Digital Production Buzz

March 26, 2015

[Transcripts provided by Take 1 Transcription]

 

(Click here to listen to this show.)

 
HOSTS

Larry Jordan

Michael Horton

GUESTS

Greg Boren, Product Marketing Engineer, Marshall Electronics

Jim Tierney, President & Chief Executive Anarchist, Digital Anarchy

Jessica Sitomer, President, The Greenlight Coach

Nicholas Pisarro, President, NP Associates, LLC

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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. Hi, my name is Larry Jordan and joining us is our co-host, the ever well rested Mr. Mike Horton.

Mike Horton: I am well rested.

Larry Jordan: You look just…

Mike Horton: Rested. What was that word that you were trying to come up with?

Larry Jordan: Yes, it wasn’t rested, but it’s a good place to start.

Mike Horton: So do you, and it’s a nice shirt you have on too.

Larry Jordan: Well, today was a blue show. You’ve got a blue shirt on.

Mike Horton: Last week it was orange.

Larry Jordan: Mhmm. We’re probably going to go with plum next week.

Mike Horton: Are we?

Larry Jordan: Yes, we cycle through colors.

Mike Horton: We should do themes.

Larry Jordan: We have a color chart that allows us…

Mike Horton: We need a stylist, you and I, let’s face it.

Larry Jordan: And a makeup trowel.

Mike Horton: And a makeup trowel, yes.

Larry Jordan: We’ve got a jam packed show this week. We’re going to start with Greg Boren. He’s a Product Marketing Engineering at Marshall Electronics. He’s also President of the Society of Television Engineers and a member of SMPTE and the Digital Cinema Society. He joins us in the studio this week to show off some of Marshall’s smallest cameras and monitors.

Larry Jordan: Jessica Sitomer is the President of The Greenlight Coach. She’s also a regular on The Buzz, but what we like best about Jessica is that she’s really good at providing really helpful career advice.

Mike Horton: She is very good.

Larry Jordan: This week, we ask her, “Are you busy doing work or just busy being busy?”

Mike Horton: Hmm. Do we have to answer that?

Larry Jordan: No you don’t. We’re going to have Jessica answer. Next is Nicholas Pisarro Junior. He’s been a software developer for over 40 years. He’s also been working with Final Cut since version one. Recently, he updated his product for Final Cut Pro 10 called Backups for Final Cut Pro that makes backups easy. Tonight, Nick joins us to explain how it works.

Larry Jordan: And finally, Jim Tierney, the Chief Anarchist at Digital Anarchy joins us. Jim’s company publishes Beauty Box, a digital retouching plug-in for a variety of software. He just recently updated the software, so this week we talk about why not, how much…

Mike Horton: Try that again, Larry. Or I could do it, if I had a script in front of me.

Larry Jordan: Yes, well, we wouldn’t give you a script because you can’t do it as well as I can. We’re going to talk about how much retouching is too much.

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

Larry Jordan: Mike, it may come as a surprise to you, but in two weeks The Buzz is going to the NAB show in Las Vegas and we’re…

Mike Horton: Finally you’re announcing it.

Larry Jordan: 15 hours of live coverage.

Mike Horton: Each day.

Larry Jordan: We’re going to do three live shows every day, plus an hour show at night. We’re going to have over 80 guests in less than three and a half days.

Mike Horton: Am I going to be one of those guests?

Larry Jordan: We have invited you, but your publicist says that you cannot attend unless we provide you a gold lame van to pick you up.

Mike Horton: I promise to wear a clean shirt.

Larry Jordan: We would be grateful.

Mike Horton: No, really, you’re booked up with everybody, right?

Larry Jordan: We’ve booked up everybody. It’s amazing. We’ve got every major vendor that’s NAB is going to be on the show and…

Mike Horton: And you’re going to be at the South Hall, the same place?

Larry Jordan: Lower Hall, 11505.

Mike Horton: Which is pretty much the same place as you were last year.

Larry Jordan: Starts at ten o’clock on Monday morning. You can learn more at digitalproductionbuzz.com and join us for Greg Boren, right after this.

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Larry Jordan: Greg Boren is the Product Marketing Engineer at Marshall Electronics. He came to Marshall after 22 years with Panasonic Broadcast Systems Company and before that he was with NBC Burbank, where he was the Technical Manager on The Tonight Show. Greg is also the President of the Society of Television Engineers and a member of SMPTE. Good to have you with us, Greg, welcome.

Greg Boren: Thanks.

Larry Jordan: So how would you describe Marshall Electronics?

Greg Boren: Ah, it’s an interesting company. It’s one of the few manufacturers still in the US that builds at least part of our products domestically. It’s a really interesting company, about 100 employees, privately owned by Leonard Marshall, the name comes from him.

Larry Jordan: And you’re based where?

Greg Boren: Oh, we’re located not too far from LAX, El Segundo, and there are some really good fish tacos in the area.

Larry Jordan: Hang on one second. Mike, could you just point his mic toward him a little bit more? Swing the mic. There we go. So you’re based in El Segundo…

Mike Horton: Do you make microphones, by the way?

Greg Boren: We do make microphones. These aren’t them. Yes, we make a rather big line of microphones under the MXL brand.

Mike Horton: Do you happen to make eight foot tables?

Greg Boren: It would be nice, wouldn’t it? Because I’ve brought a lot of junk here.

Larry Jordan: Well, Marshall has evolved a lot as a company over the years.

Greg Boren: It has.

Larry Jordan: What is it doing now?

Greg Boren: It really did start in the audio side of the business, audio and audio cabling back in the analogue days, Mogami cable, which is what people used a lot for the audio consoles and so on, and then somewhere along the way prior to me being there, they came up with the first rack mounted panels with small monitors in them and that was such a hit that that’s what people know Marshall for today.

Larry Jordan: Absolutely, those rack mounted monitors are everywhere.

Greg Boren: Absolutely. We have probably 75 different models of those and also camera top monitors.

Mike Horton: Really? You have 75 different models?

Greg Boren: Oh, we have a lot of models, yes. Enormous number of models, some with quad split, some with waveform vectorscopes in them, things like that.

Larry Jordan: Is it the same screen, just different inputs?

Greg Boren: Oh no. They’re very different. Each one’s a little bit different and that’s one of the things… we also have modular inputs where, “Oh, I need this kind of connection. Oh, I’ll just put a different module on the back.” A lot of them are in remote production trucks, a variety of things.

Larry Jordan: Well, the thing I like about it is they don’t take a lot of space. They’re flat and they squeeze up against a wall.

Greg Boren: They’re flat and you put a lot in one panel and so on. There’s a big range of those. That’s what we’re known for, but more recently we have been getting into a lot of other things. We make encoders for streaming, like this show. We can stream live on the web and we’ve done that with our encoders. We have cameras, which we’re going to talk about today, and more monitors especially at NAB – who goes to NAB? You guys go to NAB, I assume?

Larry Jordan: We are going to NAB.

Mike Horton: He’s going to be there.

Greg Boren: Oh, beautiful.

Mike Horton: On the show floor, next to the Marshall booth.

Greg Boren: Yes, we’re in Central Hall, by the way, that’s a plug.

Larry Jordan: Oh good.

Greg Boren: Central Hall, halfway down on the main aisle. I’ve done 35 NABs, I think it is, something like that.

Larry Jordan: I know, you lose count after a while.

Greg Boren: Yes, there’s been a lot of them. But anyhow, the National Association of Broadcasters show, for those who may not know what NAB stands for, we’ll be there and we have something that doesn’t sound real sexy. We make these adapters and they’re really coming on fast. We have a range of things. We’re kind of ahead of the curve on this.

Larry Jordan: Wait, wait, wait, what kind of adapters?

Greg Boren: Well, they’ll take the new 12G serial signal, which is for 4K, convert that to optical and back. We do a variety of things and there’s a bunch more coming out. We have a little Skunk Works sort of thing going on there.

Larry Jordan: Much as I’d love to think about 12G converted to 4K and I have a need for at least 25 or 30,000 of these things…

Greg Boren: I’m sure you do.

Mike Horton: Me too.

Larry Jordan: …most of us would prefer to talk about something a bit more interesting.

Greg Boren: Yes, that’s right.

Larry Jordan: I notice that you’ve got some friends sitting here on the table.

Greg Boren: Yes, these are fun.

Larry Jordan: What are these?

Greg Boren: Well, these are very small cameras and what you’re looking at in the middle of the table are two larger cameras. This one here…

Larry Jordan: Oh, just leave it there because otherwise we’re going to have a really hard time taking a close-up of it.

Greg Boren: Oh, that’s right because you’ve probably zoomed in on it. Well, all of these that I’m going to show you are 1920 by 1080, in other words full HD cameras.

Larry Jordan: Progressive?

Greg Boren: Either way, they’re selectable – progressive scan or interlace.

Larry Jordan: Frame rate?

Greg Boren: Some of them are set up more for round numbers. If you’re into the tech numbers like 59.94 and those things, some are set up for 60, some are set up for 59.94, which means they work in the US market broadcast. If you’re just streaming, those numbers don’t mean anything, everybody can watch anything on their computer.

Greg Boren: When it comes to working with professional broadcast equipment, you have to have exactly the right frame rates and things to do that. This one here, though, is interesting in that this exact model and this arrangement with a very nice Fujinon lens on the front, this is used on the Ellen show. They have a whole bunch of these scattered all around the stage and they move them around, so if they want to get somebody walking down the hall or going into the dressing room or something like that, they throw one of these up.

Larry Jordan: Can we still get good pictures from something that tiny?

Greg Boren: Oh, sure. It’s wonderful. Yes, they’re very good.

Larry Jordan: What’s the ISO?

Greg Boren: Well, that’s a number we haven’t even calculated. That’s a very good number, probably in the 300, 400 range.

Larry Jordan: Not too bad.

Greg Boren: Not bad. These actually have night vision modes in most of them, so that pulls a lot of tricks to do that. You’ll bring the grain up a little bit, you might even go black and white, but we can work on very, very low light levels with these if you don’t mind compromising something else.

Larry Jordan: So I’m just thinking of our studio here, we’re an all HD STI studio, so I can take HD STI coming out the back of this and just plug it into the switcher?

Greg Boren: You sure could.

Larry Jordan: So what about the camera to my side of it, the left of it? This one right there.

Greg Boren: Ok, this one here, well, this one’s one of the few cameras that we have…

Larry Jordan: You just do that to make our camera guy nuts, don’t you?

Greg Boren: Sorry, let me rotate it. I’m throwing him for a curve.

Mike Horton: You want to see the back of this.

Greg Boren: The back of it also has HDMI and SDI.

Larry Jordan: Ah!

Greg Boren: So that’s one of the few dual purpose cameras we have.

Larry Jordan: Now, we’re getting a question on our live chat, so I want to ask this.

Greg Boren: Oh, great.

Larry Jordan: We have to buy the frame rate when we buy the cameras? Or what adjustability do we have here?

Greg Boren: It depends on the model. Some of ours will do all different frame rates. If you’re going to use broadcast formats in the US, you would want to make sure you’ve got the Marshall Broadcast model. If you’re only going to stream or use it for some kind of surveillance purpose or something like that, then you’d get the other one – it might be a little cheaper.

Larry Jordan: Price range for both of these?

Greg Boren: Let me look at my cheat sheet here, because I always forget these things. Actually, everything I have on the table here is pretty much a $500 camera, which is pretty remarkable.

Larry Jordan: Now, just a second here. $500?

Mike Horton: HD SDI, $500.

Greg Boren: That’s 600.

Larry Jordan: Correct me if I’m wrong, I’m looking at these cameras and the very first thought that comes into my head is, “This looks like and is priced very similar to a GoPro.” What makes this different from a GoPro?

Greg Boren: All right, well, we are different and…

Larry Jordan: Doesn’t have GoPro on the side for one thing.

Greg Boren: No, we’re not really in competition with GoPro. As a matter of fact, we’ve partnered with them on various stages and things. What we have different, GoPro has an HDMI connection only. HDMI is typically rated to go about 15 feet, so to go further you’d need to go to a converter and send it out. HD SDI, that’s the term used, serial digital interface – I’m sorry, I’m turning the camera around while they’re working – the connection on the back is a serial digital interface that goes 300 feet all by itself…

Larry Jordan: So we can get a bigger run.

Greg Boren: …so on one cable I can do 300 feet. We also have interchangeable lenses on all of these cameras, which GoPro doesn’t have. GoPro are great if I’m going to jump off a mountain or climb or do all those crazy things that people do with GoPros, perfect camera for that. Our cameras don’t record, GoPros record. Those are some of the…

Larry Jordan: So you’re just feeding a signal, there’s no chip inside?

Greg Boren: There’s no recorder in any of these cameras. This is designed to go to a switcher or a microwave transmitter or someone else’s recorder.

Mike Horton: Interchangeable lenses – are you making your lenses also? Or is somebody else?

Greg Boren: We make some of these. The real small lenses we make and we have special purchases on some of these others. This is a Fujinon lens here that we don’t make. This one here we sell directly and then, if I can get to these smaller cameras here, these are…

Larry Jordan: Absolutely, go ahead. We’re on a close-up right now, so just…

Greg Boren: All right. Let me pull it up slowly here, so as not to lose it, if you can follow that. This camera here is easily the most popular camera we have, the CV500.

Larry Jordan: Turn it sideways. There you go.

Greg Boren: Tiny, tiny lens in the front, SDI connection in the back, 12 volt power. This is also a composite output, which is the old standard definition type connection, so you could run that to some garden variety local monitor if you wanted to and see a picture at the same time. These lenses are changeable, there’s even a little miniature joystick in the back here to run the menus.

Mike Horton: Really? I haven’t seen that.

Greg Boren: See it back there? Yes, see that?

Mike Horton: Oh my gosh.

Greg Boren: On-screen menus come up and you can change formats and these will do everything from 1080p 24 up to 1080p 60 and everything in between.

Mike Horton: Holy cow.

Greg Boren: I can set them for European formats, which are also very popular in Europe.

Mike Horton: Give me an example of what people are using this particular camera for.

Greg Boren: This camera goes into reality shows; Formula 1’s using these.

Larry Jordan: Now, I saw an interesting video on YouTube where a car on a…

Mike Horton: Oh, in that rally?

Larry Jordan: Did you get the clip?

Mike Horton: Oh yes, we got the clip, yes.

Larry Jordan: Rolled over, like, six times and we’re watching it from inside, from two different angles as the car spins.

Greg Boren: Is that not amazing? That was with these.

Mike Horton: Really?

Larry Jordan: Are you serious? And it survived the crash.

Greg Boren: For sure. You could drive a nail at this camera.

Larry Jordan: I would probably not want to do that.

Greg Boren: No, but you could. Here, feel the…

Larry Jordan: Look at that. Oh my goodness, that’s… 

Greg Boren: It’s pretty solid.

Larry Jordan: It feels like it’s a metal case.

Greg Boren: It’s not a joke. Yes.

Mike Horton: And it has interchangeable lenses.

Larry Jordan: This would go with my Barbie doll set.

Mike Horton: What lens do we have on this right now?

Greg Boren: If it’s the standard lens, it’s 3.7 millimeters, which doesn’t mean anything because it’s a one-third inch imager. I did a little calculation before I came here and, compared to a DSLR lens, which people are familiar with, these look like a 25 millimeter DSLR lens, somewhere in that range.

Mike Horton: So it’s a somewhat wide angle.

Greg Boren: There’d be a wide angle. We go wider. We have a range of, I think, a dozen lenses for this camera. The widest is about a 90 degree field of view, so this is a remarkable little camera, yes.

Larry Jordan: And, again, price point?

Greg Boren: Price point, around 500 bucks. This one comes with the lens for 500, these you would add the lens.

Larry Jordan: Now, all of these require 12 volts supply, so we would need to feed 12 volts to the camera and we’d get HD SDI coming out the back. Can we do 720 as well as 1080?

Greg Boren: Yes you can, yes. I insisted on that. When I came to work at Marshall – I’d only been there a couple of years – and I said, “You’ve got to do 720.”

Larry Jordan: Oh yes.

Greg Boren: “Why?” and I said, “Because ESP, ABC and Fox all do a lot of sports and they all do 720.”

Larry Jordan: And they’re going to laugh at you if you just do 1080. We have the same problem.

Greg Boren: That’s right.

Larry Jordan: The cameras that we have here just shoot 1080 and we’ve got to run them through a format convertor just to be able to stream 720, so you’re on the side of the angels as far as I’m concerned.

Greg Boren: We can select that with all of these.

Mike Horton: Well, then, why don’t we just use these?

Larry Jordan: I didn’t know about them two weeks ago. Now I do. We just thought about them as monitors.

Mike Horton: Can you put a little teleprompter thingy on this?

Greg Boren: You could, I suppose. These all have regular quarter inch, 20 threads per inch, screw on the bottom or somewhere on them, this one has it top and bottom, so yes. I did a live concert out of Nashville, we streamed out of Nashville two concerts with five of these placed very close to the band and one in the back of the hall and it was…

Larry Jordan: Can I cut them with regular broadcast cameras? Will they cut reasonably well?

Greg Boren: Yes, you want to get in here and paint a little bit with the menus to get them to match as close as you can. These don’t have the deep controls that a broadcast camera has.

Larry Jordan: Do they have an automatic light balance or…

Greg Boren: Yes, yes, you can… do that or you can put a preset in. There’s also adjustable gamma, if people are interested in those things. I’m not sure if your audience understands what I’m saying.

Mike Horton: Oh, they do, trust me.

Greg Boren: They do? That’s great, then I’m talking to the right people. Can I show you another one here?

Larry Jordan: Well, one more camera…

Mike Horton: I don’t, but the audience does.

Larry Jordan: …but I also… is that really a camera? The thing that looks like a period at the end of a sentence?

Greg Boren: This thing here?

Larry Jordan: Yes.

Greg Boren: Yes. This is the brand new, newest, newest, newest, and it has to have an umbilical hanging off of it, I don’t know if you can get that in the shot, because there’s no room to put the connectors on there.

Larry Jordan: Look at that.

Mike Horton: Holy cow.

Greg Boren: You see that ok?

Larry Jordan: Yes.

Greg Boren: It has the same lens, the M12 lens, which means 12 meter lens, and this one does say 3.7 on there.

Mike Horton: It looks like you could get one of those things in a crackerjack box.

Greg Boren: Yes. There’s a joystick on the back of that. Now, this one mounts with a little arrangement that comes on the sides and holds it like that.

Larry Jordan: Now, we’re about to run out of time, but in the time we’ve got left, what do you have for monitors?

Greg Boren: Let me just hurry right up. I’ve brought a monitor – let me pull the cover off.

Mike Horton: Ah, this is what I know Marshall for.

Greg Boren: Yes, and since we’re not going to plug it in here, everybody’s going to see that it makes a nice black.

Larry Jordan: We talked about plugging a monitor in and it just was too complex for us to handle, but the thing actually works, it’s beautiful.

Greg Boren: Yes, this has the very remarkable name of VLCD71MB.

Larry Jordan: I was just going to ask if that was its name.

Greg Boren: Yes. The MB, though, means modular design. If I can turn this around and not throw you, we’ve done this for many years, it even predates me being there. This is a module that you can buy to put different types of inputs in.

Larry Jordan: Ah!

Greg Boren: This particular one has a neat feature for cinematographers. Depending on the SDI module I put in here, I can come in, let’s say, HDMI from the camera and distribute SDI out for the video village.

Larry Jordan: Oh yes.

Greg Boren: For other people to watch, so this can be my viewfinder on the camera but I’m also sending that out. Also, the power supply section is modular. You can plug a regular little connector in here, but this one has a four pin XLR, or there are various battery configurations on here, all kinds of battery configuration – quarter, 20, all the way around. This is full resolution in a seven inch monitor. This is 1080.

Larry Jordan: Full res, 1080.

Greg Boren: 1920 1080 monitor, seven inch. It’s one of the few on the market today.

Larry Jordan: LED, OLED, what?

Greg Boren: No, this is just regular LED back lit LCD.

Larry Jordan: Standard LCD.

Mike Horton: How well does it do in the sun?

Greg Boren: It’s got about a 800 Nit range, so it’s pretty good in the sun. I would recommend a hood in the sun, I think. With almost any monitor I’d recommend that, but anyhow also headphone jack, so if you’re putting in an HDMI you can listen to the camera right there. This is one of our newest monitors.

Larry Jordan: That is so cool. Look at this.

Greg Boren: Oh yes, that’s…

Larry Jordan: You can buy me one for Christmas, Mike.

Mike Horton: Absolutely.

Greg Boren: Yes, it’s a really nice monitor.

Mike Horton: You’re on the list, Larry.

Greg Boren: You can see this live in our booth with a little picture on it at NAB; and can I show you one more camera?

Larry Jordan: You can, real quick.

Greg Boren: I’d love to do that. Oh, by the way, the same little camera, you can get it with a monster lens.

Mike Horton: With that big old lens?

Greg Boren: That big lens there.

Mike Horton: Wow.

Greg Boren: That’s right. That grabs more light and then you can also get wider angle versions.

Larry Jordan: Now, would those be used for broadcast or for surveillance?

Greg Boren: You could use them for surveillance. We’ve customized these for broadcast. We’ve aimed them at the broadcast market. They have broadcast settings in them, broadcast formats. A lot of the surveillance cameras only do things like 60p or something like that. One more little camera.

Mike Horton: Lipstick.

Greg Boren: Lipstick. It mounts with one quarter 20 back here. The Formula 1 guys also bought a bunch of these recently. A pretty neat little camera and also an interchangeable lens, but this one can be dropped in water.

Mike Horton: Do you also sell the devices to mount all this stuff?

Greg Boren: Oh yes. Yes, we have all kinds of mounts. Some of these we get from other people, some we make.

Larry Jordan: Greg, where can people go on the web to learn more about the products Marshall has?

Greg Boren: You can go to marshall-usa.com, but because we sold so many displays, lcdracks.com. Who would think?

Larry Jordan: That’s lcdracks.com. Greg Boren is the Product Marketing Engineer for Marshall Electronics. Greg, thanks for joining us today. This was fun.

Greg Boren: All right. No, thank you.

Mike Horton: Just leave all this stuff here.

Greg Boren: Appreciate it.

Larry Jordan: Take care, bye bye.

Greg Boren: See you, thank you very much.

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

Jessica Sitomer: Hello, thank you for having me.

Mike Horton: Hi, Jessica.

Larry Jordan: It is nice to finally see your face on the screen. It has been years and years. We hear this wonderful cheerful voice and we’ve never seen you before today. This is a highlight. Mike has written it on his calendar.

Jessica Sitomer: I’m just… glasses or not.

Mike Horton: I think you look good in the glasses.

Jessica Sitomer: Ok.

Larry Jordan: Oh, wonderful touch.

Mike Horton: Yes, Jessica never gets out to LA any more, right?

Larry Jordan: No, she doesn’t.

Mike Horton: It’s been a while since you’ve been out here.

Jessica Sitomer: I do!

Larry Jordan: No, she doesn’t visit the West Coast. She doesn’t like either one of us, actually.

Mike Horton: Oh, that’s right.

Jessica Sitomer: I was there in February, I’ll be back in May.

Mike Horton: Oh good. Well, then you’ll have to stop by and see the new studio. That’s awesome.

Larry Jordan: The new studios are worth seeing. Jessica, we’ve been talking in the office all day about whether we’re busy being busy or whether we’re busy doing work. How would you tell the difference?

