HOST
Larry Jordan

GUESTS
J.J. Kelley, Senior Producer and Correspondent, National Geographic
Tom Coughlin, President, Coughlin Associates, Inc.
John Pritchard, Founder/Director, The One Heart – One Spirit Project
Terence Curren, Founder/President, Alpha Dogs Inc.
James DeRuvo, Senior Writer, DoddleNEWS

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Announcer:  The Digital Production Buzz is brought to you by KeyFlow Pro, media asset management software, designed to meet the needs of work groups at an affordable price.

Larry Jordan:  This week, we celebrate Thanksgiving here in the US and this holiday gives us an opportunity to share some of our most popular recent interviews with you.  We start with JJ Kelley, he’s a senior producer for National Geographic.  We were fascinated by his stories of shooting video from the wilds of the world.

Larry Jordan:  Tom Coughlin, president of Coughlin Associates, has had a long career in both engineering and storage.  Tonight we hear his insights on Cloud storage.

Larry Jordan:  John Pritchard is the producer and director of the documentary, One Heart, One Spirit.  He explains what it takes for an indie film to win a film festival, and whether it’s worth it.

Larry Jordan:  Terry Curren, president of Alpha Dogs, continues our ongoing discussion of the impact machine learning is having on our industry and our jobs.  There’s both good and bad news here.

Larry Jordan:  All this, plus James DeRuvo, with our weekly doddleNEWS update.  The Buzz starts now.

Announcer:  Since the dawn of digital filmmaking – authoritative – one show serves a worldwide network of media professionals – current – uniting industry experts – production – filmmakers – post production – and content creators around the planet – distribution.  From the media capital of the world in Los Angeles, California, The Digital Production Buzz goes live now.

Larry Jordan:  Welcome to The Digital Production Buzz, the world’s longest running podcast for the creative content industry, covering media production, post production and marketing around the world.

Larry Jordan:  Hi, my name is Larry Jordan.  Today is Thanksgiving in the US, probably my favorite holiday because it reminds us to stop and say thanks to all the good people, and for all the good circumstances in our lives.  For this reason, the Buzz team is taking the evening off to celebrate with friends and family.  Because of the holiday, we decided it would be fun to share some of our favorite interviews from the last several months.  These span from July through October of this year.  We enjoyed them the first time we heard them, and hope you’ll enjoy hearing them again.

Larry Jordan:  By the way, I want to invite you to subscribe to our free weekly show newsletter at digitalproductionbuzz.com.  Every issue, every week provides quick links to all the different segments on the show, plus articles of interest to filmmakers.  And best of all, it’s free and comes out every Saturday.

Larry Jordan:  But though today is Thanksgiving, the news never stops, not even for holidays which means it’s time for our weekly doddleNEWS update with James DeRuvo.  Hello James.

James DeRuvo:  Larry, let me be the first to wish you a happy turkey day.

Larry Jordan:  A very happy Thanksgiving to you and your family.

James DeRuvo:  And back to you.

Larry Jordan:  So what have we got?  We still have news happening this week even though most of the world has taken the day off.  What have you got?

James DeRuvo:  While everybody is watching football and filling themselves to the gullets with turkey, Kodak is announcing a new 360 degree camera called the Orbit360 4K.  What makes it interesting is that whilst it has dual juxtaposed super wide angle lenses at 197 degrees, each one has a 20 megapixel CMOS sensor, so instead of sharing the load, they each have their own dedicated sensor which is pretty cool.  It offers three different modes including standard 360, full frame 4K from its front facing camera, and a special dome mode which captures 235 degrees of the spherical spectrum, so you can get that kind of little planet dome action going.

Larry Jordan:  How would you describe the camera itself?

James DeRuvo:  It’s really small.  Kodak’s 360, it’s very action camera like.  It’s got this really tiny footprint, and like the GoPro Hero, it has the ability to attach to a wide variety of camera mounts.  This makes it an interesting competitor to GoPro’s Fusion which is twice as big and Samsung’s Gear VR which has pretty much fallen by the wayside.

James DeRuvo:  GoPro may still have a leg up when it comes to the over capture feature that comes in 2018 and their Angel view, but competition is always a great thing for users.  Even in VR.

Larry Jordan:    I’m so sorry, even in VR.  I tell you that’s an amazing statement from you sir.  That’s the Kodak Orbit360 4K camera, what else you got?

James DeRuvo:  I’ve been into 3D printing for about a year and a half now where you can pretty much design and 3D print your own props and parts and camera tools.  I’ve been looking around, there’s a whole bunch of wide variety sites, and when you have an issue where like for me the other day, I lost a lens cap and I didn’t want to wait two days to order one from Amazon, so I 3D printed my own lens cap.  3D printers can be a great tool for those last minute replacement parts and everyday filmmaking tools.  I’ve been searching through the web and I’ve been finding tools like those cable locks that you can attach to the side of your DSLR so that your cables don’t pull out and break.  Follow focus gears, even grip heads and barn doors for your home brew lighting kits.  Why not 3D make them?  It’s a pretty interesting little industry and hobby.  There’s a wide variety of 3D model sites out there offering designs for free including Thingieverse.com and myminifactory, and thanks to sites like Tinkercad and easy to use software like Fusion 360, you can even customize and make your own original designs.

Larry Jordan:  You’ve been doing this printing for a while.  What factors do you need to keep in mind when you’re doing your printing?

James DeRuvo: I like to call it the high maintenance girlfriend of the creative process, because you have to juggle a whole bunch of different factors, including extruder temperature, bed temperature, keeping your filament free of humidity and being sure that even your 3D model’s free of flaws.  There’s actually whole websites out there where you can upload your model, and it will analyze it and repair it if there’s any sections missing.  You have to juggle a lot of things, but when you 3D print a part that you broke within a few minutes, or that prop that you designed for your short film project, the benefit of this tool becomes abundantly clear and I honestly believe that it’s going to change the world.  There’s going to come a point where we don’t remember our life without a 3D printer in the home.

Larry Jordan:  Well I’m expecting a bunch of 3D printed Christmas presents from you, so get to work on it.

James DeRuvo:  Funny you should say that, I’ve already designed them.

Larry Jordan:  Alright, so we’ve got 3D printing, and what else is going on?

James DeRuvo:  DJI has announced a new drone partnership with State, Federal and local governments.  It’s called the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle UAS, Integrated Pilot Program, with the aim of standardizing and balancing regulations that don’t stifle innovation and balancing it with keeping public safety always at the forefront.  The program will develop safer drone flight technologies, evaluate regulations and test new forms of management procedures and DJI is even giving drones to local governments to test themselves, so that they can develop those new procedures.

Larry Jordan:  Well what do you see as DJI’s goal here?

James DeRuvo:  I think their goal is to create a kind of balance between public safety and this emerging billion dollar industry.  It’s no secret that the use of drones has exploded and many government organizations are struggling to keep up with regulations that keep public safety in the forefront.  We’ve had near misses of airplanes, we’ve had drones crash into crowds and we’ve got these idiots that fly their drones in forest fires so they can get footage to sell to CNN.  DJI is seeking to develop a balanced approach that would manage public safety and preserve it without strangling this industry, so it’s worth giving it a try because now it’s kind of like the wild west out there.

Larry Jordan:   That’s DJI working with governments on regulations.  What other stories are you covering this week?

James DeRuvo:   Vimeo announcing support for the Mivo live streaming camera, it’s a 4K camera that they call a TV studio in your pocket.  Beginning Friday there are Black Friday deals galore, and we’re looking for every single one of them.

Larry Jordan:  What do you mean, beginning Friday? I think it started last week.

James DeRuvo:  They really should call it Black November now.  I’ve been getting emails nonstop for about the last week.

Larry Jordan:  James, where can people go who want to keep track of the latest news in our industry?

James DeRuvo:  All these stories and more can be found at doddlenews.com.

Larry Jordan:  James DeRuvo is a senior writer for doddleNEWS, and joins us every week and James, have yourself a wonderful Thanksgiving, we’ll talk to you next week.

James DeRuvo:  You too, happy holidays.

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Larry Jordan:  JJ Kelley is a twice Emmy nominated director and correspondent.  He is also a senior producer at Explorer, which is National Geographic’s flagship documentary series.  His work has taken him to all seven continents, and he’s currently hosting a new adventure series for the Travel Channel.  Hello JJ, welcome back.

JJ Kelley:  Hey Larry, it’s a real pleasure.

Larry Jordan:   You know, I was just calculating, it was six years since you and I last spoke on this show.  It seems like it was at least six years ago. It’s good to have you back again.

JJ Kelley:  It’s been far too long.  Thank you so much.

Larry Jordan:  How would you describe what you do?

JJ Kelley:  Well, I get goose bumps when I go to work. I do really love what I do, so my job consists of being in an office for maybe 40 percent of the time, preparing to go out into the world and then the other 60 percent I’m out there on two week assignments, sometimes less, sometimes more, at various locations around the world.

Larry Jordan:  How did you connect with National Geographic?

JJ Kelley:  It has been a pretty long and amazing road with the company.  It really goes back to doing an internship.  12 years ago I started to make my own films, and this was back when HTV was coming around and you could buy professional or prosumer cameras and they were at your fingertips and you could make your own film.  Editing software, Final Cut Pro was coming up, so really the power was starting to be taken away from these big production companies, and put in the hands of the every person.  I was the every person at the time that this was coming around, and I started to make my own films.  My senior year in college, I took a film that I made and I sent it to National Geographic and said “Will you give me a job for this film?”  They said, “Get lost buddy, you really haven’t done a whole lot.”  I said, “Well OK, fair enough, would you give me an internship?”  And they said, “OK, we’ll give you that.”  So I got an internship and it led to production coordinator jobs, associate producer, producer and then senior producer which is what I do now.

Larry Jordan:  Do you find yourself doing more producing or more reporting on camera?

JJ Kelley:  I have a short attention span and maybe that’s a good thing or a bad thing.  I’ve spent a couple of years of my career editing and assistant editing and learning the ins and outs of Avid and Premiere and Final Cut.  I spent two years of my career being a director of photography shooting.  For National Geographic I spent a little bit of time over at vice, and shot for Discovery, really working just as a DP, and then most of my career I’ve spent as a producer, but a lot of what I do is working with on camera correspondents and together we hash out the story.  We decide what the important beats are and we tell it together.  So it just became a natural evolution that working with them on what they should say, I kind of had a sense for what should be said, and my bosses took a chance on me and said “Why don’t you step out from behind the camera and get in front of it?”

Larry Jordan:  As you are looking at it from a producer’s point of view, what were some of your more unusual destinations?

JJ Kelley:  Oh my goodness.  I love this question because I really get to go to some of the most incredible places in the world.  Last year, for me it was probably my best year in terms of just getting out there.  I went to all seven continents last year, and the coldest one really stood out as being the most challenging and rewarding in terms of video production, that was Antarctica of course.  Going down there and deciding the camera equipment to bring, knowing that there is no B&H, there’s no Adorama, there’s no way to get replacement parts, basically you’re going to be down there for four months.  At times it’ll be negative 40, negative 70 degrees and you need to have everything with you to make a television show.

Larry Jordan:  Just trying to keep the gear warm enough to function at temperatures that low is a challenge in itself, separate and distinct from what you record.  How did you do it?

JJ Kelley:  I learned a ton.  I’d never been to anything quite that cold.  I grew up in northern Minnesota, so negative 40 wasn’t completely foreign to me.  But I really hadn’t done a lot of filming in that environment.  Cameras are incredibly robust.  For that shoot we had the Sony FS7 and because any time you send a filmmaker down to the frozen continent, you have to boot out a scientist.  So the science community down there wants to disseminate the information that they’re learning down there, but they also want to continue to get information.  So they only let a select amount of people down there.  So me and five other really intrepid individuals went down to Antarctica and we were charged with making a six hour miniseries for National Geographic.  We had to be our own one man band and that meant doing sound, sometimes three channels of independent audio, doing all the filming and producing a fully complete story.

JJ Kelley:   So I had two of everything, and the cameras were incredibly tough.  What wasn’t as tough were the LCD screens.  Sometimes it would be so cold, I’d be living in a tent, I’d be charging my batteries with a generator, and I remember it would dip to negative 50 and I couldn’t feel my fingers, and there was a good scene going on, it was a crazy blizzard.  I thought, this is going to be great film, great television, I got to stay with this, and then the entire monitor just goes white.  It just goes white, and I can’t see what I’m filming in front of me.  So I bump to F16, there really are no trees, there’s nothing in the background anyway.  I’m thinking, whatever I’m filming is probably going to be in focus right now, let’s just stick with it, and sure enough it ended up being a great scene.  And the camera kept ticking.  It was just I couldn’t see what I was doing.

Larry Jordan:  When you are going on location, clearly you have to take more than a camera.  What do you feel is essential part of your kit if you exclude the camera?

JJ Kelley:  I’ve been doing this for a little while now, about 12 years kind of out there in the world, and I’ve come to the point in my career where if I’m not using it every day, I am going to leave it back home because it is slowing me down.  Sometimes on more risky assignments, if it’s slowing you down, then it’s putting your life at risk.  So I really bring the bare bones, and it depends how many people are going to be with me, how many people I can hand the gear out to so everybody can have their own part.  I was just in the Central Congo and I had a decent size crew.  There were four of us that went over there, and I was able to hand bits and pieces out.  So if I can bring a drone over today, I love a drone, I love the aerial perspective, I like to get up in the air whether it’s an establishing shot for a scene, I love to have a drone with me.

JJ Kelley:  I’m going to need to have wireless audio.  Audio is so critical, it’s so important camera side.  You need to understand what people are saying otherwise the message is just completely lost.  I always wear a little DSLR camera around my neck because I love to take photographs so I always have my A7S2 with a Leica 35 prime around my neck, so any time I shoot a scene, I can get a photo just to remember for myself.  So you have those bare bones parts, you can do a lot with that.  If you know you’re going to be in a dangerous situation maybe you can leave that tripod behind, and you can get by with a … or you can just set the camera down.  It’s really deciding how much time I’m going to have, how many times am I going to be moving locations?  Is my life going to be at risk if I bring too much stuff?   So it really is tailor made to the very shoot that I go on.

Larry Jordan:  Some shoots, they just let you wander on your own.  Other shoots you’ve got minders, think of it as PR people that are keeping an eye on you.  How does your shoot change when you’re being minded?

JJ Kelley:   Oh the minders.  It definitely restricts the message that you’re going to be telling.  A lot of times if I’m going to a place, I was just in the Gaza Strip and going over there you have to apply for a film permit of what you’re going to be doing, and you really have to be pretty vague when you’re telling them what you’re going to be doing if you think what you’re going to be doing could be annoying to them.  We went in these tunnels where there are goods that are brought in and out of the country and it’s elicit travel through these tunnels.  On our main film permit, you have to be honest, you can’t lie when you’re going into these places.  But that doesn’t mean you can’t be a little bit oblique with what you’re going to do.  So when you’re actually on the ground and you have these minders with you, there are various tricks that you can use.

JJ Kelley:   You never want to lie because lying in a place like the Gaza Strip where you have a group like Hamas around, could get you at risk.  We had an amazing situation where the correspondent was talking about these illegal tunnels, and said, sometimes the Israelis say that suicide bombers are going through the tunnels and the minder didn’t hear us correctly and thought that we said, suicide bombers are going through these tunnels.  We said, the Israelis say, so we qualified it.  And they didn’t quite catch the details because they didn’t speak great English so they pulled us into a Hamas holding cell where we were surrounded by people with AK47s and then it was a matter of “We’re going to play the tape, if you’re lying, then potential orange jump suit consequences.”

JJ Kelley:  So the correspondent and I were really questioning ourselves.  It’s like, “Did you say the Israelis say that they do this?” and she’s like, “Yeah, I’m a good journalist, I’m sure that I said that” and they weren’t going to let us leave until they heard exactly what she said.  So we said, “OK I trust you” and we played them the tape and sure enough she said the right thing, they understood it correctly, and they let us go.  But you can’t be deceptive in front of these minders because it really could have some pretty awful consequences.

Larry Jordan:  A big challenge is just getting your gear across the border. How do you make sure that you come back with the gear that you went in with?

JJ Kelley:  We hope and pray that everything comes back.  Nothing’s nipped.  It depends on how much stuff you’re bringing.  National Geographic is known for taking beautiful images, pretty pictures, so sometimes that means bringing a good bit of gear.  Sometimes that means bringing big cinema lenses, a long lens, a macro lens, it could mean bringing a bigger drone.  So sometimes you’re going through with anywhere from seven to 18 excess baggage cases and you really want to know the airline that you’re flying on and make sure that they have a media rate, because otherwise that could cost you $10,000 if you go with the wrong airline and they charge you per kilo.

JJ Kelley:  So once you get over there, I really rely on local producers.  If I go to a place like the Congo, I’m hiring a solid local producer who I know, who I’ve worked with before, who’s been vetted, who’s going to have local porters that can help out, who’s going to have the right vehicles that aren’t going to break down, he’s going to have back up vehicles.  Then you need to go to a lot of countries in the world with something called a film carnet which lists every piece of gear that you have, and I live in New York, and when I fly out of JFK I go to customs and they’ll look at this list, and they’ll point to various items and I have to show them that I have those items, and I have to show them that I have those items when I get back as well, because if I don’t, my company could get fined pretty heavily.

Larry Jordan:  There’s no shortage of excitement in your life that’s for sure.  For people that want to know more, where can they go on the web?

JJ Kelley:  Go to JJKelley.com.

Larry Jordan:  That’s all one word, JJKelley.com, and JJ thanks for joining us today.  This has been amazing.

JJ Kelley:  Thanks so much Larry.  Have a great night.

Larry Jordan:  Take care, bye bye.

Larry Jordan:  Tom Coughlin is a Silicon Valley consultant, a storage analyst, and the organizer of the Annual Storage Visions and Creative Visions Conferences.  Storage is critical to media creation which is why it’s always good to have Tom back on the show.  Hello Tom, welcome back.

Tom Coughlin:  Hi Larry, thank you very much.  It’s good to be back.

Larry Jordan:  Tom, this week we’re talking about storage, specifically Cloud storage, and before we get into that though, what got you interested in storage in the first place?

Tom Coughlin:  Well I’m actually an engineer by background. I’ve worked on digital storage technologies and applications for three decades, so it’s kind of in my blood.

Larry Jordan:  How would you define Cloud storage?

Tom Coughlin:  Well Cloud storage would be a digital content that’s being stored in large data centers or on premise where it’s accessible to the internet, with public networks.

Larry Jordan:  What makes Cloud storage different from local storage?

Tom Coughlin:  With local storage you’re usually talking storage that’s within a facility being used directly for an application or for instance, media and entertainment for post production.  Generally when people are talking about Cloud storage, they’re talking about storage that’s accessible remotely and it could be used for things where people are trying to do collaborative projects and want to share content with somebody who’s far away, to do collaborative workflows.  The difference between what’s in the Cloud and what’s local is generally where the storage is actually located, and how you access that content.

Larry Jordan:  Is gear for Cloud storage different than the gear we use for local storage?

