Retro Tech Show and Tell

0:01 Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Tuesday Focus on Office Hours. Tonight is going to be a bit special to be transparent. The guest we had planned for tonight pinged us with an issue. So we put our heads together, which is always a dangerous thing here on Office Hours, because we have a lot of very creative thinkers. And we're trying to figure out, OK, so what would be a good show topic?

0:20 And I think it was because I was talking to somebody about my ancient wire recorder. and we got on the topic of classic equipment that we used in our beginnings of our career that kind of made a difference for all of us. That one didn't really make a difference, but I still have it around and actually still works and I'm going to give it a wing tonight and see if I can get it to make sounds.

0:43 So if you've never heard a wire recorder in action, this will be your night. But as we were talking about all this old equipment, we thought, wouldn't it be fun to get some of us who have been around a long time and literally start talking about the vintage gear that we had, the kind of moments in our career that we got something and it turned out to be

1:05 something that really helped us make the next progressive step in our careers. There's a lot of things that a lot of us have owned. And if you look back, a lot of it now nobody really has much value in, but it did teach us lessons. And those lessons, I think for most of us, are still important today. I know they are for me. You know, people say I was coming back from NAB one year and I

1:29 happened to mention cutting tape and the two young engineers who were in the car, the cab with me sharing it to the airport, looked at me and said, you used to actually cut tape like with a razor blade? I said, yes. We got into a nice discussion of the fact that that taught me a certain discipline when you literally had to cut and splice tape. And some of the lessons I learned

1:52 on that old stuff apply still to this day. So that's a little bit about what our topic is like tonight. And I'm absolutely delighted to be joined by some of my great friends from here in Office Hour, specifically Guy Cochran will be joining us and David Brady and Sky Gleason. All of us have been around the production arts for a long time, and we are going to

2:13 have just kind of an open conversation of what things came into our lives at what point, what lessons did we learn from it and maybe there are things that well i know for me there are things that have stayed with me my whole career and have really helped so classic gear is our topic tonight uh don't forget that we do have your questions so we're going to still do all

2:36 of our normal stuff let me pop the qr code up on the screen if you have if you hear about anything you like or if you just have reminiscences of pieces of gear that were important to you as you're coming up toss them into the mukana chat there and we will be able to get to them as soon as we can so i am going to go around the horn here in kind of alphabetical order which means

2:57 that fair or not guy cochran you have the first alphabetical listing uh do you want to dive into this that would be david brady he has b in brady oh gotcha right well all right you can tell how much time i had to prepare for this you will go with david brady david we're diving in with you What do you got for us tonight?

3:17 Well, I know since I've been on Office Hours, everybody is envious of the 20th anniversary Mac that I have here. I bought that shortly after moving into the city. I had to downsize, and that was, for a good part of my early life, living in this apartment, TV, radio, and CD player all in one in my living room. Nice. It's since gotten a little long in the tooth,

3:39 and it's hard to get it to come up and work. so oh sorry I'll keep talking up a little so it's it's been hard to keep that thing going sometimes but tonight I brought in this little device on my right shoulder and that is the Sony Anycast AWS G500 when I first started at the company I've been with since 2004 this was our

4:09 mobile rig that we would bring into ballrooms and be able to produce, record, and put on the multimedia shows with a single carry on it. Thing weighs, I think it's about 10 pounds. It's an all-in-one, six-channel audio, four-channel video. It's got the SDI option card built in. It does streaming as well, but we didn't have enough time to set that up, and I'll work

4:34 with Guy on that for next time, but it's a real media streaming, RTSP out. it's a beast I think when it was new it would cost about $18,000 $18,000 $15,000 to $18,000 or something with all the options that it's got it's nuts Sony Anycast is the buzzword I remember seeing that in DV Magazine that was like you know the thing like that

5:01 that was a lust worthy object when it came out we all went oh it's so small it's so light you could just take it into a ballroom and get a gig done without having to take in 17 road cases we were used to 32 foot trucks oh yeah to do the same thing that's impossible since we've moved our office a few times i've kept that thing tucked under my desk and i think this weekend you

5:27 know i brought it home finally so it's found a new home it'll be on the shelf or something i'll try to figure out a way to bring it into the show a little more often i couldn't quite get enough um s video composite components into it in the time if you notice the little blue box next to it uh is a uh right side chord k oscillator it's like a video synthesizer thing cool wow very very cool

5:56 so when you were using that you were obviously doing like remote things what were some of the lessons you learned? I, you know, for me, as soon as I was able to carry things in without making 13 trips with a rock and roller, I just thought my life is getting better and better because it's so small. What were the things you remember from having that piece of gear that made your life

6:19 easier? Well, while it made things easier in that we were able to get a lot done in a single box, the life lesson learned was have some sort of backup thing that you can always dump to, whether it's a still store, an e-frame or something. We would always have belts and suspenders. It's the way we went through any event that we were doing.

6:43 And I think that's really, really useful, particularly now where I think it kind of feels so easy to just throw a bunch of prompts into generative AI and get something out of it. You're not really struggling, and you don't have to really understand deeply the back end of everything. And it was understanding how to rewire, replace, keep things in such a state that you could always fix the major problems that would keep you from going live.

