Digital Production Buzz

February 26, 2015

[Transcripts provided by Take 1 Transcription]

 

(Click here to listen to this show.)

 

HOSTS

Larry Jordan

Michael Horton

GUESTS

Dan Sachelli, Event Manager, BVE

John Kelly, General Manager, JVC/Europe

Jeromy Young, CEO, Atomos

Nigel Wilkes, General Manager, Panasonic/Europe

Jim Marks, DP/Director

Michael Accardi, President, CueScript

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Larry Jordan: 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 this week we are in London at the Excel Convention Center for the BVE trade show. In fact, our entire show this week originates from BVE.

Larry Jordan: We start with Dan Sachelli. He’s the Commercial Manger, the person in charge of BVE, to give us an understanding of what this show is about. Then we talk with John Kelly, the General Manager for JVC Professional products about some of the new camera technology that JVC is introducing here at BVE. Then another announcement came from Atomos and we talk to Jeromy Young, the CEO and Co-founder of Atomos about some of the new announcements that they’re making here in London.

Larry Jordan: Then Nigel Wilkes, the Group Manager for Panasonic Cameras, talks with us about Panasonic’s view of the changing world of camera technology. Jim Marks is a Director of Photography, but we found him talking about a brand new 4K lens from Schneider Optics, so we talk about commercial production and the challenges of getting the right lens for your camera; and we wrap up with Michael Accardi, the President of CueScript, about how to pick a prompting system, whether you’re in the field or in the studio. It’s going to be an exciting show with some wonderful interview.

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: And as long as I’m doing reminders, remember to visit 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 at both our show and the industry. I’ll be right back with Dan Sachelli, the Event Manager for BVE, right after this.

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Larry Jordan: I can’t think of a better place to start our coverage of BVE than a conversation with the gentleman responsible for the show. His name is Dan Sachelli, he’s the Commercial Manager for BVE. Dan, thanks for joining us today.

Dan Sachelli: My pleasure.

Larry Jordan: How would you describe BVE?

Dan Sachelli: BVE is the UK industry hub for the whole broadcast and production industry. It’s a three day exhibition and conference taking place over here in Excel in London and it houses 270 exhibitors on their own dedicated stands and over 350 brands, and plays host to 15,000 industry professionals.

Larry Jordan: I know you work for I2I, which is an exhibition company. Does this mean that BVE is a part time job for you or full time?

Dan Sachelli: No, not at all. You’re quite right, I2I operate in many different sectors, but I solely operate on BVE year round.

Larry Jordan: So as you were planning the show, what was your theme for this year’s event?

Dan Sachelli: The theme of BVE this year has been one to reflect what’s going on in the industry, as we do every year – converging technologies, collaborative technologies. BVE is embracing a wider range of products and services than ever before and we’re trying to shift the perception of BVE to something far greater.

Larry Jordan: I’ve been visiting BVE, I would guess, for four or five years and this has got to be the biggest exhibit I’ve seen. You’ve got much more of the Excel hall involved and the energy and the number of people attending, what is it, 10,000 people you have coming to the show this year?

Dan Sachelli: We have 15,000 actually, all said and done, by the end of the show. We’ve not had the stats in yet because we’re talking during the show, but that’s what we expect. The projections are looking good. There’s been a lot more investment going on in the show this year from our side, but also on the exhibitors’ side. People are taking a lot of pride and investment in their stand space and we’re reflecting that with our theaters. Obviously the fantastic 4K theater is just behind us and you can see from that, it’s a statement of intent about how serious we are at BVE.

Larry Jordan: One of the things that impressed me is the integration of conference sessions directly on the show floor as opposed to having the conference in some hall somewhere else. Why put the conference on the show floor?

Dan Sachelli: I guess the most important thing to mention about the conference and the content is that, unlike any other show in the UK or even European or global, it’s 100 percent free to attend, whether that’s keynotes, whether that’s master classes, workshops, panel discussions. Everything’s free to attend. The idea of having all the theaters on the show floor is that they house in the audience a lot of the key buyers that are coming to BVE. As soon as those sessions are finished, those audience members are straight onto the show floor, mingling with the exhibitors.

Larry Jordan: Now, you’ve got a production theater, a post production theater, a really lovely 4K theater for showing 4K films and conversations on 4K. What are some of the other stands that you have here for the conference?

Dan Sachelli: For the conference, we’ve got a cinematography and lighting theater. You mentioned production, but we’ve also got a producer’s theater which talks about the finance of getting projects off the ground etcetera for new time producers. We’ve got a connected theater, talking about IP delivery. We’ve got a broadcast, tech and workflow theater. So for every vertical that BVE represents, we’ve essentially got a dedicated conference stream.

Larry Jordan: Have you started working on next year’s show yet?

Dan Sachelli: We have, yes. For the past six months at least we’ve been thinking about 2016. We think about 2017, we’re thinking about 2018. We’ve already added a new theater and it’s on the floor plan you can see behind me, so we’ve got an AV theater and an AV zone. We’ve got an outdoor broadcast area, but it’s February in London so we’ve brought that inside. We’ve got an expanded production services area acknowledging how important that sector is to the industry, as well as the kit and products on the show floor so, yes, lots of plans.

Larry Jordan: Do you try to put the same companies that are competing in the same area together? Or do you try to keep competitors apart? What’s your thinking on positioning?

Dan Sachelli: The whole idea of BVE and exhibitions in general is that it’s a place for people to come and contrast, compare and test competing products and, although we don’t strictly zone the whole show floor. If you look on the right hand side it’s generally more about broadcast, broadcast hardware, delivery, connected delivery. The left hand side of the show as you look at the floor plan is post production, acquisition and production service. So yes, the natural order of things suggests that you’ll be close to competitors and I think that’s a good thing, I think it’s healthy.

Larry Jordan: Putting on a show like this has got to be exhausting. What is it that gets you excited enough to come to work every day?

Dan Sachelli: I think just the reminder of what is actually happening when you get here. It’s great. You work on a show cycle that’s a year long and by the time you come, you sort of forget what you’ve been working towards. But it’s really important to keep that in mind throughout the year, what the actual end goal is of what you do, and then obviously we get to come and see it and it’s really rewarding, actually, seeing it all come together.

Larry Jordan: For people who want to learn more and stay in touch with BVE across the year, what website can they go to?

Dan Sachelli: Our website is bvexpo.com. We’ve got various social media channels that you can access us through – Facebook, Twitter. You can get in touch with me directly if you email sales@bvexpo.com if you’re interested in being an exhibitor or you just want to find out more. My biggest piece of advice would be to come down and check it out for yourself.

Larry Jordan: And Dan Sachelli is the Commercial Manager of BVE. The website again is bvexpo.com and, Dan, thanks for joining us today.

Dan Sachelli: Thanks for having me. Thanks, Larry.

Larry Jordan: A company that we’ve covered for a long time is JVC and John Kelly is the General Manager for UK, Ireland, Scandinavia and MEA, which means the Middle East and…?

John Kelly: Africa.

Larry Jordan: Africa. We’re here at the JVC booth at BVE. John, thanks for joining us today.

John Kelly: It’s a pleasure.

Larry Jordan: Why is JVC at BVE? There’s NAB, which is clearly huge, and there’s IBC, which is also huge. Why a small show like BVE? What attracts you?

John Kelly: Certainly we would of course consider both NAB and IBC as key international broadcast events, but we also believe it’s very important to get in front of as many customers as possible on a more local or regional basis. We’ve been very active in the UK and in Western Europe for many years, of course, and we see the BVE exhibition as a key part of getting our products and technology message out in front of customers.

Larry Jordan: As I stand here at the booth, I look and I see Canon and Sony and Panasonic and all the usual suspects. What customers should consider JVC? Who do you think your market is?

John Kelly: The market is very diffuse now, for one thing. In days gone by, there was very much a defined strata of professional products from the broadcast side through the kind of products that might be used for general production through into education markets and lower end videography. What we see now is almost, if you like, a flattening of the market where the same kind of technology is accessible not just to broadcast customers but, indeed, to perhaps more entry level videographers, guys wanting to get in and produce low budget cine movies, for example, so the market we’re seeing is compressed a little bit in that regard, both in terms of price and, as I say, in terms of access to technology.

Larry Jordan: I was talking a little earlier today with the General Manager over at Panasonic, who says that with the move from tape based cameras to tapeless, it essentially has become a sensor with a computer behind it, which opens up the floodgates to companies like Blackmagic or AJA, who have never been competitors before, to enter what has been traditionally a camera person’s space. How does JVC respond to that competition?

John Kelly: I think that’s a very interesting question and I think, from our point of view, much of the answer to that lies in camera ergonomics. You’re fully correct that the, let’s say, architecture of many cameras now is very much an electronic computer one, if you like, with of course that sensor at the front end as a dominant feature from an optical point of view. What we see as critically important is adopting an ergonomic formatted camera that professional customers actually can recognize and can easily work with. Of course, it’s easily possible that customers can use video DSLR type products, but what we also see, in our experience, is that they do have some limitations in terms of the practical use, in terms of things like having ND filters or having XLR professional audio support. We believe, including some of the new products we’re showing here at BVE, that the camera solutions we’re offering provide that level of ergonomic and functional control as a camera.

Larry Jordan: Which gets me to the fact that we’re at the JVC booth. What are you showing here that’s new?

John Kelly: We’re actually launching four new camera products at BVE this year, so a very exciting time for us. I’ll give you a quick overview of the range, firstly starting with a model called the GYLS300. This is a very important and interesting product for us, because the LS300 is our first large sensor camera. JVC is perhaps quite well known as producing camera products more suited to ENG style news and video production. Of course, the cine style, the shallow depth of field, large sensor market is one which has been very steadily growing over the last couple of years and the LS300 is really our first product to address that particular market. That has a Super 35 native 4K sensor at the front end, but behind that – again, going back to the point I made earlier – is the ergonomic camera style that a professional camera user would recognize in terms of those manual camera controls. We think the combination of the very large sensor and 4K resolution that gives but with a very strong ergonomic camera package provides a really good solution.

Larry Jordan: Ok, so we’ve got the LS300. What other news products do you have?

John Kelly: We have what you might say is in a sense technology wise a companion product to that, a model called the GWSP100. The SP100 takes the same sensor but puts it in remote camera head connected through an umbilical cable to a recording base station and we’re getting a lot of interest in this product from areas like sports, natural history, for example, aerial shooting, anywhere you need a very high quality but compact recording camera system. We see that as, again, a very interesting and actually quite a unique product.

Larry Jordan: Ok, that’s two cameras, so we’ve got two more to go.

John Kelly: Yes, that’s right. The third and fourth products are really brother and sister models, which are the HM170 and the HM200. These once again are HD and 4K recording products, as all of the cameras we’ve referred to are, but these are a little bit more designed as integrated lens, more point and shoot, ENG style cameras, but still giving you the benefits of 4K native recording as well as HD, but in a more compact point and shoot type form factor.

Larry Jordan: Are customers actually buying 4K cameras? Or are they just looking at them right now?

John Kelly: What we’re seeing at the moment, the level of interest in 4K is very high but I think we all recognize there are a number of challenges in terms of delivery and transmission of 4K content. We see two main application areas, one in terms of acquiring in 4K as an archive but still delivering in HD at the moment; or, indeed, just simply using the cameras as excellent acquisition products for HD for the here and now but perhaps with an eye over the next couple of years towards beginning to shoot and produce in 4K.

Larry Jordan: As you wear your General Manager hat and look at competition and industry trends, what are you keeping your eye on for this next year? What are we going to be paying attention to?

John Kelly: I think, from an acquisition point of view, two of the trends we’ve touched on are obviously key – 4K, of course, and in our case certainly the large sensor technology. As I said, that’s a part of the market that we were not addressing previously and we’re now able to do so and we’re very optimistic about growing that particular sector of our business. The other aspect, I think, of technology which is very important from a camera and acquisition point of view is in terms of networking connectivity. Now, this is an area that we’d like to think JVC have excelled in over the last couple of years, starting with models like the HM650, which was very widely adopted for news gathering, broadcasting and other production areas, and the combination of functionality that offers and will continue to offer in terms of live streaming, in terms of FTP file transfer, in terms of remote camera control, we see an increasing demand for those features in camera products.

Larry Jordan: One last question and I’ll let you go. Is there any logic at all to the naming convention of JVC cameras? We’ve got GY cameras and HM cameras. These are pretty weird acronyms. Is there a sense behind it all?

John Kelly: There is a sense but we like to keep it a mystery. We like to keep some things hidden, so I think we’ll have to draw a veil over that particular point for now.

Larry Jordan: John, for people who want more information, where can they go on the web to learn more?

John Kelly: They can go to www.jvcpro.co.uk.

Larry Jordan: That’s jvcpro.co.uk and John Kelly is the General Manager for the UK, Ireland, Scandinavia and MEA for JVC Professional. John, thanks for joining us today.

John Kelly: Thank you very much.

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Larry Jordan: This crowded booth behind me is the Atomos booth and, if you haven’t heard of Atomos, you may have heard of Samurai or the Shogun or the Ninja, which are their digital recorders. I’m delighted to introduce Jeromy Young, who’s the CEO of Atomos. Jeromy, step on in.

Jeromy Young: Cheers

Larry Jordan: Tell us, what is Atomos?

Jeromy Young: The word – I’ll tell you that first – is the original Greek word for indivisible, Socrates five and a half thousand years ago, and that’s my business partner and I, Ian Overliese, who’s our technical genius. We both love the customer and their products and what they need to do with products, and so we’re just endeavoring to produce products that reduce your time, increase your profit or creativity, because most creative guys, when you show them that you’ve got a bit more time left, they just do more to make it better, so I always say, “No, you can spend more time with your family or have a beer or something,” but no, they like to be more creative. We’re delivering tools that make that happen.

Larry Jordan: What was your first product?

Jeromy Young: Our first product was the Ninja, Ninja 1, and what it was, a ninja is an assassin – you’ll notice a theme in our products, with Samurai and Shogun, they’re all warriors and assassins – and the Ninja was the assassin for mpeg and the cost of media, P2, SxS cards, all of those proprietary formats the Japanese companies forced customers to buy and made a lot of money from or the replacement for tape where they made a lot of media profit. We wanted to cut across that to show that you could record directly to an editing format at the camera and go straight into the post production process.

Jeromy Young: I worked for ten years in Japan, Ian worked on mobile phone A6 for many years and then we both went to Blackmagic Design, helped grow that company, and then we broke out to make Atomos. We know the post production side and we had to learn the production side when we first made the Ninja. The Ninja had just a half decent screen for the time and it was recording directly to Apple ProRes from the sensor of the camera. 10 bit 422 direct from sensor was our original message and that has grown into adding lots of features for monitoring, because we realized the production guys actually cared about the monitor whereas the post production guys cared about what format they were recording.

Jeromy Young: We actually ended up marketing to two crowds and that really made us strong, because we now understand focus peaking, two to one zoom, all of the things that you need to be a really amazing monitor. We partnered up with Sharp and LG to make the best screens in the world for video. We adjust frame rates on video. We’re not a Lego block company, where we take IP from other people or chips from other people. Every single line of code, every piece of software is written by us, every design of the product is done by us, so we believe in an all-encompassing solution but without locking the customer in.

Larry Jordan: So you started with the Ninja and then where did you go from there?

Jeromy Young: Ninja led to Samurai. All the Ninja line is HDMI only, so we were really targeting that hobbyist, prosumer up to pro video market, where the cameras will come in more and more with HDMI and people making money from producing video to the masses, so weddings, corporate events. These type of customers were using HDMI cameras. Then we got a lot of requests for the SDI. Coming from the SDI world, we obviously had that on our road map and so then we spun the product into a slightly bigger screen, so that was a 4.3 inch screen on the Ninja and then we spun it into a five inch screen and then added SDI to it.

Jeromy Young: It was only an SDI product because we realized early that if you and HDMI and SDI, the cost goes up. To keep the cost down for customers, most of the time you have an SDI camera so that’s what you’re using; and then we led into convertors which then converted HDMI to SDI. It was the world’s first battery powered convertor with a continuous power system. All of our products have a continuous power patented system which is one battery goes down, switches to the other side and then you swap them out and charge the other one or have another one ready.

Jeromy Young: We’re well placed in the convertor space to put that technology in. We still have our connect convertors, which are extremely popular. They convert HDMI to SDI or vice versa, they have a battery on top that lasts ten hours, so you don’t need to plug it into the wall, so most of the time it’s like, “Damn, I’ve got this SDI feet but I’ve got a cheap HDMI Dell monitor that I want to use,” so that was what that product was for, plus it made the Samurai into a Ninja and the Ninja into the Samurai and we made a battery foot that clicked on the back and it’s a very small product, so everything hit a sweet spot in the convertor market.

Larry Jordan: So where does Shogun fit in?

Jeromy Young: Then we realized that our screens weren’t good enough. So we ended up going to mobile phone technology screens, they were custom screens for us but they used those really high quality Apple or Samsung type of screens that everyone’ used to looking at. It seemed a bit weird that you’re paying a lot of money for pro product but it didn’t look as good as your iPhone, so we brought that technology into the professional era and made the Ninja Blade and the Samurai Blade, and the Blade is the razor sharp quality of the screen. That then led to what happened next. 4K cameras started to come out.

Jeromy Young: I lived and worked ten years in Japan, worked very closely with Sony, Panasonic, Canon, Nikon at those times, so we have a very strong relationship with those guys. We’ve implemented HDMI start/stop trigger from the camera to us and that’s an open standard that we’ve let the world have – even our competitors can use that – because we believe in an open side. So there’s the Sony and the Apple side, which is quite closed and then they try to make money off that; then there’s the Microsoft theory, where everything’s open and everyone can use it.

Jeromy Young: We’re trying to mix those two together. I’d learnt my trade in DV and then we went HDV and then there was HD coming into the equation, so I’ve seen these cycles before and we knew that 4K would come very soon, so we teamed up with Japanese makers and we announced Shogun at NAB last year off the back of the A7S and GH4 products from the Japanese makers, which we had known about for six months or a year before. We knew that we couldn’t produce that product, the development time was about a year. We announced the product, saying we’d ship it in October.

Jeromy Young: We ended up slipping a little bit to December, because 4K is actually very, very difficult at these data rates, a little bit more difficult than we thought, but we ended up getting it over the line and we’ve got our best screen on that product, which is a 1920 X 1200. We’ve got a nice bar down the bottom that lets all the menu structures be there and we’ve added things like 3D Lux, 4K down convertor to link to infrastructure. We record to SSDs and we’ve just announced the DNxHR, as well as obviously the ProRes 4K formats that we support. We believe we’re the best monitor in the world that just happens to record these amazingly high quality formats and plays back and is a deck and edits on the device. That’s where the Shogun is.

Larry Jordan: You’ve also announced some new stuff here at BVE. What have you announced?

Jeromy Young: The DNxHR, first in the world to record to Avid, and Avid’s making a bit of a comeback. They’ve got a nice cloud based solution which the hiring guys are really looking forward to using, and they’re about to release their Media Composer DNxHR supported software. They gave us the spec and we finished it pretty quickly. We’re the first in the world to record this format and it’s at the camera from these amazing sensors of these 4K cameras – FS7, A7S, GH4 all the way up through SDI cameras and beyond. We also announced a pretty comprehensive 3K Lux implementation to allow the higher end customers to use the Lux that they either custom make or from a camera like SLOG, CLOG etcetera. When it comes in to the monitor, it’s all washed out, so we do a transformation on the screen, still recording the SLOG etcetera so that you can still do what you want with it after, but you can look at it, set up your shot for exposure and color accuracy like it’s a rec709 monitor, so you’re back in the world that you know and you’re not sitting there with a washed out image, trying to guess what’s going on.

Larry Jordan: There are a lot of digital recorders from a lot of manufacturers and most of the companies that make digital recorders are all good solid companies. Why should somebody buy one from you? What is it that makes your stuff unique?

Jeromy Young: There are two things, I think. I could go all day on that question, but the first thing I’d say is that we care extremely deeply about the actual production and what people do on a daily basis and that’s encompassed by us putting everything in the box that you need to get started. The only thing we don’t put in is a hard disk and an HDMI cable or an SDI cable, you need to provide that yourself. But on the hard disk side, we have open hard disks that we standardize and test and we say, “These are approved. You will have no problems using these, provided you use the Intel model number, the Samsung model number, the Toshiba model number,” etcetera. SanDisk is probably the best disk that we have in implementation right now, but we give you the drive caddy, the USB3 to SATA drive caddy.

Jeromy Young: We give you the cases to put the drives in. We give you the chargers, the batteries. We give you a waterproof case and it’s all encompassed in one price, so we’re the most affordable and we’re the most all encompassing. Then we go into the functionality. We have put a deck, a really high end monitor, a recording device like a camera but at 20 times the quality and about 30 times the data rate of what the cameras are capable of internally. We record directly from the sensor and we continue to update our software on a weekly basis. As we’re developing features or find a problem from a customer, we immediately fix it and release a new version, so it’s very much like your iPhone. It pops up and tells you, “We have a new update, please link to your computer and update,” so we don’t leave you behind. We don’t charge for extra formats. We’re doing FS RAW next month, which is our next update, so since the beginning of all of our products, we’ve done 57 updates to our operating system. It’s called AtomOS, we’re now at AtomOS 6.2. We went through 1.0, which was on the Ninja; 2.0 added metadata tagging from Apple. We do editing on the device to make sure that we’re sitting right at the point of capture or, once you’ve finished the production, you can then go and metadata tag in and out points.

Larry Jordan: Jeromy, where can somebody go on the web to learn more about the products you’ve got?

Jeromy Young: Atomos.com. It’s right there. All of our information’s on there, we’ve got a bunch of videos and all the products are listed there.

Larry Jordan: Jeromy Young is the CEO and the Co-Founder of Atomos. Jeromy, thanks for joining us today.

Jeromy Young: Thanks a lot.

Larry Jordan: It would be impossible to be at BVE and not see the Panasonic booth directly in the middle of this great exhibit hall, and I’m talking with Nigel Wilkes. He’s the Group Manager for Broadcast and IT Systems with Panasonic. Nigel, thanks for joining us today.

Nigel Wilkes: You’re welcome.

Larry Jordan: First, congratulations on the award that you guys announced in your press release today. What did you get?

