Good afternoon everybody. I'm Glenn Bullich on the QuickTime marketing team. You are in session 726, QuickTime Case Studies. And we have the privilege today to talk to the folks who delivered all of the media for the South by Southwest conference. And if you're not familiar with this conference, it's the largest conference for independent music in the world. And we have some 1300 bands get together and perform for a large audience and other bands and hopefully lots of artists and repertoire people who are adding independent bands and unsigned bands into labels. And clearly the last several years have been really, really important for independent music.

Most notably the internet arising as a way of merchandising and a way of getting bands to be able to promote themselves without being captive or accepted. And that's excluded from radio and some of the promotion vehicles that are available to major labels. And the team at South by Southwest this year sort of went over and above, not only delivering thousands of MP3s from all these bands and delivering video from the panels, but also allowing or leveraging some of the technologies including wireless and streaming to cross-pollinate between all the different clubs and the performances and that kind of stuff.

So, pretty packed session, pretty in-depth. I'll turn it over to Scott Wilcox. And if we have questions, let's save them to the end and come up to the microphones and say your name and company name and we'll do our best to answer all the questions and I'll kick it off to these guys.

Okay, my name is Gary Woodcock and this is Scott Wilcox and we're going to talk to you a little bit about how we have done our production workflow at South by Southwest. And I guess this is... That's right. Yeah. So, sorry, I got confused there. So this is just kind of an overview of what we're going to talk about.

We want to explain kind of what South by Southwest is, what it's about, how we've used QuickTime in our workflow for production for music and for video, how we've used QuickTime to help us promote the event, how, you know, we've delivered the media that we've created during the event, we'll talk a little bit about some of the experiments that we've conducted during the course of the last few years during the event, and go over a few ideas that we have for future directions of how we might use QuickTime to help us in the future.

Along the way, what we hope to do is help you learn a little bit about how you can use Apple technologies to help you do these kinds of things for your own promotions or production delivery sorts of things. We've used iTunes and QuickTime and Rendezvous and a lot of different Apple technologies to really streamline the process of delivering media for South by Southwest attendees and people who aren't attending the show but come and look at the media that's available online.

So just to give you an overview of what South by Southwest is, it's, as Glenn said, the largest sort of event of its type in the world. There's various components. It all overlaps. And for the last 10 years, specifically, we've been focusing on convergence of the film, music, and interactive technology industries.

So to sort of break it down, we also have an exhibition and trade show. It happens in March every year in Austin, and we're in our 19th year for music and our 12th year for film and interactive. In terms of attendance, it's a large group of attendees who are sort of registered and can attend the panel sessions. And then there's specialties. We have a lot of special events. And in the nighttime during the music festival, we have the bands play on 60 stages around Austin for four days.

So interactive. Basically our focus here is we do a lot of panels and conference programming and the sort of community that has involved itself most heavily over the years is really working with web technologies, blogging, the entertainment industry, we have designers, and all these people kind of come to sort of talk about the challenges, the unique challenges that are facing them in their event and how can they also use the tools they've been developing to leverage the music industry and the film industry to put sort of products in the hands of executives who are running labels, independent labels, major labels, people who are in licensing.

So we have a web awards show which is focused on trying to acknowledge the best work we feel done in the web over the last year. And all in all, the interactive event has about 3200 attendees, which has been growing significantly every year and the event tries to reflect what's going on in this space. And we've been moving more towards we have a wireless track and we're talking more about mobile content delivery and basically what's happening, we just try to reflect it.

For the film, our emphasis here is really independent film. You've got a tremendous amount of talent out there that have been making fantastic films that have been picked up and distributed by large distribution houses. And then we try to bring the directors who are really notable and working in the field of independent film like Robert Rodriguez, initially at least, in independent, kind of broken through now to the sort of majors. Richard Linklater, similar story, really put Austin on the map with Slacker in the beginning. And then we've got Jim Jarmusch. We've had any number of other filmmakers over the years. Our focus as far as the festival goes is premieres.

We try to premiere as many regional and world films. We try to do as many films as possible. We have about eight venues. We do about 200 films over 10 days. So we complement the conference aspect of the event with this film festival, which then creates a forum for buyers, distribution, people looking to work in independent film.

And then we've got a consumer base, which basically is comprised mostly of fans that also come in and see the films. So to give you an idea of the scope there, this year we had about 30,000 single admission entries into the films, so 30,000 people in seats basically.

And from that, a lot of these films go on to find distribution. And we were able to arrange special screenings like Jim Jarmusch's film Coffee and Cigarettes played there this year in addition to, who else, Robert Duvall did something, Code 46. And then we had a couple of other films that premiered there this year, which is Tim Robbins' independent film. So that's going on. There's over 3,000 attendees for that. And that sort of happens simultaneously with the interactive event.

We've got both people in the same buildings in just separate rooms and then we do crossover panels. So people can sort of meet and mingle in that arena. For music, this is probably the cornerstone of our event, mostly because it's been going the longest. And we've been able to develop a lot of the music that we've been able to do.

We've been able to develop a robust international reputation with a large European contingency and Asian contingency. We have a European rep, an Asian rep. We have a Pacific rem rep down in Australia. And we really try to pull the best talent, the emerging talent from around the world and the industry that supports them from managers, the labels they're working with, publicists come.

