Michael recently sat down with Aaron Edell, President and CEO of GrayMeta, to help us make sense of all the new AI / ML technology entering our industry. They discuss the evolution of AI in the workplace, the limitations of this technology, and how you can use it to make your life easier.

Michael: Michael Kammes with Shift Media here at NAB 2023, and today we’re joined by Aaron Edell from GrayMeta. I’ve been looking forward to this interview, this entire NAB, because everyone’s been asking about AI and machine learning, and when I have questions about AI and machine learning, this is who I go to. So, Aaron, thanks for being here today. Let’s start out very simply. Tell me just what the heck GrayMeta is. 

Aaron: Wow. That is actually a loaded question. So, when I started in tech in 2008, my first job was at a company called SAMMA Systems, a little startup based out of New York. It made a robot that moved videotapes into VTS, and we digitized it. So, okay, set that aside. Keep that in your memory. Years later, we founded GrayMeta, based on the idea that we wanted to extract metadata from files and just make them available separately from the files. Now that I’m back at GrayMeta, we have three core products. We have the SAMMA system back, and it’s so much better than it used to be. We used to have eight massive servers and all this equipment. Now it’s, you know, one server, a little bit of equipment, and we can plow through hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of video cassette tapes on customers’ facilities. 

And we work with partners. If they wanna do it with OPEX, they can buy the equipment from us. And it’s an Emmy award-winning technology. So there are a lot of really, really wonderful proprietary things that archivists love about migrating. So you’re not just digitizing. GrayMeta also has, I think, the world’s most accurate reference player in QC product software tool that runs both in the cloud and on-prem, which is pretty cool. The cloud thing is magic, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know how you play back MFX-wrapped, LP1, or, you know, encrypted DCP files off the cloud. Somehow we figured it out. And then we have Curio, which is our metadata, sort of creation data platform that uses machine learning to, as I kind of explained in their original vision was to take all these files and just create more metadata. So we really are across the media supply chain. And if you were to diagram it out, you would find GrayMeta’s products at different points. 

Michael: That’s gotta mean that you have a bunch of announcements along the entire supply chain for NAB. So let’s hear about those.

Aaron: Yes. Well, I think the most exciting is that when I first came back to GrayMeta, which was really not long ago, one of the things I really pushed hard for was a new product or a repositioning of our product. So we were happy to actually be able to announce it at NAB and not just announce the product, but that we signed a deal with the Public Media Group of Southern California to buy it. So we’re announcing Curio Anywhere, our metadata machine learning management data platform, which is now available on-prem and can run on an appliance or a local cluster as well as in the cloud. So there are hybrid applications, there are on-prem applications, but I think the most important thing is that all the machine learning now can just run locally to where you’re processing the metadata, and that saves a lot of money, a lot of time. 

You know, our product, and we’re gonna be kind of expanding on this in the future, allow you to train these models further. We kind of use the word tune the models further to be more accurate with your content, using your own content as training data. So we’re really excited to announce that at NAB. We’ve got a whole lot of other features that we’ve added to Iris as well. We can support down to the line. You can get some QC data, used to be the whole frame, but now we can actually look at individual lines in a video. Curio now also supports sidecar audio files. It’s frame-accurate timecode, which was really important, obviously, for a lot of customers. So you can export a shot list or an EDL right out of Curio of, you know, a shot with all of, let’s say, the gun violence locations on a timecode-accurate place, or all of the places where a certain celebrity or known face appears in the time code, accurate timeline, which you can just then pull into your nonlinear editor.

Michael: We’ll talk about this more later, but I want anyone watching right now to understand just how important the ability to localize machine learning and AI is. That keeps your content secure. You don’t have to pay the tax of using a cloud provider to do their cognitive services. So we’ll talk about more of that later, but you need to understand just how important that is. So the, the main product agreement is offering that. Can you explain some of the features that Curio has in terms of AI and ML? 

Aaron: Yes. So the way I like to describe it is you tell Curio where your storage locations are, and it walks through these storage locations. And for every file, really, I mean, it doesn’t just have to be video file, but video is kind of the most obvious one. It will apply all of these different machine-learning models to that video file. So face recognition, logo detection, speech-to-text, OCR, natural language processing, you know, there are other models like tech cues, simple things like that. You know, tech cues is a really interesting one because detecting color bars, right? Color bars come in all shapes and sizes, ironically, which it shouldn’t cause its color bars.

Michael: Well, NTSC, no, never the same color. 

Aaron: Exactly. Yes. But the kind of general concept of color bars is something that, for machine learning, it’s so easy for that to detect. But I think what’s really my favorite aspect is what we’re doing with faces right now. And this is, again, going to expand. Let’s say you process a million hours of content, like you’re a public television station in Los Angeles, and there are scientists and artists who you’ve interviewed in the past, maybe not part of a global celebrity recognition database that you get from the big cloud vendors or other vendors, but they’re important. And you want to be able to search by them. So Curio will process all of that content, and it’ll say, I found all these faces. Who is this? Right? You just type in the name, and it immediately trains the model. 

So you don’t have to reprocess all 1 million hours of content. It will just update right there on the spot instantly. So that’s really powerful, I think, because a lot of folks are concerned that they need to, that the machine learning model needs to tell you who it is. But it doesn’t. It just needs to tell a person that you need to tag this. It’s about helping people do their jobs better. So we also have a lot of customers who have some great use cases. I think reality television is one of the big ones.

Michael: Absolutely. 

Aaron: They have 24 cameras running 24 hours a day, every day for a week. And that’s thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of content. One use case I heard recently was we have a reality show where people try not to laugh, right? I guess things that are funny happen, and they’re not supposed to laugh. And so when they were trying to put together a trailer, they wanted to find all the moments that people were laughing amongst hundreds of thousands of hours of content. So we could solve that immediately. That’s very easy. Just here are all the points where people were smiling. So I’m really excited about some of the simpler things, some of the simpler use cases, which involve not just tagging everything perfectly a hundred percent the first time but helping people do their jobs better and saving them so much time. 

Because imagine you’re an editor, and you’re trying to find that moment where Brad Pitt is holding a gun or something like that amongst your entire archive, or really just any moment of an interview. Let’s say you’re a news organization; You’ve interviewed folks in the past, and maybe somebody passed away, and you need to pull together the footage you have quickly. Machine learning can help you find those moments. So customers use Curio, and they just search for a person. It pulls it up wherever it is, right? It could be stored anywhere in any place, as long as Curio has had a pass at it. It pulls those moments up. Here’s the bit in that moment, in that file, you can watch it and make sure it’s what you want, and then pull it down. It’s a simple use case, but it’s really powerful. 

Michael: Some of the other use cases I’ve talked at length about are things like Frankenbiting. Being able to take something that takes 30 seconds to say, getting it down to 10 seconds by using different words that that person has spoken through different places. That used to be a tedious procedure where you’d have to go back through transcripts, which you had to pay someone to do. Now you can type in those words into something like Curio, find those timestamps in a video, localize that section of video, and string together a Frankenbite without having to spend hours trying to find those words. 

Aaron: Yes. There’s a term for not doing that, which is called Watchdown. I just learned this recently. It’s where you as an editor, and I hope this is the right term, but I read about it in an article from Netflix editors, but they’re trying to put together trailers. They just have to watch every hour of everything they own for the moments that they want. And, yeah, nobody should have to do that. You don’t need to do that.

Michael: There’s that great line. It’s kind of cliche at this point, but when an editor’s putting something together, and the producer or director isn’t thrilled with the shot, and they say, “Didn’t we do a better take of that?” or “Didn’t we have a take of someone saying that,” and like, no, because you’ve sorted everything, and here is everything that was absolutely done despite your memory. So there are a lot of misconceptions, right? AI has been really hyped right now. I almost wish we had used the word AI five or six years ago because it was cognitive services. Which is not really a sexy term, but there are a lot of misconceptions about AI and what AI and ML are. Can you maybe shed some light on what those misconceptions are and the truth, obviously? 

Aaron: Yeah, absolutely. So, first of all, the word artificial intelligence is quite old and can literally apply to anything. Your kids are artificially intelligent. Think about that. You’ve created your children, and they are intelligent, right? So it’s, I mean, just like any buzzword that gets thrown around a lot. There are a lot of different meanings. The one misconception that is my favorite is that AI is going to take over the world, or general artificial intelligence is, you know, ten years away, five years away, and they’re gonna kill us all, and that’s it—end of humans. I cannot tell you how far away we are from that. Think about how hard it is to, like, find an email sometimes, right? I mean, computers, you have to tell them what to do. 

There’s no connection between the complexity of a computer and the complexity of a human brain, right? There just isn’t. One of my favorite examples is the course I took that ended up being very important to my career, but I had no idea at the time, back in college a million years ago, which was called, ironically, What Computers Can’t Do. And my favorite example was, imagine you’ve trained a robot with all the knowledge in the world. You then tell the robot to go make coffee. It will never be able to do that because it doesn’t know how to ignore all the knowledge in the world. It’s at the same time thinking, oh, that pen over there is blue, and you know, the date that America was founded, and, um, all of these facts and just information that it has built into it. It doesn’t know how to just make coffee. It doesn’t know how to filter all that stuff out. 

Michael: No pun intended. 

Aaron: No pun intended. Yes. I think that’s something that’s unique to humans: our ability to actually ignore and to just say, yeah, I’m just gonna make coffee. And you barely even think about it, right? 

I think even the most advanced artificial network supercomputers are probably the equivalent of maybe 1% of a crow’s brain, right? So in terms of complexity, again, we’re not talking about the contextual things that humans learn. So that’s my favorite misconception – that artificial intelligence is going to destroy us all and be as smart or smarter than us. 

Now, the difference is machine learning. So the term machine learning, it’s a subset of artificial intelligence. It’s usually solved by using neural networks. These are all different things, right? So we’re drilling down now. Now, a neural network is specifically designed to mimic how a human thinks and how a brain works. And it is a bit mysterious. We had a machine learning model in the past where it would learn what you liked and it was based on what things you clicked on a website or something like that. 

It would surface more things, and we built this very clever UI that would show it learning as it went along. So let’s say you have millions of people on your website, and they’re clicking things. We have no idea how it’s working. We don’t know. The neural network is drawing connections between nodes and just trying to get from when input is x, I want the output to be y. And you’re just saying, figure out how to do that in the fastest, most efficient way in between. And that’s what humans do. When we learn new words as babies, the first thing we do is make a sound. And then we get feedback from people, “Nope, that’s not bath, that’s ball.” And your brain goes, okay, and tries again, and it’s a little bit better. It tries again. And that’s our neural network building. So in that sense, machine learning models can operate similarly, but they’re so much less complex. The most complex thing in the universe is the human brain. There’s just nothing like it. And I don’t think we’re anywhere close to that. So I don’t think anybody needs to worry about artificial general intelligence taking over, Skynet, taking over and launching nuclear missiles and killing us all in spite of it making for good movies. 

Michael: I think you put a lot of people’s minds at ease, but there are a lot of creatives in our industry who are seeing things like stable diffusion. And reporters are seeing something like ChatGPT being a front end to create factual articles. Folks are worried about their jobs being eliminated. And I think one point to remember is that everyone’s job is constantly evolving, right? It, there’s always been change. But what would you say to the creatives in our industry who are concerned about AI taking their jobs? 

Aaron: Your concerns are valid in the sense that, you know, I would never presume to go and tell somebody you should not be worried about anything. It’ll be fine. I don’t know. But throughout my whole career in AI, it’s been true that it should make your job easier. I mean, it’s supposed to be used to make your life easier. So I’ll give you some examples. When I took over as CEO of GrayMeta, one of the things I wanted to do was some marketing, right? And I didn’t have a whole lot of time, and I wanted to get some catchphrases for the website or write things in a succinct way. So I used ChatGPT, and I said, Hey, here’s all the things our products do. These are all the things I wanna talk about. Help me summarize it. Give me ten sentences, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. They were great. 