Nigel Wilkes: We’ve been working over the last couple of weeks on a costume drama. We’ve just launched VariCam 35 and VariCam HS and that camera originated 12 years ago, when we were in the days of HD, when HD was starting, and 720 and we were very strong on the natural history side at that time and we could never quite get into the top of that triangle where ARRI was sat, they were sat there with their filmic history etcetera and they owned the feature and the drama world. Over the last two years, we’ve developed a new VariCam, which is what we have here today, a modular product but it has some secret little technical bits in there which is giving us the edge on the competition. Over the last two to three weeks, we were involved with 24/7, which is one of the large drama hire companies in the UK and they decided that they wanted to be a bit more radical and they didn’t want to go down the ARRI road because it was safe and everyone likes that brand. They decided to go with VariCam so, yes, it’s been great for us because it’s our first drama, it’s a high profile one that’s going out on BBC HD. They’ve taken in six cameras and they’re doing prep this week and they start shooting next week, so it’s good. I’m excited by it.

Larry Jordan: Well, congratulations. At the other end of the spectrum, we’re looking at the GH4, which has just exploded in popularity. Who are you finding are the customers for that?

Nigel Wilkes: Do you know what? The history of the GH4, we started out with GH2, which was a great product, and then GH3 came out and then GH4 came out, which was the world’s first 4K DSLR single chip camera, and the interest on it has absolutely exploded. We were at BVE here last year, the consumer guys came to join us, a guy called Mark Baber, who’s their Lumix specialist. He joined us on the stand and he was 16 deep with this camera. We got a lot of visits from the MD of a very high end camera manufacturer, who came over to see what was going on, and over the 12 month period that product has been sold to everybody from the guy who’s at home who just wants to shoot stills and get really high end still images to that low end film shooter who wants to get out and do shorts and maybe weddings and all that sort of stuff, right up to recently ‘Star Wars’. On ‘Star Wars’, they actually used GH4 for all their drone shots, so I’m a bit worried about that camera because he’s at the bottom of my chain but he’s slowly coming up.

Larry Jordan: Well, I had the pleasure of doing a road trip last spring with Philip Bloom and you could not pry the GH4 out of his hands. He was shooting it everywhere, so you have fans in a lot of places with that camera.

Nigel Wilkes: Ah, it’s amazing. It’s amazing, yes.

Larry Jordan: One of the things that I’m curious about, because you look at the strategy for Europe and try to figure out where the company is going and sales and marketing and all of that, how are you seeing the industry evolve?

Nigel Wilkes: The industry’s changed so much. I’ve been with Panasonic for 16 years now and my original job was I was the HD sales guy and I did that from the early days when we were arguing about whether 720p and 1080p was HD and everything else, and it was probably at that moment that it was one of the best jobs in the world because it was a product that everybody wanted. It was mechanism based, it was tape based, so the choices were few. You had basically manufacturers of cameras and as soon as we started moving to P2 and Panasonic started the whole solid state recording side, and at the time that we did it, it was probably 12 years ago, everyone said that Panasonic was mad, “Why are you moving away from tape? Why are you putting it onto cards? It’s never going to work.” But if you look at where we are right now, every manufacturer is doing exactly what Panasonic started all that time ago.

Nigel Wilkes: The problem with it, and we made this statement at the time, was that as soon as you take the tape mechanism away, basically you’re putting a computer on the back of a lens, so that now opens up the whole world and it wasn’t going to be long before someone like Microsoft would rock up with a camera, or maybe Google or even our friends from GoPro. I think now there is so much choice out there that Panasonic has to change as a company. We are a manufacturer of products, that’s what we do, but we manufacture robust product, product that you can take into the worst places, whether it’s deserts, as in the heat and humidity, or whether you’re taking into cold areas. We’ve had to change as a company because this industry’s changed. There’s so much choice now. You don’t ship a lot of boxes all of the time because people don’t have the budgets.

Larry Jordan: But just to raise the flag, Panasonic, like every manufacturer, is trying to find out what’s going to be the next hit product and they’re all coming out with new codecs, they’re all coming out with new formats, they’re coming out with new sensors. The change from a person that’s buying cameras point of view is almost so quick that we’re afraid to do anything because as soon as we buy it, it’s out of date. How does Panasonic respond to the instant obsolescence?

Nigel Wilkes: We’ve always had the policy with our codecs and our recording formats to basically supply all of our cameras with the same codecs. So it doesn’t matter whether your budget is three grand, four grand or whether you’re budget’s 37 grand, 40 grand. The codecs in the cameras are exactly the same. It means that you can get program makers or filmmakers all working on the same codecs, doesn’t matter what budget they’ve got, they’re all different, they’re all producing the same type of product, but it also means that you can use a multitude of different types of cameras on the same shoot and when you go into the edit, all your codecs are exactly the same. We’ve always done it, we’ve always stayed on the same sort of codecs route that we’re on now. We started with DVC Pro, we went with DVC Pro HD; we started with AVC Intra now and some of our competition, if you’ve noticed, now have AVC Intra going into their cameras. We bought out Ultra, which has now allowed us obviously to bring out 4K. But the one thing that Panasonic’s always delivered is when you go into the edit, if you go back to the days of editing film, you would cut each individual picture and then glue it together and it’s the same with us. With our codecs, when you’re editing, it’s exactly the same as editing film. When you cut, you cut a picture.

Larry Jordan: All of your codecs are iFrame based. You’re not using compressing groups of pictures, you have each individual frame.

Nigel Wilkes: That’s right.

Larry Jordan: It makes for larger file sizes, but it makes for a much more efficient edit.

Nigel Wilkes: Yes it does, yes.

Larry Jordan: So how do you manage to get excited? Every time you turn around, there’s new competition coming up, there are companies you’ve never heard of like HAA and Blackmagic releasing cameras and you’re with a more traditional camera company that’s struggling to respond to the industry. What gets you convinced it’s time to get out of bed in the morning and go to work?

Nigel Wilkes: Working for a sales company like I do, or a manufacturer as I do, working for a big brand, that’s what drives me because I’ve had, I guess, the pleasure of working on some major productions in the time that I’ve worked for this company. We are very big in natural history and those guys need a very robust product. When you’re working on something like ‘Planet Earth’ or ‘Frozen Planet’, where they’re taking them to the worst places in the world, and when they come back after being away for three years and you didn’t get one phone call to say that, “My camera’s broken down,” that for me is what drives my passion and we’re the same with news. We have every international news organization bar one in the UK and they’re exactly the same. When you watch news at night, these guys are going into the worst territories, they’re going into war zones, and our cameras survive. A lot of the competition that’s come out, although they’re very good budget wise, could you take them into those areas? I don’t think so. I don’t think they would survive, so that’s probably what makes me tick.

Larry Jordan: Nigel, thanks for joining us today. Nigel Wilkes is the Group Manager for Broadcast and IT Systems for Panasonic UK. Their web address is panasonic-broadcast.com. That’s panasonic-broadcast.com. Nigel, this has been fun. Thank you.

Nigel Wilkes: Thank you very much. Thank you.

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Larry Jordan: We’re in the Vitec booth, which is one of the largest companies in our industry, and Vitec has a number of different products, one of which is Manfrotto. Manfrotto is known for the camera heads that they make, but they also distribute products both in the UK and throughout Europe, and one of the new products they’re distributing are Schneider lenses and I want to learn more about what some of the new Schneider lenses are about. To do that, I’ve invited in Jim Marks. Jim is a commercial director who’s specialized in doing a lot of different video and he wants to talk about the new lens that Manfrotto is showing in their booth. Hello, Jim.

Jim Marks: Hi, how you doing today?

Larry Jordan: Tell me about what you’ve been up to as a director and as a DP.

Jim Marks: My career’s been varied, I think we can safety say. I began as a stills photographer, did that for almost two decades, and then about six years ago I changed into the moving image, so I came into that world.

Larry Jordan: To expand or because stills just dried up?

Jim Marks: Smart question. Both is the simple answer, and it began being a 80/20 split, a bit of moving. It’s now the complete reverse, 80 percent moving, 20 percent stills.

Larry Jordan: What kind of commercials have you done?

Jim Marks: I do TV commercials. I’ve done them for insurance companies, I’ve done holiday commercials. It’s a mix between web TV and, because I used REDs, I also pull stills, so it’s a real cross media kind of thing.

Larry Jordan: Do you find in a particular genre there are a lot of special effects or lots of actors or what?

Jim Marks: I’d like to say that I’m heading towards the world of drama. I think that’s a fantastic thing to aim towards. I tell you what, at my age – 45 – I like to learn new things and I feel, moving into film, I’m always learning and I think that’s the key thing. You never stop learning.

Larry Jordan: Well, that’s true of the whole industry, not just of directing. What is the challenge that you’ve got as a DP? What are you looking for? Is it just the look or are you fighting technology all the time?

Jim Marks: Oh, it’s both. One of the great things about this glass is it’s a full frame and, as we’ve seen with RED with the sensor change, my Dragon sensor still works with these at full frame, because that’s bigger than Super 35.

Larry Jordan: Now, tell me what full frame means.

Jim Marks: Full frame is the 35 mil standard, if you like. When people talk about focal lengths, be it a 50 as a standard, 28 as a wide or 100 mil as a portrait lens, everyone still refers to that as the full frame standard. As we know, video cameras, the chips, the sensors, come in many, many different sizes and, of course, that throws things out. For instance, because this is a full frame camera, a 50 mil, which would be a standard on a camera with a smaller chip, well, that’s not a standard. That becomes a tighter bit of glass.

Larry Jordan: Ok. Well, let’s just hold up a second. What you’re saying is that the image cast by the lens on the sensor fills the frame of a 35 millimeter still.

Jim Marks: Yes.

Larry Jordan: And some lenses don’t fill the frame?

Jim Marks: No. Well, the lenses do, but the sensors are smaller, so if you’ve got, say, a Blackmagic or a camera with a smaller sensor than full frame, the focal length has a slightly different meaning. To get a standard lens, I’d need to drop to, say, a 35 mil rather than a 50 on this glass, which is why actually it’s very important that they’ve got some wider glass, which they have. They’ve got a 25 now and an 18, which means you can get that wide point of view as well.

Larry Jordan: Ok, so what you’re saying is that for people who are experienced photographers, they expect a certain image from a 50 millimeter lens or a certain image from a 100 millimeter, more of a zoomed in look.

Jim Marks: Yes.

Larry Jordan: And when you have a full frame sensor, then you’re getting a 50 millimeter look that you expect, you don’t have to retrain your eye.

Jim Marks: No.

Larry Jordan: So for people who are new to photography, do they care?

Jim Marks: Do they care? Perhaps not, no. Whatever works for you, I think, is the honest truth. But because I work on a lot of different cameras with a lot of different sensor sizes, you need to understand that otherwise, to be honest, you’ll take the wrong lens with you to get the shot you want. You have to understand that, yes. It’s not complicated.

Larry Jordan: Tell me about this lens. What is it?

Jim Marks: This is a range of primes from Schneider. I would say they’re at the affordable end of the market. The key thing about them and what I like is the size. They’re actually quite small physically for cinema glass, and by cinema glass I mean glass that has proper focus throws and markings for distance and a common front end.

Larry Jordan: Let me just see. This is about, well, it feels like it’s just a pound or two. It’s not very heavy.

Jim Marks: Yes.

Larry Jordan: When do you care about the length of the lens? Or what are you judging the lens on? What criteria do you use?

Jim Marks: The first criteria has to be the quality of the image. I don’t care what the lens is like if the image is not what I want. As a DP, more and more the glass you choose is a bit like film stock. It’s kind of the look.

Larry Jordan: It’s that important?

Jim Marks: Oh, totally, totally, 100 percent. The chips give a particular look, you’re shooting a nice flat image, perhaps, but no, I would think that lens choice for a DP is almost like film stock used to be when we were shooting films.

Larry Jordan: Now, there’s Cooke Optics, there’s Schneider lenses, there’s Canon lenses. How do you decide which is what? Which do you pick?

Jim Marks: That comes right at the beginning of the project, when you go through the creative, go through the boards. What kind of look are you after? Do you want flare? Do you want it sharp? Do you want it cool? All these different factors play into the kind of glass. Do you need auto focus or not? Or do you want to do everything manually? It’s right at the beginning as a DP that you decide the glass you want to use, and also the camera system. For production, it’s like a triangle. The camera’s always at the top of the triangle. Have a heavy camera, you need a heavy jib. The camera is always at the top of the triangle, so from the camera everything flows down in that respect.

Larry Jordan: How would you describe the look of a Schneider lens, say, compared to a Cooke?

Jim Marks: Cooke is a bit dreamier, a bit softer. These are very good commercial lenses, really good color rendition, lovely soft out of focus area. I’d say truer colors, more consistent colors in that sense, and also, I have to say, a massive price difference in what we’re talking there. As I say, this for me is the kind of affordable end of cinema glass. It’s what you would perhaps try when you leave the world of still lenses behind, which is a big jump for a lot of people. A lot of people shoot very nice stuff on stills glass and it’s that education, learning what cinema glass can bring to your shooting and how it can improve it and how it can make it so much easier. That’s the key thing.

Larry Jordan: Now, you’ve pointed out a big difference. These are prime lenses, which means they don’t zoom. But for a lot of people who need the ability to change the look instantly, a zoom lens becomes critical.

Jim Marks: Yes.

Larry Jordan: When is it the wisest choice to have a zoom and when it is the wisest choice to have a prime?

Jim Marks: If you’re shooting, say, a commercial or something where the image quality is paramount and where light levels perhaps might be low, you might need the stop, you might need the speed, you’re going to be on primes. If you were filming an event, for instance, that’s a zoom. I can’t change the glass, I don’t have the time, I’m in a challenging environment, perhaps, with weather, then I have to go with a zoom. But these are about image quality, they’re about finessing the way you focus and deal with light and that’s what these primes bring to the table. There is a split. It’s like you wouldn’t use the old MX RED in low light, you’d use a C300. It’s the right camera and the right lens for the right job.

Larry Jordan: Schneider makes a really lovely set of prime lenses. Do they do zooms?

Jim Marks: Not yet, no.

Larry Jordan: So whose zooms would you recommend? What zoom lenses do you like?

Jim Marks: I use all sorts of zooms, I have to be honest. I’ve used zooms from every manufacturer.

Larry Jordan: You’re zoom agnostic?

Jim Marks: I’m zoom agnostic, absolutely. I’ve tried Canon zooms, Fuji, all with a particular look and a particular feel.

Larry Jordan: For people who are new to lenses, how would you describe the look?

Jim Marks: Of a zoom?

Larry Jordan: Of a zoom.

Jim Marks: There’s a tradeoff in terms of the quality and also the speed of the lens. If I’m honest, in some scenarios, people might not notice the difference, if it’s very fast work in that scenario. What you get here is something different that you can’t get with a zoom.

Larry Jordan: And that is?

Jim Marks: It’s that completely dropped background, the lightness. I think the key is the lightness. Often I’m having to gimbal it, it’ll go on my shoulder. If I’ve got a RED on my shoulder, that’s a heavy rig. I don’t often want a big, big zoom. I think another key difference is the size. You can see the size of that. A cinema zoom’s going to be here and it’s going to weigh a ton more and I’m not a young man and when I’ve got a director shouting at me to stand out there for another couple of hours, often you can get better shots for longer with a prime just simply because of the fatigue and it’s on my shoulder or moving around, especially with gimbals as well. If you’ve got a DJI or something like that, you want one of these, you don’t want a heavy zoom on the front. You really don’t, because… heavy.

Larry Jordan: So let me just add that the website you want to go to to learn more about this lens is schneideroptics.com. Jim Marks is a cinematographer, a DP and a commercial director and, Jim, thanks for joining us today. I’ve got more from BVE right after this.

Larry Jordan: I love prompters. One of the reasons I like prompters, they help me solve the problem of the fact I can’t memorize anything to save my life and one of the companies that makes prompters is CueScript and here at BVE I want to learn more about how prompters work and how you pick the right prompter. I want to introduce Michael Accardi. Michael is the Co-founder and President of CueScript. Michael, thanks for joining us today.

Michael Accardi: Thanks for having us.

Larry Jordan: Start by describing why you decided to start CueScript in the first place.

Michael Accardi: Well, I and my partners have been in the industry for quite a while and we’ve been part of the other prompting companies and we just found that there was room for innovations, some really creative ways to do things that would make prompting a lot easier to use and a lot better for the production.

Larry Jordan: Innovations in what way?

Michael Accardi: We have a system that, if you want to go in the field, you can take it apart, put it together, there are absolutely no tools necessary, there are no loose parts. We have a rigidity to the unit so that you don’t introduce any movement into the camera moves. It’s just a better unit all around. The quality of the monitors themselves look brighter, they’re easier to read. We’ve taken out the considerations of having the right inputs, because now we have composited HD SDI, we have VGA. We’ve really put it all in there so that you don’t get caught off guard.

Larry Jordan: One of the challenges with prompters is cameras have different heights for the lenses, from the tripod.

Michael Accardi: Right.

Larry Jordan: What device do we need to put the lens in the middle of the prompter so people are looking at the most prompter screen they can get?

Michael Accardi: There are a couple of different ways to do that. One of the ways is to have what’s called a riser, which will hold the camera high or low, depending on where you need it. The second way is actually to have a mount that’s adjustable so you can put the monitor lower or higher. We have both options available. We like using the mount as the proper way, because now I don’t bring the center of gravity higher than it needs to be, so we give you both options.

Larry Jordan: The hardware for a prompter is wonderful, but the software is what actually makes the difference, because if the software can’t keep up with the speaker, you’re stuck. What software does CueScript support?

Michael Accardi: We’re going to be introducing our software at NAB. Right now, we work with all the major softwares. Basically, they’re all going to be putting out a composite or a digital signal and our monitors can take that in. The real key to that speed control is having a good speed control to your software and what really makes the difference is the operator. The operator is what takes an average speaker and makes them look like a great speaker.

Larry Jordan: But it seems to me that sometimes you can’t work with a really qualified prompter operator, you’re grabbing a production assistant off the floor to say, “Help run the prompter.” What’s your software likely to do to simplify that problem? How do we solve that challenge?

Michael Accardi: What we’re doing with our software is a little bit different. We’re introducing a brand new software written from ground up, so there’s no legacy in that and it’s going to be a much cleaner, fresh approach to it. But there is still a human factor to being an operator that we can’t instill in the person. They have to have some innate capability there.

Larry Jordan: Well, true. When we’re trying to decide what prompter to use, there are a lot of prompters that are out there from a lot of different companies, what criteria should we use? Help us to pick the right prompter for our task; and let’s say that there are two. One is we’re on a documentary film shoot but we’ve got a little bit of time to set up. Second is, say, a studio operation where you’re trying to pick a studio prompter. How do you decide which one to use?

Michael Accardi: The most important thing is your talent’s capabilities, because what people think is, “I’m going to get a smaller camera, I’m going to get a smaller prompter.” The problem with that mentality is, just because the camera’s smaller, it doesn’t make the talent’s eyes any better, so I really need to choose my prompter based on who’s going to be using it, what distance they’re going to be using it in and what the lighting conditions are going to be. What we’re basically doing is we’re making sure that we get the right size for the application, the brightness so they can read it, whether it’s outside or inside. Then you’d want to know about the input, so that I can put whatever signal I have into it; and then, as you said, how do I set it up and tear it down? And that’s one of the things that we really did concentrate heavily on as well because we really wanted a rounded package.

Larry Jordan: The other challenge is this light loss as it goes through the prompter glass.

Michael Accardi: Correct.

Larry Jordan: How much light should we assume to lose as the prompter glass takes it away?

Michael Accardi: You’re basically losing 40 percent.

Larry Jordan: How much?

Michael Accardi: 40 percent.

Larry Jordan: Wow.

Michael Accardi: We can change that 30 percent, 40 percent by changing the glass. In the old days, that used to be a serious problem, but with the sensitivity of the cameras today, it’s actually not a problem. The cameras really have overcome that.

Larry Jordan: You’ve talked about all the different criteria that we have to work with to pick a prompter. Give us an example, if we’re inside or we’re outside, but what I’m trying to nail down is I’m trying to figure more specifically what do we look for? You’ve given me the questions to answer, but you haven’t given me answers yet.

Michael Accardi: Right.

Larry Jordan: So help me get a little bit more detail on picking a prompter. You’ve told me what the criteria are, how do I answer the criteria?

Michael Accardi: One of the criteria in a studio – and this is also going to play into the field – is you want a rigid system so that when you’re making a camera move, the prompter doesn’t introduce its own move. You really want to have a rigid mounting system that holds the weight, really supports the unit properly and the prompter doesn’t introduce moves into the camera. In a studio, that’s absolutely a steadfast rule. In the field, it’s no different but most prompters are made very lightweight to get into the field and don’t have that capability. What we’ve done is made a mounting system that takes that studio robustness and gives it to you in the field. In the field, you have the added concern of how long, how fast and what problems are the prompters going to introduce?

Michael Accardi: You want to make sure you have a prompter where all the parts are captive, that you don’t need to introduce tools and that works fast. A lot of times, prompters don’t get used because people are so concerned about the problems that they introduce versus the solutions that they bring and, as you said earlier, it is one of the strongest solutions to production, to have a prompter there. There are fewer takes, there’s so much more confidence with your talent and it’s a great tool. We want to make it easy enough for you to get out there and use it.

Larry Jordan: When do you pick an over or below the lens prompter versus a through the lens prompter?

Michael Accardi: Wherever possible, you want to be shooting directly through the prompter glass, you don’t want over or under.

Larry Jordan: How come?

Michael Accardi: Because as you get closer to the talent, when they start to read you’re actually going to see them looking above or below the lens and that is very distracting. We love to work with a mirrored prompter instead of a direct view prompter. There are some applications when you’re on jibs where you don’t want to introduce a piece of mirror. There are applications on Steadicam because of weight that we will do direct for you, but wherever possible you’re going to get a much better eye contact having it through the lens.

Larry Jordan: Another would be a dramatic scene where you want to prompt talent but they don’t want to be looking at the lens, you’d have an off the lens prompter in a situation like that, would you not?

Michael Accardi: Correct, correct.

Larry Jordan: Where can people go to learn more information about CueScript and the products you guys offer?

Michael Accardi: Our website is www.cuescript.tv.

Larry Jordan: CueScript makes prompters and you can learn more at their website at cuescript.tv and Michael Accardi is the CEO and the President of CueScript. Michael, thanks for joining us today.

Michael Accardi: Thank you very much.