Tom Coughlin:  Generally, it’s not.  But one thing that is different about the Cloud storage, especially large Cloud storage providers, is because they have such a volume of equipment they buy, that many of these people, like Amazon or Google, or Facebook, they define to manufacturers what they want.  They may have large IT departments themselves and a lot of times they’ll buy off the shelf components, they’ll use software to configure it and make it do what they want it to do.  Especially for smaller facilities, you know, they oftentimes have a lot more resources than some … in house storage.

Larry Jordan:  Who are the big players in Cloud storage today?

Tom Coughlin:  There’s a lot of people that are providing Cloud storage or have storage in the Cloud, folks who work particularly in the media and entertainment space.  There are smaller ones, but the larger ones would be Google, Amazon, and Microsoft is also working in that area.  There’s a lot of smaller players as well who are doing various things in Cloud storage.

Larry Jordan:  When we’re debating what storage to use, when should we consider putting our data in the Cloud, and when should we keep our data local?

Tom Coughlin:  The reasons why people put things in the Cloud is one, if they’re doing something collaborative, and they want somebody to be able to access it remotely.  Another reason that people put things in the Cloud is to basically move what otherwise might be a capital expense to buy storage equipment into an operating expense, where you’re hiring a service including backup and all of the IT operations with the content.  So there’s a few different reasons why people will use Cloud for various applications.

Larry Jordan:  What’s interesting to me is your definition of a Cloud which is basically a remote server with web access, the issues that we deal with with storage, whether its local or Cloud, are pretty much the same.  The gear is the same, it’s just whether we need the collaboration aspect it sounds like is the key difference?  True?

Tom Coughlin:  Well there’s two key differences.  One is whether you want to manage the assets yourself, which you would do with on premise, or if you want to do something where somebody else is managing it, that’s one reason.  And the other thing is to enable collaboration and sharing of content.

Larry Jordan:  How concerned should we be about the security over our data in the Cloud?

Tom Coughlin:  There’s always a question, you know, if you’ve got content available to the internet, how safe it’s going to be.  The folks that are providing these services though have done a lot to create encryption, other ways of ensuring privacy and that this data is not accessible to people who aren’t supposed to get it.  And also if you’ve got a larger facility with enough storage you can often get dedicated space within a data center, where the content’s going to be kept.  So there’s various things to be done to make the Cloud more secure.  But if you get down to it, if you don’t want anyone ever to have the possibility of accessing it, keeping it local, keeping it unconnected would be the best idea.

Larry Jordan:  As we’re picking a storage vendor, what questions should we ask them to determine whether this is the right storage vendor for us?

Tom Coughlin:  Things to look at would be what they call a service level agreement, which is the agreement that’s made, what kind of service they’re going to provide, what kind of availability they’re going to have, how many … whether it’s located in more than one place or the data’s replicated geographically so that for instance if one site goes down, it’s available from another site.  There’s a number of different things that can be in the service level agreements that have a lot to do with it.  And of course the more things you’re asking for generally the more expensive it’s going to get, so those are some of the tradeoffs you make in getting those services.

Larry Jordan:  I’ve had the great pleasure of speaking at some of your storage conferences, and you’ve been covering the storage industry with your conferences for many years.  Why did you decide to start them?

Tom Coughlin:  I decided to start them because I thought that visual storage is playing a very important role in the media space, and events that focused on that would be valuable to people in the industry, so that’s why I started Creative Storage.  The other conference Storage Visions I started because I think in general that storage is playing an extremely important role that the idea and the vision of where storage is going will have a lot to do with what we can do with the content we’re creating.  With so much unstructured content being created, particularly unstructured content not like data in databases, but data that doesn’t have as much information on how to find things, how we deal with that in videos is one of those.  How we deal with that’s very important and the tools that enable us to do that I think are the cutting edge of what makes artificial intelligence and big video projects, big data projects in general, possible.  So Storage Visions conference this year in Milpitas, California is going to have a particular focus on unstructured data storage and its application.

Larry Jordan: Who would benefit most by attending one of your conferences?

Tom Coughlin:  Geared towards people with niches in technology, those that make technology and those that use the technology, whether it be from the component side or from the systems side, or people that are making applications, using storage content.

Larry Jordan:  What are your attendees trying to accomplish when they attend the show?

Tom Coughlin:  There’s a number of different uses, all the way from people within the industry being able to connect, and for people who are making use of those tools and services to be able to find out and evaluate those tools and services on site, in an environment where they can catch a lot of things that are going on in the industry, digital storage and its applications in one place.

Larry Jordan:  What do you see as the future of storage?  Are we fading out on spinning disks and coming into something different?  Or is it pretty much the same for the next several years?

Tom Coughlin: Well things are changing an awful lot.  There’s a big move towards solid state storage where you need the speed of the performance.  But there’s also still a place for people that are keeping content for a long period of time in which case, they may trade off the price for some longer latencies, or a bit slower performance, and that’s places where … or even magnetic tape or optical disks can play a role.  So I think we’re going to see a lot of different storage technologies in place for some time to come, as long as they’re cost effective, you have that tradeoff between cost effective as storage versus performance.  Even some new technologies coming in, especially in the solid state area where there’s things like non-volatile memories that may bring in architectures that would bring the computing power closer to the storage content which will dramatically change the way that we do computation, rendering, the analysis of data to create metadata, to be able to find new stuff and even to be able to create content in new and faster ways.  For instance what if I could do CGI whilst …?  If I could really fast rendering to fill in some content and make some changes I want to make.  Those things may be possible with some of these new computer architectures.

Larry Jordan: Tom for people that want to attend your next conference, where is it, when is it and where do they sign up?

Tom Coughlin:  So the Storage Visions Conference is going to be October 16^th, 2017.  It’s going to be in Milpitas, California.  The website is storagevisions.com and welcome everyone to come there.  It’s keeping stuff, or making use of the stuff you’ve got, this is the place you can find out the best tools, new visions and ideas of what people can do and in the not too distant future.

Larry Jordan:  Tom, for people who want to keep track of all the stuff that you and your team are working on, where can they go on the web?

Tom Coughlin:  You can go to tomcoughlin.com which is my site, and also you may be interested in the Entertainment Storage Alliance site which is entertainmentstorage.org.

Larry Jordan:  So a couple of those websites, for the conference it’s storagevisions.com, and to keep track of what Tom and his researchers are doing visit tomcoughlin.com and Tom Coughlin is the founder of Tom Coughlin and Associates.  Tom thanks for joining us today.

Tom Coughlin:  Thanks so much Larry.  Glad to talk to you again.

Larry Jordan:  John Pritchard is an award winning educational filmmaker, multimedia producer and publisher.  His newest film, One Heart One Spirit, just won Best Indigenous Documentary at the 2017 Melbourne Documentary Film Festival in Australia.  Hello John.

John Pritchard:   Hey Larry, how’s it going?

Larry Jordan:  I’m talking to you, it’s going great.  By the way, congratulations on winning the award, we’re going to talk about that more in just a minute.

John Pritchard:  Many thanks.

Larry Jordan:  How would you describe One Heart One Spirit?

John Pritchard:   This is a film that has been in the making for a number of years, but it takes place in Northern Australia where there is a Festival of Aboriginal Wisdom that is shared with the outside world every August since about 1999 and a couple of thousand people come to this Garma Festival.  Garma is an Aboriginal word that means coming together in harmony, and it’s essentially the only place in the world where people from the outside can go and learn about the 40,000 year old traditions and culture of the Aboriginal people.  My film is unique in the sense that a very close friend of mine who’s a Native American elder, who is of Micmac and Mohawk heritage, travelled to Australia and was doing a storytelling tour and was invited up to this festival, and essentially a couple of filmmakers followed him around for three days, and that’s where we got the footage.  That’s really the essence of the film which is the essence of indigenous wisdom, that we’re all one human family, we’re all connected and we took that message and are now bringing it to colleges and universities on a world tour.

Larry Jordan:  I can understand the value of the festival, but why did you decide to turn it into a film?

John Pritchard:  This was a long process that started with our executive producer who lives in Sydney and we worked together very closely in New York City back in the 90s and the Native American elder is someone that we worked with in a band called Sinh-Tala where he played his Native American flutes, Greg played guitar and I played drums, percussion and keyboard.  We played all over New York City and put an album together which is the soundtrack for this album, but we all went our separate ways in the early days of the dot com era, 97, 98.  Greg went back to Australia and he really had this vision of getting Ken to meet with the Aboriginal folks up at this festival and it took a number of years but it finally happened.  The subject matter and content was very new to me being that it was an Aboriginal festival.  I’ve gone to many Native American pow wows, but there’s something very unique about Australian Aboriginal people, even finding out that our human heritage goes back to Australia, not to Africa.  The folks that focus on the journey to Eve 180,000 years ago in Africa have now started to re-write their research and it’s now going back to Australia interestingly.

Larry Jordan:  What was the purpose of the film?  Now that it’s done, what are you doing with it?

John Pritchard:  The purpose is to share the heart of indigenous people everywhere which is to have not only respect for each other, but also for the earth.  So these are two very timely issues as we know with our current political scene, kindness is not necessarily an operating word, and certainly environmental justice has had to take a big slap in the face during the last year.  But both these issues of human kindness and caring for the earth are at the earth of indigenous people all over the planet, and this message, we believe, as a filmmaking team, is crucial to bring to the world, and especially to college kids.  People that are at the heart of their own career building, about to go out into the world, and as much as we can do to introduce them to these very simple indigenous principles of respect, being less materialistic, thinking seven generations ahead.

Larry Jordan:  John, take a breath.  We’re going to run out of time, so I understand the film has value but I also want to talk about the fact you decided not just to send it to college kids, but you wanted to send it to a film festival.  What was the role of the film festival?

John Pritchard:  The big search that every filmmaker needs to go through is to find or create a festival lift that is going to be showcasing the subject matter that their film contains, and for us obviously looking at different film festivals in Australia, this one in Melbourne had an indigenous focus and we knew there would be quite a number of films that we would be competing against, but at the same time the director in particular there had a specific passion for helping get the indigenous message out.  So what I recommend to all filmmakers, which is a little bit of stating the obvious, but if you can really go through the hundreds of film festivals and find the ones that really resonate with your message, the most important thing you can do is try to contact the director of that film festival and not unsurprisingly, they are accessible, and their goal is to get your film seen and if it’s in a competitive category, to help you do as well as you can to win.  We found the Melbourne film festival to be extremely helpful all the way through from the moment we entered to getting articles written by local magazines and online blogs.  The critical component is really to search and find the festivals that match your film.  Does that make sense?

Larry Jordan:  Yes, what did you do to win?  Did you have to do anything special in terms of marketing or the media?

John Pritchard:  The main thing that we had to do was stay in the eye of both the film director and his team and once they went through their process of looking at all of the different films that were in this category of Indigenous Documentary films, they had let us know that we were high in the running.  I think it’s probably different for example with Sundance which we’re entering in another week, and you have a much larger pool of films that are not necessarily in a particular category other than documentary and feature and so on.

Larry Jordan:  For people that want more information about your film, where can they go on the web?

John Pritchard:  createkinderworld.org is where people can go and also download a free guidebook.

Larry Jordan: That’s all one word, createkinderworld.org not .com, and John Pritchard is the publisher and the director of One Heart One Spirit.  John, thanks for joining us today.

John Pritchard:  Thanks so much Larry.

Larry Jordan:  Bye bye.

Larry Jordan:   Here’s another website I want to introduce you to.  doddlenews.com. doddleNEWS gives you a portal into the broadcast, video and film industries.  It’s a leading online resource, presenting news, reviews and products for the film and video industry.  doddleNEWS also offers a resource guide and crew management platforms specifically designed for production.  These digital call sheets, along with their app, directory and premium listings, provide in depth organizational tools for busy production professionals.  doddleNEWS is a part of the Thalo Arts Community, a worldwide community of artists, film makers and story tellers.  From photography to film making, performing arts to fine arts, and everything in between, Thalo is filled with resources you need to succeed.  Whether you want the latest industry news, need to network with other creative professionals or require state of the art online tools to manage your next project, there’s only one place to go.  doddlenews.com.

Larry Jordan:  Terence Curren is the founder and president of Alpha Dogs, a Burbank based post production facility that he started back in 2002.  Terry is also the host of the Editors Lounge, a regular gathering of post production professionals interested in improving their craft.  Hello Terry, welcome back.

Terence Curren:  Thanks Larry, I always enjoy these confrontations.

Larry Jordan:  I always enjoy talking with you, because if there’s one thing I can count on, it’s the fact that you never ever have an opinion.

Terence Curren:  I guess you know me well.

Larry Jordan:  Terry, we’ve just discussed the basics of artificial intelligence with Philip Hodgetts, so what I’d like to do is to focus more on its impact in our industry with you.  So, what are your thoughts?  Is AI a good thing, or are we doomed?

Terence Curren:  Wow, that’s a great question.  Well let me put it this way, ultimately we are doomed I think.  But right now, what’s really important is to focus on being creative.  The reason I put it that way is that, yes, at some point in time, artificial intelligence will become as intelligent as human beings, and then one second later, it’s smarter than we are, and a day later we’re cockroaches compared to it.  When that happens, which is hopefully a long way off, the rosy predictions are like 2040.  The less rosy predictions are much later than that, so it’s a ways off, but there are stages, as Philip’s talked about of AI, and the ones that are going to immediately start replacing jobs in our industry are the mundane jobs, logging footage, syncing dailies, that kind of stuff, which is why I tell people, focus on the creative, because that’s the hardest thing for AI to do, the creative thing.  That muse that strikes and gives you an idea of how to put two things together that you shouldn’t put together, that all the rules say don’t put together, but somehow it makes an amazing end result.   So that part is going to be the last thing to be replaced so if you want to be in this industry and to continue to work, focus on the creative.

Larry Jordan:  Now when you say focus on the creative, it sounds like what you want us to do is look more at the craft of editing as opposed to the technology?

Terence Curren:  Exactly.  Because from the technology standpoint, that’s going to be the easiest thing to replace, technologically so to speak.  Philip ten years ago was showing his First Cuts which would string out footage into a basic rough cut and then the editor could go in and just fine tune it.  That eliminates the mundane part which is what he was trying to do.  But it also eliminates a job that an assistant editor would traditionally do.  So if you’re doing anything that’s very repetitive, if it’s something that someone can be taught within a few days, you’re probably going to get replaced sooner than later.  That’s why I really recommend focusing on the creative side because that’s the part that’s going to be the hardest thing to replace with artificial intelligence in the long run.

Larry Jordan:  Putting aside the emotional aspect of people losing their jobs which is very similar to the old joke of “Other than that, Mrs Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?”  Is it really a bad thing that we’re streamlining our workflow?

Terence Curren:  No. I’m not a Luddite.  I think that the technological improvements that we’re making everywhere, not just in our industry, but in general, make our lives better and have the promise of making our lives better throughout.  The problem is that we have a society based on a minimum of a 40 hour work week work ethic and we’re moving to a society where there just won’t be that much work that needs to be done, and how do we restructure our society so that we can enjoy the benefits of all of this technology, and not feel guilty that we’re not working hard enough?

Larry Jordan:  Or more importantly, how can we enjoy the benefits of all this technology, and live while making less money?

Terence Curren:  Yes, which is the whole universal basic income discussion which is probably an entirely different show.

Larry Jordan:  If you’re a young editor starting out, what advice would you give?  Should they embrace this technology, should they fight against the technology, and how should they structure their career?

Terence Curren:  Ooh, well, if somebody was starting out now, and wanting to be an editor, I would tell them the same thing that I was saying back when I was teaching editing classes around 2000. That is, if you can imagine yourself doing anything else for a living, you should go do it, because our industry is so difficult and so competitive to get in and then make a decent living at, that unless you can’t imagine doing anything else, you probably won’t have the drive for the long run that it takes to build a career.  That said, if you are one of those people who can’t imagine doing anything else, then just do it.  Edit as much as you can, edit for friends, look at your local film school and offer to edit director’s projects.  Wherever you can edit, and that’s how you get the chops, and the connections that eventually will lead to a career.

Larry Jordan:  Terry, for people that want more information about what you’re doing and Alpha Dogs itself, where can they go on the web?

Terence Curren:  alphadogs.tv for Alpha Dogs, editorslounge.com for the Editors Lounge, and theterenceandphilipshow.com for your dose of Philip and I debating various things.

Larry Jordan:  Bring extra coffee when that occurs.  That website is alphadogs.tv and Terence Curren is the founder and president of Alpha Dogs.  Terry, this has been fun, thanks so much for joining us.

Terence Curren:  Thanks for having me Larry.

Larry Jordan:  You know, I was just thinking.  It’s easy in these days to get discouraged.  It seems that each day brings its own share of bad news, and we certainly don’t need to go out of our way to find it.  That to me, is why Thanksgiving is so important.  Bad news rises up and slaps us in the face, but good news, good friends and good family surround us so much that all too often we take them for granted.  Thanksgiving reminds us to stop and give thanks.  As folk who specialize in telling stories with moving images, there have never been better times than these.  Yes, budgets are falling, but so are barriers that prevented many of us from even entering the industry.  Gear is more affordable and higher quality than ever.  Distribution channels that used to be controlled by the few are open to almost all of us, and audiences are eager for and receptive to new programming

Larry Jordan:  Now I don’t deny that as an industry we have major challenges, but I also want to affirm that we also have major opportunities.  Every time I pick up an HD camera, I’m reminded of how hard it was to record a professional grade video image when I started in television.  Equipment that used to require trucks to carry, now fits in my hand.  Back then, getting an audience to see what I created required a broadcast television station.  Now it simply requires uploading a file to YouTube.  In the past, we could only work with the people who were near us.  Now we can easily access creative talent from around the world.

Larry Jordan:  Life is never perfect, nor easy, but it has also never been better.  I prefer to think of the glass as half full, and growing.  Have a very happy Thanksgiving, and thanks from me, for being part of the Buzz family.

Larry Jordan:  I want to thank our guests for this week, JJ Kelley with the National Geographic, Tom Coughlin of Coughlin Associates, John Pritchard of One Heart, One Spirit, Terry Curren of Alpha Dogs, and James DeRuvo of doddleNEWS.

Larry Jordan:   There’s a lot of history in our industry and it’s all posted to our website, at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Here you’ll find thousands of interviews, all online and available to you today.  Remember to sign up for our free weekly show newsletter that comes out every Saturday.

Larry Jordan:  Talk with us on Twitter @DPBuzz and Facebook at digitalproductionbuzz.com.

Larry Jordan:   Our theme music is composed by Nathan Dugi-Turner with additional music provided by Smartsound.com.  Text transcripts are provided by Take1 Transcription.  Visit take1.tv to learn how they can help you.

Larry Jordan:   Our producer is Debbie Price.  My name is Larry Jordan, and thanks for listening to The Digital Production Buzz and have a happy Thanksgiving.

Larry Jordan:  The Digital Production Buzz is copyright 2017 by Thalo LLC.

Announcer:  The Digital Production Buzz was brought to you by KeyFlow Pro.  A simple, but powerful media asset manager for collaboration over a network.  Download a free 30 day trial at keyflowpro.com.

HOST
Larry Jordan

GUESTS
Jonathan Handel, Entertainment/Technology Attorney & Labor Reporter, TroyGould and The Hollywood Reporter
Philip Hodgetts, President, Lumberjack System
Randi Altman, Editor-in-Chief, postPerspective
Michael Kammes, Director of Technology, Key Code Media
Sam Bogoch, CEO, Axle Video
James DeRuvo, Senior Writer, DoddleNEWS

==

Announcer:  The Digital Production Buzz is brought to you by KeyFlow Pro, media asset management software, designed to meet the needs of work groups at an affordable price.