Jessica Sitomer: Ok, that’s productivity and it’s really important to identify what you’re doing. For a very long time, I’ve been training my clients to make a list of everything that they do and now I’ve taken it a step further, I’ve been working with my Greenlight Elites and I’ve taken from one of my coaches, Davy Tyburski, he does a graph.

Jessica Sitomer: In the first column it’s action, in the second column it’s impact, in the third column it’s ease and in the fourth column it’s total. Let’s say you write down attendance at networking events, social media reach outs, online resume submissions and you write down everything you do. Then you put the impact, so for networking events, that’s a ten on a scale of one to ten. It has a strong impact and ease, it’s an eight, because I teach you how to network properly so it becomes more easy, so it’s an 18.

Jessica Sitomer: Social media reach outs, you reach out to people, the impact is an eight, so you’re starting to create relationships with people. The ease is a nine, it’s really easy just to do something on social media; and then your total is 17. But then you look at online submissions. The impact is a one, the ease is a ten – it’s really easy to send those out all the time – and it’s really only 11.

Jessica Sitomer: You want to get this rating system in place for everything you do, whether it’s just research or mailings or cold calling, all of the things that you do so you can see whether you’re busy being busy or whether it’s really having an impact on you. Are you doing the easy things or are you doing the impactful things? Then you put it together and the ones that have the highest score as far as impact plus ease, those are your priorities.

Larry Jordan: Can someone who’s not a math wizard actually do this?

Mike Horton: If you can do columns.

Larry Jordan: Is this too much work?

Jessica Sitomer: No! Actually, I wish I could show you my computer right now because I made up a photo for all of you. Tomorrow, when this is posted on YouTube, I’ll see if I can upload a picture to YouTube, because I’ve made this column. It looks great and it’s so easy to do. It’s just four columns.

Larry Jordan: I’ll tell you a secret. If you email me the photo as soon as you’re done talking, we edit the show tonight, it’s posted tonight, so we’ll include your photo as part of your interview, because we have that technical skill right here.

Mike Horton: We can fix everything in post.

Jessica Sitomer: You all are fantastic.

Larry Jordan: Why the focus on efficiency?

Jessica Sitomer: What I have found is that a lot of people – the majority of people – complain that nothing’s working for them. They’re really passionate about what they do but nothing’s working; and then I ask them what they’ve been doing and when they answer, they’re doing the same three or four things over and over and over again for years and expecting something to be different, and especially the things that aren’t showing results.

Jessica Sitomer: As I said, most of them are online submitting, a lot of them are playing around fixing up their websites and their reels and I’m like, “Well, how much impact is that having?” and it’s not having a lot, so you have to look at what the actions are that are going to have a strong impact, and if I’m struggling with them, where do I get help so I can get better at them so that I’ll have impact and ease?

Mike Horton: My sister decided to change careers and went to school, got a medical assistant’s degree and then had job interview after job interview after job interview. These are face to face job interviews and she was never getting the job. This went on for about nine months and finally it seemed to me that it wasn’t how much you know, it was who you know, because the who you know people were getting the jobs, not the how much, not the better qualified. Finally, she ended up getting a job primarily because of who she knew.

Jessica Sitomer: Well, who you know is definitely going to have a big impact, but there’s also a lot that you could do to have an advantage in an interview and really what people are doing wrong in interviews is they’re just answering the questions very stiffly and how they think it needs to be answered instead of sharing stories and having conversations, so the person who’s going in for the interview never actually shows up. The interviewee shows up, but the person who this person will be working with on a regular basis, they don’t get to know in that short amount of time. But I have strategies for that.

Mike Horton: Yes, I was wondering if that was probably one of the reasons, but she’s a real people person. But then again, people change when they get into interview situations. It’s a much different kind of person that you become.

Jessica Sitomer: Exactly and… could have… you.

Larry Jordan: One of the things that you’ve stressed over the years is face to face networking is much more important than anything that we do online or via our website. We want to make that personal contact and it sounds like your system is designed to emphasize the importance of meeting people in a non-threatening social environment as opposed to the formality of a job interview. Am I hearing that correctly?

Jessica Sitomer: Absolutely, because if you know them beforehand then, yes, you’re going to have the advantage and that’s why I really encourage people to get mentors, have strategy meetings, get referrals to people so they can meet them before there is a job available; and then, when the job becomes available, they’ve already gotten to know you, they have an idea of what your work ethic is and what your personality is. That’s some work that people should always be doing, expanding their contacts.

Larry Jordan: There’s a phrase I use in my classes, and I want you to tell me if I should continue using it or if I’ve gone completely afield, which is it isn’t who you know and it isn’t necessarily who knows you, it’s who knows what you know. Would you agree with that?

Jessica Sitomer: Who knows what you know. Ok, I get it. Yes. You know why? Because with social media, I might not know you and you might not know me, but if you’re following me on social media you’ll know what I know, because you’re learning that about me, so yes. You know, it’s who you know, it’s how well you know them and I think it’s how well the person knows you that ties them together.

Larry Jordan: Jessica, one of the things that you may not know is that Mike has a routine that he goes through before every show to get himself loosened up for the show and he spins plates, and so he’s got these plates spinning in the air, it’s a way of de-stressing.

Mike Horton: While I’m saying, “Who you know, how much I know, who you know, who you know.”

Larry Jordan: And you would never think of Mike being a juggler, spinning plates out in the Green Room as he’s waiting to go on.

Mike Horton: But it works.

Larry Jordan: You would know Mike and you would know that he’s this bon vivant and incredible co-host, but you wouldn’t know him as a juggler unless you had seen him, so it isn’t until we know what he knows that Mike actually sort of has a personality associated with him. You know what I mean?

Mike Horton: Thank you. You lost me at juggling.

Larry Jordan: But it was great. It was a wonderful example. The plates spinning…

Jessica Sitomer: I’m just wondering how many plates he has in the air, since we’re talking about productivity.

Larry Jordan: Any more than three and we’re sweeping up the results.

Mike Horton: More than three, yes. Just like you, Jessica, more than three.

Jessica Sitomer: …that for their own productivity. Another one of my coaches, James Malinchak, once taught me something that I have used and I find so effective and that is his Post-It method. You take a Post-It, you write three things down for your work that you’re going to do that day and then, once you’ve accomplished them, you crumple it up and you throw it away. No saving Post-Its and checking off things and it’s nice and simple for people, you get three things done that are effective and it’s more than most people are doing on a regular basis in our industry.

Mike Horton: Is that like setting goals, only short term goals rather than long term goals?

Jessica Sitomer: Absolutely, and they should all be targeted toward those long term goals in an effective manner.

Mike Horton: Long term goals. If you don’t achieve that long term goal, that’s just debilitating, so I’m always wondering…

Jessica Sitomer: Ok, first of all the tonality here is just speaking volumes. Long term goals are amazing, because that’s how you know that you’re working for something. How do you know you’re not going to achieve them? Because they’re long term, so you’re always working to achieve them and just the fact that you have your eye focused on something, things are going to fall into place.

Jessica Sitomer: You’re going to hear things in conversations, you’re going to meet people that, when you share your goal, they’re going to be able to help you; whereas if you have no goal, then people have no idea what to do with you and how to help you.

Larry Jordan: But Jessica, Jessica, Jessica, what happens if I’m doing all this hard work because I don’t want to step outside of my comfort zone, I don’t like meeting people or I don’t want to go to social events? Mike talks constantly about how hard it is to get people to come to user group meetings. They like hiding inside their room. How do you get past the ‘I’m doing busy work to avoid meeting people’?

Jessica Sitomer: Ok, well, the first question you ask is how is this working for me? Obviously, I can guarantee you that if you’re doing busy work to just be busy, to avoid the things that are going to help you get your goals, then you’re never going to reach your goals, so it’s either time to do something else or it’s time to get yourself educated, because education and learning is the key to overcoming these fears. Your fear is of the unknown.

Jessica Sitomer: You don’t know what to expect at a networking event, so you imagine the worst case scenario of I don’t know what to say or I’m going to be shunned by the cliques or I’m going to be standing all by myself by the wall and no-one’s going to talk to me, instead of what could be. If you don’t know what could be, then you need to learn. There are books, there are home study programs, there are coaches like me.

Jessica Sitomer: There are always techniques and tools to help you so if you really want this, you’ve got to say to yourself even if I’m stepping out of my comfort zone in baby steps, like in What About Bob? baby stepping to the elevator, that’s ok. I’ve got my Greenlight Elites this month, they’re taking action every day. I gave them a booklet so that every day they had one action to do. They were all doable actions, but the progress they were making was amazing just because they did that one single action, which is more than they would have been doing.

Larry Jordan: Jessica, we have run out of time but you have not run out of advice. Where can people go on the web to learn more about all the good advice that you’ve got?

Jessica Sitomer: They can go to thegreenlightcoach.com. Check out my latest blog for my March Madness Bundle Sale. $1100 worth of learning for 97 bucks.

Mike Horton: Wow.

Larry Jordan: That’s thegreenlightcoach.com. Jessica Sitomer is the President of The Greenlight Coach and, Jessica, thanks for joining us today.

Mike Horton: Thanks, Jessica.

Larry Jordan: Bye bye.

Jessica Sitomer: Bye.

Larry Jordan: Nicholas Pisarro Junior has developed complex software and hardware for over 40 years. He’s also been working with Final Cut since version one. Recently, he updated his product for Final Cut Pro 10, called Backups for Final Cut Pro, that makes backups easy. And, if we’ve managed to switch our Skype box, I get to say hello, Nicholas…

Mike Horton: There he is.

Larry Jordan: …good to have you back.

Nicholas Pisarro: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be back. I’ve been catching up on some old programs so I get into the rhythm of things and it’s always enjoyable.

Larry Jordan: Nick, I just realized that the last time we had you on the show was July of 2013. What have you been doing since, over that last year and a half?

Nicholas Pisarro: Well, I do IOS work, I’ve done a couple of projects for a company called Arccos Golf that sells a set of sensors you put on your golf clubs and it knows when you hit the ball and it sends it to your iPhone and you can actually see where you hit the ball on the golf course and all kinds of statistics like that.

Larry Jordan: The sensors are on the golf club?

Nicholas Pisarro: Yes, it fits on the head of the golf club, where the handle is. There’s a standard fitting on the top of that, so you just unscrew that and you plug these things in. It’s a set of 14 sensors. There’s a special one for the putter and they’ve gotten themselves in the physical Apple stores, as well as the Apple website, so they’ve got a ton of money, they’ve done everything first class and if you go to arccosgolf.com and watch the video, they’ve done this video that’s so good, you want to rip open your wallet and buy one of these sets just because the video is so good. I mean, they really did a first class job on this.

Mike Horton: This doesn’t even sound fair. Put sensors on your golf club to know where it was hit.

Nicholas Pisarro: Well, they actually have a version of the app for tournaments that turns off a lot of the statistics.

Mike Horton: Turns off?

Nicholas Pisarro: So you can use it in a tournament but you can’t look at your game until you’ve finished the game.

Mike Horton: Ah, that’s a great idea.

Nicholas Pisarro: It will record your game but you can’t use the information to see how you’re doing and things like that.

Larry Jordan: That’s very cool.

Mike Horton: You’ll be so bogged down with technology, you’ll forget exactly… just don’t think, do.

Larry Jordan: Well, I want to see it broadcasting from the golf ball. That’s really what I want to see.

Mike Horton: It’s one of the problems people have with those fitness things. I mean, you’re so wired in to all this fitness technology that, jeez, just run, job.

Nicholas Pisarro: The problem is building electronics that can handle the 1000 G-force on the golf course.

Mike Horton: Well, they’ve obviously done it.

Larry Jordan: Nick, I want to talk about another piece of software you’ve written which is called Backups for Final Cut Pro 10. Tell us about what that does.

Nicholas Pisarro: My inspiration for it was the original backup feature of Final Cut Pro 7, which would back up all your work every seven minutes or five minutes or whatever and initially Final Cut Pro 10 didn’t have anything like that, and the earlier versions were particularly prone to…

Mike Horton: Crashing.

Nicholas Pisarro: Yes, crashing and molting your files and then any editing thing, like you would go and color balance your whole thing and decide that’s not right and you say, “Oh, how am I going to get out of this?” and whatnot, so that was my inspiration. I’ve also as a software developer developed backup programs for the last 40 years or so, so I know that technology very well, so it was a perfect fit for me to develop this program.

Larry Jordan: Now, are we talking backups? Because it almost sounds like you’re talking versions, where you’ve got multiple versions in case you want to go back ten or 15 minutes. Are we looking at versioning or actual backups of media and all the edit information?

Nicholas Pisarro: It will back up your media, but the basic goal of it is to back up your work every few minutes, up to every two minutes if you want.

Mike Horton: So the backups are rewriting the other backups? We’re not having a ton of different backups?

Nicholas Pisarro: If you do it every two minutes, you can restore to any of the two minute backups that you’ve done. It creates snapshots and each snapshot just has the files that have changed since the last one. It’s a continuous record of what you did.

Larry Jordan: How would I differentiate between your backups and the backups that Final Cut itself makes? Because it does a backup of the databases every 15 minutes. What would be the advantage of using your system?

Nicholas Pisarro: I do it a lot more often. When you’re editing, 15 minutes is like an eternity in the amount of work you can get done. I also have a lot of customization features. One thing it has is, if you do a manual backup, you can say why you did it. You can say, “Well, I’ve just finished the color balance on such-and-such project.” One of the problems with doing a restore is you don’t remember when you did something. When did I finish the rough cut?

Nicholas Pisarro: You have no idea, so this you could click on, you say I finished the rough cut of such-and-such movie or whatever you’re working on and then you know that if you want to go back to that stage, you can do it. You can also restore individual projects, events. You can save your motion templates and back those up automatically, so that’s a whole other area where you’re doing work and I don’t think Motion… does that for you, for example.

Larry Jordan: I understand, if my notes are correct, that you’re working on a beta of a new version. Is that true?

Nicholas Pisarro: Right, I’m just coming out with a new version. I’ve added filters so that you can just back up certain libraries, you can set up a backup for just a particular library. Another problem is that the program uses the modify date of your file to know when to back it up, but if you’re backing up across file systems, the dates are stored in a slightly different way for, say, Windows versus Mac or if it’s on Xsan, and so I’ve come up with a way of storing those so it will work across file systems.

Nicholas Pisarro: And then I put in a little trim button so you can delete the old snapshots, just little things like that that make it run a little smoother for people. I get almost no support requests for it, it’s quite amazing.

Mike Horton: Really?

Larry Jordan: That’s a wonderful trick.

Mike Horton: So it obviously works.

Nicholas Pisarro: I only get a support email about once every couple of weeks and most of the time it’s for features and things, so if somebody asks for support I spend an hour on a message because I can do it.

Mike Horton: It needs to be said.

Nicholas Pisarro: So I have a very loyal following, I’m really amazed. I’ve not gotten less than a three star review on the App Store and it’s rated five stars and it works.

Mike Horton: Yes, that’s what I was going to say.

Nicholas Pisarro: And most of the customers are professional people, they’re not casual users. They’re people who use it full time.

Larry Jordan: Nick, how much is the software?

Nicholas Pisarro: Oh, it’s only $18.

Mike Horton: Wow.

Larry Jordan: Wow, and it’s available in the App Store?

Nicholas Pisarro: It’s on the App Store, you can just look for backups and it’ll pop up, or if you look for Final Cut Pro, it’ll appear on the same page as Final Cut Pro.

Larry Jordan: What’s your plan for the new version? Have you figured out when it’s going to be released?

Nicholas Pisarro: I have a released candidate out there and it’ll probably be out in the next week or two.

Larry Jordan: Oh, that’s very exciting.

Nicholas Pisarro: Yes, and it’s an amazingly sophisticated program. We don’t think about this…

Mike Horton: As a user.

Larry Jordan: Yes, well, the thing I’ve discovered is the software that does the most, if it’s well designed, it’s easy to use and you don’t realize how technically complex it is. What website can people go to learn more about your software?

Nicholas Pisarro: I just set up an easy URL – videobackups.biz.

Larry Jordan: That’s videobacksup.biz and Nick Pisarro Junior is the President of NP Associates LLC. Nick, as always, a delight talking to you. Thanks for joining us.

Nicholas Pisarro: Ok, very good. Thank you.

Larry Jordan: Take care. Bye bye.

Nicholas Pisarro: Thanks a lot.

Larry Jordan: Jim Tierney founded Digital Anarchy in 2001 specifically to develop video plug-ins to simplify creating visual effects. One of his most popular is Beauty Box, a digital retouching plug-in; and, if our magic Skype box is working, I get to say hello, it’s fun to talk with the Chief Executive Anarchist of any company.

Jim Tierney: Exactly. How you doing, Larry?

Mike Horton: Hi, Jim.

Larry Jordan: It’s good to see you. Jim, just before we start talking about the latest stuff that you’re working on, why did you decide to create Beauty Box originally?

Jim Tierney: Actually, I saw a program at MGLA, the motion graphics group that Trish and Chris Meyer started, about doing music videos and the amount of beauty work that went into that, and we thought we could do it a lot more easily with software and that’s how Beauty Box came about.

Larry Jordan: Did it start with Photoshop or did it start as video?

Jim Tierney: No, it started as video. We’ve always been kind of a video plug-in company and that’s really where our emphasis was. We did sort of shift over to Photoshop for a little while, but we’re definitely coming back to video at this point. But yes, it was originally a video plug-in.

Larry Jordan: Aside from the fact that video’s got multiple frames running at the same time, is there a difference between Beauty Box and Photoshop and Beauty Box on video from a technological point of view?

Jim Tierney: Not a whole lot. There is a little bit of a difference between the fact that, of course, we are processing all these frames so you do need to keep things consistent frame to frame. With Photoshop, you don’t really need to keep the consistency as much from photo to photo, but if there were any variations with video frame to frame, it’s something that you would definitely notice. But technically, the algorithms are pretty much the same, it’s just a matter of how we handle processing all the different frames.

Larry Jordan: One of the things that impresses me a lot is that Beauty Box has continued to evolve as a video plug-in over the years since you first released is, and I was just trying to think about what the features were that you added after the initial release. What’s the stuff that’s been accumulating with the plug-in?

Jim Tierney: The big thing has always been speed, so we’ve always been trying to increase the speed gradually over time. Certainly, 1.0 was pretty slow and even 1.2 increased the speed and that was always the big complaint about it. Mostly, it was just trying to find ways to speed it up. With 3.0, we added in better automatic masking, so it’s better at figuring out what the skin tones are.

Jim Tierney: We’ve always used face detection as the cheap and easy way of figuring out what skin tones are; with version 3.0 we added in a bunch of other algorithms to figure that out. Then we added in something for removing shine, so if you have oily skin and you’ve got bright lights reflecting on the skin, it helps reduce shine on the skin. With 4.0, the big new feature and actually really the only new feature is just much better optimization for GPUs, allowing you to get real time performance on some video cards.

Mike Horton: Real time performance?

Jim Tierney: Real time performance. You can play it back…

Mike Horton: Wow, Jim.

Larry Jordan: It seems to me that GPUs are really designed for the kind of pixel processing that you’re doing, because you really need to blast a lot of pixels in a short period of time. How hard was it to implement GPU acceleration?

Jim Tierney: We’ve had it almost since the beginning, but to really get in there and optimize it, I mean, we’ve been working on this release for about a year. It’s taken quite a while to really get the performance increase that we wanted to get and it helped that Nvidia and AMD released some pretty powerful cards, like the Nvidia GTX980. It’s just an amazing card for the price that you can get it for.

Mike Horton: Yes, but you can’t put those in a Mac, though, right? Those are PC cards?

Jim Tierney: Yes, PC. If you have an older Mac Pro, there is a way to sort of do a Franken-machine version of it. Maybe not the 980, but we have a Titan board, which is actually a little bit better than the 980 and… external power supply and running into one of the back of the Mac, but we got it working. It’s great, it’s super fast on this old Mac Pro that we have. It’s pretty awesome.

Larry Jordan: It’s got its own air conditioner in the back…

Mike Horton: But you have one of those, I think, back there somewhere.

Larry Jordan: Yes I do.

Jim Tierney: Yes, it now has an extra air conditioner attached.

Larry Jordan: Jim, just out of curiosity, what makes adding GPU support so hard? Speaking as a non-developer, I don’t even have a clue, what’s the challenge? You don’t just flip a switch and say, “Wake up, GPU”?

Jim Tierney: No, it’s a little bit more involved than that, and also AMD and Nvidia use different APIs. There’s Nvidia CUDA, which is their own separate deal; there’s Open CL, which AMD uses and what you really want to use for the new Mac Pros. But they are each their own different language and it’s just how you push the pixels through these different APIs and get them onto the cards in a very efficient way, and I’m not really explaining it very well, but there’s a lot to managing how the pixels and the memory and everything works and getting it quickly onto the card and off of the card.

Mike Horton: Bottom line, though, if lives depend on your products, should we be using a beefy HP workstation with a giant Nvidia card to pump all this stuff through? Or can we get away with a MacBook Pro?

Jim Tierney: It depends on what you’re doing. If you’re doing a lot of effects heavy work, you’re much better off with the HP workstation, for sure. If you’re doing a lot of editing type stuff, then the MacBook works great; and, of course, the new Mac Pros are plenty powerful. They’re not super upgradeable but that’s the way it goes with Apple.

Jim Tierney: But even a mid-range PC, put a bunch of memory into it, get one of these brand new Nvidia boards and you’ve got a really great workstation. It doesn’t need to be this top of the line HP thing, although those are great. You can get a run of the mill PC from Costco and then stick a really good video card in there and some memory and you’ve got a good machine.

Larry Jordan: I’ve got an aesthetic question, before we run out of time. There’s a lot of debate over whether and how much retouching to do and Beauty Box can take somebody and make them look normal all the way to plastic. What’s your opinion on how much retouching is too much?

Jim Tierney: The goal of Beauty Box is really to keep things looking realistic. It’s really just applying a layer of digital makeup. That’s really what we strive for. From beginning this, the way that we designed it, you certainly can push it to being more plastic, but ultimately people can tell. You really want to make it look like it’s just a layer of digital makeup.

Jim Tierney: You don’t want people to notice that the effect has been applied, and they will because you can’t make someone who’s 50 look like they’re 25, as much as I would like that to be the case. We have not figured out a way to do that realistically but, you know, you can easily take ten years off somebody and have them look great and not have it apparent that there’s any effect applied at all.

Mike Horton: I hope that you come out with Jowl Shaper. Bring it up a little bit here.

Larry Jordan: No, we’ll get some Scotch Tape for you, Mike, it’ll be great. What are you looking at for the future? Any special features you’re keeping your mind open on?

Jim Tierney: For the time being, we’ve got some other stuff that we’re working on. Certainly we need to speed up FlickerFree, that’s one of our other plug-ins. We’ve got a number of other video plug-ins that are in the works. We might be showing them at NAB, we’ll see. We’d like to be.

Mike Horton: Yes, Jim will be at the Plug-In Pavilion and hopefully at the Supermeet too.

Jim Tierney: Yes.

Mike Horton: So you’ll get a chance to do one on one with Jim and all his cool products.

Larry Jordan: Jim always has cool products.

Mike Horton: Yes.

Jim Tierney: We’ll come out with more cool video products, for sure.

Larry Jordan: For people who want to keep track of all the cool products that you’ve got, both old and new, what website can they go to?

Jim Tierney: It’s digitalanarchy.com.

Larry Jordan: That’s digitalanarchy.com and Jim Tierney is the President and Chief Executive Anarchist. Jim, it’s been fun chatting with you today, thanks for joining us.