Larry Jordan: I want to thank this week’s guest, Dan Sachelli, the Commercial Manager for BVE; John Kelly, the General Manager of JVC Professional products for Europe; Jeromy Young, CEO and Co-founder of Atomos; Nigel Wilkes, the Group Manager for Panasonic Professional products; Jim Marks, Director of Photography for Schneider Optics; and Michael Accardi, President of CueScript.

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 online, all searchable and all available. You can talk with us on Twitter, @DPBuZZ, and Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Our theme music is composed by Nathan Doogie Turner; additional music on The Buzz is provided by smartsound.com. Text transcripts are provided by Take 1 Transcription.

Larry Jordan: I want to make special thanks to our production team in London – Michael Powells and Lindsay Luebbert. Back home, Megan Paulos and Brianna Murphy put the show together. Our producer is Cirina Catania. 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 shutterstock.com, a global marketplace for royalty free images and videos. With over two million royalty free HD and 4K video clips, Shutterstock helps you take your creative projects to the next level; and by Other World Computing, providing quality hardware solutions and extensive technical support to the worldwide computer industry since 1988.

Digital Production Buzz

February 19, 2015

[Transcripts provided by Take 1 Transcription]

 

(Click here to listen to this show.)

 

HOSTS

Larry Jordan

Michael Horton

GUESTS

Paul Babb, President/CEO, MAXON US

Sean Mullen, CEO & Lead Creative, Rampant Design Tools

Bob Caniglia, Senior Regional Manager Eastern North America, Blackmagic Design

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

Voiceover: Rolling. Action!

Voiceover: Since the dawn of digital film making…

Voiceover: Authoritative.

Voiceover: …one show serves a worldwide network of media professionals…

Voiceover: Current.

Voiceover: …uniting industry experts…

Voiceover: Production.

Voiceover: …film makers…

Voiceover: Post production.

Voiceover: …and content creators around the planet.

Voiceover: Distribution.

Larry Jordan: From the media capital of the world in Los Angeles, California, The Digital Production Buzz goes 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, Mr. Mike Horton, is off today.

Larry Jordan: Paul Babb is the CEO of Maxon US, which is a company devoted to 3D and virtual reality software. Recently, Paul noticed an uptake in effects hiring and we bring him into the studio tonight to talk about it.

Larry Jordan: Sean Mullen is the CEO and Chief Creative Officer of Rampant Design Tools. They specialize in visual effects elements for editors and VFX artists. We want to talk with him about the impact 4K media is having in effects.

Larry Jordan: And Bob Caniglia used to be an editor who’s now working for Blackmagic Design. We talk with him tonight about their new intensity 4K capture cards and updates to their ATEM switchers. And, because Mike isn’t here, I’m also going to work in a discussion with Bob about codecs to help you decide which codec is the best choice for your project or media capture.

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: The big news this week is that NAB has opened early registration for the upcoming NAB show and The Buzz is the first to have a free registration code that allows you to get into the expo floor for free. That code is LV4883. That’s LV4883. So when you go to nabshow.com and you want to register for the exhibit hall, type in LV4883 and you’re there. Now, The Buzz itself is going to NAB for the seventh year. We’re planning 11 live NAB show Buzz reports during the day. Each one runs more than half an hour.

Larry Jordan: Then, in the evening, we present the NAB show Buzz special report. Now, that’s over an hour of additional interviews. Our goal is to help you understand what all the industry leaders are doing during NAB. Over 15 hours of programming during three and a half days at NAB, all of it designed to help you understand what’s going on in our industry, because NAB is the time where everybody across the world gets together to talk about where media is headed.

Larry Jordan: I was just reflecting, when we go to NAB, we bring a production crew and basically we set up a live radio broadcasting station in a 20 by 20 foot booth directly on the tradeshow floor and then we invite people to come join us and we have almost 100 interviews with every leading industry scheduled to attend and talk with you on The Buzz, so even if you can’t make NAB, you can make sense of what’s happening inside our industry.

Larry Jordan: It’s going to be an exciting time. I’ll have a whole lot more to talk about as we get closer to the middle of April, which is when NAB occurs at the Las Vegas Convention Center. In the meantime, remember to visit with us on Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com; we’re also on Twitter, @DPBuZZ, and check out our website at digitalproductionbuzz.com and subscribe to our free weekly show newsletter. I’ll be back with Paul Babb 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.

Larry Jordan: 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.

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Larry Jordan: Paul Babb is the President and CEO of Maxon US, as well as a graphic software technology expert with more than a decade of experience in 3D animation, visual effects and motion graphics. Recently, he’s been thinking about how today’s economy is improving hiring opportunities, especially in virtual reality. Hey, Paul, welcome.

Paul Babb: Thanks, Larry, for having me.

Larry Jordan: So before we get into this whole discussion of hiring, give me a description of what Maxon makes.

Paul Babb: Maxon. We develop a 3D animation product called Cinema 4D and Cinema 4D enables artists to do anything from movie visual effects, of course, the most interesting part, broadcast graphics, scientific and medical animation, architecture or engineering visualization, on down to any kind of design, website design, DVD menus, corporate presentations, courtroom simulation. So many things.

Larry Jordan: Many things, but I’m sure there are clusters within which your customers occur. Who are typical customers?

Paul Babb: I’d say our biggest market, our biggest cluster of customers, is in the motion graphics market.

Larry Jordan: Now, what makes Cinema 4D so helpful for that?

Paul Babb: Well, ease of use. It’s a very fast, easy program to pick up. It’s very much geared towards graphic artists. Integration’s a huge thing. We integrate extremely well with the Adobe suite of products. There is a light version of our product actually built into After Effects.

Larry Jordan: I remember when you were getting ready to launch that. There was no small level of stress putting that together.

Paul Babb: And a little excitement too. We also integrate extremely well with Photoshop. Photoshop files can be used for a multitude of things, textures, they could be extracted.

Larry Jordan: Now, when you say integrate, what does that mean?

Paul Babb: It means that the processing during the workflow is a very smooth transition, so bringing in an Illustrator file into Cinema 4D to create 3D geometry from, say, a 2D graphic is very quick and easy, just open it up.

Larry Jordan: So if I’m using Illustrator and I’m creating a corporate logo, I would take that Illustrator file and then you could extrude it into…?

Paul Babb: Just extrude it. As a matter of fact, you could extrude the layers separately, put different colors on the layers, animate those layers separately. It’s all built in.

Larry Jordan: Are people principally using it to create still 3D objects or are they using it to create motion?

Paul Babb: Motion graphics.

Larry Jordan: Now, I know that there are other packages out there, Maya comes first to mind from Autodesk. Why would somebody consider Cinema 4D?

Paul Babb: I think ease of use and workflow, integration with other packages. Ease of use, I think, is one of the biggest things. I really do. I think ease of use is a huge obstacle.

Larry Jordan: Now wait a minute, wait a minute. I have opened Cinema 4D. I’ve seen all 755,000 million options. How am I supposed to learn this stuff?

Paul Babb: Well, I’ll be honest with you, 3D is complicated.

Larry Jordan: Yes it is.

Paul Babb: It is complicated, but I would say relatively easy. How’s that? There are things you can do in 3D, the basics, that are quite easy to pick up. You want to create film quality special effects, you want to articulate a character animation? Yes, it’s going to take you some time, probably a couple of years to really get to the skill level where you can do that on your own.

Paul Babb: But motion graphics utilizing an Illustrator file, extruding it, animating it, bringing into After Effects, doing what you want to do with that, especially if you have experience with After Effects, the transition to Cinema 4D is actually quite easy.

Larry Jordan: Let’s get back to the learning question. Do you help people figure out how the software works?

Paul Babb: God, you feed me so well. Sure. We created a site called cineversity.com where we put up video tutorials, we add plug-ins, we add presets, any kind of utilities that will help people work, but mainly it’s there for tutorials, to get started. We have anything from getting started tutorials to character rigging tutorials to breaking down projects, anything just to help people get the job done.

Larry Jordan: We’re slowly moving over into this hiring question, but are you finding that most of your customers are repeat customers upgrading or are most of your customers coming in new?

Paul Babb: I think it’s about half and half. Like everybody else, we’ve gone to an annual licensing model where people try to stay updated and, by having that annual licensing model, Cineversity’s included and anything else that we might offer. It’s kind of half and half. I think most of the people who are working want to maintain to have the latest versions, so they’re getting the latest and greatest and the newest features, and we’re getting a lot of new customers through our relationship with Adobe and just from knowledge of the market.

Larry Jordan: What’s in the light version of 4D?

Paul Babb: Light version is actually quite powerful. It comes with…

Larry Jordan: It’s a medium version?

Paul Babb: Well, it’s kind of a combination of our lowest version, called Prime, but it also has some functionality that is only available in Broadcast and Studio. In the motion graphics…

Larry Jordan: Wait, wait, those are the three levels of the program?

Paul Babb: I’m sorry, yes. No, we actually have four levels. We have Prime…

Larry Jordan: Which is starting.

Paul Babb: …which is the starting package. We have Broadcast, which is focused on broadcast graphics. We have the Visualize product, which is really geared towards architects and engineering people doing visualization; and then we have the Studio bundle, which has everything.

Paul Babb: Now, there’s a tool in our program called MoGraph, specifically for motion graphics, and we gave a couple of features in there for the light version because we want to give people kind of a little introduction, a little tickle with those tools so that they can start playing with those things. So it’s sort of in between the Prime and the Broadcast in that it doesn’t have all the functionality of Broadcast, but we give a few of the motion graphics tools away.

Larry Jordan: You’ve been with Maxon for, what, ten years?

Paul Babb: 18.

Larry Jordan: Are you serious?

Paul Babb: Yes. When you said I had a decade, I actually probably have 25 years of experience in this industry.

Larry Jordan: If you’d just update your bio once in a while, it would be helpful.

Paul Babb: That’s Vicky’s fault. Vicky!

Larry Jordan: How have you noticed the customers changing over time?

Paul Babb: Wow, good and bad. Because the tools have become so sophisticated, a lot of people who are coming into it for the first time expect that the tool is going to do most of the work for you and, bottom line, any of these digital art tools are still art tools, meaning you have to have an artistic eye, you have to be an artist to a certain point.

Larry Jordan: It’s a paintbrush that doesn’t help you to paint.

Paul Babb: It’s a very elaborate paintbrush. It doesn’t do the painting for you. Now, it does a lot of things for you that a paintbrush can’t do, but having that combination of technological knowledge and artistic skill is really the way you master these tools.

Larry Jordan: So what you’re saying is the customers have evolved from being pure artists to being technologists or being less sophisticated? What I’m trying to figure out is are you seeing, for instance, originally everybody was in motion graphics, creating it for broadcast or everybody was an architect creating. Has the pool expanded? Have you seen a trend that you’re paying attention to?

Paul Babb: I think it’s less industry focused, like you’re saying. What we see is more sophisticated people with greater knowledge, like the next generation coming up. They’re exposed to the tools so much earlier, so they’re much more knowledgeable. But there’s an anticipation that the art part will take care of itself, so sometimes you get people who are more technician than artist.

Paul Babb: Now, you also get that, because they think that the tool’s going to do more for them, they expect more from the tool, so you have to educate them on the artistic aspects of it, that you can’t give that part of it up. You can’t expect that the tool’s going to do all that for you.

Larry Jordan: Now we’ve got all these people who are using this tool and we’ve got a larger and larger customer base for you, which is wonderful, people need to get a job and the last few years have not been good years for getting work in the visual effects industry.

Paul Babb: Well, that’s visual effects, not motion graphics.

Larry Jordan: What is the difference in your mind?

Paul Babb: Well, visual effects, you’re talking about film studios and people competing for shots in a film. I’m talking about broadcast graphics, motion graphics. Our industry is booming and has been booming because, if I go back a little bit and say when you and I were growing up there were three TV stations, ok? Then they added a couple, maybe a couple of local channels, right?

Paul Babb: Then cable came along and there were a few dozen channels, then there were a few hundred. The service I have now, I’ve got about 3,000 channels, ok? Now, there are 3,000 channels that need station IDs, lower thirds, bumpers, interstitials, all that. Turn the internet into a broadcast medium…

Larry Jordan: Yes, I know exactly.

Paul Babb: …and now you’re talking millions of TV stations. That’s where the jobs are I’m talking about and when you started out with ‘now I have all these customers and they’re looking for jobs’, it’s actually more that I’ve got all these studio customers who are looking for artists. Back to the conversation about people expecting the tool to do some of the art for you, what we find is, just like you would teach a painting class, if you had 25 students in the class, maybe two of them would be good artists in the beginning and maybe a couple of others would develop over time and the rest of them are taking an art class and maybe don’t ever get it.

Paul Babb: It’s the same thing with 3D. In a class of 25 students, you’ll probably notice one or two of them that just get it right off the bat and maybe three, four or five that over time develop into decent artists, and the rest of them it may be too complicated, they may be great technicians and may be useful in the industry but not great artists. There’s always work for people but it’s getting more and more sophisticated.

Larry Jordan: I got an email today from a guy who was writing to say, “How do I find work?” Clearly, who you know and who knows you is important, but is there a job list or a job posting that people can go to? How do you find the gigs that are out there and, more importantly for studios that want to find an artist, how do they track them down?

Paul Babb: That’s a great question and we’ve pondered the idea of establishing something like that, a place where people can do that, and I think there are other groups of people, other businesses trying to be headhunters for design houses or that type of thing. It really is the Wild West to a certain point. People are going on forums, they’re creating their own work and creating portfolios online, trying to get the attention of other people.

Paul Babb: I think there are a lot of internships going on. A lot of the schools now are trying to connect with studios and set up internships where they give students a chance to get in there and do a little work. But there really isn’t a tried and true place to go look for a job or connect artists at this time.

Larry Jordan: Yes, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. We own a couple of websites which could easily be converted to a job board and it takes a lot of work to maintain a job board, and then how do you charge for it, and who pays for it, and how do you guarantee that the person, what’s the saying? On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, so we’re still thinking about it but we haven’t decided to go ahead. So it’s a hard question to answer.

Paul Babb: Absolutely. We’ve been in the same position. It comes up occasionally as a, ‘Is that a project we want to take on?’ and actually, in honesty, Cineversity, the site we’ve created for tutorials to teach, it’s not a money making proposition, it’s a service that we provide to our customers so that they can become better artists, want to upgrade etcetera, and so we’re paying for that out of our own pocket. So how do you make money doing that? It would be a great service to provide, but I’m with you across the board. I sell software for a living, I don’t deal with websites like that.

Larry Jordan: If you were to advise somebody who’s in college right now or a graduate from college and they’ve got graphics design skills and they’ve got good technical skills and they want to learn Cinema 4D, which is a wonderful package, where’s the market right now? Where are they likely to be employed? Is it broadcast motion graphics? Is it architecture? Who looks like they’re doing the hiring?

Paul Babb: Well, it’s across the board, but motion graphics is the market in which there are a lot of jobs out there. If you do a search for After Effects Cinema 4D jobs, you will find people putting up listings in all the different places where there is hiring. You will see a lot of jobs for After Effects and Cinema 4D users. In terms of learning it, there are so many free resources out there. There’s Cineversity that we do, there’s Gray Scale Gorilla, Nick Campbell’s site. There’s linda.com, there are so many resources. You can even search YouTube and Vimeo and find dozens of great tutorials to get started.

Paul Babb: To learn, it’s like anything else, give yourself a project. Find a commercial that you like and duplicate it, or the simplest things and start from there. Once you start building a portfolio, that’s what’s going to get you hired, being able to show people that you can accomplish something, do great work.

Larry Jordan: What’s your take on devices like Oculus Rift?

Paul Babb: I think right now virtual reality is a big buzzword and I think that there is going to be a lot of opportunity in that. I think that’s a little further down the road, if I’m going to put myself out on a limb. I would say that probably the bigger opportunity is going to be content creation for augmented reality.

Larry Jordan: What’s the difference?

Paul Babb: For instance, augmented reality might be an application on my phone where I can choose a couch from IKEA and put it in my room like this and see what it’s going to look like in my room, or I can put the carpeting there and see what that’s going to be looking like, as opposed to a immersive environment, which I think is going to be more probably at first for gaming because that’s where the interest and the money is.

Larry Jordan: So the hollow deck is still a ways away?

Paul Babb: I think so. But augmented reality has so many applications. Like traveling, you could get your walking tour on your phone and walk around and look up and you can have signs or there are applications already where people can leave notes for each other in certain places and they show up through augmented reality, they shine it on a brick wall and, “Oh, Bob was here, he left a message for me.” They can be private, public.

Larry Jordan: I was just reflecting, two years ago the big buzzword was 3D, stereoscopic 3D, and then last year the big buzzword was 4K, and we’re going to be talking more about that with Sean in the next section. Now maybe virtual reality. Is that likely to have legs or is it something that people are just talking about to give themselves something to talk about?

Paul Babb: I think it’s a combination of both. Everybody wants something to talk about, they want that buzzword, it makes it more interesting to go to the trade shows and for those companies, they get that kind of buzz. Again, I think virtual reality is going to take some time because look at how much work it takes just to create the content for a film that’s static, it’s not going to change.

Paul Babb: Virtual reality demands that there’s content to your actions that can change, depending on which way you look, what you’re doing, how you’re reacting to your environment. That’s a lot of content and that’s going to take a lot of time, and they haven’t even really mastered it to a point where it’s that, you know… Oculus Rift is pretty cool, but I still think it’s got a long way to go beforehand. Whereas augmented reality, it wouldn’t be that hard to create a model of a couch and be able to swap out the fabrics and then create something where you can peg an area and see what that couch is going to look like in your house. I think that’s something that is a little bit more reachable sooner.

Larry Jordan: Let’s switch this for just a second. We’ve talked about having artists get jobs and where to look. What do producers need to know about this technology that they don’t? In other words, what tips do you need to give them to help them make the most of it?

Paul Babb: Number one, it’s the artist. It’s the artist, it’s not the tool. A lot of producers and a lot of executives get caught up on the tool that’s getting used. They go, “Oh, I’ve heard this tool’s really great.” It doesn’t matter. It’s the artist who’s wielding that tool. I think the most important thing would be a visual effects supervisor who’s got a track record, you see their work and you like what their work looks like. It really comes down to the artist. I actually have a friend in the industry and we had this conversation and he was enamored with different studios and different people and I said, “Yes, but if their top artist left, they’re not that studio any more. It’s a different studio.”

Larry Jordan: So what are you planning for NAB this year?

Paul Babb: Oh, we’ve got a great line up.

Larry Jordan: Oh, talk to me about that.

Paul Babb: I think I have about 20 different great artists. I’ve got people who have worked on motion graphics for MTV, South Park, ESPN, ABC, NBC. Pretty much name the broadcaster and we’ve got somebody represented. I’ve got artists coming in to show medical animation. I’ve got guys…

Larry Jordan: Now, when you say coming in the show, what’s happening?

Paul Babb: Well, at the booth at Maxon at NAB, we set up a theater presentation so the people there can come in and every hour we have an artist come in and do a nice little presentation and show off how they did it, what kind of work they’re doing etcetera. We also broadcast that live. So if you don’t come to NAB, you can kind of virtually come to NAB through our booth.

Larry Jordan: Oh, very cool.

Paul Babb: So if you go to c4dlive.com, people can go on there and watch our presentations live. Now, if you want to see what those presentations are like, you can go to Cineversity because what we do is archive those each year, so right now they could go watch last year’s NAB Instagraph presentations and then they can watch them live or afterwards.

Larry Jordan: And what website can people go to to learn more about Cinema 4D?

Paul Babb: Maxon.net.

Larry Jordan: That’s maxon.net and Paul Babb is the CEO of Maxon US. Paul, as always, a delight visiting. Thanks for joining us.

Paul Babb: Are we done already?

Larry Jordan: We are done. See you soon.

Paul Babb: Thanks, Larry.

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Larry Jordan: Sean Mullen is the CEO of Rampant Design Tools. He’s also an Emmy award winning visual effects artist with over 60 feature film and television credits, including ‘Charmed’, ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’, ‘Ally McBeal’, ‘ER’, ‘Nip Tuck’ and many others. His company, Rampant Design Tools, specializes in creating original drag and drop visual elements for editors and VFX artists. Hello, Sean, welcome back.

Sean Mullen: Hey, Larry, thanks for having me.

Larry Jordan: It is wonderful having you with us. Sean, 4K is all the rage from a marketing point of view. Are you seeing any significant information coming from 4K? Like sales or interest?

Sean Mullen: Well, all my clients are ordering 4K at this point. So far in the last 12 months, I’ve had about 90 percent of our projects deliver in 4K.

Larry Jordan: How many?

Sean Mullen: 90 percent.

Larry Jordan: Wow. So tell me about the products that Rampant Design Tools develops, then I want to talk about the 4K products.

Sean Mullen: Well, like you said, we create drag and drop effects and we have everything from light leaks and foam effects to your favorite, the monster toolkit, and different kinds of mattes and flashes and optical effects and we deliver everything in 2K, 4K and in 5K.

Larry Jordan: 2K, 4K and 5K. Is there a difference in developing a 4K or 5K project compared to a 2K? Can you do something with that higher resolution that you can’t with 2K?

Sean Mullen: If you grab any of our free samples and you drop a 4 or 5K element into your 2K or HD timeline, you will definitely see a difference in clarity.

Larry Jordan: How so?

Sean Mullen: It’s more clear, there’s a lot more latitude to play with, the frame size is larger so you can reposition things to your liking. You can scale. You can definitely see a lot more clarity.

Larry Jordan: The 4K and 5K files, though, are significantly larger. How are you handling the larger file sizes, especially when people need to download them? Because those files can be gigantic.

Sean Mullen: That’s true. We have two options. If you buy our continental hard drive, you’ll get the full ProRes 4444 or 422 HQ trillions. We don’t offer that as a download, we offer the lower res versions of ProRes LT or ProRes Proxy as a download.

Larry Jordan: Are you finding the best delivery mechanism would be a hard disk as opposed to something else?

Sean Mullen: Right now, yes. You’d be surprised how many drives. Right behind me is a giant pile of boxes that we have just finished shipping, so you’d be surprised how many drives we ship per week.

Larry Jordan: Are you finding that people are working with 4K? Or are they down sampling it for a 2K or HD project? What I’m trying to get a sense of is how many people who are actually working natively at 4K are just simply taking advantage of the extra pixels?

Sean Mullen: I think right this second more people are working in 4K and delivering in 2K or HD or, like you said, they’re just using the 4K frame in an HD timeline. I would say the majority of people are still delivering in 1080 right now.