Larry Jordan:  Tonight on the Buzz we are catching our breath after all the news and releases over the last couple of months.  We’ve invited several of our regulars to share their perspective on recent topics, and where things are headed in our industry. Plus, we have a special look at why so many editors have a hard time getting excited about media management.

Larry Jordan:  We start with Jonathan Handel, the entertainment labor reporter for the Hollywood Reporter.  The Harvey Weinstein scandal has ballooned into something much bigger and spread around the world.  Tonight Jonathan shares his thoughts on what’s happening and what it means.

Larry Jordan:  Philip Hodgetts, the CEO of Lumberjack System, continues our discussion on the impact of machine learning on the creative process, and what we need to know to remain employed in the future.

Larry Jordan:   Randi Altman, the editor in chief of PostProspective.com shares her thoughts on current trends in post production, including the latest interest in 8K media and HDR.

Larry Jordan:  With many productions now shooting well over 100 terabytes of data, how do we keep track of all this stuff?  Tonight, Michael Kammes, the director of technology for Key Code Media shares his thoughts on workflow, storage, and finding that missing shot.

Larry Jordan:  Continuing that discussion, Sam Bogoch, the CEO of Axle Video explains why so many editors are reluctant to use media asset management software.  Why it costs so much, and what’s the minimum that any MAM needs to do.  His answers will surprise you.

Larry Jordan:  All this, plus James DeRuvo, with our weekly doddleNEWS update.  The Buzz starts now.

Announcer:  Since the dawn of digital filmmaking – authoritative – one show serves a worldwide network of media professionals – current – uniting industry experts – production – filmmakers – post production – and content creators around the planet – distribution.  From the media capital of the world in Los Angeles, California, The Digital Production Buzz goes live now.

Larry Jordan:  Welcome to The Digital Production Buzz, the world’s longest running podcast for the creative content industry, covering media production, post production and marketing around the world.

Larry Jordan:  Hi, my name is Larry Jordan.  Well, we tried really hard to come up with a theme for today and we just couldn’t do it.  There were so many different things that we wanted to talk about that rather than try and just unify around a consistent standard, well we didn’t actually.  What we wanted to do though, is we wanted to take really two looks at things.  One, I wanted to talk to some of our regulars to get their sense on trends and continue several conversations that we begun a while ago.

Larry Jordan:   The first is going to be with Philip Hodgetts.  Philip and I have been talking about the impact that machine learning and artificial intelligence has on editing and Philip has done some writing on this, and I wanted to go further in this conversation because Philip is more optimistic, and I’m more pessimistic and I just want to see if his thinking has changed yet or not.  Then, we’ve got two really cool interviews, well we’ve got a bunch of cool interviews, Randi Altman, how can you complain about somebody of her caliber and we’ve got Michael Kammes and Sam Bogoch and what Michael is doing, Michael and Sam are both going to be looking at media asset management.  Not in terms of what’s available, but why we keep avoiding it.  Some interesting conversations today, and I’m looking forward to sharing them with you, but thinking of interesting conversations, it’s time for our doddleNEWS update with James DeRuvo.  Hello James.

James DeRuvo:  Hello Larry.

Larry Jordan:  So what’s news this week?

James DeRuvo:   SmallHD has introduced a new firmware update for their entire monitor line which is really going to help streamline getting going when you’re on set.  They created OS3 which is the firmware update that expands the future set up of all their monitors including the 17 inch production monitors, to auto calibrate.  So basically they’re plug and play.  It adds false color values that can also be customized beyond 100 percent, to specific values chosen by the user.  It’s a really interesting update.

Larry Jordan:  James, how do you rank this as an update?

James DeRuvo:  They call it their largest update ever.  SmallHD has given users many tools that they’ve been looking for, including the ability to customize the color to the false color value, so you can set it up the way that you like it.  And on top of that, thanks to the ability to save all these settings to an SD card, you can now just literally take an SD card, save the settings and put it in every single monitor on set and in minutes you’re up and running without even having to calibrate every single monitor individually.  Such huge updates can save time and money.

Larry Jordan: Well they’re not the only ones doing upgrades.  Who else do we have to talk about?

James DeRuvo:  Blackmagic put out a big announcement today which is their winter fall lineup update and it includes new hardware, including the 8K compatible DeckLink Pro with 12G-SDI that records 12 bit, 444 in rec 2020.  There’s a couple of others in there as well that are color formats.  They also have new mini video converters for HDMI to SDI conversion and vice versa.  They’ve dropped the price of their micro converters and they’ve also in their camera OS 4.2 update, they have expanded the feature set of the micro cinema camera and the micro production camera line ups for expanded dynamic range by up to two stops, frame rates of up to 60 percent, and you can now output to RAW by SDI.

Larry Jordan:  It’s always nice to have updates but this doesn’t sound like a lot.

James DeRuvo:  It’s not a huge update at all but we’re used to getting this big gigantic announcement in the spring before NAB.  But with this winter update, Blackmagic is expanding the capability of their hardware to take advantage of many of the new tools that they have in DaVinci Pro, and that’s always a good thing Larry.

Larry Jordan:  OK, so that’s upgrades.  What else have we got?

James DeRuvo:  More and more often mainstream filmmakers are turning to the iPhone X or the iPhone 7 as their platform of choice for creating short films and feature films even.  While the XL mark has given the iPhone X the second highest scores for a mobile device ever, the video camera offers pretty good optical image stabilization that can make mobile filmmaking even more cinematic than before.  And it can shoot 4K at up to 60 frames per second, 240 frames per second at 1080p, and the iPhone is becoming very popular with filmmakers, Steven Soderbergh, and Jack Schneider both of whom shot their latest films using the mobile platform.

Larry Jordan:  You know, listening to you describe it, reminds me of the very long tradition that if it makes pictures, use it to make a movie.

James DeRuvo:  Anselm Adams once said that the best camera you have is the one you have in your pocket, and that’s literally true these days.  It wasn’t that long ago that Pixar guru John Lasseter stated that shooting films with a mobile device would become a major tool in the cinematic art flow of every filmmaker and when you consider that an Oscar was given for a documentary that was completed on an iPhone, and another iPhone film called Tangerine was the toast of Sundance last year, it seems to me that filmmaking on a mobile platform is becoming more popular than ever Larry.

Larry Jordan: Thank you James.   James DeRuvo is a senior writer for doddleNEWS, and joints us every week with the weekly doddleNEWS update.  James, we’ll talk to you again next week.

Larry Jordan:  Jonathan Handel is an entertainment and technology attorney of counsel at Troy Gould in Los Angeles.  He’s also the contributing editor on entertainment labor issues for the Hollywood Reporter, and best of all, he’s a regular here on the Buzz.  Hello Jonathan, welcome back.

Jonathan Handel:  Larry, it’s a pleasure to be back with you.

Larry Jordan:  Jonathan, let’s not waste time, I want to get right into it.  The last time we spoke, the Harvey Weinstein scandal was just blowing up.  Now it’s exploded both in Hollywood and the Me Too movement.  What’s your take?  Where do we stand first in Hollywood?

Jonathan Handel: It’s hard to keep track quite honestly.  It’s Harvey Weinstein, it’s James Toback, it’s Kevin Spacey, Tyler Grasham, the agent at APA, who am I forgetting? I mean, there are accusations against Dustin Hoffman I guess.  There were accusations against George Takei that he’s denied.  We could go on and on.  Not only in Hollywood but Judge Roy Moore from Alabama, turns out to not live the sort of life it seems that he contends everybody else should be living.  The British defense minister has resigned, a member of parliament as well.  It just goes on and on and on.  The state capitals, at least eight or so of them are in an uproar according to the New York Times.  The publishers of two separate art magazines have resigned here in the US.  There was a celebrity chef.

Jonathan Handel:  This has been an outpouring and I’m not meaning to make light of it by pointing out the number of people.  This has been an absolute outpouring of revelation, hopefully all of it true.  Seemingly most of it true.  This is one of the issues that we get to is that there is a vast gulf between a court of law and the court of public opinion which renders its opinion quite quickly and then moves on having writ judgment.  It’s important to remember that none of these people have been found liable in a civil case.  Almost none of them have even been sued.  None of these people have been found criminally liable.  I don’t believe that any of them have had criminal cases initiated against them, although police are investigating Weinstein and perhaps some of the others.  Police in New York, Los Angeles, I think Beverly Hills and London in the case of Harvey Weinstein.  Kevin Spacey also is being investigated.

Jonathan Handel:  I have to look at this and say I spent a year and a half covering false allegations against Brian Singer and three other men in 2014-15.  The case had collapsed that ended up with the lawyers apologizing, acknowledging that the charges were provably false, paying a settlement.  The accuser himself didn’t acknowledge anything, instead he filed bankruptcy to escape the counter sue that had resulted in the settlement from the lawyers.  But he couldn’t escape the clutches of the FBI which delivered 121,000 pages of evidence against him to his criminal lawyer, and an alternative scheme that he had engaged in, he ended up pleading guilty to securities fraud arising out of lying to investors and forging documents and going to jail for two years.  Meanwhile, his lawyer who had a history of dishonesty himself, he’d been suspended from the Florida bar for a year and a half, and then previously in a separate incident, barred for life by a Federal Judge in Oregon, he’s actually back in the latest wave here.  Dominique Huett, an actress I believe, sued the Weinstein company rather than Weinstein himself, for negligently allowing Weinstein to behave the way he allegedly did.  And her lawyer is none other than Jeff Herman, the lawyer for the lying accuser several years ago, who is himself a disgraced attorney.

Jonathan Handel:  We do have to look on the one hand that the intensity of reaction here is what’s going to make this stick finally. You know, Anita Hill talked about being sexually harassed by Clarence Thomas.  Didn’t make a difference.  A number of women talked about being sexually harassed by Donald Trump.  Didn’t make a difference, he got 63 million votes roughly, including from many women.  So, on the one hand the intensity’s important.  On the other hand, how do you stop that intensity from sliding over into a witch hunt where people who are opportunistic and not telling the truth, join in among the crowds of people who probably are?

Larry Jordan:  It is an interesting balance between the court of public opinion and the court of justice.  But do you see this growing into something that’s going to have life or is it just going to be another flash in the pan, and we move on to the next crisis du jour?

Jonathan Handel:  So far, this has been like nothing I’ve ever seen.  I’ve never seen a story continue with this intensity for what, six weeks now?  News rooms are in an uproar.  People are following this stuff and are reporting these stories.  I think that this is going to continue to have legs, and I hope and think that it is going to have an influence on people’s behavior in the future.

Larry Jordan:  Jonathan, for people who want to keep track of your thinking and what you’re writing, where can they go on the web?

Jonathan Handel:  Two places, thrlabor.com, the Hollywood Reporter Labor, and my personal website, jhandel.com.

Larry Jordan: Jonathan Handel is an entertainment and technology attorney and the contributing editor on entertainment labor issues for the Hollywood Reporter.  Jonathan, thanks for joining us today.

Jonathan Handel:  Larry, thanks a lot.

Larry Jordan:  When you can’t find your media, you need a media asset management solution.  KeyFlow Pro.  This is a simple but powerful software designed specifically to help you organize, track, and find your media.  Whether you work alone, or part of a group, it’s intuitive user interface helps you easily store, sort, search, play, annotate and share your media using team based shared libraries over a network.  Its wide range of features are all at a very affordable price and with the new 1.82 update rescanning speed is up to ten times faster and KeyFlow Pro is integrated with macOS notifications, enabling you to collaborate faster and smarter all in real time. KeyFlow Pro is available in the Mac app store, or get a 30 day free trial at keyflowpro.com.  Simple, elegant and surprisingly affordable.

Larry Jordan:  Philip Hodgetts is a technologist and the CEO of both Intelligent Assistance and Lumberjack System.  Even better, he’s a regular here on the Buzz.  Hello Philip, welcome back.

Philip Hodgetts:  Hi Larry, thanks for having me back.

Larry Jordan:  Well you know, it is never hard to twist my arm to invite you back on the show.  I always enjoy our conversations.  You know, last time you and I were on chatting, we were talking about the intersection of machine learning and editing.  And I want to continue that discussion a little bit more tonight, but before we do, just to set the scene, could you describe the automated editing program that your company released a few years ago, First Cut I think it was called?  What did it do?

Philip Hodgetts:  First Cuts, yes, we were originally going to call it the Assistant Editor because it did that preparation work for an editor, but it turns out there’s a lot of things out on the internet called Assistant Editor, so it didn’t search very well.  So we changed the name to First Cuts before release.  What First Cuts did was, it was a knowledge system.  Before we had artificial intelligence, one of the ways we embodied knowledge was in what are generically called knowledge systems.

Philip Hodgetts:   One of those examples early intelligence assistance that we’ve produced for Final Cut Pro and other applications in the early days.  They model the way somebody already thinks or the knowledge somebody has, and embodies that into a software algorithm, so it’s not artificial intelligence as we’ve been talking about.  It’s not even machine learning.  It’s literally where we would run an edit through the system that we were generating.  It would come out with a result, I would say, that result doesn’t feel right because it’s not the way I edit, that B roll should be earlier, later or should be at the end and not the beginning or the middle.  So we would go back with, Greg would insist that I now give him a rule of thumb that described the behavior that I was suggesting that we implemented.  So, in effect, First Cuts was a very competent tool that learnt how to build storage based on rules of thumb.  If you were basically teaching the introductory rules of thumb to an editor so they could get started, and get competent at it before they started getting creative edits, then that’s pretty much what you would do and First Cuts was just smarter, unlike most beginners, it followed all the rules all the time.  But there wasn’t in any way shape or form an artificial intelligence or machine learning tool.

Larry Jordan:   No, absolutely true, and that gets me to my next question.  What does machine learning allow us to do today that you weren’t able to do with First Cuts?

Philip Hodgetts:   Well I’m not even sure that we’re quite there yet, that I would find a machine learning approach that would work as well as our knowledge modeling, but what machine learning does in general is it allows us to teach a machine, generally based on some sort of neural network, but really what’s inside doesn’t matter.  We show the machine a lot of examples until it’s the outcome that we would like to get from those examples.  So if we were recognizing skin cancer for example, it’d show a lot of scans of images that have already been diagnosed and we have the human diagnosis for that, and over time the machine feeds back onto itself from the results that it’s getting to the results that are desired, until it starts to produce the same results.  Completely and absolutely on its own.

Philip Hodgetts:   We don’t understand how it gets the results inside, which I do admit is kind of a little bit scary, because results that go in are going to influence the results that come back, so if we start to model systems in the existing world, we’re going to start modeling biases that already exist.  Not so much a problem in the editing world, but as, you know, in the broader picture of how machine learning will influence society, we must be careful not to institutionalize in our machines the bias that we have in society now.

Larry Jordan:  You said that machine learning is not quite there yet.  What does that mean to you?

Philip Hodgetts:  Well for example, what we did in First Cuts, is a lot of very complicated things that interact with each other.  It is possible to give a machine a goal like walk, but with walking the goal is very simply described as be upright, move forward.  I don’t think that you know, even in yours and … brilliance you could simplify the essence of editing down to something that concise.  We’re dealing with a much more complex system of interactions and emotional overtones that are very hard to put into metadata.  And of course not having that good metadata in the first place is where First Cuts fell down at the time it came out.

Larry Jordan:  We’re going to have a conversation first with Michael Kammes, but second with Sam Bogoch talking about some of the applications, especially from Sam, that machine learning is being able to dial into the media asset management.  But let me posit something.  If we accept editing as feature film, then I think it’s going to be hard for a machine to edit a feature film anytime in the near term.  But if we define editing as pulling sports highlights, or looking for action in a news scene or taking an existing cut and just cutting it 30 seconds shorter, that’s much more mechanistic which artificial learning could help us with, true?

Philip Hodgetts:  It’s already happening.  I mean Wimbledon earlier this year was using Watson’s AI to serve up highlights.  They would pull out based on the action in the shot, the social media activity around that, statistics out of the shot, to pull out and recognize the areas of the tennis match that were important and pull that out into an accessible edit.  For this type of templatized production, I think we’ll see a lot of application of where machine learning can pull in appropriate elements for these templates.  And not this year or next year, but not too far into the future.  You know, those templates could be smart enough to pull in the elements that go into say a corporate video or a certain type of education video and, as you’ll talk to Sam about, logically we will be searching our footage in the future by its content.  By the images that are in it and by the words that are spoken not by the metadata that we’ve had humans enter.  Heaven forbid we shouldn’t get rid of the metadata, I think it’s still going to be valuable, but the reliance on the human entry is what we’re going to move away from.

Larry Jordan:  Well let’s switch gears just a little bit.  Let’s say from a business perspective, if you’re a high end feature film editor, your job is secure for the rest of your career.  But for editors, and a lot of us are doing mechanistic work, I want every editor to remain employed.  If the medium to long term trend is for simple editing to be machine enabled, what do editors need to do to make sure they’re employable in the coming years?  Or are we going to see a lot of fall out at the lower end of the editing craft?

Philip Hodgetts:  Well, the one thing that I’ve seen so far is that while lots … jobs get automated by these machines, there’s been very few jobs that have been completely replaced by machine.  So I think a double edged sword there.  I completely agree with you at the high end, you know, the editors working on feature films, on Hollywood, television, studio television, these are all fairly safe jobs.  These are very conservative industries.  The same people are going to be using machine learning to determine what will be produced, what is successful, what storylines work with and resonate with the audience.  Back to the individual editor, you have to start to bring in the things that the machine won’t be doing for long term, and that’s the creativity, that inspired spark that takes this mechanistic edit and turns it into something that sings and most importantly affects the emotion.  Machines are starting to be able to recognize emotion when they see it, but create something that is emotionally compelling and manipulates human emotion? I think that’s a skill that will remain in human hands for the rest of my career.

Larry Jordan: So how about for people that are doing simpler editing?  Do they have to look for other work or what should they do to protect their own jobs?

Philip Hodgetts:  Learn to adapt and use these new tools. I mean these are tools that are organization and pre-editing tools.  These are no different than cameras and stands and the lighting things we use.  They’re simply tools and the more efficiently you use tools, the more efficient you become.  You can start to produce more for the available funds.  Will everyone continue to be employed?  Probably not.  I mean if something is going to be replaced by machine, it’s probably inevitably going to be replaced by a machine in some situations at least.  The thing is that a good story teller and creative people will continue to be employed.  If you’re not one of those, you know, check how your barista skills are going.

Larry Jordan:  So the short answer is, keep practicing your creative skills, keep working on your people skills to keep the clients happy, and keep an eye on technology and take advantage of it when you can?

Philip Hodgetts:  Shower and clean your teeth before you go into the edit bay.

Larry Jordan:  Philip, for people that want more information about what you’re thinking and the products you’re creating, where can they go on the web?

Philip Hodgetts:  You can see our stuff at lumberjacksystem.com and intelligentassistance.com and I also occasionally write at philiphodgetts.com which was my more active in the past blog.