Now, that could have been somebody’s job, I suppose, but that was also my job. So I could have sat there all day and tried to come up with that myself, but I didn’t have time. So it made my job a lot easier as a marketing person. I used Midjourney to create interesting images to post on LinkedIn and those sorts of things. But there is no person at my company whose job it was to create interesting images. Our only alternative was to go and find some license-free images that you can find on the website and post them. 

So there were no jobs being lost for us. It only made us, as a small company, more productive. Now, I think that the other part of what we’ve always talked about with machine learning is scale. And, you know, even Midjourney, Midjourney’s very cool. But if you look, if you zoom in a little bit, eyeballs are [off center], fingers are weird. And I’m sure that will improve over time. And we all need to be very careful about understanding what we see on the internet, when we see images that are fake, when there’s music that’s fake, and when there is artificially created or content that’s written by artificial intelligence. But I still think that humans are needed because I don’t think we’re ever going to get the creativity that humans have. It’s the same kind of example I was talking about earlier. 

You can’t train a robot to make coffee if you give it all the knowledge in the world. I don’t think you can train an AI to be an artist in the same way that humans can. There’s just something about the human experience and the way that we process information that just can’t be replicated. But it can make an artist’s job easier, you know? So, you know, add some snow or change the color of this image. Or, as somebody who needs to acquire art or creative images, it helps me to at least give a creative person some examples. Like, can I have an image that sort of looks like these things? As a prompt. 

I do think there’s evolution in the jobs. I think that if we all try to think about it as a way that makes our jobs more efficient, saving us time, and maybe I like to think of it as just taking over the laborious parts of our job. I mean, think about logging. Editors logging, that was my first job as an intern at KGO Television, watching tapes and logging every second, right?

Michael: And to some extent, that’s still done. Unscripted still does that. 

Aaron: Yes. Yes, and they shouldn’t. I don’t think they have to. I think any logger would, aside from like an internship, would appreciate editing a log that’s been created by AI instead of actually creating it. So imagine you have your log, and all your job is to do, is to make sure it’s right. That’s such a better use of human brains. We’re so good at seeing something and then saying, yes, that’s correct, or that’s not correct. Or that’s a, or that’s b, instead of having to come up with the information ourselves from scratch. It just takes so much more time and is so much more annoying, laborious aspects of our brain that could just be put to better use. So that’s how I see it. I’m sure there are examples of people losing their job because the team just wants to use Midjourney or something like that. And, yeah, I mean, that sucks. Nobody should have to lose their job over that. But I think that’s the same thing, like we no longer use horses, right? We started having cars, like, you don’t need horses or people to take care of your horses anymore.

Michael: Right. But 90 mechanics. 

Aaron: 90 mechanics. Exactly. So now we need people who can make good use of these machine learning models, and now we need people who know how to train them and understand them. And it should all kind of float around and work out towards a future where our jobs are different. 

Michael: You used the term laborious, and I think that’s what most people need to realize is that the AI, the tasks that AI are going to do are the things that we don’t really want to do, right? At HPA, we saw that Avatar: The Way of Water had something like a thousand different deliverable packages, which each had its own deliverables inside of that. And that’s tens of thousands of hours of work that, at some point, we can automate. So we don’t need to do that. So you can move on and make another film. So if there were jobs, let’s say for the next 12 months, because the AI landscape is changing so quickly until NAB 2024, what tasks would you say, AI do this, humans do this? 

Aaron: Let’s take content moderation, for example. So you’re distributing your titles to a location where there can’t be nudity, or there can’t be gun violence, or there can’t be something, or even certain words can’t be spoken. I would tell AI to go and process all that with content moderation that is trained to detect those things. But I wouldn’t just trust it. I would tell the human to review it. So now your job, instead of going through every single hour of every single file that you’re sending over there and checking, is to just review and check for false positives or false negatives should save you 80% of your time, assuming that the models are 80% accurate. Right? So that’s an example of something that I would say – humans review, machines go and process. That’s simple. I would say that’s the best human-in-the-loop aspect of any kind of machine-learning pipeline or ecosystem. 

Michael: I am immensely grateful that you’ve come here today. I wanna do another webinar, another video with you. We’ll find a way to make that happen. If you’re interested in AI and ML as it pertains to our industry – M&E, check out GrayMeta. He’s Aaron. I’m Michael Kammes with Shift Media here at NAB 2023. And thanks for watching.

Miss our interview with Mark Turner, Project Director of Production Technology at MovieLabs? Watch it now to learn more about their 2023 Vision.

For tips on post-production, check out MediaSilo’s guide to Post Production Workflows.

MediaSilo allows for easy management of your media files, seamless collaboration for critical feedback and out of the box synchronization with your timeline for efficient changes. See how MediaSilo is powering modern post production workflows with a 14-day free trial.

Michael sat down with Shailendra Mathur, VP of Technology and Architecture at Avid, to discuss how they study and implement new opportunities AI brings to the industry. From integrations in Azure analytics to the RAD Lab, Shailendra explains how Avid investigates and decides when and how to utilize the latest technologies.

Michael: Hi, Michael Kammes here from Shift Media, and today we’re sitting down with Shailendra Mathur, VP of Technology and Architecture at Avid. Thank you so much for being here today.

Shailendra: Thanks for having me, Michael.

Michael: I am thrilled. We talked to a lot of people this week about technology, and a lot of it’s about what the announcements are. And there’s a lot of press on Avid’s announcements, but we’re gonna talk about AI cause, obviously, that’s the hot thing right now, and we’re really excited to see what Avid is doing with AI. So let’s start, kinda at the top level. Avid’s done a lot of research into AI. There’s been a lot of transparency and publishing of papers. Can you kind of go over how AI is handled internally, the lab that Avid has, and how that documentation is getting out to the world?

Shailendra: Yeah, absolutely. So, Avid has had AI integrations, for example, with our media asset management system. We have integrations with the Azure analytics service. So that’s how we enrich metadata, and we can search using expression analysis and other facets. So we’ve been kind of utilizing some of the AI functionality on that side, but we also started something called the RAD Lab, which is the research and advanced development. It’s RAD!

Michael: I like that.

Shailendra: And, frankly, it was also a way of bringing in researchers, the young folks, the who are out there right now. And so some of these are internship programs, but these are fail-fast, succeed-fast, investigate and figure out what we want to do with some of the technologies because there are so many ideas of how we should be doing AI for editorial, for asset management. There are so many. Which ones do we pick first? So this, using the RAD Lab, we did quite a bit of research, and part of the mission that we had was not just to keep it private to ourselves, but as you said, we’ve been publishing, but it’s also because of the collaborations, right? We are publishing. So we are published at the SMPTE conference. We actually had HPA presentations last year and this year.

So those have also just brought out other collaborators on that. And you know, when we are picking some technologies to investigate, other people have been contributing and say, “Hey, did you think of this?” So that’s been sort of our mission. So in terms of what we have done so far in that research, there are things like AI-based codecs. That’s something that we started looking at, especially when we looked at storage efficiency. You know, HEVC, AV1, these are all proceeding anyway, but AI adds another aspect to the codecs, so we started investigating that. That’s part of what’s published in the SMPTE journal as well. Some of the results we brought out are looking at things like semantic search technologies. Of course, ChatGPT is everywhere.

But it’s more the open AI models that actually help semantic indexing and semantic search. So that’s been another one. Related to that have been things like saliency maps and figuring out contextual information from images that can be actually used for different purposes. So that’s another paper that we published, which basically allows for better compression and color correction, extracting regions of interest. This is some of the work that we are doing and publishing, and you’ll probably see more coming out as a result of this work. So this is just research, but yes, there will be productization as well.

Michael: What would you say the ethos is for Avid in terms of how they view AI and AI’s role?

Shailendra: The ethos is that it’s all to help the creatives. Creatives are the life and blood of this industry. Whatever we do, we want to make sure that it’s an assistive technology versus something that’s replacing anybody. This is not about replacing. It’s all about assisting. It’s about recommending, right? Even when you look at ChatGPT, we think of these as recommendation engines, right? It’s recommending how to do things better, right? That’s really the ethos that we are following.

Michael: To get a little bit more specific on where AI fits. Now, I’m sure by NAB 2024, we’ll be sitting down, and the conversation will be skewed a little bit. But what tasks for creatives today would you say this is AI, and what tasks would still be in the creative realm?

Shailendra: Like I said, it’s a lot to do with recommendations, right? So just think of what we do with search today. Today a lot of folks have to log metadata, right? Right up front. If you don’t have the metadata, you can’t search for content appropriately. So it’s a pretty established field that you can use ML-based models for metadata augmentation, right? So that’s well understood. But then also, as a creative, you may be missing other related content. If so, then that’s where contextual search comes in, or semantic search comes in. Where it may not be exactly the person’s name, it could be another language. It could be some other information, or the person changed names. So that semantic information now is giving you a richer set of information back to work with as I created.

Shailendra: And the same thing with a journalist. You might be writing a story, right? You’re writing a story, but something else is happening, and you want to make sure that you can capture what’s happening out there. Or you could have some content for it to be used as B-roll, or it could be content in your archive that you weren’t even aware of. But as you’re writing, this is all assisting you in writing the news story. But it could also be scriptwriting. And in fact, it’s interesting that the HPA this year, Rob Gonsalves, was part of our team. He actually gave a presentation where he literally started showing how you could actually generate some script, start putting some animatics together, all using this technology. This is not replacing the creative, he was acting as a creative, and this was just speeding up their work. Right? So I think that that’s the way this is going to proceed.

Michael: That brings me to my next question because everyone in the industry is concerned about this – “What’s my future as a creative, as an editor, as somebody who does VFX or motion graphics? Do I have to worry about machine learning and AI taking my job?” And what would be your response to that?

Shailendra: No, I think this is one of the fears that everybody has. The way I think about this is that it’s AI, you know. You can say it’s taking over the world, but no. I mean, even our brains, we ourselves, I mean, I come from a research background in computer vision, and we’ve studied neurology. And as part of what we learned, we’ve barely mapped out 10% of our brain. How can we say that AI will replace our brains when we don’t ourselves know how our brains work? What it is doing is a lot of mimicking and basically has a lot of horsepower to do things. So will it get there? Maybe? I don’t know. But at this point, I’m a glass-half-full guy, you know. I’d rather focus on the positives of where it can assist us and where it can help us. I don’t think it’ll take over the jobs. It is going to be about assisting. There will be job changes. Sure. But those job changes will be very positive in my mind.

Michael: And well, that’s also been the job of a creative since the beginning of motion pictures, right? Your job has always evolved, whether it’s cutting celluloid or cutting video, or, you know, not using a bin button but instead logging stuff into a computer. It all has constantly evolved.

Shailendra: You’re just doing it faster now. Somebody still has the job of curating content. But now you’re being assisted in that. I don’t think it’s gonna take over a job. It will change them for sure.

Michael: We sat down with Mark Turner from MovieLabs, who obviously has, as you probably know, put out the 2030 Vision paper. And there are ten principles outlined in that. Yeah. I’m curious, has there been any work in RAD regarding AI and how it plays into MovieLab’s 2030 Vision?

Shailendra: So, what’s very interesting is MovieLabs, EBU and SMPTE actually just published the ontology primer, which we really believe in because we actually believe that asset management, as it stands right now, will move to much more of knowledge management, as you go forward. And that primary literally lays this principle out as well. And it’s one of the core principles moving forward. So we are very, very much aligned with that. And yes, that is going to be one of the areas that we are very interested in, and we’re working together with MovieLabs and others to bring that out. What does that look like? This is all part of the RAD Lab projects too. There are graph databases there that are coming up and implementations around that. So these are all going to be areas that we continue focusing on together with the MovieLabs site, the rest of the MovieLabs 2030 Vision. Well, we’re already showcasing products that are actually starting to show the way forward. Things like bringing the application to the media asset

Michael: Yeah. That media is sitting in cloud.

