael Cioni: The fusion of production and post production, which we all know on an IT level is absolutely happening, but on a business level, this is one of the rare instances where it’s happening. In fact, Panavision and Light Iron are not the first camera and post production group to merge. There are very few, but we will definitely not be the last and people need to think about what the picture of the future’s going to be on that business side and then what the heck are we going to innovate?

Michael Cioni: Well, when you put two really clever people in a room and groups of people in a room and they’re able to innovate on behalf of each other, the sky’s the limit. Without these types of mergers, I think the cinema production and post production community would be delaying the maturity that is really necessary for some of the most advanced things that we all deserve to use in our storytelling.

Larry Jordan: Michael, I hope that as you get absorbed into the gigantic company that is Panavision, they do not keep you from sharing your opinions. I always learn every time you prognosticate. It’s fun to listen to. Kim, to follow up on Michael’s thought on where we’re going for the next five years, where do you see Panavision going? What’s your strategic vision? You’ve clearly integrated services, but where do you see the industry going that Panavision is responding?

Kim Snyder: That’s an excellent question. I think that we at Panavision feel it’s very important to differentiate such that we can meet the needs of our customers and we will continue to invest in equipment, particularly on the lens side – that’s historically been a very strategic part of the company and I see that continuing as we go forward – investing in things like accessories and even cameras that we can bring to the market, and then marrying that up with the services that we just talked at length about today.

Kim Snyder: I think that digital capture is going to continue to evolve. We’re seeing so many changes, not just with the technology but also in the distribution models, the business models, and I think that marrying up those types of changes with technology innovation gives a huge opportunity for Panavision to touch production in a very productive way. So what I imagine us doing is innovating together, thinking about what it means to do motion pictures in the next five to ten years with technology like the cloud etcetera, so I see lots of opportunity and Panavision wants to be on the forefront of that.

Larry Jordan: Kim, do you see the biggest challenge being technology and the biggest opportunity? Or is the biggest challenge the business model and figuring out how to pay for all of this?

Kim Snyder: Yes, I think they’re both very important and I do think they go hand in hand. I think that the business model will be difficult for those of us as vendors in the industry if we don’t have unique differentiated technology to bring to the table. If we do our job in the latter, I think that the former will take care of itself.

Michael Cioni: You know, Larry, Steve Jobs said that if you don’t cannibalize yourself, somebody else will and my interpretation of what he’s suggesting actually goes a little deeper. What does that mean? How do you self cannibalize and how does that really yield? The truth is what it forces you to do is re-innovate. By self cannibalizing, you go on this discovery journey and that discovery reveals things that would not have been revealed had you not tried to self cannibalize.

Michael Cioni: I have a pretty good idea of what cameras are going to look like in 2021. I’ve published some of those concepts and I know that a lot of the services that I currently provide will not be necessary in 2021. That’s a message that a lot of people need to swallow and it’s hard, but it’s true, and so I’m always thinking, “Well, what can I do to make sure that I’m relevant, that I have value?” and that self cannibalization approach becomes this really exciting exploratory journey in which you realize what you can do to do better, and to make more, and to create more and to succeed.

Michael Cioni: The Panavision team basically is echoing that and there are a lot of amazing traditional and longstanding business people there and then there’s a lot of fresh new ones, and I think that shows there’s a healthy blend of the history of Panavision and the future of Panavision. Light Iron, we don’t have much of a history, we’re just getting our teeth, our first teeth are coming in, but we basically have this very rapid approach to self cannibalization and I am really excited to be able to distribute some of those concepts and ideas into cameras, which I’m passionate about, and further fusing post production and production together.

Kim Snyder: And as far as the business model goes, I do believe that if you are providing something that provides value to the customer, they’re going to pay for it and so that’s sort of the part and parcel thing, where if we can differentiate and bring unique technologies to bear that support the film maker to deliver his intent, that the business model will follow suit.

Larry Jordan: Kim and Michael, this has been a fascinating conversation. Kim, for people who want to learn more about Panavision, what website can they go to?

Kim Snyder: www.panavision.com.

Larry Jordan: And Michael, does Light Iron still have a presence on the web? And if so, where can people go to keep an eye on what you’re up to?

Michael Cioni: We always will and we always have lightiron.com as well as michael.cioni.tumblr. My blog’s always been available and a great resource for information.

Larry Jordan: Kim Snyder is the CEO and President of Panavision; Michael Cioni, the Founder and CEO of Light Iron. Kim and Michael, thank you very much for joining us today.

Kim Snyder: Thank you.

Michael Cioni: Thank you, Larry.

Larry Jordan: I really liked that interview. I appreciate both Kim and Michael being so forthcoming. In fact, I want to thank all this week’s guests, starting with Felix and Julian Mack, the Co-founders of Nightjar; Benoit Fouchard, the Chief Strategy Officer at ATEME; and Panavision CEO Kim Snyder and Light Iron CEO Michael Cioni.

Larry Jordan: There’s lot of history in our industry and it’s all posted to our website at digitalproductionbuzz.com – hundreds of past shows and thousands of interviews, all searchable and available. It is always interesting to see just how far our industry has come.

Larry Jordan: You can talk with us on Twitter, @DPBuZZ, and Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Music on The Buzz is provided by Smartsound. Text transcripts are provided by Take 1 Transcription. You can email us at info@digitalproductionbuzz.com. Our producer is Cirina Catania, our engineers are Megan Paulos and Ed Goyler. On behalf of Mike Horton, my name is Larry Jordan, and thanks for listening 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

December 11, 2014

[Transcripts provided by Take 1 Transcription]

[

to listen to this show.]

HOSTS

Larry Jordan

Michael Horton

GUESTS

Yvonne Russo, Producer/Director

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

Rory McVicar, Head of Product, A-Frame

===

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 affable co-host, Mr. Mike Horton.

Mike Horton: I am so glad to be back.

Larry Jordan: It’s good to have you back.

Mike Horton: You know it’s raining outside, just a little bit…

Larry Jordan: Just a little bit.

Mike Horton: …here in Southern California. I know Northern California’s getting deluged. But…

Larry Jordan: Wait, wait, how is Northern California?

Mike Horton: It’s underwater. There are people in kayaks. Really, there are pictures. And all it is is just plugged-up storm drains, but it makes it look really cool.

Larry Jordan: Well, aren’t our new audio studios cool?

Mike Horton: Oh, Larry, I’m giddy. No, seriously, I’m just giddy.

Larry Jordan: We are very excited and we’ve been doing a lot of tweaking with the audio and, Mike, your microphone should sound a whole lot better tonight.

Mike Horton: Does it sound a lot better, Mr. Audio Guy?

Larry Jordan: Yes, because I discovered…

Mike Horton: How about if I do this? Hello, can you hear me?

Larry Jordan: That doesn’t sound so good.

Mike Horton: No, no, he shook his head and he goes no, no. He doesn’t want to work with me any more.

Larry Jordan: One of the big things we learned about Mike is that he’s taking into the wrong end of the microphone. It makes a big difference.

Mike Horton: Oh, he did, he told me the last time I wasn’t talking into the microphone, that I was talking into my computer.

Larry Jordan: Yes you were. Well, we have dialed in the mic filter and now we’ve got those rich…

Mike Horton: I’m still working on trying to have a voice like yours.

Larry Jordan: …dulcet tones that we like. By the way, thinking of rich and dulcet, Yvonne Russo, which is no blend at all but it’s the best I could come up with, Yvonne Russo is an award winning producer, director and writer who just finished ‘VIVA VERDI!’, a crowd funded documentary about life inside the retirement home that Giuseppe Verdi built…

Mike Horton: I want to see this. This sounds so cool.

Larry Jordan: …in 1896 and wait ‘til you hear her story, Mike, both about how she funded the film and the film itself.

Larry Jordan: Then Jonathan Handel of Counsel at TroyGould in Los Angeles and a regular reporter on legal and labor issues here at The Buzz has got the inside scoop on the recent Sony hack, as well as problems at ART Payroll and Netco. There’s a lot of stuff we’re going to talk about here today.

Mike Horton: For us people who are not part of the hierarchy, the Sony hack has been so much fun. I’m sorry, but it has.

Larry Jordan: And Rory McVicar is the Head of Product for A-Frame. A-Frame is a cloud video platform used by MTV, Fox, the BBC, as well as hundreds of professional media companies to organize and streamline video production. Rory joins us tonight to describe what A-Frame does and how it can benefit film makers and studios.

Larry Jordan: Just a reminder, we are 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 it possible.

Larry Jordan: Mike, we’re going to be using a special show on January 1^st. It’s going to be a live show with all of our regulars, taking a look back at 2014 and look forward to 2015.

Mike Horton: That’s going to be a lot of editing for you.

Larry Jordan: And what we’re going to do, because I know you’re going to be on the road, we’re going to call you at midnight and have you phone in a report.

Mike Horton: Yes, ok.

Larry Jordan: It’s going to be great.

Mike Horton: I’m so looking forward to that. If I slur my words, it’s because I slur my words.

Larry Jordan: You want to visit with us on Twitter, @DPBuZZ; Facebook at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Be sure to subscribe to our free weekly newsletter. We’ll be back with Yvonne Russo, learning about crowd funding, right after this.

Larry Jordan: Blackmagic 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 Blackmagic 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 Blackmagic production camera 4K also features an incredibly tempting price of $2,995. Learn more about the Blackmagic production camera 4K that is definitely priced to move, visit blackmagicdesign.com today.

Larry Jordan: Yvonne Russo is an award winning producer, director and writer who just finished ‘VIVA VERDI!’, a documentary about life inside the retirement home that Giuseppe Verdi built in Milan, Italy in 1896 specifically for musicians. But there’s a lot more to the story than just the story. Hello, Yvonne, welcome.

Yvonne Russo: Hi, how are you?

Larry Jordan: We are great. Good to hear you on the phone and good to have you with us, thank you.

Yvonne Russo: Thank you. Thanks so much.

Larry Jordan: Let’s take a step back. What first got you interested in media?

Yvonne Russo: Wow. Oh, I’ve always, always loved entertainment. Actually, being a Native American, there was always a lack of Native people on screen, and one of the things I wanted to do to change that was become a producer and actually create content that served contemporary Native America and were able to tell progressive stories; and so I thought, in order to create change, I had to be that change.

Yvonne Russo: So I started producing in my 20s and the first independent feature film I had produced was ‘Naturally Native’, which was a story about three Native sisters who were adopted by Caucasian foster parents and it was a slice of life story about their journey home. That was funded entirely by the Mashantucket Pequot tribe. I was an independent film maker at that time and I worked for a company for about six years at Red Horse Productions and eventually started to go into network television and it’s evolved since then.

Yvonne Russo: I have a career that spans 18 years now, so I’ve done a lot, from indie features all through series. I don’t know, how much time do you have?

Larry Jordan: Well, you’ve been doing it for long enough that…

Mike Horton: Enough time.

Larry Jordan: …we’re not going to go through your entire resume, that’s for sure.

Yvonne Russo: I know.

Larry Jordan: Tell us about this latest ‘VIVA VERDI!’ film. What was the genesis of the idea?

Yvonne Russo: It’s so exciting. In 2010, I was working for National Geographic and I was on assignment in Milan, working on a story called ‘Milan: The Big Heart’, and it was really about the Milanesi and the places that they go to where the non-tourists go and so it’s like where they hang out, where they shop, all this stuff.

Yvonne Russo: I was following a photographer and we were creating an episode out of this and he said, “On the list, we are going to this retirement home,” and I remember saying, “Retirement home? That’s not going to make viable television. What’s up with this retirement home?” and he said, “No, you don’t understand. It’s a very famous retirement home that Giuseppe Verdi built and the residents that live there are renowned opera stars from the past and we’ve got to go check it out.”

Yvonne Russo: So I was a little skeptical, but I said, “Ok, let’s go.” We went and the moment I saw this place, I was just blown away. Giuseppe Verdi willed his entire fortune – can you imagine? – to build this home in Milan for musicians and artists who did not have any money for retirement. They didn’t have pensions, they didn’t have anything and he said that this was one of the biggest gifts that he could give, because he just wanted people to continue with the craft of music and to keep creating, no matter what their age is and money should not stop them. He didn’t allow the house to become open to the public until after he had passed away, because he didn’t want the acclaim; and to me, that was like, wow, that was truly amazing.

Yvonne Russo: Fast forward to when I was there, you walk in and this mansion, it’s a neo-Gothic style, it’s very beautiful, it’s vast but all you do is you hear music. You hear these performers just singing away, teaching, playing piano. There’s this livelihood and this vibrancy and I was like, “Wow! This is just amazing. Who are these people who live here?”

Yvonne Russo: So we went through the house and we were taking pictures and I learned that a lot of the residents are still teaching a young generation of opera stars and opera singers that come from around the world, young students, whether they want to learn how to play piano or they want to sing in theater or whatever it is, the residents are teaching them and I was really blown away by it. They also have music therapy.

Yvonne Russo: The director of the house, his name is Ferdinando Dani and is in charge of implementing music therapy. So that way, when you’re an elder and you’re in your 90s, you still want to play music and you want to be sharp but maybe you’re not as sharp as you were before, so what he does is every day he has them in these classes and it touched my heart on such a profound level that, at that moment, I just said, “Some day I want to come back and I want to tell this story independently.”

Yvonne Russo: So that was in 2010. After that, I was working for networks, I was working for the Smithsonian Channel for a couple of years and Casa Verdi was still in my head. I could not get it out of my head and I said, “You know what?” I was speaking to myself and I said, “I just have to go. I just have to go and get the permission to do this.” So when we were wrapping up the show, my editor was working on the final cut, and I had a down week and I traveled to Milan to go and ask permission from the Board of Directors to see if I could tell the story, and also be a fly on the wall and really watch the residents on my own time and absorb the vastness of this place.

Yvonne Russo: I got the approval and came back to the States and a year later I just said, “Ok, I have got to do this,” and I knew that I needed to raise the money independently and that’s when I launched the Indiegogo campaign to kick start things.

Larry Jordan: Now, wait, wait, hold it, hold it, hold it. Take a breath. It’s a fascinating story.

Yvonne Russo: I can talk a lot.

Mike Horton: It sounds like a wonderful story.

Larry Jordan: It’s a fascinating story, but why did you decide to crowd fund it? Verdi is a famous name, Milan’s a famous city. Surely you could have got funding through more traditional sources?

Yvonne Russo: Yes, well, we’re still in process. This is actually the second phase of production. We’re still going to be shooting all of 2015 as well. I plan on going out twice more. Firstly, these residents are dying. One minute they’re ok and then six months later somebody’s really sick or somebody has passed.

Yvonne Russo: As you know, it takes a while to raise money and I just felt like I needed to just get there as soon as possible, shoot the way that I want to shoot it as a director and really spend the time there. Now I’ll cut this into maybe a half hour, use that as my tool to move forward and to raise more money so we can go out again. It’s a documentary, so we’re in process right now. We’re in production.

Larry Jordan: So the goal for the crowd funding was not to fund the entire project, but just to fund a phase of it?

Yvonne Russo: Mhmm, yes.

Larry Jordan: And what was your financial goal for the crowd funding?

Yvonne Russo: The financial goal was 47,000 and I ended up raising that, but on Indiegogo it says 29,000. However, during my process, I found an investor who came on board who said he could either fund it through Indiegogo or separately outside of Indiegogo and I decided to have him fund it outside of Indiegogo, so that way all the fees weren’t taken out so I had a little more money. The campaign ended and we raised 29,000 and then the rest separately.

Mike Horton: Yes, for those who do not know the difference between Indiegogo and Kickstarter, if you set 47,000 as your goal and you don’t meet that goal, then it’s all over with Kickstarter. With Indiegogo, you get to keep that $29,000, plus obviously what this wonderful philanthropist has contributed to your story.

Yvonne Russo: Yes, yes, and his name is Ron Simons of SimonSays Entertainment. He’s our Executive Producer, which is very exciting.

Mike Horton: Super.

Larry Jordan: Now, let’s focus on the crowd funding aspect. You raised $29,000. How much effort was it to raise? How much money came in at the end? Walk me through the whole…

Mike Horton: 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Yvonne Russo: Oh, you’ve done this. Have you done this?