Mike Horton: See you in a couple of weeks, Jim.

Jim Tierney: All right, thanks for having me. Take care, guys.

Larry Jordan: Bye bye.

Larry Jordan: You know, I was just thinking about the guests that we had on today, starting with the wonderful cameras that Greg had and the ideas…

Mike Horton: Yes, that was fun. I want them all.

Larry Jordan: …from Jessica, talking about people and meeting people at trade shows, and that brings to mind NAB. Are you going to go this year?

Mike Horton: Yes. Hey, we just sold a ticket. No, seriously, just now.

Larry Jordan: You’re up to six people. What are you referring to?

Mike Horton: The Supermeet.

Larry Jordan: And what is the Supermeet?

Mike Horton: For those of you who do not know the Supermeet, the Supermeet is one of the biggest digital get-together network gatherings at NAB. It’ll be April 14^th and if you are going, this is one of the events you must go to; and by the way, the raffle right now, it’s over $107,000 worth of stuff. Honest to God, it’s insane. It takes you five minutes to scroll through the list on the website.

Larry Jordan: And if you haven’t had a chance to see Michael do the raffle…

Mike Horton: It’s crazy.

Larry Jordan: …you would pay just to watch him post the raffle. It is amazing.

Mike Horton: It’s crazy; and I know you’re going to be there in the South Hall.

Larry Jordan: We will be there and most of my staff will be there.

Mike Horton: Yes.

Larry Jordan: In addition, we’ll have most of this week’s guests there, starting with Greg Boren. He’s the Product Marketing Engineer at Marshall Electronics; Jessica Sitomer is the President of The Greenlight Coach; Nicholas Pisarro Junior is the President of NP Associates LLC; and Jim Tierney, our fourth guest, is also going to be at NAB, he’s the Chief Anarchist at Digital Anarchy.

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, all online and all available.

Larry Jordan: You can visit with us on Twitter, @dpbuzz, and Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Our theme music is composed by Nathan Dugi-Turner, additional music on The Buzz is provided by smartsound.com. Text transcripts are provided by Take 1 Transcription.

Larry Jordan: Our producer is Cirina Catania. Our engineering team is lead by Megan Paulos, includes Ed Golya, Keegan Guy, Lindsay Luebbert, Brianna Murphy and James Stevens. On behalf of Mike Horton, thanks for listening to The Buzz.

Mike Horton: Goodbye, everybody.

Voiceover: The Digital Production Buzz was brought to you 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

March 19, 2015

[Transcripts provided by Take 1 Transcription]

 

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HOSTS

Larry Jordan

Michael Horton

GUESTS

Keith Hanak, Vice President, A/V Solutions Group, Panasonic Enterprise Solutions Company

Dan Kneece, Director of Photography

Ian Cohen, Songwriter and Composer

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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, as always, we welcome our co-host, Mr. Mike Horton.

Mike Horton: Is it me or is it hot in here?

Larry Jordan: It’s because you have that all-wool suit on, that three piece.

Mike Horton: Well, it used to be freezing.

Larry Jordan: Well, it’s gotten warmer outside.

Mike Horton: For once; you had this place freezing two weeks in a row and I wear this and now I have to take it off. No, I’d better not do that because… for my white arms. I’ve got to put it back on.

Larry Jordan: We just got a vote from the live chat, they prefer the coat on, thank you very much.

Mike Horton: Put your jacket back on, Horton. Ok.

Larry Jordan: While Mike is continuing to get dressed on air, I want to introduce our guests. We’ve got Keith Hanak, he’s the Vice President for A/V Solutions Group at Panasonic Enterprise Solutions Company. He handles their sales, solutions development delivery and recurring services. Recently, Panasonic installed new gear for the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and Keith joins us to explain what they did, because this is a massive project.

Mike Horton: They do nothing but massive projects. They do all those video boards on the sports stadiums.

Larry Jordan: And they have the world’s largest electronic digital display. We’re going to talk with him about that. His group did it.

Larry Jordan: Then Dan Kneece started filming motion pictures at age 13, when his mother bought him a Super 8 camera. In 1979, while finishing his Masters in Media Arts at the University of South Carolina, Dan learned Steadicam from its originator and inventor, Garrett Brown, which led to a 28 year career as a Steadicam operator, including three feature films with David Lynch. Tonight, he shares his secrets on successful cinematography and Steadicam work.

Mike Horton: If it makes you feel any better, I’ve never been able to say successful either.

Larry Jordan: And you have not been successful tonight either.

Mike Horton: Yes, exactly.

Larry Jordan: Ian Cohen is a songwriter and composer with over 30 years’ experience writing, arranging and recording original music. Ian is an avid recording artist, working comfortably in several genres, and currently recording tracks with touring artist Mick Mahan from ‘Pat Benatar’ and Neil Giraldo and Tony Pia from ‘Doobie Brothers’. Tonight, he talks about what it takes to write songs and compose music.

Mike Horton: I’m looking forward to that one.

Larry Jordan: And he’s going to be live in the studio, you’ll be able to shake his hand, it’ll be great.

Mike Horton: I know, exactly.

Larry Jordan: Remember, you can read text transcripts for each show, courtesy of Take 1 Transcription. 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, Garrett Brown is legendary in the filmmaking community, the first to make film cameras portable and yet still create smooth shots.

Mike Horton: He’s also one of the funniest human beings you’ll ever meet. He actually came to a LAFCPUG meeting.

Larry Jordan: Really?

Mike Horton: Yes, we had him demo. This was several years ago, a very, very funny guy. Did a lot of commercials too, voiceover back in the ‘80s. He’s an actor.

Larry Jordan: Everybody is an actor at some point. I want to remind you to visit with us on Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com; we’re also on Twitter, @DPBuZZ, and you can subscribe to our free weekly show newsletter at digitalproductionbuzz.com for an inside look at both our show and the industry. It comes out every Friday afternoon, has links to both the audio and the video part of the show. Mike, it’s going to be a great show today.

Mike Horton: I’m looking forward to it.

Larry Jordan: And we’re going to be starting with Keith Hanak right after this.

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Larry Jordan: Keith Hanak is the Vice President for the A/V Solutions Group at Panasonic Enterprise Solutions Company and he handles their sales, solutions development delivery and recurring services. During his tenure, the AV solutions team has delivered a number of high profile digital signage projects for a variety of clients and most recently for the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. Hello, Keith, welcome.

Keith Hanak: Thank you, I’m glad to be here.

Larry Jordan: Keith, what does the Panasonic Enterprise Solutions Company do?

Keith Hanak: Well, it’s interesting. I know people think about Panasonic and they think about all the products that we create. In simple terms, we’re a systems integrator focused on both the eco and AV markets at a high level and I manage the AV side of that equation. But we’re essentially an integrator that supports a variety of projects in a bunch of different market verticals. It’s not a product focused organization.

Larry Jordan: Now, I know that your title is Vice President, but what’s your role with the group? Is it principally managerial or technical?

Keith Hanak: I manage the whole AV solutions business for Panasonic, but my background and what I still enjoy doing is mainly on the solutions side, so it’s primarily technical.

Larry Jordan: I was reading that you and your team installed the world’s largest high definition television LED screen. What was that about?

Keith Hanak: That was actually a very fun project. It’s … certified, it was out in Texas and the goal of the particular customer in this case was to have the biggest one. It turns out the viewing distances and where these screens are located relative to the stands requires something very large in order to be able to cover an audience – I think they have upwards of 160,000 people attend the event, it’s located on the back stretch and it’s a very iconic display.

Keith Hanak: If you’ve ever been to a race, you’ll know that it does require some visual aids and some technology in order to keep track of who’s where on the course so that you can better follow your particular driver as a fan. I think it’s a great tool.

Mike Horton: Wait a minute – this is going to be a stupid question – how long does it take to first of all design something like that, then install it?

Keith Hanak: This one here was a ground up, so we started with bare earth and it took about eight months from start to finish. It was kind of like constructing a building. Obviously, the footings for the sign are probably 40 feet below grade, you hit bedrock and you build it just like you would a building and it happens to have an LED board on it.

Larry Jordan: How big is this thing?

Keith Hanak: It is 218 feet by right around 94 feet. I think it’s over 20,000 square feet.

Mike Horton: I want one of those.

Larry Jordan: Where in your back yard are you going to put it?

Keith Hanak: It’s very big, very bright. The customer in this case is Speedway Motorsports, it’s a Texas motor speedway, and they’ve been very progressive in terms of getting the fans involved. Typically, what you would see at a racetrack is a vertical pylon that actually has just the order of the cars and what you can do now with replays, and fan engagement, and sponsors, and activation and all of those things with this sort of tool is really pretty special.

Keith Hanak: It’s one of those things where, when something happens, everybody stops and looks at the board, so it really changes the way fans engage at the track.

Larry Jordan: I was just thinking, video people are obsessing about HD versus 2K versus 4K resolution. This has got to be a bajillion pixels across by two bajillion pixels high, hasn’t it? How do you measure the resolution of something like this?

Keith Hanak: In this particular case, it’s certainly greater than high def and it’s about 1300 pixels by something like 26 or 2800.

Mike Horton: Wow!

Keith Hanak: It’s very large, but because it’s far enough away, obviously you don’t have to have resolution like a television, so what I would say is it’s the right amount of resolution to make it work, certainly greater than HD, and part of the reason why that’s necessary is there’s a lot of data and information that fans are interested in, so you not only have to have the video picture, you also have to integrate in the information. Social media’s a big part of things that are now being monitored at the track, along with scoring and timing and placement data.

Mike Horton: Are we just talking about one big huge HD television set? Or is there technology that goes into this that’s completely different than what we’d have in our home?

Keith Hanak: The screen itself, it’s really a big monitor, and I’d say the magic behind a lot of the stuff is what we’re doing in the control room. It just so happens that this particular location where we built the largest screen, we also built the control room and there’s a bunch of different data elements that are integrated into the show and we happen to work with their production staff to produce the show for them for all of their events, so there’s a whole control room and it’s quite a process and, like you would see at any live event, it’s a very significant operation with a technical director, production teams, audio and so forth.

Larry Jordan: When you’re putting this together, are you driving it from a single computer? Or is it multiple graphics cards? How do you feed a signal to something that big?

Keith Hanak: First of all, as you know at sporting events a bunch of different cameras that are being deployed now. Some are actually in-house cameras, where others come from the networks that happen to be covering those events. They have replay systems that they use to play back special events. They also have pre-canned information like sponsors and advertising data and then also integrating in with scoring and timing data is a big deal. All of those things are going on simultaneously and you’re trying to find the right mix.

Keith Hanak: Then there’s the run of show and a lot of these advertisers and a lot of the stuff that’s done during the show is actually driven by some event that happens, so if there’s a caution flag that’s sponsored; if there’s a break in the action of some sort or a change in leadership, that causes some action to take place, so it’s actually a lot more sophisticated than you might imagine, and very well thought out.

Larry Jordan: Oh, I’m sure it is. It’s like broadcasting a network television show to a screen.

Mike Horton: The thing that blows me away when you go to these outdoor sporting events and you look at these giant screens that are out there in the daylight, in the sunshine – how do you deal with that sunlight? Because I can always see the image and I can see it perfectly clear.

Keith Hanak: The technology now is such that you can achieve brightness levels that, frankly, are more than sufficient for daytime viewing and far too bright for nighttime viewing, so what’s actually happening is at night you really have to turn it down or you’ll blind the drivers.

Mike Horton: Wow, there’s a guy turning it down. That’s really cool.

Larry Jordan: Keith, I want to shift gears to a different project, one that you just completed, which was for the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. Tell me about this one.

Keith Hanak: This one was certainly a lot of fun. It was actually a very important project for Panasonic – we just relocated our headquarters into Newark, New Jersey – and we actually sat down with the folks from the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and looked at some of the objectives that they had in terms of being able to provide better services to their customers and came up with a whole list of actions that we mutually executed that we think are going to allow them to provide a lot better support to their clients now and in the future.

Keith Hanak: It wasn’t something where we came in and opened up our catalog and said, “Pick some parts here.” In their kind of facility, it’s a spectacular location and they’ve got a bunch of different spaces that are used for meetings, so the key there was connectivity and flexibility and we obviously added a lot of interfaces, a lot of internal fiber, additional cameras and we created some support acts that allow them to support different locations. Obviously signage and some of the visual elements are extremely important and I think in the end they’re going to have a facility that better serves their customers’ needs and their needs as they look to the future. It was a very collaborative project with the folks from NJPAC.

Larry Jordan: Let’s get specific. Tell me how big the job was. What kind of gear did you put in? Was it just digital signage? What did you install?

Keith Hanak: We actually started off with a lot of infrastructure, so we did a lot of the HD infrastructure, brand new cabling, a bunch of new interaction points for cameras that they would need for special events, certainly upgraded all the cameras and all of the camera interfaces all the way back from the control room to the key elements within the presentation areas. They had a bunch of stuff that they were doing that was temporary – temporary camera cables, temporary this and that – so the production… was very high.

Keith Hanak: All of that is now permanent and then we created what we call portable fly pack systems that we could move around to all of these new connection points so that they had basically several production systems in a box that they can move around to wherever the need is within that facility. It was a combination of infrastructure, a lot of image capturing equipment and then portable purpose-built production systems that allow them to do many of the same things we just talked about at the speedway.

Larry Jordan: There are a lot of system integrators out there. What was it that Panasonic offered that they felt was the reasons for going with you?

Mike Horton: Are there a lot, though? There’s Panasonic, there’s Mitsubishi and maybe a couple more. Are there a lot of them or what?

Keith Hanak: Where we like to think we’re a little bit different is that we have a lot of the advantages of being a great manufacturer, so we get the advantage of the fact that we have a great toolkit to work from, which is the Panasonic product set, which is very strong in broadcast and security and obviously I think everybody knows about our displays, so we have that advantage and then I think the rest of it is cultural. You’ve got to have the right folks, the right team and the right mindset where you go into work with the customers, in this case NJPAC, in a very collaborative way and, as I said, we weren’t trying to open up the catalog and sell it, we were really trying to apply the skills that we have from an engineering and design perspective to the business problem that was in front of them.

Keith Hanak: You need to do those things within a budget and be able to provide value back to customers and be able to do that in a way that makes sense to them and obviously to our company as well. In this particular case, it was very special because we’re new neighbors and much of the Panasonic equipment was provided by Panasonic at no charge and so it was a very important project to us because now we have a nice demo site in downtown Newark and I think they’re very happy.

Larry Jordan: I can just imagine. How big a crew and how long did the installation take?

Keith Hanak: This whole process has gone on, in terms of the evaluation with the folks at NJPAC, for probably more than a year. One of the things I will tell you is our initial thoughts were we were going to do something that was like a production facility for a TV station. As we dug into what the potential problems were and what their clients wanted, it turned out that where we started and where we ended up were very different.

Keith Hanak: What we ended up doing throughout the course of this is we probably went through and designed it two or three times until we got it right and then what we ended up with, I think, is what everybody believed to be the best approach to solving the problem and I think in the end allows us to scale and add on and meet future needs pretty gracefully from this point forward.

Larry Jordan: What was the biggest challenge in putting this together?

Keith Hanak: I think probably one of the biggest challenges for both them and us was that our initial vision was that it was going to be something that was fairly contained. We had an initial vision that it was going to be a production facility directly in the main area where they do presentations at the Performing Arts Center, and it ended up being a facility wide enhancement in terms of the infrastructure. It kind of grew tentacles, if you know what I’m saying, so it became pretty broad in the scope and scale and its reach in terms of the work that we did.

Larry Jordan: I was just reflecting, both at the Churchill Downs racetrack and for New Jersey, digital signage is a key part of what you’re putting together. Do cinematographers or videographers need to shoot or expose differently to have stuff look good on digital signage? Or do they just treat it like a television set?

Keith Hanak: I think it’s very much dependent upon the application. We’ve certainly had signage that’s not in the typical aspect ratio and it’s kind of odd because you see cinematographers who are filming sideways on the cameras, and that’s obviously always good to see, so I would say it depends on the content and the requirement that you’re dealing with.

Keith Hanak: But those things are generally pretty well thought through as we engage on these sorts of projects, so I think the content is key, so all of these things that we talked about in terms of signage and display technology, it’s an important element but it’s just the power and I think the content is what brings these things to life and keeps people interested and draws them to the display. The best stuff is done specifically custom for the application.

Larry Jordan: We used to have to worry with digital signage about smear and lag and just the fact that the signs couldn’t keep up with fast movement. Is that a thing of the past?

Keith Hanak: I think that the refresh rates have got to the point where it’s actually much easier. Compression technology also means that the files and the information you’re moving around is further compressed and I think it’s a very manageable problem in today’s world.

Mike Horton: I want to make sure that the viewers who are watching this get a chance to look at your website, especially for the viewers here in Los Angeles. If you go to a Lakers game or a Clippers game or a Kings game, you’ve got one of your big displays right there at the Staple Center.

Keith Hanak: Yes, and that’s one that we’re very proud of. That’s a great venue, not just the Staple Center, but the area around there, LA Live…

Mike Horton: Oh, you’ve got some of your displays at LA Live too?

Keith Hanak: Absolutely. In fact, at LA Live many of the displays that are out there are for hanging off the JW Marriott and so forth, those are also Panasonic displays. We’ve done not just the video board, but the control room at the Staple Center and it’s a great venue to go see an event. That video board we called the 4HD. I think that was one of the first center-hung video boards. One of the unique and distinguishing features on that is that this displays on the underside of the board.

Mike Horton: Yes, absolutely. Hopefully you’ll do the NFL stadium if it ever gets to LA.

Larry Jordan: Where can people go on the web to learn more about you and the products your team creates?

Keith Hanak: If you happen to be on the Panasonic website, we’re under Panasonic Solutions and we have a lot of our product profiles; and obviously while you’re there, there’s also a tremendous number of great products and other solutions… inside the company. Take a look at that.

Larry Jordan: Keith, thank you. That’s the panasonic.com website. The web address is on your screen. Keith Hanak is the VP of A/V Solutions at Panasonic. Keith, thanks for joining us today.

Mike Horton: Thanks, Keith.

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Larry Jordan: Dan Kneece started filming motion pictures at age 13, when his mother bought him a Super 8 camera. In 1979, while finishing his Masters in Media Arts at the University of South Carolina, Dan learned Steadicam from its originator, Garrett Brown, which led to a 28 year career as a Steadicam operator and ongoing work with director David Lynch on films such as ‘Blue Velvet’, ‘Wild at Heart’ and ‘Mulholland Drive.’ Hello, Dan, welcome.

Dan Kneece: Hello, Larry.

Mike Horton: Hi, Dan.

Larry Jordan: We are glad to have you with us. We could probably talk to you for hours just about the films you worked on, but to start what got you hooked on cameras? We’re having a little bit of break-up, the mic is cutting in and out, we can hear about every other word.

Dan Kneece: Oh, ok.

Mike Horton: It’s usually a bandwidth issue on that end.

Larry Jordan: Hang on one second, Dan, we’re going to try to tweak this.

Mike Horton: Hey, Dan, do you have any apps running in the background?

Dan Kneece: Yes, let me see if I can…

Mike Horton: Yes, see if you can close them out to give us a little more bandwidth.

Dan Kneece: Yes, let me see.

Mike Horton: And, by the way, while you’re doing that, this is my Garrett Brown story. I run this local user group here in Los Angeles and he came to demo for us. He had that little Steadicam, I forget what it’s called, but he ended up selling it to Tiffen but he was demonstrating that thing. He’s one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met in my life. He’s extraordinary, and a lot of people don’t remember, he did a lot of radio commercials back in the ‘80s, as well as developing the Steadicam and he’s a fascinating guy.

Dan Kneece: He’s the voice of Molson Golden.

Mike Horton: Right, that’s what it was, yes. He was terrific, a really great guy and obviously a master at what he invented.

Larry Jordan: Dan, what first caught your attention about the Steadicam and when was that?

Dan Kneece: I learned Steadicam in 1982 from Garrett. I took a workshop at Image Devices in Miami – I was living in South Carolina at the time, where I grew up – and I’d been enamored with it and I went there and I saw the first time Garrett picked it up, he let go of it and just hung it on an arm like voodoo, like it was floating up in the air, and I said, “That’s a really cool thing. I really am glad I’m learning how to do that,” and once I did that, then I went back to South Carolina and I started working in the North Carolina film business and I was the only one there at the time in that area doing Steadicam and so I started working… studios in Shelby, North Carolina and we’d make blow them up and shoot them up movies.

Dan Kneece: We’d get a… bombs and we’d shoot a person. We wouldn’t shoot them once, we’d shoot them a hundred times, we’d put a hundred hits on their chest and shoot them with a submachine gun and they’d just die in slow motion for half an hour. I did about six movies for Earl and then I got a chance to work on this movie, ‘Blue Velvet.’ I had been hitting up Dino… studio in Wilmington, North Carolina. They tried to hire me on a few films and then they said, “Well, we’ve got this movie, ‘Blue Velvet’ if you want to do it?” and I said, “Sure, I’ll do it,” and then I got there and I looked at the call sheet and I said, “Who’s directing this?” and they said, “David Lynch,.”

Dan Kneece: My buddies and I had seen ‘Dune’ and we thought ‘Dune’ was the greatest thing and had always said if there’s anybody in the business we can work with, we’d love to work with David Lynch, and there I was working with David Lynch. I couldn’t sleep all night.

Mike Horton: He’d done ‘Elephant Man’ by that time, too, which wasn’t a slacker movie either, so he had a pretty good rep.

Dan Kneece: Yes, yes. He’d done ‘Elephant Man’, he’d done ‘Eraserhead’; and ‘Elephant Man’ is a wonderful movie if you’ve ever seen that. That’s a great film, wonderfully done. And so I did ‘Blue Velvet’ with him, I only did a few shots on it, but that led to an ongoing career where I’ve done now ‘Blue Velvet’, ‘Wild at Heart’, ‘Twin Peaks’: ‘Fire Walk With Me’, ‘Lost Highway’, ‘Mulholland Drive’ and some commercial work and stuff for the internet and things like that, and he’s getting ready to do nine more episodes of ‘Twin Peaks’ now.

Mike Horton: Yes, and then we just read that maybe not, there’s something happening that it may not be happening, I don’t know.

Dan Kneece: I know of a couple of things online, but I don’t really put too much faith in that at all.

Mike Horton: Yes, neither do I. So we figure you know, so what’s the answer? Is it going to happen or not?

Dan Kneece: I wish I had an answer for you. All I’ve done is said I would like to do them, and then if they happen maybe I’ll get a chance. That’s what I’m hoping.

Larry Jordan: Dan, let’s put your DP hat on for a second. How would you describe the collaborative process between the DP and the director, maybe between you and Mr. Lynch, but also between you and other directors? How do you work out that teamwork?

Dan Kneece: Different directors are different. Some are very technical and want to do a lot with the technology, some only want to work with the actors and some are good at both things. People are individuals, so you have to try to figure out how you can relate to this new person. I’ve had a lot of experience as an operator being in the inner circle with the DP and the director and us planning what we’re going to do together, so it’s just an extension of that really.

Mike Horton: I was an actor a long time ago, back in a past life. Steadicam operators, between a good one and a not so good one, the good ones can always anticipate an actor’s move and even though you’ve blocked it out and you’ve still got marks to hit and everything like that, that Steadicam operator can anticipate the actor is the Steadicam operator who gets all the work, and hopefully you’re one of those guys because that makes a big difference.

Dan Kneece: Yes, I did Steadicam for 28 years. I don’t do it any more, I figured 28 years was long enough.