7:12 And that made the difference in some ways between being a professional and being an amateur at this stuff, didn't it? By any means necessary. Yeah. Get the job done. Yeah. Right. I remember pulling out cheap cameras when the bad camera, the big expensive cameras didn't work. and you go and i just need to get a signal out of here and i'm gonna do it however i need to do it

7:31 because if there's a picture up there they won't be yelling at me while i get it fixed all right well let's continue the around the horn uh guy is working on his uh biceps and what do you got guy i got the brother to that what used to be the live stream studio uh box this was the the lunch box essentially it's a

7:55 Windows PC and a DeckLink card in it, but it ran Livestream Studio, and it was similar to any cast. I mean, it came out later, but it did the same type of thing where, you know, you could bring in just a keyboard and a screen, and you could cut a show with that little guy. So it's amazing to see this kind of transition, and it streamed Livestream at the time or any

8:15 RTSP, and I was using it up until not too long ago. It's still a decent computer. I had to change got the graphics card in it but it's funny how we could take some old tech and still modernize it but that one's on on its last legs when you it'll still do 1080 hd no no problem i mean i'm sure uh yours will do 1080 hd uh is it 30 or what what does it what did the eddie

8:36 anycast 1080i so yeah yeah yeah you're in broadcast land interlaced video instead of progressive the other thing that's interesting with it is um it'll do visca controlled native So, Vizca cameras, you can pan, tilt, zoom, shade them, whatever you got to do. It's really quite impressive for a 20-year-old piece. Things from 20 years ago, 2005. Wow. Wow. Yeah. We forget. We forget how much struggle there was for these things.

9:10 And when you got something, like even length control or something like that, so one thing could talk to another thing, It was a big weight off of your shoulders. All right, let's continue to go around the horn. Sky Gleason, what do you got for us? Okay, well, I'm going to go back even further in the Wizard Channel because this is the ESPN Master tape that was 64 minutes long in digi-beta

9:39 of Mia Hamm, the first HD on ESPN Classic. nice and nice i i got to do a uh again a original movie when they first introduced hd into the espn universe and it was four by three because they didn't trust this 16 by nine aspect ratio do you remember what those 64 minute digi beta oh this was worth they were ridiculously expensive

10:12 This was at least $120. Yeah, $120 for an hour, and that means you had to have one to shoot on, then you had to have one to edit on, and if you had A, B, and C roll. And you plugged it into an $80,000 deck made by Sony again, but it was digital versus the original beta. Note its location. I don't know if you can read.

10:41 Does that say Victory Studios? The title is... Microsoft Studios. XP Launch. Wow. XP Launch. Wow. So when I met Guy Cochran in Los Angeles, we were both figuring out this new digital format because I was an avid editor on Media Composer in Los Angeles. But I moved to Seattle to take care of my family. But I had met this guy named Guy Cochran.

11:06 And he was all about this new thing that Apple was doing. and they had hybridized a nonlinear edit. Oh, that was not good. Look what happened there. Something got way out of focus. This is when your iPhone fails on you. It's the two-day out of focus. Oh, I'm so sorry. It's okay. What happened? We'll riff with it. Focus. There you go. I'm good.

11:30 Magic. Don't. Okay, so the moral of the story is when your Logitech dies because Alex Lindsay said, get the best thing. Go get something else because three years later it finally quit. But the story was Guy Cochran and I knew each other from Los Angeles, but we both were from Seattle. Turns out he's six, eight, ten miles apart from each other, and he introduced me to office hours,

11:55 and I'm bringing all of this technology with me, but it's the relationships. I mean, this is the original digital kitchen, if you had ever heard of that experience. They did some magical things. I did a lot of work with Digital Kitchen back, After Effects work. Yeah, the guy who taught me After Effects worked at that place. And the reason it's called Digital Kitchen, because it was in an agency over in Bellevue,

12:22 but this computer stuff was still too new, and all they had was a physical company kitchen. And they were physically set up on the counters. And so that was a thing I did back in 2001. We survived the apocalypse of the new millennia. But then as we moved forward, the delivery systems got from the VHS tapes. And then the new digital format, of course, was the DVD.

12:57 DVDs. DVD burners. DVD burners. W plus. And consequently, if anybody needs them, I still have some blanks. Here's what I was thinking about when you were talking about that is how we had to learn. Because in the days that we're talking about right now, it wasn't that all the information on the planet was in your pocket. I mean, we were barely crawling out on the Internet.

13:26 And if you were lucky, you had a users group or something like that where you could get together. There was the internet was almost a 500 or a 300 baht upload. Yeah. Because my first experience was- And the practical part of that is that we didn't have channels full of people talking about how to fix your process, your gear. You really had to make a couple of friends in the business and you had to go to the users

13:55 group and hang out and have coffee. And that's how you solve problems and learn things. There were some classes and the colleges and trade schools and things like that were trying to teach people. But most of us were kind of left on our own if we really love technology. And that was my joy of discovering office hours because I had come from an organization that was an ad hoc solve each other's problems because the Avid tool called Digital Studio, otherwise known as DS.

14:28 Yeah. It was a very expensive piece of hardware. And consequently, to learn how to use it, that's why I hung out at Microsoft, because they were only one of five people in the Pacific Northwest. But the joy of it was there was a bulletin board. And we as a community, and you could see when people were coming to work in the morning, because you would post a problem, and you would see somebody in New Zealand pick up and respond.