Larry Jordan:  Occasionally is not often enough.  And Philip Hodgetts is the CEO of both Intelligent Assistance and Lumberjack System, and it’s always a delight Philip chatting with you.  Thank you so very much for sharing your time.

Philip Hodgetts:  Thank you for having me.

Larry Jordan:  Take care, bye bye.

Larry Jordan: As my friend Mike Horton enjoys saying, if you haven’t heard of Randi Altman you are not paying attention.  Formerly the editor in chief of Post magazine, now the editor in chief of PostProspective.com, Randi has covered post production for more than, well let’s just say a long time.  Hello Randi, welcome back.

Randi Altman: Hi Larry, good to be back.

Larry Jordan:  Randi, you’ve been covering post since like forever.  What have you seen recently that’s caught your eye?

Randi Altman:  Oh boy, yeah, I have been doing this for a very long time.  So recently, I’ve been to many trade shows it feels like in the past couple of months.  You’re starting to hear a lot about 8K at least from the manufacturers.  Not necessarily so much from the people that are out there working, but it’s interesting.  I mean, am I allowed to ask you a question back?

Larry Jordan:   Sure.

Randi Altman:   What do you think of 8K?  I mean, obviously the companies that make monitors and graphics cards and all of that, they want to play in 8K.  What are you hearing from people about 8K?

Larry Jordan:   I have no interest in 8K.  I’m not hearing people ask me about 8K.  8K I think is just a way for manufacturers to sell more gear.  We can’t even see 4K on a screen less than 100 inches across, and even on a, on a movie screen, unless you’re sitting within ten feet of the screen, you can’t see the difference between 2K and 4K.  The eye doesn’t perceive it.  8K I think is just a marketing way of selling more gear, but other than that, I don’t have an opinion.

Randi Altman:  What about those who might say you’re future proofing your content?  Same answer?

Larry Jordan:  Exactly when is resolution a substitute for having a good story?

Randi Altman:  Never, that’s a very good point.  Like I guess the ideal would be both.  But as you say, we’re not ready yet.

Larry Jordan:   I’m not saying we’re not ready, I’m just saying there is a difference between the needs of the manufacturer to sell gear which I do not deny, and fully support.  And the needs of the editor to make sure that the money they’re spending on the gear is money well spent.  I don’t think money for 8K is well spent.   I think money for more storage and faster processors, and especially faster GPUs, now that’s hardware budget that’s well invested.  I don’t know any actor in any industry that wants to have their close up in 8K.

Randi Altman: It’s true.  I remember when HD came out and all the ageing soap opera actors were like up in arms.  They were like, “Oh my god, this is terrible.”  But you know, everything now, all the blemishes and stuff are essentially fixed digitally, so.  But yes, you’re right.  8K, I honestly just don’t know.

Larry Jordan:  There’s very few hot buttons I have, but 8K is a hot button.  So which gets me back to you.  What are your thoughts?

Randi Altman:  Well I tend to agree.  I mean, you hear the debate back and forth and no, I haven’t heard many users who are looking to work in 8K.  As you say, it’s up to the manufacturers to continue pushing and to build product for the future, and they need to be making things for 8K workflows, when those workflows finally do come.  I don’t know when that will be.

Larry Jordan:  Well remember the doldrums that we were in just before we figured out that 4K was actually a viable mechanism?  Television sets and sales had fallen off and the manufacturers were having some problems thinking about what to manufacture next, and all of a sudden, out of the ashes, 4K and especially UHD arose.  Do you think there’s more value in more pixels or HDR?

Randi Altman:  From what I’ve heard and from people I’ve spoken to, they’re embracing HDR more.

Larry Jordan:  OK, which gets me to another question.  What are your thoughts on the increasing role of machine learning in the editing and post process?  Should editors be worried about their jobs?

Randi Altman: Oh, that’s an easy question, thanks Larry.  I don’t think so.  I mean, maybe because I’ve been in this industry for a very long time, I’m going to say no, they shouldn’t be, because I do believe that editing is an art, and it’s creative and it’s a very human thing to do, to tell a story in a certain way.  While artificial intelligence and all of that might speed up the process, I still think that people need to be creative to tell a story.

Larry Jordan:  I got one more hard question for you.  Now this time put your business hat on.  Making money as an editor, especially as a freelance editor, has always been challenging.  Do you think editing is still a viable career path?

Randi Altman:  I think for the right person yes.  I think that probably less young people are going to go into it, or maybe they’ll start on that path and decide it’s too hard to keep just trying to get jobs and trying to piece together a living.  But I think that others who just have it within them, they’re going to seek out opportunities, they’re going to edit on their own, they’re going to create their own opportunities to edit.  I don’t know if that answers your question or not?

Larry Jordan:  No, it does.  So are you basically optimistic or pessimistic about the post industry then?

Randi Altman:  I’m optimistic, which is really weird because I’m probably the least optimistic person that I know.  But when it relates to this industry and yes, we all agree that in production and post production, everything is blurred, but people have proven, especially with the Netflixes and the Hulus and the Amazons that we want good content.  So we’re going to keep watching and we’re going to keep seeking that out and people have to make that.  If you’re going to produce the content, you have to post the content, so I guess I am pretty optimistic about it.

Larry Jordan:  For people who want to keep track of your optimistic attitude on the post industry, where can they go on the web?

Randi Altman:  To postperspective.com.

Larry Jordan:  All one word, postperspective.com and Randi Altman is the editor in chief of postPerspective, and Randi, as always, it is a delight chatting with you and I’ll look forward to doing it again.

Randi Altman:   Thanks Larry, same here.

Larry Jordan:    In his current role as director of technology at Key Code Media, Michael Kammes consults on the latest in technology and best practices into the digital media communication space.  Hello Michael, welcome back.

Michael Kammes:  Hello sultry Mr Jordan, how are you?

Larry Jordan:  I tell you, it’s a great show so far.  And it’s only going to get better because I’m talking to you.

Michael Kammes:  Thank you so much.

Larry Jordan:  You’ve always been fascinated by optimizing workflow and storage and the integration of technology in our lives, and I also know you were listening to Philip’s interview.  What’s your reaction?

Michael Kammes:  Philip’s been on the bleeding edge for quite a while and now that he’s made the jump further, you know, headlong into AI and machine learning, I think that’s probably the best route to go especially when it comes to all the disparate media and whatnot we’re doing within our industry.  So I couldn’t be more behind what he’s doing and where he sees the industry going.

Larry Jordan:  Does the increasing use of machine learning enable new opportunities in workflow from your point of view?

Michael Kammes:  Oh completely.  I think when we look at things like asset management, all asset managements do the same thing at the core.  They allow you to find media, and they allow you to then use that media.  What I look for in more advanced asset management systems is how can it take away the dragging my knuckles across the keyboard, the repetitive things that I do that doesn’t take the creative power that I have or the intellect that I have.  I want something to do the stuff that doesn’t take up those things.  So if I could automate transcoding, if I could automate pushing files to different places, if I could automate the tagging of media so I can start to use it, then I want that.

Larry Jordan:  We’re going to be talking with Sam Bogoch who’s the CEO of Axle Media, and has developed some media asset management software in the section after you.  But before we talk to Sam, why do you think editors are so reluctant to embrace media management software?

Michael Kammes:  Because I think creatives want to create. I can’t fault anyone for that.  I mean, that’s why you got into this industry.  You didn’t get into the industry because you feel like working in an Excel doc, or using Filemaker Pro.  You got into the industry because you want to be creative.  And a lot of asset management systems require you to do a lengthy process of logging and organizing and that takes the fun out of manipulating the moving image which is again why you got into the industry.

Larry Jordan:   So you think that the more that the machine can take over the logging process, the more people will adopt media management?

Michael Kammes:   Bingo.  When we start using AI technology to do facial recognition and recognize who’s speaking and not just how we translate what they’re saying, what we think they’re talking about, but actually what they’re saying, so subjective versus objective.  Once we pair those things together to machine learning, we now have an instant 80 percent, 90 percent of being there, getting things done, and logged.  So now we don’t have to spend as much time on the front end.  You know, that pay now versus pay later philosophy.

Larry Jordan:  Well Sam is going to talk about that exact subject, so I’m going to leave the rest of those questions for Sam, but I want to talk about the other love in your life which is storage.  And I know…

Michael Kammes:  I thought you were going to say Philip.

Larry Jordan:  No, it’s storage.  We’re going to talk about storage.  Storage is on the list of things we’re going to talk about.

Michael Kammes:  OK.

Larry Jordan:  Only you and I, I think get excited about the specs of a hard drive, but what’s happening in storage that’s got your attention these days?

Michael Kammes:  Well, right now we have several different paradigms.  We have the SSD and Flash, and we have the spinning disc, and we’ve got the nebulous, no pun intended, cloud.  Right now, there’s a shortage of SSDs which is making things difficult for some companies.  What I’m finding out there is that drives are actually getting larger in capacity than what folks actually need.  Hear me out on this, I have plenty of clients I work with that I say this’ll be 100 terabytes.  They say, “We don’t need that, we only need 20 terabytes.”  And I say, “Well that’s two drives.”  If you’re going to be sharing this amongst many people, you need more spindles.  If I can get you a 20 terabyte two drives, that’s not enough spindles, so people are now paying for throughput as opposed to capacity, and I find that’s a complete change from what it used to be.

Larry Jordan:  I totally agree.  I just purchased a system for myself.  It’s got 40 terabytes of storage on five drives, and you know, that’s illegal I think.  But you make a really good point which is that we really need to focus on how we’re going to get the data and how quickly we get the data from our drive to our computer.  What’s the next thing on bandwidth?  What’s coming up?

Michael Kammes:  Well right now I think a lot of facilities finally moving over to a 10 gig infrastructure, instead of the single gig infrastructure they’ve had for years, they’re now moving to 10 gig.  That requires running new Ethernet cables which could be expensive.  But it also requires a new switching infrastructure, and that’s usually several thousand dollars and a lot of facilities aren’t ready to make that kind of investment.  But we’re seeing more and more folks forgoing the fiber route and going more to the copper Ethernet route.

Larry Jordan:  I think we have to have another conversation talking about ways to improve your bandwidth, but we’ll save that for another time.  Michael for people that want to keep track of what you’re up to, where can they go on the web?

Michael Kammes:  Two places, michaelkammes.com and 5thingsseries.com.

Larry Jordan: That’s the number five, 5thingseries.com.  Michael Kammes is the technology director at Key Code Media, and Michael, thanks for joining us today.

Michael Kammes:  Always a pleasure Larry thanks.

Larry Jordan: Bye bye.

Larry Jordan:   Here’s another website I want to introduce you to.  doddlenews.com. doddleNEWS gives you a portal into the broadcast, video and film industries.  It’s a leading online resource, presenting news, reviews and products for the film and video industry.  doddleNEWS also offers a resource guide and crew management platforms specifically designed for production.  These digital call sheets, along with their app, directory and premium listings, provide in depth organizational tools for busy production professionals.  doddleNEWS is a part of the Thalo Arts Community, a worldwide community of artists, film makers and story tellers.  From photography to film making, performing arts to fine arts, and everything in between, Thalo is filled with resources you need to succeed.  Whether you want the latest industry news, need to network with other creative professionals or require state of the art online tools to manage your next project, there’s only one place to go.  doddlenews.com.

Larry Jordan:  Sam Bogoch is the CEO of Axle Video which has developed a new, approachable system for asset management called Axle.  Prior to Axle, Sam spent five years doing director level work in product design, product management and business development for Avid.  Hello Sam, welcome back.

Sam Bogoch:  Hi Larry, great to be back.

Larry Jordan:  Sam, I want to talk about the latest news from Axle in a few minutes.  But first, I want to take a step back and talk with you about why it’s so hard to get our media organized and the whole process of media asset management.  I mean, it’s not unusual for projects today to shoot terabytes of data, thousands of clips.  Why is it so hard for editors to get excited about organizing their media?

Sam Bogoch:  That’s a very good question and I think there’s at least a couple of parts to it.  Let me start with probably the biggest one which is that it’s like doing your chores.  Fundamentally getting organized or tagging and managing your media, it’s a lot like doing your laundry.  Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, “Ah it’s a bright, sunny day.  I can’t wait to do my laundry.”  Or maybe there are people like that, but we don’t know many of them.

Larry Jordan:  No, that’s true.

Sam Bogoch:  I think that’s probably the first problem is that.  If you’re a creative and a visual person, the last thing you want to do is spend a good chunk of your time behaving like a librarian.  The second part of it is that video is a hidden medium, and that sounds crazy because it’s the most visual medium.  But at the same time, it’s basically hidden from view.  To explain this a little more, I’ll go back to the bad old days of analog tape, and you know, someone would put a tape on the shelf, and then they’d have a show on the tape let’s say.  But apart from a little label on the side of the tape, they really had no way of knowing what was on it short of putting the tape in a deck and actually watching the show.  So for all intents and purposes video was invisible.  It was locked up in these tapes.

Sam Bogoch:   When video went digital, starting around a decade ago, it was still surprisingly hidden.  It just went from being on a tape on the shelf to being on a hard drive on the shelf, often with that same piece of tape or post it note on it, and once you got up to a few dozen disc drives and many of our customers start out with many many dozens or hundreds of disc drives, you still kind of have no idea at a glance of what’s on those drives.  You’ve got to plug them into a computer. Now at least it’s random access now, so you don’t have to actually fast forward your way ahead in the footage.  Nonetheless, it’s kind of out of sight, out of mind.  So the biggest challenge I see with media, is to present enough of it in front of you in a kind of transparent way that you feel like you could actually find something.  I think from that point onward it gets a lot easier, but until you get to that point, it’s mostly hidden.

Larry Jordan:  It’s like a text document.  You can quickly search for a word, but you can’t quickly search for a picture and a video clip.

Sam Bogoch:  Exactly right.

Larry Jordan:  In the last few weeks, I’ve spoken with a couple of media asset management firms whose software costs well over 40, 50, $60,000.  Why is media asset management so expensive?

Sam Bogoch:  It’s a combination of things.  I would say the history of the industry is such that when these systems started being developed, they started for large broadcasters and large content creators.  So it was approached like enterprise software, if you’re familiar with the IT world, something like SAP, that big complicated thing that takes months to deploy and never mind tens of thousands, often costs hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars.  But the large customers wanted it that way.  They saw it as the solution for them, and in many cases they would actually put out RFPs and I experienced a whole bunch of these when I was at Avid, we would get inch and a half thick RFP documents with hundreds of questions and requirements and the assumption was, we were going to be able to find a way to say yes to most, if not all of them.  It’s at least partly the customers fault.  It’s also a little bit the vendors fault for saying yes, but at the end of the day if you say yes to hundreds of questions and then you have a complex fairly customer specific solution, it’s going to end up costing many hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.

Sam Bogoch:  The challenge is that the media industry is democratizing and so that kind of one to one bespoke custom world doesn’t make sense for the quarter million or so video teams that are shooting stuff for YouTube, for corporate video, for social media, for sports teams.  These guys wouldn’t even know what to put on that RFP and they certainly wouldn’t be able to afford the outcome.  So what they’re looking for is more shrink wrapped software that they can just install and run.  I think the challenge is, the traditional vendors, quite a few of them, were geared up for this very static world where things didn’t change that often, and the customers were large broadcasters and large content companies.  But I think that business is as big as it’s ever going to be, whereas the real growth is in the grass roots.

Larry Jordan:   Well the growth is in the grass roots, I do believe that.  But the grass roots doesn’t have the budget to spend and so Axle is in a strange position where you’ve got to have really technically savvy software, you’ve got complex network support and multi-user databases working with different media types on different platforms, to an audience that doesn’t have a whole lot of money but needs it, but doesn’t want to use it which means how do you survive in a low cost world when you’ve really got to roll this very large rock uphill?

Sam Bogoch:   You make it sound so attractive, I can’t wait.  There are elements of all the things you point out.  Interesting to see how things turn out well nonetheless.  Like, there are enough people, between us and Adobe, we’ve gone over the numbers, and we think there’s about a quarter million video post production teams out there.  Now some of them are literally two people and a dog.  Some of them are 30, 40 people etcetera.  But it skews towards the small end of the scale.

Sam Bogoch:  What we find is that on an ongoing basis, every week another dozen or so of those people pop up out of the woodwork, contact us and say, “Hey, I’m really getting tired of putting hard drives on a shelf.”  Or, “I’ve moved all my hard drives on a shelf onto some shared storage, but I still can’t find anything.  Mostly because Spotlight doesn’t work over shared storage these days.  So, I’m stuck and I need a tool.   I don’t even know exactly what it needs to be” and they sure as heck don’t have inch thick RFP documents, but they know they need something and they start a conversation with us, and we have different levels of functionality.  Some of them are pretty sophisticated, but at its basic level it’s something that a number of storage companies are already bundling with their shared storage for instance.  So what we try and do is catch people when they first become aware that there might be a better way to do this, and then kind of educate them through the process of figuring out how to solve it.

Larry Jordan:  What do you see as the essential of any media management system?  What does it have to do?

Sam Bogoch:  I would argue it has to do as little as possible.  Now, that’s putting my own personal bias on it, but the minimum requirement is probably to help people find stuff.  We have some customers that literally use our software only for that.  So we have all these cool sub-clipping and tagging features and you know, collaboration tools, and review and approval, they never use any of that.  These customers are just like, “Hey, I can find stuff now, I’m good.”  And that’s it.  Because Spotlight does not work over a network, and because 90 plus percent of the customer base is Mac centric, this is really a tool that solves an important problem for them.  That’s the basic requirement.

Sam Bogoch:  I’d say the next level up from that is probably being able to make the video more visible by having proxies, so having low resolution versions that you can play on any computer, not just one with a red rocket card or one with a big hunking processor and GPU where you can, you know, because more and more of the shooting is in 4K.  Not that many computers are equipped to play back 4K.  And so you have a problem with a source media, if you don’t make a proxy, people are literally not going to be able to view it.   Actually 4K and 8K are a step backwards towards the days of tape on a shelf because for the last five, six years, most computers, most laptops have been able to play HD video just fine.  But all of a sudden, that’s not so true in the case of 4K and 8K.

Larry Jordan:  Sam, before we talk about your products in specific, where do you see media asset management going, say in the next three to five years?

Sam Bogoch:  So there are a number of key trends that are really just having their impact right now.  I’ve already mentioned the hundreds of thousands of post production teams that are out there shooting material.  The challenge is what will those folks use to manage their content?  It turns out that storage prices, both on premise and cloud, are dropping very rapidly, so you can now afford a small shared storage system for your team, for a few thousand dollars in some cases, maybe as much as ten or $20,000 but nothing like what a SAN used to cost.  And you can also afford cloud storage for a few dollars a month per terabyte which would have cost a multiple of that as recently as one or two years ago.  So all of a sudden the storage part is affordable and doable.

Sam Bogoch:  Other technologies are coming into play that are also making this a solvable problem.  More and more bandwidth, better artificial intelligence, better tools like ours for actually cataloguing what you have.  So we think that as opposed to the say 5,000 or so teams that use media management today, that we’ll be looking at something like 50,000 teams five years from now, and that’s again a confluence of all these different things.  More teams existing, more people reaching a point where they need to solve the problem, and then the underlying technologies, the building blocks of storage, bandwidth and software becoming much more affordable.