Mike Horton: Your back is hurting you, yes.

Dan Kneece: Carrying 100 pounds for 18 hours a day for 28 years, you’re kind of ready to try something different after a while. But I was a very good Steadicam operator and I was in demand. In ’96, I turned down six jobs for every job I took.

Larry Jordan: What makes for a good Steadicam operator? What tips do you have to be successful?

Dan Kneece: You have to be a professional and you have to have an eye.

Mike Horton: Yes, that eye, it’s huge.

Dan Kneece: It really is, and you have to interpret things. I teach at a lot of universities, I go around and lecture at AFI and UCSB and the University of South Carolina, where I went to school, and other universities around, and I tell the students that our job is two percent what they hire us to do and 98 percent people skills, because you have to be a bit of a psychiatrist to really pull this job off.

Dan Kneece: If you’ve got a day job, you’ve got a couple of hours to figure out everybody on the set, who does what, what makes them work and how to get your job done amongst all these personalities. If you’re on a longer job, you have a couple of days or else you’re out of there. You really have to figure all that out.

Mike Horton: Yes, get along with people.

Dan Kneece: You do, and if the director wants you to do something, sometimes he’ll tell you, “I want you to do this,” but it’s really not what they want you to do. They want you to do something completely different but they describe it that way.

Mike Horton: That’s where interpretation comes in, right.

Larry Jordan: Oh man.

Dan Kneece: Yes, you have to figure out what they really want and then give them that. If you can do that, you’ll be working a lot.

Mike Horton: Yes, good.

Larry Jordan: This is one of those things where we’ve just barely got ourselves started talking and I need to invite you back, because there are so many stories and how this whole technology piece works and I think you’re exactly right when you talk about people skills. For people who want to learn more about you, where can they go on the web?

Dan Kneece: I’m on LinkedIn, also my website is www.dankneece.com.

Larry Jordan: That’s dankneece.com and the Dan Kneece himself is the face you see on the screen. Dan, thanks for joining us today.

Mike Horton: Thanks, Dan.

Larry Jordan: Bye bye.

Dan Kneece: Thank you.

Larry Jordan: Michael, your mic is in the way. Michael, people are working. You can dress him up but you can’t take him anywhere. Ian Cohen is a songwriter and composer with over 30 years’ experience writing, arranging and recording original music. Ian’s an avid recording artists, working comfortably in several genres and currently recording tracks with touring artists Mick Mahan and Tony Pia. Tonight, he talks about what it takes to write songs and compose music. Ian, it’s a delight to have you with us, thanks for being here.

Ian Cohen: Thank you very much for having me.

Larry Jordan: What inspired you to start playing music all those many years ago?

Ian Cohen: Well, way back when, when I was about four or five, my dad had this huge record collection, Django, Dave Brubeck, classical, all the different genres, The Beatles, all the pop artists, and literally every day after school I’d come home, put my headphones on and spend hours and hours listening to all of these great musicians, artists and songwriters and that went on for three or four years.

Ian Cohen: I remember distinctly that I got pretty inspired by John Denver – it’s kind of a funny story. I was listening to a lot of different artists and my parents were kind of on the B Plan with the lower middle class, so whenever I wanted to get something for a holiday, I wanted my big wheel, I never got that; I wanted my racetrack, never got that.

Mike Horton: You got a John Denver album?

Ian Cohen: No, I wanted the train set, all those things, K-Mart special, blue light would go off, and I remember distinctly everything was, “No.” But then we were walking through the mall in Schaumberg and I looked up on the wall in Music Land and I saw a guitar and I kind of pointed in there, I said, “Can I get a guitar?” and they dragged me right in there and it was like a $40 cheap guitar and that’s when I started.

Mike Horton: Electric or acoustic?

Ian Cohen: It was acoustic and I got…

Larry Jordan: But you were doing more than playing music. If I remember, when you were 16, you were inventing as well. What did you invent?

Ian Cohen: Yes, as I progressed I was really focused on innovation and writing my own book, so I didn’t want to emulate, I didn’t want to copy other people’s riffs. It was very important to me to actually be an original artist.

Mike Horton: At age 16, you decided that?

Ian Cohen: Well, I was doing that when I first started with the electric around 12 years old.

Mike Horton: Oh Lord.

Ian Cohen: And so what happened was I came home from a party – I probably shouldn’t say that because my family might be listening – but I came home from a party and was staring at my guitars and I started hearing these different sounds. I wasn’t hearing voices, I was hearing sounds, and I was looking at my guitars and these guitars, I used to sleep with them, I used to put them in bed with me and everything and I was just completely focused on music.

Ian Cohen: I thought, “What if I just saw the ridge in half on one of my guitars?” and I literally sawed it in half. I was in shop in school and I sawed it in half and I made two arms. That was the original idea and my mom actually worked as a patent legal secretary for Hewlett Packard and Xerox and at Xerox Park, when I was 13, I played on the Alto computer, I was right there in the middle of all this innovation.

Mike Horton: First of all, I can’t picture this. You have two arms, but we’re still talking about six strings?

Ian Cohen: Yes, yes, I took an electric guitar…

Mike Horton: Not 12 strings, six strings with two arms.

Ian Cohen: Right, so what the object was, was that if you were playing a song, everybody was always using it for all this crazy pyrotechnic guitar stuff and I wanted to kind of have a way to be able to incorporate it in songs, to subtly put it in there so it more instead of being completely a lead type of accent or color, you wanted to actually use it within your songwriting.

Ian Cohen: I had the idea and I drew a picture of it and did the prototype and then I met the patent legal guys, the major attorneys that also had science engineering degrees and they said go back, spend two weeks and brainstorm every possible way you could do this, and I came back with non-adjacent strings, I could divide up all the strings, for any stringed instrument. I could selectively control separate sets of strings simultaneously, so that was my invention and I built prototypes and I still to this day prefer my original idea, which is just to have the two arms.

Ian Cohen: I wrote the patent, I did all the drawings, I did drafting in high school so I was also very much involved in that, so I was able to do all my drawings. The only thing that the attorney did was right the claims, filed it and in 1993 the patent issued.

Larry Jordan: Mike, I don’t want to make you feel bad, but he was 16 when that happened.

Mike Horton: Yes, this was like Mozart doing stuff at five.

Ian Cohen: Well, no, no, no. The idea, the first time I thought of it, was 16. I filed a non-disclosure, so that way you do drawings, it’s not a formal patent, but what it does is if there’s an interference in the Patent Office, then it leapfrogs whoever filed. But by the time I had written it, I wrote the patent probably when I was about 18, I took other patents that were in the prior art and edited them and then constructed in a way that…

Mike Horton: Did this whole invention, this object, this double armed guitar become a muse to your music?

Ian Cohen: Yes. I’ve used it for years and actually, when I’m playing it, it feels like I’m in the new frontier. There’s not really an instruction manual for it. You’re playing it and there’s nobody that’s said, “Hey, this is how you use this thing,” so when you’re doing it, you’re actually doing something that’s new and it feels really amazing.

Ian Cohen: The problem is that people don’t really adapt new ideas or innovations quickly. There’s a cycle and so people are really focusing on traditional ideas. Innovators and people that come up with new things are not really always taken seriously, which isn’t what happened with my case.

Larry Jordan: Well, let’s shift gears and talk about your music, otherwise Mike, as we know, is a deep lover of technology and nothing except blinking lights gets his attention, which is just not true at all.

Mike Horton: There’s nothing happening here.

Larry Jordan: Tell me about your songwriting process. How do you go about it? You’ve written songs, you’ve scored films and you’ve scored commercials. Let’s start with songs. Do you start with the words? Do you start with the music? Or does it all just appear full blown in your head?

Ian Cohen: Usually what happens is I’m playing chords. Actually, let’s go back. It usually starts with something that’s affected you emotionally, something that’s happened in your life that causes you to say, “This has really affected me intensely,” and you express yourself. It’s almost like therapy, you start to think about what happened and the only way to really get it out is just to start to throw it out and the story happens simultaneously.

Ian Cohen: Usually, I’m playing acoustic guitar and the lyrics are flowing, almost in an improv manner, so everything is coming out and then I’m recording everything all the time, I’ve been recording everything since I was 14…

Larry Jordan: So you’re not taking notes, you’re just doing a recording?

Ian Cohen: I’m usually doing a recording unless I’m not near a recording device. Then I’ll have to work the part over and over until I remember it and then I’ll write it down really fast. But when the song seeds happen, they happen really quickly and they’re a fleeting moment, so if they’re not recorded it’s hard to recapture them or remember the melody and remember how it happened.

Ian Cohen: It’s generally starting off with acoustic guitar, could be sitting in any location – on the beach like when I lived in Hawaii or just anything that strikes you or you had a heartbreak in your life or you have something really positive happen in your life and then you end up starting to write about it and the lyrics flow, and then you start to evolve the song.

Ian Cohen: The song isn’t always pure, usually it’s not pure, it’s not a solid song. You’re throwing a lot of ideas around, so you’ve got to pick through and find them and then the song evolves.

Mike Horton: Even when you were 12 years old, you were talking about how you wanted to be completely different, you didn’t want to have the same riffs, you didn’t want to have the same chords. That’s really, really hard to do and that’s putting a lot of pressure on yourself to come up with that organic thing that’s happening, whether it be that heartbreak or whatever. You’re just saying, “It’s got to be completely different.” How does that stop you from being creative? Or does it stop you from being creative?

Ian Cohen: Well, this is the problem, there’s a lot of adversity, from my standpoint, in your life when people all want you to play cover music. They want to hear the popular music.

Mike Horton: Well, you’ve got to pay the bills too.

Ian Cohen: Right, you’ve got to pay the bills or, in my case, I’ve had a day job, like a lot of musicians have had, and they build up whatever career they might have around it. But the core is that you just have to maintain your integrity, you have to keep on fighting all of the voices that come in and say that you have to play what’s popular, yet you have to write songs that people relate to.

Ian Cohen: But if you’re writing something about something that happened, most people relate already because they’ve gone through that emotion in their life at some point, so you’ve just got to fight off all of the adversity.

Mike Horton: If you wanted to, could you write a hit song in the next hour or two? Just by what’s popular out there right now?

Ian Cohen: Well, that’s a loaded question.

Mike Horton: I know.

Ian Cohen: The definition of a hit song, what was a hit…

Larry Jordan: Well, let’s flip the question. How long does it take to write a song?

Ian Cohen: Sometimes a song is evolved over years, sometimes the first song seeds happen and then they happen really quickly. In the last two weeks, I’ve written a song called ‘Just One Win,’ that’s the chorus – Just One Win is kind of the melody of it and I start off with a melody and a seed and then I work the lyrics and then I have the idea of what it was about.

Ian Cohen: That’s taken a couple of weeks, written and recorded on the guitar and then with a voice, but I can go back and start building it, which is where Mick and Tony come in, because then I’ll start building up the composition, the arrangement, and I’ll lay down bass lines and I’ll do drum loops with the different parts and changes within. There’s no substitute for a guy like Tony Pia, who is a top notch touring professional with the Doobie Brothers and is with Brian Setzer and all kinds of other people, or Mick Mahan who tours with Pat Benatar.

Ian Cohen: These are friends of mine, so when they come off their tours, I have this battery of material. The question is how long does it take to write a hit song? I don’t have a hit song. I think in my repertoire I might, I don’t know, it’s hard to predict. You can’t really judge for yourself what is going to be a hit. Most people don’t know and people who write can try it in a way that’s contrived, but I don’t think that that’s really the right way to do it. I think it just has to be from the heart and if it happens to strike a chord…

Mike Horton: Do you like what’s popular right now?

Ian Cohen: Sure, yes. There’s a lot of material out there that’s phenomenal. You listen to the songwriting, the melodies, the lyricism, it’s phenomenal, so yes I do.

Mike Horton: I’m talking about what’s popular on the radio.

Ian Cohen: Yes. No, I like some of that, sure, but…

Mike Horton: …critically popular.

Ian Cohen: No, I’m trying to be open minded so some of it I like, some of it I don’t. Some of it, I think, might be a little overproduced, but some of it I think is really raw, some things that strike me. What I’m looking for when I’m listening is an emotional movement.

Larry Jordan: But that’s true for songwriting. Is it also true for the films that you compose for? Is there a difference between composing for a film and composing a song? The song is built on an emotional hook. Is there still storytelling with film composition as well?

Ian Cohen: Sure, yes. With the film, it is different because there are hits, there are parts in each segment of film that you have to score to in a way, there’s a vibe to it and you have to capture it. You have to look at each cue and look at the way the vibe of that is and if there’s a certain emotion that’s being portrayed, if it’s comedy or drama, whatever it is, you have to really try to key into the emotional effect.

Ian Cohen: Let’s just say we’re people that go watch a movie – what moves you or what causes you to react? When you’re composing, you’re trying to connect with that film and that scene in a way that is heartfelt and that the people that are watching it are drawn in more to it and it’s a whole movement. When I watch a movie, sometimes I’ll get the chills or chicken skin, I call it the chill factor.

Ian Cohen: That’s the art of the film composing, how you are able to match the music for whatever the scene is. With the advertising, it’s a little bit different because it has to be more subtle, it can’t be overpowering. Sometimes the music in a film could be maybe a little bit more predominant.

Mike Horton: A little bit more, because you’ve got 30 seconds to get that through.

Ian Cohen: That’s it, right, 30 seconds and actually writing 30 seconds of music is extremely difficult because it has to have a build up and end and stop at a certain point and there are going to be a lot of things happening within that whole thing, so when I do stuff it’s on spec most of the time, where somebody says I got the film and then I score to it.

Ian Cohen: I’ll give you an example, on my website I have a sample where there’s an Exxon commercial and in there, I was watching it, and they were talking about chemistry and Exxon, and how they’re trying to affect the environment in a positive manner, and so I’m watching these little cells run across the screen and I’m thinking, “How am I going to get that to sound chemical and how am I going to get it to sound like something that you would find in a lab?” Another one was a Betty White one where it’s a Snickers commercial and she’s running around, it’s got to be comical and there’s…

Mike Horton: Talk about opposite ends of the spectrum. Exxon and Betty White.

Ian Cohen: Yes, then on my site too there’s an iPod one where you look at the screen and there’s a dance troupe on there, so you’ve got to come up with a groove, you’ve got to look at the screen where there’s on music and you look at it and you say, “Ok, how am I going to do that?”

Mike Horton: We’ve got to get to this question from Caesar.

Larry Jordan: Caesar’s asking in our live chat, what music software do you use? How do you compose?

Ian Cohen: I use a combination of several different programs. I use Sebelius…

Mike Horton: Oh, cool.

Ian Cohen: …Logic and Pro Tools. Now, what I do normally, is it a film composing question?

Larry Jordan: Film or video, yes.

Ian Cohen: Ok, film or video, ok. So songwriting would be, I would say, pretty much writing the framework of everything in Logic and then move it over to Pro Tools for the…

Larry Jordan: For the mix.

Ian Cohen: Right, for the mixing and also the power of the plug-ins, the different things that I use, and other things in there, the sound samples. But as far as composing goes, I link up Sebelius with Logic, or I can export a midi file. You’ve composed it, you’ve taken the instruments – let’s say you have ten or 12 pieces and you’ve orchestrated the whole thing – and then what I do is bring the midi file in and voice it and I use all of the sound samples in Logic to voice it because the instruments that are in Sibelius are crappy.

Larry Jordan: So you’re using Sibelius to capture the midi and then you’re doing the voicing and texturing in Logic.

Ian Cohen: Well, to score it, so if you look in Sibelius, you’ll have all the staves, you can call it whatever instruments you want – violin, cello, flute, there’s a myriad, percussion, timpani, every instrument known to man is in there – and then what you do is, if you’re scoring, you have the film and you can open it up inside Sibelius and first you start to grunt and you’re looking at the film and you’re just trying to figure it out, you just make all kinds of noises and you try to figure out how to actually capture your interpretation of it, and then you put hits in.

Ian Cohen: You can also change the tempo in there. Let’s say it’s a one minute cue. In there, you can have 120 beats per minute, you can even have a different key signature, different time signature, and then you can all of a sudden have it shift to a different tempo, different time signature, because if it changes in the scene then you want to try and shift it around.

Mike Horton: I think that’s cheating.

Larry Jordan: You just be quiet.

Mike Horton: It is.

Larry Jordan: …listen to your music.

Ian Cohen: Let me give you an example. The phenomenal thing about Sibelius is then you can print out all the sheet music.

Mike Horton: Oh gosh.

Ian Cohen: No, but then you have an orchestra and you bring it in there, I’ve done this several times, and each instrument has…

Larry Jordan: You’ve got the score.

Ian Cohen: You’ve got the score, each player takes it and you get up and conduct it or do whatever, and they’re all playing it.

Mike Horton: Think what Leonard Bernstein could have done with that in the ‘50s. We’ve only got 30 seconds, but quickly, you’re a long time Logic user and this is what I always ask Logic people – do you hate Logic 10 or like it?

Ian Cohen: I’m not even using it.

Mike Horton: Yes, I knew you, ok. So you’ve not even gone to Logic 10 yet.

Ian Cohen: No, because I’m actually more focused in on Pro Tools mainly because of the card system with the HD.

Larry Jordan: Ian, where can we go on the web to learn more about your music?

Ian Cohen: Iancohenmusic.com.

Mike Horton: Easy.

Ian Cohen: Pretty self-explanatory.

Larry Jordan: That’s iancohenmusic.com. Ian, thanks for joining us today.

Mike Horton: Yes, it was good fun.

Ian Cohen: Thank you. Thank you so much.

Larry Jordan: Take care.

Ian Cohen: I really appreciate it.

Larry Jordan: You know, Michael, it is always fun to listen to the creative process and how the creative process works and how people create music or commercials or digital signage.

Mike Horton: Have you ever created music, Larry?

Larry Jordan: I did once. I did one piece of music.

Mike Horton: Really?

Larry Jordan: It really came out well and I said, “I am resting on my laurels, that’s as far as I’m going to go.” How about yourself?

Mike Horton: No.

Larry Jordan: Not even singing in the shower?

Mike Horton: I can sing in the shower. But, no, music, no. I was one of those kids who was bullied early because I played the accordion.

Larry Jordan: Are you serious?

Mike Horton: I did, I played the accordion when I was a kid. That was the instrument I chose.

Larry Jordan: I played baritone.

Mike Horton: My parents said, “Choose an instrument.” I chose the accordion.

Larry Jordan: You and Lawrence Welk.

Mike Horton: So I was playing polka, for God’s sakes. It was just… I look back and what was I thinking? Not the guitar, not the piano, the accordion.

Larry Jordan: Well, at least you could always play it regardless of where you were. It’s a portable instrument.

Mike Horton: It made me who I am today, a co-host on The Digital Production Buzz.

Larry Jordan: I prefer to think of it as a retired actor with a music career to look back on with great pride.

Mike Horton: Ok. An accordion player, oh my God.

Larry Jordan: I’d love to see you in shorts and polka outfit doing the accordion. It would be worth watching.

Mike Horton: I might post a picture one of these days.

Larry Jordan: I want to thank our guests this week: Keith Hanak is the Vice President for the A/V Solutions Group at the Panasonic Enterprise Solutions Company; Dan Kneece, Director of Photography and Steadicam operator; and Ian Cohen, songwriter and composer.

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, all online and all available.

Larry Jordan: You can visit 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. If you want to talk to Mike, you can email us at information@digitalproductionbuzz.com, but we will question your sanity.

Larry Jordan: Our producer is Cirina Catania. Our engineering team is lead by Megan Paulos…

Mike Horton: If you want to learn the accordion, email me at michaelh.

Larry Jordan: …and includes Alexia Chalida, Ed Goyler, Keegan Guy, Lindsay Luebbert and Brianna Murphy. On behalf of Mike Horton, the accordion guy, 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 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

March 12, 2015

[Transcripts provided by Take 1 Transcription]

 

(Click here to listen to this show.)

 
HOSTS

Larry Jordan

Michael Horton

GUESTS

Justin Thomson, Founder, Ashridge Films

Ned Soltz, Contributing Editor, Digital Video Magazine, Ned Soltz Inc.

Jeff Gerrard, Owner, Jeff Gerrard Casting

===

Voiceover: The Digital Production Buzz is brought to you 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.

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. Hi, my name is Larry Jordan and joining us is our co-host, the ebullient, ever affable and handsome Mr. Mike Horton.

Mike Horton: The ebullient?

Larry Jordan: Ebullient.

Mike Horton: Ebullient?

Larry Jordan: I had to look the word up, but it applied to you.

Mike Horton: Wait a minute, let me look the word up. What does that mean? Holy cow, it means that?

Larry Jordan: It means cheerful and energetic and bubbling over with enthusiasm.

Mike Horton: You say you can never make me smile. I’m smiling, Larry. I’m ebullient.

Larry Jordan: Yes, you are amazing.

Mike Horton: It is Ebullient Thursday.

Larry Jordan: And nobody does ebulliency better than you do.

Mike Horton: Thank you.

Larry Jordan: We have an acting theme, watching Mike smile, for this evening. We start our program tonight with Justin Thomson. He’s an actor, a filmmaker and Founder of Ashridge Films, with more than 20 years of acting experience especially in improv. Recently, Justin moved from London to LA and tonight we want to talk with him about acting and the business of acting.

Larry Jordan: Then Ned Soltz joins us with his thoughts on two new cameras, one from Sony and the new CION from AJA. Ned is the Contributing Editor for Digital Video magazine, a moderator on 2-Pop and Creative Cow forums and a consultant on all things related to digital video.

Mike Horton: And a good friend of mine.

Larry Jordan: And a good friend of mine.

Mike Horton: Really? Well, a better friend of mine. We talk daily. Right, Ned?

Larry Jordan: Finally, if you’ve seen Bud Light’s ‘I love you, man’ commercials, you’ve seen the work of Jeff Gerrard, the owner of Jeff Gerrard casting. Jeff and his team have found just the right actors for feature films and over 3,500 television commercials, of which over 1,000 featured Mike himself.

Mike Horton: I wonder if Jeff remembers me.

Larry Jordan: We will find out.

Mike Horton: Because I probably did a thousand commercials for Jeff. Jeff, do you remember me? Well, we’ll find out.

Larry Jordan: Tonight, Jeff shares his thoughts on what it takes for successful casting sessions; and The Buzz, by the way, is going to NAB for our seventh year of coverage of our industry’s biggest event.

Mike Horton: Are you going to interview me, by the way?

Larry Jordan: We are not interviewing you.

Mike Horton: You didn’t interview me last year.

Larry Jordan: No, we’re interviewing industry leaders.

Mike Horton: Oh, that’s right, sorry. I could update my resume.

Larry Jordan: We’re going to have more than ten hours of programming over four days. Mike, are you going to NAB?

Mike Horton: I am going to NAB.

Larry Jordan: What are you going to be doing?

Mike Horton: I’ll be doing the Supermeet, which makes me an industry leader, which you should interview.

Larry Jordan: I should interview you?

Mike Horton: You should interview me. You should interview me Monday morning, so we can get it out right there and get a lot of people to the Supermeet on Tuesday night.

Larry Jordan: Be careful what you ask for, because we have an opening on our first very show Monday morning. We may book you for it.

Mike Horton: Really?

Larry Jordan: Yes.

Mike Horton: Oh, really?

Larry Jordan: Yes.

Mike Horton: Well then, do me. Oh no, wait a minute, I’m at the Blackmagic Design press conference, which you should be at too.

Larry Jordan: I will be, except…

Mike Horton: Well then you could do it after that.