Larry Jordan: Describe some of the effects that you’re creating. What are people buying?

Sean Mullen: We have everything from practical effects like fire, smoke, water, rain and snow. We also have more subtle things that sell quite a bit. On the major networks, you see all of our light leaks and, believe it or not, our mattes are really popular. Film flashes, different kinds of color overlays, grungy effects, that kind of thing.

Larry Jordan: With the effects that you’re creating, are you seeing your customers are segmenting in particular parts of the industry? Or are you selling everything everywhere?

Sean Mullen: We sell to everyone who’s doing wedding videos and corporate projects all the way up to feature films and broadcast shows. Every single major network has our content and uses it quite a bit, but we sell to many, many corporations for corporate pieces and, like I said, wedding pieces and independent films, so we’re pretty much spread out across the board.

Larry Jordan: Now, if I remember correctly, the stuff that you’ve got would be an overlay on top of existing material, so I would have a background shot and you’d lay flames or smoke or fog on top of it. Are you seeing a shift in tastes in terms of the kind of overlay files people are using? And are you seeing any trends start to develop in terms of what seems to be the hot visual effect these days?

Sean Mullen: Practical effects have kind of taken a step aside. It’s really more of the overlays. People are really getting into taking a LUT file and adding some really great color effects to their video and then combining it with our overlays to give it that more organic feel on top, so you see a lot of our overlays used everywhere, even in the news.

Larry Jordan: Take me through one of them, let’s say smoke, because I can picture that easily enough. How do I use the smoke overlay in my project? What would be an application, not in terms of the effect but practically speaking? I get the hard drive, I open it up, what do I do with it?

Sean Mullen: You bring it into any of your editors or your compositor or you throw it into After Effects or you bring it into Premiere or Final Cut. It’s a QuickTime so…

Larry Jordan: Let’s bring it into After Effects. So I’ve got After Effects fired up and I’ve got a shot of a forest. How would I integrate smoke with a background shot of a forest?

Sean Mullen: I would find a shot that feels right; we have over 200 clips in our smoke library, so something’s probably going to work best for you. Drop it on. You can sample it very quickly by using a blend mode but, to be honest, I would probably use Unmult from Red Giant, it’s free, and then a compound blur to really give the look and a more professional feel. But you can absolutely just drop it on and use a blend mode.

Larry Jordan: Describe the second technique that you’d prefer. Walk a little bit more slowly through that. What do we do to blend it more smoothly?

Sean Mullen: As you know, smoke’s not necessarily 100 percent transparent. There are layers of thickness, so you want that to happen in your composite. You don’t want to just see straight through it, it doesn’t quite work that way, so what you do is you do a compound blur and so whatever’s thicker in the smoke is less transparent than whatever’s not and it gives a more realistic effect.

Larry Jordan: What’s the average cost for your products?

Sean Mullen: We have everything from $29 all the way up to $500 and the $500 would be a massive library of 5K.

Larry Jordan: And what am I getting? Am I getting a QuickTime movie?

Sean Mullen: Yes, everything we deliver is in QuickTime.

Larry Jordan: Does it include an alpha channel or not?

Sean Mullen: On the hard drives, yes, our products include alpha channels.

Larry Jordan: So what do I get for the download? Why would somebody download this?

Sean Mullen: Quickness. To be honest, I’m a purist, I think putting an alpha channel on a light effect doesn’t make any sense. You’re definitely going to want to blend light so that it looks more realistic, but some people insist on it. The only way to have it today is to download. Trying to ask someone to download a ProRes 4444 with an alpha channel would be a nightmare, so we avoid that altogether.

Larry Jordan: Nightmare, I think, is a polite term. Have you got any cool deals going that people can take advantage of?

Sean Mullen: Right now, if you use the code rampant50, everything’s 50 percent off in the store. Anything you buy is 50 percent off.

Larry Jordan: Is that upper and lower case?

Sean Mullen: It’s all lower case, rampant50.

Larry Jordan: Lower case, rampant50.

Sean Mullen: That’s correct.

Larry Jordan: That is very cool. What’s the next title you’re going to be working on?

Sean Mullen: I can’t talk about…

Larry Jordan: Oh, Sean, we know. Just make something up. Is it coming out soon?

Sean Mullen: It’s coming out soon. We have a massive booth this year at NAB. You know what? I heard through the grapevine you’re not 100 percent on board with the 4K, so I want you to come check out, I’ve got two 65 inch 4K monitors, I will prove to you the value of 4K. I’ll give you a personal demo. Speaking of which, we’re giving hundreds of 4K clips away absolutely free, just to prove that 4K’s not scary and that it’s awesome.

Larry Jordan: I’m not afraid of 4K, I just don’t think it’s valuable in most situations for distribution, but acquisition, it’s perfect. Sean, what website can people go to to learn more?

Sean Mullen: You can get hundreds of the 4K effects for free at 4kfree.com or you can see our regular website at rampantdesigntools.com.

Larry Jordan: Rampantdesigntools.com. Sean Mullen, CEO. Sean, thanks for joining us today.

Sean Mullen: Thanks, Larry.

Larry Jordan: Bye bye.

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Larry Jordan: Bob Caniglia began working in the film and television industry in 1985 as a part time cameraman and editor of industrial videos. Then he was an editor for the Disney Channel and 5:25 post production, working on music videos for Prince, Madonna and Michael Jackson. Bob then came to Blackmagic Design when the company purchased DaVinci in 2009, where he is now the Senior Regional Manager for Eastern North America. Hello, Bob, welcome.

Bob Caniglia: Hi, Larry. Thanks for having us.

Larry Jordan: We are glad to have you on. I want to start with some context. How would you describe Blackmagic Design?

Bob Caniglia: I’d describe Blackmagic as the enabler, the one company, I guess, in the industry that is trying to get as many products to as many people as possible and sort of leveling the playing field so that you’re not judged on the products you’re using, you’re judged on the final quality of the content.

Larry Jordan: So what’s your role with the company?

Bob Caniglia: One of the things I do is work with the Reseller Channel, we have a large reseller channel that sells all our products – we don’t sell any directly – so I work with them. I do a lot of one on one demonstrations at trade shows – we do a lot of trade shows. I do a lot of the press, like this, and anything in between. Fortunately, I have a pretty strong background in a lot of the equipment that we make, so when they were making cameras and switchers and they started adding on other things, I actually knew much more about that in terms of using it than I even did about color correction.

Larry Jordan: Let’s start first with the Intensity card. Describe first what the card is and then we’ll talk about the upgrade second.

Bob Caniglia: Sure. The new Intensity Pro 4K, which we announced this week, is a digital capture card that will take in analogue audio/video, as well as HDMI and the new 4K will even capture up to 4K resolution, as well as display 4K output. So this way it goes into a computer, Mac, Windows, Linux, whatever operating system that you’re working on and you can either bring in legacy videotapes or maybe a straight input from a live digital camera.

Larry Jordan: Is support for 4K video the only new feature on the card?

Bob Caniglia: Well, that’s basically the big upgrade to it, is that now you can do 4K. For the same price as the original Intensity Pro, you’re now getting an upgrade path to 4K when you need it, so you can do SD HD today and then 4K in the future.

Larry Jordan: Now, what formats does the card record to?

Bob Caniglia: You can record to a variety of ProRes formats and it works with a host of software, whether it’s any of the Blackmagic software, Media Express, you can use that, you can use Resolve, you can use Sony Vegas, Avid, Media Composer, Final Cut X, Adobe Premiere Pro, After Effects, so a host of software solutions actually.

Larry Jordan: I just checked the back of my iMac and there’s no PCIE slot, so for people who are on the new Mac Pro or an iMac or a laptop, are they out of luck? Is there a Blackmagic product that can help?

Bob Caniglia: We have Thunderbolt capture devices as well as USB3 capture devices, so there’s a host of products that’ll fit everybody’s need, all the way up to the DeckLink 12G 4K card that has PCIE as well. But there’s a variety of different solutions for input and output and it starts as small as one of our mini recorders and mini monitors, which are just Thunderbolt products that you can use for $145 to either capture or output SDI or HDMI.

Larry Jordan: I’m a new user and I’ve got a lot of legacy tapes, whether they’re as old as U-matic and half inch VHS or Beta or Digibeta, and I’m trying to figure out how to bring them into the computer. I’m looking at two really reputable companies. There’s Blackmagic Design and there’s HAA and both of you make capture cards. How would I make the decision as to which company’s product to support and to buy?

Bob Caniglia: I think that you’re going to find a similar feature set. It might be a price point thing. It depends. One of the things about legacy tapes, whether you’re using our card or anybody else’s card, is that oftentimes you’re going to need a time base corrector, which isn’t going to be built into the card.

Bob Caniglia: That’s going to be something you’re going to need in line through the old videotape, so actually one of the more important things is to make sure that you have a time base corrector or you’re going to be all over the place in terms of being able to get audio and video in sync and then the picture not rolling and things like that, but that’s not a feature on the card itself, that’s something that has to be done prior to the signal getting to the card.

Larry Jordan: Yes, I transferred a lot of legacy half inch tapes and the difference a time base corrector makes is amazing. It stabilized the picture, took out a lot of chroma fringing, so I think that’s really good advice. But you gracefully ducked the issue of how to decide between an HAA and Blackmagic card. If the prices were the same, is there a feature in Blackmagic that you like or, again, how do I make a wise decision here?

Bob Caniglia: One of the things about Blackmagic is we also make a product called Resolve and the Resolve software could be used to do a variety of things once you ingest it, and it’s free. Resolve Lite is a free software that works beautifully with the Blackmagic hardware and only with the Blackmagic hardware currently, so it would be a great combination to use that as your capture software. Then you could use it to edit and, if you had the full version, you could do some noise reduction as well.

Larry Jordan: When you’re capturing, when would you capture RAW versus capturing to ProRes or DNxHD?

Bob Caniglia: RAW is basically for a primary acquisition, so if you’re going out to shoot with one of our cameras, say, I would record RAW then. For instance, if you were shooting a commercial where the size of the files doesn’t make a huge difference, then shooting RAW is perfect, especially in a commercial where you’re trying to make sure that you capture a product or images that are pristine and that you can get the most out of the color and whatnot.

Bob Caniglia: If you’re going to do visual effects, shooting RAW is great so that you can do green screen work, things like that. When you’re going to capture for archive, when it’s an older videotape or something like that, if you were doing it for your personal use, you’d want to capture it at a mid to higher quality but not fully uncompressed because the file size would be way too large.

Bob Caniglia: But it wouldn’t be bad to do a mezzanine level compression, meaning something in the middle that then, if you wanted to turn that into H.264 to put on the internet, would be fine for use so that your friends can look at it or something like that. But making it H.264 right off the bat probably wouldn’t be the best thing for a longer term archive, depending on how much you like the material.

Larry Jordan: What mezzanine formats do you like?

Bob Caniglia: Any of the ProRes or DNxHD, but just in the smaller, sort of the LT range. It all depends on how much you want to store in a way. It’s something that people don’t actually consider often until they start to record. Even with our cameras, you can record in 4K RAW all the way down to ProRes HD Proxy, and when you have the camera and you change the setting, suddenly you go from ‘I have seven minutes of RAW’ to ‘Oh look, I have three hours of Proxy’, so there’s a metric that you need to figure out – how much storage do I want to use versus how good a quality do I want?

Larry Jordan: If you’re capturing from a standard SD format, standard definition, and you want to get as much quality as you can, would you capture to RAW? Or is that overkill? Granted, the file size is there, but let’s say you’re just plain obsessing about quality. Are you going to see a significant improvement in quality of RAW versus ProRes four by four versus ProRes HQ? Help a videographer who doesn’t understand codecs to understand which codec to pick for this challenge.

Bob Caniglia: The thing about if you’re going to record RAW, then in order to use the asset you’re going to have to do color correction in order to revive it, ok? If you’re pretty concerned about quality, I think at that point, especially in an existing material, I would probably go with ProRes HQ, highest quality there, or the DNxHD 220, something like that, because that way it’s at the highest point if you have the ability to store that off.

Bob Caniglia: Also, from there, then you can make whatever you want and, again, this is where Resolve Lite comes in. It’s a perfect way to turn that from whatever you captured originally to a smaller size, even all the way down to H.264 if you wanted to put it out on the web.

Larry Jordan: How much does the Intensity 4K card cost?

Bob Caniglia: The Intensity Pro 4K is $199.

Larry Jordan: $199, and for people who have existing Intensity cards, is there an upgrade path?

Bob Caniglia: No, there’s no upgrade path to that, but it’s $199. Again, it’s only really if you need the 4K for use today.

Larry Jordan: Is the non-4K version still being sold?

Bob Caniglia: They’re still available if people need them. That card also plays a role in some OEM business, so there are customers, other manufacturers, that build solutions around cards and some of them require those cards, so the original card works fine in those solutions so they’ll still be around for a little while, assuming that we can still get parts, which is basically the case with almost any product.

Larry Jordan: Let’s shift gears from the Intensity card to the new ATEM switcher. Now here, I must confess, that when we were building our studio here, we added an ATEM switcher as part of our production package, so I’m not just a guy asking questions, I’ve got a vested stake in this discussion. What does the new update do?

Bob Caniglia: The new update provides macros and the beauty of the macros is they are all inclusive, and what I mean by that is you can build macros inside macros. Grant Petty, the CEO of the company, did a nice little video on our support site to show people how to use the macros and he even used a great example of bringing in a series of stills and having the sequence reveal itself through a macro.

Bob Caniglia: You can either do it manually by calling the next slide, or have it do it on a time basis, and then you can actually take that macro and roll it into another macro, so there’s a way to really build a lot of pre-built effects and speed up the use of the ATEM so that it’s easier to, say, call in new titles. If somebody’s sending titles in, you could build a macro to bring in slide 13, assign it to downstream key 2 or whatever.

Bob Caniglia: Those kinds of things can be all pre-built and you can just recall them all live while you’re working. I’ve been waiting for these and what I think is great is that we didn’t just implement macros, we implemented them on steroids. I think it’s worth the wait for those that have been waiting for macros.

Larry Jordan: Can a macro be built in the middle of a live production? Or is this something that gets done before you go live?

Bob Caniglia: Generally it’s done before you go live. In theory, you could. The only problem would be that you’d have to avoid the program bus, I think, if you were live on air in order to build a macro but generally you wouldn’t build a macro while you were on air. You would want to do that prior and the beauty also is that, if you have a control surface, you can do it via the control surface or via software, or both.

Larry Jordan: One of the challenges that we’re discovering with the switcher is that it’s hard to change effects or titles during production. We’ve only got the ability to, I think our team calls it the super source, where we’re superimposing more than one image together. How do the macros help us in this regard? Do they add additional capability or are they just adding speed?

Bob Caniglia: They’re adding capability in the sense of being able to get to something quickly to reset an entire set-up, and you could build it so you could transition out of them. Say, for instance, you have a super source where you have a couple of boxes with some people in there or whatnot. You can build one so that it calls that up then, say, trigger another macro that brings on an ID of somebody, and then you can have it hit another one so it takes it off and then maybe make another macro so it will dissolve off, and you could put in multiples.

Bob Caniglia: You could name them, so you would say ‘Super source 2 host A in camera one’ or ‘Reveal super source with key’, ‘Super source without key’, ‘Bring on super source’, ‘Key on super source 2’, so you could really build out a lot of… which is what a lot of people do. You think about today, especially in live newscasts and whatnot, if you have the ability to build macros, well, it’s the same thing. It’s the same song and dance. It’s two shot, one shot, back to here, over the shoulder, not over the shoulder, throw to weather, come back, throw to sports, so there are a lot of different things that can be pre-built.

Bob Caniglia: I worked back in the day when there were no macros, doing live news and I laugh now because I think between the visual effects you can do now in software as opposed to trying to do them all live with a DVE and a big switcher and some of the… stuff that you can do with macros, these TVs don’t know how good they have it.

Larry Jordan: Yes, I remember back in the days I worked at a four re-entry switcher and we had to build all the effects live on different mix effects buses and you were driving something the size of an aircraft carrier to do a live show. Now, the control units are just a small briefcase sized thing. I want to reflect back, take a step back to a higher level. Back in the old days when you and I were getting started, we had massively large switchers that cost billions of dollars from companies like Grass Valley, and then Blackmagic came in and reduced a traditional switcher with the ATEM switcher, it’s a really nice entry system, but then Tricaster came out and Tricaster has what I would call the second generation of switching, which is where it’s all built into a Tricaster system, of which there are a variety of flavors.

Larry Jordan: Then Telestream Wirecast came out and we’re seeing a third generation of switching which is not based on proprietary hardware, but based upon software which is blended inside a Mac Mini. Thinking about these three generations of traditional and Tricaster and webcast, is there still a role in new productions for switchers like ATEM? Or is that really catering to a legacy market? And where do you see switching going in the future?

Bob Caniglia: One of the things that we’ve built is pieces for the puzzle. Some of the other systems have all kinds of features that not everybody needs. A friend of mine tours with a band, and I guess I don’t know that I should give it out, but anyway he tours with a band and he told me, he sent me a note the other day saying, “Hey, we’re going out with all Blackmagic this year,” and I said, “Well, that’s interesting,” and he said, “Cost isn’t the thing. It’s the space.” The guy said it’s a lot less space, the stuff works, we’ve been using pieces of it for the last couple of years and decided ‘I don’t know why we’re not using this all the time’, because it’s the size of what they need to do.  They need a certain number of inputs.

Bob Caniglia: Some of the smaller systems, sure, it’s great if you only have three or four inputs, but if you’re doing a larger production where you have four or five live cameras, you’re also feeding a video wall and some other things, you need more inputs and a lot of guys want a physical surface to clang on. So those situations are still out there. A lot of churches and schools and things where they want to have hands on and they want to still touch things.

Bob Caniglia: I even have one guy who works for one of the national morning shows on Sundays, he’s the director, he called me, asked me about the original ATEM TV studio and he said, “Am I getting this right? Can I just plug the two cameras of a two camera shoot we do during the week and I could record that on my laptop and then I’ll be good to go?” and I said, “Yes,” and he said, “This is great,” because what he does is he sits in the back of the room, the thing doesn’t make any noise and he hits the spacebar and cuts between the two cameras and does a line cut on his own.

Bob Caniglia: He said he rarely has to do a pick-up, it saves him a ton of time and it wasn’t so much the cost of it, because clearly it doesn’t cost a lot. He said even if it was $10,000 or $20,000 instead of $1,000, the fact that he could physically take in his briefcase and go and do it was the thing that made it the most appealing to him.

Larry Jordan: There’s so much more we could talk about but, as people are looking at the Blackmagic product line, everything from cameras down to switchers, even the mini convertors that you make which I seem to be buying like popcorn right now, what is it that makes Blackmagic products special for you? Because there’s clearly a light in your eyes as you describe this stuff. What is it that gets you excited?

Bob Caniglia: I think the exciting thing is that the whole company is geared towards trying to enable everybody to do as much as they can with as many products as they can at an affordable price. A lot of times, people ask, “Why don’t you tackle a certain segment of the market in a different category?” and truthfully we look at a lot of different things, but if we can’t go in and compete on a price level to get our run rates high enough to make that worthwhile, then it’s not really worth it to us.

Bob Caniglia: For instance, I don’t know, pick anything, if we were going to make a building and our building was going to cost the same as a building cost today, it wouldn’t make any sense for us to get in there, even if we build a better building. So our philosophy, Grant’s philosophy really, is to make sure that we enable the masses so that everybody can do it. What I find the best about it is that we get A level directors who buy our cameras and we get kids in high school who save up their paper route money to buy a camera and they’re both just as excited to use them.

Bob Caniglia: In the old days, you would get judged by the quality of your video image rather than the content, and now you get judged by your content instead of the quality of the video image you use because you can do just as good a job as anybody else. A lot of A level people are using our cameras as B cameras that start to move into A cameras.

Larry Jordan: Bob, where can people go on the web to learn more about Blackmagic?

Bob Caniglia: We’re at blackmagicdesign.com and we’ll see everybody at NAB, at the bottom floor of the south lower hall.

Larry Jordan: The entire bottom floor, if I remember the size of the booth. That’s blackmagicdesign.com. Bob Caniglia is the Senior Regional Manager for Eastern North America. You’ve got to hold out for a shorter title. Just call it VP. Anyway, Bob Caniglia is running out of Eastern North America and, Bob, thanks for joining us today.

Bob Caniglia: Thanks so much, Larry. Take care.

Larry Jordan: It’s been a great show this week. We’ve covered a lot of different information, talking with Paul Babb about some of the challenges and some of the opportunities for getting work in visual effects but, more importantly, in motion graphics, where is where Cinema 4D excels. Thinking

Larry Jordan: back on it, that’s exactly what Sean Mullen is doing as he’s taking these tools and getting them to create not just plug-ins, not just applications, but create visual elements that we can use inside our existing NLEs and in After Effects to add some additional variety and make our projects look unique compared to other people; and I like that idea of finding ways to take existing tools and get jobs for us. That’s what is, I think, the whole reason behind what this industry is doing, is we want to be able to take creativity and earn a living from it.

Larry Jordan: And then we had a chance to talk with Bob Caniglia which Blackmagic Design provides all kinds of tools for us to use.

Larry Jordan: Thanks to Paul Babb, the CEO of Maxon US; Sean Mullen, the CEO and Lead Creative at Rampant Design Tools; and Bob Caniglia, the Senior Regional Manager for Eastern North America, Blackmagic Design.

Larry Jordan: There’s lot of history in our industry and it’s all posted to our website at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Here you’ll find hundreds of past shows and thousands of interviews all searchable and always available. You can talk with us on Twitter, @DPBuZZ, and Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Our theme music is composed by Nathan Doogie Turner and we’re having a great time. Have you noticed this week that we have a brand new open? Well, at least modified version of the open. One of the neat things about the technology we’re using is we’re tweaking it and making the open different a little bit every week.

Larry Jordan: Additional music on The Buzz is provided by smartsound.com. Text transcripts are provided by Take 1 Transcription and if you have questions or comments, email us at info@larryjordan.com.

Larry Jordan: Our producer is Cirina Catania, our engineering team is led by Megan Paulos, includes Alexia Chalida, Ed Golya, Keenan Guy, Brianna Murphy and Lindsay Luebbert. My name is Larry Jordan; on behalf of Mike Horton, thanks for listening to The 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 shutterstock.com, a global marketplace for royalty free images and videos. With over two million royalty free HD and 4K video clips, Shutterstock helps you take your creative projects to the next level; and by Other World Computing, providing quality hardware solutions and extensive technical support to the worldwide computer industry since 1988.

