So, good afternoon. I'm glad you stuck around. A few minutes ago I was counting, "Wow, five people. Cool." So, my name's Dennis Biela. My company's called Lightspeed Media. We do a lot of VR work. We're going to talk about some of our projects and such. I've been taking pictures for a long time. All this tells you is that I've been out there a while.

Part of the thing is I'm also a pilot, which is kind of like a love/hate thing I have with the museum. We'll be talking about the projects. I've been teaching for Apple for like five or six years now, doing presentations and such. Normally I do a running dialogue. If you want to ask questions during the presentation, feel free.

But today they want me to hold you or hold the questions till the end. So if you have a couple of questions, please try to remember those at the end of the presentation. We'll have some Q&A and I'll be happy to answer anything that you may think of. And usually I have one rule.

And my one rule is this: There's no such thing as a stupid question. Right? So if you think that you have this stupid question, just feel free to ask it. If it's really stupid, I have a prize. So it's a chance for you to win. It's a chance for you to look really stupid in the crowd, but get something for it. So feel free to ask questions.

My current project, I'm working with the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. And last year they started up a whole new museum. We had, while they were doing the construction, we had a bunch of aircraft and space artifacts that we had to photograph. How many of you were here last year? Can I, anybody here? I got one, I got two, three, four.

All right, so I got about four people. So most of you, this is new material. So I can run my old jokes. I don't need the new jokes this year. So anyway, this is an unwrapped image from a QuickTime VR. And we'll talk a little bit about some of the uses. This is the Enola Gay.

This is the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. That's the actual photograph. And then we have 3D rendering of water on the outside. The museum thought it would be kind of tacky. to have a mushroom cloud, so we just stayed with sky. So what is QuickTime VR? So we have a couple different pieces. If we could switch really quick.

Ah, there we go. So QuickTime VR is basically like an animation. It's a series of still images to build up an effect. So here is a monocoop, and it's called Little Butch. And I can click on one side, and I can rotate the aircraft. We get a full 360 of the view. Let me close that. That's an object movie. And then I'll show you a panoramic of-- There it is.

That same B29, let me put that full screen for you. So this is the inside of the Enola Gay. And I can look, I can go down. For the museum, we'll talk about some of the advantages and the reasons why in education this is all of a sudden starting to really take off. But I've got this full 360 environment that I can look around in.

So this is a series of still images. I'll talk more about the hardware later. But it's 18 shots, 18 still photographs. And we use an application that goes in and blends them together. We shot the windows with like blue tarps outside so then we could drop out the windows and run in a sky. So let's close that. If I could go back to my presentation, please.

Okay, so we have over 200 aircraft to shoot, 144 space artifacts. The project was going to take like eight months when we started. Actually, it was going to be three to six months. And now it looks like I'm going to be stuck there nine years. So I have a lot of stuff to shoot yet.

The other thing is that I learned a whole new vocabulary working with the government. You know, things like we have a funding shortfall. Now, for those of you that have never dealt with the government before, funding shortfall means that you can work as long as you want, but we can't pay you.

Okay, so that was the first term that I had to like grasp the concept. The next term is a really major one. If anyone ever uses this on you, like in Washington, DC, you know that the rug's going to be pulled out from underneath you. It's called fiscal responsibility. Anytime you hear that, you know that the ax is falling right on your head. So anyway, we photographed a lot of rare aircraft. I have approximately 90 airplanes shot so far and about 40 space artifacts and a lot of cool things.

I mean, for me as a pilot, it was really unique because like I'm inside the Enola Gay. You know, I'm inside the original Learjet. You know, you learn a lot of things for trivia pursuit. You know, you're really good at games also. But so it was like a big privilege. a big honor for myself.

we'll have shot 60,000 images. So there's a lot of issues. I was used to smaller projects, you know, maybe 10,000 pictures. Now I'm looking at 60,000 images. We'll have about a terabyte of data. And there's a whole slew of things that you have to keep track of, and there's a whole slew of issues that start propping up. So one of the things that I never counted on in the beginning was the fact that I would become an administrator. Now, I'm a photographer.

I love taking pictures. That's what I do. I do a lot of different projects and stuff, but I always get involved in taking pictures. Well, this was a project where I had to start focusing on, like, managing other people, but also managing the content, making sure that everything is taken care of and keeping track. All right.

The new museum had opened up in December of this past year. They had 85 artifacts in place when they opened up, and they're averaging 330,000 visitors per month. So they had a big celebration a few months back for the first millionth visitor. The museum is on track for hitting 4 million visitors per year.

But what you have to remember is that the Smithsonian, the National Air and Space Museum specifically, is the most visited museum in the world. They average 14 million visitors per year. That's over a million visitors per month walking through the facility. So we have a lot of issues in dealing with electronic content when we're talking those types of numbers. So basically, the reason why we got involved in the project, the major thing that the museum has an issue with, is you. You, the visitor. We have a problem with you. We want you to come. We want you to visit.

But don't get too close. Don't touch that artifact now. You know, when you hit that type of volume of people coming through, you can't allow them to touch anything. You know, just think about having to wipe off a countertop after a million people have touched that countertop. So it's that type of analogy. So we got involved with creating content for the museum so they could put in kiosks so people could electronically visit the interior of the aircraft.

That's the number one complaint that the museum has, is there's no way to see the interior. They have cutaway drawings. They have pictures. But you can't get inside. So we allowed the Smithsonian a way to actually get inside the aircraft, to be able to look around and visually see what's going on.

Hardware, a little bit about how we shoot and what we use. This was from last year. Apple Computer helped out on the computers. If they hadn't, I wouldn't be here. Nikon and Canon digital cameras. We have a couple cameras from each manufacturer. Bogan supplied lighting. Kydan with VR heads. I had a, we'll talk more about later, but I had a special robotic head created for shooting some of the aircraft. Alexa, Compact Flashcards, and then Gray Tag Macbeth for color. Color became a big issue for us in the very beginning.