Larry Jordan: What’s the Supermeet going to be? Have you published the agenda yet?

Mike Horton: Just call, get your price right now and book me.

Larry Jordan: Have you published the agenda for Supermeet yet?

Mike Horton: Not yet. No, we know who’s going to be on it, we don’t know what they’re doing. They won’t tell us.

Larry Jordan: Have you found a location?

Mike Horton: Yes. Riviera Hotel, which will be imploded in August of 2015.

Larry Jordan: Just after you leave it, actually.

Mike Horton: Right after. They’re closing the doors two weeks after we leave.

Larry Jordan: Remember to check our show transcripts, located on each show page, courtesy of Take 1 Transcription. You can learn more at take1.tv. Visit with us on Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com; and on Twitter, @DPBuZZ, and subscribe to our free weekly show newsletter at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Mike and I will be back with Justin Thomson right after this.

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

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

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

Larry Jordan: Justin Thomson is an actor, a filmmaker and a Founder of Ashridge Films, with over 20 years of acting experience. Recently, he moved from London to LA and tonight we want to talk with him about the craft and business of acting. Welcome, Justin, good to have you with us.

Justin Thomson: It’s excellent to be here, thank you.

Mike Horton: Welcome. 20 years, wait a minute. 20 years, that makes you, what? You started when you were two?

Justin Thomson: I started when I was nine.

Mike Horton: Ah.

Justin Thomson: Yes.

Larry Jordan: So what got you started in acting?

Justin Thomson: Two things. Mainly I found out that I got to kiss girls and so I was sold, I was going to be all over that.

Larry Jordan: As a nine year old? I find that very hard to believe.

Mike Horton: Well, he was in London.

Justin Thomson: Well, I was early. German, we develop early, yes.

Larry Jordan: So what are some of the projects you’ve worked on?

Justin Thomson: I did a lot of voiceover when I was a kid, dubbing films. I did ‘Independence Day’, ‘Stargate’, tons of stuff like that. Then I did a few guest appearances on TV series. I even played Donald Trump on ‘Quantum Leap’. That was probably one of my greatest…

Larry Jordan: Whoa!

Mike Horton: You played Donald Trump?

Justin Thomson: I played a young Donald Trump.

Mike Horton: A young Donald Trump?

Justin Thomson: Yes, yes. That was…

Mike Horton: With really bad hair? Because your hair is actually pretty good.

Justin Thomson: What they did is they just cut it from here and then they implanted it into here. I’m really sorry if he’s watching this.

Mike Horton: He’s not.

Larry Jordan: That’s more detail than I really want to know. Thank you.

Justin Thomson: Oh, that’s all right. Yes. No, it was good but it was funny, as a child actor I loved being on set and that was one of the things that inspired me to actually continue in it, because I realized that when you make a film, it’s kind of like a giant canvas with hundreds if not thousands of people all adding their brush stroke to the painting.

Mike Horton: And everyone’s supposedly collaborating.

Justin Thomson: Supposedly, and so I started working basically every single job that I possibly could once I was old enough and I’ve been a PA, I worked as a grip, a gaffer, on sound, I was a cameraman for two years, I traveled around the world. I actually worked with Jeff who’s going to be on the show. Actually, that was one of the things that I learned the most as an actor, by far, was working with Jeff as his assistant.

Mike Horton: Were you able to – because we’re talking about Jeff being a casting director – be in the audition process and watch other actors? You can learn so much from that.

Justin Thomson: I was very, very fortunate. There was a really amazing producer, John Brister, and he was working on a film and he’s always been my mentor and he said, “Justin, as an actor, there’s one thing I want you to do – work in casting and understand it,” because for actors it’s this big mystery, like a black box. You go into the audition, you come out and then you’re totally nervous and you’re like, “Why didn’t I get the job?”

Larry Jordan: So as an actor, what did you learn from that? What piece of advice can you share with other actors?

Justin Thomson: The biggest thing that I can share is realizing that it’s all about persistence. If you love what you do – and you need to love acting in order to do it, that’s why whenever anybody asks me what I do I just tell them I’m a waiter in denial, so true…

Mike Horton: I like that, it’s a good line.

Justin Thomson: But it’s basically very important to understand that there’s a shape that each director and each producer is looking for and usually the best actor doesn’t actually get the job, it’s whoever matches the shape the most and eventually, if you’re persistent and you’re reasonably good enough at your craft, then your shape will come along and then…

Larry Jordan: Now, what do you mean by shape? It’s more than just looks, isn’t it?

Justin Thomson: It’s look, it’s attitude, it’s charisma. But unfortunately a lot of it is based on look because they have something in their mind that they’re picturing.

Mike Horton: Yes, a lot of it doesn’t have to do with you or your performance, which could have been brilliant and more brilliant than the other people, but if you’re not right for the part, you’re not going to get it.

Justin Thomson: Exactly.

Mike Horton: It’s as simple as that.

Justin Thomson: Exactly.

Mike Horton: So don’t take it personally.

Justin Thomson: 100 percent.

Larry Jordan: So what got you interested in improv? You’ve been doing mime work and improv work for a long time. That’s like the ragged edge of acting.

Justin Thomson: It’s a place of convenience for those who aren’t very good at remembering lines. It actually influenced my life very early on. I gave a TED talk on this last year.

Mike Horton: You gave a TED talk?

Justin Thomson: I did, TEDEX.

Mike Horton: Oh but still, that’s pretty cool.

Justin Thomson: Yes, it was very cool.

Mike Horton: So we can look it up? We just Google your name, TED talk and…

Justin Thomson: Go to YouTube and Justin Thomson, TED and you’ll find it.

Mike Horton: I’m going to watch that tonight. I will call you after it’s over, we’ll talk about it.

Justin Thomson: Please do, or you can just hit me up on Tinder, that’s fine, that works too.

Mike Horton: Ok, that’s fine.

Larry Jordan: When you guys are done, let’s just go on with the show here.

Mike Horton: Have you done a TED talk? I mean, he’s done a TED talk. That’s pretty cool. You should do a TED talk.

Larry Jordan: I should.

Justin Thomson: I agree, I agree.

Mike Horton: Me? No.

Larry Jordan: You could talk about coiling cables and codecs.

Mike Horton: I could.

Larry Jordan: But we would probably not listen to it.

Mike Horton: It’s an inside joke.

Larry Jordan: Take charge of this, would you? Because this has just gone off the rails already.

Justin Thomson: So you asked why improvisation has become a big part of my life, and it actually was one I loved it in acting because it forced rapid thinking and there’s one rule in improvisation and that’s never to deny, always say, “Yes, and…” so contribute to whatever the situation is and that, I realized, applies totally in life.

Justin Thomson: If something comes across your path in life, somebody gives you an opportunity, like when John Brister said, “Hey, I’d like you to work with Jeff Gerrard,” instead of me going, “Oh no, you know, I don’t really want to do that. I just really want to be auditioning and doing other things,” I said yes to it and it totally expanded my horizon. When you say yes to things, there are all these opportunities that exist. The second you say no, they disappear. So improv actually influenced my life in a massive way.

Larry Jordan: An interesting thing, as I was reflecting on this, one of the things that I’ve learned in my own directing is that many times drama is not in the person speaking but in the person reacting to the person speaking and improv is all about reacting to external forces.

Justin Thomson: Yes.

Larry Jordan: Is that a true statement?

Justin Thomson: It’s absolutely a true statement. The most important bit of advice that I give to any actor, not just in improvisation, but in theater and stage and in film and television, it’s listening. If you’re too much in your head, you miss every little grain or gift that’s given that might be even a mistake but could be turned into something really amazing, so if you’re too focused on yourself then you’re going to lose the real essence of it. Because that’s what life is, it’s listening and communicating.

Larry Jordan: Meaning that rather than trying to think about what your next line is, think about what’s happening around you?

Justin Thomson: Exactly, and the line will naturally occur because it’s a response, the dialogue has been written as a response, and so it’s intuitively inside of you.

Larry Jordan: Well, who should the actor listen to? Is it other actors or the director or the audience? What are you picking up on?

Justin Thomson: The studio executive, always listen to the studio executive. Whatever he says, they’re great. It’s a collaboration, obviously actors and directors, it’s a dance. I think a bad director is somebody who’s trying to control every moment, saying, “Ok, do this and then do this and do that,” and that’s not how it should be. A good director, I have found, gives waypoints that you should ultimately achieve and how the actor gets there is his choice, but get to that emotion, get to that spot, whatever it is.

Mike Horton: A good director casts well and then pretty much leaves you alone, and trusts you.

Justin Thomson: The best director that I ever worked with was Michael Winterbottom and he’s done some amazing films. His process was basically he would say, “Ok, this is our ultimate destination, where we want to go in the scene.” There’s a lot of improvisation in all of his films and he always stood on the side and he just gave gentle guidance, kind of like being a lighthouse off in the distance so you never lost your way as an actor in the scene. Yes.

Larry Jordan: Well, that speaks to something else. How does an actor learn to trust a director? You’re the one who’s exposed, it’s your face that’s on the screen and yet it’s the director’s vision. That’s a really fine line to walk.

Justin Thomson: I think it happens before the production occurs, depending on the style or what the production is. If you’re doing a student film, obviously you don’t have the luxury of three weeks of prep and rehearsal and reading at the table.

Mike Horton: Rehearsal?

Justin Thomson: Well, yes, exactly.

Mike Horton: Rehearsal? Say that word again.

Justin Thomson: Rehearsal, exactly. But it’s just a dance. I don’t know, it’s like the first time you go on a date. You can never dictate exactly how it’s going to go, but you have to trust in each other that you each have a strong enough vision and points that you can give and take.

Larry Jordan: I was reflecting, this is the third time you’ve been on the show. You were on in 2010 when we were talking about the fact you had just moved to London; then in 2013, we were doing Bestival; in 2014, you’ve abandoned London, come back to LA. What brings you back to LA?

Justin Thomson: It’s March and it’s 80 degrees outside.

Mike Horton: Pilot season.

Justin Thomson: It’s a few different factors. I love London. There’s that saying, “He who is tired of London is tired of life,” but as far as working in front of the camera or just working in film in general, the absolute epicenter is Los Angeles, is California for creativity and for everything. There’s a fantastic work ethic in London. It’s not so unionized, it’s a smaller industry, so once you make friends you’re in and it’s a great place to work, but if you want to really take it to the next level and especially for actors, I think you need to be here.

Mike Horton: Have you found your circle of friends here yet? Or did you just move back and now you’re finding them?

Justin Thomson: You are my friends.

Mike Horton: Ok, good.

Justin Thomson: Both of you.

Larry Jordan: I’m very sorry.

Mike Horton: Well, your circle is very tight right now but hopefully it’ll expand in the next month.

Justin Thomson: That’s all I need.

Mike Horton: You have to live at the right apartment complex too.

Justin Thomson: That’s actually true, and drive the right car.

Mike Horton: And drive the right car.

Larry Jordan: Is there a difference in acting between London and LA?

Justin Thomson: Yes.

Larry Jordan: How so?

Mike Horton: Really?

Justin Thomson: Yes, big time actually.

Mike Horton: I’d love to hear this. All right.

Justin Thomson: Obviously, theater, you need to be in London or New York, those are the two places. Now, when it comes to auditioning, this is the one of the things I learned from casting, and a lot of my British friends who were actors who would come here for pilot season were always shocked because you’re taught to be totally off book.

Justin Thomson: In the UK, when you go into an audition, you need to know your lines dead and here, even if you haven’t memorized, there’s this whole technique where people say, “Actually, bring the sides in and occasionally glance down and act like you’re reading it,” because then it allows the casting director or the director or the producer to believe that, “Oh well, if he’s this good while he’s just cold reading, imagine how good he’ll be off book,” so it’s just little things like that.

Mike Horton: Huh. I was never off book in auditions. Ever.

Larry Jordan: Really?

Mike Horton: No. Well, you would get four or five auditions a day. There’s no way in the world you could, especially if it was a 12 page audition, there was no way that you could do it so you’d have to bring the things in and you were always reading really, really bad stuff, where improvisation comes in big time, so you just change it.

Justin Thomson: Yes, that’s very true. But in the UK, it’s such a craft. It’s a four year degree. Here, everybody’s like, “Hop on the Greyhound, come out to LA,” and you’re suddenly an actor. There, you need to go to RADA, you need to go to all the right schools.

Mike Horton: Did you go to the schools in London?

Justin Thomson: I never went to school there.

Mike Horton: Ok.

Justin Thomson: I was home schooled my whole life, so I can’t read or write.

Mike Horton: That’s right, but you do know math and science and coding.

Justin Thomson: Sure, yes.

Mike Horton: Good job, mom.

Larry Jordan: I want to shift gears before Mike runs us completely out of time.

Justin Thomson: Sure.

Mike Horton: I’m sorry. Go ahead, Larry.

Larry Jordan: Is it my turn now?

Mike Horton: Yes.

Larry Jordan: I want to talk about the business of acting. You’ve been surviving as an actor for 20 years and the stories of the starving actor and low pay of actors are legendary. What are some of the key business things that you’ve learned to keep your career moving forward, to keep yourself fed and keep growing in new parts and new tasks and challenges?

Justin Thomson: Two things – people need to realize that, actors, you are a brand, you are your own company, you are your face, everything. A brand is everything, and even for Coca-Cola or whatever it is, but now is the best time ever to be an actor, I think, because the barriers to entry are zero. The biggest thing that I learned at a young age was start creating your own content because it was a lot easier for me to hire myself than try to get hired to do a job, so I’d find people that I liked to work with, that collaborated well together, and we’d create stuff.

Larry Jordan: Allow me to play devil’s advocate. It is absolute easy to get stuff on the web and get distribution, but that’s not the same thing as earning a living at it. There are millions of people who post videos that get nothing from it. Your job as an actor is not just simply to act, but to earn a living. There’s a big difference between access to content at low cost and earning a living.

Mike Horton: Yes, but that content that he’s creating rather than sitting around and having somebody else be part of that content that’s being created, he’s creating content, those people can see it and see what he can do and then he can get hired for that, and that’s what you mean about that entry level, because he’s doing it. Ashridge Films. He’s already doing it and good on you, because a lot of people are still going through that process of auditioning and trying to get the roles. No, go out and create your own content while you’re auditioning.

Justin Thomson: It’s a matter of being proactive and then also you still have to be talented.

Mike Horton: Yes.

Justin Thomson: It comes down to that. You can’t just fake it, no matter how much auto tuning or iMovie pre-edit you have there, you still have to have talent. But you can learn faster and you don’t have that barrier to entry so that, if you are talented, you don’t have to know the guy or be the son of the director who’s the studio executive, whatever. You can actually get it out there and get a following and get your voice heard.

Larry Jordan: So how do you market yourself to get gigs that pay money as opposed to simply get your face on the web?

Justin Thomson: Well, that’s a good balance. You have people creating buy-ins now who are getting millions of dollars because they have a ton of followers and, to some branding person that has value to them. The most important thing is do it because you love it, don’t do it because you want to make money at it. Do enough that you can survive. I think I’m quite an optimistic person that you can ultimately achieve those things if you’re passionate and love it, you’ll always find a path.

Mike Horton: And that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing, Larry, because we’re passionate about it, we love it.

Justin Thomson: And you’re an amazing example. Look at what you’ve created. You’ve created something amazing.

Mike Horton: Exactly.

Justin Thomson: It’s awesome.

Mike Horton: Might have hired the wrong partner but…

Justin Thomson: That’s all right, that can be CGI’d out, don’t worry.

Larry Jordan: Yes, we can put in a different face if we need to. What do you find is the best way to promote your career? Is it the web? Is it demo reels? Is it face to face meetings with agents? What is it that generates business?

Justin Thomson: I hate to say it, because I used to hate it as a kid, but it’s who you know, it’s who your friends are, because that’s how I give jobs or how I get jobs, it’s because people I’ve worked with, that I like to work with, that is the ultimate way to do it; and then there’s a tipping point. Once you have enough content that’s good, then somebody says, “Hey, I worked with this guy, he did this really amazing film for Bestival. Why don’t you work together?”

Mike Horton: Yes, we need to actually bring him back and talk more about it. If you go to his website and click on ‘FX3’, we need to talk about that. Has nothing to do with his face, it has nothing to do with putting his face out there. It has everything to do with this new technology, this 360 degree almost virtual reality sort of technology that he is doing right now and hopefully making money at.

Larry Jordan: Well, one of the things I’m interested about is that your website doesn’t have your face on it, doesn’t have your email address on it, doesn’t even have a demo reel on it. It’s understated to the point of invisibility. How come?

Justin Thomson: Ashridge Films primarily came out of the fact that I was developing a program for the BBC in which I did put my face, but it was primarily focused for just content creation. I think there’s a balance between saying, “Ok, I am Justin Thomson Productions,” and everything about that or, “This is my production company and this is my acting side of it.” If you go on to IMDb, you see plenty of the films and projects that I’ve worked on, but when it comes to content creation I don’t want one thing to distract from the other.

Mike Horton: By the way, are these your eyes?

Justin Thomson: Those are not my eyes. That was a photograph that I took in Bhutan.

Mike Horton: Oh. Oh, you went to Bhutan?

Justin Thomson: I went to Bhutan many years ago.

Mike Horton: Oh God, I’ve always wanted to do that.

Justin Thomson: For a project and, yes, so I love those eyes.

Larry Jordan: When should an actor who’s been doing work on the web get an agent?

Justin Thomson: It’s interesting, because nowadays you don’t necessarily need to have an agent. Again, the barriers of entry are totally gone. I know this sounds weird – and we were just at the edge of it when I was working with Jeff Gerrard – Actors Access, Showfacts, the actors have access to those and more and more. We did a campaign for a very large franchise in which we were looking for somebody, and we scoured the nation to find it and we ultimately found it because I posted something on Craigslist and then somebody came in.

Justin Thomson: Agents are good because they have some relationships with casting directors, so you have a little bit of a better chance to get in, but don’t let it be a barrier to pursuing your passion.

Larry Jordan: Where on the web can people go to learn more about the acting and work that you’re doing?

Justin Thomson: Google knows everything about me, so you could go onto Google, put in Justin Thomson, or you could go to IMDb for acting and then ashridgefilms.com for content.

Larry Jordan: Ashridgefilms.com. Justin Thomson is the face you’ve been looking to. Justin, thanks for joining us.

Justin Thomson: Loved being here.

Mike Horton: Thanks Justin, that was great.

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Larry Jordan: Ned Soltz is an author, an editor, educator and consultant on all things related to digital video. He’s also a Contributing Editor for Digital Video magazine, a moderator on 2-Pop and Creative Cow forums and a regular correspondent here on The Buzz. Hello, Ned, welcome back.

Ned Soltz: Hello, Larry, it’s good to be back and somehow I am getting feedback here. This is the first time we’ve attempted this. I think I’m ok right now. Good, I’m muted. Can you guys hear me?

Larry Jordan: We can hear you loud and clear.

Mike Horton: We can hear you really well. Can you get feedback? Because I’m talking over Larry and we’re actually talking at the same time.

Ned Soltz: Oh, that’s what’s plausible, then. Hello, Michael. I’m very disappointed that I’m not able to see you, but we’ll rectify that in a few weeks at NAB.

Mike Horton: I hope so.

Larry Jordan: I’ve seen him, Ned, I’m not sure that’s a good idea.

Mike Horton: Yes, it’s not a really good idea. I really look awful, Ned.

Ned Soltz: Yes, I’m not sure about this new Skype video format. It’s like tell everybody I have a radio voice and a radio face to go along with that radio voice, so this is one of my rare live appearances.

Mike Horton: This is your home in New Jersey, right? Is that where you’re coming from?

Ned Soltz: Yes, it is. This is my home studio we’re coming from.

Mike Horton: Oh my gosh.

Larry Jordan: It’s a lovely ceiling, by the way. It looks great behind you.

Mike Horton: It is.

Ned Soltz: Yes, with the little ersatz lighting in the last five minutes, anything I could pull out of the bag.

Mike Horton: You look good, Ned.

Larry Jordan: Ned, let’s get right into it. Tell us about the new Sony FS7 camera.

Ned Soltz: Well, I love the new Sony FS7. I not only reviewed it, I actually bought it and that to me really says something, when I see a product that I really think is going to do the job for me and then just coincidentally I had the opportunity to write about it. Basically, I think it combines so many different aspects.

Ned Soltz: What we have is a large sensor camera which has such a wonderful form factor that it’s really usable, and what I’m beginning to see right now is a large sensor quasi ENG type of acquisition, where you can work this camera very, very carefully and, despite the shallow depth of field from a large sensor camera, it’s very plausible to use it in that matter; and it’s also plausible to use it in a very cinematic sense.

Ned Soltz: Sony marketed it originally as a cinéma vérité camera and, indeed, that’s what it is. It’s a baby F5 in many regards, with its 4K, UHD internal right now but by the end of the month the new Firmware 2.0 will be out, which will then allow actual 4K DCI in camera, which is a pretty amazing feature.

Larry Jordan: You say it’s a baby F5. Where does it fit in terms of price?

Ned Soltz: It’s about half the price of an F5.

Larry Jordan: Wow.

Mike Horton: Yes, that’s amazing. I mean, it’s just incredible.

Ned Soltz: Yes, it is. It is at $16,000 for the F5, and the F5 does have more than the FS7, but on the other hand, for $8,000 you’re getting full 4K DCI right now within the camera; for another $2,000 for the back, that can enable ProRes, but it also enables the use of real batteries, it provides a counterweight for shoulder mounting, timecode in/out, gen lock. But just even the base camera itself, recording to those XQD cards, where you have the choice of an XAVC intra, an XAVC long GOP and even, for legacy reality TV type production, a 50 megabit 422 mpeg2 codec, which is really the darling of reality TV.

Larry Jordan: Grant in our live chat is asking, the shallow depth of field on the camera seems to be too much of a problem. How do you overcome that? The reason that he asks is he’s looking for a small light camera that has zoom but doesn’t have a real shallow depth of field. Is the depth of field going to be a limitation for focusing for run and gun?

Ned Soltz: Let’s put it this way. If you’re working with a lot of light and you’re able then to stop that lens down and if you can shoot that lens at about an F8, you’re not going to have that much of an issue with shallow depth of field, any more than people right now who are shooting Canon C300s. It’s really very much the same situation, so it is plausible. You just have to watch your focus, learn to focus in zones and the like relative to your aperture. I don’t think it’s that much of an issue, but certainly it’s very different than shooting with your traditional CMOS smaller chip, three chip camera.

Larry Jordan: In terms of the camera, how good is the audio with it?

Ned Soltz: I find the audio phenomenal and right now, in fact, with the 2.0 upgrade, you’ll be able to record four channels of audio. It has that MI, multi interface, shoe which right now can take the Sony UWP wireless microphone, which I also bought to go along with the kit, as well as the Sony on camera dual XLR module they were selling for the A7S. So with that module or with the wireless microphone, you can have two channels of audio there and you’ve got two XLR inputs so you can actually record four channels of audio. I think in terms of comparing it, for example, to my EX3, the pre-amps are far cleaner so I can trust that audio a lot more on the FS7.

Larry Jordan: All right, well, let’s shift gears. We’ve got the Sony FS7, but the other new camera that you reviewed recently was the CION from AJA. What’s your take on that?

Ned Soltz: The CION from AJA. Pretty amazing. Really. I am just floored at what manufacturers are able to do today at any kind of price point, whether it’s $9,000 for the CION or, to change the topic just slightly, the new Alexa Mini for $36,000 and bringing that feature set of the Alexa down to a price that is competitive in that level of the market. What impressed me most about CION was just the color science of the camera.