Mike Horton: No. Well, yes I have, and it’s so hard. It is so hard and it’s so stressful and, yes, I have done it and was I successful? No. It was so hard, so I understand what you went through. You probably lost five years of your life and it’s really hard.

Yvonne Russo: It is the most humbling experience.

Mike Horton: Yes.

Larry Jordan: Now, tell me why.

Yvonne Russo: I planned. I went to the seminars, I went to Kickstarter seminars, the Season Spark seminar, Indiegogo’s, I really did my research and I thought, “Ok, I’m buttoned up. I have everything put together.” I created extensive lists of friends and family and all the social capital throughout my career, who do I know. It’s everybody, it’s all your organizations. I had to create a list.

Yvonne Russo: At the time, my producing partner – and I say at the time because the Indiegogo thing just really threw her off. She was like, “I can’t do this,” – she’s just a friend now. But it was so difficult. We put our lists together and we thought, “Ok, let’s go ahead and do this,” but we treated it almost like a film. You have to have so much development way ahead of time, because once you launch, there you go.

Yvonne Russo: You start with your friends, “Hi, I’m raising money,” ok, and then they’ll take a look at it and then another day passes, nobody’s contributed or maybe they have, and then you have to go to your broader circles, and your larger fish pools of people and you’re always asking for money. It got to the point where I actually printed out flyers and stood in front of the Metropolitan Opera…

Mike Horton: Oh my gosh!

Yvonne Russo: …passing out flyers about the campaign. I went to a newspaper called … which is an Italian/American newspaper, and asked them if they would please write something about our campaign to help us raise money, because we had to make our deadline.

Yvonne Russo: We sent out various releases to different press organizations, bloggers and journalists and people would say that they would write something and they didn’t come through or they did come through. It was just hard. It was just really hard and I’m a Sundance Fellow, so Sundance said, “Ok, well, we’ll support you but we have an agreement with Kickstarter, so we can’t say Indiegogo, but we’ll say our Fellow Yvonne Russo has her film out, support her campaign.” They have to be vague.

Mike Horton: Did you find one thing worked better than everything to get you to the top, to your goal?

Yvonne Russo: Yes, letters. Personal letters.

Mike Horton: Really?

Yvonne Russo: That’s all. Yes, just personal letters.

Mike Horton: Great idea. Actually handwritten letters or emails?

Yvonne Russo: No, emails, but really personalized emails, humbly asking for contributions and I think that’s the way that we really received most of our funding because those contributions were larger amounts and they came from people who really understood the project and knew me personally in my career. I think it was really the letter, just the personal touch.

Yvonne Russo: After a while, people just get sick of hearing about it. That’s the truth, they don’t want any more emails coming in. It’s like, “I don’t need a gift. Here, here’s your money, go away,” so it’s tough. I also recommend a pre-launch. What we did is also a soft launch. What we decided to do was tell our friends and family, we asked them to contribute, they said they would and we estimated an amount of money that we would have the day we launched for the public.

Yvonne Russo: We said, “Can you please contribute your money on a Sunday, then we’re going to go ahead and launch to the public on the Monday,” so then that way we weren’t starting at zero and at least there was something in the canteen account. We had to be so creative and, a long story short, we met our goal and it was in the end very exciting.

Larry Jordan: A couple of questions, first coming in from the live chat. Thomas wants to know what you would do differently for crowd funding, and clearly starting a day earlier for family is one thing. Has something else come to mind? And then I’ve got a second question to follow up, but go ahead. What would you do differently?

Yvonne Russo: I would have a full time team on board. Honestly, a full time team because it’s so hard. The moment that you take your finger off the keyboard and you don’t tell people what’s going on, your numbers will not increase. Somebody has to be at it 24/7, all the time. So I would literally hire people, I would have a full staff, depending on how much money, and I would also try to get foundations or organizations or companies that would tie into your campaign earlier on and try to lock them in and engage them early, so that way, when you do launch, you have their contributions during the campaign.

Mike Horton: Did you use video at all in your Indiegogo page? Or was it just pretty much text?

Yvonne Russo: Yes.

Mike Horton: Ok, good.

Yvonne Russo: No, video. You have to use video.

Mike Horton: Yes, yes.

Yvonne Russo: And have different versions too.

Larry Jordan: Eric in our live chat’s asking whether or not you used the PBS Development channel. It sounds like that would be a good fit, he says. Have you considered that?

Mike Horton: The what?

Yvonne Russo: No. No, I haven’t.

Larry Jordan: PBS has a Development channel.

Mike Horton: It does?

Larry Jordan: He suggests you consider that.

Yvonne Russo: I didn’t know that.

Mike Horton: I didn’t know that.

Yvonne Russo: Cool. Thank you.

Mike Horton: Eric, give us a link.

Larry Jordan: Yes.

Yvonne Russo: Yes, Eric.

Larry Jordan: Don’t just sit there typing, Eric. Be useful.

Mike Horton: Come on, Eric, give us a link.

Yvonne Russo: Email me, Eric. Can you email me?

Larry Jordan: I’ll pass it on as soon as he types it into the chat. He’s typing now.

Yvonne Russo: Excellent.

Larry Jordan: Given how much work, you’ve spent full time for what seems like forever to raise $29,000, which is a drop in the bucket for most films. Would you ever use crowd funding again?

Yvonne Russo: No.

Mike Horton: Only if you’ve got a staff.

Yvonne Russo: No, I don’t think so, unless I had a very, very large team. We have lots of Facebook friends and lots of LinkedIn friends and, again, lots of social capital, but I don’t know that it’s really the thing for me.

Mike Horton: Like you said, it’s so humbling to beg for money all the time.

Yvonne Russo: It’s humbling.

Larry Jordan: And not get the money, that’s even worse.

Mike Horton: And not get the money, yes. But you got it.

Yvonne Russo: I got it.

Mike Horton: You got it and you did it, so wonderful for you.

Yvonne Russo: Oh yes.

Larry Jordan: So you’re going to be shooting for 2015. What are you shooting for as a release date? Are Mike and I going to see this before we retire?

 Yvonne Russo: Yes, actually. Probably the end of 2016. It’s still some time because I want to follow a couple of storylines and that’s just going to take some time as these characters evolve in real life. We plan to shoot in April, in the spring.

Larry Jordan: Stop a second. Stop, stop, stop, stop. Here’s the link – www.pbs.org/pov/filmmakers/resources-4-filmmakers.php.

Mike Horton: Or just Google PBS Development channel.

Larry Jordan: Yes, PBS Development channel at pbs.org and quickly, Yvonne, before I run out of time, what’s the website for the film?

Yvonne Russo: Vivaverdithefilm.com.

Larry Jordan: That’s vivaverdithefilm.com and Yvonne Russo is the producer and director of it. Yvonne, thanks for joining us today.

Mike Horton: Yes, great story and I’m looking forward to it.

Larry Jordan: We wish you great success.

Yvonne Russo: Thank you.

Larry Jordan: Bye bye.

Yvonne Russo: Ah, thank you so much. Bye bye.

Larry Jordan: Finding the perfect royalty free image or video for your creative project can be a crucial step in the film making process and, whether it’s for your website, publication or video segment, the experts at shutterstock.com can help you choose from over two million royalty free HD and 4K stock video clips, including time lapses, aerials, green screens and model released clips.

Larry Jordan: Sourcing over 12,000 brand new video clips each week, Shutterstock consistently offers the highest quality stills and video clips from professional film makers. Plus Shutterstock provides sophisticated search engine tools so you can search and drill down by category, clip resolution, contributor name and more. Also, use their great no risk try-before-you-buy option so you can see how their clips will look in your project before making a single purchase.

Larry Jordan: Try Shutterstock today – sign up for a free account. No credit card is needed and, as an added bonus to you, enter promo code BUZZ2014 before December 31^st to receive 25 percent off any footage package. Discover shutterstock.com.

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. Hello, Jonathan, welcome back.

Jonathan Handel: Well, it’s a pleasure to be back.

Mike Horton: Hi, Jonathan.

Larry Jordan: It’s a pleasure to hear you back, so there.

Mike Horton: We’ve got to have Jonathan come out here.

Larry Jordan: Oh, we’ve got to show him the massive gold lamé studio that we’ve got.

Mike Horton: Oh, it’s awesome. Drive the Porsche out here, Jonathan, you’ll love it.

Larry Jordan: What’s left of the Porsche.

Mike Horton: Yes, that’s right.

Jonathan Handel: The Porsche was a radio controlled car. I don’t think it’s street legal.

Larry Jordan: I don’t know, you could find a reason.

Mike Horton: What car does Jonathan drive? Lexus?

Larry Jordan: Jonathan drives a used Volkswagen Beetle.

Mike Horton: A Bentley?

Jonathan Handel: No! It’s a Mercedes SLK, bright yellow sports car.

Mike Horton: I knew it!

Larry Jordan: See?

Mike Horton: It’s a Mercedes, I knew it.

Larry Jordan: He’s a lawyer.

Jonathan Handel: It is, but it’s a convertible.

Mike Horton: Oh!

Larry Jordan: That’s because his hair likes flying back.

Mike Horton: I know it does, because Jonathan has a lot of hair.

Larry Jordan: It does. It’s like that mane of… anyway, Jonathan, there’s only…

Jonathan Handel: Are we on the air?

Mike Horton: Yes.

Larry Jordan: Yes we are, of course. There’s a lot going on in…

Mike Horton: This is called entertainment.

Larry Jordan: Mike, shut up.

Mike Horton: All right, go ahead.

Larry Jordan: There’s a lot going on in the industry right now. I want to start with the massive data hack at Sony. What’s the latest?

Mike Horton: It’s fun.

Jonathan Handel: Fun’s not the word.

Mike Horton: Yes, well, it is for us. Not for Sony.

Jonathan Handel: Not for Sony, no, not for Sony.

Mike Horton: And the employees, obviously.

Jonathan Handel: And the employees. The news today was medical records were released.

Mike Horton: Oh my goodness.

Larry Jordan: Oh no.

Jonathan Handel: So, yes, not fun for anyone. I think it was about three dozen employees’ medical records, so people who had cancer and this and that. This is a disaster for Sony. It really just keeps going on and on and supposedly the amount of data that was lost was 100 terabytes or something and we’ve just seen snippets of it.

Mike Horton: Jonathan, why are trades reprinting this stuff?

Jonathan Handel: It’s interesting. Variety actually just did sort of an opinion piece on exactly that today that I haven’t had a chance to read. We’re the press. You ask why the New York Times printed the Pentagon papers, why did people print some of the Snowden papers and stuff. It’s our obligation to print information.

Jonathan Handel: Now, people are not printing the names of employees or their medical records or printing people’s social security numbers, but stuff like salaries of the top executives and the email correspondence between some of the executives where they were making racist remarks about President Obama…

Mike Horton: Well, yes, that brings up the question why are they reprinting the emails between Scott Rudin and Amy Pascal? What news is that?

Jonathan Handel: That’s a bit of a hard one. I’m not sure I want to be in the position of trying to answer that question, frankly.

Mike Horton: Well, that’s not what we’re talking about, but I just thought I’d throw it at you before you get here with your Mercedes.

Larry Jordan: What’s Sony’s legal and practical exposure? If 100 terabytes of data has been stolen, that’s got to leave them massively exposed.

Jonathan Handel: Yes. So far we’ve got 75,000 social security numbers, I think, the health information, so to start with you’ve got exposure to employees, former employees and movie stars and non-star actors and so forth whose social security numbers and in some cases medical information have been revealed. The question is did Sony take the proper steps to secure this data?

Jonathan Handel: Now, there’s a question that not enough people are raising, it seems to me, or that no-one, I haven’t heard anyone other than myself phrase, which is I think that some of the finger here has to be pointed in the direction of the computer industry. They had a file, for example, I guess an Excel spreadsheet or something, of some information and the password was password. First of all, why is someone using that as their password?

Jonathan Handel: But secondly, who exactly is the computer programmer that programmed an encryption and password system that allows people to put in an idiotic password like that? Second question – why isn’t every single computer keyboard sold today sold with a fingerprint scanner so that passwords and encryption and so forth can be biometric and not your dog’s name plus your zip code.

Jonathan Handel: We rely on technology to such a degree that our reliance has blasted way past our prudence and sensible caution when it comes to cyber security and I think some of that lays at the feet of the technology industry.

Mike Horton: Damn, that’s my password, is my dog’s name and zip code.

Larry Jordan: From a certain point of view, if you’re selling a new piece of equipment – I just bought a bunch of new network gear – the user name is admin, the password is password. So the very first time you log in, you don’t have to have some bizarre password because you just installed it, you don’t know how it works. The fault is not necessarily with the manufacturer, the fault is the guys, once they set it up, didn’t change the password.

Jonathan Handel: I don’t agree. Some of the routers that get sold today have stickers on them and the SSID for the wifi network is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and the password is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and it’s not admin and password, it’s whatever is on that sticker and so if you’re like the typical user who doesn’t change that stuff, you’re at least pretty darn secure because it’s not admin and then password, and it shouldn’t be.

Jonathan Handel: Likewise, the computer keyboard question, the fingerprint scanners. The computer industry is certainly happy to give us things that we don’t already know that we need, and in some cases find that we like them and that they’re useful features for us. Well, this is something that we all should know that we need and it really starts to become a little bit like the car industry not giving us seatbelts for decades because, well, consumers might not like the extra cost and this and that. It starts to run a little sour in the taste, it seems to me.

Larry Jordan: Before we run out of time, thinking of hacked websites, ART Payroll was hacked in October.

Mike Horton: I did not know that.

Larry Jordan: But the hacking wasn’t announced ‘til last week. What’s the latest about this?

Jonathan Handel: Well, that’s right, this is one of the payroll companies that producers use primarily for union workers, for actors and crew members and so forth.

Mike Horton: And I get checks from them.

Jonathan Handel: You get checks from them? Well, hopefully you got an email from them about the hack.

Mike Horton: I have not.

Jonathan Handel: Really?

Mike Horton: No, not yet. Unless my wife hasn’t told me, because she looks at the mail, but I have not had that email or that mail.

Jonathan Handel: That’s surprising, because that letter actually went out a week ago or so.

Mike Horton: No, I’m very familiar with that payroll service because I have residuals almost every week.

Jonathan Handel: I would contact them because they say that they’ve notified affected people. Unless they have some reason to know for sure that your data wasn’t affected, which I don’t know. But it points out that this is not just a Sony problem or a Target problem or a JP Morgan Chase problem. It’s something that can affect much smaller companies as well.

Mike Horton: I think you know, because you’ve talked to security people, anything can be hacked. Anything. Anything.

Jonathan Handel: Sure, but the question is putting up enough walls so that you’re not as attractive a target as my password is password and let’s just go rampaging through and see how many terabytes of data we can collect.

Mike Horton: Yes.

Jonathan Handel: You’re right, everything can be hacked. Look at Snowden, for example. I happen to think that a lot of what he did is patriotic and we ought to know about the NSA’s programs, but the interesting thing from the hacking perspective is here’s this guy who wasn’t even an NSA employee, he was a contractor…

Larry Jordan: Very quick, very quick.

Jonathan Handel: He sat in Hawaii and he managed to vacuum up data from all around the NSA and those are the computer security people.

Larry Jordan: And, Jonathan, your blog is?

Jonathan Handel: My website, actually, is at jhandel.com and there is a blog there as well.

Mike Horton: Yes, we ought to talk about this more.

Larry Jordan: And Jonathan Handel is the jhandel himself and, Jonathan, we will have you back because there’s still more stuff we can talk about.

Mike Horton: Yes, thanks so much for your insight.

Larry Jordan: Thanks for joining us today.

Jonathan Handel: Thanks a lot, guys. Bye bye.

Larry Jordan: When you’re working with media, one thing is essential – your computer needs peak performance. However, when it comes to upgrading your Mac, there are so many different options to choose from that the process can be confusing. That’s why Other World Computing carries the best upgrades that let your computer performance and storage grow as your needs grow. Since 1988, OWC has become one of the most trusted names in quality hardware and comprehensive support to the worldwide computer industry.

Larry Jordan: With an extensive online catalog of Mac, iPhone and iPad enhancement products, as well as a dedicated team of knowledgeable experts providing first rate tech support, OWC has everything you need to take your current system to the next level. Whether you need to maximize your system’s memory, add blazing speed or enhance reliability, look no further than the friendly experts at OWC. Learn more by visiting macsales.com today.