Digital Production Buzz

February 12, 2015

[Transcripts provided by Take 1 Transcription]

 

(Click here to listen to this show.)

 
HOSTS

Larry Jordan

Michael Horton

GUESTS

Kanen Flowers, Chief Mayhem Officer, That Studio

Dan Berube, President, Boston Final Cut Pro User Group

Maxim Jago, Director, MaximJago.com

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

Voiceover: Rolling. Action!

Voiceover: Since the dawn of digital film making…

Voiceover: Authoritative.

Voiceover: …one show served a worldwide network of media professionals…

Voiceover: Current.

Voiceover: …uniting industry experts…

Voiceover: Production.

Voiceover: …film makers…

Voiceover: Post production.

Voiceover: …and content creators around the planet.

Voiceover: Distribution.

Larry Jordan: From the media capital of the world in Los Angeles, California, The Digital Production Buzz goes live now.

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

Mike Horton: Wow.

Larry Jordan: …Mr. Mike Horton.

Mike Horton: Hello, Larry. Hello, Mike.

Larry Jordan: We’ve got a great show tonight, starting with Kanen Flowers, the Chief Mayhem Officer at That Studio, with a preview of what to expect at NAB.

Larry Jordan: Then Dan Berube, the Founder of BOFCPUG, which is the Boston Creative Pro User Group…

Mike Horton: Pro User Group.

Larry Jordan: …and Co-Founder of the Supermeets…

Mike Horton: It’s really hard to say, isn’t it?

Larry Jordan: I’ve heard of Supermeets. Anyway, he’s, along with Mike, the Co-Founder of those and joins us to share his thoughts on Sundance 2015 and his experiences at the Editors’ Retreat this past week in Florida.

Larry Jordan: Then we wrap up with Maxim Jago, the filmmaker and futurist, talking about the future of technology and media.

Mike Horton: Holy cow, what a line-up.

Larry Jordan: It’s a great group.

Mike Horton: It’s a, yes, really great group.

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

Larry Jordan: Mike, I am so excited.

Mike Horton: Yes, I’m so nervous. But you should be real nervous.

Larry Jordan: It’s the brand new TalkShow from Newtek and we’re premiering it here on the show. Let me show you what it looks like. It’s a combination of computer with video generator that allows us to present broadcast quality Skype calls live on the show. It provides extremely high audio and video quality, the ability to cue calls, delivers full frame studio grade video from over 300 million Skype users and allows our guests to watch the show while we interview them. It’s, like, serial number two. We are excited because all three of our interviews tonight use TalkShow and Skype and we’ll be starting with our first one, with Kanen Flowers, in just a minute.

Mike Horton: Kanen is going to…

Larry Jordan: Isn’t that cool?

Mike Horton: …premiere it. He’s the first one to do it. Let’s see if it works, folks.

Larry Jordan: Well, what I was told is that Microsoft got serial number one and we got serial number two.

Mike Horton: Really?

Larry Jordan: And we are putting on the air and, I tell you, we’ve been working with it in rehearsal and it is stunning.

Mike Horton: Yes, saw a little bit of it, it looked really cool.

Larry Jordan: Oh, it’s just amazing.

Mike Horton: I’m hoping Kanen puts a green screen in the background.

Larry Jordan: I think what Kanen has done is he has moved his computer outside to Hawaii and he’s on the beach and he’s showing us what…

Mike Horton: Why the heck not? We should do that with Dan, because Dan’s in Boston in 20 feet of snow or something.

Larry Jordan: Well, Dan is suffering from severe cold and, against doctor’s advice, he is getting up out of his near death bed, just to be with us because chatting with us on The Buzz is that important to him.

Mike Horton: It is, yes. Ok.

Larry Jordan: Let’s see. We’re continuing to tweet, we’re using Wirecast for our live stream and we’ve spent a lot of time making Wirecast work, so…

Mike Horton: Yes, we should actually show another picture of this place. Well, we can’t because we need a roving camera, but this is just amazing.

Larry Jordan: Well, you saw the studio tour that we did last week.

Mike Horton: Yes. You should play that every single week before the show.

Larry Jordan: Well, I think what we’re going to do is run elements of that as part of the pre-show, as part of our opening.

Larry Jordan: By the way, remember to visit with us on Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com; we’re 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. Mike and I will be back with Kanen Flowers right after this.

Mike Horton: On Skype.

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.

Larry Jordan: 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: In 2014, Kanen Flowers founded That Studio with a focus on independent visual effects, creative content and distribution of new films. Along with his Co-Founder, Alan E Bell, Kanen is helping new and existing artists get their content onto the internet. Hello, Kanen, welcome back.

Kanen Flowers: Oh, hello Larry. Good to be back.

Larry Jordan: It’s good to have you back. It’s been a long time since last we chatted. Let’s start at the beginning. Why did you decide to start That Studio?

Kanen Flowers: Originally we started That Studio with the idea of helping independent filmmakers create original content. I’ve always been an independent filmmaker, as you know. I started out as a technology guy and always had an eye towards film and toward creating independent film, television. I was always the guy that preferred ‘Sideways’ over ‘Transformers’, so I always thought, “Oh, it’d be really interesting to help people like that,” you know? And so I got into film thinking this whole film thing is going from film cameras to digital cameras and, as a technology guy that made a lot of sense to me.

Kanen Flowers: As I got into it more and more, I started realizing that there are a lot of ways to create content out there, but there aren’t a lot of tools that are really geared toward what I would call the independent filmmaker. There are a lot of plug-ins and a lot of stuff that you can use, but I didn’t feel like anybody was really trying to figure out… let’s say I want to make the next upstream color with… or primer. How do I do that? Where do I start? How do I begin? How do I even approach? It’s an enormous undertaking, to figure out how to approach making an independent film or television show or to kind of liberate yourself like that, and so I got excited about that and I spent two years…

Larry Jordan: It sounds like what you were doing is not looking at the individual technology, not looking at the plug-ins, but looking at the process, that you were looking at a process solution rather than a technological solution.

Kanen Flowers: Yes, we did. We spent two years really screwing up publicly. We created this company called Scruffy TV and I know Michael Horton has seen a lot of the mess, but we spent two years just failing publicly to see, like, how do we even build this stuff?

Mike Horton: Yes, but a lot of that mess we also learned from.

Kanen Flowers: Yes, I hope so. I know I learned a lot and you’re exactly right, Larry, it started out as, “How do I do this process? How do I build this group of people who know what they’re doing? How do I enable them with the tools?” and, for us, even “How do I have a group of people around the world all collaborate?” and those are all really hard questions to answer. Along the way, we discovered a couple of things and I can talk about it as little or as much as you like.

Larry Jordan: Help me understand what it is that you discovered, because when you talk about collaboration with a team of people around the world, that’s a management issue. How do you manage remote creative people? It has nothing to do with filmmaking, it has everything to do with management, motivation and inspiration. There’s a big difference between that and telling a story with pictures.

Kanen Flowers: No, I completely agree, and one of the biggest challenges we had in the beginning with that studio was accountability. Accountability is really tough when you have people in Poland or Australia and you’re in San Francisco or Hollywood or wherever you are – Portland for nine months while we shot a TV show.

Kanen Flowers: Yes, accountability’s tough, but it turns out that a combination of creating a strong meritocracy, where people are rewarded for actually working, and then using the right tools. We use Cello and Whipster and there are just a ton of tools that we use that really enable that. It’s tough and I think a lot of people try and skip over that. There’s a massive human component to some of this work that we do.

Larry Jordan: I’m discovering it here. As our business gets bigger and as we start to add more and more staff, figuring out who’s responsible for what and figuring out realistic deadlines and clear lines of communication is a never ending process of self discovery.

Kanen Flowers: I absolutely agree, and tools are only as good as the people who are using them too, right? So the hardest part is obviously getting everyone on board. I’m lucky enough that I have a group of people who all share my vision, this idea that we can all collaborate together to build tools for people like us, but also for other independent filmmakers.

Kanen Flowers: One of the great things that came out of this whole process is along the way we shot ‘Hero Punk’, which was the first feature film shot on a Blackmagic cinema camera, which was kind of fun, all green screen, which you can see behind me this green screen.

Larry Jordan: It’s an amazing green screen, by the way.

Mike Horton: We’ve got to do something with that green screen.

Larry Jordan: I’ve never seen a higher quality green screen in my life.

Mike Horton: We’ll send him the technology.

Kanen Flowers: I think it’s $29 on Amazon. I’m cheap. I think I probably mention that every time we talk. So yes, building all of these different properties like ‘Hero Punk’ and ‘1820’, and we’ve shown some of the stuff that we’ve done. We’ve shown behind the scenes and we’ve shown how to, but what we discovered along the way was really fascinating. We discovered that, not only were we having to build this process, but also we realized that there were actually a ton of tools that we didn’t have and that, in fact, no-one had and it was really frustrating.

Kanen Flowers: I’ll give you a great really quick example. Let’s say that you have – which you would if you shot on the Blackmagic cinema camera and you shot especially cinema D and G – let’s say you have 120 terabytes of footage that you start editing, the editor works on, and then you get into picture lock. Well, after you get that 120 terabytes of footage into picture lock, what do you do now? You conform. Conform is such a boring thing to do and nobody wants to do it. It turns out there was actually no tool that automated that process, there was no tool that took that 120 terabytes of footage, put it into a common codec, put it into a common naming convention and put it into a format that you could put on one drive and send out to people around the world.

Kanen Flowers: So in the process of building our own content, we also started building our own tools. One of those tools is Conform Studio, which does exactly as I’ve described – it’s a tool that conforms your footage and it’s relatively inexpensive. I think right now the price is 79 bucks for it, so we’re trying to build things that work for people and also things that people can afford.

Mike Horton: Wow, Kanen, I hadn’t even heard of Conform Studio, which I am looking up right now. Oh, there it is. There’s a download. Oh my God.

Kanen Flowers: Yes, it’s a fun tool that we built along the way, Mike.

Mike Horton: It came out in June. Where have I been?

Larry Jordan: Clearly, you have not been reading your memos.

Mike Horton: You need better PR, Kanen.

Larry Jordan: Oh, go on, embarrass him in public. Let’s just make him feel like he’s inadequate, could you?

Kanen Flowers: That is bad.

Mike Horton: Welcome to The Digital Production Buzz.

Larry Jordan: Kanen, do you think of yourself as a visionary or as a storyteller or as a technologist or as a filmmaker? How would you categorize yourself? I use words like ‘irreverent’ and ‘edgy’ and ‘willing to take risks’ and ‘killer sense of humor’, but how would you describe your role and what you’re trying to accomplish for yourself?

Kanen Flowers: I’ve often joked that I’m kind of the anti-Stu Maschwitz. He started out as a filmmaker and became an accidental technologist and I think I started out as a technologist and became an accidental filmmaker, which is kind of interesting. But with both of us – and I don’t mean to compare myself to Stu, although I think he’s a wonderful human being – I think that we’re both really focused on the idea of putting together a technology that makes people’s lives easier. It’s kind of an interesting thing.

Kanen Flowers: There are a lot of tools out there that I really have no interest in because I think that they’re impossible to learn. Michael, you and I have talked about this before. You need a PhD in about six different subjects to learn something like Nuke or one of these other tools, and so I’ve made it kind of my life mission to make that process of creating visual effects or beautiful music, like with That Studio Atmospheres, or Conform Studio, the thing that Michael mentioned earlier, I’ve made it my life’s mission to make those tools easier for filmmakers. I don’t think you should really have to have a giant budget or a giant crew or a bunch of, frankly, guys who are overpaid and sometimes rather difficult to help you bring your vision to life.

Kanen Flowers: That maybe makes me controversial and, don’t get me wrong, I love a lot of these visual effects artists, I think they’re great, but you shouldn’t be shackled to them. You shouldn’t be held captive.

Larry Jordan: But let me play devil’s advocate for a minute. I think one of the challenges that brings out creativity is that when you’re fighting against a technological barrier, if everything is possible and everything is easy, it’s hard to decide which way to go. But when you’re always hammering up against a barrier, the cost of doing live television 30 years ago, the fact that you had to paint on wet concrete to do what Michelangelo did, it’s the fight against what technology allows you to do that allows creativity to flourish. It sounds like you would not agree with that.

Kanen Flowers: Oh no, I think we’re in violent agreement, Larry. I totally agree with you and I think that the part that I think is difficult for any independent filmmaker today – budget is always a pain point. It’s difficult. Finding really good people who are talented is amazingly difficult and then there’s this hard barrier, which is if everyone can make a film, everyone will and so how do you get your voice out there? I think we have, as independent filmmakers, we have many, many, many barriers that we have to overcome and one of them should not be, “How do I use this stupid software?”

Mike Horton: Yes.

Larry Jordan: True.

Mike Horton: Well, that’s always part of it, but whatever you’re going to do, just do that story that I want to see.

Kanen Flowers: Yes, exactly.

Mike Horton: And that’s how you get your voice out there.

Larry Jordan: Although finding good stories is sometimes tricky.

Mike Horton: That’s the problem. There are a lot of people out there telling stories, but I don’t want to see them. Or if I do see them and they’re not very good, then that’s where it ends right there.

Larry Jordan: Kanen, let’s change hats for you for a second. Coming up in April is my favorite toy store, which is NAB, and I know that you’re doing a panel at NAB, but I don’t know what the panel is about and I’m trying to decide if I should just sleep longer or if I should attend. So tell me what’s happening for you at NAB and then we’ll talk a little bit about what you’re looking to see.

Mike Horton: Oh, you should take your digital recorder any time Kanen’s on a panel.

Larry Jordan: A digital recorder?

Mike Horton: Yes.

Larry Jordan: All right.

Mike Horton: Record what he says.

Larry Jordan: I got it. So first, what are your thoughts on the panel? What’s it about?

Kanen Flowers: I’m doing two things at NAB that are both very, very exciting for me. One is I’m doing an all day green screen workshop that teaches people how to use this cruddy green screen, like I have behind me, with tracking markers and all of those things to create fully realized 3D environments, so I’m going to walk people through a full day of how to do that.

Larry Jordan: A full day of staring at a green screen? Man, you are a cruel and unusual taskmaster. I’m impressed.

Mike Horton: Yes, but he’ll change the background often.

Larry Jordan: Oh, ok, good.

Kanen Flowers: That’s right.

Larry Jordan: Ok, so we got a day workshop on green screen.

Kanen Flowers: So a workshop on green screen; and then the other thing is you said panel, I can’t help but get excited about telling you this – at NAB we are launching an Adobe Premiere Pro panel and an Adobe After Effects panel that is a panel inside both Premiere Pro and After Effects that gives you ready access to over 10,000 high quality visual effects, flame, fire, explosions.

Larry Jordan: It’s not a panel, it’s an extension. That’s where you have your own part of the interface.

Kanen Flowers: That’s correct.

Larry Jordan: You’re launching two extensions, Premiere and After Effects?

Kanen Flowers: That’s correct.

Larry Jordan: That is very, very cool.

Mike Horton: That’s going to work with the That Studio, all the ten gazillion effects that you have in that?

Kanen Flowers: That’s correct, Michael, you’ll be able to preview them, download them, automatically comp them into your timeline and you’ll have read access to over 10,000 practical visual effects, tons of composed music and tons of composed sound elements. We’re adding a bunch more stuff too.

Mike Horton: Wow.

Larry Jordan: No wonder you’re not getting any sleep these days. I understand. That’s a ton of work.

Kanen Flowers: Yes.

Larry Jordan: What’s been the biggest challenge in putting that together?

Kanen Flowers: Oh, man, that’s an interesting question. Well, we decided, instead of going with the old panel technology, which was written in Adobe Flash basically, we decided to embrace the new Adobe SDK, which is HTML5 and JavaScript and all that stuff. So our panel is not only lightning fast, but it uses the internet to do previews and all those things. It’s a hardcore technology solution that hopefully feels like a simple thing to use.

Larry Jordan: That is so cool. Are you sitting there doing the coding yourself? Or are you waving your magic wand at others who are doing the coding?

Kanen Flowers: I think I’ve written one line of code.

Mike Horton: And you did it very well.

Kanen Flowers: No, mostly it’s great people on my team like Bart Walczak who’s actually in Warsaw, Poland.

Larry Jordan: Oh my goodness.

Kanen Flowers: And different people like that, yes.

Mike Horton: Can we get a preview of this? Is it up on the website yet?

Larry Jordan: No, it’s a secret, Michael. Nobody knows. We can’t talk about it ‘til NAB.

Mike Horton: Oh, then…

Kanen Flowers: We’re doing a closed beta between now and NAB and we’re looking for feedback, because we want to launch it as the best possible panel we can.

Mike Horton: Oh it’s closed beta. Well, there is something here on the website. It says it’s secret though.

Larry Jordan: Yes, we can’t talk about it, so we won’t mention the fact that if you go to thatstudio.com, you won’t learn anything about this secret. Kanen, as you’re looking forward to NAB, putting your technology hat on, what are some of the things you’re looking forward to seeing? Are your eyes really lighting up at 10K video preview technology?

Kanen Flowers: Absolutely not. I’m still shooting at two and a half K most days.

Mike Horton: And it looks exactly like 10K.

Kanen Flowers: It’s hard to tell the difference.

Larry Jordan: Oh yes, true enough, true enough. So what’s got your interest?

Kanen Flowers: To be honest with you, I don’t want to sound like a big fan boy, but I mentioned the Adobe Premiere Pro panel that we’re doing, and the After Effects panel, I’m really excited to see, I saw a sneak preview, like many people did, at Adobe MAX and I’m really excited to see some of the great audio tools and some of the great video tools Adobe’s doing. They seem like they’re just on fire the last year. It’s crazy. So I’m excited about that. We’re going to be over in the plug-in pavilion, what I think some people call ‘Tiny Town’.

Larry Jordan: It’s one of my favorite spots, though. You meet such great people and there are so many cool apps in such a small space that go into the plug-in pavilion. It’s just a must see on my trip.

Mike Horton: Plug-in kiosks.

Kanen Flowers: Yes, and come by and see us if you do. I mention them because right behind them, taking up basically the width of the plug-in pavilion, is Red Giant and I’m really excited about what Red Giant’s doing with Universe lately. I think they really turned the dial up to 11 on that, which is great.

Larry Jordan: That’s a very cool point. Beside taking a long nap after NAB launches, what’s in the future for the rest of the year for That Studio?

Kanen Flowers: Well, we’re finally at a point where I think we’re going to be able to show some of the really cool stuff we’re doing with regard to the creative content. Michael has seen, I showed it at LAFCPUG, actually, for the first time, the behind the scenes and how we put together ‘Hero Punk’, and so that’s exciting. But we have the TV pilot that we’ve been talking about for about a year now, ‘1820’, we’re about to show a heck of a lot of that, along with how we used a bunch of the tools we’ve created along the way to build it. So I think this year is just going to be a ton of content and a ton of tools from us.

Mike Horton: Any release date at all on ‘1820?’ Or is there a self imposed deadline that you’re putting on yourself?

Kanen Flowers: It will be before October.

Mike Horton: Good.

Larry Jordan: Of which year?

Kanen Flowers: Of this year.

Larry Jordan: Oh, ok, good. Just checking.

Kanen Flowers: It will be in the future.

Larry Jordan: By the way, on our live chat, which is going on right below the live video stream, Eric is asking whether you’re doing any more work in 4K or everything you’re doing is 2.5.

Kanen Flowers: Oh no, we’re definitely shooting some stuff in 4K, but we’re mostly editing and most of the stuff that we’re doing with all of our artists is in two and a half, yes. We are shooting in 4K, though.

Mike Horton: And one day you’ll be able to come to LAFCPUG and actually show it on our 2K projector, if we ever get it plugged in.

Larry Jordan: It’s plugged in, it’s just…

Mike Horton: Long story.

Larry Jordan: …there’s no power.

Mike Horton: Interview me one day and I’ll tell you all about it.

Larry Jordan: Yes, we don’t interview you, you’re too depressing.

Mike Horton: Ok.

Larry Jordan: One other question before we let you go, Kanen, you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the process of filmmaking, everything from management down to the technology. For somebody that wants to start doing their first independent film, and they understand how a camera works and they understand how to point a microphone and pick up sound, so they’ve got the basics down, what don’t they know? What advice would you give them that they need to understand before they tackle a feature?

Kanen Flowers: Hmm. I think the hardest thing – I said this earlier – but I think the hardest thing is finding talented people and knowing how to spot that talent, and I think the thing that is really important, and that goes for not just the crew or the people working behind the camera or around the camera, but also goes for the actors.

Kanen Flowers: I think learning to spot that talent is a real gift and I think that you can learn that but I think it takes some effort and I would just encourage them to watch as much as they possibly can with a very critical eye to see what it is that makes a performance and what it is that makes a shot.

Larry Jordan: And my advice is don’t be afraid to make a mistake and don’t pretend you know everything. Those are the two biggest mistakes, is don’t try to be perfect, just do it and learn from what you’ve done.

Mike Horton: Hire wonderful people and let them do their stuff.

Kanen Flowers: Yes, and you can watch the 100 crappy videos that we released before we got to something that was even watchable if you want to learn how not to do it. We’ve got plenty of evidence out there.

Larry Jordan: Kanen, what website can people go to to learn more about what you and your team are creating?

Kanen Flowers: They can go to thatstudio.com.

Larry Jordan: That’s thatstudio.com.

Mike Horton: And they’ll learn nothing about the panel.

Larry Jordan: And Kanen Flowers is the Chief Mayhem Officer and Founder of That Studio, Co-Founder truthfully. Kanen, thanks for joining us today.

Kanen Flowers: Thank you, guys.

Mike Horton: And I’m going to fool with Conform Studio.

Larry Jordan: And nobody does a better job of fooling around than you do. Thanks again, take care.

Mike Horton: I am so smart.

Larry Jordan: Bye bye.

Mike Horton: Bye Kanen.

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Larry Jordan: Dan Berube is the Founder of the Boston Creative Pro User Group. He’s also the Co-producer with our own Mr. Mike Horton of the world famous Supermeets and long time recurring guest on The Buzz. Hello, Dan, welcome back and in spite, by the way, of a mean cold, he is standing up to chat with us today.