Shailendra: Exactly. So there are three ways we are doing that. Literally, virtualized editing that’s actually happening. Our customers are leveraging that today., in the cloud, public cloud storage and working directly on that. We have a web browser view that allows you to edit and asset manage. So again, even though the web browser view is remote, you might be sitting remotely, but it is close to the media because you’re not moving the whole content over. So that’s another way of thinking of it. And we just introduced NEXIS | EDGE. NEXIS | EDGE as a product is the same thing, but in that case, it’s not a browser view. It’s a much richer editorial environment, like the full editing system where you’re just accessing the media remotely in the swimming mode. So these are all aligned with MovieLabs, principles, the cloud principles. So [we] completely believe in where they’re going and will be right along for the journey.

Michael: Excellent. Shailendra, thank you so much for your time. You’re welcome. I’m Michael Kammes with Shift Media here at NAB 2023. And thanks for watching.

Shailendra: Thank you.

Miss our interview with Mark Turner, Project Director of Production Technology at MovieLabs? Watch it now to learn more about their 2023 Vision.

For tips on post-production, check out MediaSilo’s guide to Post Production Workflows.

MediaSilo allows for easy management of your media files, seamless collaboration for critical feedback and out of the box synchronization with your timeline for efficient changes. See how MediaSilo is powering modern post production workflows with a 14-day free trial.

Mark Turner, Project Director of Production Technology at MovieLabs, chats with Michael at NAB about the 2023 Vision and their goal of bringing a more efficient workflow process to the entire industry.

Michael: Hi, Michael Kammes here from Shift Media, booth N1875, and on the show floor today, we’re talking to folks who make a difference in our industry.  And today, we’re talking with Mark Turner of MovieLabs. Mark, thanks for joining us today.

Mark: Thank you. I’m busy with making a difference. It’s good.

Michael: Excellent. So MovieLabs. There has been a lot of buzz about it. I’d like for folks, the uninitiated folks, to kind of understand what MovieLabs is. Can you explain to our folks out there what MovieLabs is?

Mark: Sure. MovieLabs is a joint venture, technology joint venture, of the major Hollywood Motion Picture Studios. And we’ve actually been around for 15 years now. Started out in distribution technology. We’ve been moving up the stack and now are doing a lot of work in production. That’s where people are hearing about it now, the 2030 Vision. There’s a MovieLabs paper that came out in 2019, which is very focused on where do we need to get to to make a more efficient workflow process. Because let’s face it, our industry is not scaling well, and we are gonna be asked to do more and more scaling, and our old a hundred-year-old workflows are gonna fall apart. So we need to find a better way of doing stuff. So the studios, through MovieLabs, have put out their paper. It is the common studio viewpoint.

Michael: They got a whiteboard and said, this is where the industry is going. This is where we need to go.

Mark: This is where we should all get to, not just for the studio’s benefit, but for everyone. All boats will rise, right? We will not be able to scale this industry if we don’t sort of get to this place. And it’s very cloud-based focused. But there’s a lot of work to be done, which is why we blew it out ten years. There’s workflow implications. It’s training implications. Like, this is a big change, and it’s the change we never really did when we went from analog to digital. I mean, we went from analog to digital, we changed the cameras, changed from moving things in film cans to hard drives, but the workflows really didn’t change. And we’re doing a pivot into the cloud. That opens up a whole bunch of new technologies. Like, this is our chance now to change the workflows and really get a more modern media workflow system running. And if we don’t do it now, we’re gonna miss the boat.

Michael: I love the organization of the paper because it was actually broken out into many principles, ten different principles. And we’d be here all day if we talked about all the nuances of the ten principles, so maybe you can make that a little bit more digestible.

Mark: Yeah. So the ten principles, they break down into three areas. That’s an easy thing, right? The first five are all about cloud foundations. So the first couple really talk about the idea that all the media created coming outta the cameras should go straight to the cloud and then stay there, which is critical, right? Because what we do now is we create media, and then we send it to someone, and they do some work, and then they send it to someone else, and they do some work. They send it, send it, send it, and they duplicate it and copy it. And we ended up with this proliferation of content, and we need to stop that. So the idea is we put everything in the cloud, there’s a single source of truth, and then people come in and remotely work on that.

So, you know, the second principles talk about applications coming to the media instead of the media moving to the applications. Media is big. Applications are small. We should stop moving media around the place and move applications to the media. And there’s some stuff about archiving in there, but the first five are all about this sort of cloud foundation. And then on top of that, we’ve got security and identity, which is this idea of, okay, now we’ve got everything in the cloud that’s inherently connected to the internet, bet I could fix security while we’re at it. Um, so there’s this specific work we’ve been doing in our security, and that’s foundational as we did that work first. And then on top of that, a cloud foundation, a good security platform, now we can start talking about software-defined workflows and getting really interesting, clever abilities to automate things, move things through the pipeline faster.

It’s metadata in there. There are ontologies in there. There’s the ability to sort of create more interesting pipelines on how applications are talking to each other. So we have to do all of them together. It’s not like we’re waiting, you know, until 2029, and we’re gonna drop this solution on the world. We have to do the work now. That’s why we’re here. There are companies right now that are demonstrating parcels of 2030 Vision, like, right here today, which is great. You know, SaaS platforms like this – great, we’re all for that. We’re all for open AI, APIs, and, you know, the ability to interconnect things. So that’s what you know we are here for, is what bits can we do now so that we can check them off, and we’re looking for the gaps. What still needs closing, and where does technology or training or some new processes need to be fixed? And that’s what we are here to do.

Michael: That brings up a really good point because the paper was originally released in 2019, and since then, it’s felt like a decade because of various things that have happened in the world. But I’m sure over the past almost four years, there’ve been some things that have needed to be updated. Right? So there’s been some updates from the 2030 Vision released in 2019.

Mark: There have been new releases. We haven’t changed the principles, right? The principles are fine. Someone asked me last week, have we changed the principles? I was like, I don’t feel a reason to change the …

Michael: No asterisks at the end.

Mark: No.  Because they were aspirational anyway, right? They were big, and they weren’t specific. And MovieLabs does not dictate technology to anyone. You know, the studios can’t and should not be doing that. What we do is set direction and say, if we all got here, could we make a better world? So, no, we haven’t felt the need to change anything.

Michael: But there’ve been updated papers.

Mark: Yeah. We’re releasing new content and doing work as well. We’re actually now, you know, writing code and actually deploying tests and putting different companies together and making things happen. So yes, we’ve put out a paper on our software-defined workflows, which defines that concept and then goes deep into what’s required. We’ve done a lot of work on security. So the last part of what we call the Common Security Architecture for Production, which is a five-part architecture…

Michael: That lower third for that is gonna be unwieldy for you!

Mark: See, we call it CSAP. That’s easier. Add that. So CSAP part five just came out. There’s one more that’ll come, but that takes this sort of cloud well-understood security concepts that work, IT people use ’em every day, right? Cloud is used for government. It’s used for military. Like, the cloud is a very inherently secure place. We can make that work for media workflows. We just need to sort of approach things slightly differently in our heads. CSAP is about, how do you take sort of well-established, current technology that works in the cloud and apply it to production? So it’s a whole architecture. People pick it up, use the technologies today and actually build a new security system.

Michael: That’s actually pretty interesting. You said people just pick it up, and I think what’s interesting is because you’re putting out these principles and putting these kind of guidelines, it’s where folks should end up going. The 1,700 manufacturers that are here at NAB, how do they approach MovieLabs or how do they say, “You know what, we like where this is going. How can we get on board and contribute to that?”  What is the usual process there?

Mark: So, you know, MovieLabs are not a standard-setting body. We’re not out certifying things. The paper is public. It’s designed to be out there. People can read it. People can download it. We have got companies that are writing blogs about what it means to them. Google this week just published something about how do you take the CSEP principles and apply it on Google Cloud today. Amazon just finished a three-part blog series about exactly the same thing. How do you take that security thing and map it today to stuff you can buy off your Amazon marketplace? So any company can get involved.

Michael: But there’s gotta be common directions and not just the principles.

Mark: And that’s all that MovieLabs is doing. Right?  We are just funneling everybody in the right direction. And the Vision is a vision. It’s a roadmap. It’s like, here are the things we think we have to get done. But we’re not building products. We won’t build products. We’re not for that. We want everybody else to go and build the products. So we’re just gonna make sure that it, you know, if you’re gonna do that, could you do it in this way so it will work with other things upstream, you know, or downstream. Or we can pass data backward and forwards and stuff because we’re looking at this bigger picture than any one particular part. But yeah, the more implementers, the more vendors, they can ping me, look it up online, follow the blog series and follow us on LinkedIn. That’s my biggest thing to people.

Cause there’s constant new thinking coming out of MovieLabs. And we’re also running this showcase program, which came out of IBC last year, where we’re actually taking case studies. We’re working with the companies who implemented a solution that demonstrates the principles today. And then, we posted them on the MovieLabs website. So, you know, you can go and look right now, and you can look up archiving use cases from Disney, which they did with Avid. You can look at interesting workflow things that Skywalker have done, and you can say, all right, I’m interested in how do I build a new security workflow ontology system, and we found someone who’s already done it. We’re gonna work with them, write a case study, and publish it online. Like, all boats will rise if we share our knowledge.

Michael: I love the fact you specified that there’s no certification. To be very transparent about that. There’s another company that also doesn’t do certification but is very important to our industry, and that’s the MPAA and their TPN+. That program just came out, and I’m curious if there were any discussions or back and forth on how the two bodies may work together. Because the TPN+ obviously is making sure that things that are being looked at, someone’s facility, kind of adhered to some of the best practices of the industry, which MovieLabs is obviously influencing.

Mark: Yep. I mean, so we know the TPN goes very closely…

Michael: But there’s no TPN certification. They’re very clear on that. There’s an audit.

Mark: There’s an audit, and we won’t do that. So we would look to organizations like TPN to go and audit. So whether someone’s done a good version of the MovieLabs architecture, ours is an architecture. We would hope everybody implements it in a good way. But we’re not going to get measuring. That’s not the role of MovieLabs. That’s what TPN is for. And that’s great. That’s, you know, we’ll get to a point probably in the next year or two where they can look at what we’ve built, or what we’re proposing, and they can look at that. How do you map that into either TPN+ or a different version of it? That’s a TPN question.

Michael: I’m sure we’re all tired of talking about the pandemic, but some technologies obviously were accelerated during that process. So did you see gaps or similar other technologies that just, wow, we didn’t see that coming during the pandemic that has since caused some of these different papers to be updated?

Mark: No. Someone suggested that we caused the pandemic to try and prove that a cloud-based workflow would be a good idea. I would like to put that to the bed. That is not true.

Michael: If you had that kind of power, I’d like to talk to you after this interview.

Mark: So the pandemic proved a few things. One, it proved that people can actually work remotely, which for a lot of creative jobs, a lot of people were like, “We couldn’t possibly do this remotely. How can that ever work?” And then, all of a sudden, in two weeks, they were doing it. Right? So for creatives, it kind of moved a lot of the mindset to, “Yeah, we can do this job remotely,” which is great. Because a lot of the Vision has this idea that you can work from anywhere cause everything’s in the cloud. So we were kind of there, but we’re also not declaring success because we had two years of people working from home. Working from home and the Vision were not the same thing, right? So it was a lot of rush jobs to get people to go and move media to go and work from home, and they were tending to do it in an isolated place and then sent the media back to central office. That was not the same thing that we were talking about. So it moved us a little bit further forward in mindset, at least. But it didn’t necessarily fix all the technology problems we needed to get fixed to make a permanent change to an entirely cloud-enabled workflow where everything goes in once, and it stays there and doesn’t keep moving in and out and backward and forwards. That’s inefficient. We don’t wanna do that again. That was, see my earlier point of analog in digital. So progress. It was not a good thing, it was a disaster, but we’ve pivoted to make it at least learn some lessons out of it.