Larry Jordan:  Before I get totally lost in this discussion, and we all get completely depressed, let’s talk about some really exciting and happy news.  What’s the latest news from Axle?  What are you guys doing we should pay attention to?

Sam Bogoch:  So the number one thing is that we’re making that visibility even easier to come by by using artificial intelligence technique.  There’s been a very marked improvement in the performance and affordability of machine learning and AI so what we’re able to do with our new Axle AI product is pre-tag all your material, so you don’t have to actually sit there and watch it all to put the metadata tags on it.  And suddenly, your hours and hours of footage are now tagged with lots of information.  There’s speech detect, so you have a transcript, it may not be 100 percent accurate, but it’s 90 plus percent accurate.  You have identification of who’s in a scene, and if there’s celebrities it can even name them.  What objects are in the scene.  What kind of activity is going on in the scene and so forth.  And so it takes a huge step towards making thousands of hours of footage searchable and manageable.

Larry Jordan:  For people that have not yet started using media asset management software, where do they start with Axle?  What’s the entry point?

Sam Bogoch:  We have what’s called Axle Starter, and it’s $495.  It’s also bundled, with some of our partners’ storage solutions, so we just announced for instance with the folks at Promise, that they’re bundling it with their V-Track shared storage.  We have similar deals in place with Simply and Avid. It’s generally intended to be affordable for a post production team that would be buying their first shared storage, and again, here we partner with a number of different vendors, but it doesn’t have to be a vendor that bundles our product, it can also be really any type of high performance SAN or NAS.

Larry Jordan:  And for people that want more information about what Axle can do for them, where do they go on the web?

Sam Bogoch:  You should go to Axlevideo.com.

Larry Jordan:  That’s all one word, axlevideo, and Sam Bogoch is the CEO of Axle and Sam, thanks for joining us today.

Sam Bogoch:  Thanks so much Larry.

Larry Jordan:  You know, I was just thinking.  I’m continually fascinated by the law of unintended consequences.  This is the idea that even good ideas have repercussions that can’t be predicted at the time something is introduced.  Philip and I were talking about one example, how the increasing interest from technology firms in machine learning, runs the risk of automating the editorial process.  So that many editors who spend their time cutting simpler projects will find themselves out of work.  Now by that, I don’t mean that machines will be able to edit a really good feature film, at least not for a long time.  But much of editing today is much less creative, and more machine like.  For example, pulling sports highlights or clips of celebrities on the red carpet, or B roll of some event.  You know, the kind of editing that doesn’t take a lot of thought, but requires a basic level of skills and technology.

Larry Jordan: Those are the editing tasks that are likely to be automated first.  If you think about it, the application of machine learning to logging and identifying footage that Michael and Sam were talking about is one big step along the path of telling an editing system to scan a chunk of footage, find all the clips that feature a specific celebrity, build the selects into a timeline so that a human editor can add, polish and output. In other words, this is a task that a lot of assistant editors do every day. My concern is not that this is bad, but that as editors we need to think about how we can do more than just simply slap clips together for a client, because all too soon, that task can be automated and we’re out of work.

Larry Jordan:  How can we continue to boost our creative input while keeping clients happy in the coming world of editing automation?  That is going to be a big focus for many of us over the next couple of years.  Just something I’m thinking about.

Larry Jordan:  I want to thank our guests for this week, Jonathan Handel with the Hollywood Reporter, Philip Hodgetts of Lumberjack System, Randi Altman of postPerspective.com, Michael Kammes of Key Code Media, Sam Bogoch of Axle Video, and James DeRuvo from doddleNEWS.

Larry Jordan:   There’s a lot of history in our industry and it’s all posted to our website, at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Here you’ll find thousands of interviews, all online and all available to you today.  Remember to sign up for our free weekly show newsletter that comes out every Saturday.

Larry Jordan:  Talk with us on Twitter @DPBuzz and Facebook at digitalproductionbuzz.com.

Larry Jordan:   Our theme music is composed by Nathan Dugi-Turner with additional music provided by Smartsound.com.  Text transcripts are provided by Take1 Transcription.  Visit Take1.tv to learn how they can help you.

Larry Jordan:   Our producer is Debbie Price.  My name is Larry Jordan, and thanks for listening to The Digital Production Buzz.

Larry Jordan:  The Digital Production Buzz is copyright 2017 by Thalo LLC.

Announcer:  The Digital Production Buzz was brought to you by KeyFlow Pro.  A simple, but powerful media asset manager for collaboration over a network.  Download a free 30 day trial at keyflowpro.com.

HOST
Larry Jordan

GUESTS
Michael Wohl, Author, The 360° Video Handbook
Michele Yamazaki, VP Marketing, Toolfarm
Matthew Celia, Creative Director, Light Sail VR
Andy Cochrane, Director, The AV Club
Chris Bobotis, Director of Immersive, Adobe Systems, Inc.
James DeRuvo, Senior Writer, DoddleNEWS

==

Announcer:  The Digital Production Buzz is brought to you by KeyFlow Pro, media asset management software, designed to meet the needs of work groups at an affordable price.

Larry Jordan:  Tonight on the Buzz we are looking at the brave new world of virtual reality.  VR is captivating the imagination of many filmmakers, but what is it?  How is it different from traditional film, and what do you filmmakers need to know to make it work? Tonight we find out.

Larry Jordan:  We start with Michael Wohl, filmmaker and author, who’s written a new book called The 360 Video Handbook.  Michael shares his thoughts on what makes VR different from traditional filmmaking, and traditional theater.

Larry Jordan:  Matthew Celia is the creative director of Light Sail VR.  This is a company that specializes in creating VR with great characters and compelling narratives.  Tonight, Matthew shares his experiences in what it takes to make VR work.

Larry Jordan:  Michele Yamazaki is the VP of marketing for Toolfarm.  Tonight she talks about the different software tools that are available to create and improve our VR productions.

Larry Jordan:  Andy Cochrane is a director of 360 VR content for the AV Club and tonight he talks about the fundamental and steep learning curve that needs to take place for successful VR storytelling.

Larry Jordan:  Chris Bobotis, co founded Mettle, and is now the director of immersive video for Adobe Systems.  He describes how Adobe views VR, how they support it in Premiere, and what directors and editors need to know to use it successfully.

Larry Jordan:  All this, plus James DeRuvo, with our weekly DoddleNEWS update.  The Buzz starts now.

Announcer:  Since the dawn of digital filmmaking – authoritative – one show serves a worldwide network of media professionals – current – uniting industry experts – production – filmmakers – post production – and content creators around the planet – distribution.  From the media capital of the world in Los Angeles, California, the Digital Production Buzz goes live now.

Larry Jordan:  Welcome to the Digital Production Buzz, the world’s longest running podcast for the creative content industry, covering media production, post production and marketing around the world.

Larry Jordan:  Hi, my name is Larry Jordan.  Virtual reality is a medium that I’ve had a hard time wrapping my brain around.  Probably because VR actually wraps around my brain.  Still, the more I learn the more I realize that VR is not an offshoot of traditional film or video, it’s something totally different.  So this week, we decided to devote our entire show to learning more about this new technology and from what I’ve learned, as I was putting this week’s show together, is that VR can be pretty amazing, as long as you take it on its own merits and don’t try to force it to become something it isn’t.  Whether we can use VR for storytelling isn’t really important, as you’ll learn, because VR is far more than just stories.  This will be a fascinating show.

Larry Jordan:  By the way, I want to invite you to subscribe to our free weekly show newsletter at digitalproductionbuzz.com.  Every issue, every week provides quick links to the different segments on the show, plus articles of interest to filmmakers.  Best of all, every issue is free, and comes out every Saturday.

Larry Jordan:  Now, it’s time for our DoddleNEWS update, with James DeRuvo.  Hello James.

James DeRuvo:  Hello Larry.

Larry Jordan:  It is good to hear you again sir, what’s the news for today?

James DeRuvo:  Well Red Giant software has announced a retro 80s update to its Universe Subscription software service.  This update, version 2.2 comes with up to 11 new tools which include a retro style 16mm and 8mm film looks from an actual … and that’s enabled people to create that muddy VHS look along with tools that enable them to create channel surfing transitions like you’re watching TV on an old CRT screen.    There’s also now support for Avid Media Composer.

Larry Jordan:  Well just what I need, muddy retro VHS video from Red Giant.  Why do you think the retro look is so popular right now?

James DeRuvo: Well the popularity is going back to the 80s thanks to television series like ‘Stranger Things’, and the upcoming Spielberg film, ‘Ready Player One’, which is filled with 80s references.  So old is new again and many want the option of being able to create that dated, VHS video look.

Larry Jordan:  OK, Red Giant updates Universe.  So they do the update by going back in time, that makes sense.  What’s your next story?

James DeRuvo:  Well, going forward in time, Sharp is introducing a new 8K professional cinema camera.  It’s got a Super 35 8K CMOS sensor, and comes with a PL mount.  The 8C-B60A camera looks to grab a share of the cinematic 8K pie.  It records in 10-bit, 422 at 60 frames per second, with real time, uncompressed, 8K output by a 12G SDI.

Larry Jordan:  Well what do you see as the target market for this new camera from Sharp?

James DeRuvo:  Originally I thought it would be the traditional corporate, video wedding markets, and Sharp is better known for its broadcast quality EMG cameras, but if they’re going after the cinema camera market, and at a price of nearly $80,000, I think it should at least record in 12-bit 444, and at this point, I guess I’m still firmly in Red Helium’s camp, but I welcome the competition.

Larry Jordan:  It’s nice to know that Sharp is back in the camera game.  What else have you got for stories this week?

James DeRuvo:  Well, with a banner sales quarter things are really starting to look up for GoPro.  Thanks to a cost cutting plan that included layoffs and a simplification of the action camera company’s product line, that has given the company enough runway to start innovating again and they’ve created the new Hero 6 with a GP1 sensor and the Fusion 360 camera with their over capture feature.  You add to that the success of the Karma Grip, the resurrection of their drone, and a third quarter’s growth steadily rising to over 37 percent.

Larry Jordan:  It sounds like you see this as a turnaround for GoPro?

James DeRuvo:  I think it is.  It’s no secret that 2016 was a tough year for GoPro but after making some hard calls that included a massive recall of all the Karma drones, and initiating their cost cutting plan, those moves have paid off and now they have made over $330 million in sales after being over $110 million in the red.  The action camera company is back on track and they’re looking forward to some cool new products in 2018.

Larry Jordan:  Let’s see, we’ve got GoPro and we’ve got Sharp and we’ve got Red Giant.  What other stories are you covering this week?

James DeRuvo:  Other articles we’re following include the iPhone X video camera.  It’s good, but is it great?  Nikon is not only closing a factory in China, they’re also bugging out of South America, and could Disney be buying 20^th Century Fox?

Larry Jordan:  Now that one I’ve been reading about and that’s a fascinating concept.  I’m looking forward to hearing how that story plays out, and for people that need more information, where can they go on the web?

James DeRuvo:  All these and more can be found on

Larry Jordan:   And DoddleNEWS has just gone through a facelift, the whole website looks a whole lot better, and James DeRuvo is a senior writer for DoddleNEWS, and James, as always, a fun time chatting with you, I look forward to talking to you next week.

James DeRuvo:  See you next time.

Larry Jordan:  Take care, bye bye.

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Larry Jordan:   Michael Wohl is an award winning filmmaker and author of 12 books on post production, including the brand new 360 Video Handbook.  But Michael is probably most well known as one of the original designers of Apple’s Emmy award winning software, Final Cut Pro.  Hello Michael, good to have you back.

Michael Wohl:   I’m so glad to be here.

Larry Jordan:   Michael, what makes 360 VR different from traditional filmmaking?

Michael Wohl:   Well there’s a lot of things.  You know, fundamentally the experience of watching VR is so much more personal and immersive and the word immersive gets thrown around a lot, but I think a good movie can be pretty immersive.  I think a good novel can be pretty immersive.  What’s different about 360 video is that when you are watching content in that medium, you really do feel transported into a new place and having an experience that is different than that of your normal day to day life.  That is what really makes it special.

Larry Jordan:   Can we tell stories using VR, or is that actually asking the wrong question?

Michael Wohl:   I don’t think it’s asking the wrong question, but I think that it’s still a difficult question to answer because I think the way we tell stories in VR is going to be different than the way we tell stories in traditional media.  Fundamentally, VR and 360 video is much more about experiencing life in a new place or in a different perspective than you may be used to and that can be used for storytelling but it also can be used for all sorts of other things too.

Larry Jordan:  For instance?

Michael Wohl:  People are using VR in therapeutic settings, people are using VR to help veterans with PTSD, it’s being used for training, for trauma situations, or emergency response situations.  Any place where the experience of being in a situation can be overwhelming, by being able to do that first in VR, you’re able to have the physical experience and the mental experience of going through that trauma or whatever it is, but you’re in a controlled environment, so you can sort of stop and analyze, and the idea being that then when you are put in that real situation, in real life, you will be that much more prepared.

Larry Jordan:  Some people describe VR as more like live theater than traditional films, would you agree?

Michael Wohl:  The theater analogy is a good one and I think it’s a useful one for thinking about how to create VR.  The actual experience of watching VR is not all that like watching theater, just as that film is not at all that like watching theater, although when films started, people said it was a lot like theater as well.  VR is much more immediate and personal.  You are physically in a space, you look around you, and you see the room and the space around you in a way that in theater, you know, theater for the most part is done on a proscenium with somebody sitting in the audience watching.

Michael Wohl:  There is a type of theater that’s sometimes called immersive theater where the actors are all around you or you’re walking through a space, and something like ‘Sleep No More’ is one of the most famous examples of that, which is set in a hotel in New York, and you walk around the rooms and different experiences happen.  Some of the people around you are other guests, some of them are actors, and you do really feel like you’re a part of the scene to some extent.  VR is more like that immersive theater, than it is like traditional theater, but even that, I think it’s still a very different experience.

Larry Jordan:  Let’s shift gears for a bit.  You just finished writing your book 360 Video Handbook.  Why did you decide to write it?

Michael Wohl:  I was really interested in developing 360 content.  I’ve been a filmmaker and video maker for many years, and I’ve been curious about VR since I was a kid, and now the technology was becoming more viable, I wanted to experiment with it so I got a camera and some software tools and started trying to teach myself how to use it and very quickly wanted some help looking around for resources.  What I found was very scattershot, like little pieces here or there, it was often contradictory.  Different vendors were promoting different workflows and I really felt like there was no unified source of information on how to do this stuff.  With my experience in teaching film and filmmaking techniques, I thought this was probably something I could help out with.

Larry Jordan:  I know that one of the things that you did in your book is shoot a variety of different VR short films, what is different about working with talent on a 360 shoot versus a traditional film shoot?

Michael Wohl:  I think this is one of the areas that’s most exciting in that it really is quite different, and I think that it takes a lot of experience to make sense of that and figure out how to work with talent.  Frankly, while I have some ideas about it, I don’t think we’ve answered the question yet.  I think it’s still happening.  But what I can say is that just like in theater, when theater is good, you feel transported in a way that is difficult in most media.  When theater is bad, it’s cringeworthy, embarrassing.  There’s nothing like sitting 15 feet from an actor while they’re just not there, they don’t feel present in the space, and it feels really unnatural.  VR shares that dilemma, or that benefit too right?  When it’s good, it’s great, but when it’s bad, it’s terrible.

Michael Wohl:   I think part of the thing is that acting for VR is very different than acting for film and it’s different from acting for theater.  It’s maybe a hybrid of the two, but I think it maybe something completely different than both.  Part of that is because when you’re shooting a 360 video scene, technically you’re going to be running long takes, we don’t use traditional coverage of multiple angles on the scene.  There are some cases where that’s done, but generally most 360 or VR projects are done where there’s continuous action from a particular point of view.  So, in that regard, your actors need to be able to work through an entire scene, non-stop, the way they would in a theatrical situation, but the level of performance needs to be regulated and adjusted depending on how close to, or far away from the camera the actor is.

Michael Wohl:   So if the actor is standing five feet from the camera, their performance has got to be incredibly subtle and naturalistic, just the way it would be in a close up on a film.  But when that actor steps five feet further away or ten feet further away, their performance needs to be different.  In order to read the physicality of their actions, they need to be a little bit broader and bigger the way they would perhaps on a stage.  But, even still, their vocal performance needs to remain consistent throughout because audio is probably being recorded closed miked, and so if they start raising their voice, or projecting in the way they would with theater, that’s going to read really artificial.   So you really have this interesting hybrid of these different models, and it needs to be done dynamically during the course of a scene.  So you really have to shift gears as an actor while you’re working.

Michael Wohl:  One more piece of this is, as a director, most of the time in 360 or in these VR projects, because the camera is shooting in all directions at once, the director can’t be there on set watching, can’t be sitting behind the camera giving direction and interrupting the scene, and correcting and making all those adjustments.  So you really need to be working this all out through the rehearsal process and then letting the scene play out as it goes.

Larry Jordan:  For filmmakers who want to get into VR for the first time, what one core piece of advice do you have for them to get them started in the right direction?

Michael Wohl:  This is maybe an easy answer or a cliché answer, but the best thing you can do is to get a cheap camera like a Ricoh Theta, or the Samsung 360.  These are decent quality cameras, very lightweight and easy to work with, and will allow you to experiment and play, because the one thing I would say is that, you’re going to make a lot of mistakes. There are a lot of ways, especially for experienced filmmakers, that your instincts are going to be wrong.  What I would say is, don’t do your project you’re passionate about first.  Do a bunch of experimentation, do a bunch of testing, play with it, and then see the results and watch those results in a headset  because you will experience the scene in a very different way than most people I think expect to.

Larry Jordan:  Michael your book is 360 Video Handbook.  Where can people go to get it?

Michael Wohl:  It’s available on Amazon, and it’s also available through my personal website, which is 360videohandbook.com.

Larry Jordan:  The book is the 360 Video Handbook, it’s just excellent, and Michael Wohl is the author and Michael, thanks for joining us today.

Michael Wohl: Thank you so much Larry.

Larry Jordan:  Matthew Celia is the managing director and creative director of Light Sail VR, a company that creates engaging VR content.  Hello Matthew, welcome.

Matthew Celia:  Hi, thanks for having me.

Larry Jordan:  How would you describe Light Sail VR?

Matthew Celia:  Light Sail VR is an immersive production company focusing on creating live action, narrative entertainment with a real focus on story.

Larry Jordan: Now you used the term live action, what does that mean for VR?

Matthew Celia:  There’s two kinds of virtual reality.  There’s game engine based, which is your shoot them up video games or anything created in a 3D world, and then there is live action which is cinematic VR, stuff that’s captured with one or multiple cameras to create this virtual reality scene.

Larry Jordan:   Do you view VR as something for games, or telling stories, or providing experiences, or something totally different?

Matthew Celia:   I define virtual reality as anything that transports an audience member into a new environment.  So it’s anything that replaces your vision, or your sound and makes you feel like you’re in a place that you’re not currently.  That could be video, that can be games, it can be 2D, it can be 3D.  It doesn’t really matter as long as it’s in a headset.

Larry Jordan:   Well tell me about a recent project you guys have created.