Larry Jordan: Rory McVicar is Head of Product at London based A-Frame, which is a cloud video platform used by MTV, Fox, the BBC and many others. We use it to organize and streamline video production and, as A-Frame’s principal product expert, Rory is responsible for developing new workflows and new features. Prior to joining A-Frame, Rory worked as both an offline editor and a freelance videographer, so he knows media. Hello, Rory, welcome.

Rory McVicar: Hello, Larry, how are you doing?

Larry Jordan: Well, I’m really glad to be talking to London because it’s raining on the day we’re recording this interview and it’s nice to hear somebody that knows how to deal with rain, because I’m having a hard time coping.

Rory McVicar: I think that’s very likely that your involvement with London today has resulted in the weather surrounding us. It’s got that effect.

Larry Jordan: Rory, let’s start with the most obvious question first, what does A-Frame do?

Rory McVicar: A-Frame is an innovative cloud platform for storing, managing and making use of professional video. So it provides a platform into which disparate stakeholders can upload content, it then provides a layer of visibility to that content that has kind of hitherto been unknown and has allowed users to collaborate around that visibility and maximize the value of the content that they’re working with.

Larry Jordan: I’ve just heard you describe it, but I’m not completely sure I understand what it is that you do. Where do you fit into the production process? Are you a stock footage company or are we moving files around during the editing process or distribution, like Amazon S3? Where is A-Frame?

Rory McVicar: That’s a really good question, Larry, and I think the answer – although I may sound like I’m being difficult, I promise you I’m not – is in all of those places. We are used by different customers in different parts of an asset life cycle, we’re used in different parts of the workflow, but to give you a couple of concrete examples, we do provide viewable storage, work in progress storage for productions that are going into an edit, so we provide a lot of our customers with the facility to look at the rushes that they’ve acquired from a shoot and build a story about an edit before they actually go into the suite.

Rory McVicar: That’s one concrete example; another is the broadcast use case that our customer Fox Sports 1 have adopted, which is many, many dots on the map representative of stringers needing to submit content. A-Frame provides a central repository into which those stringers can deliver their content and then we have transcode capabilities to homogenize all of those many, many different formats into their standard playout go to air codec which they download from, so it creates a kind of funnel for delivery.

Rory McVicar: But that’s just a couple of workflow examples. The actual capabilities that are included in the A-Frame platform are transcode, multi-format upload, high speed file transfer and collaboration tools, which really all revolve around metadata, and that is to say building intelligence around assets so you can find them more quickly, so that you can view them and so that you can access them and pull them down into your edits or whatever environment they move onto next.

Larry Jordan: It sounds like you’re more than just cloud storage. You’re actually processing the media once it comes up to your facility.

Rory McVicar: That’s absolutely right. Whether it’s transcoding a group of rushes that are presented in GoPro or in 5D or in Canon XF305 all into a common format such as DNX HD, for example, we provide a unique solution in terms of being able to simplify what is increasingly becoming a very complex range of acquisition formats.

Rory McVicar: If you factor in all of the different codecs, your P2 cards, your XDCAM disks, all of these things that make video hard to deal with, we keep that and we hide it from the user by throwing it on the back end. What we present on the front end is an H.264 proxy which allows users to sit back and watch video, review it, add comments to it, create log notes against it, build sync pools out of it or create collection from shared editorial concepts and then take that information that they’ve collaborated around and transport it out, whether that’s to Avid, to Final Cut Pro, to Quantel systems or to Adobe Premiere.

Larry Jordan: Well, I can see the advantage of an H.264 proxy file, because it’s tiny. But the big problem I’ve got with starting to get involved with camera masters is that those files can be really big. I mean, if you’re shooting with an Arri Alexa and you’re shooting ProRes 4 by 4 HQ or SQ, you’ve got a real problem on your hands getting that stuff uploaded; and worse, you’re across the pond and bandwidth is often limited as we transfer across the ocean. How do we deal with the bandwidth issues?

Rory McVicar: That’s a great point and it’s a promising consideration, how we build our workflow. There are a couple of different answers to that question. One revolves around a network of upload partners that we have built relationships with around the States. So you can drop off your camera rushes at these post facilities and centers of video communities and they have fast connectivity and are trained in uploading into A-Frame. That’s one piece of the answer here.

Rory McVicar: The second is that we increasingly work with camera manufacturers in partnership to build that proxy first workflows. The latest range of cameras from Sony, from Panasonic, from Canon and also very many off board encoding units will create edit ready proxy material which can be pointed towards an A-Frame project so that as soon as the content’s acquired, it’s pretty much visible to the rest of the project team and, as we all know, production is becoming more and more disparate and more and more global in its nature.

Larry Jordan: Before I get too excited, I was looking over your client list. You’ve got MTV, we’ve got Fox, we’ve got the BBC and none of these are small companies. Are your services priced so an independent producer should even consider it? Or is this really a game for the deep pockets?

Rory McVicar: I think it’s fair to say we’ve got a great foothold in the enterprise broadcast market, but we actually come out of a post production and, in fact, a production background, so our CEO, David Peto, started out as a producer.

Rory McVicar: He then became the owner and co-founder of the UK’s first all Final Cut Pro HD post facility unit and it was the problems that he witnessed working at that facility specific to the growing complexity around file acquisition, disparate locations, how people maximize the value of content that they’ve sweated blood, sweat and tears over a period of months and seeing that content go and live on a hard drive in a cupboard, which was the initial provocation for the idea, really, of what A-Frame could be. We have a large client roster of independent production companies and people making various different types of programming.

Larry Jordan: Give me a couple of examples of where A-Frame would fit into, say, an independent producer’s workflow. Show me how I could use your services.

Rory McVicar: Yes, absolutely. Let’s take digital dailies as a starting point. I think that might be pertinent to a lot of your listeners. If we speak about A-Frame for digital dailies, a good customer case study is a facility, 1619, based out in the States. They use A-Frame pretty much across the board for their productions as a digital daily service and one of the most recent high profile productions that came to fruition after using A-Frame was Scott Rudin Production’s Rosewater. So all of the content that was being generated on set was collapsed down into a common codec by DIT, so it was a lightweight H.264 to start with on being uploaded.

Rory McVicar: It was then uploaded into a secure project space, at which point it was instantly accessible to the 20 or so people who resided on the West Coast of the United States, the East Coast of the United States and London. It was accessible for them to view, to add their comments and to also be a part of what is essentially becoming a pre-edit process.

Rory McVicar: One thing we’re seeing is the traditional handoff between production and post is shrinking because there is a need to get content rationalized before you can begin to tell a story. We know with file based workflows and the rise of tapeless, people are shooting a lot more content than ever before. You need to have a better idea now about the story you’re going to tell when you’re moving into the edit suite than perhaps you did when you were watching the clock on tape or even film. So that’s one use case.

Rory McVicar: We could also take a look at, for instance, the global file distribution that was experienced. Fox Sports 1 use A-Frame in a use case which involves the submission of stringer content, as I mentioned previously, but one really interesting thing that came out of Fox Sports 1’s use of A-Frame revolves around the international partners that they have to share content with, and what we found was that for every one asset that was uploaded to A-Frame, to the secure project space which was shared between Fox Sports in Pico and Fox Sports in Brazil and Fox Sports in Australia and Italian partners and so on and so forth, each asset was downloaded and went to air nine times.

Larry Jordan: What I’m hearing as you give me these examples is that you service a middle man to take assets which are generated in one spot and sharing them with media creators and producers and everybody else around the world. So an ideal use case for your service is people who are located in more than one location that need timely access to production video. Is that a true statement?

Rory McVicar: I think that’s certainly fair. I think where A-Frame’s value can be maximized is when you have multiple disparate stakeholders spread across the world. But the interesting point is that it provides a central access.

Rory McVicar: Traditionally, file sharing is point to point, but because A-Frame captures the video in the middle, makes sure it stores the original video in exactly the format it was presented in and creates an H.264 proxy, you can begin to build out a kind of self serve model for your partners and for the different elements of your internal organization who need access to this content perhaps at different times of the day, when time zones come into factor, and sometimes they’re right up against a deadline and need to get access as quickly as possible. These are some of the common advantages that we’ve seen in using the service in larger organizations.

Larry Jordan: But the key to this is security and I am not a fan of the cloud, because every day we turn around and some major new site – I mean, just last week Sony was hacked. How do we make sure that assets which we’re not ready to release to the public stay secure?

Rory McVicar: That’s a very fair point and it’s one of the central concerns of A-Frame engineering here in London. What I can say to try and address your concerns is when you upload your content to A-Frame, where is it going? Well, it’s actually going to what we call A-Frame’s broadcast cloud. These are servers owned and operated by A-Frame which reside in top tier data centers in New York, Los Angeles and London.

Rory McVicar: We create three copies of any file uploaded to the system and these servers sit behind 2,048 bit RSA encryption key controlled access, they are locked in cages, they’re manned 24/7. We actively continuously monitor and protect our services from attack vectors such as SQL injection and cross site scripting. When you’re working in the browser, the level of SSL certification is the same as your online banking applications.

Rory McVicar: So it’s one of the primary concerns of all that we do here at A-Frame, to create a secure environment for people to upload their content to, and that’s led to FACT accreditation over here in the UK, which is the equivalent of the MPAA in the States, and we are aligned to the best practices set out by the MPAA in the United States as well.

Larry Jordan: Well, now that I’ve got a really good idea of what A-Frame does and where it fits into the whole production and post process, you’re Head of Product, which means you’ve got to come up with something new. So what’s new?

Rory McVicar: So what’s new? It’s a good question. We’ve just been demonstrating our A-Frame full 2014 release at CCW in New York and we’ve made a number of different enhancements to the existing product. One of the best things about using a SAS product like A-Frame, a software as a service product, is that new functionality becomes available to you without having to outlay a massive cost in either hardware or on premises installation.

Rory McVicar: The enhancements that we make to the product get pushed to users automatically and, as part of the A-Frame full release, we are speaking about automated media movement using a desktop transfer agent so that I can set up a very simple workflow which will take a file from a watch folder on my desktop, upload it into a secure project space on A-Frame, transcode it into the format my collaborator requires and push that content to my collaborator on the other side of the world, all without me having to do anything else. So really simple workflow management using an interface that’s been designed to be training light and on boarding light.

Rory McVicar: We’ve also improved the aspects of control around the project and the count space. We’ve introduced a metrics dashboard, which brings together all of the business intelligence generated from finally getting multiple people working together in one space because, of course, one of the principle advantages of the cloud is that it can break down silos. Well, once you’ve broken down silos, there’s a lot of intelligence that can be gained from seeing how people work together in their different environments.

Rory McVicar: We’ve also focused on building out further integrations, not just with camera manufacturers like Sony, Panasonic and Canon, but also with editing tools and post production tools like Adobe Prelude, where we’ll take in the XMP metadata embedded in any content that’s been logged or rough cut and bring that in along with the media and present it in IUI so that people can search against that, add their own comments and push the amalgam of all of these different strands of intelligence into their edit environment, wherever that may be.

Larry Jordan: I was just reflecting, with all these new services you’ve got, how do you price your services?

Rory McVicar: A-Frame is costed on a subscription model as a software as a service product and essentially the three vectors which generate the price that a company will pay are the amount of concurrent users that are going to be occupying a seat within the account, the amount of storage – remember, there’s no limits on the file size you can upload, there’s no cost to upload for bandwidth, or download – and also which features out of a comprehensive tool set the user will require. So costing is very much built on a bespoke conversation and consultative model.

Larry Jordan: Are we talking hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of dollars a month for a relatively small production?

Rory McVicar: For a relatively small production, we’re speaking about thousands.

Larry Jordan: Ok, and the other big issue for a lot of independents is they’re project based. They want to be able to subscribe for the period of time that they’re putting the program together but they don’t need to have an annual or ongoing subscription. Do you have month by month subscriptions?

Rory McVicar: We do, although we’re finding that more and more the different pockets of an organization that may have an overarching IT department or operations department are seeing value in actually just gathering together their different teams and providing this service as an ongoing catch-all for different creative endeavors or different projects that are ongoing throughout the year.

Larry Jordan: Rory, A-Frame is based in London. If a US producer wants to use your services, where can they go?

Rory McVicar: While the A-Frame engineering team and the media sales teams are based in London, we also have an office in Boston and also employees working in New York and in Phoenix. So we’ve got quite a reach across the States, actually, covering both sides of the United States. While we are based in London, it’s more and more so becoming equally represented on your side of the pond.

Larry Jordan: But you also have data centers and, if I remember correctly, you’ve got a data center in LA and in New York and London, so even when you’re transferring data, it’s not necessarily going to your London data center.

Rory McVicar: Oh, absolutely right. One of the principle advantages of being able to choose where your media lives, as you can do with A-Frame and as you can’t do with other cloud providers, is that you can ensure that your media stays within the United States if you want to; or, if you’re based in Europe, you could ensure that your media stayed in the London data center.

Rory McVicar: It’s an option that you choose at the point of project creation and then all of your media, when the disaster recovery backup is made, is pushed to its twin location which, in the case of New York and Los Angeles, they backup to each other so you can be sure that your content’s staying within the United States, if that’s a consideration in your particular production.

Larry Jordan: How about producers in other countries outside the North American area?

Rory McVicar: We’re actually seeing a lot of use across different areas of the globe, most notably in Australia, where nine networks are using us. In these cases, they’re using the A-Frame broadcast cloud as it’s laid out and it’s performing absolutely sufficiently for these users’ needs.

Larry Jordan: And for people who want more information about the services and A-Frame itself, where can they go on the web?

Rory McVicar: The best place to go is aframe.com, where you’ll find a blog and you’ll also find White Papers and further information around the product.

Larry Jordan: That’s aframe.com and Rory McVicar is the Head of Product for London based A-Frame and, Rory, thanks for joining us today.

Rory McVicar: Thank you, Larry.

Larry Jordan: You know, Mike, it’s been an interesting show. We’ve had a pretty wide range of guests, starting with crowd funding; and then, you know, the more you think about this Sony thing, the more both sad and embarrassing it gets.

Mike Horton: Yes, we’ve got to bring him back and talk a little bit more about this.

Larry Jordan: Yes.

Mike Horton: I know I’m making light of this whole thing, because a lot of people are having fun with it, including me, but it’s a serious situation.

Larry Jordan: And it’s serious because, I mean, look at what happened with ART. That has the potential to affect you directly.

Mike Horton: Well, the moment I got on the internet, I threw privacy out the window. No, seriously. That’s it. Everybody knows where I am. I know your phone number, I know your social security number. I know everything about you, Larry. Everything.

Larry Jordan: I know, I know, but…

Mike Horton: Everything.

Larry Jordan: …try not to write checks on the account, would you? Because there’s…

Mike Horton: I know the account number, and I won’t. I’ll be a good boy.

Larry Jordan: You just can’t spell it correctly, that’s the situation.

Mike Horton: No, but really, talking to security experts, there’s little we can do about all of this. There’s little we can do.

Larry Jordan: And it’s so widespread that, by the time you get access to it, it’s somewhere else.

Mike Horton: There are a lot of very smart teenagers out there doing the best they can to do these sorts of things and they’re doing very well at it.

Larry Jordan: Well, now that you’ve got me fully depressed, I want to thank our guests for this week, starting with Yvonne Russo, the award…

Mike Horton: Just going back to your thing about the cloud and how you don’t trust it.

Larry Jordan: …winning producer, director and writer; Jonathan Handel of Counsel at TroyGould in Los Angeles and the entertainment labor reporter for The Hollywood Reporter; and Rory McVicar, Head of Product for A-Frame.

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

Mike Horton: It is, it’s thousands, isn’t it? It’s thousands.

Larry Jordan: It really is. It’s a frightening thought.

Mike Horton: Isn’t that incredible?

Larry Jordan: Yes.

Mike Horton: Is that something to be proud of?

Larry Jordan: It’s an amazing thing to be proud of. You can talk with us on Twitter, @DPBuZZ, and Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com. You should visit Mike Horton’s website. It is an eye opener every time you see it. One of these days he’ll clean it up.

Larry Jordan: Anyway, music on The Buzz is provided by Smartsound.