Smithsonian has certain standards and we had to fit in or meet those goals. Part of the thing that we're doing for the museum is that, remember earlier I talked about the VR and I had shot 18 still images of the interior. I'm using a Canon 1DS and that 1DS is making a 31 megabyte file each. Okay, so we're making like 600 to 700 megabytes of data of each node, each rotation, of the interior of every aircraft.

So to Smithsonian, the VR is really cool, but the other thing that they're accomplishing is they're documenting the interior of every aircraft. It was something that they never had before. So it was a great thing for them to be able to have all this information and we'll show you some high resolution VR later as far as how the interiors look.

Okay, we had five computers, two photographers, myself and David Palermo. We had a couple volunteers. You know, there's that funding shortfall, right? So if we give you people that you don't have to pay, we could do this for less, right? So there's always people who are volunteering, wanting to come to the Smithsonian to work. They assigned a staff member, and the one CES staff member, that was the janitor.

You know, he would come by and clean up the floor, take away our trash. But to the Smithsonian, that's a line item. Well, we have to pay that guy. You know, you make trash, we have to pay him. I was like, yeah, but there's this funding shortfall. If we leave the trash for an extra two weeks, could you pay me? So anyway.

Our areas in the museum, we had to do blue screen for chroma keying, for the object movies, also for some of the interiors. Originally, I had all these fancy drawings of, "We're going to make a blue wall," or, "We're going to put up a wall and paint it blue," and all that. Well, we didn't have funding for that. We didn't have the cash. Those are drop cloths, those big blue tarps that they use at construction sites. It's 60 feet tall and about 100 feet long, but they're really shiny.

When they first came in, I had to sit there with a broom with sandpaper tied to it. I sat there and took the sheen off, all 100 and whatever feet long, sitting there sanding away. People would come by, and they would ask me these really intriguing questions. "Are you painting that?" or "Are you just trying to brush it off?" Nobody ever got it right. I was just trying to take the sheen off the material.

So this is the museum when we were first getting started. You can see the long hall, the blue tarp being hung. We had to come up with a way to rotate the airplane. There's a real intriguing company in Seattle, Washington called Hover Air. Now Hover Air makes these what they call air bearings, and they're basically little pallets that you can put weight on.

We were going to get four of those and then kind of like bolt them together so we could roll the aircraft up on these pallets, you know, inject air and then be able to lift the airplane up. Each pallet is rated at 10,000 pounds and then rotate the airplane. Now each of those pallets cost like $5,000 to $6,000.

They were going to give us a discount, but it never happened. Again, it was just a funding issue, so I had to think. I had to think of ways to solve problems. So one of the ways that we did that was we had to do a lot of research.

One of the ways we did that was we had these, they're called basket dollies. We have up to, we have several, and some of them can handle 20,000 to 30,000 pounds each basket. They're used on ships. Specifically, they're used on aircraft carriers to move the jets into tight spaces. After they land and bring them down below deck, they could move the jets so they could really stack them in. So we got three of those.

And then we would like use the girders and then bolt them together and then roll the airplane up and then we have a 150 pounds of weight and a little rod coming up as our spindle so we could rotate the aircraft in place. And if you can't see it here, I'll show it to you in another shot, but there's pieces of blue tape.

We sat there one day and we just measured out every 10 degrees so there's 36 pieces of tape and we would just physically move the airplane so it would line up on the tape. This solution here costs us 29 bucks. Okay, so let's see, I can spend $15,000 or I can spend $29. Okay, so it was one of the ways that we were able to overcome the challenges that we incurred.

This is the space where I shot now. Okay, you saw how it was before. It's now the food court, you know, because times change, the museum's open, stuff like that. So I have to shoot at night when nobody's there. Before I could shoot like normal hours. Now I have this. You can only work at certain times of the night.

But you also have to leave before the sensors kick in. And the sensors, the motion sensors are so sensitive that they can actually show you your heartbeat rate, you know, in the museum. So when there's only one or two people in there. So our project is continuously evolving.

This is for heavier aircraft. This is the blue lines that we were talking about. This is just two-inch steel pipe. And we have slides and we can just quickly move them, the slides in and out. And then it's bolted to the heavier basket dollies and then we can rotate. So this particular airplane is about 14,000 pounds.

And so we had to come up with ways to rotate heavier and heavier airplanes. Now I've rotated a lot of interesting airplanes up to the Concorde. It's a little bit big, a little heavy. It can only fit in one way through the museum doors. But pretty much everything else down as far as size and weight, we were able to rotate. rotate.

Okay, this is our new office. We'll talk more about that. We now have two G5 Power Macs, a PowerBook, just myself. I have three volunteers and one NASM, National International Space Museum, staff member to help out. So that's my new office. My old office was a storage closet, which was 10 by 11. So now I have a space that's 10 by 20. So I'm just styling now. I mean, I've got all this room. We have a 7600 printer also. We do a lot of posters. The current project, or current phase of the project, is to shoot missiles.

We're in the space artifacts. They're getting ready to open up the space hall. So I'm shooting a lot of these missiles. What's the purpose of the project? We're shooting a lot of these older missiles at this moment. We're also shooting space capsules, and in two weeks I shoot one of the space shuttles. So we'll be actually going through a functioning space shuttle, not one of these simulators.

Okay, no two shots are ever alike. Every time I go to shoot something, it's a consistent variable. You know, the cockpits are different sizes, we'll have different setups. This is a Kynan head right here, and we had to build like wood form factors, you know, kind of like, you know, like a box so I could bolt it down so I could rotate the camera around. This is my own homemade rig where I could use a fisheye lens. I would do four shots going around.

This particular glider, it's, I'm sorry, this is a wooden glider from the 30s, and the wind screen, or however I want to call it, the shielding was molded to the guy's head, all right? It was only six inches across, so there was no way I could get a regular VR head in there once the piece was set over it. So we came up with the shooting with fisheyes for that.

The other thing is I have an automated head, a robotic head. It takes the camera and moves it into position. That's really great for jets because on the jets, the hydra, usually the, like an F-15, okay, the F-15, it's a hydraulic mechanism to raise and lower. Well, unfortunately, the hydraulic fluid's all drained out, everything's turned off, so there's no way to raise and lower it.