Mike Horton: And he’s got 50 feet of snow outside, I’m assuming.

Larry Jordan: Hey, Dan, how are you?

Dan Berube: How are you, Larry? How are you, Mike?

Mike Horton: Hey, Dan.

Larry Jordan: It’s 80 degrees outside and Mike and I are in air conditioned studios. I just want you to know we’re thinking about you.

Mike Horton: Yes, and it’s going to be 90 degrees tomorrow.

Dan Berube: Thank you, thank you. Rub it in. I don’t know how useful I’m going to be during this next ten minutes, because I am so full of medicine that you would not believe, but I finally got rid of the hoarse voice. I’m just excited to be back and to go from Daytona, beautiful Daytona, back to over four feet of snow here in Waltham, with another blizzard happening this weekend.

Larry Jordan: I know. It’s like…

Mike Horton: I know. It’s incredible.

Larry Jordan: If it’s Monday, it’s got to be a blizzard.

Mike Horton: Have you seen the pictures?

Larry Jordan: I know, it’s been phenomenal.

Mike Horton: The pictures are just incredible.

Larry Jordan: What you don’t understand is Dan is not in his house, he’s inside a snow drift that he’s been able to furnish.

Dan Berube: Yes, it’s pretty warm in here. I tell you, it brings me back to my childhood because we used to do the snow banks and build Eskimo huts and whatnot, but I don’t have to worry because I’ve got tiny houses in the front of my yard that people are living in. I like it.

Mike Horton: I want to know how the dogs can go outside.

Larry Jordan: Before Mike gets his… on and heads out to say hi, you were just at Sundance and I wanted to get your take on what was happening there. What were you doing at Sundance?

Dan Berube: I was. I was there basically working with Emerson College, sponsoring a couple of the six female student filmmakers that were there for the festival in tandem with Creative Mind Group and Creative Mind Group does programs at Sundance in Berlin and Cannes. It’s basically building up their experience as filmmakers at the festival to give them an enabling presence at the festival. I was there, I was actually rooming with your next guest, Maxim Jago, so I get to say that I slept with Maxim at Sundance.

Mike Horton: Cool, we’ll start the… like that.

Larry Jordan: You may say that, he may not want you to say it, however. There’s a difference there. What was your takeaway from Sundance? What’s the highlight that you remember?

Dan Berube: This was the first festival at Sundance for me, so I went there with an accreditation pass that was, like, 200 bucks. The festival pass is, like, three and a half million dollars, so I couldn’t afford it, so I didn’t see any films there. But what I did see was lot of filmmakers and I went to a lot of networking events and got to stand in line outside at over capacity crowds.

Dan Berube: My favorite part was just meeting people and filmmakers and having conversations with them, because there’s a lot of breaks and a lot of places that you could just sit and hang, and it’s really interesting to see the type of filmmaker that’s at Sundance. I did speak, I presented with Maxim at the HP Sundance House on the Tuesday there, and that was interesting. There was a good crowd, so we got to talk about basically enabling technologies and Maxim approached it to me in conversation, what happened to me, how did I get started in filmmaking in the past, and we talked about the present and then pontificated and prognosticated about the future. So that was a good hour with him there.

Dan Berube: I went to the Canon Creative Studio, I went to the new Frontiers Pavilion. It was amazing because it was all virtual reality and there were several different exhibits. I’m telling you, where the technology is going is incredible, what’s happening now.

Mike Horton: And the VR was covered hugely in all the trade papers. 4K was the buzz last year, VR is the buzz this year, and they’re doing some astounding things. I wish I could have seen that, Dan.

Dan Berube: Yes, well maybe we’ll get to do it at a Supermeet…

Mike Horton: Yes. I mean, I’d love to do that. I know Ted Schilowitz is very into it and a lot of Oculus Rift, of course, you hear all about.

Larry Jordan: But three years ago it was 3D. Last year it was 4K, now it’s VR. Is it one of those things that’s going to appear for a show and disappear?

Mike Horton: Again, you don’t know, but it’s just really cool technology right now. You don’t know exactly where it’s going to go. They were doing narrative stuff. They won’t do feature films on these things. Well, who knows? Maybe they will.

Dan Berube: They absolutely will do. It started this year with Oculus Rift showing ‘Interstellar’, where some of the film was presented using the Oculus Rift. That was at the Smithsonian Institution and whatnot. That’s just a glimpse of what can happen, but there were exhibits where actually two Emerson graduates, the Daniels, they’re music video directors, they did a series of videos that were interactive that had multiple endings and you just pressed a touch screen and it flowed with the story and with the mood and the feeling. That was incredible.

Dan Berube: There was a bird exhibit, where you lay on a table and you strap yourself into wings and you put the Rift goggles on you and you start moving around, flying over San Francisco.

Mike Horton: Oh wow.

Dan Berube: I didn’t get to do that because, I’ll tell you honestly, that was in a darkened room and that was after one of the big parties that we went to. We were basically out until 5.30, six o’clock every morning, so I think if I had done that exhibit, there would probably be some tactile response from me on the floor.

Larry Jordan: Dan, as you look at it, Sundance is really the intersection of technology with creativity. How is creativity changing due to the impact of changes in technology?

Dan Berube: I can speak from my point of view. I was there also promoting a film that I have just worked on called ‘The Chain’, which is based on an original story by Tobias Wolff and I held it – I don’t know if you can see this – I held it on this USB keychain.

Larry Jordan: Yes, we see that.

Dan Berube: I was giving out a ton of these to film festival organizers and filmmakers and reviewers who were interested. For me, enabling technologies today, I think XML has a lot to do with it. Being able to work in a fashion with the software now I created with Adobe Creative Cloud and basically had a team of people who are like minded who you can depend on, just like Kanen was talking about, when making a feature film, identifying people that you want to work with, and they all had different strengths.

Dan Berube: I cut the film, stayed in the MXF codec throughout the process because we shot on the Canon C300 – that’s 1920 by 1080 – and then handed off XML to the colorists who were on the set, to the visual effects artist, Tim Montgomery, who worked on a PC based system on After Effects and Flame. Honestly, I think that Hollywood’s in the past for today’s filmmakers because we’re now able to do things like not worry so much about picture lock, and that was important for Noel, the director, and I because we wanted to be able to make new changes throughout the process.

Dan Berube: We involved the sound designer and the composer early on in the process. We didn’t wait until picture lock to be able to pass that off to them, and I was conforming in ProRes 4444 while the footage was graded and then while Tim Montgomery was still working on the visual effects and we were still feeding versions, iterations of the soundtrack into the film and timeline. That to me was incredible for the experience of the film, and just an indication of where you’re going to see this.

Dan Berube: I’m just scratching the surface and we can’t talk about this in the ten minutes that we have, but I think storytelling is evolving across the medium. George Lucas talked about the super tape…

Larry Jordan: Well, Dan, what we’ll do is we’ll invite you back, because this could use a lot more than another hour.

Mike Horton: Yes, there’s a lot more to talk about.

Dan Berube: Yes, there’s way too much.

Mike Horton: And Dan’s film’s going to be in DC here in two weeks.

Larry Jordan: It’s excellent. Called ‘The Chain’, and where can people go to learn more about you, Dan? Quickly, what website?

Dan Berube: Yes, thechainfilm.com.

Larry Jordan: Thechainfilm.com and bofcpug.org for his user group. Dan, thanks for joining us.

Mike Horton: Bye, Dan, talk to you soon.

Dan Berube: Bye bye.

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Larry Jordan: Maxim Jago is a film director, a screenwriter and an author who splits his time between filmmaking and speaking as a futurist. He’s a regular speaker at media technology conferences, film festivals and events that celebrate creativity. He’s also the Innovation Officer at filmdo.com and a mentor for new filmmakers. Hello, Maxim, welcome.

Maxim Jago: Hello, how are you?

Mike Horton: Hello, Maxim.

Larry Jordan: We are doing great. I was just reflecting that you travel the world as an expert on behalf of companies like Adobe, so my first question is where in the world are you today?

Maxim Jago: That’s a good question.

Mike Horton: Where am I?

Maxim Jago: Right now, I’m in Athens, Georgia. I’ve just been speaking at the Georgia University, at the Grady College, giving some presentations to the students here about, if you like, more like the philosophy of films and communication techniques, networking tips, so when they graduate they can meet people and give more than they take, and just speaking about the techniques I’ve learned over the course of making the 50 or so films that I’ve worked on, so it’s been a pleasure.

Maxim Jago: And just before that, as you heard there, I was with Dan Berube at the Editors’ Retreat in Daytona, which was wonderful; and before that, I’ve relocated to New York now, so I’m having my Englishman in New York experience. I have an apartment a couple of blocks from Time Square, which is great, so I had about four days at home and before that, of course, was Sundance and Dan and I shared a room.

Maxim Jago: It’s very difficult to get accommodation during Sundance. It’s easy to get stuff out of town but difficult to get it in walking distance, and we managed to get a twin room which was just perfect. Not The Ritz, but it did let us participate in the festival. Then I think before that, I was in New York briefly and before that I had a trip, I was speaking at the Dubai Festival, then I was in London…

Larry Jordan: You can stop now, I’m getting tired just listening to the itinerary.

Mike Horton: Frankly, I want to be Maxim.

Maxim Jago: I don’t have a time zone any more.

Mike Horton: I want to go to those places. I want to go do Dubai. I want to go to Sundance.

Maxim Jago: Oh, you want to go to Iceland. Go to Iceland, there’s some…

Mike Horton: Oh, I’d love to do that.

Maxim Jago: …the official photographer for the tourist board there, a guy called Ragnar, and he’ll take you around. It’s beautiful.

Larry Jordan: What was it that got you interested in technology in the first place? You specialize in trying to figure out what’s happening in the future, but what was it that caught your eye back when you were so young?

Maxim Jago: When I was a child – that’s a great question – I was raised by intellectual hippies. It’s a bit like being raised by wolves but with more intellectual debate. I remember my mother would go to what we call in the UK jumble sales, I don’t know what you’d call them here, you know, people selling bric-a-brac and junk and stuff, and she would give my brother and I all kinds of toys and we would take them all to pieces.

Maxim Jago: It would be a birthday present to give me an old gas meter and a wrench and a couple of screwdrivers to take it to pieces. It’s a kind of obsession to understand how things work. In fact, when I got to 11, with some hubris, I think, I sort of figured, “Well, I think I kind of understand technology now. I want to understand everything else,” and I read a beautiful book by an American author called Richard Bach – he’s famous for writing ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’…

Mike Horton: And all the hippies were reading it at that time.

Maxim Jago: Yes. Well, I read it and I was so excited to have found another human being that was asking these question about, why are we here and what do we know and what is reality? And in the book he draws this beautiful analogy between reality and film. He says that choosing to be born is a bit like choosing to go to the cinema, where all kinds of experiences happen and, if souls exist, then they know that it’s fate but, of course, the characters on the screen don’t and they’re really having the experience.

Maxim Jago: I was so moved by this, his description of reality as a kind of illusion and the parallel with film. It’s one of the major reasons I became a filmmaker and I began studying life, the universe and everything. I wanted to understand everything, basically, and what I’ve concluded is the older I get, the more I realize I have no idea. I think Socrates was right, we’re all winging it, but as long as we can get along, we can have fun along the way.

Mike Horton: Did you ever at any time, I know you like to tell your stories visually, but have you ever tried to write a book?

Maxim Jago: I did, actually. I wrote a novella, and the re-write is in the works. I have about 50 projects and that’s one of them. I had this rationalization of my projects a few years ago, where I looked at how long I thought I was likely to live and just struck some things off the list because I realized that life is short and, you know, you get those bits of advice when you’re a kid and you realize that they’re right when you’re older and it kind of makes you grumpy because you wish you’d realized it sooner.

Maxim Jago: One of the bits of advice I heard was that the secret of life is to find out what you love and to do that, and you’ll always find a way to make money, you’ll always sustain yourself if you really love whatever it is. My obsession, my catnip, is communication, but I love philosophy, I’m writing a metaphysics PhD, which is killing me, it’s going to take forever, but…

Mike Horton: Are you serious? Really? Wow.

Maxim Jago: Yes, it’s beautiful. So it’s ‘The Nature of Being’ is the broad title, it’s an old title. The basic argument of the PhD is that we’re either here by chance, in which case nothing matters, or we’re here for some kind of reason, in which case there is potentially a design and so it becomes meaningful to reverse engineer life; and so I reverse engineer consciousness, I reverse engineer space and time and I conclude that we should get on with it, because clearly if there is a design, not knowing what we’re here for is part of the design, because nobody really knows. So we should stop worrying about it and, instead of existential angst where we worry about whether we’re going to do it wrong, we should have existential joy because if a client gives you a terrible brief, it’s not your fault.

Mike Horton: I tend to wonder why I’m here.

Maxim Jago: Well, exactly. Nobody really knows, so stop worrying about it and get on with it. That’s the gist of the metaphysics PhD. Obviously, it’s…

Mike Horton: Pretty soon, Dr Jago. Dr Jago. That’ll be fun.

Maxim Jago: The thing is, who needs a PhD? But wouldn’t it be cool to have ‘Directed by Dr Jago’?

Mike Horton: Absolutely.

Maxim Jago: I think there’s a lot of… potential.

Mike Horton: There’s your motivation.

Maxim Jago: And it…

Mike Horton: That’s the motivation right there.

Maxim Jago: I can maybe tell girls at parties…

Mike Horton: And it looks great on your business card.

Maxim Jago: Yes, yes, exactly.

Larry Jordan: I want to move you to Florida and the Editors’ Retreat. What were you sharing with the editors? What did you want them to start thinking about?

Maxim Jago: Let me see. Oh, ok, yes, I gave a couple of talks there that were really interesting. Kanen Flowers was sorely missed. Dan was there, we had some real greats there. One of the talks I gave was just a straight up masterclass on Premiere Pro.

Maxim Jago: You know I wrote the… book for Premiere Pro, I recorded the visual training for it, so I’m supposed to know what I’m talking about. I think increasingly Premiere Pro is becoming a bit like Photoshop in that apparently they have an interview question at Adobe for the Photoshop team where they say, “Do you think you totally know Photoshop?” and if you say yes, you fail because nobody totally knows Photoshop. Premiere Pro is definitely moving in that direction, but I showed some of the really advanced techniques, some of the stuff that particularly people who’ve self trained might have missed, just things that might have bugged you about the application that you just didn’t realize there was a tick box that made it perfect, and some more advanced compositing features and project browsing, that kind of thing.

Maxim Jago: But for me, the really interesting presentation that I gave was about communication. My passion, my absolute passion is communication and I’ve spent many years studying it informally. I gave a presentation about really advanced techniques for achieving the maximum transfer of understanding from one brain to another, but also dealing with conflict. There’s an amazing book that I think should be required reading at school called ‘Non-Violent Communication’, I think it might be a guy called Marshal Rosenberg but I might have that wrong. It’s about conveying information without adding judgment and it turns out that we do this all the time and so…

Larry Jordan: Wait, just say that again. Conveying information without adding judgment, did I hear that correctly?

Maxim Jago: Yes, exactly that. So without me telling you what you are or without me telling you why you did something. The classic example for conflict management would be we’re having a discussion and you start shouting. Now, I could say you’re being aggressive, but then I’m telling you who you are, I’m telling you what you are, and that’s bound to annoy you, it’s not going to help.

Maxim Jago: But if I say, “It’s making it difficult for me to think because you’ve raised your voice,” I’m not saying why you’ve raised your voice, I’m not saying what I think about you raising your voice, I’m describing my personal experience and something that is probably not in dispute, that you’re shouting.

Maxim Jago: So it took me about three months, actually, to adjust the way I communicate and you slip up sometimes, but the gist of it is that the guys says positive or negative judgment will elicit a negative response, so now that we’ve got that clear it’s up to you. If you want to have a bad reaction from people, go ahead; but if you don’t, here are some approaches to how to avoid it, so I was talking about that kind of thing. It’s just invaluable, particularly because we’re working in a world that’s very heavily orientated towards teamwork.

Maxim Jago: One of the reasons I love making films is that it’s not all about me, it’s about the relationships I have with the other creatives that I’m working with. For me, this is fantastic. It’s all about the connections between us as people, so being able to communicate better is quite fundamental, and you see that. I don’t know if Kanen’s ever told you about his old distributed creative process, he has these teams all around the world and somehow he’s created a system where people in different cultures and different time zones can all work together.

Maxim Jago: This is a big deal and I think we’re going to see more and more of it, especially with things coming online like the Oculus Rift very soon. I’m very interested in 360 video and VR and you guys were talking with Dan about that. It is a very exciting time for that; and I’m developing a project that I’m hoping maybe we can work with Ted Schilowitz, he mentioned. We’re hoping to shoot something in June.

Mike Horton: Well, we talked about Kanen assembling this worldwide group of people, but even big studio movies have assembled worldwide. They can just go into a studio with a big screen and a lot of Skype feeds and one person over here is doing color, one is doing the sound and they can be on the stage with the composer and nobody’s together any more, they’re spread out all over the world and that’s coming.

Maxim Jago: It’s amazing.

Mike Horton: Yes.

Maxim Jago: Yes, but there’s a problem with it. Well, there are two issues really.

Mike Horton: There is a problem, yes.

Maxim Jago: One issue is that it’s crucial that we remember that we’re the storytellers and I think that sometimes, especially working as a technologist, we forget that in the old days it would be a bard in an inn somewhere with a lute and they would use the music of the lute to enhance the experience of the storytelling for the audience, and I think as filmmakers we are essentially storytellers and it’s crucial that we remember that.

Maxim Jago: You were talking there briefly with Kanen about are we looking at 10K? I think we’re going to top out in terms of distribution format. I think we’ll top out at 8K and the reason is because of our physical size and the size of the walls in our environment. There’s really no point going beyond 8K, it would be retina. Obviously for acquisition, we’ll go higher, but who cares ultimately? Jeff Greenberg gave a great presentation at the Retreat, where he was showing uncompressed ten bit 1080, which was something like two gig for this piece of video, and then a 1.6 meg H.265 compressed file that on the projection screen, to be honest, it was pretty indistinguishable and looked pretty much the same, and nobody cares about the picture quality. They care a bit more about the sound quality.

Maxim Jago: What they care about is a story that’s compelling, about a performance that’s authentic, about stakes that matter to us so that we can engage with the story and feel something about it, and I think this is something that Hollywood struggles with.

Maxim Jago: And the other thing is fidelity.

Larry Jordan: Let me play devil’s advocate just for a second. I agree that if you don’t have a compelling story, people aren’t going to watch your film, but there is a point where the technology can make the story more believable or less believable and bring you into or out of the story. So it seems to me that there has to be a balance between the creative storytelling and the understanding of the technology to tell the story properly so the audience doesn’t say, “Oh, they’re in a green screen, I don’t believe it any more,” and they tune out. Would you disagree?

Maxim Jago: I 100 percent agree. No, I 100 percent agree. Weirdly enough, I often get asked what I think is the best camera. I have great relationships with the major camera manufacturers. I haven’t seen a bad picture from a camera for ten or 15 years, so I agree with you 100 percent that there comes a point where the technology becomes a hindrance. I’m working on my first feature film now and the sequel to the film will be released the same day of the film.

Maxim Jago: The idea is you go to the cinema, you see the film, but we’re going to rebuild the world of the film in the game and we’re going to have support for the Oculus Rift and maybe some other VR technologies in the game. So the idea is that you cross the fourth wall instead of the characters crossing the fourth wall. You go into world of the film and experience it. Now, I agree with you about that level of fidelity, where the technology is not a hindrance for the audience, 100 percent agree.

Maxim Jago: But for me, what’s interesting is invisible filmmaking. I want to create an authentic experience for the audience by whatever mechanism. Now, I had a go with pretty much every VR technology available. The new holographic technology from Microsoft, unfortunately, I didn’t try but I’ve heard it’s amazing. A lot of people are talking about, and I do think this is the first genuinely new medium that we’ve had for years and years, the fact that things can go on in every direction so you can stage performances and you can decide whether or not something happens based on where the person’s looking, so the narrative can go in different directions and that’s very powerful.

Maxim Jago: But, frankly, it’s a little bit annoying looking over your shoulder all the time wondering what’s behind you. It’s not that convenient. It’s going to be great for games, but what blew me away about particularly the Oculus Rift, which has a very, very fast response time, there’s a very low lag, is that we have a thing called proprioception, which is the brain’s awareness of the body when you’re not looking at it, so you know where your arms are even if you’re not looking at them because of proprioception, and it’s partly to do with your relationship with your environment.

Maxim Jago: Now, when you’re looking at a person, your vision is actually moving the whole time very slightly. You’re breathing, you’re leaning, you shift position in your chair, you notice something over the shoulder of the person that you’re talking to and your gaze moves very slightly all the time. Of course, when you’re using the Oculus Rift, that’s what happens – as you move your head and tilt it and adjust it, you get that instant feedback that feels like you really are there. It’s incredibly immersive.

Maxim Jago: So the thing I found the most compelling wasn’t the every direction thing – I’m looking forward to the sports and I’m a gamer, I’m looking forward to the games – it was the fact that I really felt I was present with the person that was speaking to me, and what made that feeling of presence was just that the picture could wobble in accordance with the proprioception I have of my own head. It’s very exciting.

Mike Horton: I’m excited.

Larry Jordan: Sorry, I was just taking notes.

Mike Horton: I am, I’m really excited about this technology. I don’t know where it’s going to go, nobody does.

Maxim Jago: Let me tell you the most exciting thing about it. It’s $300.

Mike Horton: Yes?

Maxim Jago: So I’m interested in the really big and the really small. For me, the stuff in the middle is kind of logistics. This for me is the really small, this is consumer technology. It’s $300 for the most expensive, best virtual reality hardware you can get. Google is heavily into it, I was chatting to Trevor, who’s leading the virtual reality for Google, very interesting guy; the guys at Samsung. These people are developing art projects, but the most expensive version you can get is $300. Super high resolution, super responsive, very accurate tracking with your movements.

Maxim Jago: Think about the consequences. There are a couple of ways that you can shoot video with this. One way is that you can have a 360 camera, so 16, maybe 22 cameras, and you stitch the images together. Another way that you do it is you use lasers to measure the environment and you take the textures – you can do high resolution video or you can do it as stills – and you create the environment photo realistically in three dimensional space and then you allow the viewer to navigate the environment. It becomes immersive theater.