Mike Horton: Or future proof it. I’m very proud of you, Larry.

Larry Jordan: Text transcripts are provided by Take 1 Transcription. Our producer is Cirina Catania, the engineers are Megan Paulos and Ed… On behalf of Mike Horton, my name is Larry Jordan, and thanks for listening to the Digital Production 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.

Digital Production Buzz

December 4, 2014

[Transcripts provided by Take 1 Transcription]

[

to listen to this show.]

HOSTS

Larry Jordan

Michael Horton

GUESTS

Jordan Kelly Montgomery, Producer/Director, Jordan Stone Productions

David Foley, Sr. Technologist & Founder, NanoTech

Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin and Associates

===

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. Our co-host, the ever handsome Mike Horton, has the night off.

Larry Jordan: We start this evening with Jordan Kelly Montgomery, a producer/director with Jordan Stone Productions. Recently, they completed editing of a series for Fox Sports, only to confront figuring out how to deliver their final product, so tonight we’re talking about deliverables.

Larry Jordan: Next is David Foley. He’s the Co-founder and Chief Technologist at NanoTech Entertainment. They are a company focused on delivering 4K media to the home and he shares his thoughts on the challenges of dealing with 4K this week.

 

Larry Jordan: Then we look at the latest trends in technology with Tom Coughlin, the President of Coughlin and Associates. Tom has built his career reporting and consulting to the storage industry. Since media devours storage, I thought it would be a good idea to talk with him about how we’re going to get more space to store all of our stuff.

Larry Jordan: And just as a reminder, we are 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 it all possible.

Larry Jordan: I am so excited. Today marks the start of broadcasting from our new studios in Los Angeles. Yes, we’ve moved out of Ralph’s Maytag Museum after all these years and into a new state of the art space which used to be the former home of DTS. In this week’s Buzz newsletter, which comes out tomorrow, I’ll provide a rundown of all the audio gear that we’re using for the show and how we’re using it.

Larry Jordan: Our move to these new studios marks a significant change to what we can do each week on The Buzz and you’ll see more changes coming later in December and in January. For now, the hammers are still building out the facility, but it is so exciting to be here and I can’t wait to tell you more about it.

Larry Jordan: By the way, thinking of exciting things, we are very pleased to announce that The Buzz and Moviola have collaborated on a special video event that premiered today featuring a candid interview with Emmy nominated producer/director/editor Luis Barreto. You’ll get a rare behind the scenes look at what’s required when working in reality television, the importance of casting beats in scripts, budgets, deliverables and how Luis broke into the business. It’s a unique opportunity to learn about what really goes on in reality television.

Larry Jordan: You navigate to moviola.com, click on the featured video of the day, you’ll see The Buzz logo, register and enjoy the show. That’s moviola.com, Luis Barreto and, man, when you see it, it’s going to change your life on reality programming. Luis was an incredible guest and Mike and I had a great time talking with him.

Larry Jordan: Remember to visit with us on Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com; we’re also on Twitter @DPBuZZ, and you want to subscribe to our free weekly show newsletter at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Every Friday morning it comes out with an inside look at our show, our guests and the industry.

Larry Jordan: Thinking of the industry, I’ll be back with Jordan Kelly Montgomery right after this.

Larry Jordan: Blackmagic 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 Blackmagic 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 Blackmagic production camera 4K also features an incredibly tempting price of $2,995. Learn more about the Blackmagic production camera 4K that is definitely priced to move, visit blackmagicdesign.com today.

Larry Jordan: For over a decade, Jordan Stone Productions has partnered with some of the largest production companies in the world to produce exciting content from development through post. A recent partnership included Hoplite Entertainment’s reality series ‘Stable Wars’ for Fox Sports and it is this production that we want to talk about. Hello, Jordan, welcome.

Jordan Kelly Montgomery: Hello, thanks for having me.

Larry Jordan: We are glad to have you with us. How would you describe Jordan Stone Productions?

Jordan Kelly Montgomery: Jordan Stone Productions is a boutique production company that produces original content, mostly in the reality space. What we do really well is partner with larger production companies whenever the workload gets a little too big, and they really need someone to come in and get the ball all the rest of the way across the goal line. That’s where Jordan Stone Productions comes in and brings their creativity.

Larry Jordan: Ok. We’re going to talk about deliverables, but we’re going to quickly set the stage. Tell us about what ‘Stable Wars’ is.

Jordan Kelly Montgomery: ‘Stable Wars’ is an exciting show. I’m so excited to be a part of it. It’s a second season show, the first time that Jordan Stone Productions has been asked to be a part of it, and we’re partnering with HopLite Entertainment on this show. This is a really exciting show. It’s really unique in the way that it’s such a sports oriented show. It focuses on the Del Mar horseracing syndicate. We have two male syndicates and one all female team and what they’re doing is they each have their horses that they’re racing down in Del Mar and then they’re in competition with each other. So you get the big epic scope of the big time, big money horseracing but then we really focus that energy down to just these three syndicates and how they’re exciting and in competition with each other.

Jordan Kelly Montgomery: Of course, the more that they’re in competition with each other, the more they’re actually going to end up appreciating each other. So it’s a very positive spin in a reality world which could easily go negative and we’re proud of the fact that it stays pretty positive and fun.

Larry Jordan: What is Jordan Stone’s particular role in this production?

Jordan Kelly Montgomery: What Jordan Stone did was we came in – Jordan Stone’s primarily my wife and myself – and I came on board as the Supervising Producer on the show. So I would be in the field, overseeing all of the production in that aspect in the field, as well as taking that ball and bringing it back to post.

Jordan Kelly Montgomery: Post is really where we shine at Jordan Stone. We have some outstanding editors on our staff who are seasoned in this business, and who have worked for some of the top networks out there in promo and in television and we work together as a team. I’ve got to tell you that this reality work moves so fast. It moves faster than everybody expects it to, because deliverables change, expectations change, the shows change and as that happens we have to keep up with that demand and that’s what our team is able to do.

Jordan Kelly Montgomery: Jordan Stone Productions does story and there’s been a big emphasis on that. We do story really, really well. We can be handed a bunch of stuff that doesn’t necessarily make sense and make sense out of that. I credit our team for being able to do that all the way through.

Larry Jordan: Ok, so let us now fast forward. We’ve done this incredible reality shoot at Del Mar race grounds, you’ve got incredible pictures, it’s gone through the editorial process and you’re getting ready to deliver the final version. This is where I want to spend some time working through some of the issues. Why are deliverables so hard?

Jordan Kelly Montgomery: Deliverables are hard because deliverables are always changing. I’m still pretty young and… ten years, and ten years ago when we started off it was different and we were lugging in the… into the edit bays and hooking them up and… you had to turn into Mr. Spargo or… I’m really not a technology guy. I learned it to do what I do in the business, but I really try to lean on other people for that – it’s another expense and another addition that comes in there and it’s another responsibility that I don’t really want to have on top of me.

Jordan Kelly Montgomery: What we do is get everything to the specs that we need it to be, get the show timed out and then we run that process over to our… We use Alpha Dogs. I used them on my first very show I made for G4. It was called ‘Champion of Champions’, it was a half bike show, half documentary show and I was in way over my head and I didn’t know what we were going to do and somebody mentioned, “I’ve got to show you these guys over at Alpha Dogs,” and I said, “All right, let’s go see what these guys are all about,” and, man, I’ve got to tell you, the biggest thing that I hope anybody walks away from this evening with is if you’re going to show big budget, low budget, whatever it may be, you’ve got to go to Alpha Dogs. They’re just so great. Oliver Chan, he’s the general manager over there.

Larry Jordan: Ok, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold it, hold it, hold it. I have absolute faith that the staff is perfect, but I want to focus on deliverables. What did you have to deliver to Fox? What formats were they looking for and was there just one or were there multiple versions? And how were you involved in managing quality on the output?

Jordan Kelly Montgomery: Fox then had moved all the way over to digital, so we’re still cutting up things, transferring over to tape for those guys and then they’re shooting that off onto satellite to some of the other affiliates. So it’s a little challenging because what we have is Fox San Diego, Sun Sports, Sportstime Ohio and a bunch of others that I’m not even aware of that are getting a different deliverable. Those are just the domestics that we have so far. Coming down the pipeline as we speak are other deals being made at gunpoint, and let’s not talk about those at this time.

Larry Jordan: No, it makes sense.

Jordan Kelly Montgomery: As well as international ones as well.

 

Larry Jordan: What it sounds like is that each one of these different distributors needs a different format. Is there no standardization in terms of delivering file formats to different companies?

Jordan Kelly Montgomery: There’s new technology and the guys that can afford it do have it and then the other ones, they haven’t been able to move over just yet. I’m a little nervous to find out what international is going to be like. We’re so ready to see what that’s going to come at, but it is, it’s always different. When I’m talking to closed captioning or I’m talking to all the different departments that I have to to get everything finalized, there are lists and lists and lists of all sorts of deliverables that there could possibly be.

Larry Jordan: It sounds to me like, because you’re the Supervising Producer, you contact the folks over at Alpha Dogs and say, “This is the deliverable spec,” and you hand them the sheet of paper that Fox Sports or Sun Sports gives you and they’re then charged with meeting that spec. Is that true?

Jordan Kelly Montgomery: Yes, they save the day, that’s what they do.

Larry Jordan: Tell me more about what ‘Stable Wars’ is. What are the challenges? Is the challenge in the shooting or is the challenge in the editing?

Jordan Kelly Montgomery: That’s a good question and I think it depends on which side of that… that you fall on. I’ve traveled the line between being in the production, the edit bay and I’ve really got to tell you, you don’t get one without the other.

Larry Jordan: No, that’s true.

Jordan Kelly Montgomery: Early on in my career, I started on the post side, I was like, “It all happens in post. If you don’t have it here, then you don’t have it anywhere.” If you don’t have it on camera, you don’t have it in post. When you get that understanding, and the biggest thing that needs to be understood is that grace needs to be given to each side of that communication back and forth, and then everybody just needs to understand that it’s never going to be perfect, or it’s going to be the way you expected it but it is going to be as good as it could possibly be.

Larry Jordan: It’s a never ending challenge. You work as hard as you can in production to make it perfect and then, when you look at it in editing, it’s amazing how much stuff slips through the cracks that you’ve got to fix. Each hand has to do the best they can and when it’s all done you’ve managed to hide the mistakes, especially reality. Reality must make that especially hard.

Jordan Kelly Montgomery: This has happened on every show. When we first start getting the footage coming in, the first thing I do is go, “This is going to be a nightmare. It’s not going to work out at all,” and so I feel that there’s a level of insecurity that I feel the first couple of episodes. That usually means that we’re doing a good job. It’s really about the fourth episode that I can stop and look at it with open eyes and then go, “We’re making a really good show here.”

Jordan Kelly Montgomery: I’m usually not the first one to say it, it’s usually the networks. They’ll get a look at the show and they’ll go, “Oh, that’s fantastic. We want that show,” and then actually more and more people are biting for the show and I was like, “They want our show? They want our show?” but when you’re in the trenches, it’s hard to tell if you’re winning the war or losing, you really don’t know.

Larry Jordan: Does Fox try to influence the content much?

Jordan Kelly Montgomery: No. The only thing that Fox is concerned about is standards and practices, making sure that, at certain times you can only have, you can’t show hard alcohol, even if it’s just a bottle in the background. They want it blurred or a different shot at it. Typically all they care about, they take a look at the show, they saw that it was fine, they saw it was exciting and family friendly they were like, “We’re on board.” Not to mention it is a second season show, so it’s had a chance to prove itself to its audience, so they really just let us make the stuff that we wanted to make.

Larry Jordan: It’s exciting to be able to have a network show and that size audience with that size company and be able to develop it the way you want. For people who want more information, Jordan, where can they go to learn more about both the company and the show?

Jordan Kelly Montgomery: I would really encourage folks to check out Fox Sports for ‘Stable Wars’. Their site is good, but also we have our own Facebook page, it’s stablewarsdelmar on Facebook and it’s got fun videos, it’s got interviews, it’s got links to some of the cast members and stuff if you want to really learn about the show and have a good time and enjoy it and that’s a good place to find out where it’s…

Larry Jordan: And where can they go for Jordan Stone?

Jordan Kelly Montgomery: You can check us out on jordanstoneproductions on Vimeo. You can see a lot of the sizzle reels and the development that we’ve done.

Larry Jordan: Jordan, I’ve got to cut you off, but thank you so much for your time. We will talk with you again soon and I wish you all success.

Jordan Kelly Montgomery: A pleasure. Thanks so much.

Larry Jordan: Bye bye.

Larry Jordan: Finding the perfect royalty free image or video for your creative project can be a crucial step in the film making process and, whether it’s for your website, publication or video segment, the experts at shutterstock.com can help you choose from over two million royalty free HD and 4K stock video clips, including time lapses, aerials, green screens and model released clips.

Larry Jordan: Sourcing over 12,000 brand new video clips each week, Shutterstock consistently offers the highest quality stills and video clips from professional film makers. Plus Shutterstock provides sophisticated search engine tools so you can search and drill down by category, clip resolution, contributor name and more. Also, use their great no risk try-before-you-buy option so you can see how their clips will look in your project before making a single purchase.

Larry Jordan: Try Shutterstock today – sign up for a free account. No credit card is needed and, as an added bonus to you, enter promo code BUZZ2014 before December 31^st to receive 25 percent off any footage package. Discover shutterstock.com.

Larry Jordan: David Foley is the Senior Technologist and the Co-Founder at NanoTech Entertainment, which is based in San Jose and focused on entertainment and communications products. He’s an award winning IPTV and gaming designer and development professional with over 20 years of experience in the industry. Hello, David. Welcome.

David Foley: Hi, how are you?

Larry Jordan: I’m doing great, but it’s not me I’m interested in. I want to learn more about you. Tell us what NanoTech Entertainment is.

David Foley: NanoTech Entertainment is a company that started out in the out of home entertainment gaming business – arcade machines, casino machines – and then a few years ago we saw a trend in television where the market was moving towards a streaming over the top kind of model, and an on demand content model as opposed to the traditional broadcast market, and so we started investing and developing technology for that market and we are now meeting in the middle with the manufacturers of televisions and we think this is the first year where really the viewing habits have changed substantially and you’re seeing a shift in how people watch television.

Larry Jordan: What does over the top mean?

David Foley: Over the top is when you have a set-top box like a Roku or you have a Smart TV that’s connected to the internet and you’re getting your television from an internet source as opposed to from a regular traditional broadcast or cable source.

Larry Jordan: This would be like Netflix or something of that sort?

David Foley: Correct.

Larry Jordan: Are you making hardware or programs to run on top of the hardware?

David Foley: We’ve done both, actually. We built the first streaming set-top box that does 4K and we also build a lot of streaming channels.

Larry Jordan: Now, there’s a lot of discussion in the industry about 4K and I think all of us are pretty well accustomed to shooting four, five, even 6K for production to get the highest quality imaging we can, but there’s a real bottleneck when it comes to distributing 4K to the home. How are you getting around that?

David Foley: There are two things. One is you need to optimize your compression and in the last year there has been a big movement to move over to the new HEVC or H.265 standard and that’s really benefited everybody in that you’re getting about a 40 percent improvement in requirements for the bandwidth needed to broadcast something. We’ve been able to successfully stream 4K as low as six megabits per second.

Larry Jordan: At six megabits per second for 4K?

David Foley: Yes.

Larry Jordan: Wow. Well, what is the difference – without getting really, really technical – between H.264 and H.265? Why not just make the bit rate lower with H.264?

David Foley: The algorithms that do the compression in H.265 are much more efficient. So at the same bit rate you get better quality or at the same quality you get a smaller file so you can use less bandwidth.

Larry Jordan: So it’s not simply just lowering the bit rate, it’s actually the mathematics of how the video image itself is being compressed.

David Foley: That’s correct.

 

Larry Jordan: Because you’re involved both in hardware and in the program… what trends are you seeing this holiday season that consumers need to pay attention to?

David Foley: I think what’s most interesting is you’re seeing the second generation of the 4K televisions becoming widely available. You’ve got all the manufacturers that offer a 4K television but they’re also now offering Smart televisions that are able to have apps built into them, like our UltraFlix app.

Larry Jordan: What does UltraFlix do?