We can, we have to crank it. So let's say 18 shots, you crank it, it takes 15 minutes, an aircraft, all right, 15 minutes up and 15 minutes down to crank that sucker. So the robotic head became really important to us just so we didn't have to sit there and wait the, you know, wherever that would be, you know, third, no, 18 shots times 15 minutes, like four hours.

Color. We talked about this earlier. I use a lot of Apple technologies in what I'm doing. So color became a big thing for us because it wasn't that I couldn't get the individual images, you know, let's say 36 shots to match. I could do that pretty well. What the Smithsonian wants is this is a visual record. Remember what I'm doing? I'm documenting history. You know, like I get a phone call from a friend of mine at like, I forget what time it was. It was like 8 o'clock.

at night. And he's like, you know, calling me up and I'm like really busy. So I'm telling him, look, I'm sorry, I have to go. I'm shooting the right flyer. And his response was, you know, if you didn't want to talk to me, you could just say so.

So I'm like, I'm photographing and documenting history. So, Smithsonian is very paranoid, I would have to say, about color reproduction. So we had to go through and really work on color sync and work on calibrating the camera and getting everything a very good consistency, so that they know if they open up an image that that's the correct color.

We actually got to the point of GrayTag Macbeth makes a color calibrator for the screens that can also be used to take measurements off of anything, any flat piece of art or whatever. So usually what we do is we photograph the gray card and the color wedge chart, and then we take the GrayTag Macbeth sensor, and then we take a color reading off of the artifact.

We then, and if it's a multicolor piece, we'll be taking multiple readings, and that can actually be added into the metadata. So now all these files, and we script, we do a lot of scripting so we can automate, all these files now have all that color information right in the Photoshop file.

So that way there, somebody opens it up, they say, well, okay, I want to reproduce that color. What color was it? They have that actual densitometer readings to tell them exactly what that color was. So it became really a concern of mine and something that we had to work through. So Kevin O'Connor, he's one of the ColorSync specialists for Apple. He goes out there and teaches and stuff, got involved, helped me out. He brought GrayTag Macbeth in.

They supplied the calibrators, the software. They continuously give us updates and support. It works out really well. And then, of course, Apple Computer with ColorSync became a big issue for us, working with, you know, with the color sync and color sync, and then, of course, Apple Computer with ColorSync became a big issue for us, working with, you know, with the color sync and color sync, and then, of course, Apple Computer with ColorSync became a big issue for us, working with, you know, issue for us, working with color sync so that, you know, what we shot, what we saw became what we actually got.

My volunteers. I asked for, you know, they came up to me and said, "What would you be looking for in a volunteer?" I said, "Blonde, blue-eyed, 24 to 30, single. I got Doc Harvey." So, Doc Harvey is actually a famous neurologist. He has some of the medications like, what's that one, Zorloff, is Doc Harvey's creation. So, he's an avid photographer and he wanted to do something with photography in the Smithsonian, they sent him my way. And then, right behind him, that's Dr. Elliot.

So, and Doc Elliot is a dentist, so every time I go in there while he's always, "Did you floss today?" So, they tend to work on all the retouching for us. They, we have about, I think, about a hundred or so, I think, about a hundred Oh, 320 gigs in each machine, and they'll come in to have a regular sequence. We have a very precise sequence of things that they have to do to the images. They just can't jump on anything. They have to follow a certain routine. We have a lot of off-site backups.

We have several FireWire hard drives at the museum where we keep all the data. We also have several FireWire drives at the main museum with the same data, and then I personally keep a couple of copies, two sets of copies of all the images. Again, it's just that, you know what? If the place burns down, there's no way I could replace all this work. So paranoia kind of finally crept in, and I just started making more and more copies.

Doug is our museum gopher. That's all I can call him. He helps us out. He makes sure that everything happens. But at times, he's ready to do himself in because he has to deal with the museum, so I'm always giving him his chance. This is a Navy prototype. It actually flew in the '50s. It was for... They would launch it off-ship.

All these types of missiles have hanging points, so we've started now, instead of making casters, we actually suspend everything from the ceiling. So we have a whole rig set up now with a crane. They'll bring in the artifact. We hoist it up and get going. I'll show you some more images of that in a little bit. Use a lot of software. I'm going to talk a little bit about the software.

Canon... I don't have Nikon up there. I apologize. Canon and Nikon both have, like, their equivalent of remote control. We tether the cameras to the computer. Now I'm using a laptop before I used to use an iMac. But I'll have it hooked up through FireWire, and I'll fire it from the computer. And the reason why I do that is I save the download time.

I'm not going to the card, taking the card out, putting it into a card reader. I'm going right to the drive of my computer. And the other thing is that the little displays, you know, those little displays, those little screens on the back of the camera aren't always the most accurate things to judge color and density by.

You really need to use a thing called a histogram if you want to be serious. So I just found that going to the computer saved me time. Plus now I'm using a calibrated screen, and I have the histogram show up. So it was a much better way of doing things.

Photoshop CS. Who could live without Photoshop? Photoshop. Apple computer. I actually use Preview. I tend to drop the images over Preview when I want to review things quickly. iPhoto. A lot of professional photographers give me a problem with iPhoto, but I'll show you some cool stuff with iPhoto later. Shake.

Shake is saving me tons of time. I have a lot of people saying, "Shake, you know, it's $3,500." And your point is? So, do you think I really bought that? So, but anyway, Shake is saving us a lot of time because when you see those pictures of the airplane, you know, against the blue background, that's what Doc Harvey and Lewis, or Lewis, um, Elliot would actually draw a path over each individual image. What we're doing now with Shake is we take a picture of this background without any image, I mean without any aircraft, and then we start shooting our sequence.

We bring the images into Shake, and we, what is Shake? Basically, it's a high-end rotoscoping program. It has a lot of other features, a lot of other powers, but I'm only interested in the rotoscoping aspect of it. So, it looks at the background without any missile in it.

It then looks at the missiles and it says, "Okay, well, everything that is yellow, it stays, and everything else outside of the yellow now gets dropped out." So, before, it would take us two days to do one object movie, alright? Running Shake, it takes three hours. So, you know, people talk about how expensive it is. It is an expensive app.