Ned Soltz: That’s what I wrote about; and then, actually independent of that, there was an article that someone on RedShark News had written about, very much the same thing, of really the ability with the color science to create wonderful looks within camera that might require far less grading than recording just in a log or a RAW format. They just have it right.

Larry Jordan: What format does the CION record in?

Ned Soltz: CION records in all flavors of ProRes right now, but it’s not a log. Essentially, they have a flat gamma, they have an expanded or an extended gamma for a couple of extra stops of dynamic range and the ability to turn that gamma off completely, which gives you a dark image. It’s not lot but it allows you to grade very much like that; and then there are varying look tonalities to the camera.

Ned Soltz: There’s a neutral, there’s a skin tone, and by experimenting with those various permutations and combinations within camera, it’s plausible to create a very, very fine look – again, within the limitations of the camera. Remember, this is an ISO 320 camera, so you’ve really got to light it indoors, not like the native ISO 2000 of an FS7 or something. It’s back to the old days of cinema.

Mike Horton: We only have a minute left or something like that, but are there any bad cameras out there? I know we have too many cameras, you keep saying that, we have too many cameras, but are there any bad cameras?

Ned Soltz: No, none of them are bad.

Mike Horton: I knew that.

Ned Soltz: None of them are bad. It’s a question of what works for you in terms of the ergonomics, the feature set, the price point, your intended use and you’ve really got to try these things. Rent it, go to a VAR that carries all of these cameras and really determine what’s going to work for you in your given situation.

Larry Jordan: Ned, in the short period of time we’ve got left, the AJA camera is a brand new camera, should we wait before buying to allow AJA to work the bugs out? Or does it seem stable now?

Ned Soltz: The 1.1 Firmware did stabilize things quite a bit and took the EI up to 1,000 and the native ISO to 320. It’s very hard to tell when to jump into a camera. I’m an early adopter kind of person. By the way, being an early adopter of the FS7, I’ve gotten business with it because few other people have them, so people are interested in renting it or people are interested in having things shot with it, so I think in that regard that was a very good decision on my part.

Larry Jordan: And, Ned, where can people go on the web to read your reviews?

Ned Soltz: They can read both of those reviews at www.creativeplanetnetwork.com.

Mike Horton: And you can meet Ned at the Supermeet at the desk, taking tickets.

Larry Jordan: That is Ned Soltz, Contributing Editor for Digital Video magazine and reviewer par excellence of cameras. Ned, thanks for joining us today.

Mike Horton: Thanks, Ned.

Ned Soltz: Thank you so much, guys, see you at NAB.

Larry Jordan: Bye bye.

Mike Horton: See you soon.

Larry Jordan: I guess we’re back on again, Michael. It’s our turn again.

Mike Horton: Are we?

Larry Jordan: We are indeed.

Mike Horton: Well, you’re running the show, Larry. Go ahead, do your intro.

Larry Jordan: Somebody’s got to run it. It’s certainly not me.

Mike Horton: It’s not me.

Larry Jordan: From Bud Light’s ‘I love you, man’ campaign to Jarhead 2 and the latest Little Rascals, Jeff Gerrard and his associates at Jeff Gerrard Casting have found just the right actors for features and over 3500 television commercials, and I’m curious to know how they did it. Hello, Jeff, welcome.

Jeff Gerrard: Hey, how are you?

Mike Horton: Hi Jeff.

Larry Jordan: We are doing great. How would you describe the role of a casting director, aside from exhausted, which is where you are right now?

Jeff Gerrard: Yes, you got that right. I would say we’re gardeners. I like to say we’re weeders. I think we get hired because of our vision and our eyes, how we see certain things through talent, life etcetera, and we go in and we take a meeting with the director or producers etcetera, and if we’re on the same wavelength we get the job.

Larry Jordan: You’re right now in the middle of casting a film, which is one of the reasons we scheduled you at this time in the show, as you’d have time to get to a telephone. What are you doing now? Not necessarily the name of the film, but what part of the process are you in?

Jeff Gerrard: We have just completed the casting on Friday and this week was me making all the deals, so basically we have our cast in place, we are completed, the producers have accepted everyone, the studio accepted everyone and now we’re into the contract and negotiations phase, which I’m happy to say is over as of today.

Larry Jordan: Tell me what that phase means, because that’s a part of the business that I’m not familiar with.

Mike Horton: Arguing with agents.

Jeff Gerrard: Yes, thank you, you got that. No, to be honest with you, I think on the film that I was doing, I was pretty up front with everybody going in. We had a certain budget, we had to accomplish certain things. We obviously have to appease not only the director’s vision of what he wants on the screen, but we also have to appease the studio to get a certain amount of cache name in there to open the film and if it doesn’t get a theatrical release, if it’s made for a direct to DVD type of a feature film, as more and more and more of the industry is going in that direction, we have to make sure that all parties are satisfied and happy.

Larry Jordan: But now in the negotiation part, you’re not talking with the actors at all, you’re talking with their agents.

Jeff Gerrard: No, it’s strictly having a conversation with their agents, their managers, the combination of the two, then the lawyer gets involved as well, so the actor has a number of people on their team that we deal with, not on a day to day basis but more on the end of the film, the process, the casting section is done and now we’re into the negotiation, yes.

Larry Jordan: Ok, well let’s go back a week to when you were casting. How are you finding the talent you want for the film?

Jeff Gerrard: A number of ways – agents, managers, watching television, going to movies, seeing theater etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Just any way that I possibly have them on my – I want to use an old fashioned word – Rolodex. I have their team in my computer, bank of my brain up here or I can’t remember someone and I turn to my trusty associates and assistants and say, “Hey, who was that guy that stars on this show that got… it was dropped after one season, but remember he played the gardener and he…” blah, blah, blah, and right away it becomes a ball session with all of us together, trying to come up with the name, the right person who we’re thinking of, and it’s an input.

Jeff Gerrard: We work together, I’m just one little piece of the puzzle and sometimes a director will call me and say, “Hey, did you think of it this way?” I say, “Yes, he’s on the list but, I got to tell you, he’s not available, he just booked a pilot,” and that’s the toughest part of casting a movie now during these months in California, in Hollywood. It’s pilot season and nobody wants to come out on your film because they want to get a pilot and they want to have that pilot go to series.

Mike Horton: Do pictures matter anymore, Jeff? Do you still look at pictures?

Jeff Gerrard: We do, just we look at them in a different way now. Everyone’s on computer, so the picture you’re looking at is about a thumb print. If you can imagine what your driver’s license photo looks like, that’s basically what we’re looking at and we have to click on that and then all of a sudden the resume will show up and then we have to click on the next person or the next person etcetera.

Jeff Gerrard: But when we do have a session for producer/directors, we do request that they still bring in a hard copy picture and a resume. I’ve got to tell you, there’s nothing like the feel of a picture and a resume in your hand. Maybe I’m just the old fart in the neighborhood, but there’s nothing like that, to flip that picture around and to see their training, to see where they did theater. It’s just the way I was brought up in the business, so it’s taken some time to get used to just click, click, click, but it is a lot easier on the environment.

Mike Horton: Yes, Jeff, I think you are the old fart and there are not too many people like you left, I think, which is a shame.

Larry Jordan: Which is more important – is it more important for an actor to look right for the part or to be right for the part?

Jeff Gerrard: Tell me what you mean by be right. It’s so funny that you should say that, because I did a movie a number of years ago, 20 plus years ago, and I went to New York to scout some people and I never like that phrase, “Oh, he just walked in and he was the part.” I just didn’t understand that until I was doing this movie, I flew to New York, I saw a number of people and in walks this young man who’s only done one other project in his life. His name was Dylan McDermott and he walked in and he was the role I was looking for, so that’s when I learned that’s what that phrase means. It’s almost like a bell goes off in your head.

Larry Jordan: So it’s more than just what they look like?

Jeff Gerrard: Oh, definitely. I think nowadays actors are blessed to be in the business now, unlike 25, 30 years ago when it was a certain type, you looked a certain way, were you this, were you that, especially commercials. You were either blonde haired with blue eyes or you were extreme character so they had someplace to put you. You were either P&G or you were a character person.

Jeff Gerrard: Now it’s Americana and it’s great. It’s great to cast commercials nowadays and in films as well, TV shows, everything. You see it’s just a piece of Americana. It’s like walking to the corner store and running into all these wonderful faces and now we get to cast all that, and there’s nobody holding us back saying, “Oh, it has to be Caucasian,” “Oh, it has to be Hispanic,” “Oh, it has to be African American.” No. A lot of times, they say, “It’s your canvas, go with it, show me the best people in town.”

Mike Horton: Yes, and Jeff, I’ve got to say this because I’ve been holding out for a little while and I don’t know if you remember me, but I was an actor for a number of years and you cast me in a number of commercials back in the ‘80s and the ‘90s, Michael Horton is my name, and of course my wife Debbie’s…

Jeff Gerrard: Michael!

Mike Horton: Yes.

Jeff Gerrard: Of course! Debbie Zip?

Mike Horton: Yes, and Debbie Zip was my wife and Debbie and I, of course, did hundreds of commercials of which you were a big part of our career, and I quit acting in 2000 because I couldn’t take it any more, I didn’t like it, and I never really liked doing commercials even though I did hundreds of them.

Jeff Gerrard: And it was your bread and butter.

Mike Horton: But it was my bread and butter. Not only was it my bread and butter, it was big time bread and butter because you can do one day’s work and make $30,000 over an entire year of residuals; and, of course, you were a big part of buying my house, so thank you Jeff, and raising my children – I have two grown children, thanks to you and the other casting directors – but that was then, this is now and one of the reasons I think I quit acting was, number one, I wanted to be a director and I wanted to be more in charge of my life, but what was happening was that actors were becoming kind of numbers, not necessarily people any more, and I wonder if that’s the same? Is that going on now?

Jeff Gerrard: Worse.

Mike Horton: How different is it now than 15 years ago?

Jeff Gerrard: It’s a little crazy because, as I talked about… oh Michael, it’s so great to hear your voice. I’m so sorry, I didn’t know it was you on the other end. This is so cool. All right, I love this. Well, yes, nowadays everything is coded so you are a number, it’s almost like you do have a barcode, you’re in the system, so it’s like going to the supermarket and getting a container of milk and all of a sudden you have to… the barcode.

Jeff Gerrard: All the actors bring little barcodes in their wallets as well and it’s just barcodes and they don’t have to fill out anything, it comes up instantly. They want to change pictures, so for certain things it’s really a benefit, but for other things it’s gotten worse. Since you dropped out, I think the ratio of bringing people in has gone up probably double. You have to bring in at least 100 to 150 people a day.

Mike Horton: Wow, really?

Jeff Gerrard: Yes. It’s not like, I remember you and Sandy Simpson and Kevin Borland and all you guys coming in and getting to know you a little, getting to know about you, getting to know where your talent lies and how to finesse that a little bit or, “Hey, that was really great, I love what you brought to it. Let’s just try it this way,” and still allowing you the freedom to bring your creativity to it, even if it was for that 30 seconds, 60 seconds.

Mike Horton: But you can’t do that with 150 people a day or 150 people a spot.

Jeff Gerrard: Well, you know what? I try to do my best with it, but it gets a little rough sometimes.

Larry Jordan: Jeff, what does an actor need to keep in mind when they’re going into a casting session, knowing that there are 150 other people they’re looking at today?

Jeff Gerrard: Don’t be anyone but yourself. Go in there, do what you do, what you do best, celebrate what you do best, embrace what you do, put it out there on the line, go home and forget about it. You want to keep a journal, keep a journal because it’s always good to know, hey, I looked back in my journal and guess what?

Jeff Gerrard: I booked a lot of MOS spots or I booked some improv spots, but I haven’t booked any dialogue driven spots, so maybe it’s time to reevaluate the instrument inside. Maybe the grooming outside is great, that’s why you’re booking those spots that don’t require any dialogue, but maybe the instrument inside isn’t as fine tuned as you think it is.

Mike Horton: I was booking all the spots that required dialogue because the outside wasn’t that great.

Jeff Gerrard: You were great. You don’t sell yourself short, guy. You were great and you were the top. In fact, weren’t you with TGI, BBR, whatever they’re called now?

Mike Horton: Oh yes, whatever their name was, I can’t remember. It was David Brady and a bunch of other people.

Jeff Gerrard: That’s right, it had Pat Brennan, yes I do, because I called for you a number of years ago and they said, “Jeff, he hasn’t been in the business forever,” and I said, “But this is the type of guy I want.”

Mike Horton: No, I couldn’t take it any more. Commercials are a director’s medium and I worked with all these wonderful directors throughout my career, like Tony Scott and Adrian Lyne and Antoine Fuqua and cinematographers like Caleb Deschanel, because they’d all do this stuff in between gigs. But as an actor, you don’t do them for the artistic rewards, you do them for the money, and thank God for them because they allowed you to pay the rent while you were pursuing your career.

Jeff Gerrard: And I have to tell you, commercials, it is a great stepping stone especially now, during pilot season. We will get a lot of calls to our office, because I’m President of the Commercial Casting Directors’ Association, all right?

Mike Horton: Oh, good for you.

Jeff Gerrard: So I get a lot of calls in my office saying, “Hey, Jeff, if you didn’t cast this, do you happen to know who the person is in this spot?” blah, blah, blah, “We want to bring him in for a lead in a pilot.”

Mike Horton: Now, Steven Bochco brought me in for LA Law because of a commercial that he saw that I did for American Express.

Jeff Gerrard: Exactly. Exactly. And Pete Andrade was brought in and he got a Bochco series, I think ‘Cop Rock’, because of a commercial he did standing against a wall for AT&T talking straight to camera, so you just never know where your next meal’s coming from.

Mike Horton: Yes, absolutely. No, commercials were absolutely wonderful and a very necessary part of my life.

Jeff Gerrard: Right.

Larry Jordan: Jeff, I want to come back to a casting session. One of the questions that I have is you’ve said for somebody to be themselves when they come to the casting session. How important is the first impression?

Jeff Gerrard: Oh, I think it’s very important because a lot of times, especially nowadays, when the economy hit bad for everyone, it hit every job and everything so budgets were cut in half, casting days were down from three days, you had to do it in a day and a half, you had one prep day to still do 12 characters, so it got hit a lot of times.

Jeff Gerrard: So when you do walk in that room, that’s what we’re looking for, we do want to see that we’re going to be able to pull your natural, honest personality through, and that’s what I say all the time. I always look for honesty in a performance, whether it’s just you kissing your dad goodnight and running upstairs to go to bed, or it’s you doing wall to wall copy straight to the camera.

Larry Jordan: If that’s true, then what does an actor need to do to make a good first impression? What thought should they be doing? It’s nice to say ‘be yourself’, but you’ve got to be more than yourself, it seems to me, in the casting session, don’t you?

Jeff Gerrard: It just depends. If you’re talking commercials, I still stick with that, I say you come in, the acting 101. Just because it’s a commercial, you don’t just say, “Oh, it’s just one line”. Well, if it’s just one line, well, who am I, where am I, why am I there? It’s those people that come in, I know it sounds silly just about a one line in a commercial, but if you’ve got a bunch of guys standing out there and there are 20 guys out there and the line is, “Thanks, Joe, come again,” well who is he?

Jeff Gerrard: Well, he’s a gas station attendant, I just said the line. Well, no, don’t just say the line. What was he doing just prior to Joe coming here and pumping the gas? And was it an old fashioned kind of gas station where you pump the gas for Joe? Is Joe’s kid in the back of the car? Does he always wave to you? Did Joe go off the curb again for the third time this month? So you add a lot of texture to that one line so it always has a beginning, a middle and an end, and it’s the same way with theatrical jobs.

Jeff Gerrard: As I always tell everyone, I’m throwing a party, you wouldn’t come to my house empty handed, right? So you’d want to bring something. I want to see what you have to bring to the mix.

Larry Jordan: Now you’re wearing your casting director hat, you’ve seen the 100 guys that came in that day, how do you make a decision? Is it just a gut feeling that this is the right guy or are there other criteria you’re using?

Mike Horton: Well, I wish Jeff made the decision, but…

Jeff Gerrard: Yes, if it’s commercials, it’s definitely not me. The tape goes off for the day into cyberspace here, because we do everything online, so whatever we’ve recorded for the day goes off and the agency looks at it, the production company looks at it, the director looks at it. Sometimes, if budgets are tight, they send it directly to the client nowadays and the client is picking certain people that they want to have back.

Jeff Gerrard: We just finished a big campaign for Mercury Insurance and it had over 25 characters in it, so it was a lot of finding the best people in the prep so that when you got them in the room, you knew they’d be able to deliver, you knew they’d be able to take direction. Like I said, it might just be a commercial, but they understood acting 101, what a beginning is, what a middle is, what an intention is, what a conflict is. Sometimes when you throw stuff at them, you think, “Oh, well, they’re grabbing it. Look how textured this performance is,” and it’s a 30 second performance.

Mike Horton: Jeff, after all these years, are you still having fun?

Jeff Gerrard: A ball.

Mike Horton: Good.

Jeff Gerrard: I’m still having a ball.

Mike Horton: Good.

Jeff Gerrard: I love it. I wake up every day and guess what? I don’t have to see the same faces every day, I don’t have to be in at eight o’clock in the morning and leave at nine, you know? But sometimes I do have to show up at nine in the morning and leave at nine at night, as I was doing for the last month on a film, but that’s what’s exciting about it.

Jeff Gerrard: Going in the trenches there, working with my staff, seeing who’s new in town, seeing who came in from New York or Chicago or the Midwest. You’re believing in the agents and the managers that are working with you, that they’re going to have a heads up on you because they signed a certain person for a certain reason.

Mike Horton: When I was doing this, Jeff was one of the good guys, let me tell you.

Jeff Gerrard: Well, thank you sir.

Mike Horton: He was one of the good ones.

Larry Jordan: Jeff, how important is a demo reel to an actor?

Jeff Gerrard: I think it’s really important, especially in your beginning stages. Now, that’s twofold. In my opinion only, and once again everything we’re talking about is just what works for me and has worked for me for the past 30 plus years, my feeling is a demo reel is really important but you want to make sure the best of your work is on it, and I don’t care if you’re just starting out and you only have a one liner here and you’ve got three lines here and you’ve got another one liner there.

Jeff Gerrard: Show me the difference in that reel, show me the different characters you brought to life, show me that someone who has a show that’s costing them over a million dollars a week to produce said, “Guess what? Let’s take a shot on this kid who has nothing on his resume and let’s see what he brings to that one liner.”

Larry Jordan: Have you ever discovered somebody who was a beginner and then suddenly made it big, aside from Michael?

Jeff Gerrard: I don’t know if you would say that we actually discover them. Everybody had an agent or a manager, so someone’s discovering them. I’ve been lucky enough in my career that I’ve worked with Patrick Swayze, God rest his soul, before he hit it big. The last one I think I did of real name value was Andy Samberg just before he got Saturday Night Live.

Jeff Gerrard: He came in on a commercial for me for a Japanese company. They had to bop in the car – you would have loved this one, Michael – to ‘Earth, Wind & Fire’ and just have a really good time as they were driving their Volkswagen down the highway. He books it, they send him to Japan with five other people and three weeks later to the day I see ‘Saturday Night Live’ signs a new young guy, bom-bom-bom, the rest is, you know.

Mike Horton: Ah, that’s great.

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

Jeff Gerrard: You can always punch in jeffgerrard.com. That’s the website. You could to go IMDb and you can check out my resume there as well.

Larry Jordan: That’s jeffgerrard.com and Jeff is the owner of Jeff Gerrard Casting. Jeff, thanks for joining us today.

Mike Horton: Jeff, it was great talking to you. You meant a lot to me and, of course, my wife Debbie Zip, to our career and we should do lunch.

Jeff Gerrard: Hey, I’m around, I’m in Sherman Oaks.

Mike Horton: All right, I’m in Chatsworth.

Larry Jordan: Thanks, Jeff.

Jeff Gerrard: I’ll drive!

Mike Horton: Ok.

Jeff Gerrard: All right, Michael, thank you both very much. I really appreciate it.

Larry Jordan: Our pleasure. Thank you for joining us. You know what, Michael? It’s nice to hear that you had a career in acting. That was very cool.

Mike Horton: Well, I think I told you that 15 years ago, but you forgot.

Larry Jordan: Yes, well, the 750…

Mike Horton: I never talk about it. I really don’t. I don’t. It’s kind of fun to talk about, but it’s such a past life, it really is. It’s a past life. I enjoy my new life as co-host of The Digital Production Buzz.

Larry Jordan: Well, the thing I like is it’s nice that you have a past life and some wonderful stories to tell from it, that’s for sure.

Mike Horton: Ok.

Larry Jordan: I want to thank our guests for tonight, starting with Justin Thomson, the actor and filmmaker; Ned Soltz, Contributing Editor for Digital Video magazine; and…

Mike Horton: See you at the Supermeet, Ned. Ok, go ahead.

Larry Jordan: …and Jeff Gerrard, the owner of Jeff Gerrard Casting.

Mike Horton: See you at lunch, Jeff. Ok, go ahead.

Larry Jordan: There’s lot of history in our industry – and a lot of noise around this table – that’s all posted to our website at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Here you’ll find hundreds of past shows and thousands of interviews all searchable, all online and all available.

Larry Jordan: You can talk with us on Twitter, @DPBuZZ, and Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com and Mike himself will sign autographs for people who need to have…

Mike Horton: Hey, you’re booking me Monday morning on the NAB show floor, right?

Larry Jordan: We are going to have you on the show somehow.

Mike Horton: I’m the funniest guy you’ll ever, ever interview.

Larry Jordan: You just have to chill out.

Mike Horton: It’ll be worth it. Just do it. Just book me. It’ll be worth it.

Larry Jordan: My mind reels. Our theme music is composed by Nathan Doogie Turner.

Mike Horton: Just ask the right questions.

Larry Jordan: Hush. Additional music on The Buzz is provided by smartsound.com, Transcripts provided by Take 1 Transcription.

Mike Horton: Remember, just go with it.

Larry Jordan: Our producer is Cirina Catania. Our engineering team is lead by Megan Paulos, includes Alexia Chalida, Ed Golya, Keenan Guy, Lindsay Luebbert and Brianna Murphy. From Mike and me, thanks for listening to The Buzz.

Mike Horton: Goodbye, everybody.

Voiceover: The Digital Production Buzz was brought to you 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

March 5, 2015

[Transcripts provided by Take 1 Transcription]

 

(Click here to listen to this show.)

 
HOSTS

Larry Jordan

Michael Horton

GUESTS

Brad Malcolm, President, Athentech Imaging Inc.

Rodrigo Thomaz, Product and Training Specialist, Audio-Technica

Kevin McAuliffe, Senior Editor, Extreme Reach Toronto – Avid Community Leader

===

Voiceover: The Digital Production Buzz is brought to you 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!

Larry Jordan: Since the dawn of digital film making…

Voiceover: Authoritative.

Larry Jordan: …one show serves a worldwide network of media professionals…

Voiceover: Current.

Larry Jordan: …uniting industry experts…

Voiceover: Production.

Larry Jordan: …film makers…

Voiceover: Post production.

Larry Jordan: …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 Mr. Mike Horton.

Mike Horton: Hello everybody.

Larry Jordan: Affable. I like that word.

Mike Horton: Affable. I do too. It’s with two Fs. Affable. I am feeling mighty affable today.

Larry Jordan: Nobody has a better aff than you do.

Mike Horton: Thank you. I’m watching ourselves right now.