Matthew Celia:   Recently we’ve just embarked on our first live action interactive narrative, is what we’re calling it.  It’s called ‘Speak of the Devil’ and it’s really exciting, because what we did is, we’ve made a mesh narrative where we give the audience the ability to go from location to location whenever they want, and they’ll experience the story in different ways, depending on which part of the forest they explore.  Of course it’s horror, so it’s pretty exciting, and I think a lot of people are going to love it, but I don’t think I’ve seen a project like this before in this space.  It’s immersive theater, but it’s in VR.

Larry Jordan:  Is it released or in production?

Matthew Celia:  Currently we are racing to finish it in time for hopefully a Black Friday release.  We’re going to be releasing it on Google Daydream, Gear VR, HTC Vive, and Oculus Rift.

Larry Jordan:  I wish you great success, though horror is not a genre that I like, I still wish you success with it.  But before we talk more about projects, I want to talk about equipment.  What equipment do you use to shoot your projects?

Matthew Celia:  We use a range of different cameras because not every camera is right for every single project.  But on Speak of the Devil, we were fortunate enough to be partnered with Google and use the GoPro Odyssey and their Google Jump Cloud Stitching which offers 6K over 6K stereoscopic, at 60 frames a second.  It really is one of the highest quality cinematic VR productions you can do right now.

Larry Jordan:  OK, I want to just focus on that for a second, so it’s 6000 pixels horizontal, 6000 pixels vertical?  Is that a correct statement?

Matthew Celia:  Technically it’s 5,760 pixels horizontal and 5,760 pixels vertical.  Your vertical’s divided into a left eye and a right eye.  Each eye has a two to one aspect ratio that you stack on top of each other so the software can decode it and give you the 3D feel.

Larry Jordan:  So basically, the resolution horizontal is double the resolution vertical?

Matthew Celia:  Yes, exactly, per eye.

Larry Jordan:  That means you’ve got to have massive storage.

Matthew Celia:  Massive storage.  We’re really lucky in this to have a partner of ours, Lumaforge, which makes network storage drive.  They’ve donated a 125 terabyte server for this project, and this project’s taking up almost that whole server.  I think we’re at 80 terabytes of footage right now, which is the biggest project our studio’s ever undertaken.

Larry Jordan:  That’s a mind-blowing amount of storage.  For people who want more information about the kind of work your company is doing and to track your projects on the web, where can they go?

Matthew Celia:  Go to www.speakofthedevilvr.com to take a look at our latest project, and sign up to get notified of when it gets released, and then while you’re there, you can head to www.lightsailvr.com to see some of our great brand of work and 360 storytelling.

Larry Jordan:   Matthew Celia is the managing director and creative director of Light Sail VR, and Matthew, thanks for joining us today.

Matthew Celia:  Thank you so much.

Larry Jordan:   Take care, bye bye.

Larry Jordan:  Michele Yamazaki is the VP of marketing at Toolfarm, a company that specializes in plugins and effects for video editors.  She has written or co-written two books on plugins as well as becoming the go to person on software and plugins for our editing systems.  Hello Michele, welcome back.

Michele Yamazaki:  Thank you very much.

Larry Jordan:   This week we’re talking about VR.  So far we’ve got a good idea of what it is, and how to use it to tell stories, but I’m not exactly sure what kind of software and plugins we need.  Do you guys carry VR plugins?  Or is that a concept that doesn’t yet exist?

Michele Yamazaki:   No it definitely exists.  What’s interesting is that a lot of the software that you’ve been using for years, is now incorporating VR, immersive video effects, and 360 tools right into the software.  The latest Adobe suite, Adobe Creative Cloud CC 2018 has, in Premiere and other software, they have this immersive 360 video, with tools and there’s all sorts of tutorials on it online to help you get started with it.  3DS Max, from Autodesk, also has a VR workflow that you can download portions of, or is included in it and you can jump right in.  There’s a new Spherical camera in Cinema 4D R19 which came out a couple of months ago, and the latest Boris Continuum Complete, that just came out a month ago, that also has several tools to help you edit and work with VR formats, 180 degree or 360 degree formats.  Mocha VR has tracking and roto and masking tools that all work in a VR format.  So yes, it’s really popular.

Larry Jordan:   Well it hasn’t yet shipped but Apple did a reveal of the new Final Cut X which also will include VR in it, so I’m curious to see what happens when Apple ships their product as well.

Michele Yamazaki:   So am I.

Larry Jordan:   Michele, one of the things that filmmakers focus on is telling stories.  But VR actually is a much bigger environment than storytelling.  What have you discovered in terms of how VR is being used outside of filmmaking?

Michele Yamazaki:  It’s used in such a huge number of positive ways.  It’s been used to treat medical disorders like PTSD, to help cancer patients, to help cure disease with researchers being able to use VR to learn about cellular structures and the immune system.  It can be used to diagnose dementia or help children with autism.  Outside of that it can be used in training.  Wal-Mart I know is using it to train new employees, they’re using it to train police officers, new teachers, the Chicago Bears quarterbacks even are using VR.

Larry Jordan:  Well now that we’ve got a sense of where VR is useful, we need to think about the kind of tools that we can use to create VR.  What software right now can we use for VR?

Michele Yamazaki:  Well there’s all sorts of different tools out there.  There’s certain things for blurring and for depth of field and for tracking things.  There are all different tools, so it really depends on what you’re going to be needing, and if you’re going to be working with motion graphics, or just video.  So there’s a lot to take into account and there really aren’t that many tools out there, but if you’re working in 3D you’ll need a 3D tool for example.

Larry Jordan:  Some of these tools are complex to learn and take a while to figure out even if we’re going to be able to use them or not.  Is there any easy way to get our hands on some of these tools without breaking the bank?

Michele Yamazaki:  I highly recommend downloading a demo version. Most of these tools have free demos that you can download.  As a matter of fact, we have a free 30 day rental license of Boris Continuum 11, the one that just came out with the VR tools, and you just go to Toolfarm and you can fill out a form and we’ll send you a license for that.

Larry Jordan:  There’s a product that you guys just announced called Render Garden, tell me about that.

Michele Yamazaki:  It’s coming out next week and what it is is an After Effects script that instead of rendering one big file, it will break up a big file into several pieces and they call those seeds, garden seeds.  They’ll segment it, and so it can maximize your CPU cores on one machine, or you can do it across network rendering.  So it will speed up your renders by quite a bit, and it will work with these VR tools or any other plug in that you may be using.  It works for After Effects and it will sell for $99 and it does background rendering as well, so you’ll be able to work in After Effects on more content while you’re rendering.

Larry Jordan:  Help me, as someone who doesn’t know After Effects that well, what does this do that After Effects does not?

Michele Yamazaki:  It lets you background render for one.  So in the old days you were always working in After Effects and once you’re ready to go, you set it to render and walk away for depending on how long your render would take.  Back in the old days I can remember going away for 24 hours and it would still be going, but that was a long time ago.  This will speed up your effects, so there are some plugins out there that are very intensive on your CPU or RAM or whatever, and this will really speed up your render processes.  I tried it a couple of nights ago, and I didn’t really take a good benchmark, but it was easily twice as fast.

Larry Jordan:  For people that need more information about the tools that you have available, where can they go on the web?

Michele Yamazaki:  To www.toolfarm.com.

Larry Jordan:  Michele Yamazaki is the VP of marketing at Toolfarm, and Michele, thanks for joining us today.

Michele Yamazaki:  Thank you so much.

Larry Jordan:  Andrew Cochrane is a director working in interactive and immersive media such as virtual and augmented reality, installations, live events and mobile and web apps.  Hello Andrew, welcome.

Andy Cochrane:  Thank you for having me.

Larry Jordan:  It’s my pleasure.  Andy, we’re learning a lot about VR tonight and one thing Michael Wohl said earlier in the show is that VR is not like traditional film or live theater, but something totally different.  What’s your opinion?

Andy Cochrane:   I think that as a medium, that’s absolutely true.  It shares a lot of techniques and feels like a lot of other things.  It feels like film, and video games and theater, and even amusement parks and other live entertainment, but it pulls from all of those other disciplines but it’s not any one of them.  It is something new.  It’s an experiential medium which if you look at most of the media that we use for entertainment, they’re not really experiential.  They’re more passive and something you listen to or view or experience passively.  Whereas VR is a much more involving medium that when it’s really working well, makes you feel like you’re actually a part of the experience and not just an observer of it, so it definitely is a new thing and we’re only at the very beginning of figuring it out.

Larry Jordan:  You’ve been working in VR for a while.  What’s the learning curve like?  How much do you have to forget, or can you really build on what you already know?

Andy Cochrane:  I think the only way to create VR is to come into it with some experience in some other form of media, be it traditional live action or visual effects and animation or video games.  But you definitely need to bring your knowledge with you, but check your ego at the door.  It’s a team sport and it’s massively multi disciplinarian, so I think the folks who are doing really great work in VR are people who have traditional skills in a different format and they’ve come into VR open minded and looking to collaborate and have not approached it with an “I know what I’m doing, I’ve got 20 years of experience.  I’m good at that, so of course I’m going to be good at this” approach.

Larry Jordan:  Do actors need to learn a different way of acting?

Andy Cochrane:  Yes, in terms of live action VR, I think we’re witnessing as dangerous a technological transition as sound.  I think there were a lot of silent film stars whose talent did not translate into the talkies when we got sound, and I think we’re at as large a crossroads, if not larger. Because a lot of theatrical and film training really starts to fall apart in this medium, I don’t believe we have any stars of VR yet.  I don’t think we have any actors who have really figured out how to work in this medium fully.  There’s certainly folks that are doing a good job, but it’s not theater, it’s not film, it’s not TV.  The audience feels like they’re there and because of that the writing has to be very natural, very believable, very realistic and the performances need to match that.  They need to feel real instead of feeling like they’re a movie star, or feeling like a drama, or a comedy.  It has to actually feel like it’s really happening.  That’s a skill that I don’t think there’s anybody that has really demonstrated they have that nailed yet.

Larry Jordan:   Andrew, for people that want to hire you for their next project, or just keep track of what you’re thinking, where can they go on the web?

Andy Cochrane:   My website is Andrew-cochrane.com.

Larry Jordan:  That’s Andrew-cochrane.com, and Andrew, thanks for joining us today and we’ll keep in touch and see how your projects turn out.

Andy Cochrane:   Thank you so much.

Larry Jordan:   Take care, bye bye.

Larry Jordan:   Here’s another website I want to introduce you to.  Doddlenews.com. DoddleNEWS gives you a portal into the broadcast, video and film industries.  It’s a leading online resource, presenting news, reviews and products for the film and video industry.  DoddleNEWS also offers a resource guide and crew management platforms specifically designed for production.  These digital call sheets, along with their app, directory and premium listings, provide in depth organizational tools for busy production professionals.  DoddleNEWS is a part of the Thalo Arts Community, a worldwide community of artists, filmmakers and storytellers.  From photography to filmmaking, performing arts to fine arts, and everything in between, Thalo is filled with resources you need to succeed.  Whether you want the latest industry news, need to network with other creative professionals or require state of the art online tools to manage your next project, there’s only one place to go.  Doddlenews.com.

Larry Jordan:  Chris Bobotis was the co-founder of Mettle, where he architected Mettle’s Skybox cinematic 360 VR software for Premiere and After Effects.  Now he’s the director of immersive for Adobe Systems, bringing his deep experience in 360 VR to Adobe.  Hello Chris, welcome.

Chris Bobotis:  Hey Larry, how are you?

Larry Jordan:  What makes 360 VR different from traditional video?

Chris Bobotis:  I think the biggest thing is what we used to rely on is what we know as the frame or a framing device.  So a frame is the silver screen, it’s your computer monitor, your TV monitor.  That’s gone away.  So in a sense the frame in front of us has become the whole world around us in 360 VR.  That lends itself to great opportunity to reinvent storytelling and even reinvent content creation tools.

Larry Jordan:  We’re going to talk about storytelling in just a minute, but I was looking at your title and your title is Director of Immersive, and yet we call the format 360 VR.  Why are you a director of not 360 VR?

Chris Bobotis:  I think 360 VR is one component.  It’s a bit of a stepping stone to a lot more that will make its way to business and consumer.  So that’s augmented reality as we started to see with Pokémon Go in mobile devices and we’re starting to see with Head-Up Display technology such as the HoloLens …  Then eventually, augmented reality and all that we know of 360 VR spatial video converges to something that people are starting to call mixed reality or extended reality.  We’ll get that down pat when we get there, but for now it’s one of the two and this was why we chose Director of Immersive because it’s further reaching and it’s a better umbrella term than just 360 VR.  So 360 VR’s a great starting point, but I think there’s a lot more that we can accomplish.

Larry Jordan:  Now would you include audio as part of that immersive experience?

Chris Bobotis:  Audio is huge Larry.  It’s even bigger than it ever was in our framed world or in our rectilinear world.  You can break immersion very easily with bad audio so one of the pushes that you’ve seen at Adobe is special audio effort.  I don’t know if you got a chance to see our sneaks at Adobe Max?  So sneaks is basically technology that we show that may make its way into the product line, but a big part of that was what we call Project Sound … and that’s basically spatial audio offering and everything to help that along in Adobe products.  So I’m very excited about that.

Larry Jordan:  Let’s shift back into software development for just a minute.  What are the software challenges of working with immersive video?

Chris Bobotis:  I think the biggest challenge is that regardless of titles and all that, I don’t think anybody really knows how it’s going to shape up and shape out.  I think the biggest challenge is staying very in tune with the user base and watching what pain points come our way and trying to be as pro active as possible.  In some ways, trying to be a bit of a thought reader, but really being in tune with the content creators, and helping determine what tool set we should prioritize next.  And even being, I hate to call it reactive because that’s a horrible word in my world, I would rather call it pro active, so if you’re well entrenched and in tune with the user base like our customers, then you can kind of anticipate what the next set of tools can happen.  It’s what we did at Mettle, and that’s what we’re going to continue to do at Adobe now that I’m at Adobe.

Larry Jordan:  From an editing point of view, once I’m looking at VR inside Premiere, what makes editing immersive video different from editing traditional video?

Chris Bobotis:  Not much.  I think one of the easiest things short term, was to demystify the whole format.  Though the format for 360 VR video is kind of strange.  It’s this thing called  Equirectangular, and when you first look at it, you don’t quite know what to do with it as an editor, but one of the first things that I worked with Adobe on, even before I joined Adobe, I said we need to demystify this.  So what we did is, in Premiere Pro we introduced a viewer based system, so you’re not looking at an equirectangular anymore instead you’re looking at rectilinear view which is basically what you would see if you look in the browser, a mobile device, or in a head mounted display.  So right away, as soon as you introduce that, the editor gets comfortable because now they’re looking at something in context, not at this foreign looking format that neither the editor really knows what to do with, nor does the compositor, nor for that matter do a lot of the algorithms, like the camera tracking algorithms you know what to do with because it’s way too distorted.  So as soon as you switch over to rectilinear workflow paradigm, a lot of the pain goes away.

Chris Bobotis:  That’s part of it.  The other part is, again it’s a frameless world, so some of the things you have to do more than you did in rectilinear is you have to help influence gaze because you can’t depend on that framing device any more.  So you’re not sure where the viewer can be looking at any given point in time, so some of the things that we did with Transitions, when we started to build Transitions for 360 VR production, is we introduced a point of interest so an animatable point of interest where you can influence the gaze.  Spatial audio will help along tremendously with audio cues so that you are sure that your cuts and transitions work well and this helps of course drive narrative.

Larry Jordan:  I’m still trying to get my brain wrapped around VR as a traditional film and video guy.  This idea of losing the frame is very difficult for me. But one of the things I’ve learned is that VR is much more like live theater than it is traditional filmmaking, that it’s much more of an experience rather than pure storytelling. Would you agree with either one of those comments?

Chris Bobotis:  I don’t think it’s quite theater or cinema to tell you the truth. I’ve always been hard pressed to answer that until about maybe about four or five months ago when somebody stuck a microphone in my face, in New York, and said “What about it?”  Pretty much the same question.  And I said, “To me it feels a lot more like dreaming than it does cinema or theater, so I don’t dream in a frame.”  I don’t know about you, but I would guess most people don’t.  They don’t frame their dreams, nor are they really linear.  A lot of them are abstracted, non-linear and yet we’re OK with that.  We live in a dream, experience dreams and we’re very OK with that.  I think there’s the opportunity where 360 VR as a medium can help move along and even evolve a storytelling experience, so do things really have to be that linear anymore?  Do we really need to depend on frames anymore?  I’m guessing this is a natural evolution so I can’t quite call it theater, but I can’t quite call it cinema either.  I think it’s an evolution and it taps into both.

Larry Jordan:  So then, what advice do you give editors who are going to start editing a VR project for the first time?  What mindset should they bring, or how should they think about it?

Chris Bobotis:  Experimentation.  By all means experiment, make mistakes, keep what you like, throw away what you don’t.  Don’t over invest in expensive cameras or anything else.  Keep it simple to begin with.  Either find some footage or maybe a friend’s been shooting footage, find some footage that you can work with, or rent or buy something that’s very affordable and just start cutting.  Start to understand the medium and give it it’s due respect I guess.  So, you’re right, some people find it very daunting, the idea of this frameless new environment, others finding it very challenging.  And I mean challenging in the best way as in a fresh challenge like, there are no rules, maybe I can help establish some of the rules.  Or establish a vocabulary to help narrative along.

Larry Jordan:  Switching back to software again, which part of the computer is taxed the most during editing VR?  Do we need to worry about setting a specific spec?  Do we need a faster CPU or a faster GPU or just plain more RAM?  Is there something special from our hardware point of view that we need to worry about when we’re starting to edit VR?

Chris Bobotis:  So I would prioritize my investment.  A better CPU, a better all round system certainly serves you better, so it’s not one thing, but if I had to prioritize it would be GPU, and then I would get into very fast disks, the speeds are amazing, they’re very affordable these days, so I would definitely run SSDs.  And then start looking at the RAM and the CPU.  So GPU is high in my book.  In time, more and more companies will … on the GPU.

Larry Jordan:  GPU, the graphics processing unit should be your highest priority and then optimize everything else after that?

Chris Bobotis:  Correct.  Your SSD you want data moving back and forth fast.  Then you start looking at CPU, mother board and RAM is important, but less as you move towards the GPU.

Larry Jordan: Chris, we’re going to have to come back and talk to you about this again.  There’s just so much that we need to cover, but for people that want to learn more about the products that Adobe has that can help them in a VR environment, where can they go on the web?

Chris Bobotis:  So Adobe.com.  We don’t have a designed URL yet for all that is immersive, but there is a passion at Adobe for this, you know, it’s obvious with the acquisition of Mettle and having … lead the efforts, so you’ll see a lot more tutorials, a lot more courseware, a lot more information available on adobe.com, so I think that’s a very good starting point.

Larry Jordan:  That website is adobe.com and Chris Bobotis is the director of immersive for Adobe, and Chris, thanks for joining us today.

Chris Bobotis:  My pleasure Larry, thanks for having me.

Larry Jordan:  You know, I was just thinking, the problem I’ve had with VR is that I kept thinking of it as another way to tell stories, and it is but as we learned tonight, it’s much more than that.  In fact, it’s another way to experience reality.  As I was listening to Michele recite some of the different uses of VR, I realized that almost none involved traditional storytelling but all involved immersing the viewer in a different environment.  As Chris said, VR isn’t like traditional filmmaking, but it isn’t like theater either.  It’s more like dreaming, creating illusions without walls, and environments we move through without being attached.