David Foley: UltraFlix is the first 4K, all 4K streaming network and what we did was we created a Netflix-like experience; however, every piece of content that we have is in 4K Ultra high def.

Larry Jordan: Ultra high def, that’s essentially a doubling of a 1080 image, so it’s 1920 x 2 horizontal and 1080 x 2 vertical. Why did you pick that size?

David Foley: That’s the industry standard for 4K. That resolution is what all of the new 4K televisions support.

Larry Jordan: There’s also a lot of discussion about it’s not true 4K, where true 4K is actually more than 4,000 pixels on the side. Is there a big difference in image quality between the two?

David Foley: There’s not. We’re talking a couple of hundred pixels and it’s really more of an aspect ratio issue than a sizing issue. What you’ve got with the Ultra high def or 2160P is a straight 16×9 aspect ratio, which is what all the television manufacturers build to.

Larry Jordan: In order to do UltraFlix, do we need to purchase NanoTech hardware? Or can we purchase a 4K set made by any manufacturer?

David Foley: Most of the major manufacturers have a Smart TV. So the folks like Sony, Samsung, VIZIO, they all have UltraFlix built into them and you don’t need separate hardware. We had originally built the MP1 set-top box last year to accommodate those TVs that don’t have electronics built inside of them, like the Seiki’s, so it really depends on the television. If you go down to a Best Buy, every television there can run UltraFlix and most of them come with it built into the TV as you buy it out of the box.

Larry Jordan: What’s keeping you guys busy and excited this holiday season?

David Foley: Really, content generation is keeping us busy. A year and a half ago, we created a division called 4K Studios and we actually purchased two film scanners that scan 35 millimeter film into 4K. We’ve had those things running pretty much non-stop, taking films in and converting them.

David Foley: One of the things that we’ve found is that you have a chicken and egg problem in the industry where the studios don’t want to spend a lot of money converting film until they know there’s a lot of televisions out there, and people don’t want to buy televisions until they know there’s a lot of content out there. So we decided to take the lead in that and we actually set up two studios, one in San Francisco and one in Hollywood, where we’re creating a lot of content that’s all 4K. We’re doing a lot of work for studios where we’re scanning their films and converting them into 4K.

Larry Jordan: What’s involved in the conversion process? Is there much restoration involved?

David Foley: There is, actually. After you do the scan, one of the things that we have to do is re-scan the films because the newer scanner has a better image sensor which is able to actually capture a 4K digital picture of the frame of film. Once you’ve captured the film, you then have to go in and do a repair path and, depending on the quality of the film, that could be a little bit of work or a lot of work, where you go and you fix up scratches, you fix up damage to the actual physical film.

David Foley: After that, you then have to go through a color grading process where you adjust the color of the scans to match what the original film directors wanted to have the scene look like; and then once all that’s done, we have to then go through an encoding process where we actually compress it down to something that could be streamed.

Larry Jordan: I remember reading a while ago that the typical 35 millimeter frame only had a resolution of about 2K. Are you manufacturing data to get it up to 4?

David Foley: No. Actually, you get just a hair over 4K from a 35 millimeter film, so we are at the physical limit now of the analogue to digital conversion. When we go to anything higher than 4K, then you would be interpolating pixels but with the new image centers, you’re at just about a one to one scanning the film into 4K.

Larry Jordan: Is there a particular genre or age of film that people are interested in seeing in 4K? Or are you just grabbing everything you can get your hands on?

David Foley: We’re grabbing everything we can get our hands on and then, as we go to these studios, we’re trying to get the classics. The ones that are going to have stunning visuals, and try and get those first because obviously if something was visually stunning in the theater, you want to translate that to the home experience.

Larry Jordan: Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia kind of things?

David Foley: Absolutely. Any of the big epics are going to look great in 4K.

Larry Jordan: What else are you paying attention to in the next couple of months? This strikes me as cutting edge consumer technology, because now we’re able to see in the home the kind of images that normally you could only see in the edit suite.

David Foley: Absolutely. If you go to the store and you see some of these TVs, it is quite stunning. There have been some naysayers who say, “Well, there’s no difference at six to nine feet of looking at an HD screen versus a 4K screen,” but that’s simply not true. One of the things that people forget is that we’re not only talking about more pixels on the screen, but we’re talking about more colors as well. 4K enables us to go to ten bit color and so you’re going to get much more vibrant colors on the screen.

Larry Jordan: Are you seeing any interest in the new Dolby Vision, which gives us even greater bit depth than ten bit depth?

David Foley: Absolutely, and that’s going to be next year’s consumer product, if you will. I think that will be the third generation televisions, because you actually have to do some electronics inside the TV to support that, but one of the things that we’ve done is in our workflow as we go from the film all the way down to the digital stream, we’ve stored everything that we did in the workflow in its original format and we’re scanning everything in 16 bit color because we know we’re going to have to go through and do another pass at everything once the Dolby Vision type color space becomes available on the TVs.

Larry Jordan: It’s exciting times. This is really cool stuff. Where can people go on the web to learn more about the kind of products that you guys are making available?

David Foley: Our website is ntek.com.

Larry Jordan: That’s ntek.com and David Foley is the Senior Technologist and Co-Founder of NanoTech Entertainment. David, thanks for joining us today.

David Foley: Thank you very much.

Larry Jordan: When you’re working with media, one thing is essential – your computer needs peak performance. However, when it comes to upgrading your Mac, there are so many different options to choose from that the process can be confusing. That’s why Other World Computing carries the best upgrades that lets your computer performance and storage grow as your needs grow.

Larry Jordan: Since 1988, OWC has become one of the most trusted names in quality hardware and comprehensive support to the worldwide computer industry. With an extensive online catalog of Mac, iPhone and iPad enhancement products, as well as a dedicated team of knowledgeable experts providing first rate tech support, OWC has everything you need to take your current system to the next level.

Larry Jordan: Whether you need to maximize your system’s memory, add blazing speed or enhance reliability, look no further than the friendly experts at OWC. Learn more by visiting macsales.com today.

Larry Jordan: Tom Coughlin is a Silicon Valley Consultant specializing in storage and he’s also the organizer of the annual Storage Vision and Creative Vision conferences. Storage is critical to media creation, which is why it’s always good to have Tom back on the show. Hello, Tom, welcome back.

Tom Coughlin: Thank you, Larry, it’s great to be back and talk to you and your listeners.

Larry Jordan: I just realized, in my intro I forgot to mention you’re the CEO of Coughlin and Associates. What does Coughlin and Associates do?

Tom Coughlin: I do consulting, and I write reports and things of that sort and I’m involved in organizing several conferences, especially I do some conferences that relate to digital storage in media and entertainment.

Larry Jordan: You’ve got one coming up in January that we’ll be talking about a little bit later, because I’ve had the pleasure of speaking at it many times and it’s always a great time to get together. But let’s talk about this new report you’ve released taking a look at the uses of storage and media. Tell us about the report and what you found out.

Tom Coughlin: It’s a 205 page report with about 91 figures and 50 some tables in it, looking at every aspect of digital storage in the professional media and entertainment and this will be the tenth report on this topic that I’ve done.

Larry Jordan: 205 pages?

Tom Coughlin: Yes.

Larry Jordan: I think I could summarize it as you can’t have enough storage and it can’t go fast enough. What more do we need to say?

Tom Coughlin: That’s right, that’s right. We’ll just close the book right there. But you might worry about the cost.

Larry Jordan: What did you learn that’s changed over the last year?

Tom Coughlin: There’s an awful lot of very interesting trends. We have higher capacities in almost every type of storage technology out there, whether it be magnetic tape, optical disks, hard disk drives or flash memory. There’s been announcement of magnetic tape up to ten terabytes and five; also, hard disk drives are now, still they’re not shipping it, at up to ten terabytes and five. There’s four terabyte flash memory out there.

Larry Jordan: Wait, wait, wait, slow down, slow down. Tom, hold it, hold it. There’s a hard disk that’s got ten terabytes of storage?

Tom Coughlin: They’re shipping eight, but they announced ten by next year.

Larry Jordan: Unbelievable. I just was so distracted by that. Storage is increasing and spinning media, ten terabytes? I thought we’d sort of maxed out around four. How did they manage to squeeze all this extra space in?

Tom Coughlin: There are a few different ways in which people have done that. There’s a technology called shingled magnetic recording, where they partially overwrite a previously written track… that’s one of the ways that people have been able to do that and therefore get more density per disk.

Tom Coughlin: Another way is that a company called HGST, which is a division of Western Digital, have created drives that are hermetically sealed that contain helium. That allows them to get more disks in the drive without running into some problems with the drive as it’s developed because of a phenomenon called flutter.

Tom Coughlin: Those technologies combined together have allowed people to get six, eight and soon ten terabyte hard disc drives; and there’s more technology, of course, waiting in the wings for all of these different devices to enhance their capacity and lower the cost per terabyte of storage.

Larry Jordan: Now we’re talking cost per terabyte, not cost per gigabyte.

Tom Coughlin: Oh, gigabyte is so… We’re now into tens. We’re in the double digits in the decade.

Larry Jordan: Just because I cut you off as you were doing a summary of the report, you were saying that we’ve got increased storage and faster performance in magnetic tape; we have increased storage in spinning media, hard disk, and are we also getting increased storage in solid state drives?

Tom Coughlin: We are indeed. Solid state drives, there are technologies out there with three dimensional NAND where they actually stack the memory channels inside of basically a hole in the silicon and they can stack them up.

Tom Coughlin: Samsung has products now that are using that vertical math, so that’s a major advance and it’s one of the paths forward towards increasing the density of flash memory. In addition, they’re reducing the size of the lithographic feature, they call them, inside of the chips in order to get more cells in a given surface area of the chips. So there’s a lot of advancement going on there and the price of flash memory is going down.

Tom Coughlin: In addition, there are increased improvements in the error correction capabilities that are allowing the development of three bit per cell flash going to more applications, both on the client end and also potentially on the enterprise side, so there are a lot of things going on with flash. The other technology is the optical disk. There’s a new roadmap on optical disk that talks about 320 gigabyte disks available by next year, write once disks. They’ll have 500 not too long after that and they’re even talking about a terabyte optical disk.

Larry Jordan: Are we seeing any kind of a market for optical disk? We’re seeing that CDs and DVDs are pretty much on the out. Where is optical disk popular?

Tom Coughlin: The optical disk for distribution, as you’re mentioned, are going down in every market except maybe Blu-Ray, where it’s a way of getting the higher resolution content. What these roadmaps are targeting is optical use for archiving applications. There are people who like to use optical media because today’s optical media actually has very long endurance, even without taking special care in the environment. So if you’re trying to create an archive of media, the media itself could last quite a long time, again without extremely special care.

Tom Coughlin: That’s primarily the market for this new optical media. Panasonic has done some work in that and particularly Sony is pushing this. They’ve got what looks almost like a tape cartridge but it’s got 12 optical disks that… one and a half terabytes. The next generation product will be about 3.2 to 3.5 terabytes.

Larry Jordan: When you say it has a longer life, what kind of lifespan are we looking at for that optical media?

Tom Coughlin: The claim there is that they could probably do a 50 year life. The issue you’ve got, of course, with a long life product is finding the equipment to play it on. Format obsolescence is the thing that you worry about with that, but at least the media potentially could survive that long.

Larry Jordan: We have the same problem with LTO tape. The tape will last 25 years but we won’t be able to have players that last that long.

Tom Coughlin: That is the issue and that is why, if you really are into an archiving practice, at some point before it gets too late you need to have a transition plan, moving from one media to another, both in order to avoid the format obsolescence but it also can be a means by which to reduce your costs going forward.

Tom Coughlin: The technology, we mentioned tape or hard disk drives or even optical disks you’re going to be able to get more density of information on a given piece of media and it’s probably not going to cost any more than the old piece of media once it becomes mature and so your net cost and the net footprint for storing a certain amount of information is decreasing over time. There’s a real TCO advantage in migration of content over time and building that into your plan.

Larry Jordan: This whole concept of format obsolescence is one that is new to me. I was just wrestling with that over the last couple of years. We have archives of Digi-Beta tapes and two inch tapes, and one inch tapes and there are no machines to play them on. The tapes are still good and we could still play them if we had the device, but we don’t have the device. That’s an element that you don’t think about having to pay attention to.

Tom Coughlin: Yes, you have to worry about that. That rich content that you’re creating can get trapped on a piece of media that no longer has a device to be played on or no longer will things connect to the interface on your device to read the data, if you’re not careful.

Larry Jordan: Yes, I have a stack of SyQuest drives that meet that criteria perfectly, but you’re too young to remember SyQuest drives.

Tom Coughlin: I know the feeling.

Larry Jordan: One of the things that we’re hearing a lot about in hard disks is 3D storage or holographic storage. What’s that all about?

Tom Coughlin: The holographic storage that people are generally talking about is an optical disk phenomena. The holographic images that you can sometimes see, people make these pictures that give you a three dimensional look, they can store different information that can be read from different angles because of the interference patterns that are created by the light that’s recorded in the optical media. That’s what creates the hologram but it can also be used for storing information in a holograph.

Tom Coughlin: That’s the basic idea. Doing this in practice has turned out to be rather difficult and so there’s still research going on right now. It actually is one of the things they were talking about in that long term optical archive roadmap, but so far there’s no practical implementation or products you could buy with that yet.

Larry Jordan: Another term that we hear a lot about is 3D storage on spinning media. Is that a fancy or is there some development there?

Tom Coughlin: On a hard disk drive?

Larry Jordan: I believe that’s what I remember it as. Normally on a hard disk, you’re just storing right at the surface of the hard disc. Are you able to store in depth or is that simply optical media that does that?

Tom Coughlin: The optical media in particular, because I could focus on different layers. The problem with the magnetics is there is a way that I can record different information with… because there are differences in the penetration of the magnetic field, depending upon the frequency of variation of the field. If I’ve got very fast variation in that frequency, it won’t get as deep.

Tom Coughlin: If I have a lower, slower change in the field, it will get deeper. So I can record lower frequencies deeper in a magnetic media, whether it be tape or a hard disk drive, than I can with higher frequencies and there have been people who have played around with the idea of storing the… information that gives you the information on where you are in the data and the disk at a greater depth, essentially underneath the data layer. I’ve heard about that kind of stuff at some conferences and people have talked about doing that for quite a while.

Tom Coughlin: It’s potentially a viable technology. Writing magnetic information where I can address it in layers at any density, right now we don’t know how to do that, at least as far as I know. I’ve thought about it.

Larry Jordan: Let’s get back to your report. We’ve seen that densities are increasing, storage capacity’s increasing, performance is increasing but that hasn’t covered the full 200 pages yet, has it?

Tom Coughlin: Oh no, no. There’s the way people are using storage, and then you’ve got direct attached versus networking, and then the appearance of even more remote networking with the cloud and all those are very important trends. They’re shaping the way people use storage.

Tom Coughlin: The other thing is the emergence of flash memory and the lowering of cost has encouraged faster interfaces, like the Thunderbolt interface on Macintosh computers, for example. The Thunderbolt 2 can run at 20 gigabits per second raw, it has that potential, and the only thing it could possibly see to channel this so it would use up a significant amount of that bandwidth would be a flash memory device, some kind of solid state storage device.

Tom Coughlin: For people who are working with rich media, that can be very valuable because those files are getting big and transporting them can take a long time with a slow interface. So fast interfaces are important and flash memory has enabled that. The other thing is the networking capabilities have helped people in terms of doing locally collaborative projects, but when you are addressing information and remote data centers through the internet, then you have the possibility of doing collaborations, like video production collaborations, that can span space and time.

Tom Coughlin: So enormous trends and the fact that whole cloud market, I believe, by 2019 will be something like a $1.5 billion market, cloud storage for media and entertainment.

Larry Jordan: We’re going to save the cloud discussion for another time, because I am not yet a fan of the cloud for storing media which is in production or editing, although I’m totally a fan for distribution. But I need a clarification from you – what’s the difference between flash and SSD?

Tom Coughlin: Flash memory is the technology that’s used in solid state drives. The flash memory is actually a means of storing information on a silicon which doesn’t go away when you turn the currents and voltages off, so that’s called a non-volatile memory. An SSD is built with a number of these chips that are using that flash technology. If you ever open up an SSD, you’ll find a bunch of chips on a port. Those chips contain flash memory technology, they contain those cells that store that information by trap charges that stay trapped, at least for a while.