Larry Jordan: It’s going to be cool.

Mike Horton: This is cool. Oh my God, do I look like this? Oh, hello. I’m still trying to get used to this whole thing.

Larry Jordan: Well, you’re doing a great job of completely confusing the rest of us, I just want you to know that. We start this week’s show with Brad Malcolm. He’s the President of Authentic Imaging Inc and they’ve created a produced called Perfectly Clear…

Mike Horton: And it’s cool.

Larry Jordan: …that automates the process of correcting and improving still images and also has uses for video producers. Then last week, The Buzz was in London, attending the BVE expo. During the show, we interviewed Rodrigo Thomaz, a product and training specialist for Audio-Technica. In this interview, recorded at the show, he showcases new wireless products and shares his thoughts on how to pick a mic for you next project.

Larry Jordan: Then we turn our attention from production to post, with a conversation with Kevin McAuliffe. Kevin is a senior editor with Extreme Reach, Toronto and an Avid community leader. He has close to 20 years of Media Composer experience and we talk with him tonight about what’s new with Media Composer.

Larry Jordan: Just a reminder, we are offering text transcripts for each show, courtesy of Take 1 Transcription. You can learn more about transcripts at take1.tv and thanks, Take 1, for making it possible.

Larry Jordan: Mike…

Mike Horton: Mmm?

Larry Jordan: …you remember all our conversations about the cloud that we’ve had for production, post production, putting media up to the cloud.

Mike Horton: Yes. Are you feeling a little bit better about the cloud?

Larry Jordan: Last week, we got so bitten, you would not believe it.

Mike Horton: Really?

Larry Jordan: Yes, we planned to originate The Buzz, both audio and video, from BVE expo at the ExCel Center in London. We spent the first day shooting video interviews and stand-ups and then that night I did a rough cut in the hotel room. I was ready to send up the files to back here so they could put them all together and integrate them, put the show together. We had less than 100 kilobits per second upload. It would take a day – a day – to upload each segment.

Mike Horton: What hotel were you staying at? Some place in Australia?

Larry Jordan: I don’t know, but there was a string that went out the back of the hotel. We realized that six days to upload the show was going to be just a non-starter.

Mike Horton: Larry, you know, when you go to places like that, you need to just stay in America where we have the fastest speeds. But when you go to South Korea, oh, piece of cake. Be like that.

Larry Jordan: Well, it’s a place I haven’t been recently, so…

Mike Horton: Well, it’s very fast speeding.

Larry Jordan: Anyway, the reason that we didn’t have live video or any video last week is we couldn’t get it back here, so we’re going to be posting some of the interviews that we did as video on our YouTube channel, but that’s why it was audio only; and I know you were worried, because you worry about that stuff.

Mike Horton: I was, because I looked for your video and just saw audio.

Larry Jordan: And it was because…

Mike Horton: It was so boring.

Larry Jordan: …we couldn’t get it out of London. It was unbelievably slow.

Mike Horton: Ok.

Larry Jordan: Remember to visit with us on Facebook, at digitalproductionbuzz.com; we’re also on Twitter, @DPBuZZ, and subscribe to our free weekly show newsletter at digitalproductionbuzz.com for an inside look at both our show and the industry. We’ll be back with Brad Malcolm right after this.

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

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

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

Larry Jordan: Brad Malcolm is the President and Co-founder of Athentech Imaging. They’re the makers of Perfectly Clear. This innovative technology provides intelligent image correction for still images. Hello, Brad, welcome.

Brad Malcolm: Hi there. Thanks for having me.

Larry Jordan: It is wonderful to have you on the show. Brad, how would you describe Athentech Imaging?

Brad Malcolm: We were formed by a bunch of smart physicists, engineers, computers developers and so that was the essence for the company when it was started, to come up with innovative technologies, ground breaker technologies and so we are doing that in photography right now. We also have technology in the medical realm and in the earth sciences realm, so that from a broad picture is what we’re about. Invent new things, things that are different that add value.

Larry Jordan: Why did you decide to start the company? I know you’re not the founder, you’re a co-founder, but what was it that spurred it? Starting a company is not easy work.

Brad Malcolm: Tell me about it. Yes, it was actually brought to my from my uncle, who had met Brian who was our first inventor, and Brian went to Europe a long time ago to photograph stained glass windows. He came back from his vacation and they were under exposed and they were dark, so he used Photoshop to correct those images, to make them better.

Brad Malcolm: But that was very time consuming and that was very difficult and he said, “The average person isn’t going to want to try to do this,” so he invented the core part of Perfectly Clear and said, “Hey, this is kind of cool,” and that’s where the company was formed and was shown to me and I came in to help where I could and just kind of got sucked into doing more and more and the photography stuff was shown to somebody who said, “This is really cool. What can you do with X-rays?” in their radiology world and that was really cool; and then “What can you do in the earth sciences realm?” so that was really cool as well.

Brad Malcolm: When you get some smart people together, there’s a lot that can be accomplished.

Mike Horton: You bring up X-rays. Are you enhancing X-rays? Are you making them clearer? What exactly are you doing with X-rays?

Brad Malcolm: Yes, we make them perfectly clear.

Mike Horton: Oh, so they’re not perfectly clear when we get the X-rays, you make them perfectly clear.

Brad Malcolm: That’s the name of our brand, so that’s why I joke about that. The market we’re active in right now is photography, but medical sciences and earth sciences are some other areas as well. The problem with X-rays is there are 4,000 shades of gray when you get an X-ray, but the human eye can only comprehend about 100 to 200, so that’s why it appears slightly fuzzy, and so we actively manage that dynamic range to bring out lots of information pixel for pixel so that everything is very… in X-rays. Everything looks crisp.

Mike Horton: So your information is still accurate, you don’t actually put in things…

Brad Malcolm: Absolutely. It’s very accurate. We don’t…

Mike Horton: Yes, you’re dealing with…

Brad Malcolm: …on our technology and that’s the essence of our patents as well.

Mike Horton: What’s that big white spot?

Larry Jordan: I was just going to say, using the spot healing brush on your X-ray would probably be a bad idea.

Brad Malcolm: Yes. Photography, there’s a big thing right now, filters, Instagram’s popular, all that creativity and creativity’s a good thing, but you can never do Instagram to your X-rays. That wouldn’t be acceptable in the medical realm.

Larry Jordan: Brad, you mentioned your product, which is Perfectly Clear. Tell us what that does and, more importantly, contrast what that does with what I’m doing in Photoshop when I’m adjusting levels or tweaking curves.

Brad Malcolm: You could think of it as being a smart, intelligent image correction and we’ve got unique science on how we do that. Our whole value proposition is to save you time so that you don’t have to do that in Photoshop. You want to spend time behind your camera and if you’re in Photoshop or Lightroom, those tools, you want to spend your time being creative, not doing mundane image correction, and that’s what we do.

Brad Malcolm: So when your images are dark, if you have red eye, if they’re noisy, when they’re lacking in color vibrancy, all those challenges we overcome. In other words, cameras have physical limitations – they have a single aperture which acts much differently than the way the human eye works, which is constantly and dynamically dilating so that you can always manage all the incoming light, so everything… with your eye looks great.

Brad Malcolm: You snap a picture at a single point in time and that’s why you have exposure issues, that’s why you have noise issues. We overcome those things, that’s what we do, so we’re a big time saver. A lot of the stuff that we do, you can do in Photoshop; a lot of the stuff we do, you can’t do in Photoshop, but we’re going to get you there quicker. Instantly.

Larry Jordan: There was a point on your website that I was really confused about, because you were talking about the fact that when you are doing Photoshop and you are adjusting settings or cleaning up color, you’re actually damaging the image, which was surprising to me because I didn’t realize that if I was doing a levels adjustment or a curves adjustment, I would be damaging the image. Is that what’s actually going on or are you just interpreting the images differently?

Brad Malcolm: Well, no, that is true and it comes from a different shift. Remember, digital is everywhere now but it’s relatively new even 15 years ago or 12 years ago, depending on when you define it started. What happened when we started to take digital images is we retrofitted or companies used the same technology that we did in film and used that concept, and what that means is you add white to brighten an image.

Brad Malcolm: Well, when you add white to brighten an image, it becomes washed out or faded, so now you have to add in color vibrancy to bring that back. Now when you do that, the color shifts so it becomes oversaturated, so then you’ve got to brighten it again, and you get in this vicious cycle and that’s what we mean by that, where part of our technology is how we always maintain real color. We maintain the DNA integrity of your photograph.

Brad Malcolm: That color blue shirt that I see, for example, should be blue or it should be purple. We’re not going to shift it. When you run it through other corrections, blue skies can become washed out or colors shifted to become prettier. We don’t do that and it’s very easy in advanced software tools like a Photoshop or others, when you adjust something, your levels, you clip, i.e. you go too far, you push it past the dynamic range, the 255, 255, 255, so you lose detail in order to get information in one area. We don’t do that, so that’s what we mean by that. We maintain all the real color that’s in your image.

Larry Jordan: If someone was a skilled Photoshop user, could they achieve the same results your software does? Or is Photoshop inherently causing the problem?

Brad Malcolm: I don’t want to make it sound like we’re picking on Photoshop, because that’s not the point, so it’s not that Photoshop’s inherently causing the problem. It’s just the way that the manual tools are designed and there’s a lot of complexity in an image, so it’s really easy to push something too far or in fixing something, let’s say I took a picture of you right now and the background’s too dark so I want to brighten up the background, well, everything gets brightened, so the background is good but now your face is overexposed. Because we do everything at a pixel per pixel level in 20 megapixel photo, when we do our correction, we’re correcting every pixel independently, so it’s as if that photo was taken by 20 million individual apertures.

Brad Malcolm: To your other question as well, though, we have a wide range of corrections. Our noise removal, for example, Photoshop, Lightroom, other tools have noise removal but there are several sliders to accomplish that. What we do automatically is very powerful, we don’t lose details or blur like other stuff does and it’s one click. Our red eye, which is from our partner, Photo Nation, that’s fully automatic. You can’t automatically remove red eye, usually you’ve got to select an area around here.

Brad Malcolm: If you’re a wedding photographer, if you’re somebody that does higher volume, with us you can batch process through thousands or millions of images. In fact, through our licensees, over 30 million prints every day are automatically corrected with our technology. That’s automatic and that’s where the real benefit comes. If you’ve got noise, we remove it. If you’re underexposed, we fix that. Got red eye, we fix that. Lacking color vibrancy, we detect it and fix it; and then the later stuff that we added is Beautify, which makes it easier to look your best.

Brad Malcolm: That’s a little more on the creative side, but smoothing your skin tone, whitening your teeth, adding life to your eyes, making that pop, removing dark circles around your eyes. You can do that in Photoshop, that’s what people do, but when we show people what we do with one click, it blows them away and they say, “Wow, I would mask, I would level, that would take me ten minutes in Photoshop to do,” and we do it instantly.

Mike Horton: You have the same application for the iPhone and the iPad, so you can add beauty and whitened teeth and all that. Can you really do that with a finger?

Brad Malcolm: You can indeed. We also have that for the Android.

Mike Horton: Yes, I’m going to download for the iPad and iPhone and probably try it out tonight, because your website makes this look all so wonderfully simple and I can sure use the help with my photographs, so I’m going to take…

Brad Malcolm: Well, that again comes down to the value. That’s our whole value proposition. We’re here to save your time, make it easy to look your best, make it automatic because you have better things to do. And just one thing for clarification – on the iPhone, we’re coming out with a major release here shortly. That doesn’t contain the next generation of Beautify, like our current Android does and our current plug-ins do. That’s coming soon, but you’ll see four out of nine Beautify stuff, so just stay tuned.

Larry Jordan: You mentioned that this is a plug-in. What software do you work with?

Brad Malcolm: It’s a plug-in to Photoshop and it’s a plug-in to Lightroom.

Larry Jordan: I was just reflecting as you were listing all the different things that you did, is any of this technology patented?

Brad Malcolm: Yes, we have a lot of different patents in over 15 different countries. We spend a lot of money on patent expenses. It’s insane, how much money actually one spends. But yes, our technology’s patented in not just one country, but in over 15 different countries, and there are multiple patents.

Larry Jordan: Let’s go back to this whole color correction image improvement point of view. When I was reading your website, I read that our eyes see color one way and our cameras see color a different way. Could you, without confusing Michael, explain this in laymen’s terms, how this works?

Brad Malcolm: There are two aspects, there’s color and there’s light. The eye is constantly adjusting to manage all the color and all the light, where as a camera is a single point in time and so that’s a large part of the difference between the camera and the eye. In real time, the eye can manage different color, so if we have multiple light sources in a room, for example, the eye can focus in on one and realize, ok, that object is white and that object is blue. Let’s look at snow, for example. Quite often, you take a picture and the snow’s blue. Well, it wasn’t blue, so why was it?

Brad Malcolm: The camera has to white balance on something and it’s a difficult problem and it’s easy to get the colors mixed up when there are multiple light sources, so it balances on something that isn’t quite white and you end up with a blue image or a green image, whereas the human eye doesn’t have that problem. It comes down to just the inherent challenges in building an advanced sensor of a camera, and they do a great job. There’s a lot of technology in our cameras, they’re very advanced, but they’re still just physical limitations compared to the human body.

Mike Horton: Did you have a lot of fun with that internet phenom last week with the blue and black dress and the gold and white dress and everybody was seeing it in different colors?

Brad Malcolm: I didn’t see that. I’ve been traveling, so I…

Mike Horton: Oh, it was huge. It blew up and then every tech website gave you the reasons why people see different colors and, of course, none of those essays made any sense to me at all. But people saw this dress in either gold and white or blue and black and there were reasons for it, something to do with the brain and the eye, I don’t know. But anyway, it was a huge phenomenon last week.

Brad Malcolm: Yes, well, the body’s an amazing machine. The way our retina sees things differently, you’ve got the rods, you’ve got the cones, everything’s interpreted differently. I don’t want to get into all that detail because I may say something incorrectly off hand, but yes it just is amazing the way the human eye works for that and, of course, it gets complicated trying to build that in a real time mechanical device.

Larry Jordan: It’s interesting, just looking at Mike under the lighting that we have in the studio…

Mike Horton: Am I all red?

Larry Jordan: No, but looking at Mike outside, you know that he looks the same but the color temperature of the light is so different and your eye adjusts to that automatically and with the camera you’ve got to tell it what color light it’s working in.

Mike Horton: I know you were always very busy, but did you read about that? Did you get into that phenomenon of the blue and the black and the gold and the white?

Larry Jordan: It was very cool.

Mike Horton: I saw it as gold and white and my wife saw it as blue and black.

Larry Jordan: Really? Yes, blue and black, that’s me.

Mike Horton: Ok.

Larry Jordan: We’ll fight it out after.

Mike Horton: All right, we will.

Larry Jordan: Brad, give us some examples of how we can use the software. From what I understand, and I will confess I haven’t run it yet, but really you just load the pictures into the software, click one button and the processing is automatic. I’m not dragging sliders around, it’s doing all that for me. Is that correct?

Brad Malcolm: Yes, that’s correct. There are a couple of things, as background. We license the core technology, so we provide that engine to our licensees, the largest printers around the world use us. You’ve probably used us if you’ve ever been into a… or printed through a major retailer, and so that’s the licensing side, the B2B side of our business.

Brad Malcolm: We have a desktop software, which is a Photoshop and Lightroom plug-in. You install that in Photoshop or Lightroom; it also works in Adobe Elements and Corel’s PaintShop Pro. You load an image in and you open Perfectly Clear and it’s corrected automatically. We give you eight different presets that you can choose, so you can choose each one that highlights or emphasizes a particular issue. We have a fixed start for really dark images. If you want extra vibrant images, we do have a landscape one. We have our Beautify one that essentially is for portraits, because all images are slightly different.

Brad Malcolm: So yes, you click it and it’s automatic. We do have sliders for every one of our algorithms, so for those people who want to fine tune, they can do that but again, our strength is saving you time. And then same thing in our mobile apps, Android, IOS, which includes Amazon Kindle devices. It’s automatic but if you want there are slider bars to fine tune, and they’re not the same slider bars you’d find in Photoshop. They’re unique to each one of our algorithms.

Larry Jordan: We have a live chat and Dean is asking whether there are any plans to work with Apple’s Photo application?

Brad Malcolm: What does ‘work with’ mean, I guess?

Larry Jordan: If it’s a plug-in for Photoshop, would it be a plug-in for Photo?

Brad Malcolm: That’s a good question and I don’t have an answer to it. Apple’s Photo is still new, so…

Mike Horton: Yes, it just came out. Or did it just come out?

Brad Malcolm: I believe they’re still in beta, actually, so Apple had a program called Aperture and they’re phasing out Aperture, so whether or not we can be a plug-in largely depends upon whether Apple opens up that interface so that we can build in. Adobe has a plug-in interface and so we need that to be available to plug into that architecture, so that’s the technical answer. We will have a standalone version out here later this spring as well, which means anybody can use it in anything. It doesn’t plug in, it doesn’t require any… programs…

Mike Horton: Oh nice.

Brad Malcolm: …you can just load imagines from anywhere, that will be Windows and Mac, and then you can think of it, use us for your first step and then you can use Photo from Apple or whatever your other tool is for organizing, sorting, sharing etcetera.

Mike Horton: I mess around with both Photoshop and Lightroom a lot. I don’t necessarily like one over the other. Do I have to buy two separate applications for those two programs?

Brad Malcolm: No, no. What we’ve done is we have a Photoshop plug-in or a Lightroom plug-in, or we have a bundle of both of them.

Mike Horton: Oh, you have a bundle? Ok. Well, that’s the one I’d get.

Brad Malcolm: Yes, the plug-in is $149, just for reference, so you can spend $149 for either Photoshop or Lightroom, or spend $199 and you get it for both. We sell a curved platform in that case, those two platforms. There are a lot of other companies that have their different filters and enhancements and they have five or six different plug-ins. We just have one.

Larry Jordan: Our producer, Cirina, has found an interesting use of your product with a video workflow, which is kind of cool. What she does, she tells me, is that she uses it to pull a still image from raw video, then uses Perfectly Clear to do a quick color grade for her colorist to use as a reference. Have you seen other unusual uses of the application?

Brad Malcolm: It’s an interesting one. For that workflow, she’s using a Blackmagic camera, if I understand correctly, which is very high quality and we’re talking 4K, so it’s high quality. But it comes down to what a lot of people don’t realize until after the fact – hey, I got a DSLR, hey, I got high quality. I’m shooting RAW. Ok, so RAW, great.

Brad Malcolm: In theory or practically we are capturing all this information, but because it hasn’t been processed, it’s actually flatter than a JPEG is, whereas a JPEG has actually been processed so it has some punch to it. People get a DSLR to shoot RAW, they think they’re going to have a better image but then they’re disappointed because, ah, ok, now I got to have complicated RAW processing software.

Brad Malcolm: Well, if you use our technology, we work on RAW files so we automatically analyze that and give you an image that looks great, but we preserve all their detail. So that’s what happens there, you have a high quality Blackmagic video, you can shoot a still in there but it needs some oomph, it needs some punch, and so that makes a lot of sense and we do see that a lot.

Larry Jordan: What’s the price of the program?

Brad Malcolm: It’s $149.

Larry Jordan: So $139 for Photoshop, another $139 for Lightroom and then some number for both?

Brad Malcolm: No, 149.

Larry Jordan: 49?

Brad Malcolm: Yes, so 149 gets you the Lightroom plug-in, or you can spend 149 to buy the Photoshop plug-in, or you buy the bundle which gets you both and that’s 199.

Larry Jordan: And for people who want to learn more, where can they go on the web to learn more about the product?

Brad Malcolm: If you Google Perfectly Clear, which is the name of the technology, we’ll come up as your top ratings. Our website is athentech, which is our company name, athentech.com, and two other things to mention, our mobile app for Android and IOS is $2.99, so you could buy half a cup of coffee or, while you’re waiting for your cup of coffee, you download the app, because it’s less than the price of a cup of coffee. Gets you amazing images and I don’t know if Cirina’s mentioned, but she’s also won several awards as of late and we’re featuring one of her pictures and Perfectly Clear has helped her win that award because it saved a lot of time.

Mike Horton: Oh, great. That’s so cool

Larry Jordan: And Brad is the President of Authentic Imaging. Brad, thanks for joining us today. I’ve enjoyed the visit.

Brad Malcolm: Thanks for having me.

Brad Malcolm: My pleasure.

Mike Horton: Thanks, Brad.

Larry Jordan: Take care. Bye bye.

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Larry Jordan: Last week, I was in London attending the BVE expo at the ExCel Center. During the expo, we took our cameras and microphones around the show floor looking for interesting stories to cover and many of those we presented in last week’s show. However, we saved one for tonight. In this interview, I spoke with Rodrigo, Thomaz, product and training specialist for Audio-Technica UK, about some of their latest microphone products.

Larry Jordan: Continuing our tour around BVE, we’re in the Audio-Technica booth. Now, for those of you who don’t know Audio-Technica, it’s a microphone company, it makes a wide variety of microphones, and what I want to do is to learn more about what Audio-Technica’s got, both in wired in wireless mics. To do this, I want to introduce Rodrigo Thomaz. He is the event manager for Audio-Technica. Rodrigo, thanks for joining us today.

Rodrigo Thomaz: Hey, my pleasure to be here with you.

Larry Jordan: Describe Audio-Technica. What does the company do?

Rodrigo Thomaz: Audio-Technica actually started about 50 years ago in Japan with cartridges and stylus turntables. Then we moved on to microphones, headphones and so on and now wireless systems as well, so the history is there for 50 years doing great products.

Larry Jordan: As I walk around BVE, there are any number of microphone companies here. What makes Audio-Technica special? Why should someone consider your products?

Rodrigo Thomaz: First of all, it’s a family orientated business. It was run by a family in Japan for 50 years and we strive for quality and natural sound. There’s no compromise in that. Even though its tech specs are well advertised, it’s very honest. When you buy an Audio-Technica product, that’s what you get – a very honest sound, very natural.

Larry Jordan: How would you compare yourselves with other companies that also emphasize audio quality? I think Sennheiser comes instantly to mind, and others.

Rodrigo Thomaz: Sure. I think one thing we can say about us is the fact that we make very specific mics for very specific applications. Our catalog is huge, we have a large number of microphones. Sometimes it’s a very singular microphone; however, we do have microphones for very specific instruments or voices or even, if it’s in broadcast installation, which is a big part of our business as well, broadcast installation for us is massive. It’s just a variety of products to cover everything in the range of all Europe.

Larry Jordan: Talk to me more about the wireless. What have you got that’s in wireless? I know that one of the new products you have is also wireless for field work.

Rodrigo Thomaz: Yes. Right now we are exploring our System 10 camera mount system, which is this little guy over here. We have a number of systems on the System 10 range and this is now our third incarnation of System 10.

Larry Jordan: And what is it?

Rodrigo Thomaz: Basically, it’s a 2.4 gigahertz, a little receiving transmitter. What we have here is a very small little receiver, lithium battery, a long life battery, and you have a dual mono and balanced output as well, so if you do have a DSLR camera. For instance, if you need to feed left and right of the stereo image, well, we do have a dual mono over here that would do that for you.

Rodrigo Thomaz: If you have a camera such as a Blackmagic or another camera that takes up balance signal, we flick the switch and now we have a very nice balanced signal as well. It can monitor your audio as well, PFI and monitor output here for your headphones. We do have a little body pack as well that you can use a number of already, very popular microphone headsets, lapel mics, even goose necks or boundary mics, so a number of opportunities there for you to use those microphones. We have about 20 of them for you to choose from.