Maxim Jago: I’m working on a project right now which is a film based on a play my father wrote – he was a playwright and a poet and he actually died before he finished converting a one act play for me into a screenplay and he hated the re-write. The play is called ‘The Garden’, but he started calling it ‘The Awfulness’ because he couldn’t face doing the re-write. It’s about an underground garden and the entire garden’s fake and there’s an 18 year old blind girl in the garden who’s never been able to see, she doesn’t know that seeing is even a thing and she doesn’t know that the garden’s fake and the entire thing is a set-up and she’s coming of age and she’s starting to ask questions.

Maxim Jago: She’s taken care of by a nurse who pretends to be blind but isn’t, and her father, who pretends to be blind but isn’t, and it turns into a thriller. It’s a beautiful one act play and my plan is that we’ll take over a warehouse in New York, maybe in Brooklyn, we’ll have a week of building up the set, we’ll spend half the budget on the set. The glasses are made of plastic, the flowers are made of cloth but it doesn’t matter because she’s blind, she can’t see, so we can see the lights and the walls, it doesn’t matter.

Maxim Jago: We’ll shoot it for two weeks as theater, so we’ll just run through it twice a day for ten days, and then for the third week of production we’ll invite audiences in for a truly immersive theater, but part of the performance will be 360 video, so it’ll be a film where we’ve shot the film and then live audiences will be able to come into the set and watch the play and it’ll be the same actors, the same environment, the same story. I don’t think that’s ever been done, but we’ll also do that for a 360 camera and we’ll allow people to view it like that.

Mike Horton: I want to be there.

Larry Jordan: Maxim, where can people go on the web to learn more about your thinking and the projects you’re working on?

Maxim Jago: Sometimes I feel like I should make a website called something like confusedenglishman.com. My main website is just my name, just maximjago.com. I also have quite a lot of videos on Adobe TV, 23 courses on lynda.com.

Larry Jordan: You can stop now. We’re already depressed.

Mike Horton: And I want to go to Iceland.

Maxim Jago: Go to Iceland. We’ll go together.

Mike Horton: Oh, absolutely.

Larry Jordan: That website is maximjago.com. Maxim, it’s a delight chatting with you. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Mike Horton: Yes, thanks so much.

Maxim Jago: Thank you so much.

Mike Horton: And good luck on your communication skills.

Larry Jordan: Take care.

Maxim Jago: …but let’s get to that later. Thank you. Thank you very much, guys.

Larry Jordan: Take care. Michael, it’s been an amazing show…

Mike Horton: Yes.

Larry Jordan: …with some great guests.

Mike Horton: There were no codecs, there was no metadata, it was fabulous.

Larry Jordan: We missed cable rolling, however.

Mike Horton: We did.

Larry Jordan: Yes, we did.

Mike Horton: We’re doing that next week, I believe.

Larry Jordan: I want to talk about coiling cables and…

Mike Horton: Well, now with all these lights and with all these beautiful cameras…

Larry Jordan: And that TalkShow Skype box worked great.

Mike Horton: Did it?

Larry Jordan: Oh, it was fabulous. Well, you were looking at the people, for heaven’s sakes.

Mike Horton: I did. It was that little kind of weird thing there. I want to see it when you put it up on the new YouTube channel.

Larry Jordan: It is going to be beautiful when it comes up on our YouTube channel. I want to thank our guests for this week, starting with Kanen Flowers, the Chief Mayhem Officer at That Studio; Dan Berube, the Founder of BOFCPUG and Co-founder of the world famous Supermeets; and Maxim Jago, the technologist…

Mike Horton: Which, by the way, tickets are on sale. I’ve got to get that plug in.

Larry Jordan: Where is it?

Mike Horton: Supermeet.com or larryjordan.biz.

Larry Jordan: What city?

Mike Horton: Oh, it’s in Las Vegas.

Larry Jordan: Well, why did you say that?

Mike Horton: Well, where else would it be?

Larry Jordan: I have no idea. Given you, you’re all over world, for heaven’s sake. There’s lot of history in our industry and it’s all posted to our website at digitalproductionbuzz.com. There are hundreds of past shows, thousands of interviews all online, searchable and available. You can talk with us on Twitter, @DPBuZZ, and Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Our theme music is composed by Nathan Doogie Turner and additional music on The Buzz is provided by Smartsound. Text transcripts provided by Take 1 Transcription and you can email us at info@digitalproductionbuzz.com.

Larry Jordan: Our producer is Cirina Catania, our engineering team is led by Megan Paulos, includes Alexia Chalida, Ed Goyler, Keenan Guy, Lindsay Luebbert and Brianna Murphy. 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

February 5, 2015

[Transcripts provided by Take 1 Transcription]

 

(Click here to listen to this show.)

 
HOSTS

Larry Jordan

Michael Horton

GUESTS

Peter Hamilton, Founder and Editor, DocumentaryTelevision.com

Philip Hodgetts, President, Lumberjack System

Terry Curren, Founder/President, Alpha Dogs Inc.

Erik Valenzuela, ReRecording Mixer, Sound Waves Post, LLC & Alpha Dogs, 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.

Larry Jordan: Welcome to the brand new studios of The Digital Production Buzz. Let me give you a tour.

Larry Jordan: We’ve spent the last four months building a brand new studio facility that will allow The Digital Production Buzz into both an audio and video podcast. What I want to do is show you the studio and the control room, the gear we selected and how we put it together.

Larry Jordan: DTS build this facility 20 years or so ago, acoustically treated it because they were working with a new concept in surround sound, which they eventually rolled out to movie theaters. Well, they moved out of this space a long time ago, but recently we took it over. I mean, how can you turn down an acoustically treated studio? Take a look.

Larry Jordan: Here is our new studio, more than 500 square feet of production space. This is a great place for doing training, newscasts, interviews and other smaller projects. We installed four new Blackmagic Design studio cameras and supported them using both Manfrotto and Libec tripods and heads. We then added prompters from Prompter People for two of the cameras. The lighting grid is all new, although we started with pipes and fasteners from Home Depot and painted them black. Then we added Leprecon lighting dimmers, Bowl Richardson lights and Leko’s and a complete lighting control system, which I’ll show you in a minute.

Larry Jordan: Where the DTS audio mixer used to be, we replaced with the set for The Digital Production Buzz. The entire environment from ceiling to floor is designed to minimize echoes and maximize audio quality.

Larry Jordan: While we use a variety of mics, depending upon the project, for The Buzz we really like the sound of these Electro-Voice RE20 mics. We chose the Behringer audio system because it allows us to put a remote snake in the studio which supports 16 audio inputs and eight audio outputs connected to the control room via a single ethernet cable; and I should also mention that we kept the 20 foot projection screen with built-in theater speakers and these sound amazing.

Larry Jordan: The goal and key benefit of our entire system is live webcasting. From here, we can stream live audio and, at the same time, live 1080p video anywhere in the world. This gives us the technical ability to respond to industry news almost immediately.

Larry Jordan: While the studio allows us to stage just about anything we want, the real power of this facility is our control room. Here, you’ll find a 42 channel audio mixer, 24 channel lighting control panel, 16 channel Blackmagic Design ATEM switcher and a rack full of support gear and about two miles of audio, video and data cabling.

Larry Jordan: We installed five Blackmagic Design hyperdeck shuttles. These digital recorders provide instantaneous playback with the ability to record each camera independently as well as the line output in the switcher. We also added a Terenex format convertor to allow us to change frame size or frame rate or even sync to any external source in real time.

Larry Jordan: This is the other half of the Behringer system, their X32 producer mixing console. This gives us multiple outputs for streaming and recording, as well as split feeds for telephone and Skype interviews, as well as studio monitors, all without giving us any feedback.

Larry Jordan: Currently, we’re using a Leprecon lighting console, but later this month we’ll be swapping that out for an iPad control system to save space while still being able to control each individual light and provide on-camera light cues.

Larry Jordan: We had a lot of debate about what to use for a video control system. We have about eight video sources, four cameras, two computers, Skype and graphics and ultimately we picked the ATEM switcher from Blackmagic Design and then we supplemented it with Wirecast to provide online graphics and streaming.

Larry Jordan: Because our control room is very small – it’s about 70 square feet – we needed to be efficient with our monitors, so we used a large multi-image monitor for all of our video sources, then specific monitors for videoscopes, cameras and program.

Larry Jordan: These are some amazing new facilities and a dream come true for me, because finally I’ve got the tools that I need to be able to create some exciting new programs, which I can’t wait to share with you.

Voiceover: Welcome to the brand new studios of The Digital Production Buzz.

Voiceover: Rolling. Action!

Voiceover: Since the dawn of digital film making…

Voiceover: Authoritative.

Voiceover: …one show served a worldwide network of media professionals…

Voiceover: Current.

Voiceover: …uniting industry experts…

Voiceover: Production.

Voiceover: …film makers…

Voiceover: Post production.

Voiceover: …and content creators around the planet.

Voiceover: Distribution.

Voiceover: From the media capital of the world in Los Angeles, California, The Digital Production Buzz goes 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 and joining us, as ever, our ever handsome co-host, Mr. Mike Horton.

Mike Horton: Hi, Larry. I’m sorry, I’m in the chat room in the back chat and there’s a lot of interesting people in there.

Larry Jordan: You know, the interesting thing is not only can you be in the chat right now, but you can also be watching the show and chatting at the same time.

Mike Horton: I know. Well, we just saw the opening. That’s the first time I’ve seen it. Great job.

Larry Jordan: Isn’t it fabulous?

Mike Horton: I mean, I’ve been here a few times, but that was an absolutely wonderful walkthrough of this place and there’s a lot of stuff I’ve still got to learn about.

Larry Jordan: Well, the video was shot by Megan Paulos and edited by Brianna Murphy and…

Mike Horton: It’s really cool. I mean, this whole place is really cool. Now we’ve got backdrops and you’ve got your red shirt.

Larry Jordan: Well, you and I needed all the help we could get, actually.

Mike Horton: Hey, when do I get one of those red shirts with the DP logo on it or whatever it is?

Larry Jordan: You missed the lunch meeting where they were passed out.

Mike Horton: I do have one of the old blue ones.

Larry Jordan: Mhmm? Well, I think that with this wall, we’re going to keep it a little bit warmer.

Mike Horton: It was an extra extra large. I have lost weight.

Larry Jordan: Mhmm. Avoid yellow, however. My team does not like yellow shirts, so just red or plum.

Mike Horton: But it’s cool. This place is awesome. I can’t wait ‘til we have live guests.

Larry Jordan: Oh, oh, oh, oh! We have a new toy coming that we’re going to premiere next week.

Mike Horton: Oh!

Larry Jordan: It was just shipped this week by NewTek. It’s called their TalkShow. It’s a way of putting Skype on broadcast television.

Mike Horton: Without the sync problems?

Larry Jordan: Without the sync problems, and we have, like, serial number one. It’s going to be installed tomorrow and it’s going to allow us to have virtual guests sittings next to us so we can have a Skype and we see their face and our face. It’s just as though everybody is in the same room at the same time.

Mike Horton: Really? We ought to put a robot here and put a face on the robot.

Larry Jordan: We’re going to have a little stuffed teddy bear. It’s going to sit here.

Mike Horton: Yes, put that. Put its face on. It’ll be really cool.

Larry Jordan: Called Guest.

Mike Horton: No sync problem.

Larry Jordan: And thinking of our guests, we’re going to start with Peter…

Mike Horton: …

Larry Jordan: Just hush. We’re going to start with Peter Hamilton, who is the world’s preeminent expert on documentary finance and distribution. He’s here tonight to talk about the film business in Africa, new rating systems, the recent Realscreen summit, where he ran a panel, and his take on Tivo Research’s new systems that they’re launching now.

Larry Jordan: Also tonight we’re going to take a closer look at audio for our projects and we’re going to start with Philip Hodgetts. He’s the CEO of Intelligent Systems and Lumberjack Systems. He’ll join us tonight to talk about audio production in the field and what we can do to improve the quality of our on-set audio.

Larry Jordan: Then we’re going to shift over to post production. Terry Curren is the Founder and President of Alpha Dogs and Erik Valenzuela is an Audio Mixer who’s also at Alpha Dogs. This is a post production house in Burbank, but Terry also hosts the popular Editors’ Lounges. He’s here to give us some tips on how to get the very best results when working with post production sound.

Larry Jordan: By the way, we are providing text transcripts for each show, courtesy of Take 1 Transcription, and 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: You know, Mike, this studio gives us so many toys to play with and…

Mike Horton: I know. There are a lot of cables, there’s a lot of equipment. It’s a lot of fun.

Larry Jordan: And we’re going to be doing a lot more. If you haven’t had a chance to join us on the live chat, visit us at digitalproductionbuzz.com. We’re also on Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com; Twitter, @DPBuZZ, and just all kinds of great stuff happening for this show. Mike and I are going to be back with Peter Hamilton 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.

Larry Jordan: 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: Peter Hamilton is a Senior Marketing and Distribution Consultant who works with the non-fiction industry on marketing and business development. He’s a former CBS executive and his clients include A&E Networks, the BBC, National Geographic and many other media groups, governments and non-profits. Hello, Peter, welcome back.

Peter Hamilton: Ah, it’s great to be here. Thanks very much for having me.

Larry Jordan: Well, you know, it’s always a delight having you on the show and recently you hosted a panel at the Realscreen summit. What was your panel about?

Peter Hamilton: The panel was titled ‘Formula For A Hit’ and the content related to how networks use audience research to develop programs and what the role is of the audience researcher in the program development and renewal process.

Larry Jordan: What was the takeaway from the panel? What did people learn?

Peter Hamilton: It was a really fascinating panel. We had on representatives from Scripps Networks, which includes HDTV and Food and other channels, and they’ve had relatively steady performance of viewing over the last year or so, whereas most of the other unscripted networks have been suffering a decline in viewing. Anyway, for the Scripps Networks, they reported that it’s very much about the story, that they don’t use research heavily to test and to develop program. It’s really more about the program as a gut.

Peter Hamilton: The other networks, NatGeo, Scripps and Discovery, all rely heavily as well on their audience research teams, but really as filters in the development process and not as real deciders. I guess the final takeaway is that there’s just so much talk about these new online strategies for measuring content and how much they’re going to appeal to viewers and all of the research has reported that, although they’re a really a important part of the process, they’re not the deciders and that there’s no magic wand or silver bullet coming out of Silicon Valley that is going to predict whether a show is going to hit or not.

Larry Jordan: We’ve been looking for that magic bullet for the better part of 150 years.

Mike Horton: Yes, that’s the way it’s been for 150 years. All the research in the world.

Peter Hamilton: Yes, and they don’t seem to feel that they’re any closer to it, although they do have a wonderful array of tools to test programs. One point that came out really strongly is that the research is more helpful when it comes to renewal time as distinct from developing a new programming concept.

Larry Jordan: It’s always easy to find something that doesn’t work once you’ve seen it. It’s almost impossible to predict something that doesn’t work when nobody’s had a chance to see it, it seems to me. Would you agree?

Peter Hamilton: Yes. Luckily, I don’t have to make those risky decisions day in, day out, but I do agree with you.

Larry Jordan: What was or is the Realscreen summit?

Peter Hamilton: The Realscreen summit is a phenomenally successful conference dedicated to factual or unscripted or documentary programming. It was launched by a Canadian company called Brunico in 1999, when about 500 delegates turned up, and at the time they were mainly focused on documentaries and factual series – wildlife, history, science and those genres – but with the explosion of reality TV earlier on this century, the market itself exploded and it became the key marketplace for the understanding and pitching of ideas in this reality TV area.

Peter Hamilton: I mentioned that in 1999 they had about 500 delegates; there were 2500 delegates in Washington last week and each of them paid around about $1500 plus whatever it costs for accommodation and travel and the rest, so it’s a really big successful venture. And then finally, it’s been franchised out to LA and London, where there are other Realscreen conferences.

Larry Jordan: All right, well, let’s shift gears because one of the things that you’ve spent a lot of time paying attention to is distribution and let’s think about international distribution. You’ve spent a lot of time in South Africa working with an association called ATFT. What was your trip about and tell me about the organization.

Peter Hamilton: It’s fascinating and it’s been a wonderful experience for me. I was engaged by the Association for Transformation in Film and Television. It’s a South African professional group that’s dedicated towards empowering mainly young producers who are either black or Indian. They are members of the overwhelming majority of the population which was, of course, incredibly disfranchised under apartheid. The ATFT has engaged me to work with these producers to prepare them to enter the international marketplace, and that means going to South Africa, which I did three times last year, and it’s a fantastic country and I really recommend anybody who has the ability to put it high on their list of wish destinations.

Peter Hamilton: I went down there three times and I organized workshops and presented workshops – actually the ATFT organized them. I arrived, presented the workshops in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town and then met the producers who were going to these big international conferences and markets, whether it was the Science Producers’ Congress in Hong Kong or Sunny Side of the Doc in France, and I mentored them, is probably the best use of the word, but really enjoyed their company enormously at these markets. Fantastic experience.

Larry Jordan: What are they doing that you think is the most important aspect of their work?

Peter Hamilton: It’s an incredible country to be in, because it’s youthful and it’s positive and, of course, the countryside, the landscape is staggering. Also, it’s got the feeling that even though it’s politically very, very challenged and there are still tremendous divisions between communities, there’s a feeling of optimism and newness in South Africa and I’m finding the producers there just really open to learn, really open to contribute and yet full of confidence that they can make it on the bigger stage.

Larry Jordan: Is there something we can do here to help the guys at ATFT?

Peter Hamilton: I think watch this space, read my newsletter – documentarytelevision.com – where I will be reporting on and tracking developments down there. I’m trying to organize an internship program for young South Africans from the ATFT family in the States, but I’m not ready to actually press the starter motor on that, but we’re getting close to it. I want South Africa and this particular program to be a big part of my life because it really gives me a lot back and so that’s really the secret.

Peter Hamilton: I guess there’s one other thing I should mention, and that is that the South African government is ultimately funding this initiative and there are very significant resources and tax benefits available to producers who shoot in South Africa, who hire crew down there and who develop intellectual properties in South Africa. So I strongly recommend that your listeners who are looking for locations for either their scripted or unscripted work, check out the benefits of South Africa.

Mike Horton: Yes, I want to remind everybody that the HBO series Homeland is filmed in South Africa, primarily because of the tax credits.

Peter Hamilton: Yes, and the same applies to my category of television, which is factual or unscripted.

Larry Jordan: All right. We’ve got a whole list of subjects I want to cover with you. Going to a different subject, ratings are generating a lot of news recently. What’s new on the ratings front?

Peter Hamilton: There’s been a very significant falling off of viewing of the major unscripted or reality programming channels. In some cases, the falloff is very severe, as in A&E Network. With most of the other channels, it’s been troubling. Holding water, holding ground is considered to be a real accomplishment and the question is why? Why is there this sudden fairly universal cross genre falling away of viewing? That’s what we’ve been looking at. I’m not inside the networks, so I don’t have the data that they have, but clearly there is viewer exhaustion with the reality genre.

Peter Hamilton: The structure of these programs is becoming predictable, the formats are known to the viewers. When they ask themselves the question, “What’s coming next?” they pretty well have the answers, so they’re not sticking around. I think there’s a certain exhaustion of the genres that nearly all of these networks flooded to with this reality me too-ism over the last ten years or so, so that’s an important factor.

Peter Hamilton: But another really big factor is that the structural changes in the industry are finally catching up with cable and satellite and there is a statistically significant but still at this stage small group of viewers who are switching from cable and satellite viewing to SVOD or subscription video on demand, which principally means Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime at this stage, but overwhelmingly Netflix.

Mike Horton: Yes, I’m in the middle of trying to talk my family into that.

Peter Hamilton: These decisions are draining viewers from the cable/satellite ecosystem and, more importantly and scarily, they’re draining money, they’re draining finance, cash flow, financial flows out of the system because, as you know, a Netflix subscription is under $10, whereas I’m paying $125 for my cable and satellite package here in Brooklyn. That’s a huge falling away of revenues, around the margin at this stage but growing and anybody who’s looking at the model is very concerned right now.

Mike Horton: Are you considering cutting the cable?

Peter Hamilton: I’ve become addicted to the English Premier League and I don’t have another way of getting to it, but other than that I would. But, you know, my choice is pretty irrelevant – I’m over 60 – but my son, who is in his 20s, is not a cable subscriber and neither are so many in his generation, and that’s a really significant factor.

Larry Jordan: Peter, before we run out of time, your main area of interest is distribution, marketing and distribution and helping program creators create money for their programs and you’ve recently published a buyers’ guide, where you profile hundreds of buyers in dozens of countries and networks. What’s changed in the last year for the documentary side of the business?

Peter Hamilton: That’s a really good question and thanks for mentioning my guide, which listeners can read about on my website. It’s co-produced with a French conference organizer, Sunny Side of the Doc. What has changed, what we’re sensing but we can’t quite pin it down, is that with the exhaustion of viewers for these over-formatted and predictable and over-managed reality formats, there is a new look being taken at ways of telling content rich, more factual, documentary programs and series, that there is a swing back to these in the States, or at least a focus on how to renew the genre in the States, and at the same time in Europe, particularly in France and Germany but also in the Netherlands and the UK, the unscripted documentary, the more content rich genre, is still very strong.

Peter Hamilton: Lots of producers are looking to do co-productions in Europe for their programs, where there is still a strong audience and very robust government financing programs.

Larry Jordan: It sounds like the market for documentaries is stronger internationally than it is domestically.

Peter Hamilton: It is, definitely. The strongest markets would be Germany, France and the UK, to a lesser extent Japan; Australia would be shrinking, the States is struggling but, as I said, hopefully a return of some kind. Canada is fairly stagnant right now, the CBC has been defunded by the Conservative government up there and they were an important buyer of docs. You’re really looking at France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK and then other smaller markets in Northern Europe, Scandinavia and so on.

Mike Horton: You need international stories. You can’t do American stories if you want to go international, right?

Larry Jordan: Really quickly, because we are going to run out of time, what genre is the hot genre? What subjects do we need to think about?

Mike Horton: Rock and roll.

Peter Hamilton: Listen, I really don’t have the answers. I would say to listeners, go to one of these big international markets and find out. You’ve just got to get out of Dodge and find out for yourselves.

Mike Horton: Well, you did that blog on Independent Lens and mussel shoals was the big ratings winner for Independent Lens, so rock and roll, people.

Larry Jordan: Peter, what website can people go to who want to learn more about your report?

Peter Hamilton: My weekly newsletter is called documentarytelevision.com and we welcome readers.