Michael: In terms of progress, I wholeheartedly buy into the Vision, a lot of folks here do, but there’s gotta be, I don’t wanna say naysayers, but folks who are digging their heels in. Aside from the obvious, “Well that that’ll take too much time” or “That will cost too much money,” what are some of the objections that you’re hearing from the small group of folks? And how do you typically respond to those?

Mark: I think what we hear from people is it’s gonna be hard. Which that’s why we gave ourselves ten years.  We are a very rare industry where we’ll spend a hundred million dollars on a single product, right? And have two and a half thousand people working on that product for 18 months. A lot of whom are freelancers. And then, you know, they walk out the door. You know, if you went to Ford and said, “Hey, why don’t you make a new car cost a hundred million dollars, and we’ll just make one of them, and then the whole team manufactured it would just break it apart again.” And they [say], that’s crazy.

Michael: I’d like to be in that pitch meeting.

Mark: But we do that, and that’s the complexity, right? We have a lot of people that are not employees that we need to put together. We need a lot of tools. A lot of tools have custom plugins. You know, we have to make that whole ecosystem work in a way that you can swap in and out components, right? And this idea of a software-defined workflow is that I’m not locked into this pipeline. I have to do it this way. You know, we started production this way. We can’t possibly make a change. Like, if midway through an 18- or 20-month, 24-month production cycle, someone comes up with a great new technology, you should be able to drop in it. Like, if you say that to someone right now, a producer will go, don’t touch anything; it’s working.

Software can fix that, but there are a lot of people to be involved. So largely, what we have is skepticism that we can pull this off, which, as we get more momentum, I’m less worried about. And then the other one is change management, which is, okay, you build the best technology in the world, but if no one uses it, or no one knows how to use it, or it’s super complicated to use, then we failed.  So a lot of my work is actually about, okay, can we bring the people along as we’re doing the new technology? So, you know, we are not gonna get to the end of 2029 and say to people, “Hey, there’s a whole new solution out there. Well done. Here. Go.” And they’ll go, “I don’t wanna use that. That doesn’t do what I wanted it to do.” No, don’t work like that. So we’ve gotta get people on technology to move in parallel.

Michael: If we move a little bit more topically, obviously, the big buzzword is machine learning, AI. How do you feel that may influence any of the ten principles or at least some of the updates since then?

Mark: I’ll tell you the high-level viewpoint we got of it, and it’s mentioned in the original paper, which is that there’s gonna be a whole bunch of AI tools. We predicted then in 2019. Some of them are gonna be very useful. What will be the most important thing that we think we can help with is a common data format for them to learn from. And to understand, you know, if you’ve got a particular data model, who owns that model? Who created that model? A lot of innovation will appear if we can all standardize the data that flows underneath it, right? Then you can do creative things with workflow, and you can plug in different applications. So we built this ontology, the ontology for media creation. Again, it’s in multiple parts because it’s designed to be extensible, and that’s all up on the website.

You can go look at it, but it defines basic terms that we need in our industry that other people don’t. You know, we have characters and actors that are related to each other, and they’re mentioned in a script. And you end up with these very large data models when you start going, “Well, wait a minute, I’ve got a shot, and we’ve got a shot. There was a take, and the take had these actors on stage in it, and they were portraying these characters. Um, but one of them had a stunt double in as well, and that was also portraying the same character.” So we get very complicated data models that come, all of which are custom for every production right now. And we think a lot of software and a lot of tools will be a lot more useful if we can actually all standardize the data so that everything is actually being able to innovate on top of that.

So that’s a big part. And AI, one benefit from that is that you can actually then have it understand context, which a lot of the excitement right now is about natural language processing in that you can tell it what you want, and it’ll go and create it. That still struggles if you don’t give it the right context to understand what the language is. You know, if I say “shot” to something at ChatGPT, it might think guns.  We weren’t talking about that. It doesn’t understand the context. So we need to give these tools context we had to make them useful for us. So there’s a lot of work to be done in AI yet as well to make it a truly useful tool that isn’t a gimmick.

Michael: At the annual HPA Tech Retreat a few months ago, a multi-day event, at almost every session, every discussion, MovieLabs was discussed. Not just discussed, it actually had a place of prominence on the screen. HPA, a lot of times, is very much feature film, larger budget broadcaster, cable television oriented. And I would love for folks who are more independent to kind of know where MovieLabs fits in for them when they’re not working on those types of shows.

Mark: You know, MovieLabs is owned by the studios. They produce a huge amount of episodic TV, right? Just to be clear, they are not just making movies. So episodic TV has always been included. I think one of the reasons why you saw it mentioned a lot, but it’s not MovieLabs that’s mentioned. It’s the Vision that’s mentioned. The Vision has been democratized, and there are a lot of companies that now have it as their vision, right? It’s their strategy. It’s, “This is where we are going, and the studio said they wanted to get there.” Hell, that’s what we wanna go to too. So it comes up a lot because I think a lot of people, it landed at a time when a lot of people were going, they needed direction. They’d heard about cloud, they’d send some bits of this, and it just put everything together on a nice little packet.

People went, “That’s it. That’s what we’ve been talking about. That thing.” If you look at those principles, you could apply those to a webcast at a conference. You could apply those principles to making a student film, making a 30-second commercial, you know, making a YouTube video. I mean, they are pretty foundational for all types of media. And actually, there’s some cloud companies that have been talking about them. They’re pretty useful in any creative industry, actually. They’re pretty good high-level principles for everybody to work for. We may create tools for the very high-end that can afford, you know, 25-million dollar visual effects budgets and given builds of amazing virtual production technologies. But if we do it right and we create enough scale, those innovations will fall down to everyone, and you will be able to do, you know, virtual production on an iPhone.

We’re seeing begin bits of it now, right? You can start doing swapping out backgrounds and stuff. Even five years ago, that was unheard of. You know, you can get a visual effects company to go and do rotoscoping now, and we’re getting to the point where some of this technology is becoming democratized as well. So I think the Vision was published on behalf of the major studios, but it is not owned by them. And it is a vision for the future of creative industries in general. And I think that’s the way it should be perceived.

Michael: Lastly, where are the various places online where we can read the paper, read the updates, see video fireside chats, etcetera? Where can people learn more?

Mark: So MovieLabs.com is the best place cause it’s got the showcases on there. There are some video things that we put out as training. There are more of those coming up. The visual language, which we haven’t spoken about actually, but we have a whole visual language. We’re building workflows. All of that is on there. The ontologies are on there. And then the best way to find out updates is to follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn, and you can look us up on MovieLabs on LinkedIn, and we’re gonna start doing a newsletter soon as well. Because there’s so much stuff going on that sometimes we don’t even hear about, and we go, “Whoa, whoa, that happened?” So we’re gonna start putting together a newsletter. It just brings it all together so people can get one digest of all the things that are happening. But yeah, there’s a lot to follow. It’s going well.

Michael: Thank you so much for your time.

Mark: Thank you.

Michael: Thank you for tuning in. This has been Mark Turner from MovieLabs. I’m Michael with Shift Media.

Miss our interview with Terri Davies, President of Trusted Partner Network? Watch here to learn more about the TPN application process.

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Michael was privileged to sit down with Terri Davies, President of the Trusted Partner Network, at NAB to discuss the recently upgraded TPN program and the new TPN+ platform. Terri walks us through the application process and clarifies exactly what the program offers.

Michael: Hi, Michael Kammes from the Shift Media Booth here at NAB 2023. And joining us today is Terri Davies from the MPA.

Terri: Thank you for having me.

Michael: Thank you so much. We have a ton of questions to ask, so I hope all of you are paying attention. First off, there’s a three-letter acronym we’ve heard in the industry for years, and I want to talk a lot about it. It’s TPN or the Trusted Partner Network.  Please explain to everyone what the TPN is, and especially what the relaunch of the TPN is.

Terri: Okay. So the TPN, Trusted Partner Network, as you said, is wholly owned by the Motion Picture Association, and it was devised back in 2018. It was launched to really reduce the number of security assessments that the vendor community had to go through for each of the studios. So some brilliant minds got together, and they pulled together this concept called TPN that basically leveraged the MPA best practices and built a questionnaire on top of it, which is, in essence, the TPN program. And then, TPN held that information. There were third-party assessors who validated the vendor’s answers, and TPN became that source of truth for the studios to go and one-stop shop for all security information from which they can make their own independent risk-based decisions.

Michael: Fantastic. And you said that was 2018, correct?  So there’s been five years, there’s been a lot of things that have happened around the world since then. So what are some of the new features? Some of the latest concepts in the relaunch of the TPN.

Terri: TPN launched doing site assessments, meaning physical locations, and it was tremendously successful. The team did a great job. It grew enormously in the first 18 months, and then, of course, COVID hit, and all of those sites and locations that were so carefully assessed shut down. And everybody moved to the cloud, and at that point, the MPA best practices did not include application either in the cloud or on-prem. So the whole thing kind of ground to a halt. And unfortunately, you know, production stopped during COVID, but then it quickly spun back up again, and the studios had to scramble to get productions up without TPN being able to keep up and do app in the cloud or on-prem. So we have spent the last year redesigning the program and relaunching it. It relaunched on February 6th.

We’ve rewritten the MPA best practices. We’ve taken it from hundreds to 65, which means that the TPN questionnaire is also reduced from 400 plus questions to 135. We’ve built a new platform, as well, that we’ve cunningly called TPN+. We launched February 6th, and it includes app and cloud, as I said, but we also wanted to address the assessment fatigue and just the sheer fatigue around the subject of security in the industry. So if a vendor, especially an application vendor, is done SOC 2, for example, we now accept SOC 2 in the TPN+ platform. And the content owners can see that cause they should be interested in that. If they’ve done ISO cert, we accept that, and we built in filtering based on the ISO cert to pre-populate answers in the TPN questionnaire as well. So there are many, many new functions. Those are really the high level.

Michael: For companies that are interested in getting assessed by the TPN.  What are usually the steps of that process?

Terri: So, they contact us, they sign up to TPN, and they get access to the TPN+ new platform. They then complete their profile services, sites, owned applications, licensed applications, any other documentation they wish to share, including non-TPN security certs. They then complete a TPN questionnaire, 135 questions or less. If we descoped it, if, for example, they work exclusively in the cloud, we’re not gonna ask them about physical tape meetings. At the same time, they schedule their assessments and negotiate that separately with a TPN-accredited third-party assessor, who then goes ahead and assesses their questions. They go through all of that to get to the end of the TPN assessment and earn their TPN Gold Shield.

Michael: And does the MPA end up listing folks who have done the TPN assessment on the website? So you can cross-reference that?

Terri: We do not put it on the website. There’s a growing registry in TPN+, we’re ten weeks after launch, and we have 400 companies signed up, just to give you an illustration.

Michael: That’s amazing. The assessors must just be going crazy.

Terri: They are. Well, this is another nuance about TPN. So we’ve also introduced, because one size does not fit all, of course, in our industry, and certainly, in my time at the studio, I would view a tentpole feature film pre-release security risk very differently than a syndicated rerun of a TV show. And there are many, many service providers out there who do one or the other. So we’ve also introduced a TPN Blue Shield at the self-reported level.  So not everybody has to go through an assessment that may well be good enough for the content owners if this service provider is just working on library content.