It's not a cheap thing. There are other things out there I understand that could probably do it, you know, but at least I get tech support with Apple where I wouldn't get tech support with some of the other products out there. But look at the amount of time I'm saving. Then think about the amount of images I have to shoot. Two hundred airplanes.

Two hundred airplanes at thirty-six shots each, you know, times X amount of days. Shake pays for itself in a few, you know, few weeks. It's already made it, my life, much easier. So, that's why it's highlighted. I just like, I love the thing dearly. QuickTime VR Authoring Studio from Apple, I use that. And then Mail, because the government is all email, you know.

What are you doing today? What are you doing tomorrow? Where are we at? Can you send me that in an attachment? So, email is like my big thing. Realvis Stitcher 4. Now, this product here allows me to create cubic VR so that, you know, we can do the full 360 view inside. VR Toolbox, the Works 2.5.

That particular product we use a lot when we're wiring together or putting together like nodes. Nodes are rotation. And like in the B29, we do that. In the B29, we want to do a walkthrough. Now, the reason why we like the Works is that it's pretty easy to use.

So, I don't have a lot of training that I have to worry about with some of my volunteers. And it allows us to do linear video in between. We'll see some of those samples in a little bit. Great Tag Macbeth for color and fetch. I do a lot of uploading of images.

Smithsonian, they can never wait for stuff. They're always like, could I get that? Like, you know, and I'll be like, yeah, when do you need that? Oh, can I have that now? So, I do a lot of FTPing. Okay, so we're going to look at some of the QuickTime stuff. We're going to talk about some of the benefits of the QuickTime VR and why I see it as like, you know, this whole big growth market. So we'll go to the demo.

I love it when technology works. So like we were talking about before, we have this full 360, right? I can look around, I can go up, I can go down. So for the museum, this was a natural, right? I've got a cockpit, I want people to see how the interior of the airplane looks. My number one complaint. But then we started doing so much more with it. So let me show you.

Object movies. This is a standard object movie. This is a moon suit. The moon suits are, you may not know, they're disintegrating to dust. It's that, differential metals, there's a term for it, I'm sorry, I'm just a photographer. So, but when you have this similar metals touching each other, they start to break down over the course of time. There's several different metals made into the weave of a space suit. They're stored in like lockers that they would use for bodies, which they got from some department in the government, which kind of creeped me out.

But, so, anyway, they've got all these space suits in these lockers, these frozen lockers, and they'll pull them out and pull out the space suits. So, I've shot a bunch of space suits. It's kind of like a big honor because they don't just pull them out for anybody. And here, I can click and then I can rotate and I can see the different sides. sides.

So an object movie. Let's close that. And then we looked at the airplane before, of course. You know, I can look at the different sides. I could zoom in if I wanted, but I started doing more things with motion. You know, they wanted to show, like, different aspects, so... Now I have to put out a disclaimer here. I've used this piece a long time.

This is a friend of mine. I had to do a VR for a clothing manufacturer. And they were trying to figure out after they had saw this, like, okay, we'll make a big turntable, you know, we'll spin it at a certain rate, we'll try to have her stand still.

And, you know, I'm sitting there like, you know, that's not your job, that's my job as a photographer. Besides, I'm worried she'll throw up. So all I did was, you know, take a video camera and videotaped her. By the way, I have to put this out there. There's a tire right behind her butt, so her butt's not that big.

This is just a video clip. I'll grab it here, I'll rotate, you can see the tire, now I can see the back of the jacket, I can see the front, I can rotate, see the back of the jacket, I'll come a little bit off. there so now the tire shows. Anyway as streaming video or as compressed video that's about a meg to a meg and a half depending on the screen size.

As an object movie in QuickTime VR it's 410k so I've shrunk it by a factor of I know what is that two hundred percent something like that a little bit more so and we don't need all those frames right videos running at 24 frames per second I don't need all those frames just to show a turn so when I started showing this to the museum and we started working on stuff they came up with a whole new way to use this so now what we're doing is we're photographing or we're videotaping landings we're going to be doing some aircraft carrier landings and we're going to show through QuickTime VR how the aircraft comes in when it flares you know the highlight all those different points when the aircraft comes in and it's more interactive than watching a straight video right because you have control you can click and start moving the cursor back and forth as opposed to just letting it play I didn't do this piece. An actual friend of mine wired this together.

It kind of gives you some aspects to think about. This is a skinned movie. Skin is the shell or the casing, the outer wrapper. It's my crude attempt at a video camera. That's why I'm a photographer, because I can't draw. I have a lot of features put into this.

You know, I can look around. This is a standard cylinder. Alright, but maybe you want some information out of this. So now I'll click on angles. And within this VR, now as I rotate, that's degrees of a compass. So I'm at 107 degrees. I'm at 8 degrees. A lot of applications out there now being able to give you the capability to do that. But think about education. Think about being in the middle of, you know, like the Titanic, underwater, rotating around, having information start showing up, telling you what you're looking at, all embedded in the movie.

It's not an asset that's going to go, like, lost, or it's not something that you need to worry about. It's part of that movie. So QuickTime with the skins and the able to script and do wiring or that type of stuff became a big deal for us. Let me turn that off. So now I've got, let's say I've got 50 caves. Alright, and I want to go to the next cave. I'll click. I now have this transition. So it's actually just a linear movie.

And now I'm, that was rendered out, and it's just taking me to the next cave. Now it dumps off. I'm inside that cave. Well, let's say I had those 50 caves. You know, that video transition, the first one, man, that's cool. The second one, yeah, it's okay. The third one, I'm way over this, right? You've got 50 caves to go through. That's 25 tunnels. So now we just have it wired in. I turn off the transition. I'll come back around. I'll click. Now I just jump to my next cave.

QuickTime is pretty impressive because it has all these wired capabilities that you as content creators or people putting the data together, or you can have somebody put this data together for you. So I found that that became a big selling point for us. It wasn't also creating the content and also shooting with high resolution cameras. It was the fact that I could give them more features, more abilities with QuickTime than any other media.