Larry Jordan: So flash is the technology upon which an SSD is built, but the SSD is the entire package, whereas flash is just the storage component?

Tom Coughlin: It is. Now, there are new types of non-volatile solid state technology that I think… could be very, very interesting. There are magnetic solid state devices that are called magnetic random access memory that, especially some were using some interesting quantum mechanical effects with spin tunneling that may be replacing DRAMs and SRAMs.

Tom Coughlin: They’re used for the actual computer internal memory and that could have very interesting applications. If I replace these volatile memories, which require voltage and currents periodically to refresh them and keep them from going away, with non-volatile memory I could lower the power usage of my computer equipment quite a bit and also, when I turn it off, it retains its state so I could boot back up again.

Tom Coughlin: On the other hand, if I crash my software, I’m going to have to actually erase the data on there in order to be able to get back to where I was. So rebooting to recover, you will have to have special circumstances if you want to get back to the original state or if you have a problem and you want to get back to where you didn’t have a problem.

Larry Jordan: There’s a big discussion right now about SSDs with TRIM not being supported by Apple in the latest version of the operating system. What does the TRIM function do and why are people concerned about this?

Tom Coughlin: TRIM is important in terms of the… When you write the information on a flash memory cell, there’s what’s called an erase step and a write step. The erase step basically zeroes that out again and that write step is where you put the information into it. That erase process damages some very thin layers inside of the flash memory device and that’s called wear in a flash memory device.

Tom Coughlin: There is technology that is built into SSDs and other flash memory drives, just like what Apple uses, that have special code in their controllers that try to reduce the wear on the flash memory and TRIM is one of the technologies that’s used that people are implementing in order to try to deal with some of the wear issues. Not supporting it would be an issue for…

Larry Jordan: One of the concepts that Apple has come up with is what they call a Fusion drive – the marriage of SSD with spinning media to get the benefit of the speed of SSD and yet the reduced cost that spinning media provides. Are we seeing that technology being adopted by anybody else, or does Apple have that locked out with a proprietary patent?

Tom Coughlin: The Fusion drive that Apple makes is their own design, but there are many people who are working on what’s called a hyper storage device, which may combined flash memory with hard disk drives. In fact, there are hard disk drives that are sold that have flash memory built into the hard drive and so that flash memory is used for caching information that’s accessed frequently in order to increase the overall apparent speed of the hard drive. Seagate a few months ago said they had sold ten million of those into the market.

Tom Coughlin: There are different options for combining flash and hard disk drives together – at a smaller level, in an individual computer and then when people are building these larger storage systems where there are even more ways, where they have a number of hard disk drives or a number of slots for hard disk drives or an SSD in there or a PCI card with SSDE or there are even some flash memory devices now which can be built into DIMM-like cards. So they actually go into the memory bus, that you can build new types of architectures which combine flash and hard disk drive in even more complex ways that could provide the trade off performance where you need it, but also lowering your raw costs as a storage system to store content.

Larry Jordan: Tom, for people who would like to read the whole report and get a sense of where the industry is going, where can they get the report and where can they learn more about you?

Tom Coughlin: They can learn more about me on my website, which is tomcoughlin.com. On that webpage, there is a link to a page that says ‘Tech papers’ and if you click on that, you will find information on the reports that I do at the top. I also have a newsletter and there’s information on that about midway down the page.

Tom Coughlin: On the lower part of the page, there’s a whole bunch of presentations and articles and things that I’ve done for many years that are available as PDFs that people can take a look at if they want to find out some things that are available. But that report, there’s a brochure on it available very near the very top of that ‘Tech papers’ page at tomcoughlin.com.

Tom Coughlin: If they’re interested in the Storage Visions conference which is coming up here, it’s January 4^th and 5^th 2015 in Las Vegas, Nevada – and I know, Larry, that you’re going to be there, you’re going to help me one of the sessions on New Hollywood – you can go to storagevisions.com and you can get information on that conference.

Tom Coughlin: It’s a two day conference with some great talks, some really interesting sessions on aspects of digital storage and its use and applications, like Larry’s session, and a lot of experts, a lot of chances to network with people and see exciting products in the trade show with the exhibits and sponsors we’ve got. So we’d welcome you and have you come join us January 4^th and 5^th 2015 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Larry Jordan: Those two websites are storagevisions.com and tomcoughlin.com. Tom Coughlin is the CEO of Coughlin and Associates. Tom, as always, a delight chatting. Thanks for joining us today.

Tom Coughlin: It’s absolutely my pleasure, Larry, and I look forward to seeing you in January.

Larry Jordan: I look forward to being there. Thanks.

Larry Jordan: It’s been an interesting show and it’s been a fun time to start our new studios and share the new opportunities with you. I want to thank our guests who joined us today, starting with Jordan Kelly Montgomery. He’s a producer/director with Jordan Stone Productions talking about the challenges of finding the right deliverable; then David Foley, the Co-founder of NanoTech Entertainment; and Tom Coughlin, the President of Coughlin and Associates. It was a great group of guests and I’m glad to have shared the show with them.

Larry Jordan: There’s lot of history in our industry and it’s all posted to our website at digitalproductionbuzz.com – hundreds of past shows and thousands of interviews, all of them searchable, all of them available to help you understand where we came from and how we got to where we are today.

Larry Jordan: You can talk with us on Twitter, @DPBuZZ, and Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Music on The Buzz is provided by Smartsound, text transcripts provided by Take 1 Transcription, and you can email us at info@digitalproductionbuzz.com. Remember to visit digitalproductionbuzz.com, sign up for our free newsletter, comes out every Friday. Love to keep you informed about what’s going on with the show.

Larry Jordan: Our producer is Cirina Catania, our engineers are Megan Paulos and Ed… On behalf of Mike Horton, who has the night off, my name is Larry Jordan and thanks for listening 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 27, 2014

[Transcripts provided by Take 1 Transcription]

[

to listen to this show.]

HOSTS

Larry Jordan

Michael Horton

GUESTS

David Colantuoni, Sr. Director Product Mgmt, Creative Apps/Storage, Avid Technology

Robert Neivert, Chief Operations Officer, Private.me

===

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. My name is Larry Jordan. We recorded this show a couple of days early so that our co-host, Mike Horton, along with the rest of our staff can take the day off; and happy Thanksgiving everybody.

Larry Jordan: We have an amazing show today. We start with Dave Colantuoni. He’s the Senior Director of Product Management for Avid Technology, specifically all of their media applications. Recently, Avid announced new licensing and features for Pro Tools, which is an indispensible tool for audio recording, editing and mixing. We talk with Dave about the whole Avid media family and he gives us a sneak peek as well on the upcoming release of Pro Tools.

Larry Jordan: Then, Ned Soltz, Contributing Editor for DV Magazine, returns with a look at cool new camera accessories that you need to learn more about.

Larry Jordan: And Robert Neivert, the COO of Private.me discusses net neutrality, individual privacy and the challenges of the web.

Larry Jordan: 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. You can learn more at take1.tv and thanks, Take 1, for making it possible.

Larry Jordan: 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 at digitalproductionbuzz.com for an inside look at both our show and the industry.

Larry Jordan: I’ll be back with an amazing interview with Dave Colantuoni, right after this.

Larry Jordan: Blackmagic 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 Blackmagic 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 Blackmagic production camera 4K also features an incredibly tempting price of $2,995. Learn more about the Blackmagic production camera 4K that is definitely priced to move, visit blackmagicdesign.com today.

Larry Jordan: David Colantuoni is the Senior Director of Product Management for Avid Technologies. In fact, he leads product management and design for all of Avid’s professional video editing, storage and broadcast product portfolios, including the Media Composer family, ISIS storage, Avid motion graphics and video service and Pro Tools, the industry standard for audio post. Hello, Dave, welcome.

David Colantuoni: Thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it. Thanks for talking to me today.

Larry Jordan: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Start with something simple – what’s your role with Pro Tools?

David Colantuoni: I run the product management, and product design teams here and just to simply break it down, the product management team is responsible for the strategy and the business of Pro Tools; the design team takes the strategy and the business needs and turns them into what the end user ends up using in the product. They work on workflows or they design things with customers or user interface helmets, things like that. I’m responsible for both of those entities.

Larry Jordan: So because people love Pro Tools, it’s all because of your work?

David Colantuoni: Well, I have an unbelievable team that actually does a lot of the work. It’s a pretty good team. A lot of them are located multi-nationally, so we have some folks in Burlington, Massachusetts, we have some folks out in Berkeley, California, Mountain View, California, so there are a lot of people who are scattered about working on Pro Tools. It’s a great team, though. Some of the marketing is in Florida. Avid actually is a big company and it’s located in various parts of the world. Some of the engineering is located in other parts of the world, for instance.

Larry Jordan: I want to focus on Pro Tools, and we’ve all heard about Pro Tools since forever, but the Avid Media Central platform is a new term to me. What does that mean?

David Colantuoni: About a year and a half ago, we had a new CEO come in and we started on a new initiative here, building out what we’re calling our Media Central platform, and it’s all part of the Avid Everywhere initiative. Really, this is an opportunity for us to re-look at the marketplace.

David Colantuoni: Avid has been in the marketplace for 25 years or more now, and so we decided that we were going to take a fresh look and a fresh approach to how we were going to interact with our customers, listen to our customers, understand their workflows, understand what our partner needs are and understand what our company needed to do to work for the next 25 years and more.

David Colantuoni: We decided that there was a need for somebody to take leadership in the industry and build out what we consider a very robust and open platform, which we’re calling the Media Central platform, and what this really is the opportunity for Avid to take its products and make them extensible to not only our customers and accommodate their workflows, but also invite in partners who can fill in parts of the workflow that our customers need, and work directly with us and make sure that our customers have a seamless experience using Avid products and other products.

David Colantuoni: This is a way for Avid to lead the industry. Media Central is an open platform that has multiple components, multiple APIs, user interfaces, player engines, for instance, that allow media to be played back on multiple systems using the same media engine, and really allows us to be open and work within our own workflows here at Avid so the customers can interact seamlessly to solve their business challenges.

Larry Jordan: Audio post professionals tend to be a pretty iconoclastic bunch. They worry about audio, but they really don’t care about motion graphics or video servers or ISIS storage. Why should they care about the Media Central platform?

David Colantuoni: That’s a great question. If Avid does this right, the customer should not notice that they are actually using a platform, and so far they really haven’t noticed that. The nice thing is, as we make this all work behind the scenes, there should be a seamless experience for a customer to use Pro Tools, for instance.

David Colantuoni: I actually referenced a player engine and I can give you a very concrete example of the things we’ve done in the last year to make this real for a Pro Tools customer. Pro Tools had its own player engine before to play back video. Actually at Avid, we had a number of them here and we decided that that just wasn’t right.

David Colantuoni: Not only can our customers not use, for instance, Media Composer or Pro Tools or some other product at Avid, they are just having trouble making all these products work better together. In the Media Central platform, we actually extracted the Media Composer player engine and we’ve now developed that in a platform. What that means is that Pro Tools actually gets that for free.

David Colantuoni: Because there’s a platform sitting behind Pro Tools, when they need a player engine for a video, they actually just get it for free. It has to be tied in and there’s a little bit of work that has to go on behind the scenes there, but that’s a very common element that can become real for a user when using the Media Central platform.

Larry Jordan: I can see the benefit, because with earlier versions of Pro Tools, I remember sending sound off to audio post and they could only handle a standard definition video, even if it was shot high def, because the video player wouldn’t support that. Editors now have much greater flexibility in the video formats. They can play back for mixing to picture.

David Colantuoni: Absolutely, and not only that. The same media that can play back in Media Composer can now play back in Pro Tools and it is a wonderful experience. Then, another common element is taking the Pro Tools audio engine and putting that in the platform. All of the components that need to interact with Pro Tools and the Pro Tools audio engine in our Media Central platform will take advantage of that now.

David Colantuoni: Here’s the added benefit – if a partner wants to use, for instance, that video player engine, because that sits in the Media Central platform, we have hooks into our platform that we will give them for free and they can tie their software to use that same engine.

David Colantuoni: Now, that has a great benefit because now not only are they interacting with a video engine on Media Composer, but they have access to Pro Tools or any other product in the Avid portfolio that’s taking advantage of that player engine. It’s extensive and it’s quite difficult to go out and build all of this, but ultimately what we feel, just that simple example of a player engine, for instance, if you use your imagination and see how that could easily solve a lot of our customers’ challenges today.

Larry Jordan: Well, it also solves a lot of your challenges, because now you’re only developing one player or one audio engine as opposed to having 17 different flavors that do the same thing.

David Colantuoni: So true. It does make it easier for us and it makes it easier for our partners too. What happened in the past, before our Media Central platform, is that we’d have a partner who wanted to use that video player engine, and it may or may not have worked and a customer would buy our products and they would buy their products and there would be some interactivity going on between both of the companies, but it wasn’t really a seamless experience.

David Colantuoni: Now, we have certification programs that we’re putting in place at Avid so that customers know that, when they buy our platform or our products and that partner’s product, it’s going to work for them. So yes, it does make it easier for us, but it makes it easier for our partners too.

Larry Jordan: One of the big new announcements you made was on Pro Tools licensing, which I promise I’m going to get to. But with the new Pro Tools 11, what are some of the key features that have been added to this version that we need to pay attention to?

David Colantuoni: With Pro Tools 11, there are a number of features. It’s been out for a little bit now. One of the things was offline bounce, which is a performance feature so you can essentially send your files off in near real time. Then, of course, it’s 64 bit and we also released an AAE engine, which is the engine that I just talked about. That’s now being moved and is sitting in our Media Central platform.

David Colantuoni: There are a whole bunch of other things around ultra low latency with a dedicated input buffer and then the whole player engine that I spoke about that’s sitting in our platform, the Media Composer player engine, that’s all part of Pro Tools 11. It’s actually quite an extensive improvement on the Pro Tools product line, all centered around performance. There are various player engine improvements, and 64 bit performance and then offline bounce. It’s been quite a good release for us.

Larry Jordan: It sounds like it’s been more than just features. You’ve done a lot of fundamental foundational work to try to improve the underpinnings, correct?

David Colantuoni: Yes. These are the things that you don’t get credit for in product management and product development. A few years ago, Avid actually started an initiative to get all of its products with new user interfaces moving to 64 bit code so that we can move these products for the next couple of decades, making sure that they’re on modern, robust platforms and things like that. If I’m not mistaken I think every product now is on a 64 bit architecture like Pro Tools. I know Media Composer is, I know Interplay is.

David Colantuoni: We’ve spent a lot of time really building up the foundation, putting new user faces. Actually, Pro Tools was the first one that went, a number of years ago now. That was really the first take and we’ve actually used the Pro Tools look and feel on how we’ve moved all of the other products forward. It is really centered around modernizing and making sure that the application’s set up for the future.

Larry Jordan: Now we can talk about your latest announcements. What’s the news from Pro Tools licensing?

David Colantuoni: I think I have to take a couple of steps back, and I don’t want to make this seem any more complicated than some of our users think, but what we’ve done as a company initiative under Avid Everywhere is to look at the changing business environment of how software is licensed, and making sure that we accommodate all of our users so they can acquire Media Composer, Pro Tools, Sibelius and all the other products in the easiest fashion that they can.

David Colantuoni: Some companies have moved to subscription only models, some companies still sell perpetual licenses What we decided is we’re going to have a flexible licensing initiative. For Media Composer, we actually moved to a subscription and perpetual model. So you can buy the product, you can buy a perpetual license and keep it forever and use it just like you have traditionally; or you can choose to rent it through a subscription.

David Colantuoni: With that, when you purchase a new seat of Media Composer, you actually get a year of upgrades and support with that purchase. We’ve taken that and we’ve actually moved that to the Pro Tools model. If you purchase Pro Tools today, a brand new seat, you actually get the use of the software forever, as long as it will run on a computer or your system, and you get a year of software upgrades in that whole year, along with technical support. So if you need to ask us a question or you have an issue you want to ask us about, you get access to that. That’s part one of the program.

Larry Jordan: What’s the difference between this new licensing and, say, an annual support contract?