Michael: I see. There are two main themes in our industry. Acronyms. And misconceptions. So what I’d like to talk a little bit about is, there are a lot of misconceptions about what the TPN is, what it isn’t, and I thought maybe you could explain some of those, including the term certification.

Terri: Yes. I would love to – certification or accredited or pass or fail or approved. That’s that nuance. So TPN do assessments. We report the results of those assessments, including remediation items, to the content owners. So the content owners can make their independent risk-based decisions. We do not pass or fail. We do not accredit. We do not approve. We do not certify.

Michael: I think we need to say that to everyone out there. There is no MPA or TPN certification.

Terri: That’s correct. That is correct. Yes. We simply do the risk assessment, and we report that to the studios because, you know, we have all of the big content owners, obviously part of TPN, there are more and more content owners joining, such as BBC Studios now, and every one of them has their own risk profile. We couldn’t presume to come up with a pass or a fail that would satisfy one studio on this end of the spectrum and another studio on this end of the spectrum. So we are simply reporting findings and remediation items to the studio so they can make their own decisions.

Michael: A big, I don’t wanna say player in the industry, but a huge concept is the MovieLab’s 2030 Vision. If anyone attended HPA, that was a fundamental point of every session. And the 2030 Vision outlines the ten principles of where the industry should be at that point.  And I’m very curious how the ten principles, the pillars of the 2030 Vision, and the refreshed or relaunched TPN assessment. How did those kind of work together?

Terri: Yeah, so MovieLabs is a sister association to ours. We have common members, and the MovieLab’s work is fantastic. The work that they’re doing is terrific. So as we were rewriting the MPA best practices, it was really important that we had that 2030 Vision in mind. I should also add, you know, we have done so much to update the TPN program in the last year. Our real mantra is progress over perfection because if we held out for perfection, we never would’ve gotten it done. So we republished the MPAs practices in October. We’re publishing another update in a couple of weeks based on the ten weeks of learning we’ve had. Since we’ve launched, the 2030 Vision is like our Holy Grail, or our North Star is probably a better expression. It’s our North Star. We speak with MovieLabs regularly. We are very, very connected, and we will always seek their advice as we do each iteration on the MPF best practices to make sure we’re in alignment because by the time we get to the 2030 Vision, they’ll be onto the 2050 Vision and so on. So, we follow their lead in that regard.

Michael: This is phenomenal information. Where can more people go to find out about the process and just TPN in general?

Terri: So our website, www.ttpn.org, has all manner of FAQs and information. And there’s also a contact us button. If you can’t find the information that you need, please contact us. We really don’t want to be a faceless DMV. We want to be people in the industry that you can contact if you need further information. So please click that button if you can’t find the information that you need. And we’ll be glad to speak to you and answer your questions.

Michael: Terri, thanks so much for your time. This has been Terri Davies from the MPA. I’m Michael Kammes with Shift Media here at NAB 2023. And thanks for watching.

Terri: Thank you, Michael.

Miss our interview with Alex Williams, founder of Louper? Watch here to learn more about our review and approve integration.

For tips on post-production, check out MediaSilo’s guide to Post Production Workflows.

MediaSilo allows for easy management of your media files, seamless collaboration for critical feedback and out of the box synchronization with your timeline for efficient changes. See how MediaSilo is powering modern post production workflows with a 14-day free trial.

Ready for an even faster workflow? Our new integration with MASV enables accelerated uploads without compressing or splitting files. Collaborators can also upload to MediaSilo without needing access to your secure workspaces. Michael Kammes recently sat down with Greg Wood, CEO of MASV, to discuss the advantages this provides MediaSilo customers.

Michael: Welcome back. I’m Michael Kammes with Shift Media here at the NAB 2023 Show Floor, and today we’re joined by Greg Wood from MASV. Greg, thanks for coming here today.

Greg: Thanks, Michael. Thanks for having me.

Michael: We have a lot of things to talk about, but for the folks out there who don’t know, and I don’t know why you wouldn’t know, can you share with the folks what MASV does?

Greg: Absolutely. MASV is an accelerated file transfer platform. We have a global network, and we have the ability to deliver an unlimited volume of content anywhere in the world, really simply, really easily and very securely.

Michael: This year, one of the themes of our booth is integrations, and we are thrilled to announce that we have an integration with MASV. So instead of using the uploader included with MediaSilo, we now can use MASV. So what does MASV bring to the table that MediaSilo doesn’t?

Greg: Well, we’re a specialist in moving files. So if you need to ingest files, collect files from a whole bunch of contributors, or you need to simply deliver content in the fastest way possible via cloud, that is what we do. So that’s our specialty. And it makes sense for us to work with vendors like Shift and integrate with MediaSilo, because we want to help get assets into MediaSilo as quickly, as reliably and as effectively as possible. So, if you imagine where we fit in, like you can stand up a MASV portal. This is a webpage where anyone can drop content, and you can set up an automation that will take the files directly from that webpage through the cloud and put it right where it needs to go into MediaSilo. And that makes everything really easy, really fast. No fuss, no muss.

Michael: I hope everyone realizes just how powerful portals is because often you’re working with not just a team that you work with on a daily or weekly basis. You’re dealing with partners, vendors, contractors outside the ecosystem, and being able to give them a simple place to just say, drop your files here – it’s one less thing. You have to train these folks to learn how to use it.

Greg: And think about how we used to do this, right? We used to like ship drives around, and drives are never gonna go away, right? They’re just too handy and simple, right? But drives on-prem technologies like standing up a folder and inviting people to your folder in the cloud, right? That can get confusing. Am I in the right cloud? Am I putting the files in the right place? With portals, you literally have one page, it can be fully branded, all the instructions are more clear. They drop the files there, and [the files] get handed automatically into where they need to go. So it’s really, really simple.

Michael: Aside from the integration with MediaSilo, what else is MASV announcing at NAB this year?

Greg: We’ve had a really busy show. The biggest thing for us is that we are kind of a lingua franca for moving large files. So we can talk to a lot of different storage devices, both on-prem or in the cloud. And we’ve just announced that we’re now able to do that from cloud storage as well. So if you’re a user of S3 storage or if you’re a user of Wasabi, now you can take the files out of that storage in the cloud and deliver it, say, into MediaSilo, just as if you were sending it from your own computer at home, right? And so if those are really adopting true cloud workflows, it’s getting just so much simpler. Like we’re removing all that complexity that we had to use even two years ago. It was way more complicated to do this. And I think that’s going to accelerate the pace of cloud production.

Michael: You bring up a good point. Uh, one of the biggest stumbling blocks has been we have terabytes of data on-prem. We’re not sure how to get that to the cloud, or we’ve already parked terabytes of content in the cloud. Now we want to do more with it, but we can’t do a lot more with it where it’s sitting. So, being able to do something like an S3 transfer to MediaSilo, which is on AWS, makes it that much easier.

Greg: Well, and you’re really pointing out the real solution that MASV provides, right? Because it gets very, very complex to deal with where all your assets are. There’s a lot of uncertainty, and where there’s uncertainty, there’s security risk. Because if you don’t know where to track things down, you know that that’s going to be a problem, right? You have to make sure that the content is protected, your customers are protected. And so, what if you can create these really clear workflows, a clear path to deliver the content where it needs to go, you’re gonna be able to have greater certainty that your content is where it needs to be and secure. So that’s exactly the problem that we’re simplifying.

Michael: What I’m really curious about is, in our technology age now, there are a lot of comparisons. This is better than this because of this. I’m really interested to hear people who have come to MASV and who have stayed on MASV, they’ve undoubtedly tried other solutions. What makes them say, I want to stick with MASV, and here’s why.

Greg: Yeah. Well, I think most customers would come back and say that it’s simplicity. It’s a wonderfully easy interface. If you’ve ever sent an email, you can use MASV, right? Even setting things up, it is really quite easy. And doing an integration with MediaSilo, that’s probably the number one thing; it’s very fast. There was a time when people felt like sort of you needed to have a UDP solution on-prem, UDP dedicated internet links, all this sort of stuff to get great speed. And that’s simply not the case anymore. Like, we’re TCP-based and we can send at up to 10 gigabits per second if you’ve got a 10-gigabit fiber connection. And that just delivers files so fast. So speed is amazing. And then of course, the security, you gotta know where your assets are. We’re TPN certified. We’re ISO 27001 certified. And probably the biggest news for us this year – we just have achieved our SOC 2, uh,

Michael: SOC 2 Type compliance.

Greg: Yes, exactly. So for companies who have to know where their assets are and keep their customer data private and everything, that is a huge achievement. So, those are the reasons why people use MASV, for sure.

Michael: So there’s been a lot of changes in the industry. How has that influenced how MASV has marketed themselves? What has helped or what has hindered?

Greg: Well, I mean, there’s so many. I’ve seen so many changes and obviously the pandemic is first and foremost in everyone’s minds because it drove such incredible change in the technology marketplace. So, you know, obviously when everyone had to go home and work from home, you needed these remote tools, and of course, MASV was there to help people out. So that was a real boon to our business, and we learned a lot about what people really needed. We came up with some really wild features we wouldn’t have thought about otherwise.

We have a product, a tool called Multiconnect, where we can bond multiple internet connections and basically double your bandwidth by sending over two paths, all with software, right? Like that’s, that’s incredible. And just thinking about how much faster that makes everything. So, you know, the pandemic drove really interesting changes, but I think another thing is the consumerization of IT. Because, you know, we’re on our phones every day, and so many of the apps we use are so simple, and they’re a delight. And then we go to work and we’re supposed to deal with kind of a terrible user experience that hasn’t changed that much from what, the early 2000s or something, right? So, we really believe that you’ve gotta make tooling that is simple, fast, secure and reliable. I think reliability is the greatest feat of engineering you can have. If you can trust that app to just work, and you know how to use it, you don’t need IT intervention. That’s really been a really big trend for us, and it’s central to what we do here.

Beyond that, of course, the move to cloud. So cloud production [is] essential. And we help support that by getting all the assets to the cloud and from the cloud to where it needs to go. So I think those are the biggest things for us.

Michael: I think over the past few years, we’ve seen that folks are really embracing the concept of manufacturers and companies being transparent. Right? And what I mean by that is a lot of businesses, the trajectory of their businesses, based on where their manufacturing partners or technology partners are going, one of the things that MASV does is says, this is our roadmap. This is what we’re doing. And that kind of transparency helps clients and businesses decide where they’re going to go. So I’d love for you to discuss any of the features or the directions that MASV is looking for in their future.

Greg: We see cloud production only continuing to grow, and I think incredible things are possible. So our integration with MediaSilo is a great example of where we want to go in the future. There’s gonna be more integrations to come, for sure, with other vendors and all kinds of places. And the exciting thing about that is that once assets are in the cloud, so many things are possible. And we’re gonna see so much great innovation coming out of this event. We’ve seen so many great news items and new innovations coming out. So we really see the pace of cloud production accelerating. Obviously, there are all kinds of other ways we’ll continue working, and MASV can connect all of those things. We’re gonna continue to be the specialist at delivering files the fastest, in the easiest kind of way.

And probably the biggest thing that’s coming up right away is our improvement to portals. We’ve got this portals product we talked about already. We can drop those files onto it and automatically deliver the files where they need to go. Well, we have learned from customers over time, we love talking to customers. If you go on our website, you can talk to a human being right away, and [customers are] telling us, hey, it would be great if you could move this feature further up with the flow, and this would be more discoverable if you did this other action. So we’re really cleaning up portals and improving it to make it even easier and more accessible to more people.

And I think that’s how we love to do business. We’d love to hear customer feedback and turn around really fast. And, I mean, that’s how we connected with MediaSilo. We had customers telling us, “Hey, we wanna deliver our files into the review and approved solution at MediaSilo. Can we do that?” And, of course, we could. So that was great.