Close that. So, Concorde, I'll take you inside the Concorde. So this is the Concorde. As you know, or you may know, that Air France and British Airways gave Smithsonian, one of their fleet, they gave away seven different aircraft. And, you know, I can look around. See the different sides, I can go up, you know, that type of thing. But, you know, I'm a kid, I'm interested in, like, stuff, right? I just want to learn something, so I'm going to zoom in.

You know, now I can read all the information, all the detail, figure out what the gauges do. In the latest creation that the Smithsonian is doing, as you would move your cursors through, you know, text would show up and it would start telling you what this device does and how it interacts with the airplane. So, as I said, a great educational tool. Let's go back.

I'm going to show you something. I got permission to do this today. It's actually really cool. If I say it's really cool, then it has to be really cool. I hope I grabbed the right one. No, hold on. Don't change that, Donald. It's this one. Isn't it opening? I hate demoing beta stuff. All right, we'll do this. We'll try again. We'll start over.

There we go. Okay, so you're wondering, "Why is this guy excited about this? We're just seeing some cars pass by. I'm excited about this because I can do this." This is like video VR. At any point in time I can start like scrolling around looking at the different aspects.

It's actually set up to do cubics though. You have to think about like how to fill in the top and the bottom. But we're seeing linear video that we can rotate around in. So for, let's just jump out of the box and say for a Smithsonian, it's real easy. I've mounted cameras on airplanes.

Right? So now as you're coming in for a landing to the carrier, you can actually spin around and see everything that's going around inside that cockpit. What a great training tool. Race cars. Think about the fact of having this inside a race car. And you can see everything that's going around inside the driver's environment as he's driving.

So this player is kind of neat. It's not the actual player that will play back in QuickTime, but I can do a combo. So this is the actual unwrapped piece on the bottom and the blue box signifies what we're actually seeing in the top. This is done with a standard mini DV three chip camera.

So we're not talking like lots of high end hardware in that way, but it does require some accessories for the lens. Basically we're shooting up into a sphere. So it's like a one shot solution. And then that sphere is being unwrapped in the software. All right. It's a tough crowd. I can tell it's a long day. If I can have my slides back, please.

Okay, so working on a large, we're now going to kind of get into some of the meat of the project and some of the problems I ran into that if you're doing even a small QuickTime project, I think it's good to know. So the Smithsonian tests out everything.

You wouldn't believe how many times I had to make like prototypes. Even before we started on the project and I knew I was going to do it, I'd have to prototype interface and stuff all the time for them to look at, to test. They wanted to figure out about the kiosk on the floor at the museum.

So they actually went out and they did focus groups. Focus groups are, you know, they bring in a group like you and they sit you in front of a screen and they say, "Tell us what you think." So they got past the first focus group and then they started deploying a couple of kiosks and they brought in these people.

Now, I didn't have any content for them to put onto these screens. At the time we were still shooting. So what they did was they just shot, they had an old VR of a model airplane shot against black, a VR of it. And they threw that on the screen.

So the acceptance rate on a scale of 100 was at 25%. 25 people out of 100 that looked at that said, "Yeah, it was cool." The others said they wouldn't bother with it. So of course all the administrators are now getting upset because they've got this project, they've got all this imagery being created, and they're not sure if people are going to accept it.

So the first thing they do is they go to the screen and they say, "Hey, I want to see this." And the first thing I'm going to tell you when you start creating content or you're involved in a project is never, ever show bad samples. Okay? Only put out good work. I know it sounds kind of corny, but it's very important because as soon as we put the Learjet up there, you know, shot and rendered out in high res and blue background and all nicely clean, the acceptance rate jumped up to 72% overnight.

Just going from a plastic model with a black background to the real thing with blue increased by almost 50% how well people responded to it. They did some interface changes, they did some other cool things with information about the artifact as the artifact would rotate, and it jumped up to 84%. You know, anything above 70% is acceptable to a museum, and when you hit 80, they're like grins. They're really happy with you. So I'm always telling people if you're going to put out samples, even if it's just for a test, never put out anything but your best.

Remember that whatever you put out there represents you. And if you're willing to put out crap, then that -- sorry, that's my technical term for it. If you're willing to put out substandard work, because this is a family computer company, then, you know, that'll be the perception of the clientele and the public. your best foot forward.

I have a lot of people asking me about digital cameras. What's the best digital camera to use? And I tell them, yes. Whatever you can afford. Whatever you need. You know, they're all concerned about usually the wrong things. You know, they want to know, like, how many pixels does it have, and this and that. And you know what? It's really based on what the client needs. The client's needs, and I'll throw in another thing, also what, how should I phrase it now, what you use as a sales tool.

Part of my sales tool when I talk to a museum is I shoot all high resolution. You're going to have the highest quality possible from a digital camera. And if you've got 18 shots, that means you've got 18 12 by 14 inch prints that you can make of the interior. So for a Smithsonian or a museum, they're all about the quality. The resolution. So I need a high end camera. I have another client that does bathroom remodeling.

Okay. So what am I dealing with? White porcelain. Do you think I have a lot of detail I need to show? So if I was just shooting that all the time, then really all I need to worry about is an acceptable quality of image resolution. You know, how sharp it looks. But probably more as far as tonal range. How much white to black it can be. How much color it can show.

I may be looking at an entirely different camera than say like a Canon 1DS, which is more for the resolution than it is for maybe the tone range. So my standard response to people is to try out several different cameras. You know, manufacturers want to make sure that you're happy because there's, you know, you can go out and say I really love this camera.

You know, and you'll tell all your friends and maybe, you know, one or two people will listen to you. But you know what? If you buy a camera that you're displeased with, not only will you tell all your friends you're not happy, you'll tell anybody that will listen that you're not happy. And a manufacturer doesn't want to lose sales.

So he wants you to make sure you're happy. So I tell people go to a camera shop, try out the different cameras, see about the software, get on a couple of lists, see what people think. But it really should be what you are used to and then what you accept. I love high-end stereos. I'm really big into music. I bartered for a pair of $12,000 speakers. I mean, there's really cool stereo system. And, you know, stereo audio files, we even test out cables. Anything more than $50 is real money to me.