David Colantuoni: What’s different is it’s actually included now. We looked at the challenges that our customers are facing today and we had multiple ways of upgrading. There were different tiers that you came in at. We thought maybe we could take a second look at what our pricing was for Pro Tools upgrades and we decided that we wanted to give our customers the best experience possible. So the best way to do that is to make sure they’re always on the latest upgrade or have access to it – because sometimes customers want to wait, they may be working on a project – and having access to technical support.

David Colantuoni: Now, that’s a little bit different than the past because one thing we want to make sure people know is that Avid is unique in that we have an actual entire customer support organization that’s focused only on the media and entertainment business. That’s unusual; there aren’t a whole lot of companies that do that.

David Colantuoni: We have people that worked in the industry, they understand how the products work, who are helping customers with their technical support calls. In order for us to ensure they get that complete experience, we thought we would include this year of upgrades and support in that initial purchase. That’s one difference from before.

David Colantuoni: The second part of it is that, at AES we announced that we were going to give customers the opportunity to purchase what we’re calling the standard support program, which includes upgrades and support for a year, and they would get access to the latest version of software. Now, the interesting thing is that we did do a special deal at AES, where we extended that for 16 months because we wanted to make sure that customers saw the value. We’ve looked at the pricing and we’ve given them 16 months of the ability to upgrade – and, by the way, that’s still going on today, it goes until the middle of December, that particular deal.

David Colantuoni: But moving forward, we’re going to have two programs. One, when you purchase a new product, you’ll get that year of support and upgrades. That’s included with that purchase; and then the second part of that is when that year is up, we want you to come back and re-purchase that year of upgrades and support under that standard support program. Those are the two main differences.

Larry Jordan: Which customers are you aiming this toward? Is it new customers because of the bundle or is it existing customers because it’s a modified version of the support contract?

David Colantuoni: It’s for both, really. It’s kind of a strange name to give it, but really we want to let people know that they are getting those upgrades for a year and they are getting access to technical support, so there are two components to it for $199 for that year. We’re aiming it to any customer who wants to upgrade, and any new customer who feels like they want to buy the software today but not if there’s a new version coming.

David Colantuoni: This way, it ensures that for the next year they’re going to get upgrades for that following year. So if they’re holding back and didn’t want to buy a new seat of Pro Tools, for instance, because they were afraid that it might get upgraded – and by the way we did talk about what’s coming next in Pro Tools and we can talk about that in a moment if you want to – they don’t need to any more.

David Colantuoni: They’re going to have access to that if they want to buy Pro Tools 11. By the way, if they want to upgrade today and they’re on an older version, they can upgrade and then get that previously announced Pro Tools cloud feature that we talked about at IBC and NAB, when it’s released.

Larry Jordan: You just opened up so many doors. I don’t have enough time in a single show to talk about this, but two quick questions. One is what is coming in the next version of Pro Tools? And the second one is Avid has a reputation for always being late in supporting the latest operating systems. It’s always behind. What are you doing to keep up with the latest releases?

David Colantuoni: We’re very tight end with OS manufacturers and we’re working on new Yosemite support right now for Pro Tools. We have quite an extensive test grid that we need to go through and we do work on beta software, but even after the main release comes out we still have some work to do, we’re still looking at some of the issues that our customers are reporting on beta and fixing them. It just takes us a little bit longer because we have so many integrated systems that we need to test. It’s a little bit more work.

Larry Jordan: Just to keep your feet to the fire, Apple and Adobe manage to support OS’s faster than you do. Why does it take you guys so long?

David Colantuoni: Apple obviously test their integrated systems while they’re developing their software, but Adobe doesn’t have hardware and for Pro Tools, we actually have quite an extensive suite of hardware that’s attached to Pro Tools software and that includes HDX and Native and all the computers that that sits in, even all the way up to consoles. Not only that, Pro Tools is actually tied into things like Interplay and ISIS.

David Colantuoni: Some large customers have a lot of Pro Tools systems and they’re using an ISIS and a whole bunch of Pro Tools hardware. We can’t just release that. We need to make sure that that absolutely works, and once we get that final gold master from Apple, we need to go off and that’s when we kick off our final release testing and beta test with our customers and then release the software. Sometimes it takes a little bit of time, sometimes it takes a lot of time. It’s just that we have a lot of different workflow challenges that we need to go through and we can’t release the software just to release it. We want to make sure it works.

Larry Jordan: Now we can get to the fun stuff. What’s coming in Pro Tools 12?

David Colantuoni: I’m not sure if it’s going to be Pro Tools 12, I’ll leave it at that, but the next release of Pro Tools, and I guess maybe what I should do is talk a little bit about what we’ve announced over the past few months at various trade shows. What we’ve been showing is a few things around Pro Tools collaboration and Pro Tools saving to the cloud. We’ve internally named it Pro Tools Cloud, but we’re still working on the name.

David Colantuoni: Essentially, what we’ve shown are multiple Pro Tools users interacting on a Pro Tools session file, on a track, and working together and collaborating, creating music, for instance, over the internet using the cloud. They’re able to chat, they’re able to see each other on video feeds and this is the ultimate way of working together remotely on a Pro Tools session file. That’s just one part of it.

David Colantuoni: You can also have the ability to save those files to a cloud archive or listening to plug-ins directly in your application and buying them and installing them without having to restart your computer, just instantaneously. If a person in London is using Pro Tools Collaboration and they have a particular plug-in and they send that file over while they’re collaborating to their collaborator in Los Angeles, let’s say, and that person doesn’t have the plug-in, we’ll actually have an experience that will inform the Los Angeles user that they need a particular plug-in and we can let them listen to it and if they want to purchase it, they can purchase it so that they can collaborate even more seamlessly. It’s really the next generation of how we’re using Pro Tools to bring multiple users together in a very wide circle that can be worldwide.

Larry Jordan: That is so cool. Have you announced a release date?

David Colantuoni: We haven’t announced a release date yet, but stay tuned and visit us at NAM this year. We’ll have some things we’ll talk about there, like we always do, and we’ll have some more information on what’s going on there.

Larry Jordan: David, I’ve got another 17 pages of questions I’d love to go over with you. We have to get you back on the show sooner than Avid has been on, so can we invite you back?

David Colantuoni: I would love to come back, thank you.

Larry Jordan: We would love to have you and I will get another 20 pages of questions ready. For people who want to know more about Avid and its products, where can they go on the web?

David Colantuoni: Avid.com. All the information that we’ve talked about here, particularly on the licensing, is up on our web page.

Larry Jordan: And David Colantuoni is the Senior Director of Product Management for Avid Technologies. David, this has been a wonderful chat. Thank you so much for your time.

David Colantuoni: Ok, great. Have a great day. I’ll talk to you soon.

Larry Jordan: Finding the perfect royalty free image or video for your creative project can be a crucial step in the film making process and, whether it’s for your website, publication or video segment, the experts at shutterstock.com can help you choose from over two million royalty free HD and 4K stock video clips, including time lapses, aerials, green screens and model released clips.

Larry Jordan: Sourcing over 12,000 brand new video clips each week, Shutterstock consistently offers the highest quality stills and video clips from professional film makers. Plus Shutterstock provides sophisticated search engine tools so you can search and drill down by category, clip resolution, contributor name and more. Also, use their great no risk try-before-you-buy option so you can see how their clips will look in your project before making a single purchase.

Larry Jordan: Try Shutterstock today – sign up for a free account. No credit card is needed and, as an added bonus to you, enter promo code BUZZ2014 before December 31^st to receive 25 percent off any footage package. Discover shutterstock.com.

Larry Jordan: Ned Soltz is an author, editor, educator and consultant on all things related to Mac Digital Video. He’s also the Contributing Editor to DV Magazine, a moderator on 2-pop and Creative Cow forums and a regular here on The Buzz. Ned, welcome back.

Ned Soltz: Hello, Larry, and happy Thanksgiving everybody.

Larry Jordan: And a very happy Thanksgiving to you as well. Ned, last week we looked at the latest trends in cameras. This week, I want to move to accessories. What’s caught your attention?

Ned Soltz: What really is interesting me these days are questions of stabilizers, and drones and other major accessories to make those cameras really work and add production value. Drones are a particular interest. Within recent days here in New York, we’ve had two incursions of drones into JFK air space and that certainly isn’t helping the whole cause with the FAA of the ability to be able to use these devices commercially and yet more and more of them are being produced.

Ned Soltz: For example, the last couple of weeks in the city, we’ve had the PhotoPlus Expo and we’ve had the CCW shows and, in both of those situations, drones have been featured, particularly those manufactured by DJI. They really are producing some phenomenal gear, whether with their own camera or with the ability to mount a GoPro or any of the other smaller action cams, and yet I think that’s sort of a risky investment right here on people’s parts of buying these things when ultimately are you really going to be able to use them in any kind of commercial sense?

Larry Jordan: I think there are a couple of issues here. One is can you; but the second is if you’re not an experienced pilot, however that’s defined, that drone can drift in all kinds of trouble without really too much effort.

Ned Soltz: Oh, that’s a real issue. I was speaking to one operator, for example, who bought three of the DJI drones. He crashed two of them in a tree, only one of them is working right now and obviously somebody who isn’t a tremendously experienced drone operator but a tremendously experienced photographer and videographer. These definitely have their issues.

Ned Soltz: When they work, you’re getting some absolutely amazing and phenomenal shots with them, but I think there’s a great deal of care that needs to be taken. The DJI products, the Phantoms look particularly interesting and they claim that they’re easy to operate, but frankly I’m a little bit afraid of it myself, not being a very good gamer and I was terrible back in the days of Microsoft Flight Simulator. I crashed every time, so I’m a little skeptical myself right now. Intriguing that this DJI, that makes the drones, also makes one of the newest crazes in stabilizers, and that’s the Ronin, a $3,000 device.

Larry Jordan: Now, wait, what does a stabilizer do? I’m familiar with stabilizers which are stabilizing, say, a DSLR mirror and stabilizers in software. What else is there?

Ned Soltz: This is a gimbal based device on which you can place a camera of varying weights depending upon the capacity of the gimbal and the device, hand hold it with the two handles that are there, and either by single operator or by dual operator with a supplied remote, be able to walk around and get absolutely perfectly stable shots overhead, low shoots, movement shots. In other words, it’s not a replacement for a Steadicam, you get a different kind of shot with the stabilizer than you do with the Steadicam, but becoming tremendously popular.

Ned Soltz: The first of these was the Movi, which started at $15,000 for a Movi that had higher capacity for something like a RED. But right now the Ronin stabilizer made by the same people that make the drones, DJI, is about $3,000 and will hold up to, let’s say, a Scarlet with a small prime lens and you can do some amazing work with it.

Ned Soltz: Now, of course, you start getting into some weight, you probably can only hold it three or four minutes depending on how much you’ve worked out that particular week, but what a lot of people are doing is using the good old Easyrig, the thing you strap on your back and the rig that goes over your head and the cable and attaching that to the cable and you can go virtually indefinitely with an Easyrig.

Ned Soltz: The advantage to the Ronin is that it’s just so unbelievably easy to balance. The Movi, it’s a great product and it’s still the granddaddy of all of these products, but it’s a little bit harder to balance. Two or three steps plus automation and the Ronin balances to your camera right away and probably, with about an hour’s worth of work, anybody can be reasonably good at operating it. The learning curve is a lot less steep than, for example, learning to be a Steadicam operator.

Larry Jordan: So the Ronin would be similar to a Steadicam in concept, in that it’s a handheld camera, but doesn’t cause motion sickness.

Ned Soltz: It’s a handheld camera, and your shots are going to look a little bit different with using a handheld stabilizer than they will with the Steadicam, and there are situations where you’re going to want a Steadicam, but if there are situations where you really need to be moving closely, to be moving rapidly, to be changing angles quickly, then these handheld stabilizers really hold tremendous promise.

Ned Soltz: There are now other clones of the Ronin that you’re beginning to see pop up online and at various shows, that are selling for even less than that $3,000 price point, so I think we’ll see over the coming months an erosion of the price point. The question will be how good they’ll be,  but effectively if you did pretty well in high school physics and can understand the concept of a gimbal, there’s the physics behind it and then all that’s required is just engineering something of proper material, weight and durability to be able to hold up to cameras of a variety of weight.

Larry Jordan: Ned, we’ve talked about camera stabilizers and we’ve talked about drones. What else has caught your attention?

Ned Soltz: I want to move on to another topic right now, also shown at the PhotoPlus Show in New York and introduced, a new monitor from LG, effectively a computer monitor. It’s a 31 inch monitor that will support up to UHD resolutions on a Mac. It will not support full 4K on a Mac but, with specific video cards, will support full 4K on a PC and it’s 1399 and they guarantee that it’s something like 90 percent of Adobe SRGB color space and about 90 percent of a DCI P3 color space. So this is something very useful now to monitor all of these HD, UHD and 4K cameras that we talked about last week. It really is a gorgeous, gorgeous image and at 1399 it’s really very much a breakthrough price.

Larry Jordan: And that’s from LG?

Ned Soltz: That’s from LG, right, and it’s a 31 inch monitor at $1399. But again, Mac users should be aware that if you’re shooting and trying to monitor through a display port or HDMI, you’re trying to monitor whole 4K, that won’t happen on a Mac, it’s not supported. It’s only supported on a Mac up to UHD resolutions.

Larry Jordan: Just to be clear, UHD is one of the two flavors of 4K.

Ned Soltz: One of the two flavors of 4K, right, so that is a double 1920 by 1080. That was adapted for broadcast TV because that remains within a 16 x 9 aspect ratio, which is the aspect ratio of broadcast TV. Interestingly enough, the aspect ratio of this LG monitor is 17 x 9, which is the full 4K 4096 resolution. You can display either one on a PC, but only the 3840 resolution on a Mac.

Larry Jordan: Anything else that you think we should pay attention to?

Ned Soltz: Well the Atomos Shogun finally is beginning to ship. It’s shipping at the end of November, so it’s right about now, and they say that by mid-December they should be caught up with all of the backlog, so here you’ll have a seven inch monitor and a device capable of recording 4K video to SSDs that included in that and the price point for that is only $2,000. It will also accept RAW signals from a number of cameras that are producing a video RAW. Shogun is shipping finally, after all of the hype at NAB, and it really is a big deal at, again, a breakthrough price point.

Larry Jordan: Thinking of big deals and announced ship dates, you notice this week also HAA announced the ship date for the CION camera.

Ned Soltz: Oh yes! Yes, yes, yes, we can’t forget that. CION should be in stock at most dealers by the end of December and the images that I have seen from it so far in test footage have been absolutely gorgeous. AJA has really nailed the color science on that camera.

Larry Jordan: Ned, it is always fun talking with you. Where can people go on the web to learn more about the things you’re discovering?

Ned Soltz: They can go to creativeplanet.com and look for DV Magazine and that’s where a lot of my articles will be hosted, and also contact information.

Larry Jordan: Ned Soltz is the Contributing Editor for DV Magazine, as well as a moderator on 2-pop and Creative Cow forums. Ned, as always, it’s been a delight having you join us.

Ned Soltz: Thank you, Larry.

Larry Jordan: When you’re working with media, one thing is essential – your computer needs peak performance. However, when it comes to upgrading your Mac, there are so many different options to choose from that the process can be confusing. That’s why Other World Computing carries the best upgrades that let your computer performance and storage grow as your needs grow. Since 1988, OWC has become one of the most trusted names in quality hardware and comprehensive support to the worldwide computer industry.

Larry Jordan: With an extensive online catalog of Mac, iPhone and iPad enhancement products, as well as a dedicated team of knowledgeable experts providing first rate tech support, OWC has everything you need to take your current system to the next level. Whether you need to maximize your system’s memory, add blazing speed or enhance reliability, look no further than the friendly experts at OWC. Learn more by visiting macsales.com today.

Larry Jordan: Robert Neivert is the Chief Operating Officer for Private.me, which lets people search online without being tracked. Even more, he’s an expert on net neutrality, which is what we want to talk about with him today. Hello, Robert, thanks for joining us.

Robert Neivert: Thank you, I’m happy to join.

Larry Jordan: First, happy Thanksgiving to you and thanks for taking time out of your holiday to visit. Second, could you define what net neutrality means?