Larry Jordan: So I could use the Audio-Technica receiver transmitter with any microphone?

Rodrigo Thomaz: Well, really you can. We use this on the high risk connectors, a four pin high risk connector, so if you do have another brand that you like to use or you already own – I can see that you use a very nice… microphone, that is a very nice product – you could actually just rewire that with a high risk connector and, voila, you have that as well.

Larry Jordan: There’s a real challenge with wireless frequencies getting more and more congested. How do you make sure that you’re on a clear frequency?

Rodrigo Thomaz: Well, it’s digital. For instance, a lot of people who use this product would be, let’s say, videographers at a wedding or using a DSLR camera. They might have a live band playing. Most likely, they will be using a UHF system, but even if they are using a different system, we can fit eight systems together at the same time in the same place and the space between each frequency is very nicely calculated.

Rodrigo Thomaz: The system is very smart, it’s always looking for a free frequency and it never will let you down… diversity, so it’s not a diverse thing in a sense but it always looks for an empty frequency and there’s a safety net for you there. Let’s say a wireless wifi router is changing channels all the time. The system is very clever in that it always has a spare frequency there for you and it will just flick to that frequency and you never even hear a sound or a click or anything. Just very seamless.

Larry Jordan: Audio-Technica has so many different microphones for so many different purposes, how do you decide which microphone to use?

Rodrigo Thomaz: We do have a microphone range, for instance the Artist Elite, that if you go into a recording studio, let’s say I’m recording vocals, a vintage vocal or a more pop vocal, we do have microphones to cater for that as well. The 4047 microphone has a very nice vintage sound, but I can have a pop singer who wants a very crispy sound so I may suggest a 44 to a 450 microphone.

Rodrigo Thomaz: Those microphones aren’t being sometimes changed for about 20 years and they are very, very good quality and people have been using these all over the world, they’re very popular. It’s good to have a chunky catalog. It’s hard work for us to export. However, for the end user it’s great because you can pinpoint. I had a lady here who came looking for specifically a microphone for a violin. We have a 80 20 31 mic, which was designed for strings only, so it’s very specific. We like to do that, to be very specific about our mics, so we have a lot of mics for a lot of applications.

Larry Jordan: What’s the model number of this new transmitter receiver pair?

Rodrigo Thomaz: This we call the System 10 camera mount system. This is how you’re going to find this online. If you search for System 10 camera mount system, there is the…

Larry Jordan: For people who want more information, what website can they go to?

Rodrigo Thomaz: They can go to eu.audio-technica.co.uk.

Larry Jordan: Rodrigo Thomaz is the event manager for Audio-Technica. Rodrigo, thanks for joining us today.

Larry Jordan: Kevin McAuliffe is the senior editor for Extreme Reach Toronto. He’s also an Avid community leader with close to 20 years of Media Composer experience. Kevin uses his knowledge to help educate not only the Avid community, but editors currently looking to make a switch to Media Composer. Hello, Kevin, welcome.

Kevin McAuliffe: Larry, thanks for having me. Michael, good to talk to you again as well.

Mike Horton: Hiya Kevin. We were worried about you for a second, couldn’t get a hold of you.

Kevin McAuliffe: I know, I was sitting up here waiting for the Skype call to come through, but it’s funny because I was listening to that last interview and I’ll sing the praises of Audio-Technica, because I’m actually talking to you on one of their microphones right now and it’s fabulous, I love it.

Larry Jordan: See? He is a multitalented individual. Kevin, just to get ourselves started, what got you interested in editing in the first place?

Kevin McAuliffe: Oh, there’s a great story. It’s funny, nobody ever asks me that story and it’s always a good one. When I was about 14 years old, my parents took me to Universal Studios in California and I did this thing called the Star Trek Experience and basically they took you and they dressed you up like, I was a Klingon, basically, but they actually made a little ten minute video and it was one of those things where I saw all the cameras and I saw the stuff and I thought to myself, “That’s something I’ve got to do.” I was totally amazed at how they put this thing together. I still have the video from way back then.

Kevin McAuliffe: I came back home and I said to my parents, “I don’t know what aspect of film or television I want to do, but that’s what I want to do,” and believe it or not, at the time, this was, well, let’s see, this was about when I was 15 so about 25 years ago, they looked up to see how many schools offered this and there was a school in Ontario, Canada, one high school that had a television studio in it. We’re still using it. Ready for this? Video Toaster. Editing on Video Toaster with all those fantastic wipes with the football players, stuff like that, but that sort of gave me my first real look at everything that went into television and editing was always one of those things that kind of scared me because you had those giant tape decks that were 400 pounds that you had to slam the tape in at the top, three quarter inch back in the day.

Kevin McAuliffe: But after high school, I took a tour of Sheridan College. Sheridan College is well known for their computer animation course, but they’re also well known for their media and their advanced television, and I walked in and I saw – here’s another thing that’s going to make me sound old again – non-linear editing on D Vision, way back in the day, and it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen and I was like, “That’s what I’ve got to do. I want to learn how to do that.” Of course, they made me sit through two years of doing the old splicing on the Steenbeck and things like that, but in the third year I got to use Media Composer, version 5.5.

Kevin McAuliffe: When I tell people, “Oh, I’ve been using Media Composer since version 5,” they’re like, “What? You’ve been using it for three or four years?” I’m like, “No, it got to 12 and reset itself and started with Media Composer Adrenalin version 1, so technically it’s at version 20 now, so I’ve been using it for 15 versions,” so I’ve been using it a long time.

Mike Horton: I’ve got a story for you, that ‘Star Trek’ thing. I did an episode of ‘Star Trek Voyager’, and I know you did the same thing when you did the Universal Studio thing, where I got to beam up. I got to stand in the pod, I got to beam up and, of course, they cut that scene.

Larry Jordan: No!

Kevin McAuliffe: Of course.

Mike Horton: They cut that scene. They actually give you a little badge at the end of that scene where you actually get to beam up on that episode. It was so much fun and they cut it out.

Larry Jordan: So no-one’s ever seen you beam up?

Mike Horton: So if you ever see ‘Star Trek Voyager’, they cut out that scene.

Larry Jordan: How could they do that to you?

Mike Horton: I know. I know. It was just so much fun.

Larry Jordan: Do you still have the badge?

Kevin McAuliffe: I’ll look for your hand in that episode.

Larry Jordan: That leads to the next question. You got bitten when you were a ‘Klingon’, so to speak, but what brought you to Avid?

Kevin McAuliffe: Back in the day, there were really only a couple of players. Like I said, there was D Vision, which at the time was, I really got an intro because that was sort of the first little foray into non-linear editing, and then it was Avid. After that, Avid was really the only player. Premiere was around back then and wasn’t the juggernaut that it’s become today, but it was an Avid world back then and that was really the only option.

Kevin McAuliffe: For the longest time, that’s what I did and, as we all know, as the job changes and we do different things, other things came along and for the longest time I actually switched to Final Cut. I was a Final Cut guy for probably about four years – I’m going to get lots of hate mail for this – I want to say in the Final Cut heyday, but certainly in that five, six, seven span, in the Final Cut Studio span, it was really making headways.

Kevin McAuliffe: Premiere at that point started to get in the race, was starting to accelerate at that point, but it was really the Avid and Final Cut battle at that time and I was doing a lot in Final Cut and at the end of the day, most of the work that I have done has been in collaborative environments and I’m not going to say that’s really where Avid excels, because Avid excels at editing in general, but one thing about Avid – obviously as people have known over the last ten years – they’ve really started to focus on that collaborative workflow and that has really been the focus of a lot the work that I’ve done, it’s been working with six or seven other editors on many of the same projects and that’s really where Avid has now started to dominate.

Mike Horton: You’re based out of Toronto, right?

Kevin McAuliffe: Yes, Toronto, Canada.

Mike Horton: Is it pretty much an Avid town? Or is it now becoming an Avid/Premiere town? I know a lot of people still use Final Cut.

Kevin McAuliffe: In my opinion, it’s still a pretty Avid dominated town. We’re in that interesting flux period. Apple obviously took the direction that they took a couple of years ago with how they wanted to Final Cut and Premiere has now got into the driver’s seat with Avid to be in that race, and it’s become an interesting race because for the longest time that was Final Cut’s scene.

Kevin McAuliffe: I’m not saying that Final Cut’s not in the race as well, don’t get me wrong, but at the time it was really one of those, if you could sit down and edit in front of Final Cut and you went into a Media Composer facility, you could make your way through Media Composer, they were very similar in how they functioned. Well, now Premiere’s kind of stepped into that place. If you’re a Media Composer editor, you could sit down with Premiere and get up to speed pretty quickly. If you’re an editor, you can sit get up to speed pretty quickly when editing on either system. Now, Final Cut has obviously taken things a little bit differently in the past few years.

Larry Jordan: But I want to come back to this, Kevin, because I want to contrast something. Grant, who’s in our live chat, writes that Final Cut is so easy to use now and its functionality for sharing is better and faster than Avid, I can’t see the hoo-ha any more, which gets to something I’m really curious about. For decades, there’s been the whole which NLE is the best and the NLE wars. Where do you stand on this?

Mike Horton: Tell me you hate it.

Kevin McAuliffe: You know what? It’s interesting that you said sharing, because I’m not talking about necessarily sharing, I’m talking about a collaborative workflow where you might have ten editors working on a project at the same time. I’m not talking about a couple of editors sitting down, I’m going to edit some and then, Larry, I’m going to pass it off to you and then you’re going to do some stuff and you’re going to pass it back to me. I’m talking about editors sharing storage, sharing media, working on a project at the same time.

Mike Horton: You can do that, right, Larry, in Final Cut with an XN?

Larry Jordan: No. You can’t have multiple people in the same library at the same time, but you can access the library from an XN. But you can’t have multiple people, no. Kevin’s absolutely right, the collaboration within Avid beats everything in Premiere with the possible exception of Adobe Anywhere, but beats Premiere and beats Final Cut. So that’s a good point.

Kevin McAuliffe: We’re not talking necessarily about sharing, we’re talking about a collaborative multi editor environment. As far what’s better, that’s like me saying what’s a better apple? Is a Fuji apple better? Is a Red Delicious better? One thing that I always try to tell all Final Cut editors – and don’t get me wrong, a lot of editors say… and then I can cut circles around you and that’s great and everything – because Final Cut is a different beast than it used to be, and I say beast in the most respectful terms, is that you might be the best Final Cut Pro 10 editor in the world, but you’d better get out there and you’d better learn Media Composer, because

Kevin McAuliffe: Avid is entrenched in a lot of production facilities, especially in LA, especially on the bigger productions, and if you want to get in on those productions, it’s not like it was back in the day where I know Final Cut and Avid works very similarly, it’s a very different workflow now so get out there and if you want to get into these facilities that have Avid, make sure you know it backwards, forwards, upside down. I hear people talk about the rigidity of Avid, “I don’t like Media Composer because I don’t have the flexibility that I have in other applications,” but I tell people that, believe it or not, that’s a blessing in disguise.

Kevin McAuliffe: One thing I tell people, when they go in to set their project up, people immediately always think that when they’re setting their project up, they’re setting it up to how their footage was shot and I say, “Don’t think that. Think of how you’re setting your project up as to what the final file that you’re going to deliver to your client is.” If you think that way and you’re bringing in media, because again, much like in Premiere, much like in Final Cut, you can bring in any type of media into Media Composer timeline to work with, but that Media Composer timeline is fixed to what you’re going to be delivering at the very end of your production.

Kevin McAuliffe: If you remember that, Media Composer is essentially giving you the road to drive down and saying, “This is the way you’re going to drive,” so that no matter what happens, you’re going to get to the destination the way that you need to.

Larry Jordan: Now, I want to be clear here that you don’t work for Avid, you’re an editor that just is using Avid.

Kevin McAuliffe: I do not work for Avid.

Larry Jordan: But recently Avid’s been having a really hard time financially and there’s been a lot of talk of the beleaguered Avid. Is it worth editors even learning the software, given the difficulties Avid is going through?

Kevin McAuliffe: Let’s put it this way. Like I said, I don’t work for the company, I can’t speak for the company, but I don’t really necessarily think that Avid’s going through any tough times, like everybody is saying they are. If you take a look at the Academy Awards this year, take a look at the films that were nominated for film editing – you’ve got ‘American Sniper’, you’ve got ‘Boyhood’, ‘Grand Budapest Hotel’, ‘Imitation Game’ and ‘Whiplash’ that won the Academy Award, all edited in Avid.

Kevin McAuliffe: The big players out there are still using Avid. I wouldn’t consider myself to be a big player because I’m not editing Hollywood features, but I’m doing pro editing, I’m doing commercials, I’m doing things like that and for me Avid is still the tool of choice.

Larry Jordan: Why did it take Avid so long to get into 4K?

Kevin McAuliffe: That’s a great question and that’s one that people like to give Avid a bash for. Again, it’s only my own personal opinion, but what people need to remember about a company like Avid is that Avid has two very different and distinct ecosystems. There are technically three, if you want to include storage in that, but storage can flip back and forth between the editing side and the post audio side. Really, there were a lot of factors that Avid needed to take into consideration such as interplay, which is asset management for Media Composer.

Kevin McAuliffe: That’s something that Avid has to keep in mind when they’re developing their software, so they need to make sure, it works great in Media Composer, but how is this going to transfer into interplay asset management? You need to make sure that all that 2K, Ultra HD, 4K media is being indexed the way that it needs to be so all the editors can access it. They need to make sure that if I’m going to be sending 4K work over to Pro Tools, that the files that I’m sending get over there in one step.

Kevin McAuliffe: Again, just my own opinion, but when Avid is designing stuff, it needs to look at the bigger picture. They can’t just look at it as, “Let’s just put this into Media Composer,” because suddenly you’re going to have a system that’s, let’s say, doing 4K work at a facility but then you’re going to have another system that maybe hasn’t been upgraded yet. There are just all these different things that they needed to take into consideration when doing this. Again, just my own opinion.

Larry Jordan: Well, at least he has an opinion.

Mike Horton: Kevin does have an opinion. Kevin, I just wanted to let you know that I always watch the tutorials that you do. You put them up, what, about once a week now?

Kevin McAuliffe: Once a week, yes.

Mike Horton: The one on background animations – oh, so good. It was so good, so much fun. Good job, I loved that one. It was just so much fun.

Kevin McAuliffe: Well, thank you. Thank you.

Mike Horton: And you can find those, by the way, on PVC. I think you’ve got a Vimeo blog or on the Avid site. But anyway, Kevin puts these things out about once a week.

Kevin McAuliffe: Yes, once a week. You can actually find them on youtube.com/user/ mediacomposer101. User singular.

Mike Horton: Yes, so you can learn Media Composer for free from him, so thank you Kevin.

Kevin McAuliffe: Well, I mean, that’s something that I try to do. Really for me, the tutorials got started out at the Creative Cow, so obviously I want to give a big thanks to them because Ron Lindeboom and… gave me the freedom to do them. They said, “Avid is something that’s important that people learn,” and I did 93 tutorials for them that have had somewhere between one and a half to two million views across all their channels, and I still get people who email me every day saying, “I just watched your tutorials on the Cow and I have a question for you,” so now I try to direct them to the new site.

Kevin McAuliffe: But there are still people out there checking them out and that was version 6 of Media Composer. We’re now up to version 8.3 of Media Composer, so people are still out there finding those older tutorials.

Larry Jordan: Before I talk about how Avid interacts with other software, you started to talk about what Avid does that other NLEs can’t and you stressed how important collaboration, multiple editors working in the same project at the same time, is. Off the top of your head, what are some of the key features for you that Avid has that we can’t get from Premiere or Final Cut?

Kevin McAuliffe: That’s a good question. It’s an interesting situation that we’re in in the Avid world, because for the longest time we’ve had pretty much most of the features at our disposal that we really need. One thing that I think Avid is doing now that is interesting, it’s kind of like Adobe did with After Effects, which is with After Effects we didn’t have the greatest keyer in After Effects so instead of Adobe spending all this time to say, “Let’s develop a new keyer” they turned to I believe it’s The Foundry and they licensed Keylight to put into After Effects.

Kevin McAuliffe: It’s kind of like what they’ve done with Imagineer Systems with Mocca and what they’ve done with Cinema 4D.

Kevin McAuliffe: One thing that Avid has great support from is their partner companies, like Boris FX and other companies like that, that really give us tools in our timeline that let the guys at Avid do what the guys at Avid do and lets the team at Boris FX develop these great tools for us like, for example, it could flicker fix or it could be 3D elements, it could be all this great type of stuff, to let us fix the problems that normally editors – and don’t get me wrong, I love After Effects, I’m a huge After Effects user, but a lot of times I just need to get in and do stuff quickly in my timeline and I don’t want to be constantly sending stuff to After Effects, even though the fact that we have Pro Import After Effects, formerly Automatic Duck, inside of After Effects is fantastic, so I just export in AF with no media, they go boom, I import it, there’s all my Media Composer layers inside of After Effects in 30 seconds, which is really good.

Mike Horton: What’s the one thing in Avid that is lacking that you so want and you dream about? Is there anything?

Kevin McAuliffe: I don’t think there’s anything necessarily because, like I said, the partner companies have really stepped up and filled in a lot of the gaps. For example, we have the Marquee Title tool. I remember back in the day when the Marquee Title tool required its own dedicated workstation, the workstation alone was 25 or 30 thousand dollars and now all of that 3D titling and stuff like that can be done with effects like Boris FX’ 3D Objects or NewBlueFX’s Titler Pro. NewBlue Titler Pro covers…

Mike Horton: Yes, that’s a brilliant program.

Kevin McAuliffe: …subscription, so editors might already have some of these tools at their disposal and they don’t even realize it yet.

Mike Horton: And NewBlueFX, they do it for all the NLEs, but they do brilliant work.

Larry Jordan: Yes, they do.

Mike Horton: Their marketing team lacks.

Larry Jordan: How do you move files from Avid to DaVinci Resolve?

Kevin McAuliffe: The one thing I love about finishing in a program like Resolve is that the functionality is pretty much the same, much like in After Effects. In Resolve, we can basically take an AAF from our Media Composer timeline, whether it’s a 30 second spot or a half hour show, and export the AAF. Now, this is in HD or higher than HD, we can do all the way up to 4K.

Kevin McAuliffe: We can export an AAF, basically go into Resolve, we can link to all the media that we’ve already digitized, so this is all DNxHD or DNxHR for doing higher than HD. It all appears in Resolve to do our color grade and then we can actually render out MXF files right back to Media Composer, so that when the AAF file is exported, it’s just a link to inside of Resolve. The Resolve workflow is a really, really good solid workflow for Media Composer editors to use for color grading. It’s a fantastic tool and the great thing is that, I’d say, for most of the stuff that Media Composer editors want to do, the free option will work perfectly.

Kevin McAuliffe: The only thing they need to keep in mind is that if they happen to be doing stereoscopic, you’ve got to pay for that option, but if you happen to be doing any of the DCI resolutions, the digital cinema resolutions, that requires the full version of Resolve, so something to keep in the back of your head.

Mike Horton: Yes but, come on, it’s $999 for goodness’ sake.

Kevin McAuliffe: If you’re doing stuff for the cinema, I know, $999 is a really good deal, and it’s funny because I’m taking a look at, and of course now the program just escaped my brain and I have it sitting here beside me somewhere…

Mike Horton: Fusion.

Kevin McAuliffe: Fusion, that’s the one. What’s very cool about Fusion is that Fusion actually has a Media Composer plug-in, so you can basically, through Media Composer, drag the Fusion plug-in onto your clip, you click one button, Fusion opens, do the work you want to do, you say save and, boom, it appears in your…

Mike Horton: And as we speak they’re working on a Mac version.

Larry Jordan: That’s true.

Kevin McAuliffe: There you go. A lot of companies are starting to look, and let’s put it this way, if Media Composer was as, quote unquote, dead as some people like to say that it is, these companies wouldn’t be investing a lot of time to make these things for Media Composer. Obviously, Media Composer’s still a big market.

Mike Horton: Yes, well, thanks for all you do, Kevin. I really learn a lot from you, as does my son, who watched that same tutorial just the other day.

Larry Jordan: Kevin, where can people find the tutorials?

Kevin McAuliffe: They can find the tutorials over at youtube.com/user/mediacomposer 101 and I just want to thank the great team at Video Guys for being a sponsor, because they’ve been fantastic. Yes, they can check it out, they can subscribe to it there. We’ve only had the tutorials done for about three months…

Larry Jordan: And, Kevin, I’m going to cut you off.

Kevin McAuliffe: …and we’ve had about 20,000 viewers so far.

Larry Jordan: Kevin McAuliffe is a senior editor with Extreme Reach Toronto and an Avid community leader. Kevin, thanks for joining us today.

Kevin McAuliffe: Thanks for having me, Larry.

Mike Horton: Thanks, Kevin.

Larry Jordan: Take care. Bye bye.

Mike Horton: Stay warm.

Larry Jordan: Michael, it’s interesting listening to Kevin talk about the benefits of Avid. We spend a lot of time talking with Premiere people and with Final Cut people and it’s nice to hear the Avid folks chip in.

Mike Horton: It’s more nice to hear that he just doesn’t give a damn about the war any more, which I know you don’t either. You have your favorites, you have what your knowledge is. You don’t necessarily need to know all of them. I expect you one day to actually do webinars on Vegas Pro, but you probably won’t. But this whole thing about the war and what is best, it’s just really silly and it needs to stop.

Larry Jordan: Well, it’s like asking yourself what’s the best car or the best camera, it really is the best car for the job that you need.

Mike Horton: What is the best car, Larry?

Larry Jordan: It’s easy, Michael, are you’re driving a group of 40 school kids across country or driving sheets of plywood? Because one’s a bus and the other’s a truck.

Mike Horton: Good analogy. Good analogy. I like that. What is it? Is it a minivan or a Prius?

Larry Jordan: But we’ve got to have Kevin back, he does such a great job.

Mike Horton: Oh, he’s wonderful. He’s one of the best.

Larry Jordan: Let’s see, we had a wonderful time in London…

Mike Horton: Yes, what did we have tonight?

Larry Jordan: We had London and we had Perfectly Clear and we had…

Mike Horton: By the way, Perfectly Clear really looks cool. I’m going to download that for my iPhone, because I have this awful, awful iPhone which takes awful, awful pictures and that could make my awful pictures into perfectly clear pictures. Thank you. That was a good commercial, wasn’t it?

Larry Jordan: And look what it would do to your elephant seals.

Mike Horton: It could.

Larry Jordan: It would turn them into otters. It’d be great.

Mike Horton: Give them nice skin tone during the molting season.

Larry Jordan: Beautiful blue, yes, it’d be great. I want to thank our guests for this week: Brad Malcolm, the President of Athentech Imaging, the makers of Perfectly Clear; Rodrigo Thomaz, product and training specialist with Audio-Technica in the UK; and Kevin McAuliffe, Media Composer community leader and expert trainer and expert editor.

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, all online 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. You can email us at any time via our website.

Larry Jordan: Our producer is Cirina Catania. Our engineering team is lead by Megan Paulos, includes Alexia Chalida, Ed Golya, Keenan Guy and Brianna Murphy. On behalf of Mike Horton – that’s the handsome guy in a gray suit – my name is Larry Jordan…

Mike Horton: It’s blue.

Larry Jordan: …and thanks for listening…

Mike Horton: It’s dark blue.

Larry Jordan: …to The Digital Production Buzz.

Mike Horton: Goodbye, everybody.

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