And then, finally, we’re a global company. We can deliver files as fast in Vegas as we can in Singapore or even in Africa. So we’ve localized our product recently into Japanese, German, Spanish, and Dutch, and in the future, we’ll be doing more of that and making that even better. So those are the big things we’re most excited about next.

Michael: One of the hurdles that people deal with when they get to the cloud is pricing. I don’t know how many megabytes I used this week versus next week? But you have a very innovative way of doing that. What is the pricing structure for MASV?

Greg: Yeah. It can be really opaque in our industry to know what something’s gonna cost. And it’s a foundational belief at MASV that our pricing matters and packaging matters. You should be open with that. So we are best known as a pay-as-you-go business. So we love usage-based pricing. We charge 25 cents a gig. And if you have a project where you have a lot of assets to deliver, you can actually prepay credits at a discount as well. And that works for everybody cause now you can pay less for an enormous volume that you’re sending, and then you can invoice, put that on your media delivery fee, or you can give it to your accountant to keep track of everything. It just makes it so much easier.

But it de-risks using MASV as well because if you’re gonna send a petabyte worth of data in the first quarter, and then in the second quarter you don’t have any projects planned, you don’t want to sign up for like an enterprise agreement, or an annual contract with one of the on-prem vendors or whatever. So, it’s all pay-as-you-go. So you just use it, we charge you, you don’t use it, you don’t get charged. So you can actually build all kinds of new workflows, whether the automations we offer or using our API, knowing that you’re not gonna get charged if you’re not gonna use it. So that de-risks it for the customer as well.

Michael: So, aside from watching this video, where can people learn more about MASV?

Greg: If you go to our website, massive.io, you can enter M-A-S-V or just the word massive. You can find everything you want, including a hundred-gig free trial, and you can set up all those automations, that’s completely unlimited. So you can really see whether or not it works for you and if you want to use it. And we hope people will.

Michael: Excellent. Thank you so much for your time, Greg. Thank you for tuning in. Michael Kammes with Shift Media from the NAB show floor 2023.

Miss our interview with Alex Williams, founder of Louper? Watch here to learn more about our review and approve integration.

For tips on post-production, check out MediaSilo’s guide to Post Production Workflows.

MediaSilo allows for easy management of your media files, seamless collaboration for critical feedback and out of the box synchronization with your timeline for efficient changes. See how MediaSilo is powering modern post production workflows with a 14-day free trial.

Alex Williams, the founder of Louper, sat down with our Senior Director of Innovation, Michael Kammes, at NAB to discuss our latest integration with the cloud-based real-time collaboration platform. They talk about why people choose Louper over the competition, and the features that make it so popular, even in the most unexpected workflows.

Michael: Hi, Michael Kammes here from Shift Media on the show floor. Today we’re with Alex Williams from Louper. How are you doing, Alex?

Alex: I’m well, Michael. Thank you for having me.

Michael: Excellent. We are so thrilled to have Alex here because one of our announcements here is that we’re integrating with Louper. Louper has been one of my favorite technologies in the past couple years because they enables review and approve in a live way, plus some awesome other features. So I don’t wanna steal your thunder. Perhaps you could just share with everyone – what is Louper?

Alex: Yeah. Right. So it’s live review and approve. You can play out of your NLE so you can review edit sessions, VFX reviews in real time in a web browser. And on top of that, you can also review assets. So existing media files, you can have synchronized playback of that inside the room. And everything works in the web browser with built-in video chat and text chat. And so it’s sort of a synchronous live review and approve tool to complement the asynchronous tools out there.

Michael: What I love, you brought up at the very beginning, was interfaces with NLE. So video editors, there are a lot of screen-sharing tools out there that say, we’ll just do a screen scrape, right? We’ll just do a screen share, and the quality is degraded. The color management is out the window. Sync AV is often not there. So being able to integrate directly within the NLEs, gives you that high-quality, correct frame rate. And I think a lot of people just glaze kind of over that. Can you talk a little about the tech specs as they are right now? Like, are we doing SD, is it HD, what kind of frame rates, what kind of data rates?

Alex: Yeah. So at the moment, it’s uh, 4, 2, 8 bit SDR, up to 4K resolution frame rates 23.976, 24, 25, 30. And we don’t process or compress that stream in any way. That’s a pass-through thing. So, whatever you stream at resolution frame rate is what the end user sees in the browser. And then, in terms of data rates, it’s anything from 2 to 20 megabits per second for offline editorial. And people use color reviews as well for SDR contents. And then, on top of that, you can also get a direct signal out of NLEs like Final Cut, Avid Media Composer, and Premiere Pro. Flame as well for online assets. That’s quite a popular one as well now. So you get the actual video frame out of that as opposed to a full interface scrape or anything like that. It’s a true signal.

Michael: So one of the things that we’re showing here is taking that technology and enabling Louper to plug into MediaSilo. So can you explain a little bit about how that integration works and what folks who already use MediaSilo can then use Louper to do with their assets?

Alex: Yeah, sure. So if you look at Louper as kind of the shell where you have your video chat, your text chat, everything’s live, and you know, at the moment, the content in there is a live stream on top of that. And with the MediaSilo integration, you can now connect your MediaSilo assets, video files that exist on MediaSilo, to Louper, and you can then have synchronized playback of those video files within the Louper room so everyone sees the same frame at the same time. There’s collaborative shared playback, controls, pause, play, sync, as well as onscreen drawing and annotations. So that sort of adds a real-time live review to existing assets, which is exciting.

Michael: So MediaSilo clients who are already used to the more traditional on-demand review and approve now can do joint screening sessions, for lack of a better term, for assets that are already sitting inside a MediaSilo project.

Alex: Yeah, exactly that. Yeah.

Michael: Excellent. So, I’m sure you’ve had some excellent growth since Louper started just a couple years ago. Have there been any unexpected use cases, like use cases you didn’t really imagine when you first developed the product?

Alex: Yeah, I mean, we’ve been so focused on our vertical and media entertainment and film industry that in terms of the types of use cases and the types of workflows, that said, there are some ways that people are using the product, which I didn’t envision. We spoke to a customer last week who works in visual effects, and they have VFX editors that use Louper for internal reviews. And from that point, they go, well, we’ve actually got multiple projects, multiple VFX editors, and we like to have an internal review every morning and have all the VFX editors streaming into the same Louper room and just switch between the live signals and do a 30-minute review with everyone on the team looking at that, and then switch over to the other VFX editors live signal without having to go to a separate room. We’ll start a new session, all remaining right there. And I think that kind of stuff is cool and stuff I didn’t expect, of having it really be this hub where everything can happen live and in real-time, and you can send signals into and out of it really, really quickly and easily.

Michael: So over the past few years, especially during the pandemic, a lot of solutions popped up that enabled live review and approve. And obviously, folks will try out each one. And when folks end up trying all the others and end up coming to Louper, what’s the main reason you hear is why folks said, yeah, that’s really the reason why I’m sticking with Louper.

Alex: The biggest thing is ease of use, setup and, especially on the client side, just having the ability to join via links in the browser. So on the client side, for people who are producers, directors, clients who need to join the session, they don’t need to register, they don’t need to sign up. There’s no real setup. It’s a one-click drawing in the web browser and that, people love that. That’s been the biggest, the biggest kind of, “Yeah, this is cool.”

Michael: Now, this is where you’re on camera, so I’m gonna try and put you on the spot. Just to see what I can get out of you. But can you talk about maybe what directions you may be looking at Louper going or what features you’re really looking into? Can you discuss any of that?

Alex: Yeah, I can. So the big one is support for 10-bit 4:2:2, 4:4:4 HDR streaming. We are getting a lot of interest from colorists and yeah, we support SDR and 8-bit 4:2:0. But really there’s a need there for 4:2:2, 10-bit, including HDR. So that’s something we’re working on actively. And that is one of multiple things, but that’s probably the biggest one that, you know, that we’re responding to. In terms of customer stories.

Michael: Where could folks find out more about Louper?

Alex: So on the website, Louper.io, l-o-u-p-e-r dot i-o. I’m also on Twitter @alex_willo_. And that’s pretty much it. Our website’s pretty extensive in terms of use cases and customer stories, and setup guides. It’s also free signup. So it’s super easy to get started and try it out and take it for a spin.

Michael: And for any MediaSilo clients, we’re now in beta with utilizing Louper to playback content to folks in real-time from MediaSilo. And we can also get you connected with Alex to talk about playing out directly from your NLE. Alex, thanks so much for coming. Thank you for tuning in. This is Michael Kammes from Shift Media at the NAB show floor.

For tips on post-production, check out MediaSilo’s guide to Post Production Workflows.

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MediaSilo allows for easy management of your media files, seamless collaboration for critical feedback and out of the box synchronization with your timeline for efficient changes. See how MediaSilo is powering modern post production workflows with a 14-day free trial.

A tradition stuck in the Past.

Let’s face it: the traditional agency pitch is a drawn-out, sprawling, cumbersome process that has now spread throughout the creative industry.

From pitching on a client’s entire creative business to bidding on a specific project or campaign, creative agencies in advertising, marketing, experiential, PR and digital all dutifully invest time, creative energy and resources into frustratingly rigid dog-and-pony shows.

And talk about rigid: according to pitch consultancy ID Comms, today’s agency pitch process has been in place since the early 1990s. In other words, most consultants’ pitch templates are older than the internet.

Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, when accelerated changes swept through so many other industries, these archaic processes remained in place, keeping agencies tied to stagnant and unproductive methods of developing new business – while the rest of the world raced ahead.

Basically, we’re stuck with the traditional pitch.

The Creative Cost

Yes, the process is formulaic and time-consuming. Yes, the average agency surveyed in the industry report The OUCH! FactorTM spent 22.2 days’ worth of staff time last year on each pitch they entered (equal to one employee working one full month per pitch – 11 times a year). And sure, the odds of winning the pitch after all that work are around half at best, according to the same research. It couldn’t get any worse, right?

Wrong.

New studies have shown that the traditional pitch process actually feels like it undermines the core strength of an agency: creativity. With all the focus on jumping through hoops to present strictly formatted materials for every client who requests them, it has become very difficult for agencies to show what they actually do well themselves.

“We’re meant to be in the business of creativity, but the focus has shifted,” says MullenLowe Group UK’s Lucy Taylor in a Campaign Live article from March 2022 (Resetting the pitch process and bringing the soul back to adland.) “The average agency now spends around 2,000 hours a year working on pitches, time that’s often tacked on to the end of the working day.” With that kind of time required to address restrictive pitch requirements, it’s almost impossible to demonstrate real creativity.

Pitches can also be very stressful and lead to burnout, posing a serious problem for existing clients, who “need a healthy landscape with dynamic agencies and great creative work. That’s the lifeblood of our industry,” says Andrew Lowdon from the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA), the trade body representing advertisers in the UK, in Marketing Week. After all, says Jemima Monies of adam&eveDDB in the Creative Salon, “New business should be a means of nurturing talent, rather than draining it.”

So how can you shift the odds in your favor when it comes to preparing for the dreaded pitch?

The Agency Reel: The Win Before The Pitch

Consider the basic criteria clients use to determine the fit of any agency— essentially, the admission price for you to compete:

• You understand the client’s business, their vision and their immediate needs.
• You have experience in their industry.
• You have a recognizable roster of previous clients.
• You have the right mix and level of capabilities.
• You can personalize your solution to them.

It seems like an overwhelming list of things to demonstrate clearly. But with one creative pitch reel done right, you can prove to your prospects that you possess all of these characteristics before you invest valuable hours into a pitch. They can see right away that you’re a great fit for their needs and that you have creativity to boot. If a client loves your pitch reel, then you’re in the enviable position of only needing to confirm their impressions rather than having to prove that you’re right for the job.