14:55 Then somebody in Australia. And then somebody in South Africa. and then somebody in London, and then somebody in New York, and then somebody in Detroit, and then somebody in Kansas City. And it was just a joy that that community was helping each other because the manufacturer didn't understand it. They had bought that software from somebody else. And this is a fail about talking with your hands. I apologize to the community.

15:19 That's okay. I so apologize. No, no, no. Don't worry about it. The information is more important. One of the things about that era too, Sky mentioned it. He brought up the idea that things were so expensive that most individuals, if you weren't working for a large company, you literally could not get your hands on a broadcast camera. They're, you know, 60, a hundred thousand dollars, something like that. And that was back

15:43 in the days when, you know, you can go to McDonald's for $3 and 50 cents or something like that. So it's been a, you know, getting a hold of serious professional gear typically meant going to work for a station or a production house or something like that you did not have the option to get inexpensive gear put it in your bedroom and literally make your own tv station which pretty

16:08 much everybody can do now so david what were your how what was your entryway into being able to learn how to do production okay what well i mean i still don't i still don't literally do production per se I was production adjacent via an IT pathway. Okay. When I got into the business. That was just the same. You had to work for somebody who had mainframes, right?

16:34 Right. Well, AS400s and PC. We were like an IBM PS2 shop when I first cut my teeth. But it was at a media company. So it was adjacent in that way. One of the groups that I worked with was the emerging technology group. So we were always doing cutting edge stuff. We had my mentor, and I've relayed this message before during office hours.

17:01 The one thing he told me was understand the basics and everything else falls in place. And I still hold that to heart. And it's what I try to share with other folks. one of the bigger events we did was there's a certain music video award show that happens once a year and i think it happened just recently um so the company a couple of nights ago yeah

17:27 our group when they had one of those events here in new york many years ago we had set up uh bryant park which is down 10 blocks down from radio city musical where the event was and we were the tech for the party. We had stuff like Newton message pads with CDMC. Oh, Newton message pads. Wow, I remember the Newton. We had a radio modem on the thing,

17:54 and our objective was to go around to guests. We installed Times Square zipper signs around the entire park. We're like, here's the message pad. Send your note to the sign. So people would type in their note, send it, and zip. It would rip around. Wow. We had another thing that my mentor built using CUCME, which was a precursor to all this video technology stuff.

18:19 CUCME was, I think it was an MIT project, little black and white cameras. And we had this rack of gear that we'd roll out. It was an ISDN backhaul to our server and we'd go broadcast concerts. And this is in 1994, I think, you know, publishing it all on the three letter company's website for all people to see. It was kind of kind of really cool.

18:48 And then, you know, it's just been going since then. Absolutely. I wanted to see Mark Giuliani was in the chat over there saying, I remember trying to type a paper for school in a computer lab in school and an Apple just like the one behind Bill. It's my old original 128 Macintosh, the first big boy computer I ever had. And it's still back there.

19:11 I don't think it still works. I haven't tried to turn it on a long time. But, yeah, we all came up through this. Guy, how did you start to get – I mean, you've been in this a long time. I remember we ran kind of across each other back in the early, early days of users groups and stuff like that. How did you get your feet wet in technology back in those days?

19:32 Back in those days, I would say that it started, actually, let me pull up one little piece of gear. Remember these things? Zip drives. There's my old... No, we remember them. Jazz drives, zip drives, any kind of storage we could get our hands on. So this is my transition from doing graphic design. So that's what my background, that's what I went to school for.

20:02 So I was taking classes in 1993, 94, 95 in Photoshop and Quark and all this freehand. And it was at a building where one of the tenants had an Avid. And he said, hey, you should learn this program. And he handed me After Effects. And that's what changed my world. So on these little disks, I was saving frames, just each TIFF, because you'd have 30 frames

20:28 and you'd load them in one by one, a TIFF sequence. So he would give me these logos and he'd be like, can you do an animation where this logo flies in with this still image or four still images? And it was stuff that the Avid couldn't do. It was just too difficult for it to do. And that was like a quarter million dollar piece of gear.

20:46 And he had the beta cam and he had, you know, he had a full on recording studio in there as well. So that was the beginning of it. But for this show, I wanted to cut to my other camera here, which has kind of the behind the scenes here. And what really got me started in computers is this is the actual computer from 1985.

21:08 In fact, I found Commodore 64. Yeah, Commodore 64 found my old joystick and my old game that I used to play here. Jupiter Lander was one of my games. So on this very keyboard, I used to get magazines in the mail. And I would type in here 10 return, you know, 20 returns. I would actually be typing in the programs that I would get in the mail.

21:32 And if you made a mistake, you would not be able to run that program. And pretty soon I was able to save them to disk. And I have the disk drive over here. Actually, let me grab the disk drive. So here was the disk drive, the original. Punching sprites. Commodore 64 disk drive from 1910. Oh, my God. How much does that weigh?

21:54 About 14 pounds? Yeah, it's not that heavy, but I would have plugged it in. It did light up. I just didn't have the cable to go because it's actually, if you remember, it's like an RF coaxial because we used to hook them into TV, so I'd need some kind of adapter to get it to composite. The funniest component of that conversation is, yes, it may weigh 30 pounds,

22:18 but it holds a whole total of what, 512K? But so that Alphabet Avid editor guy, I wound up buying this. Oh, a G3. Yeah. So this, and not only just a G3, had the ice card in this thing that was about $3,000 and gave me like crazy processing power, like eight times the processing power. So this is that G3 from back. And then down below here, I have a G4 and then I have a G5.