Robert Neivert: Net neutrality is basically the ability for an ISP to not be able to change how they provide service based upon what website or where you’re trying to go. Imagine if you’re a user, you want to be able to access, say, Google or Netflix or anyone equally, that is to say they all get an equal chance. That’s sort of the idea of net neutrality. It’s oftentimes referenced and people talk about it like a roadway. Basically, all the companies have an equal shot to deliver services to the customer.

Larry Jordan: But highways have speed limits. Shouldn’t the web?

Robert Neivert: The web does have a speed limit, but imagine if net neutrality doesn’t pass. Comcast might be able to say, “You, Google, you’re not allowed on the road any more. You, Facebook, you’re not allowed on the road any more.” That’s really closer to what people are talking about if net neutrality doesn’t pass.

Robert Neivert: There are alternatives and that may not happen, but conceptually what people want to prevent is an ISP being able to control the content you see. For example, if you’re a Comcast customer and you type the word Google in, you expect to go to Google. But in fact, if net neutrality doesn’t exist at all, that may not be the case. You might type Google, but you might get taken to Comcast’s own search engine and not actually to the site you intended.

Larry Jordan: So it’s less an issue of speed limits and more an issue of access.

Robert Neivert: It’s also about speed, but access is part of that. Let’s use a slightly different example. Comcast recently had a dispute with Netflix. As part of that, they basically made all of Netflix slow down. They gave such poor service that it was no longer viable for you to use Netflix. So although they could get to Netflix, it was not reasonable for them to use it any more and that’s an example of the abuses that net neutrality is attempting to prevent.

Larry Jordan: Is there a relationship between net neutrality and the privacy of personal data?

Robert Neivert: ISPs today generally operate not quite as a monopoly, but mostly as monopoly in the areas. They have a tremendous amount of control over your data and they can choose to control many parts of your user experience on the web. Today, they’re sort of semi-regulated and net neutrality would push that even further to say they can’t really abuse that too much.

Robert Neivert: But if you imagine that isn’t true, they could easily store all the information and make use of that, either selling it off or otherwise making use of it. Privacy is oftentimes protected because of competition. When you have a choice, if you can choose to use a vendor or not, it allows you to choose privacy. But if you only have one provider, you have no choice and it’s difficult to protect your privacy.

Larry Jordan: That gets to another key question, because we’re wrestling with that here as we’re doing a website re-design. Why is it so hard to keep personal data private?

Robert Neivert: Part of that is because of the structure. Whenever we go to do things on the web, say you want to buy something or you’re looking at information, oftentimes we have to give information out to get what we want; the very basic model of the web today is that you give away your information.

Robert Neivert: Think about it, you type your name, your address and other things into a website to get something shipped to you. That concept is that you’re giving away your personal information and it’s theirs. The terms of service that the websites maintain says that the information is theirs to use. That’s one of the reasons, because when the web was constructed the whole idea was they said, “Well, this is easy enough. We’ll give out our information and we get products back,” and that’s why it’s now difficult to claim control of your information, because all these websites already have it.

Robert Neivert: One of the products or services that people have been looking at and exploring now is to say, “Look, you shouldn’t give out this information at all, but if a company wants it, they ask permission to make use of it,” and that’s a different model, a different way of viewing the world.

Larry Jordan: It strikes me that it becomes a question of ownership – who owns data about ourselves? Do we own the data or does the data become public when we enter, say, our shipping information into a store? It sounds similar to when we were publishing phone numbers in the phone book.

Robert Neivert: Exactly. In fact, that’s an excellent analogy. Today, we accept the fact that as we type this information in and these companies make use of it, we grudgingly accept it because we didn’t really think, “Hey, how bad could it be?” We didn’t really think of the consequences. But now, it’s so much more extensive. Where before they might just have had our phone number, now they know everything about us. The level of data has increased to the point where people who don’t know you, you’ve never met, can know so much about you that it feels like a violation of privacy.

Larry Jordan: For instance?

Robert Neivert: For instance, let’s go through a few things. Here’s a very simple example. Say you go shopping on Amazon and you’re looking at various products, and let’s assume for the moment these are very personal products. If you flip over and, say, go to Facebook or something else and you look to the right, you’ll notice ads for those same products start appearing on other web pages. Huh? How does that work? In fact, you’re actually being tracked. Everywhere you go, they know that you looked at those products and they’re happy to push ads for them. This is terrible. Think about the information flow that had to happen there. An awful lot of people suddenly know what you were looking at. Does that make sense?

Larry Jordan: Yes, it makes perfect sense. Your company is called Private.me. How does that affect what we’re doing?

Robert Neivert: Our goal, what we’re trying to accomplish, is to stop the process of you giving out your information, but instead you store your information in a single secure place and, when you give permission for a single use of that information – say to someone to ship you something – the company can see your address only to ship you something and then they can no longer access the information. The whole idea is that you don’t give your information out at all. In fact, you only allow short term permission to make use of. Basically, they can only access it when they want to ship you something; other than that, they can’t see your home address. Facebook can access personal information, for example your age or your birthday, only insofar as you want them to and at the time you want them to. If any time you want to stop, and here’s a very unfortunate example – if you have a stalker or your teenager daughter suddenly starts running into difficulty – that you can literally cut off access. All those companies, you can cut off their access to that information, preventing them from getting further information.

Larry Jordan: It seems to me there are two views of ownership. The point of view of you and your company is that we own our data and the point of view of merchants is that they own data which we have shared with them, but by aggregating it with other vendors they learn more than they would have learned just with a single transaction.

Robert Neivert: Exactly. In fact, that’s very accurate. Private.me is about saying you own your data and we choose to feel that the model of merchants or companies having your data is not the right way to do it. This worked in the past, where say in the past you went to the bank and you gave them your information. It was necessary for them to have it, but they did not have access to the enormous ability to access the information as they do today. Today, with a simple email address, I can find out your income, where you live, I can find out almost everything about your life and that’s too much. The system has built the ability to find out so much about you that it’s now become dangerous to give out your information.

Larry Jordan: Let’s switch this back again to net neutrality. There’s been a lot happening politically on the net neutrality issue and I want to try ultimately to tie it back in to private data, but I want to come back to net neutrality because Washington has been talking about this. The FCC seems to be involved, President Obama is involved. What’s happening on net neutrality politically in Washington?

Robert Neivert: I think what’s happened, obviously the President has issued a statement to the FCC basically supporting net neutrality and the politics of that are very tricky. It’s easy to understand who gains from net neutrality by looking at who donates money. If you look at the donations, you see the ISPs on one side donating millions of dollars to prevent it and you see on the other side things like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others voting to get it passed, as well as Google and Facebook and a few other companies. We can see who gains from this, who gains from net neutrality. I think what we’re really seeing is a political battle between two titans. You have the ISPs on one side and the large tech companies on the other. What is very interesting is that, in fact, the tech companies are arguing for regulation, and this is unusual. They’re very concerned that the ISPs, which are basically monopolies, will take control of their industry. That’s maybe a little exaggerated, but it’s their fear.

Larry Jordan: It is not unprecedented. I look back at the days of Ma Bell, when Ma Bell was a single phone company not that many decades ago, and we were running into similar issues of monopoly power.

Robert Neivert: That’s very true. What’s going to happen now with an ISP is they have complete control over the delivery of the product for all these tech companies.

Larry Jordan: So it would be that the only way you could get a package would be through the Post Office. It’s not necessarily because the Post Office is bad, but it limits the options you’ve got in how to get a package.

Robert Neivert: Yes. I would say it’s more like FedEx, because the Post Office is sort of a greater good, they have a mission to deliver. FedEx, their purpose is to make money. If they make more money not delivering the package, they won’t deliver the package. To ask an ISP to do the greater good is not a rational statement. The fact is, for an ISP, they are better off preventing services. They will make more money and it’s not like they’re wrong, they’re not evil, that’s what they’re there for. They’re supposed to make money, that’s their mission. That’s what companies are for. Let’s use a simple example. Verizon. It would cost Verizon a lot of money to have Netflix be successful, so really it’s in their interests to block and throttle and choke off Netflix. They make more money. This isn’t evil, they’re optimizing for their shareholders. That’s what we ask them to do. We can’t expect them to be a greater good, that’s not their mission. That’s the government’s mission.

Larry Jordan: Well, then, who holds the power here in this battle? There are actually three parties at work – there’s the government in terms of regulation, there are ISPs, information delivery, and the tech companies providing the original products. Who’s got the upper hand at the moment?

Robert Neivert: I think the battle’s actually a very good analogy. In fact, the three armies are basically tussling it out now. I don’t think it’s clear. Obviously, Obama has thrown in saying, “I support net neutrality,” and the fact that he’s backing the tech company army. The ISPs obviously have put in a substantial amount of money to make sure certain Congressmen are on their side, so they’ve certainly got some of… It’s not clear to me who’s going to win, but I also want to point out that it’s more than just the one battle. It’s more than just the Title II, which is what’s being invaded at the moment. It’s a long term planning.

Robert Neivert: What happens after they pass or don’t pass this regulation? There are many, many things that go with this. What is really being debated is is the internet open access, which basically means is the internet a common good, like roads, and therefore everybody gets equal access? Or, like capitalism, is it bought and sold… like shipping packages, where you can pay more for faster or pay less for slower? The odd part of this is for the most part these companies want capitalism, they want it to be a free market. They want to pay more to get faster and better deliveries over the internet. The problem is, because the ISPs are monopolies, all the other companies realize it’s not a fair game. The game won’t play out, they can’t play it because they can’t switch providers.

Robert Neivert: People can’t switch, so no matter how powerful Google is, no matter how successful Apple is, without a neutrality of some sort, they’re completely at the mercy of the ISP. They simply have no power. It doesn’t matter how good their product is, it doesn’t matter how much money they have, it’s irrelevant because they cannot deliver it without the ISP. Most tech companies don’t like regulation, but because the ISPs are monopolies, that’s actually why they’re fighting for regulation, because there isn’t a choice for them. It’s subtle to explain why there are so many battles here, but it actually comes down to the fact that people who don’t normally want regulation want it when threatened with a monopoly and that’s actually the crux of why you see the net neutrality fight happening. They actually don’t care about net neutrality because they’re already paying for premium service. Google, Facebook, they already pay for it. Nobody talks about it but they actually are paying for it now, today. What they don’t want is a monopoly strike, a cut-off. That’s what they’re scared of.

Larry Jordan: Where is the FCC at this point? What’s going on?

Robert Neivert: The FCC is in the middle. Before a few months ago, they did not want to move them to the higher regulation condition. They were in support of not moving to net neutrality. There has been a lot of public pressure towards them, but with the lobbyists and the corporate dollars, they’ve been swinging back and forth. It is not clear which way they’ll go. Certainly, with the President’s issuance, it certainly has moved them a little bit, but their actions today are showing more indecision than decision. They’ve actually pushed off the vote to next year, so it’s not expected to be resolved until well into next year. I’m not sure where the FCC is exactly; remember, it’s an agency, it’s not a single entity, there are certainly people on both sides. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that you’re asking them to add a substantial amount of regulation which is counter to the way most of the US likes to work, so it’s really a matter of arguing whether there’s a common good or not, whether it’s a necessity like electricity or roads.

Larry Jordan: If the FCC does nothing, isn’t that essentially status quo? Doesn’t that move us toward net neutrality? In other words, doing nothing is actually good?

Robert Neivert: Doing nothing would result in the ability for the ISPs to continue to do what they do now, which is to some level discriminatory traffic, i.e. the ISPs can choose to charge some companies more than others to get service. If they fail to pass it, you should expect to see a change in the service levels. Specifically, certain companies like Netflix and Facebook will be forced to pay money, in some cases substantial amounts, to maintain service.

Larry Jordan: Ok, so the current status quo is not going to last for the long term, so a decision has to be made. Are there court cases that are impacting this decision?

Robert Neivert: At the moment, there are lots of court cases going around, but not directly to do with this. This is a choice of regulation. After the decision gets made, I would expect to see lots of cases and other things, but this is a choice of regulation at the moment of whether or not they qualify as this common needed good or not.

Larry Jordan: We’ve spent a lot of time talking about net neutrality. Does Private.me have, as they say, a dog in this hunt?

Robert Neivert: Not directly. We want choice. We want the consumers to be able to choose where they go, how they use the net, so that they can choose to protect their data. If they have a single provider, whether it’s an ISP or anything else, it’s never good for privacy. Any time one company can force control, they will take control. That’s within their interest. Where we stand on this is that we would like to see choices and, since we cannot control the ISPs, since we cannot say, “We’re going to give choices to end users,” we’d rather see net neutrality so at the very least service providers can equally get to customers and provide customers the ability to say, “I don’t want to give up my personal information from this provider. I’ll choose this other one.” We don’t like the idea of a single ISP having so much control that they can basically take control of your privacy as well.

Larry Jordan: What do you see happening in the next, say, six months?

Robert Neivert: Oftentimes in these things, you don’t have a black and white winner or loser. I suspect that in this case we probably will see some form of net neutrality passed, but I expect there’ll be some exit clauses, some subtleties that allow the ISPs some leeway to charge for something. I just don’t think you’re going to see an absolute win or loss. I think you’re going to see more of a middle ground. Maybe they’ll pass that, but they’ll probably pass another law saying, “Well, in this case you can charge more or less for this,” and a half victory or a half loss, depending upon your point of view on the matter. I would actually expect that. I would expect the result of that is not a lot of changes from where we are today. Maybe little things, but not a lot. What I’m looking forward to or hoping for is to actually advance… to enable something that makes it optimal for the ISP to invest and improve the infrastructure in the US, but I just don’t see that happening from this particular decision. I expect that what you’ll see going forward is someone like Google getting into the game of fiber and going directly to the customer. I expect that to generate a lot more good in terms of better services than this net neutrality.

Larry Jordan: It sounds like we’re going to continue to muddle forward but lean in the right direction, but not really resolve it completely.

Robert Neivert: I think that’s an excellent summary. I don’t see us making any real leaps forward here. I don’t see Congress really being united enough on the topic to push it in any particular movement forward. I think it’ll sort of wobble back and forth.

Larry Jordan: Tell me about Private.me quickly, before we run out of time. Why should I come visit your site and what do I get?

Robert Neivert: Our mission is to allow you to protect your privacy, your information. We started off by simply allowing you to, say, search anonymously so people can’t look at what you’re doing, basically. The overall mission we’re trying to accomplish is that you can take all your personal information, whatever that may be, put it in a nice secure place and, instead of giving it to companies to use, you allow them temporary access. You say, “I’m going to allow that company to ship me something today, right now. That’s the only time they can see my address. After that, they can’t.” Our overall mission is to allow people to say that they own their data and if you want it forgotten, if you want it deleted, if you want it removed, you can hit a button and it goes away and that means your life is yours to control, it is not anyone else’s right to own your personal data.

Larry Jordan: Robert, this has been a fascinating conversation. I want to invite you back in a few months to talk further about this whole issue of data privacy and what we can do to guard our own data. What website can people go to to learn more about you and your company?

Robert Neivert: They can go to private.me and there’s some information there about how to browse, how to do some searching anonymously, as well as our up and coming future products. Any ecommerce company that wants to support this can also work with us to build this anonymous into their website, so we’ll protect all the users’ data so that the ecommerce site can say, “You don’t have to worry about being hacked and having any of this information stolen because we won’t have it, it won’t be on our systems.” We hope to find a lot of companies that are looking forward and want to protect privacy and work with us so that we can help them achieve that goal.

Larry Jordan: Robert, thank you very much. The website is private.me. Robert Neivert is the COO of Private.me and, Robert, thanks for joining us today.

Robert Neivert: That was great joining you. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Larry Jordan: It may be Thanksgiving, but this has been a great show. We started with David Colantuoni, the Senior Director of Product Management for Avid Technologies; Ned Soltz, the Contributing Editor for DV Magazine; and Robert Neivert, the COO of Private.me.

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

Larry Jordan: You can talk with us on Twitter, @DPBuZZ, and Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Music on The Buzz is provided by Smartsound. Text transcripts are provided by Take 1 Transcription. You can email us at info@digitalproductionbuzz.com. Our producer is Cirina Catania, our engineer is Megan Paulos and on behalf of Mike Horton, my name’s Larry Jordan, and thanks for listening 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.