Larry Jordan: That’s documentarytelevision.com. Peter Hamilton is the Founder of the website and Editor of documentarytelevision.com. Peter, thanks for joining us today.

Peter Hamilton: Oh, it’s my honor. Thank you so much.

Larry Jordan: Bye bye.

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Larry Jordan: Philip Hodgetts is the CEO of Intelligent Assistance and Lumberjack Systems and is involved in the technology of virtually every area of digital production and post production. He’s also a regular contributor to The Buzz, knows just about everything that’s got blinking lights attached to it and, as always, I’m delighted to say welcome back, Philip.

Mike Horton: Yes, that’s for sure. Hello, Philip. All right.

Larry Jordan: All right, Philip is there somewhere. Hang on a second.

Mike Horton: Hello?

Philip Hodgetts: I’m here.

Mike Horton: There we go.

Larry Jordan: There you are. We knew we’d find you.

Mike Horton: I was going to have to put on my headphones here.

Larry Jordan: Philip, tonight we want to take a closer look at audio, both in production and post, and a couple of weeks ago we talked with you about the gear you were taking on location and how small it’s become. But tonight, I wanted to look at the same concept of production but from an audio point of view. What gear are you using these days and what are you doing to get great sound on location?

Philip Hodgetts: Because I mostly do interview based material, I’m very much focused on getting a good interview source.

Larry Jordan: Ok.

Mike Horton: And?

Larry Jordan: Are you still with us?

Philip Hodgetts: I’m still here.

Larry Jordan: Ok. So what gear are you using to get great source audio in production? Mike and I are ready to take notes.

Philip Hodgetts: Well, because I’m doing interviews that have a very specific function…

Mike Horton: Oh, it’s the Burbank audio on Philip right now. Philip, I think you need to go out on your balcony.

Larry Jordan: You are cutting in and out and we are hearing every third sentence.

Philip Hodgetts: Oh, that’s not good. How about now?

Larry Jordan: Much better.

Mike Horton: Yes, well, kind of, yes.

Larry Jordan: He has an Australian accent, you’ve got to make allowances.

Mike Horton: People in the chat are starting to make fun of the sound.

Philip Hodgetts: You’ve got to allow for that.

Mike Horton: And here we are talking about audio.

Larry Jordan: All right, yes, but this is…

Philip Hodgetts: Yes, how ironic.

Larry Jordan: This is on location audio, so it’s a perfect opportunity. Let’s just try this one from the top again, Philip. When you’re on location, what are you using to gather your sound?

Philip Hodgetts: I always carry two or three options because not everything will work every time. I carry with me a fairly directional microphone, a short shotgun I think you would describe that as, and I also carry a lapel, a radio mic pair for the situations where I can’t run cables or for some other reason. My go to, my fallback position, is always a lapel microphone on the person recording to a Zoom H1 digital recorder in their pocket and so that’s closely miked, the mics are not too intrusive on camera and, as long as you run the cable carefully, then that’s a fairly easy solution. The biggest advantage for my minimalist production crew is that it doesn’t require an extra person.

Larry Jordan: Are you finding yourself principally recording double system or are you just keeping the H1 in your pocket for protection?

Philip Hodgetts: I am always recording double systems these days. You can record into an iPad using a… cable and recording uncompressed audio there, but I find the lack of cables, the ability to put a microphone on each person feeding into the recorder on those and then using any of the modern NLEs, pretty much, to synchronize that audio and any video shot angles into a multicam gives me the most flexible audio combination I can get. Really, the ability to synchronize by sound rather than having to synchronize by timecode opens up this whole world to another way of working where we don’t have to either run cables to the video recorder, as it was back in the earlier days of production, or set up… a separate camera.

Larry Jordan: So we’ve got the Zoom H1, which is your double system.

Mike Horton: That’s the one you always use when you go off and do…

Larry Jordan: I use the H4. It’s the big brother.

Mike Horton: H4? Oh, what does that do? What’s the difference?

Larry Jordan: It’s three numbers larger.

Mike Horton: Well, yes.

Philip Hodgetts: You really wouldn’t put an H4 into your pocket.

Mike Horton: Ok. Oh, really?

Larry Jordan: No, the H1 is a really small thin device and the H4 is a little bit thicker. For me, it gives me more channels to record. It gives me two XLR inputs and allows me to record either using the onboard microphones, which I never use, or plug in Lavalier microphones or short shotguns into the H4 and I can record a stereo…

Mike Horton: So the H4 isn’t something you just put in their face and…

Larry Jordan: You could if you were a news reporter and you didn’t care a lot about quality, you just wanted to get the audio, you’d put the microphones directly in their face. But I will put microphones on the talent and run the microphones into the back of the H4 and use it just as a digital recorder.

Mike Horton: So you get what you pay for.

Larry Jordan: I have never used the H1, so I say nothing good or bad about it, but the H4 gives me really pretty sound. But Philip, recording it is one thing and synching it is something else, but the real quality of your audio is based on your microphones. What are you going to use for mics?

Philip Hodgetts: I have not considered myself an audio expert ever, so I went to a friend of mine, David Lawrence, who has extensive expertise in the subject and he recommended, for the purposes that I had planned, a relatively inexpensive Audio-Technica lapel microphone – the exact model number eludes me right now but it was about $50 on Amazon. It’s not a Sony or Tram microphone by any means, but for the purpose of recording decent quality voice audio speech, it has proved to be very functional and that’s $150 a unit that I can put on a person. I’m capable of putting out four of those simultaneously to individually mic up to four people.

Larry Jordan: We’re going to be talking with Terry Curren in the next segment about post production audio, but when you’re in production, in addition to getting the interviews that you’re shooting, do you worry about getting room tone or atmosphere?

Philip Hodgetts: Absolutely, room tone every time. You need to get at least a minute of clean room tone that doesn’t have any obvious sounds in it. If you loop a minute of room tone and it’s got an obvious sound in it, you’ll hear the repeat. Longer is better, if you’ve got the time in your schedule, and general atmospheric sound is also useful as well. For example, I’ve done a lot of this recording interviews in one location with my family reunion. Recording some background noise of just the ambient family reunion going on was something that I would possibly try and use in post production.

Larry Jordan: Are you recording with the same mic, you just tell the talent to stand there and you’ll record noise with everybody holding still? Or do you do a separate audio set-up to get the room tone?

Philip Hodgetts: I use the same mic, but I separate it from the talent and just clip it when they’re out of the room to something handy.

Mike Horton: By the way, Philip, when are we going to see a little bit of this family reunion? Is this a ten year in the making process? I know you want to go back and do some more.

Philip Hodgetts: Yes, circumstances dictated that I didn’t get quite through the interviews that I wanted in this trip, so I am going to have to go back for the next family reunion, if not before. It’s primarily a family project. I’ve come to realize that once we get stuck in our own little world where we’re not that careful about what we put on Facebook, that we’re not the only valid view in the world and a lot of my family takes their privacy a lot more seriously than I do, so it is at this point going to be a purely family project.

Mike Horton: So maybe this could be a boyhood thing.

Philip Hodgetts: …technology. And, of course, we’ll use it to test out some technology that we have ideas for, just to see if it works.

Larry Jordan: What’s been the biggest challenge to you in terms of getting decent sound in the field?

Philip Hodgetts: Trying to get decent sound without having somebody there dedicated to getting decent sound. In an ideal world, you would always have somebody with a nice chopped down microphone, with all of the boom arm on it, recording one or more radio mics on multiple recorders for different talent. That would be the ideal world; if you’ve got the time and budget for that, then I support that entirely. If you’re like me and trying to get things done on a minimal budget, mostly because it’s a personal project and because I like to test the limits of what I can do, then not having that dedicated person becomes a challenge and…

Larry Jordan: Take a breath. I need a quick website before we wrap up. Where can people learn more about what you’re writing, very fast?

Philip Hodgetts: Philiphodgetts.com and, of course, if you sneak over to metadata.guru, you’ll see the beginnings of my new site.

Mike Horton: Oooh! Dot guru.

Larry Jordan: Philip, thanks for joining us. President of Lumberjack Systems, talk to you soon. Bye bye.

Mike Horton: Thanks, Philip.

Philip Hodgetts: Thank you.

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Larry Jordan: Terry Curren is the Founder and President of Alpha Dogs. It’s a Burbank based post production facility founded in 2002. But he’s not the only one at Alpha Dogs. Another gentleman there is Erik Valenzuela, who’s an audio mixer. As we talked with Philip last segment about the process of creating production sound, this segment we want to talk with Terry and Erik about the process of post production sound. Hello, Terry, welcome back.

Terry Curren: Hey, Larry. Hi, Michael.

Mike Horton: Hi Terry.

Larry Jordan: We’ve been talking about production sound with Mr. Philip and that got us thinking about post production sound and, while you may not be out in the field shooting all the time, you are… a lot about doing post production audio, One of the things that you had recently at the Editors’ Lounge was a panel where audio mixers all got together to talk about post production sound. What was the takeaway that you got from that panel?

Terry Curren: Actually, with a lot of things that I was surprised, about how to prep projects properly, what things to put in there, what kind of things don’t actually come across – I was surprised to hear some of that. Erik was actually one of the guys on the panel, so he could probably answer that better than me.

Larry Jordan: I know, but I’m going to talk to you first and then we’ll get Erik in. What was your takeaway?

Mike Horton: We want to get at least five minutes of Terry before we get into everything else.

Terry Curren: Yes, ok.

Larry Jordan: I would love to get a sense of what your take is on audio, then we’re going to bring Erik in.

Terry Curren: Ok. It was interesting, hearing Philip talk about it, because we record a show together also and our audio’s not the level of audio I would do for a feature presentation, let’s say. But we work on a lot of reality shows and that audio leaves a lot to be desired. That’s more like what Philip’s talking about, and trying to get it all evened out from a bunch of different sources is challenging to say the least. Fortunately, our mixers like Erik can work miracles, but I’m not supposed to say that because they’ll get mad because they get more bad audio.

Mike Horton: I know the mixers don’t want to work miracles, they want an easy job. What is our job? What do we need to do? Or is that a question you’re going to ask five minutes from now?

Larry Jordan: Yes, because you know as well as I do that Terry is the boss and doesn’t really know what’s going on, so we’re going to invite Erik…

Mike Horton: And Terry has opinions.

Larry Jordan: I want to invite Erik Valenzuela into the conversation. Erik is an audio mixer at Alpha Dogs. Erik, good to have you with us.

Erik Valenzuela: Good to be here. Thank you very much.

Larry Jordan: Help Terry out here. What do editors need to know about getting audio ready for a post mix?

Erik Valenzuela: There are actually a lot of things that can really help to expediate the process. I would say the most important thing is using the best audio available and, for the most part, that would be like using a Lav instead of a boom, because there’s more flexibility in addressing the audio to match certain situations from using a Lav.

Larry Jordan: Now wait a minute, wait, wait, wait, wait. That goes against everything I have ever heard.

Mike Horton: Absolutely. I was kind of flabbergasted at that.

Larry Jordan: The Lav picks up clothing rustle, the Lav picks up somebody hitting their chest and the boom at least isolates you from that. Back up that statement.

Mike Horton: Yes, we could put a windsock on a boom.

Larry Jordan: Explain this to me.

Erik Valenzuela: Like Terry has said, we work on a lot of reality TV and so sometimes we have multiple contestants and they sometimes don’t want to use other people’s responses or they want to stick to a certain storyline, so they only want to use one contestant’s audio to keep the story going, so we need to cut everybody else out. That gives us more flexibility. If we have a boom, then everybody’s in there, it’s all married together and we have no flexibility on who we want to hear and who we don’t want to hear.

Larry Jordan: Ok, so what you’re saying is you don’t want to use the Lavalier in place of a boom, you’re using a Lavalier on each one of the actors so you can isolate each channel and then pull up just the actor that you need for that particular moment, so it’s not that the Lav has got better audio, it’s just that it’s isolated. Is that what I’m hearing?

Erik Valenzuela: Correct and, for the most part, on reality shows there’s a lot of moving around. It’s not like a set where people are standing in a certain place and there’s a controlled environment where there are no air conditioners on or there are no cars passing by. Sometimes they film on the street, so if there was a boom on a street scene, then there would be way too much traffic. Let’s say they need to make an edit and there’s a car passing by, that could get a little tricky sometimes on the boom.

Larry Jordan: Ok, so we’ve got a bunch of isolated microphones in our video edit. What do we need to hand off to the audio editor? There are really two sides to this question. The first is what do you want and then what problems do we cause audio that we should start to avoid? But first tell me what you want.

Erik Valenzuela: I would say what I want, and I usually request when I talk to the editors, is give us the best audio possible. If there was a boom and a Lav going on at the same time, I’ll take both of them and use the best one sometimes. For the edit, if I see that there’s a better chunk of the boom that sounds better, then I’ll use that. But, like I said, sometimes on reality shows there’s so much moving around and there are so many people talking at the same time, we just really want to hear what that person’s saying, the one that they have on camera and they’re focusing on, so that’s why I said using the Lav is the best option in that scenario.

Terry Curren: So basically you’re saying you want more, you want all the audio tracks if possible?

Erik Valenzuela: No, not all of them. Let’s say there are four contestants and they have a boom going. In that case, I would pretty much only use the contestants from the Lavs because I know for the most part that people are always trying to get camera time, so they try to respond to everything or have an opinion about everything, but when they’re telling the story, we need to stick to whoever’s talking and that way the Lav will give us just that pertinent person’s answer, perspective or opinion and it doesn’t marry that other extra audio that maybe people will try to focus on, where the producer might not want them to focus on. What really helps us is if editors would delete any audio that is not necessary, because when we get a show and it’s full of thousands of audio files, we have to dig through there to make sure that we’re getting what we need to hear and what is necessary for the actual show we’re working on. Sometimes if there are a lot of extra mics or extra audio in there, it can turn into a long process to split the show out.

Larry Jordan: So first you want all the different audio sources that we’ve got available and…

Erik Valenzuela: Not all of them.

Larry Jordan: What else can we give you that makes your life easier?

Terry Curren: Eric, one of the things that you pointed out was having the audio on the proper track, in other words all of the dialogue on one track etcetera.

Mike Horton: Do people give you tracks all over the place? What do they give you, that you would have to educate them to give you the proper track?

Erik Valenzuela: It happens all the time.

Mike Horton: Really?

Erik Valenzuela: I’m actually looking at a session right now where the music is all over the top tracks and the middle tracks and bottom tracks, it’s just all over the place, and that makes it pretty difficult for us to grab it, because to make networks pay for the splits, we need to make sure that all the music is on the music tracks, all the dialogue’s on the dialogue tracks and the effects are on the effects tracks, so that way when we split the show up for the splits, everything is isolated outside of the mix track.

Larry Jordan: Wait a second. Why is that so important? Explain to me why track assignments are such a big deal to you.

Erik Valenzuela: What I try to tell the editors is, if they can, just have the primary talkers on top, responders just below it and effects below that and then the music below that, so when I open up the output when I’m going to start working on the show, I can look at it and just start grabbing the music, putting the music on the music track. I have a template that has all the track labels so, like I said, everything gets routed to the right stems necessary for the network splits. An hour’s show can take me anywhere from four hours on an organized show to up to 12 to 16 hours on a very unorganized one hour show, because I have to listen to almost every audio file to make sure that I’m not missing anything. I’d rather spend that time being creative or fixing edits and stuff instead of splitting out the show, just because it was kind of messy or sloppy in the set-up.

Mike Horton: So what you’re saying, though, is it’s the same thing that we should be sending to every post production sound house, right? Not just you, not just the way that you work, but every place, right?

Erik Valenzuela: I would say the mixer or whoever’s splitting out the show would really appreciate a very organized session when they get it. Like I said, I’m looking at a session right now where stuff is just all over the place and now I have to dig through it. The music is easy to recognize and the effects are easy to recognize, but you just have to pull it from different tracks and stuff. It would just be nice if it was just all on the bottom and you could just grab it, put it all on your music track and so on and so forth. But it doesn’t always happen that way and, like I said, every minute saved…

Mike Horton: Oh sure, yes

Erik Valenzuela: …just helps.

Mike Horton: And every time you open your mouth, it saves a lot of people a lot of money.

Erik Valenzuela: Yes.

Larry Jordan: Do we need to make special arrangements if we’re going to send something to ProTools? Does ProTools have functions that video editors need to pay attention to when they’re getting ready to prep their projects?

Terry Curren: I would say one of the most important things is handles on all the audio files.

Mike Horton: Oh yes.

Terry Curren: And when outputting for QuickTime, if you don’t have the Avid hardware for the video, if you’re just going to use the internal output from Pro Tools, it only takes MOVs. Sometimes people will send me M4Vs or different video compression settings. That kind of makes things a little difficult for Pro Tools, so for the most part what I do is, when I know there’s an output is coming, I’ll just send a little output procedure to the editor so that way he matches all the necessary parameters to help Pro Tools ingest everything quickly and correctly.

Larry Jordan: Now, define handles from an audio point of view. What does that word mean?

Erik Valenzuela: When we get an audio file, let’s just say they cut in dialogue and there’s a dialogue edit or something on there where they want them to say a certain thing in a sentence. It really helps if we can pull out the ends of the audio files so we can maybe get room tone or maybe we can get the end of a cut off word. If there’s no handles, then we’re stuck there with that cut off word, or maybe we won’t be able to get room ambience to fill up little holes, natural room ambience from that day that was recorded, which would sound a lot better instead of putting some generic background white noise. It just helps towards the ambience to have it all matched that way. There’s a nice good flow to the mix and there’s not these weird sounding, nothing should ever sound weird. If it’s weird, we’re not doing our job right. I just try to make everything sound as smooth and non-jarring or just sound good and smooth throughout.

Larry Jordan: One of the terms we’ve been hearing a lot about recently in terms of audio levels and final output is the CALM Act. What is the CALM Act and what does it mean…

Mike Horton: It doesn’t work.

Larry Jordan: Hush.

Mike Horton: It doesn’t, though.

Larry Jordan: What’s the relationship with the CALM Act to what you’re creating and how do we need to worry about our levels when we’re feeding it to you? In other words, do video editors need to care?

Erik Valenzuela: Oh Terry, can you help me with that?

Terry Curren: Absolutely. As a video editor, it’s not my problem, it’s the audio guy.

Mike Horton: We should tell everybody what the CALM Act is, right?

Larry Jordan: Good point.

Terry Curren: Yes, ok.

Mike Horton: Yes, it’s the commercials, they have a set limit of volume on it where it used to be, if you go from the television show to the commercial, the commercial volume would go [MAKES NOISE]. Well, it’s not supposed to be that way any more, but it’s baloney.

Terry Curren: Well, the idea is that traditionally we had a spec of, say it’s minus 20, wherever your point is, that that’s the peak that you can have. The problem is that even though you’re looking at a VU meter and you go, “Oh, it looks like everything is right there,” it can sound different. How the human ear hears is different than how a VU meter actually works, so you could be legal within the VU meter, but the sound sounds really loud. They do that by mixing a lot of sound into that same space, like a bright color, let’s say, versus a dim color but still within… to video, say, on the video side. So commercials are always mixed as hot as possible so that they really pop out, whereas a television show isn’t mixed that way. What happens is you go from a TV show to a commercial and the commercials sound like they’re really loud. If you look on a VU meter, they’re not any hotter than the television show. The CALM Act is designed to get around that and Dolby came out with their LM100 first, which they claim that they can analyze more as the human ear hears it, so that’s the loudness level as opposed to the actual volume, if that makes sense.

Erik Valenzuela: Yes, on my mix I use the Dolby Medium Meter and actually all networks that I’m working with now, they’re asking for minus 24 for your dialogue as an average, so you have to be within 2 dB of minus 24, so you just have to mix your dialog using that Dolby Medium Meter and it all has, like I said, an average of about minus 24. So you’re always keeping an eye as you’re mixing your show to make sure that you’re within the legal limits for the specs, and that really helps.

Larry Jordan: Erik, I should mention that the minus 24 is actually an average level not a peak level, so for editors that don’t have average audio levels on their systems, setting the peaks to minus 24 is going to be really, really way too quiet. There’s a difference in measuring stuff.

Larry Jordan: I could talk about audio for probably the next five or six days.

Mike Horton: Michael Kammes just posted. There’s a plug-in for Avid and Pro Tools.

Terry Curren: There is one, yes.

Larry Jordan: It’s by Nugen Audio, according to what Michael tells us, and another one is TC Electronics, which is the one that’s bundled with Premiere and there’s another one that works with Final Cut X which allows you to monitor average levels. But we’re going to be out of time. Terry Curren is the Founder and President of Alpha Dogs. His website is alphadogs.tv.

Mike Horton: This was fun.

Larry Jordan: And Erik Valenzuela is an audio mixer with Alpha Dogs and, Erik and Terry, thanks so very much for joining us. It’s been a fun discussion.

Mike Horton: And we didn’t get to hear Terry’s strong opinions.

Larry Jordan: Bye, guys.

Terry Curren: Thank you. Good night.

Erik Valenzuela: Bye.

Larry Jordan: Mike, I want to thank our guests this week – it’s been an amazing conversation – starting with Peter Hamilton. He is an Executive Producer and a Consultant specializing in distribution and marketing for documentary and non-fiction projects around the world. Then we shifted into a discussion about audio, starting with Philip Hodgetts. He’s the CEO of Intelligent Assistance and Lumberjack Systems, taking a look at what he does to create high quality audio on production on location. Then we went to post production, talking with both Terry Curren, the Founder and CEO of Alpha Dogs, and Erik Valenzuela, the audio mixer also for Alpha Dogs, looking at ways that we can improve sending files to audio mixing for post production.

Larry Jordan: By the way, thinking of things to learn, our industry changes on a daily basis and, if you have a chance, visit our website at digitalproductionbuzz.com. There you’ll find hundreds of shows and thousands of interviews documenting every facet of our industry. You can also talk with us on Twitter, @DPBuZZ, and Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Our theme music is composed by Nathan Doogie Turner. Additional music on The Buzz is provided Smartsound; text transcripts by Take 1 Transcription; and you can email us at info@digitalproductionbuzz.com.

Larry Jordan: Our producer is Cirina Catania, our engineering team is led by Megan Paulos, and is joined by Ed Goyler, Lindsay Luebbert and Brianna Murphy. On behalf of Mike Horton, my name is Larry Jordan and thanks for listening to The Digital Production Buzz.

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