22:48 So I've collected them all over the years. and held on to them. Have you ever heard the Imperial March done on a C64 disk drive? I don't have it. No, there's programmers that do it because that thing goes like... I should make it do that. I should load it in. Speaking of weird sounds, maybe I'll jump in here and see if I can turn on

23:15 what may be the oldest piece of technology we have. I'm so glad you said that. I thought you were going to call on me next. No, no, I am going to call on you next. I'm going to you, but I want to get this over with so I can turn on the light because it's hidden over here. And let's just see. This is small drum roll, the oldest piece of technology I have.

23:36 I actually thought this was older than it was. This actually came from the 1950s. But what you're looking at is a Western wire recorder. I think it's the oldest piece of technology Probably within a hundred miles of me right now And for those of you who have never seen this particular thing and I I brought it out because it's in my wall of

24:00 Of I call it my wall of happiness back there things that i've had for years But this is the strangest tech and you know They come out with things that are the leading edge of everything for a while these wire recorders recorded on a tiny piece of wire that is actually smaller than a human hair it is a magnetized steel wire uh it runs through a set of heads so if i come back over

24:25 here uh and i would go to there and see if i can actually um keep this microphone kind of turn in that direction and see if i can actually see if we can play back something this will undoubtedly be if we hear anything in terms of a voice or anything it would be from someone who has long since gone away i'm going to turn it on now see if we can listen to it

24:48 ah there's that fine sound um this guy is full of gears and god knows while at all else it's got these massive things and a lovely art deco microphone that is a beautiful piece of operation I'm not going to try to record on it because I think that would be pushing it too far, but let's see. Let's record your next book. Hit me a sound. Let's see if we can get it to hear something.

25:36 Well, we're hearing something from someone who is undoubtedly no longer with us now. Let me see if I can get this turned off. Anyway, the interesting thing to me about it is that those reels of wire, because the wire is so thin, last between 75 and 120 minutes. It actually was a pretty good office system, and those ran right up into the 1950s.

26:06 I think the last machine that they made that was a wire recorder in commercial production was like 1954. The reason that's interesting to me is you forget how fast things change once they move on to something better. And we've all seen that over and over and over again. But you could edit on this. And I don't know if you really call it editing.

26:31 you can actually literally if the wire breaks or if you want to take out a section you can just cut with a pair of scissors the wire and tie it back together and it'll actually edit that way it was it predated physical tape which we used to have to splice with a splicing block and little uh adhesive tabs which was kind of the next set and that's why i'm remembering the discipline that i

26:59 had to learn to edit back then when I was working on radio commercials and other things, I honestly think it still benefits me today because even though now everything is non-linear and it's punch, punch, punch, and it's done in relative instance as opposed to how long it used to take to edit something like a show or a radio commercial back in the day when you were literally cutting

27:23 and splicing everything, the discipline about thinking about is this where I want to place the cut because I can't really keep doing it and undoing it and redoing it and undoing it. So you do learn a certain discipline about thinking, you know, it's, I guess the woodworkers thing, measure twice, cut once. And I think there was some sense to learning that early in my career

27:48 because now I really do try to pause for a moment. I'm fine to just try things because I know I can undo it really quick, but rather than tying seven or eight things, I always take that extra step before I execute an editor to say, is this the edit I was, am I really happy with this idea? I don't want to just waste all my time trying things and undoing them and trying them and

28:09 undoing them. And I think that stood me in good stead over the course of my career. I'm not all unhappy that I came up an area where I had to work a little harder to make a program that sounded really good. So now, that's my wire recorder. I can turn my light off, and I can go to Sky Gleason. Sky, talk to me. I sent a link to a Wikipedia page for the Avid DS. If our amazing studio people

28:39 could bring that up, that would be great. And I'll discuss that briefly, because Avid was one of the original composers of bringing all of the different hardware and software together to do non-linear video editing and consequently that uh media composer was one of the very first ones that was available but it was only edits and it was the digitization you talk about hard drives the

29:08 original one gigabyte one gig a byte drive was ten thousand dollars and then the magical thing in los angeles which they were very focused on because that was the machine that was the machine town of making stories so they were really very focused even though where they were uh avid was from me uh in uh tewksbury massachusetts they understood that their bread and butter was

29:35 figuring out how to own that town in Los Angeles. And consequently, when the three gigabyte, three gigabyte, it was a hard drive came out. It was the size of a shoebox. Now that is the beginning when Guy was talking about being on the Media Composer, but this was a tool that was designed up in Canada. It was right next to Autodesk, Sorry, that was discreet at the time.