A good reel will help pave the way into a prospect conversation before you’ve even spoken with them while leading with proof points they care about— giving them confidence to trust you with the brief. And reels are the most visually arresting way to show all of your work, from print to outdoor to experiential. Nothing jazzes up a static medium more than a video presentation with music. And nothing showcases your successes better than a video that tells the story behind the work. It’s a tool that can speak for you without you having to be there.

Better yet, a great reel will allow you to learn earlier in the process (even before the competition begins) whether the client feels you’re a good fit, so you don’t waste time pitching on work that you never had a chance to win anyway. Then you can determine whether to continue to invest or weed out the clients that aren’t a good match and instead focus on the next important project.

What’s important to note is this: the best reels reflect the specific client who’s watching it and demonstrate what you can do for their exact needs. That airtight resonance of your work with the client’s needs is what gives a reel the best chance at hitting every one of their initial criteria.

Bespoke Reels: Sizzle On Demand

Of course, every client is different. That means the best reel you can use is one that’s customized for the particular client. And creating custom sizzle reels professionally can get very expensive—up to $10,000 per minute of finished video, or more in many cases.

And that’s the conundrum: on one hand, a reel made just for the client you want to pitch will be far more effective and ultimately win more of the right clients for your agency or firm. On the other, it’s risky, involved and expensive to professionally create a bespoke agency reel each time when you have no idea whether you’ll land the project. And the more work samples and other elements you have to choose from, the more complex creating the perfect reel can become

If you’re going to engage with multiple prospects while trying to beat The OUCH! FactorTM odds, it makes sense to scale up your reel-building capabilities internally. Doing this will allow you to conduct business development proactively, respond more swiftly to requests, reduce the expense of customizing your reels and, most importantly, increase the “at bats” your agency gets by pitching as many clients as possible. Best of all, with the right tools, it’s possible to build reels quickly with the staff and resources you already have in place, using the content you’ve already created.

Check out the full guide to pain-free-pitch reels here.

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The reel is everything. Whether you’re an independent rep hoping to get your future star on an agency’s radar or an executive producer with a director or editor ready to tear up the awards circuit, the first step is getting agency producers or creatives to take notice. And that means you need a showreel. But how do you make your showreels work harder and cut through the clutter amidst so much competition? We’ll help you make the most of your work by making the most of your reels.

A Digital Foot in the Door

When you first approach an agency or client, you often don’t even get the chance to talk to anyone. It’s only after you’ve sent a reel and they like it that you get to have an actual conversation about the talent you represent. So your reels have to do the talking for you. Think of them as a digital foot in the door.

Use Advertising Tactics To Cut Through the Clutter

Since a showreel is essentially an ad for one of your creators, it can be helpful to think of showreels in terms of both reach and frequency. On a basic level, reach refers to how many different people see your ad, and frequency is the average number of times each of them sees it. Most people just think about getting their reels in front of prospective clients, but that’s only part of the equation. Unless someone watches it two or three times (and preferably more), there’s a pretty good chance that they’re not going to remember it well enough to reach out to you and take the next step. So you’ve got to think about ways to get them to watch the reel more than once if you want it to bear fruit. That may be a matter of following up and asking questions about what they thought of particular spots so they watch them again while engaging actively. Or it may even mean sending the reel more than once and tracking whether or not it’s been viewed. This requires a bit of extra effort, but it’s critical to getting creatives to remember the reel you sent and who did the work.

There is a limit: you want to avoid inundating them with the same stuff over and over. But you’d be surprised how quickly the details disappear after just one viewing. So if you sometimes feel like you’re just sending reel after reel into thin air, keep in mind that finding ways to increase your viewing frequency could help crack the code.

Timing Is Everything

Sometimes getting people to react to your reel isn’t just a matter of having them watch it enough times. They also have to watch it at the right time. Say your reel showcases a lot of motion graphics; unless the viewer has an immediate need for motion graphics work, they may not respond to it, even if they like it. The fact that they viewed it is great, but you’ll still want to make sure that it’s fresh in their minds when they have a project that the work is a good fit for.

If you’ve done your homework correctly and have seen to it that people are viewing your reels, the next step is to do what you can to increase the likelihood that they’re seeing them at a time when they have a need and can take action. Otherwise, you’ll want to keep in touch and maintain an ongoing relationship until they do. Even if they don’t have a need now, they may talk to someone who does, and if you’re top of mind, that can turn into a new project.

Talent Alone Isn’t Enough

It’s a familiar refrain: “We need to see it on the reel.” No matter how talented, experienced or smart your director, editor, colorist or VFX artist may be, no one is ever going to just take your word for it. Prospective clients almost always want to “see it on the reel.” And by that, they mean that they want to see not just the flashiest or funniest work on your showreel but also things that are very similar to what they’re hoping to produce. This helps reassure them that your person can do the job. If you have a very similar project available to show, then by all means, include it. But sometimes, that kind of thinking is really a trap. Making a great reel requires more than just showing stuff that’s really similar to what the client is hoping to produce, even if that’s what they asked for.

It’s a Trap! (And How To Beat It)

While there are obvious reasons why agencies and clients often seek out reels featuring work that’s as similar as possible to their proposed ideas, there are also a number of drawbacks to this approach that they are usually unaware of.

Generally speaking, creative professionals take on jobs for one or more of the following three reasons:

1. The reel: They love the creative idea and think that the end result is likely to end up on their reels, where it can bring in new work.
2. The relationship: They want to start a working relationship with an agency or client in the hopes of establishing an ongoing flow of projects.
3. The money: The job is lucrative enough that it’s worth doing just for the paycheck.

In the best-case scenarios, all three reasons will be at play. But in the real world, that’s rare. More often, only one or two of these conditions are met. Generally speaking, agencies and clients hope that the creative merits of their idea are strong enough that a talented creator will want it on their reel. But creative professionals are a restless lot, motivated by variety, excitement and creative innovation. So if a client seeks out someone who has work just like their project already on the reel, chances are that person is only going to take it on for the money or to get in with the client for future projects. After all, if they already have something just like it on their reel, they don’t need it for that. And if they don’t need it for their reel, that means they’re doing it for one of the other two reasons. The risk in such cases is that they may just “phone it in,” creatively speaking. That’s why the practice of looking for reels that are just like the proposed project is a trap.

But all is not lost. The best creative agencies and clients are savvy enough to be aware of this and are frequently open to finding talent who can demonstrate the general skill set to do a great job, even if they don’t yet have an exact clone of the project on their reel. Those clients know that the added bonus of having someone really excited and creatively stimulated by their project is well worth any perceived risk in trusting it to someone who hasn’t done one just like it before. And that’s where building just the right showreel can help crack the code.

Picking Your Spots

So how do you decide what to put on the reel? The first thing to consider is what skills the client will be looking for rather than just what the finished product will be like. Will they be concerned with actor performance, how good their food looks or heartwarming storytelling? Does comedy or tone matter to the project’s success, or does gorgeous composition matter more? While you may not be able to show them their exact piece on your reel, you can show them things that required the same skills in their creation. Whether it’s for an insurance company or a delivery service, funny dialogue is funny dialogue. If the project requires that, try to include something demonstrating the ability to achieve that result.

In addition to demonstrating specific skills, you may want to consider budget and scope. Having worked on large-scale projects with lots of moving parts may be reassuring to a client with a complicated project. Meanwhile, flashy-looking locations and sophisticated visual effects may scare a client who knows they are playing with a limited budget. You may want to show work that managed to achieve a lot of impact without huge production investments. In the end, what you choose to put on the reel is about reassuring a prospective client that you have the knowledge and skills to make their project great, even if you haven’t done that exact thing before. You can also use a showreel to balance out or address any concerns you know the client has going into the project. Having your work do the talking is always better than just verbal reassurance.

Aim High

While you don’t want to scare clients with scope or make them think you are only good with huge budgets, it can be very powerful to show them what their work could be like. Especially with agencies and clients who are new to the game, you want to show off work that might be aspirational to potential clients. Make them see that you can take their work to the next level. So if you’ve got a spot that’s next level for them, use it to show them how good their work could be if they hire you.

Leave Out the Kitchen Sink

Building a great showreel can be a bit like building a great meal. You want enough courses to make everyone satisfied, but you don’t want to overwhelm with volume. And if every piece you choose to include is great, you’ll leave a fantastic overall impression. But if one piece is notably weaker than the others, that is what the viewer will remember. Better to have fewer and know they’re all good than to include a “weak link.” Leave them wanting to see more. Especially with new and developing talent, having a short reel is fine and far preferable to a reel of mixed quality with some flawed pieces that aren’t up to standard. As a guideline, people will assume you’re as good as the worst work they’ve seen from you.

Put Yourself In a Box (or Boxes)

While most creative talents crave variety and new challenges, this sometimes works against making the best showreel for agencies and clients. When seeking creative professionals for a project, ad agencies and clients usually have a specific vision in mind and want to find someone who’s a perfect fit for that particular job rather than a talented generalist. They’ll be looking for very specific skills, as well as genres and sub-genres of work. So having a really broad reel, while seemingly impressive, can be confusing or make them concerned about whether you really understand what they’re after. If you’re strong in multiple genres or styles, creating separate reels for each is fine, but it’s often a good idea to refrain from putting it all on one showreel (unless specifically requested). It may take more thought and resources, but if you’re truly multi-talented, try making distinct reels that demonstrate each of those disciplines and marketing them separately.

Make It Bespoke

Of course, every client and project is different. That means the best showreels reflect not only the general category they’re in but are customized for the particular client or even specific aspects of the project. The reel should demonstrate what you can do for their exact needs at the time. That connection between your work and the client’s needs is what gives a reel the best chance of getting you in the door. So the more customized you can make the reel, the better your chances of winning the job. The top people in the business make custom reels for each job they pitch on, despite the time and cost this may incur. And creating custom showreels professionally can get very expensive quickly: as much as $10,000 per minute of finished video once you’ve factored everything in.

Look the Part

Because your reels are the first impression you will make on many clients, it’s a bit like your resume or a first job interview. You want it to have a professional look and feel. You wouldn’t show up to an interview in your gym outfit or hand them a hand-scribbled resume. So make sure your reel is polished and professional-looking. Include company graphics or animation at the head and tail, and make the hosting page or presentation look good. If possible, you may even want to include their logo or customize the reel with a mention of the project. This is all part of making it feel like it’s the perfect fit for them.

Managing Your Stable

Most companies in the creative world manage work for a number of people. Whether you’re a production company, editing company, independent rep, post house, music house, color grading or VFX facility, or involved with other parts of the creative pipeline, chances are you’ve got a lot of work to pick from and a lot of assets to manage. Add to that the need to demonstrate a variety of skills and customize your reels for specific jobs, which means you’ll need to handle a lot of materials and keep track of them all. Having a reliable system for managing all of that is essential, or things can get messy pretty fast. It can also be a big time suck, so organization is critical when setting up a reel-building process.

Mitigating Costs and Time

While it’s clear that creating custom showreels is the best strategy for winning jobs, not everyone can afford the time and money it takes to do so. On one hand, a reel made just for the project you want to pitch will be far more effective and ultimately win more jobs for your talent. On the other, it’s a big ask to professionally create a bespoke showreel each time when you have no idea whether it will even get viewed. And the more projects and samples you have to choose from when building reels, the greater the challenge to managing the process efficiently.

If you’re going to be pitching on a lot of projects with a variety of different parameters or styles, it often makes sense to scale up your reel-building capabilities internally rather than relying on outside vendors. Doing this will allow you to be more proactive, respond more swiftly to reel requests, reduce the expense of customization, and, most importantly, increase the “at bats” your company gets by pitching as many projects as possible. Fortunately, there are now tools and options available that let you build reels quickly with the existing staff and resources you already have, using the content you’ve already created rather than going to outside vendors.