Hell, now, sorry. Right now, anything more than $10 is real money to me. So I try out everything. So even on the cameras and computers. You know, they want you to be happy, so go out and try it. Make sure you get the right product for what you need.

By the way, compact flash cards, they're getting bigger and bigger. Now we have companies making 8-gigabyte cards. It's great. I love having all that storage. The problem is that I've been in a field where I've dropped a memory card and lost it. It was from 10,000 feet, but that's okay. One day I'll find that right field.

I tend to use smaller cards, maybe like 1-gig cards, and swap them around. I never shoot all to one card. I keep moving the cards in and out. Just so that if one goes bad, I'm not replacing all the data. I'm only replacing a small portion of it. Just another little tip: cataloging. My God, cataloging is a whole separate class.

So, at least keep a simple database of how you have your stuff organized. Remember, we have a lot of images. We have our catalogs all broken out by days, by artifact numbers, catalog numbers, by colors. We also have to do searches by color. Photoshop CS makes it really easy to put that data in there in batches so you can get through it really quick.

Anything that saves me time. My business philosophy, my billing, is a little different than a lot of people. How many photographers are in the room? Two? Three? Okay. Four? How many web developers? Okay, good crowd. Put your hands down. How many just use me as an excuse to get out of work today? There we go.

So, my business philosophy is that the first thing you do wrong is they'll come to you and they'll say, "How much will this cost and how long will it take?" And you'll answer them, and you'll answer them pretty reasonably. But that's a big mistake. You'll come to me and say, "Dennis, I want you to do this project. How much is it? How long will it take?" I'll figure 10 hours. I want to make $150 an hour.

It's $1,500. I'll tell you $1,500. And you'll be trying to look for a number. Well, if I gave you 10 hours at $150 an hour, right, you're going to say, "Well, can't you do it in eight?" I don't have budget for 10. Could you do it in eight? You've already started giving away part of your negotiation by giving them numbers that they can shave.

All right? So, in my head, I'm doing the calculations. 10 hours, I want to make $150 an hour. It's $1,500. So, I put out $1,500. Okay? It's really tough to do that. Okay? It's really tough for the U.S. government to deal with that. You know, they are so -- they actually want to know what your markup is per hour. You know, so it's alien to them. But the flip side is, for me, it was a great business model because I give you a price of $1,500.

What's my goal now? I want to get through that job as fast as I can. If I can do that job in seven hours instead of 10, look at how much more profit I make. Now, I had this big discussion with this -- you know, Smithsonian and part of the government, and there's this organization called Ocon, office contracts and -- anyway.

And you know, they want to know the hours and stuff like that. I said, you know what? I'm giving you the per unit price. What are you worried about? And they're like, well, we want to... I'm like, no, no. If I get done faster, and they're like thinking, well, then we're overpaying you. No, you're not overpaying me. Look at it this way.

You have so many personnel assigned to me to work on that project. If I get done faster, look at all the money you're saving, too. Look at my incentive. If I can finish off faster, I'm saving money. I'm saving expenses. I'm making more money. But I'm saving you money, too.

Let's look at your model. You want to pay me per hour. What incentive is that for me to get done fast? You know, I want to spend an extra week working for you. You know, and that means that you'll have X amount of employees and X amount of insurance and X amount of this and that all tagged into that, too. So for that model, it took me a while to get the government, at least with me, to accept the fact of like, oh, yeah, we could save money if we just pay per unit as opposed to paying per hour.

So all my stuff is per units. You know, in my head, I know how many hours it'll take and what I want to make, and I know what the government will pay. But, you know, as far as what I show them on paper is, you know, a per unit price. Okay, cataloging. This is the current way we're doing it. There's our weights taped down to the floor at all the 10 degrees.

This is what we call a beauty shot. It hasn't gone into Photoshop yet for retouch or anything, but it just shows you the lines. We're suspending the artifact from the ceiling. There's actually special clamps bolted onto the I-beams. They actually, Smithsonian knows how much each beam can support, you know, because when you're the government, you have lots of time.

And so we know what our weight limits is as far as I'm using strobes. I'm bouncing them up into the ceiling. The ceiling was painted white and then silver on the sides. We did that. They didn't do that. So that way I could bounce the light up and then have it come down as opposed to building a big softbox or light modifier. It allowed me to get a nice soft light. You may be wondering about the glare, but I'll show you an image in a minute.

Sealy Posturepedic Mattresses. Their factory is two blocks away from the museum where I work on this stuff. So we get free mattresses all the time. So they use them to protect the artifact. So, you know, like, if that, you know, ever broke, you know, that artifact is only going to fall like a foot and a half down into a mattress. So that's why that's there.

This is a German glider bomb. It would be on a large aircraft, two prop job. They would get close to the target. They would release it, and it could glide up to 50 miles towards its target. So it has a little radio homing beam, that type of thing. It's extremely rare. So the Smithsonian, one of the things they do is they publish a lot of books. They do a lot of books.

So part of all this imagery I'm creating is going to be used in the museum. And I'm going to be using this image in the books. So here's that same shot that's appearing in a book about this artifact. You know, so all we did was drop out the background. And then in Photoshop there's a real, you know, two second technique for darkening where that glare was. And there's the artifact. It looks great. So 31 megabyte file.

I tend to shoot as close to the artifact as possible because I can always put in extra background. Okay. We use this particular blue because it's real easy. For the Smithsonian to key in, they have some weird applications to key into the blue and drop it out if they want. So a lot of that stuff.

Okay, so some of the things the Smithsonian does with the work. Kiosk, we talked about the kiosk. Plasma displays, they have, that's a big thing in museums. Also, what you need to remember if you're looking at creating content is you have to make a leap of faith, but think museum and then all think commercial.

You know, stores, you know, other entities, stuff like that. So a lot of plasma displays going into museums right now to display content. So the kiosk here actually, in the final rev, will have the kiosk and then two large flat panel 42-inch plasma displays. As the person starts moving around on the kiosk, the two flat panels will mirror that.