30:06 But this was a company called, oh, it just left my mind. It's right there on the page. Excuse me, Softimage. And the challenge of running software is hard enough. But it was being transposed from French Canadian. And so even in its English, trying to describe how to use this tool, the buttons were very tiny and that was the introduction of the large

30:37 stylus tablets. We didn't use mice and all of that, but I had been editing on Media Composers in Los Angeles, making a living, but then they went from $80,000 all the way down to $40,000. And then the joke was, well, a friend of mine said I could walk from Santa Barbara all the way to San Bernardino on the backs of every Media Composer. So if you

31:01 wanted to figure out how to do the next thing jump onto that compositing and again digital studio this was pre-analog this is where david brady comes into the story when sdi was the only you know things of getting signals from point a to point b and we were still doing things on tape well this was the first inner you can see that tiny little buttons you could it was very difficult

31:29 to read. It was not in French, but it might as well have been compared to trying to understand the language. And that's why that community from around the world was so critical because the interface was very complicated. But Avid was selling hundreds of Media Composer edit systems, but people didn't want to understand this complicated thing. Now, the irony of that story is when Final Cut 10 came out, it was based on a lot of the interface tool set that the Avid

32:08 DS was doing and the higher end compositing systems called Smoke and Flame and those million-dollar edit systems. The ones nobody in the real world could afford. You had to be But that was what was being used to make, quote, real commercials with because it had the layering. But again, it was all hardware driven, very expensive at the time. But when things got commoditized and this is where I, yes, I jumped in early when things were still on tape.

32:39 But I do remember the day we went from tape delivery to digital. Digital delivery. I'm sitting in Burbank. Huge thing. Yeah. And I'm at Kappa Studios. And again, the gentleman there was very thrifty. We'll call it thrifty. Yeah, we'll say thrifty. And so the broadband was available, but expensive. And the delivery system, and this is where Dave comes in. And well, we historically would deliver by tapes, even to the point of sometimes you would buy a seat for that tape and fly it to New York because New York was the distributor of the show.

33:21 Well, we were to deliver a one-hour show physically across the street, but it was now completely again, as engineers were the gatekeepers, they said it had to be delivered digitally over the internet. Well, we had maybe a 1,200 baud connection. I mean, talking about shoving elephants through straws. I mean, stir straws, not even little big sucky straws. Everybody who's running out of air will remember the whistle, buzz,

33:55 Well, 12 hours later, we delivered a 43-minute show. I think that's why they call it dailies. We're going to get to a couple of our questions here in a second. By the way, that was my first hard drive right in the middle of there. That's a Corvus 11 megabyte hard drive. I think I paid a couple of thousand dollars for it. There you go.

34:19 to think that my watch has a thousand times more power than that all right um so our first question on the tuesday focus question and answer system comes from douglas carmichael and douglas wonders what does the panel think of retro revival products like the c64 ultimate does anybody uh guy cochran dive in what do you think i think it's pretty cool i mean the other day i was in

34:46 one of these thrift stores, and I was telling Bill this story right before the show, is I found this in Goodwill. This is a Radio Shack realistic 200 channel scanner, and it was there for $9.99. So, I plugged it in. You could see the plug there on the left side. I plugged it in, turned it on, and it turned on, but nothing but static was coming out. So, I chatty-pt'd it, and it's like,

35:12 turn the squelch down. So I turned the squelch down. And then I just asked it a few more questions and pretty soon I had the weather coming out of it. And it's cool to see retro things like this, because this was about in modern day money, about a $800 device. And my dad had a handheld one. And I used to listen to the police scanners and modern day, this got me going down this path just

35:35 the other weekend because I wound up buying it from the thrift store because I was fascinated with the things that you could do with it, which is pick up local stations. A lot of them now are encrypted. So they don't, like our local police department, they encrypt their stuff. So it just comes across as static. But there's the local airport I was able to pick up.

35:54 And so when you think of retro, learning how to program these things was fun because ChatGPT had me, you know, entering in, there's 200 programs. So it's just a different way of programming. And then it has a nine volt battery because if you unplugged it, the memory, you know, it's volatile memory. It's not the stuff. Yeah. So it's just little things like that. When you remember, like I was talking about with the Commodore 64,

36:18 plugging in those programs until we got that disk drive. When I shut that thing down, it was gone. That 64K was live. And then if you turned it off, that program that you spent an hour typing in manually was gone. So it was so cool. And we got the disk drive and I was able to save and not only that i was able to go over to a friend of a friend that worked at our school

36:40 and he had just a ton of uh games and uh apps and so we just were swapping uh floppies and he was like in his 40s and i was this kid 10 years old just like can i copy your games if you didn't save your work and you had a power brownout or something like that everything just disappeared back in those days.

37:04 David Brady, you raised your hand as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I had a C64 as well. I think that was high school years for me. I appreciate the retro gear that's coming out, if only for it showing the kids of today what we had to go through then. The only thing that you will never re-experience is that programming out of a magazine

37:32 or I watch these channels on YouTube and the guys were like, oh, there was this radio station in the UK that would broadcast things over a modem and you'd record it on the modem and then write it back to, you know, so if it can give an appreciation for what it is, is cool. But I don't think we'll ever re-experience the awe of discovery

37:58 like we had back then. And the same thing with music. The music discovery of today is different than when you would buy a record, if only because of what the album cover looked cool. Yeah, I agree with you 100%. You used to have to work hard to gain any kind of knowledge in this stuff because it wasn't just floating through the air everywhere.

38:17 And everybody didn't have, you know, like, I want to learn something about being a cinematographer. Well, the old days, you used to have to find your way to get into somebody who knew something about it. And there weren't that many people. Well, now there's 7,000 websites devoted to how to become your own cinematographer. Guy, you had some other? Yeah, it just reminds me of this whole rage of LPs.

38:39 And I know before the show, I'm queuing up, teeing up David if he wants to go grab his toy next. But the generation that's coming up is wanting to see things like the LPs, the Walkmans, the, well, I grabbed the next evolution after. Those things changed our lives. Which, who knows what these are. Oh, mini discs. Okay, and then where did I put the player?