Read about how to optimize your reel-building system in our next installment.

The reel is everything. Whether you’re an independent rep hoping to get your future star on an agency’s radar or an executive producer with a director or editor ready to tear up the awards circuit, the first step is getting agency producers or creatives to take notice. And that means you need a showreel. But how do you make your showreels work harder and cut through the clutter amidst so much competition? We’ll help you make the most of your work by making the most of your reels.

Read about how to optimize your reel-building system in our next installment.‍

On our first episode, we hang out with Sven Pape, host of This Guy Edits, to check out his new editing bungalow and bay, the gear he uses to edit and chat about workflow and collaboration. Next on “What’s In Your Bay.”

Michael
On this episode of “What’s in your Bay” we’re talking to this guy, Sven Pape, indie doc and feature editor and nearly a million subscribers on YouTube. Oh, no… it’s half a million.

Sven
Half a million…

Michael
Half million.

Sven
But I won’t stop until it’s a million.

Michael
Today, we’ll sit down with Sven Pape. We’ll check out his new editing bungalow and bay, the gear he uses to edit and have a chat about workflow and collaboration. Next on, “What’s In Your Bay.”

Sven
Well, come on in. This is the actual office right here.

Michael
This is a brand new building, right?

Sven
Brand new. This is going to be where the assistant editor station is right here. And then I’ll be over there. Well, I actually am. I’m going with a laptop. This is a decision I made about, I don’t know, six years ago. I had a Hackintosh, actually, before that.

Sven
It’s actually pretty straightforward. It’s just a MacBook Pro. At some point, I decided I don’t need a desktop anymore because I need to be able to edit on the fly when I’m, like, traveling, when I’m on location. I also have the iPad connected to it in the teleprompter, and I do Zoom streams sometimes while I’m showing stuff to edit to students, and I run all the drives.

Sven
I have about five or six LaCie drives, and it’s about 16 to 20 terabytes per box. And I basically, I mean, I run a feature on one of those, and then I have a backup or I have my entire YouTube library of like 100 plus episodes that I’ve created on there and backed up. I only really recently started to do a full backup of everything, and a week later, one of these died.

Sven
So I got lucky because that would have been thousands and thousands of dollars worth of video. Instead of that, I would have lost. So if they do the system of three, right, so two locally and then one off-site just in case the building burns down, you still have the ability to be up and running.

Michael
So I see a ton of monitors on your desk. And these aren’t just regular 16:9 monitors. These are ultrawide.

Sven
And I have them just because the timeline is long, and I want to be able to see as much of the timeline as I can. I love this. That’s the Monogram Creative Console, which really helps me with editing to just stay more in the flow state and be able to like, cut as fast as I want to without having to worry about, like, where do I put tracks and manage media, that kind of stuff.

Sven
I have two Rodes. This is the N-11. I love this mic. This is my favorite video mic. And it’s actually not that expensive. It’s, like, 150, 200 bucks, and it just has a super clean, fat sound. And then this is also a Rode. But that’s just for Zoom because I do a lot of Zoom calls with students or I have live stream office hours.

Sven
And to be able to sound good and look at it’s really important to just sort of up the production value, then it feels more professional.

Michael
I’m glad you mentioned Zoom because I can imagine that having a good camera to be on Zoom with your students is important. So what kind of optics do we have there?

Sven
There’s the Sony ZV-1, which is really a specialized camera for vloggers. So it’s like auto everything. And I love that. It gives me a good look, and I don’t have to worry about sound or anything. If for any reason I lose connection here, it immediately switches over to that camera, and it’ll be fine. And then behind that, I have a GH-2, too, which is a very old camera.

Sven
It’s about ten years old. It’s actually the one that Martin Scorsese tested first when he was like, Should I shoot film or should I shoot digital? And so he tested all kinds of cameras, and this was the one he picked as being the has the most character. So I’m going to stick with that for quite a while.

Michael
I think I understand this desk is also a transformer, right?

Sven
So it has this retrofit here where it can be a standing desk. And I actually like to, I got to make sure that I don’t break anything here, but I can theoretically, I’m not going to bring it up all the way just about here. And I love to do all my work while I’m standing because then I can sort of move to the sound, to almost dance to the editing when I do the sound.

Michael
Was that a little bit of Walter Murch?

Sven
It’s a little bit of a Walter Murch thing when I’m cutting and want to do a lot of the heavy lifting, which is like selecting shots and really thinking hard about how I’m going to, like, structurally build something. I’d rather sit down for that. And they also do this, which is great, like when I’m standing and then I want to have my laptop right here.

Michael
Is that some of your swag? “Just Edit.”

Sven
Just that is. Yes.

Michael
Some of your merch.

Sven
Merch. Get a little bit in trouble with Nike with that. I’m still selling it.

Sven
So what’s really nice about having this new office is I actually have a bathroom here as well, so they don’t have to come into the main house. We can have a coffee; we can sit down here. And there’s also an option where the director can sleep here overnight if we have a long session because this can be pulled out to become a bedroom.

Sven
And this is something that I really noticed when I was working in my other bay. It’s like, okay, how do I make sure that the director can be comfortable? Because it’s going to take a couple of days to get through and edit. And so any amenity that I can throw at them is another option for them to entice them to hire me.

Michael
I see you have an assistant editing station. Is this to do just to string out, or what do you typically task an assistant editor to do here?

Sven
Well, I try to get them as involved as possible, so whenever there’s time, I want them to cut. Being able to work together closely in this environment is really, really important. And then they can also stand if they want to.

Michael
Yeah. I see you have a standing desk here.

Sven
At any point, decide I want to be cutting on this system right here, and I can be standing. This TV can come out and swivel. So if it’s like if I have a director right over here, I can just pull it more like this. I’ll be watching it over here. The director will be watching it over there, and we can be communicating.

Sven
I am starting to write a screenplay, and I actually, I know this is like a trend right now to be writing on typewriters, but I actually find it quite enjoyable. And it also makes me be very focused when I put it on the page because I can’t delete. So I have to commit. I have to commit to the scene.

Sven
So we’re actually using a typewriter, like in the morning for an hour, which is actually really helpful to get things done. This is one of the old YouTube plaques that you get for 100,000 subscribers, and I got one of the last ones before they changed to like, it’s more of a mirror-looking thing. And so I’m really glad to get this one.

Sven
And I hope with my other YouTube channel eventually, I will get the new one. This is the phone, and it actually works. I can call the company Film Supply whenever I need a shot. Just call us direct.

Michael
It’s like the “Bat Phone.” You can pick it up and hit the button.

Sven
And supposedly, it’s 24×7. I haven’t tried it, but supposedly I can get somebody at night.

Michael
After the tour, it’s time to sit down with Sven and talk about editing and collaboration. So the first thing I want to point out is that normally when you walk into a higher-end editing bay, you’re seeing Avid Media Composer or Adobe Premiere Pro. But I noticed a familiar icon here. What? What’s that?

Sven
Yeah, I’m still loving Final Cut X. It’s my go-to system. It’s so intuitive. I love the magnetic timeline. I love the fact that I don’t have to think about media management at all or track management. And I can stay more focused in the storytelling, less clicking per cut. That’s what I love about it.

Michael
So when you are working with directors for a lot of the indie projects you’re working on or documentaries do, do they normally request and say, we want you to edit in this software application? And then is there a discussion, or is it this is what I’m working in or nothing at all?

Sven
It really, it depends on the project. So I cut a documentary, and it was already set up in Premiere, and I hadn’t cut in Premiere at all. I told him, that’s fine. Like, I didn’t argue the fact. I’m like, It’s going to take me two weeks to figure it out, but you’re hiring me for the storytelling.

Michael
A core tenet of Shift Media is collaboration. We make tools that enable folks to collaborate. So to that end, what kind of tools are you using to collaborate with people, whether they’re, you know, in the same office or in the same facility or on the other side of the world?

Sven
Well, first of all, I have a pool of about five editors that I work with on various projects at the same time. And what I usually do is I get the media organized here, and I send it over Dropbox to them.

Michael
Are you creating proxies of everything, or are you cutting with the camera originals?

Sven
I’ll try to do the high-res if I can. Sometimes we’ve done proxies, too, and it has worked, but it always creates a little bit more friction. I give the footage to them, I give them direction, and they start cutting. They are then going to start sending me cuts where I can give timecode-based feedback on them online. At some point, we’re going to start sharing examples where I tried to bring the project back alive.

Sven
We constantly update each other’s additional media that we created, and eventually, I will do the final pass on everything before it goes out. And it’s always pushing my editors just a little bit more than what their ability is. I try to get them as close as possible to the finished project, but it doesn’t quite work out because, in YouTube, you have a lot of, like, beginning aspiring editors that are, like, excited to build content.

Sven
So there’s a lot of training, coaching and directing involved online as well. And that happens usually through Discord, Zoom. But those sessions in the room are what really make a difference in terms of just fine-tuning polishing. So usually I have these milestone events where I have a director, and I have a director that’s in Germany, and he shoots, he sends the stuff over here, I’ll send cuts back.

Sven
Eventually, he will fly over for like a milestone or we’re getting ready to do a screener for festival or the producer or whatever. And then we’ll spend a couple of days on the cut together just walking through all the minutia of just massaging it.

Michael
As we’ve spoken about, collaboration involves working with people in the same room or all across the world and in different departments. I’m going to bring up a few job titles, folks who work on the same projects you do. And I want to hear your one piece of advice for those people. So let’s start at the beginning. Let’s start with aspiring editors.

Sven
Actually, edit every day, like there are a lot of aspiring editors who want a cut, and it’s so easy to find something to cut. And if you really want to learn to become good at it, you need to be cutting practically every day because you got to get those 10,000 hours.

Michael
What one tidbit of wisdom would you give assistant editors?

Sven
So many things. But I would tell them to never make excuses when it comes to their misgivings or things that they didn’t deliver. Instead, be very cautious about what you promise. Always under-promise and overdeliver, that makes the relationships so much better.

Michael
And what about directors?

Sven
Other than “get out?” I would say, “hold off.” There’s a lot of work in progress, and it’s very important for the directors to be part of that process. And I tend to really want to show them a cut at various levels, but I don’t necessarily want to be already thinking about the details until we figure out the big picture.

Sven
That’s an end goal that you’re trying to reach with a feature, and it’s going to take a long time to get there. So having patience on both sides to let things suck for a while so that you can get all the other things lined up so you can make the right decisions about how you’re going to change the details. It’s really important. And that patience for a new director is often very hard.

Michael
So, in addition to production, post-production, teaching, and YouTube, what are you doing to keep yourself sane?

Sven
Well, I have a balanced life. I have other passions that maybe combine my interests in filmmaking with something that I’m really, really obsessed about right now. Well, keeps me sane as well as to really not stress about popping out content constantly and just let it happen. Like, if a good idea for a piece of content comes, I’ll make a video.

Sven
I don’t feel obligated to make a video just to make a video.

Michael
Is there anything else you would like folks to know?

Sven
I’m a little bit in the transition phase in the sense that I’m a traditional filmmaker, but I’m also a YouTuber and it’s a very interesting spot to be in the sense that I can use what I’ve learned traditionally as a filmmaker and apply it to social media. And I think a lot of filmmakers have kind of a blind spot when it comes to social media.

Sven
They look down upon it, or they don’t see quite how it’s going to benefit them to get involved. And I think there’re so many ways how it would benefit you. First of all, you can make better content than many other people as a filmmaker because you have the skills. And secondly, you can suddenly own things that you create. A lot of filmmakers work for hire when you are a creator.

Sven
Most of the stuff you create, you own. So you can license it, you can sell it, you can do whatever you want with it. Owning the content becomes even more important.

For more tips on post-production, check out MediaSilo’s guide to Post Production Workflows.

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