Larry Jordan: I was also struck by Michael’s comment that acting for VR was completely different, blocking and rehearsals are like live theater, audio is like film, while the actual performance needs to switch seamlessly between the subtlety of a film close up, with the ability to engage an audience as though you were on stage.  All without changing the modulation of your voice.  As Andy said, VR has a fundamentally steep learning curve.  We need to set our sights on how this craft develops over the next decade, because we won’t have it all figured out by next year.  Exciting times and the perfect opportunity to experiment with this new technology for yourself.  Just something I’m thinking about.

Larry Jordan:  I want to thank our guests for this week, author Michael Wohl, Michele Yamazaki with Toolfarm, Matthew Celia from Light Sail VR, Andy Cochrane, the AV Club, Chris Bobotis from Adobe Systems, and James DeRuvo from DoddleNEWS.

Larry Jordan:   There’s a lot of history in our industry and it’s all posted to our website, at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Here you’ll find thousands of interviews, all online and all available to you today.  Remember to sign up for our free weekly show newsletter that comes out every Saturday.

Larry Jordan:  Talk with us on Twitter @DPBuzz and Facebook at digitalproductionbuzz.com.

Larry Jordan:   Our theme music is composed by Nathan Dugi-Turner with additional music provided by Smartsound.com.  Text transcripts are provided by Take1 Transcription.  Visit Take1.tv to learn how they can help you.

Larry Jordan:   Our producer is Debbie Price, our assistant producer is Tori Hoefke.  My name is Larry Jordan, and thanks for listening to The Digital Production Buzz.

Larry Jordan:  The Digital Production Buzz is copyright 2017 by Thalo LLC.

Announcer:  The Digital Production Buzz was brought to you by KeyFlow Pro.  A simple, but powerful media asset manager for collaboration over a network.  Download a free 30 day trial at keyflowpro.com.

HOST
Larry Jordan

GUESTS
Ned Soltz, Contributing Editor, Red Shark News, Ned Soltz Inc.
Riley Stricklin, VP of Sales, LumeCube
Clark Weber, Senior Product Manager – Connected Devices, GoPro
Philip Hodgetts, President, Lumberjack System
James DeRuvo, Senior Writer, DoddleNEWS

==

Larry Jordan: Tonight on The Buzz, we are looking at new technology. We start with Ned Soltz, contributing editor for Red Shark News. No one has a better handle on cameras and camera trends than Ned. Tonight, he shares the latest in camera trends that he’s watching this year.

Larry Jordan: Next, Riley Stricklin is the VP of sales for LumeCube – very bright, very small, very portable lights. Tonight he tells us about their latest technology, including portable lights for drones.

Larry Jordan: Next, continuing on our theme of small, Clark Weber is a senior product manager for GoPro and shares their latest news about the new Hero 6 and Fusion 360 cameras.

Larry Jordan: Next, Philip Hodgetts, the CEO of Lumberjack System, shares his thoughts on emerging technology trends that we need to watch.

Larry Jordan: Next Nigel Booth, the Executive Vice President of Business Development and Marketing for IPV, discusses the importance of using a media asset manager, why so many editors are reluctant to use them and their latest technology integrating a MAM with the Cloud.  All this, plus James DeRuvo with our weekly DoddleNEWS update. The Buzz starts now.

Male Voiceover: Since the dawn of digital filmmaking.  Authoritative: One show serves a worldwide network of media professionals.  Current: Uniting industry experts.  Production: Filmmakers.  Post-Production: And content creators around the planet.  Distribution: From the media capital of the world, in Los Angeles, California, The Digital Production Buzz goes live now. 

Larry Jordan: Welcome to the Digital Production Buzz, the world’s longest running podcast for the creative content industry covering media production, post production and marketing around the world. Hi, my name is Larry Jordan.  Tonight’s show looks at a variety of new technology, new products and new trends. Ned Soltz and Philip Hodgetts will cover new ideas in cameras, machine learning and HDR, while we hear about new products from GoPro, LumeCube and IPV.  One of the interesting things I’ve been thinking about recently is why editors are so reluctant to embrace Media Asset Management Software, especially when even small productions generate hundreds and hundreds of media files.  So tonight I talk about this with Nigel Booth, the head of marketing for IPV. Is there a problem with the software, or the way that it integrates with our editing systems, or the way that we think about MAM itself?  Tonight will be an interesting show.

Larry Jordan: By the way, I want to invite you to subscribe to our free weekly show newsletter at digitalproductionbuzz.com. Every issue, every week, provides quick links to the different segments on the show; plus articles of interest to filmmakers.  Best of all, it’s free and comes out every Saturday.

Larry Jordan: Now it’s time for our DoddleNEWS update with James DeRuvo. Hello James.

James DeRuvo:  Hello Larry.

Larry Jordan: It is good to hear your voice again this week.

James DeRuvo: Yes, I’m actually talking to you from Portland, Oregon this week. I’m on assignment.

Larry Jordan: On assignment?  Or is that what we call a vacation around here?  I hope you’re having a good time.

James DeRuvo: I’m not really sure what the word means.  I work too much!

Larry Jordan: So what’s the news this week?  What’s our lead story?

James DeRuvo: Well Boris is expanding in the virtual reality where software updates promotes Sapphire and Continuum. Since they bought both of those suites last year, they’ve added integration of Mocha’s planar tracker… Preset Effects and Transitions and the ability to deploy green screen chroma keying within the virtual reality state. There’s also five new virtual reality tools for sharpening, reorienting and fixing of flicker issues.

Larry Jordan: Well both Boris and Mocha are big effects people. Does that change your attitude toward VR?

James DeRuvo: I really don’t think the industry cares! I’m not sold on virtual reality. As a mainstream medium, I never have been. But Boris FX, since they acquired Sapphire Cinema last year they’ve been moving steadily towards virtual reality. With this new update, they’re adding tools that will enable users to take those popular Mocha tracker tools and use them in the VR state and that means more special effects inside the virtual world and that can’t be a bad thing.

Larry Jordan: Alright, well that’s news from Boris. What else have you got?

James DeRuvo: You know that RED has a great app called RED Tools and for the first time they’re making it available for android. It’s got a multi-purpose digital tool kit for fine tuning and simulating your favorite RED camera rig configuration. You can use a host of cool utilities including crop factor, setting and determining the recording time, flicker free video, calculating a depth of field, planning speed, exposure, the works. And there’s also a light and dark mode so you can adjust your screen according to your ambient lighting conditions and there’s support for 11 different languages.

Larry Jordan: Well what do you see as the main impact of this announcement?

James DeRuvo: Well, you know, in answer to this, our business is largely IOS centric. Everybody tends to use Apple products and you can see the disparity between filmmaking apps for android versus filmmaking apps for IOS.  You hardly see Android Apps. I think it’s about to change. I think this upstage will create a ripple effect in that RED tools move on to the Android platform. It makes a lot of sense because RED is coming out with that cool hydrogen one smart phone. That one’s on the android system and so I think this is going to be a first step in filmmakers embracing android more seriously and it could become a viable competitor in our business.

Larry Jordan: Well also Android is bigger outside the US than it is inside the US so that may have an impact as well. So that’s RED and Boris. What’s our third story?

James DeRuvo: Well, the question I have is, can the iPhone 8 match the Panasonic GH5 and 4K cameras like it in video quality?  And believe it or not, it has a shot.  The iPhone 8 looks to have better color gamut, thanks to its HDR features and a higher contrast. Although the GH5 tends to look a little bit more true to life with its 8-bit 4:2:0 palette and the option to shoot anamorphically in 10-bit 4:2:2. But I kind of like the bolder colors of the iPhone 8. I actually did a comparison with my iPhone and my Canon 5D and I really like the colors on the iPhone 8 being bright ambiance sunlight. I just thought it was a better look. The iPhone also kind of looks to equal the GH5 in detail, shooting at 4K at 50 frames per second. But as you zoom in, that’s when the GH5 starts to get the edge because you actually see where the details start to get muddy as you do that digital zoom in the iPhone whereas the GH5 has the optical benefits.

Larry Jordan: That’s an interesting comparison between the cameras. What other news are we covering this week?

James DeRuvo: Other stories we’re following include the Panasonic EVA1 is shipping. BenQ has a massive 27 inch studio monitor for under $1,000 and believe it or not, you can turn your Smart phone into an external field monitor recorder.

Larry Jordan: And where can people go to keep track of all this industry news?

James DeRuvo: All these stories and more can be found at DoddleNEWS.com.

Larry Jordan: And James DeRuvo is the senior writer for DoddleNEWS and joins us every week with the latest news update. James, thanks for joining us, we’ll talk to you again next week.

James DeRuvo: See you next week, Larry.

Larry Jordan: When you can’t find your media, you need a Media Asset Management solution, KeyFlow Pro. This is a simple but powerful software designed specifically to help you organize, track and find your media, whether you work alone or part of a group. Its intuitive user interface helps you easily store, sort, search, play, annotate and share your media using team-based shared libraries over a network. Its wide range of features are all at a very affordable price. KeyFlow Pro allows unique, on the fly, Final Cut Pro X project sharing by simply dragging between Final Cut and KeyFlow Pro. Media collaboration in work groups has never been easier. KeyFlow Pro is available in the Mac App store or get a 30 day free trial at Keyflowpro.com. That’s Keyflowpro.com. Simple, elegant and surprisingly affordable.

Larry Jordan: Ned Soltz is just a wizard, that’s the only way to describe it. He’s also a contributing editor for Creative Planet and Red Shark News and best of all, he is a regular here on the Buzz. Hello Ned, welcome back.

Ned Soltz: Hello Larry and let me get out my wand and try to do a little wizardry tonight for our listeners!

Larry Jordan: You don’t have to have a wand to do that, you do it just by keeping track of everything you’re keeping track of.  So, now that all the major trade shows are over for the year, what trends in camera technology stick out to you?

Ned Soltz: I think there are a couple of trends and one of those trends really is toward more and more miniaturization. That even as you see the higher end cameras that are appearing, the form factors tends to be much smaller and also tend to be much more modular. So you can really build the camera as you need it, adding whatever extra that you want or need, or shoot internally with. So I think that modular trend is certainly on the increase as well as the miniaturization and certainly those trends toward 4K and higher resolutions which are down sampling higher resolutions to 4K. I think that’s where we’re going to be right now and the combination of resolution, high dynamic range, we can’t ignore, that’s essential, and 4K.

Larry Jordan: I was just thinking modularization is the perfect response to mobile devices because they can’t be modularized and so therefore it’s a way of differentiating your project from the cellphone everybody’s got in their pocket. Would you agree?

Ned Soltz: Exactly. I completely would agree because the most you can do with the cellphone that’s in your pocket are mostly add on lenses or other such add on devices. So I think that’s one way of differentiating from the cellphone as the cellphone sensors themselves become higher and higher resolution, more and more image stabilization, exposure options and third party software. There’s a certainly a place for that. However there needs to be the differentiation between the lines and I’ll even go further and say the differentiation between the cellphone, the DSLR camera, a mirrorless camera, and the dedicated video camera. All have their place and all require differentiation.

Larry Jordan: One of the things that I’m reading about is the trend toward more full framed sensors. What’s going on here?

Ned Soltz: I think because it’s there people want it. The full frame sensor has a tremendous advantage when you’re really shooting in a cinematic which means that you’re going to have much more shallow depth of field, much more coverage. The full frame sensor, I don’t think is quite as effective if you’re working in a run and done situation where you need to be able to actually have less depth of field and where your delivery modes don’t necessarily require that. But if you’re shooting cinema, the cinema 4K, or greater, that full frame sensor, just gives you a much stronger or larger image and much more depth of field in that image. So there’s a value there. After all, people shooting with DSLRs all the way back to the original 5D were shooting full frame.

Larry Jordan: What does full frame mean?  Does it mean that it’s the same size as a 35mm piece of film?

Ned Soltz: It’s a larger sensor so that means the image is still. You’re still going to have a 4K or UHD image, but the fact is you’re just going to have a different aspect ratio within that lens and a different field of view. I think that’s about the best way of putting it. Much larger field of view, but which also then accounts for much shallower depth of field.

Larry Jordan: Thinking of things that we debate, the Arri Alexa is generating an ongoing debate about whether cameras need to support 4K video. What’s your take?

Ned Soltz: There are a lot of feature films out there shot on Arri Alexa and they’re not shot on 4K and certainly nobody can question their cinematic quality or the quality of the camera. Every so often producers just learn a phrase and so producers learn the phrase 4K so everything has got to be shot 4K. So that disqualifies Arri Alexas from Netflix or other content providers that require delivery in 4K. And I think that’s wrong. I don’t think it has to be 4K necessarily, but in a way 4K is really become the de facto shooting mode and we’re already now talking about 8K.

Larry Jordan: I can’t even imagine the storage requirements for 8K. My mind boggles. But before we get off on that depressing subject, it would be remiss if we didn’t talk about at least on new camera. Tell us about Sony’s latest news, their mirrorless camera they announced last week.

Ned Soltz: The new A7R III – I was at the launch and had a little bit of hands on time with it. I will be shooting with a pre-production version of it the week after next and can speak about it a little bit more. From the point of view of a still camera, it’s certainly considerably more advanced with that pixel shifting technology that they have which produces a much sharper still image and its focusing capabilities and the like. But to look at the video capabilities of it, it adds Sony’s great eye auto focus feature to video which will much easier in tracking moving subjects. But still, it’s still a 4:2:0 8-bit internal Codec which means that you’re going to have limitations. So you can certainly shoot these in SLog2 or SLog3, but there’s just a limit to how much you’re going to be able to grate 8-bit 4:2:0 before it falls apart. However if you’re going to the web and you’re shooting Rec.709 or Sony’s version of Hybrid Log Gamma, if you have an HDR, or HLG set available, this is a very, very credible camera.

Larry Jordan: For people want to keep track of all of your thinking about cameras, where can they go on the web?

Ned Soltz: They can go to www.creativeplanetnetwork.com. Or they can go to www.redsharknews.com

Larry Jordan: There’s just way too many outlets for all of your creativity! Ned Soltz is a contributing editor for Creative Planet and Red Shark News and Ned, thanks for joining us today.

Ned Soltz: Thank you Larry.

Larry Jordan: Over the past two years, LumeCube has revolutionized the way people capture content with their smart and affordable lighting system. Riley Strickin is the VP of Sales for LumeCube. Hello Riley, welcome.

Riley Stricklin: Thank you Larry.

Larry Jordan: How would you describe LumeCube?

Riley Stricklin: LumeCube, we describe as the world’s most versatile lighting device. So this means that you have the capability to essentially put light where it hadn’t been able to be placed before and this includes underwater, down to 100 feet due to the 100 feet waterproof depth, all the way up into the air, on drones and anywhere in between from photo and video sampling. We come from the pro photo and video world and over the last few years we’ve seen cameras have so many innovations, get so much smaller, to the tune of a 4K device in your pocket. With your mobile device, GoPros are becoming much smaller. But what this has done is led to those cameras including a lot of smaller sensors and lighting from a traditional standpoint has really always been a big paying point – batteries, cables, light stands. Essentially if you are going to go on a trip, I can fit all of my camera and lenses in a small back pack, but if I wanted to bring my lighting equipment, I would have needed an entire pelican case, check another bag and have all of that gear. So what we’ve done is captured that professional quality, light of 1500 lumens at a daylight balance temperature, and put it in a small case that can fit just inside of your pocket, one and a half by one and a half inches. And we’ve also included a few unique features that really no other light has such as being waterproof down to 100 feet, or 30 meters, as well as having a Bluetooth capability which means that not only can you set it directly in your manual perspective, but you can control it simultaneously from behind your lens to make sure that you get the right light whenever you’re taking the shot.

Larry Jordan: Well the problem with making a light smaller is it becomes closer and closer to a point source, which makes our shadows harsher and especially for talent is something that we don’t want. We want big, soft lights. How do we solve the problem with your gear?

Riley Stricklin: We’ve brought a unique solution to that. Of course knowing that recipe, the physics of lighting being smaller is harsher, what we’ve done is custom designed a Fresnel based lens, with 270 refraction points which gives you a 60 degree demangle out of the LumeCube with an extremely smooth fall off, no harsh hot spots and instead of using traditional LEDs, which is a light emitting diode, we’ve used what’s called an LEW, a light emitting wafer, which is a flat LED technology which allows us to produce more light in a smaller space, so not only is the LumeCube in itself internally diffused by giving you a nice, soft light source, but we’ve also just come out with a product called the Lighthouse, which allows you to magnet and stack different diffusers, color gels. It means mini diffusion bulbs which are somewhat like mini soft boxes and all are on a magnetic based design and now we have small lighting kits that you can actually still carry just in your pocket or in your bag, but you can provide some color correction down to 3200 kelvin, you can diffuse it. So we’ve basically brought all of that, the science behind big lighting, and put in a smaller, portable design so that with our light output you can achieve the same result.

Larry Jordan: One of the other new products that you’ve got is lighting for a drone. What have we got and what were the challenges in building that unit?

Riley Stricklin: That was a very unique design that in all honesty was almost a happy mistake. We had some of our normal customers who were using LumeCubes on their cameras, on their smart phones and GoPros, saying, “Hey, how do I attach them to our drones?” And so we had seen people trying to tape them on and of course drones are so sensitive with all of their motors, so we created and worked alongside DJI to create custom drone mounts for the LumeCube.

Larry Jordan: So that you’ve got a drone that’s just lighting, or does the drone hold both the light and a camera?

Riley Stricklin: Both the light and a camera. So we have custom created mounts or the entire line of DJI products as well as the unique drone products for all of their drones, as well as Artel and even the a GoPro Karma.

Larry Jordan: How are these things powered?

Riley Stricklin: Quite uniquely actually. We put a lithium ion battery internal so you never have to worry about buying additional batteries, replacing batteries. It’s an internal battery that is recharged with just a micro USB cable. So on your way to your shoot, or while working, you can recharge the LumeCube just from any small power bank or your computer, anywhere that charges your cellphone essentially. So you always have some powered lighting ready on the go.

Larry Jordan: One last question, how much do these LumeCubes cost?

Riley Stricklin: Individually, they are going for $79.99. So sub $100 which in the lighting business, we’re all used to thousands of dollars. We sell them in single packs, dual packs and four packs and you can get them for 80 bucks a pop. 150 bucks for a two pack and under $299 for the four pack.

Larry Jordan: For people that absolutely, positively have to add these to their kit, where can they go on the web to learn more?

Riley Stricklin: They can go to our website which is www.lumecube.com and we’ve also got great retail partnerships with companies such as B&H and Adorama and just launched nationwide in the US with Best Buy as well.

Larry Jordan: That website is all one word lumecube and Riley Stricklin is the VP of Sales for Lumecube. Riley, thanks for joining us today.

Larry Jordan: Clark Weber is a senior product manager at GoPro having just launched the Hero 6 as its main product lead. He has 20 plus years of Internet and outdoor technology experience having launched consumer products for Garmin, Magellan and GoPro. Hello Clark, welcome.

Clark Weber: Hey there, how’s it going?

Larry Jordan: Well I’m talking to you and I’m about to talk about the GoPro, it’s going great.  Tell us about the new Hero 6, what’s new?