39:04 I grabbed so many things out. Oh, here it is. I grabbed so many toys out. So this was the mini disc player, which was super cool because it was digital. And this one was what I used to back up the audio on my XL1. So I would do an interview and I would actually record. So some of these discs, this was my case that has my library of mini discs.

39:31 And this one has the, as Josh Kaufman was saying, pre-show, do you still have the remote? Yes, Josh, I have the remote. And this one still works. I still have the power supply. And at the time, I also had the home unit. So I had the full-size unit as well. But the bummer about these was that you couldn't do what we do now, which is just plug this into USB and copy the files off.

39:57 So if you wanted to put something on, you still had to feed it. So I remember copying via the optical port so that I could maintain digital. So I would get things to not have a hiss or anything. So a lot of these recordings that I have on here were still done in the lowest noise manner possible. but it's wild to think of the things that we take for granted

40:18 because I know some of you guys know about dat tape and some of you know about that whole evolution. And one more audio thing while we're on audio. I got one more too. This is the mix. You got one of these too, dude? No, no, no, no. I got something else. Oh, you got that. You're teeing up the... Okay, this is a mix pre-D.

40:35 So this is a two in. Very early recorder. So you got two XLR ins and two out. And it sounds, I just used this at our church event because it's so dead simple. It just works. You know, just plug it in, XLR in, mic in. And now, David, do you want to show us your record player? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a record player.

40:57 Vinyl. You know, you have vinyl. Seven inch single. It's an old seven inch. This is Bob Taylor, Wowsville, part one and two. But I have two of these things. And this is the Sony PS5 linear tracking turntable from approximately 1983, I believe. Oh, I remember seeing pictures of those. It snaps around the LV. It'll run off four AA batteries so you can bring it to the park.

41:23 That's so cool. It has two headphone jacks so you and a friend can listen to your vinyl. And, yeah, so the little sleevy thing comes off. Oh, the feet also. You can't go in the subway with that and totally just be rocking out. The feet also expand so you can, you know, it has feet that kind of rock in and out. This is when Sony design was its best.

41:46 Awesome. You would toggle, there's a toggle for when you're going to 45, 17 millimeter. You drop that thing in, you lock it in place. I don't have batteries in it, but then, you know, it'll track in linearly and play. I'm sure it was high fidelity. It is. That's what I want to see you walking down like a boombox on your shoulder. Yeah.

42:09 I think there's a current turntable called like the hamburger or something, but it has like a tone arm that comes out. This thing, the tracking is inside, so it's really unique. It yellowed over time. I have two of them, like I say. One of them I bought and brought to an electronic repair shop here in town. and I had the service manual for it.

42:34 I gave it to the guy. He got it working again. And I think these things on eBay, I have some Google Watch agents happening, and I think they go for about $1,200 a pop. So it's like Sony stuff. I don't know. I don't think people remember how much the original iPod changed people's habits. I mean, I think that's one of the reasons Apple is the company it is now

43:01 because we were using all these kind of solutions. They were great. We loved them. They let us take our libraries of music out with us. But then suddenly you had this little device that you could put, I think the ad was 10,000 songs in your pocket or something like that. And that was a revolution for everybody. You could have a whole music library that you carried with you.

43:23 You had little earbuds that you could listen from. and when the big monster dropped when the first iphone dropped that classic steve jobs thing of it's got all your songs on it and it's got all of your notes and everything and it's a telephone i think that people were conditioned by the success of the ipod the original one into accepting hey wait a second if i get this other device i got all of that plus the phone and there we go

43:55 So, Guy has holding up one of the original iPods. Actually, this one was special to me because this one, I remember when video came out for the iPod. And so, I was so excited that I had to figure it out. And so, I was working for this company at the time, DV Creators, and we had a super popular forum. And I started creating the first video podcast.

44:18 So, my video podcast got so popular, I was in the top 10 of iTunes. So if you opened up iTunes, I still have a screenshot. Yeah, because DV Creators had an email list of over 100,000 people. So when I put these couple of videos up, the algorithm in the Apple store saw all these 100,000 people coming in and downloading my podcast and subscribing.

44:40 So I was beating out the nightly news and like all these pop family guy, 60 minutes. I was right up there on the top. It says something about in those days, if you were early in the process and knew what you were doing, you really could establish a reputation that was almost global by virtue of the fact that nobody else was doing this stuff.

44:59 Now, somebody sits there and says, I've got this great idea for a show and tries to vibe code it. Well, that's great. And God bless you. But there's 700 million other people out there who are doing exactly the same thing using exactly the same tools. So the fact that you can do that, which, again, I think is wonderful, and I'm hoping we get a lot more cool young artists who are using these new tools, but it doesn't differentiate you anymore because pretty much anybody can vibe code some of these things.

45:29 That's an overstatement because as I've learned. It's exactly on the money because the term scarcity is exactly what we're talking about, and the barrier to entry was the expense of the equipment. Right. And consequently, now that you're only doing a subscription to an app and it's somewhere in Utah or Nevada or wherever the, you know, the humming stack of computers is, that's we're going to have a whole new revolution of creatives.

45:58 But this term that I'm hearing, very popular, you know, AI slop is exactly that. But we don't have the engineers. I'm kind of jumping onto the next question. Should I jump to the next question? Yeah, let's jump to the next question. Vic Hernandez in Springfield, Missouri comes up with our next question. And he says, what tech do you miss most? And mine is the engineer.