So that, you know, those 330,000 people that come in per month can get through all that content. Right now, part of the problems are is that they can't put in enough kiosks to handle that type of volume, especially at the main museum. So some of the things that we're doing is working on where you could have sections on the web you would view so much it would time out.

And then it would give you a web URL that you could go back to. We actually have more sophisticated stuff with smart cards, but then the government has these, like, knowledge, you know, we can't, you know, like on the bottom of the websites. You know, none of this will be used for anything else. So they figure if we don't ask for it, then we have no problems. It's always easier to say no. That's what I've learned in government. So final thing is handhelds. So I'll show you this.

I don't know if you can -- can you see this okay a little bit? Afterwards, if you should want to see it, I'll show you. If you want to see it, come on up. This is an iPack, and it has a little screen on it. It's like a little radar screen, and it's rotating around, and there's airplanes on here for sections. So I can go in.

Click on an airplane. Now I have a little screen. I'm sorry, this is so tough. I have a little screen with other pictures, and then I can click on those pictures, and then I can pull up the stats, so I have all this information. We also have QuickTime movies, the regular movies playing on this, and we also have QuickTime VR playing back on this. So when you go to a museum, you remember you used to rent the headsets with the narration? Now you rent these.

They're going to rent them out at $9.95. They're trying to get down to the $5 mark, but it's just not going to work. So $9.95, you rent this, and you do your whole tour through the Smithsonian on your handheld device. Now there's like a picture, it's a map with the outlines of the airplanes you can click. This actually goes into a larger plastic box. They take your credit card. When you come in, you take the credit card. It's authorized for the value of the IPAC at list.

So that if you should walk out with it, the museum's making a profit. And you do your little tour, and then when you're done, you turn this back in. They take off the authorization, or they'll leave the $19 on it. So it's pretty cool. This is considered the latest thing in museum tours.

Museums in Europe are doing it. Smithsonian is going to deploy, I think, 5,000 of these throughout the Smithsonian. So the thing I wanted to bring up is 5,000 of these things all need content. You know, I love these things, because it needs pictures. They found out that people really don't like renting these with text.

They like renting them with pictures and VR and all that good stuff. So I do a lot of work now getting ready for handheld devices. for handheld devices. Okay, so we're going to do a little tour. You have our lovely and talented Apple representative. It's going to pass around some 3D glasses. So she'll pass those around.

I think we should have enough. Oh, I'm sorry, the cyan should go to the right. So, hand to the right, can you see that there? Okay. I need to launch iPhoto. Can we switch to my screen? So iPhoto is this really cool, great tool because I have a lot of people who come to the museum and they need a little slideshow for a PowerPoint presentation. And I drop the pictures in here and then I'll just tell them, "Okay, tell me how long the movie," and stuff like that. So I'll put something like this together for them. Sound? Do we have sound? I'm hoping this is going to work. Okay.

♪ ♪ Is it working? I'll take a picture of you with the glasses. I go to presentations all the time. I think creative people have a thirst for knowledge. I was involved in a survey recently where the people asked, I had like three or four psychologists interviewing me, and they're doing a study on creativity. And they asked me, "What's creativity to you?" I said, "Creativity." And I had to think about it. I responded, "It's the application of knowledge." Think about it.

You've all been in the office and somebody will say, "You know, that's a really creative use you found for that." So, you know, Apple used to have this saying, "Knowledge is power." And to me, creativity is the application of that power. So, you know, we have to Look at different ways that we can use the applications. I went to a presentation on – can I have my slides back please? Thank you.

I went to a presentation years ago on digital photography by another photographer. And at the end he did this whole thing on 3D. And I was like, wow, that's really cool. So afterwards I went up and I talked to him and I said, how did you do that? And he's like, well, I'm not going to tell you. I was like, what do you mean you're not going to tell me? Well, if I tell you, you'll want to do it. I was like, well, yeah. So I've made it kind of like my quest to tell everyone I know how to do this.

So if you should be interested in how to do it, it's super easy if you have like Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. You take two photographs. You take two photographs about four inches apart. Okay? So take one shot, move the camera over to the other eyeball or slide it over. I actually have a little piece I made up to do this. Take the second shot.

Open them up in like Photoshop Elements, Photoshop, CS, whatever. Take the red channel, you know, go into channels, select the red channel, copy it. Paste it into the red channel of the opposite image. And that creates the offset. That's how easy it is to do it. So if you ever go to a presentation on 3D and the guy won't tell you how to do it, say, "I know. Dennis told me." 250 million downloads.

So I bring this up because, you know, part of my business depends on QuickTime. And so I want to see that number as large as we possibly can get it. One of the reasons why I like these big numbers is this: think about if you create content. If you create content, and especially if you're selling something, I've actually sold several things over the internet, and I've had the 1% rule work.

So I've sold training CDs, I've sold CDs of VR, and I've sold 1% to my database. So 250 million times 1%. That's a lot of numbers. That's a lot of sales. Right now we're creating a CD-ROM for a Smithsonian of my VR, and we're going to sell it at the Smithsonian.

You'll take the tour, you'll get all excited, you know, you'll want to buy. So let me run the numbers for you. 330,000 visitors per month. 1%. Okay? At $20 a CD. That's almost like real money there. You know, in a year that can be like a quarter of a million to half a million dollars in sales of just a CD of VR images. So I'm real excited when I hear Apple saying about, like, you know, we're selling more. Apple's empowered me to do a lot of creative work. I'm a big fan of creative things, and I use creativity as my sales tool.

How can I compete against another photographer? Well, first off, there isn't a better photographer in the room than myself. So now that I've got all the photographers alienated. But that's my physique, that's my attitude. I'm really good. So if I don't get the job, I never say lose, if I don't get the work, it wasn't because you were better than me.

It was because your style, the way you create the content, the way you shoot the pictures fits that campaign, fits that ad campaign. When I was shooting cars, that's the way I looked at. My style, and I used to get paranoid. I'd have somebody call me up and say, "Yeah, we're interested in you because you have this classic style." I was like paranoid. I was pigeonholed. I'll be the classic guy for life. Right? So I started looking ways to reinvent myself. And one of the ways I could reinvent myself was through my creativity.