Clark Weber: So we launched the Hero 6 at the end of September and it is our highest performing camera yet. We actually designed a new chip platform that we called the GP1 and that essentially allowed us to control a lot of the aspects of the camera. So we’re getting double the performance that we’ve had from previous cameras like the Hero 5, so we’re getting 4K 60fps, 1080p 240fps which allows super slow-mo. With that control too, we’re getting better image stabilization. So we’re getting three access digital video stabilization across most of our resolutions, the ability to do digital zoom, 12 mega pixel photos, HDR photos and what’s really interesting with GP1 is that we have intelligence in the camera. So we’re actually able to tag moments in real time and identify those key moments whether its audio, things like that that could create a better edit downstream for creating GoPro videos.

Larry Jordan: In other words, you can add markers on the fly?

Clark Weber: Yep.

Larry Jordan: Wow. That’s cool. How do you decide what features to add to the next generation of a camera and more importantly because everybody wants the camera to do everything, how do you prioritize them?

Clark Weber: It’s a good question.  It’s a good mix where our audience builds from the professional, down to the everyday parent, so what’s important for us is that we need to have top end resolutions and frame rates, whether that’s 4K, 60fps, 1080p 240fps, so that needs to be in our camera. But we also have to be cognizant of that. The one of the problems that people have had with GoPros in the past is that you’re shooting all of this footage and you have all of this memory, how do you pick those moments and make a quick edit?  So we have these things that we call ‘Quick Stories,’ which allows you to create this quick, fast edits and so that’s also important to hit downstream with a majority of our customers.

Larry Jordan: Take us behind the scenes, to the extent that you can, because this is probably something you say you can’t talk about. But I’m going to ask you anyway. How much lead time do you need to develop a camera?  I’m sure you’re working on the Hero 7, 8 and 9, but is this something that takes three or four years to develop?  What’s the hardware development process?

Clark Weber: It really depends. When we’re developing our own chipset such as the GP1, that’s years of exploration and development. But once we get into traditional cycles, that can be anywhere from one to two years. It really depends on the complexity of the product.

Larry Jordan: So you’re one of the few people on the planet that knows what the next three Hero cameras are going to be?

Clark Weber: I have an idea!

Larry Jordan:  Something else I’ve heard about, the Hollywood and a back pack option. Tell us about that.

Clark Weber: What’s nice about GoPro and the whole ecosystem that we’ve developed is that essentially there’s a variety of ways that you can use your Hero cameras. So with Hero 6 Black right out of the box, you’re getting Gimbal likes, stabilization from the camera, but we also have our Karma which is our drone and also Gimbal system. So it’s really easy for me to, if I want to take it up a notch, and have better stabilization in those smooth effects, I can insert by Hero 6 into my Karma grip which I can store in my back pack and have tremendous stabilization right there. And if I want to take it a step further, I can also put my Hero 6 Black into the Karma drone and fly that around and have a new perspective and point of view. And all of that can fit into a back pack. In fact, we make several back packs.

Larry Jordan: Before I let you go, I want you also to tell us about the Fusion 360 camera. Tell us what’s news here.

Clark Weber: So we announced the GoPro Fusion back in September. The product is a 360 spherical camera which captures everything around you. What’s interesting is for play back you have two options. One is that it can play back in a VR environment, either through a headset or through 360 playback on YouTube, Facebook etc. The more interesting thing is a feature that we call OverCapture. OverCapture, for the director, or whoever’s shooting, you’re capturing all of the things around you in 360 but later on when you’re editing, you can actually pan through that 360 footage and punch out the interesting scenes that you like and then it is laid out in a more traditional 1080p format.  The capture is at 5.2K, the spherical capture.

Larry Jordan: This is very similar to what we’re doing 4K with now. We shoot 4K so we have the ability in post to go back and cut in and not lose quality.

Clark Weber: Yes.

Larry Jordan: That’s very cool. For people that need more information where can they go on the web?

Clark Weber: Probably the best place to go is www.gopro.com.

Larry Jordan: Clark Weber is a senior product manager at GoPro and Clark, thanks for joining us today.

Larry Jordan: Here’s another website I want to introduce you to. DoddleNEWS.com. DoddleNEWS gives you a portal into the broadcast, video and film industries. It’s a leading online resource, presenting news, reviews and products for the film and video industry. DoddleNEWS also offers a resource guide and crew management platforms specifically designed for production. These digital call sheets along with their app, directory and premium listings, provide in depth organizational tools for busy production professionals.

Larry Jordan: DoddleNEWS is a part of the Thalo Arts Community, a worldwide community of artists, filmmakers and storytellers.  From photography to filmmaking, performing arts to fine arts and everything in between, Thalo is filled with the resources you need to succeed.  Whether you want the latest industry news, need to network with other creative professionals, or require state of the art online tools to manage your next project, there’s only one place to go, DoddleNEWS.com.

Larry Jordan: Philip Hodgetts is a technologist and the CEO of both Intelligent Assistance and Lumberjack System. Even better, he is a regular here on the Buzz and helps explain the future today. Hello Philip, welcome back.

Philip Hodgetts: Hi Larry.

Larry Jordan:  Earlier tonight we were talking with Ned Soltz about trends in camera technology and I want to talk about some other new technology, specifically two ongoing themes that we’re hearing from Adobe and Apple and others are machine learning, also Artificial Intelligence and HDR.  What are your thoughts on machine learning?

Philip Hodgetts: I am both excited and powered by it and terrified by the implication. It’s like every movie rolled into one, truly a blockbuster success. The exciting thing about machine learning is it gives us a way of using computers to understand the world around us, to understand natural speech and interpret it into the ways that we would interpret it, to understand what is in the world around us, in our pictures, in our images, our videos. These are exciting because they will feed into the post production process and speed up the organization and finding of media. On the other end of the spectrum, some of the things that people are experimenting with are quite terrifying because they are things like being able to put words in anyone’s mouth and have the video match, spoken in their voice with their face moving to match the words that you’re putting into their mouth. So we as a society will have to work out how we are going to deal with verifying the voracity of news and all video in fact.

Larry Jordan: I had a conversation with a developer today about exactly this. His initial reaction was to say what you need to do is don’t hold the developers responsible, you just need to go to reputable websites. I think that’s pushing it off in the wrong direction. Developers are responsible for making sure that what we see is actually believable, that it’s the truth as opposed to manipulated.

Philip Hodgetts: We also have to take in account that Frankenbiting has been part of the reality TV world for many years. It’s not necessarily out there in the public’s mind. But people finish sentences in a way that make them sound more natural, kind of almost put words in people’s mouths. Now if we can do that much more seamlessly, I’m a little concerned about the implications of it. At the same time, I think being able to search what you want by image description, to be able to search a bunch of interviews by content, these are exciting tools to add to our tool box.

Larry Jordan: It’s a two edged sword and it’s only going to get worse. Is machine learning going to have a bigger impact on production or post?

Philip Hodgetts: My immediate response is to say post production and I certainly see that’s where it’s going to be a use for organization or understanding tool very quickly. But it tends to be that what affect us in post tends to have knock on affects into production and I think we’ll see a lot more of image manipulation coming into the production and the technology is there to improve motion tracking and old method reality in real time.  I think post production, but you never know.

Larry Jordan: The computing power we’ve got to access today just continues to get more powerful which allows us to do more stuff which gets us to HDR. It’s now a highlight on all three editing systems Avid, Adobe and Apple, what’s your take?

Philip Hodgetts: I have long been one of the proponents of better pixels not more pixels necessarily.   I think even 4K is usually over killing pixel density. But High Dynamic Range, this ability to resolve and show more of the real world dynamic range, so we have blacks that are black but we can still see the details there.  We have highlights that flash in our eyes and flare like they do in the real world.  If you get sun off a windshield, it almost hurts your eyes and if you look at one of these High Dynamic Range images on a High Dynamic Range set, up around the 1000 Nits which is about 10 times brighter than our regular television, then the impact is very dramatic. It’s a very different look to the image. It also brings a whole set of post production, end production challenges along the way, but these advances generally do.

Larry Jordan: It changes the way we think about storage because the bandwidth that we need is so much larger as we move to higher resolutions, which we’re moving to, whether you and I think it’s a good idea or not, but HDR, and I am a fan of it as well, I think it’s going to be huge, but it’s going to change the way we think of storage because now we’re counting our storage in petabytes not in terabytes.

Philip Hodgetts: Fortunately, the storage costs have come down. That’s one of the great joys over the last couple of years that storage costs have indeed come down to a fraction of what they were when you and I were starting out with digital media. I think I paid $9,000 for a 6 gigabyte drive at one point. These things have come down and will continue and as they come down in price, the demand for more of it will take up. Storage is going to about the same portion of your budget regardless.

Larry Jordan: I agree. I paid $20,000 for 20 gigabytes and was bragging about it for weeks! I know what you mean. For people that need more information, where can they go on the web to learn more?

Philip Hodgetts: I sometimes write a philiphodgetts.com – no where near enough. But also at lumberjack system or intelligenceassistance.com.

Larry Jordan: And the voice you’ve been listening to is Philip Hodgetts, a technologist and CEO of both Intelligence Assistance and Lumberjack System. Philip, every time I talk to you I learn something. Thanks for sharing your time with us tonight.

Larry Jordan: Media Asset Management is important in any project but is often misunderstood or not used. Nigel Booth is the executive Vice President of Business Development and Marketing for IPV. IPV makes Curator, an all in one media management system that recently expanded into the Cloud. Hello Nigel, welcome.

Nigel Booth: Hi Larry, how are you today?

Larry Jordan: It’s good to have you back. We were talking just a couple of months ago and I was so impressed I wanted to bring you back because there’s more stuff about Media Asset Management I want to talk about.

Nigel Booth: That’s great. Thanks very much, Larry.

Larry Jordan: In the past, we’ve talked about IPV’s media asset software, but tonight I want to take a step back and look at a bigger picture. Most editors agree that managing assets is essential to getting any project done on time. If that’s the case, why do so many editors not use Media Asset Management software?

Nigel Booth: I think that’s a really good question, Larry. Hopefully I’ll be able to maybe give you some insights there. I think it’s the fear of the unknown. I think the tools that they’ve seen historically are very, very clunky and not intuitive and a lot of the historic Media Asset Management solutions kind of rely on you having an understanding of where the data or the files are actually found, but what we found is embracing intuitive UIs that users every day use, such that searching for something on Amazon, the search and find content, they’re more than happy to do that. So we’ve kind of taken inspiration from those tools and allowed the searching and finding of content extremely easy and it needs to be an experience that a user can come into the system and find assets very quickly. I think the previous were barriers were the previous search experiences that people were giving.

Larry Jordan: At least in my perception in that in order for us to be able to find something we’ve got to label it in the first place and labelling, putting in all the metadata for all the clips just seems like this Sisyphean task of rolling a giant rock uphill. It’s just more effort than we want to spend. Wouldn’t it just be easier to ignore that?

Nigel Booth: That is a good question. When you think about video, video is quite opaque actually, so you want to find video content that lives within a file. In the traditional terms, you’re searching for metadata that describes an asset in its entirety and that’s absolutely valid, but you often want to find metadata that relates to a sub clip within an asset as well. You have to make that metadata and that tagging of content simple and easy to do. So you can do one of two things. You can make it intuitive or force a user to do it. And what we try and steer people towards is using things like a common vocabulary so the vocabulary is already described for them, so they can very easily go in and tag content. I think what you find is that there may well be an initial reluctance but in 10 months when they want to find that piece of content that they used in a previous project, then they can do it instantly, or instantly search for content that other editors have used in their project and find it, then they absolutely do see the value of that. I think the trick is to keep those search tools within the editing interface, as I mentioned earlier. They don’t want to go off and look in another UI to achieve that.

Larry Jordan: One of things that you guys have done recently is move your Media Asset Management system to the Cloud. Tell me what that’s about.

Nigel Booth: I’d just like to point out actually that we don’t solely operate in the Cloud. 70 percent of all our recent installations have some element of the Cloud to it and it may well be that just the proxies live in the Cloud but the high res remains local. So it’s really a company’s decision in terms of how they want to move towards the Cloud. Ultimately this is a train that’s coming and clients need to get on the train. So what we see typically today is a hybrid approach, where you’ve got high res assets, as I say, on premise and proxies are being stored and searched. I think importantly, a modern supply chain has to remove the need for you to be close to your content and the Cloud does enable that. You can search for content, find content, pre-prep it, edit it when the high res is in a completely different location to you. And the Cloud kind of enables that collaborative work flow and you now no longer have to be loser to your high resolution content.

Larry Jordan: The problem that many of us have with the Cloud is that it’s a very attractive collaborative environment, but it’s also very insecure. We’re reading daily about millions of people’s data being hacked on the Cloud. Do we really have to make a trade off between the convenience the Cloud provides and security?

Nigel Booth: If you look at Amazon and you look at Microsoft and even Oracle as well, there is a lot of security that’s sort of build around their tool. And yes you are seeing these daily hacks, but often some of those daily hacks are coming into on premise solutions via some VPN, or Virtual Private Network, with people burrowing into it. So the Cloud is intrinsically fairly secure if you manage it correctly. An example of that is that even some of the government clouds, the private government clouds, are hosted by some of these large players as well today. So security absolutely is a concern. However, there are a number of things that you can do to maintain security as well.

Larry Jordan: When should we decide to move assets, even proxies, to the Cloud? When does the Cloud make sense versus our local server?

Nigel Booth: A lot of this tends to come from the commercial drivers and it’s absolutely true to say that most people are looking at migrating on premise hardware to software only solutions as well. So it makes sense to look at the Cloud. I mean you have to look at things like what is your local connectivity, do you have internal IT resources to manage on premise solutions, or are you looking to migrate to a hosted type solution with potentially the manufacturer offering the software as a service. And of course when you’re designing something for an on premise solution, you have to design to the worst case. At this moment in time I’m going to get 100 assets, then I have to design for worst case. Whereas some of the beauty of the Cloud and the elastic services mean that you can spin up other services automatically to deal with peaks and loads and then in that instance you’re only paying for those peak loads at that time. You’re not designing a solution for those worst case scenarios every time.

Larry Jordan: So where does IPV fit into this?

Nigel Booth: We offer our software as an on premise solution. We offer it as a Cloud based solution with these services that can elastically spin up based on peaks and demands. We also  offer the solution as a sort of a hybrid approach really so we have the best of both worlds. I think commercially we absolutely embrace subscription and software as service models and we’re seeing more and more people move to the sort of OpEx as opposed to CapEx spending these days as well and we’re able to accommodate all of those commercial scenarios.

Larry Jordan: Tell me a little bit about Curator. How would you describe the product?

Nigel Booth: Curator is a Media Asset Management solution that’s focused in and around the creative services, reality tv and broadcast. It provides a way of being able to search and find content, but importantly, it’s more than just a User Interface across a database. Really what Curator does is facilitate you to do something with that content. It has behind it a sophisticated workflow engine that allows you to, based on your actions, do something either in a manual way or in an automated way with that content. So, for instance, let’s push it to an automated QC tour, let’s push it to somebody to review on approval. Let’s bring in that content into an editing interface, along with all the annotations that have been made either manually or through some cognitive services, and add value to the content and do something and drive a workflow and that workflow might be to remotely conform that material and produce a new piece of content directly. So it is more than just being able to search and find your content. And we do provide some intuitive UIs to help you through that process as well.

Larry Jordan: For people that want to get started with Curator, how much are they investing?

Nigel Booth: It’s a good question. I think it’s one you’ve asked me before actually, Larry. It depends on what they want to do and it also depends on what devices we’re connected to and we’re leveraging. And if we define a small user group as something like 5 to 10 users, we would start at around the $2,000 per month. Of course as you add more users, add more functionality, that includes connection to other broadcast devices, then that can scale up significantly.

Larry Jordan: We’re looking at $24,000 a year from Media Asset Management. Why is it so expensive?

Nigel Booth: That’s a great question, Larry. It kind of really depends on what these users are trying to do. I mean if we’re going to use this as a solution where we’re editing and creating original content, it doesn’t sound like a great deal. Just in terms of the old perpetual model, we start at the $50,000 mark, and run right the way up to a million. I’m thinking for an owned perpetual license model. In terms of where we sit in that Media Asset Management space generally, we would start somewhere like a CatDV finished. Media Asset Management to us is more than just being able to find the content, that’s very important. However just finding the content isn’t the be all and end all. You need to do something with it. Where we really come into it is we provide the users the ability to do something with that content. So move it from an archive, move it from this location to this location, move it into an edit suite, with all the annotations that have been logged separately. So we do add huge value to that side of it.

Larry Jordan: And for people that want more information, where can they go on the web?

Nigel Booth: They can go to www.ipv.com

Larry Jordan: Nigel Booth, the Executive Vice President for Business Development and Marketing for IPV, Nigel thanks for joining us today.

Larry Jordan: I was just thinking, I had an interesting conversation with a software developer earlier today. We got to talking about new technology which can invisibly make elements in video, such as edits, objects in the frame, even audio stutters disappear as if they did not exist in the original. As I mentioned during our discussion, I’m increasingly uncomfortable with this type of technology because it directly enables sites that specialize in fake news to create videos which look real but aren’t. They responded that the answer is for consumers of content to be aware of the credibility of the sites they visit and only believe videos from reputable sites. While this is always good advice, it isn’t always practical. Given the ubiquity of links we don’t often know what site we’re vising, even reputable sites linked to less than reputable sponsors. It seems to me that developers are refusing to acknowledge the responsibility that they have for the proliferation of fake news, fake news which is driving most of us nuts. Developers also have a responsibility for the rest of us to be able to quickly tell if a video has been altered. This information is currently buried deep in the XML data of a movie file that needs to be much more accessible.

Larry Jordan: Yes, Hollywood needs to create seemingly real special effects, but for those of us who get our news from the web, which means all of us, we need to know, not just guess, but know, whether a video is displayed as shot, or whether it’s been photoshopped. Technology is only going to make image manipulation easier and more invisible. If we don’t start having these conversations now about what is real and what is fake, and how to tell the difference, we will quickly move into a future where we have to assume that everything we see is fake and that will be a sad day indeed.  Just something I’m thinking about and as always, let me know your thoughts.

Larry Jordan: I want to thank my guests this week, Ned Soltz from Red Shark News, Riley Stricklin from LumeCube, Clark Weber from GoPro, Philip Hodgetts of Lumberjack System, Nigel Booth of IPV and James DeRuvo of DoddleNEWS. There’s a lot of history in our industry and it’s all posted to our website at digitalproductionbuzz.com.  Here you’ll find thousands of interviews all online and all available to you today, and remember to sign up for our free weekly show newsletter that comes out every Saturday.

Larry Jordan: Talk with us on Twitter @DPBuZZ and Facebook at digitalproductionbuzz.com.  Our theme music is composed by Nathan Dugi-Turner, with additional music provided by smartsound.com.  Text transcripts are provided by Take1 Transcription; visit take1.tv, to learn how they can help you.  Our Producer is Debbie Price, our assistant producer is Tori Hoefke.  My name is Larry Jordan and thanks for listening to The Digital Production Buzz.

Larry Jordan: The Digital Production Buzz is copyright 2017 by Thalo LLC.