46:25 Because the engineers were the gatekeepers. Because the equipment was so expensive. The crazy engineer, worst possible case, was Technicolor. in Hollywood, and David, please tell me you didn't do this to your editors, but you physically, they physically stapled the mouse cable down because they didn't want the editors coming in and rearranging the keyboards and the mouse. Because again, we horrible freelancers would

46:57 come in and need to zhoosh things around, but the engineer says, not on my watch. Oh, yeah. Well, there was a kind of a gatekeeping priesthood. It's all, all of my radio days, you could decide you want to do this or wanted to do that. But if the engineering team didn't say you can do that, you didn't get to. And you never brought liquid into the keyboard.

47:21 Why was that, David? Why is that, David? Tell us about it. I mean, it depends on the type of liquid. You know, a martini won't do that much damage. It evaporates. Is that what you're telling us? Ask me how? Your grain alcohol. The engineers do make mistakes, though, because I worked in an FM station for a while, and we did a simulcast of a Rolling Stones concert.

47:41 So I thought, OK, I'm just going to they're going to start showing. It's going to last for 90 minutes. So I turned off the lights in the studio and I got my chair and I settled back. And about three minutes later, the station scrammed and went off the air. I went, oh, God. And we got it back up. And I thought, oh, man, all these people are going to be so upset because they were synchronizing the FM to the TV and blah, blah.

48:00 And finally, the station got back up in the air. Oh, my God. That was so stressful. So I settled back, turned off the lights, and settled back to watch the thing. And four minutes later, the station goes off the air. The idiot engineer had wired the light switch into the telemetry to the transmitter. So when I was turning off the lights in the studio, it was killing the signal to the mountain.

48:24 And without the signal, it had to scram the transmitter. Can I share? I'm on set and the guy is using the engineer maybe maybe David you told me this story but there is a coffee maker in the in the edit suite maybe Jeff won't have Jeff told me this story but they said do not use that the power sources are not good we can't have a coffee maker says well I want my coffee it says

48:53 well bring it from in but you can't and so because every time they would use the coffee maker it would overheat the entire electrical panel and shut the whole trailer down well sure enough the person came back in and they took the hot pot away from him it didn't happen and but sure enough the next day the trailer went down again the engineer comes in and says i told

49:20 you no coffee he says i was making tea oh guy cochran he had a note here I was just spelunking, and one of the things that I found while I was spelunking is this, which is pretty rare. Is that a DIN 6? ADV. So this accompanies that, Black Mac TV. So that's a super rare. It's like yours, Bill, that you have behind you, but it had a TV tuner in it.

49:54 They only made about 8,000 of them. Oh, yeah. I remember hearing about that. this mouse click it just it's there's something about it so i look i look this thing up on ebay 125 bucks sitting in a hundred another one yeah for 173 for a mouse up but that's the the crazy retro stuff that people you know they miss this stuff they miss those well you know it did make

50:15 a difference in your life for some of us these weird things that we got i mean i got this evo 9700 this weird dual weld tape deck and it really changed my life i was shooting on hi8 i wanted to get into doing video i couldn't get myself into a tv station to use the big cameras so i used a tax refund and got a an eight millimeter camera and i used and i started making my first programs

50:38 and the next thing you know i'm starting to get money for it and you know fast forward 20 years later and i'm running an advertising agency why because i figured out how to use that stupid little do-a-well editor and I lit my brain up in a way that nothing else had before that. So you never know what's going to supercharge your thinking. And so my advice for anybody who's

51:02 young who's watching this is just keep exploring, keep figuring things out because you never know what's going to be the light bulb flip switch. Let's go to the next question in our list. This one is coming in from Josh Kaufman in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. What complicated workflow work around you routinely use that would seem absurd to someone entering the industry today? Skyrace's hand on this one. Well, I did because I'm thinking about my friend in Boise, Idaho, that he and I are

51:31 now sharing a nonlinear editing system. It's in the cloud. We're sharing the timeline. I'm watching him edit. He's watching me edit. We're seeing things in real time. But then just last week, we did hook up Claude to Black Magic and he is not an editor but he assembled an edit in a matter of minutes because we've got the pipes all connected together

51:59 and so in this exponential thing that used to be the barrier to entry of doing something we are now physically being duct taped to the outside of the rocket ship of things that are happening So while we're bringing up these old archive dusty things, then the generation that's not listening to this show is is doing things that we didn't know couldn't that we didn't we didn't believe could be done because we didn't have the imagination.

52:29 So I'm going to I'm going to vote for what complicated workflow is routinely used. I'm going to say the imagination. That is a pretty complicated workflow. David Brady, thoughts? Yeah. For us in the work group that I was with, we used to record just about everything on TV via this product called Snapstream. And Snapstream would do it in TS format, but then we had to deliver things to sports division, all these other places, in whatever flavor that they wanted.

53:04 So we had this complicated Rube Goldberg system that would, the Snapstream would record to one drive. We'd have some watch folders that would then get pulled into a Telestream Vantage. And depending on what the target was, it would transcode and re-mux everything. And it was just overly complicated for us to do on the front end for people down the road instead of them doing it on their local thing.