So I'm always looking on what the latest technology is. I was doing DVDs with... Actually, before Apple. Apple bought DVD Studio Pro. It was made by the company that made Toast. And I was making DVDs way back when. Now, one of the other things that you should think about is that if you're going to make a sale, usually the first or the last phone call is the one that gets the job. Right? And the odds are more for the first than the last. And usually if it's the last, it's because they were cheaper than you. And you don't want to compete on price. Never compete on price. Always compete on quality. And results.

So I actually still have art directors who call me up saying, "Dennis, I saw this on the web. I don't know anything about it, but it looks cool. You must know it because you know everything about technology." And I'm saying, "Yeah, I've been doing it for months." As I surf the web saying, "What the hell is he talking about?" Right? But they called me first because they know that I'm really trying to push the envelope. I'm trying to be really creative. I have a new project. It's called the QuickTime Bug. So we picked up a Volkswagen Bug. I have several sponsors involved.

We actually have a URL, the QuickTimeBug.us. By the way, today if you should have gone to the web, Macworld, they gave us booth space. They did a press release specifically on the Bug, and we're getting about 8,000 hits every half hour. The server's kind of like overloaded. So I'm kind of happy about that. In a, like, oh my god way. So we have the QuickTime Bug. We're going to be -- it's going to be here at the show. It's being tuned. We're getting an XServe installed. We have a touchscreen up front.

It's going to be like this big technology piece. If any of you have, like, associates involved in a mug, I'm going to be crawling -- or crawling -- traveling around the United States doing presentations on QuickTime. I'd be happy to swing by your mug. My only rule is you fill up the tank with gas and it can only hold 12 gallons.

So it's not a big deal. I'll be happy to do a presentation for you. While I'm traveling the countryside, I'm going to be creating QuickTime and QuickTime VR of really unique things. I've already set up with the Forest Preserve. I'm going to be shooting VR of the Statue of Liberty.

The Statue of Liberty is closed, but you'll be able to do a virtual tour of the inside. We actually have a government helicopter. We worked it out. So we're going to try to make an object movie of the outside. The Pueblo Indians, you know, they have those ruins. The Pueblo Indians live in those bluffs. So that's on the list to shoot.

General Electric is having me shoot a train engine interior. I photographed some actual -- you know, have you ever wondered what the hell those cabs look like? You know, the big truck drivers. You see them driving. What's it look like inside of those? So I have some VR of one of the interiors of a truck. It's pretty interesting in there, actually. So they got their TV, their fridge. Their bed right there. It's hilarious. So we're creating a lot of content of places that you wouldn't normally go. We're going to be showing it at the website.

I have to phrase it this way because of legal parameters. At the end of the tour, the content will be turned over to a national museum, which will then put it on a two-year traveling show. So you'll be able to visit 90 different locations throughout the United States.

It will be the first time that they have ever done an all electronic display. So it's kind of cool. We're setting a lot of firsts with it. So that's a quick time bug. I'm still shooting at the Smithsonian, but our project's kind of like gone into this when they're ready for me to shoot with X amount of stuff, I go in and shoot. When they're not, then I'm free to do whatever. So I'm going to drive around for a bit.

A little bit. We'll be hitting all the spots across the country. So, it'll take us about a year. So, at the end, then we'll be donating all the stuff. Okay, so I have two minutes left. I'm right on time. So, last year I had three most important things, but now that I've got more experience dealing with the government, I have a couple things I added. So, let's talk about the five things that you should probably remember. Perseverance. You know, no job ever comes easy that's worth it, at least for me.

So, I spent a lot of time chasing after Smithsonian. It cost me about $10,000 to $20,000 in like a year to a year and a half, just going back to Smithsonian all the time, doing demonstrations, presentations, a whole bunch of things that I had to do to prove that I was really good. And I really wanted that job, so I really went after it. So, anything you do that's worthwhile is going to take some effort. So, perseverance, probably my most important thing.

Thinking outside the box. One of the cool things that's going to happen at the end of this year is that the Smithsonian is going to have an art show of my VR. We can make large panoramic prints. Remember that first slide where you saw the interior of the Enola Gay? They're taking a bunch of that imagery, since I do it all in high res, and they're making them into prints.

They'll be about 30 inches tall and about 7 to 8 feet wide. They're doing about 20 of those, and they're going to do an art showing of it. And then it's going to become part of the museum's collection. So, you know, I'm just a photographer. I'm in the Smithsonian. This is really cool. So, that type of thing. So, thinking outside the box, new ways to use the same content.

Whatever you're charging, it ain't going to be enough. You can never recoup all the expense and knowledge and stuff. Somebody has to pay you for being up at 3 o'clock in the morning trying to figure out, "How am I going to fix this?" So my dad was an accountant. He used to tell me, "Whatever you think you should charge, I want you to double it." So whatever you think you should be charging, you should double it. Now, there's this other thing called cash flow.

I need X amount of money going through the bank account so I can pay my bills or pay the electric. So I need a certain amount of cash flow. So I'll do barters when it makes sense. And sometimes the barters are things as simple as, "Could you put my name and link on your website?" That has an advertising value to me. So I'm constantly looking for ways to make sure I get the work, get some cash, but also have some extra exposure.

Contracts are always open to interpretation. This is what I've learned from the government. So make sure that you get everything that you can in writing and get as close to what you should have as possible. Okay, because somebody's going to say, well, we didn't think that meant that. Right, we thought it meant that over there. So always make sure that you can get as much information into your contract as possible. And nothing is ever as easy as I thought.

I always run into issues. I always run into roadblocks. But the flip side is the way I look at it is that I love being a photographer. I love what I do, and people pay me for it. What better life can I have? I do something that I enjoy, and I haven't worked a day in my life.

So what I can pass on to you there is that you really have to enjoy or you really need to love what you're doing because you're going to have plenty of times where you're going to start wondering what the heck am I doing here? Okay, so just another thought. So I want to thank you for coming. I'm glad that you hung in there through my presentation. And we're going to have a Q&A.