53:30 But it was still fun. it was a scripting education for sure. And maybe that was the point. It got you into a different way of thinking. And the first time you dive into something like scripting where there's legitimate rules you have to follow, it kind of programs your brain to think in a different way. And that way turns out to be really useful

53:51 for a lot of other things you do. Let's go to our next question. Oh, that's me. Josh Kaufman in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania says, If you had to produce a show today using only gear available 25 years ago, what would be the hardest modern capability to give up? Oh, my God. Everybody wants to get on this because it would be difficult. So, Guy punched first.

54:16 So, Guy, you're up. Then Sky, then David. Guy, go. Well, I was looking for the video where I made one on the Firestore FS4, which was the first affordable way of digitally capturing DV. as a a stream so it was coming through the firewire port recording onto a file and that was pretty amazing so i'm going to say that these tapes which uh i have oh yeah here

54:44 if you guys remember these tapes i do not miss real-time capture this one hour tape would take an hour to capture and i had the bigger ones that were 184 minute dv cam so if you shot a three hour show and especially if you had multiple cameras and you had to ingest all those you were you were camping for a while and then if you had to re uh in final cut if you wanted to bring just your

55:10 online edits back on the deck would have to scrub and just go and find that spot and then it would start to capture and it would pre-roll and it was it would go all around hunting for those clips so i don't miss that stuff uh i don't miss doing it at all the other thing i had one more camera around here. Jeez, you know

55:32 I got a lot of stuff around here, but I'm missing a big camera. Oh, here it is. Oh, man. There's an ancient one for you. Serious lens on your camera. So this one, this is a studio camera, so it did not, actually, here's the pairing to it. So it did not record. You needed a deck. I have a similar camera like that.

55:54 So then this is how you would shade your camera and so you have your iris control and your white balance uh shutter speed all from here remotely so that's a uh something that uh today most people would be like what you how are you having to do all that stuff it's like uh well some of the some of the stuff i do miss

56:14 because i could zoom in from this thing and with our a lot of our lenses we don't have the zoom servo capability uh from afar so some of the old stuff right par focal lenses are harder to find Yeah. Sky? I'm kind of going along the line with Guy, though, in the sense of what I wouldn't miss. And again, it's a lot of this stuff that we've been showing.

56:38 And I did a show in Boise two weeks ago, and I shot it all on my iPhone because it gives me the quality, the turnaround time, the efficiency. It was up in the cloud. The editor had a hold of it instantaneously. We were turning on a dime. The AI was already set up for what the questions were going to be. So it pre-edited a lot of the rough edit for us that by the time I got done with the show,

57:08 I had quality footage that was in full-on 4K that I could now turn into vertical or horizontal for the client. And so to do all of that in the past, I started with, it used to be a 35-foot production truck that you and I made our living on. And David, you supported that. And I got to work in that. And it was a great honor, but a huge challenge.

57:38 So I'm kind of reversing it, Josh. Sorry. Thanks for letting me be here. David Brady. Okay, I'm going to answer it verbatim. What would be the hardest modern capability to give up would be undo. There you go. Oh, my God, yes. David for the win. David for the win. Yeah, that's a nice one. For me, the answer is also one word, but it's metadata.

58:04 I was so fortunate to have friends like Greg and Philip who were really heavy thinkers in this. And I think I've saved more hours over the last 40 years because they schooled me early on the importance of setting camera metadata, setting metadata throughout the whole editing process. And I've literally done gigs and gotten paid for gigs where because my metadata markup, particularly using things like the keywords, the frame accurate system in Final Cut, when I got everything, when I schooled myself into putting an endpoint at the right frame because I knew where that scene started and putting an outpoint at the end of the right frame and with just enough pads so that I was pretty sure it could cut against the next scene correctly.

58:55 I actually had one moment where I did that. I rated all the takes of a radio spot. I took nothing but sorted by A's and I hit assemble. And I had a finished spot with one keystroke. And it was because I had paid attention to marking and applying metadata correctly. And I think that was one of the days my brain lit up more than it ever has before.

59:19 I just realized that the entire world now is operated by the control of metadata. And if you understand that at a deep level, you can save so much time. Anyway, that's speaking of saving so much time. We have eaten up an entire hour. I didn't expect it to go this fast. Thank you all so much for being here and doing this with me.

59:41 I enjoyed this immensely. And we'll probably come back around and do something similar again at some point. Because, you know, it's important to know where you are. It's important to have an idea on the future to understand where things are going. But I tell you, if you're lucky enough to have been around long enough to learn lessons from the past, it always shocks me at how much some little thing I learned in the past,

1:00:07 particularly personal discipline things. Don't get upset because you have to renumber these things because it's going to make you remember it next time. You won't make the same mistake, not just on this job, but in 100 jobs in the future. And each one of those you'll save time on. Those kind of lessons are what a career is really made up of for me.

1:00:26 So thank you all, gentlemen, for sharing your pluses and minuses, your ideas and your thinking. This is what office hours is great for. For those of you who are interested, there's a lot of traversal today. This was episode 2380, and you would have traveled 5,000 miles to get this information. Otherwise, that's 37 million bananas for scale. Our huge thanks to everybody in the back end for making this show possible every time we do it.

1:00:52 We'll be back next Tuesday. And I'm not sure what we're doing next Tuesday because our schedule is a little bit off. But we will have something for you. We always do. And my only hope is it is as much fun as this one was with my friends. Thank you so much. We'll see you all next time on the Tuesday Focus on Office Hours.

1:01:09 Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you.