And people come to really see, okay, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. And they're like, "Okay, what's the stuff going on now?" So because of that, we're focused largely in the indie scene. You know, we've got smaller indies and your more established indies like Sub Pop. And this really -- what we've seen, interestingly enough, is that that is really thriving now.

As the larger labels and distribution houses continue to merge and merge and merge, we've seen that, with the tools given to people, they're really able to get into the industry and get into people in rich media and on the Internet and websites, that more independent houses have been taking advantage of implementing new media as a strategy for promotion. And the end result is that sales have been through the roof. I've got a friend who's the director of sales at Sub Pop, and he says, "We're doing well." And this is really encouraging news, I think, for the music industry overall. So 8,000 people there.

This is an example of one clip we did with QuickTime during the event. We shot this with minimal production on mini DV and then edited it in Final Cut Pro, compressed with Cleaner 6, and delivered it the day after. Sort of we compressed overnight and then published in the morning.

Because then you're cheating yourself. Your conviction is not there. You're doing this because you believe in it. It's you and it's real. You didn't steal, you didn't kill, and now you're not even ill because you got the real feel. If you want to play the guitar, really play the guitar. Learn how to play the guitar. Learn how to play the piano. Learn how to really sing. Don't cheat yourself. If Bessie ain't doing it, don't copy Bessie. Because Bessie ain't going nowhere.

If she go in the West, she ain't gonna be that long. She'll be back home. Learn how to really, really put something in it. And remember this, that the grass may look greener on the other side, but it's just as hard to cut. So that was a clip from our keynote presentation this year. Most of you, I'm sure, recognize Little Richard. And every year we try to have artists with the benefit of industry experience do our keynotes. And then we integrate other aspects of people in the music industry throughout the panel's programming.

South by Southwest has a unique set of constraints because it's a festival, it's an event. And we basically go into the space, which would be the convention center, and into the clubs. And we have to set everything up like in 48 hours. And then we have to do the event.

And at the same time, we'd like to capture as much from the event digitally as possible. And then we need to cut the stuff and we need to get it out there on the channels because we have very little time. And we have a very fixed amount of time where spotlight on South by Southwest.

We've got a big promotional push and we need to take advantage of the interactive and new media technologies at our disposal. So for our video program in particular, we have a lot of budgetary limitations due to the fact that we're also having to put all the production in the clubs and we have to sort of do things with the theaters. So we've got a lot of physical production.

And then so which leaves us sort of scant resources from a new media production, digital production standpoint. So the way we solve this problem is that we use volunteers for our production. And we ask the volunteers that they provide their own camera, actually. We've been going with mini DV primarily as a format over the last four years because of just the sheer amount of proliferation of the device.

And we've been kind of running the consumer and pro-sumer markets. So what this does for the volunteer, though, is create a unique opportunity for them to gain exposure at the event because we try to make sure that they're credited appropriately. We'll say this person shot this clip and this person edited this clip.

And then when they're meeting people the event, they have the opportunity to say, oh, yeah, this is what I'm doing with this and here's my card. So the whole social networking aspect of the event plays really well into gaining sort of. A range of talent from from novice to professional. So they go out and we deploy them to shoot the event.

And the main thing that we focus on is simplicity overall. We have a fairly elaborate production scheme, which I'll talk about in a minute. But we we try to do it in a guerrilla fashion whereby for the panels and stuff we we maybe will plug into the board and we'll set a camera up in the back and then we'll send up a close up. Shot up front for the bigger events.

So we have a two shot to edit between, you know, but we don't get more complicated than that because it creates a lot of editing time overhead and we need to get this stuff out quick and we want to be able to get it out and extensible to emerging mobile formats as well.

So we've basically chosen something where we're actually getting a lot more content than we're currently able to to use in real time. So we've basically chosen something where we're actually getting a lot more content than we're currently able to to use in real time. We focus on the two to five minute clip or so. And I think that's next. Oh, you're talking about that. OK. I'll continue with that part later.

So one of the things that South by Southwest does a really excellent job at is event promotion and also promotion for the various films and bands that participate in the event. And the typical, just looking at the music side of this, the bands will submit songs to South by Southwest that they want to use to promote either their performance or perhaps they have an album out that they want to tie into. But basically something that represents their vision, their art, and that they want to emphasize at the event.

The songs that are received by South by Southwest are encoded into MP3 format and then they're made available for download on the South by Southwest website. And there also, there was something very new that happened this year that an engineer at South by Southwest, David Rose, had a great idea. He had a great idea to try to leverage the songs that we were getting from the artists through iTunes. And so the same songs that are encoded are hosted on a central server and they're available through iTunes.

And David also did some additional work to go talk with the Austin City Wireless Project, which is kind of a collective of people that offer free access points throughout Austin. And I think there's 50 sites currently. There's 50 sites during the event, but now there's like 80. So this is kind of blowing up really quickly. They work in conjunction with the city as well.

Yeah, so it's pretty much citywide. While the event's going on, there are access points you can walk into. You can basically bring up iTunes and get access to these songs. And this is kind of what this looks like. This is an example of one of the access points locally in Austin. And you can see that there's the promotion for South by Southwest with the logo.

And it also has the iTunes tie-in to let you know that if you have iTunes, either on your Mac or PC, and you log into their access point, hey, there's something really neat waiting for you. And this is another login example that you can see. And so this is just kind of the screen that you get when you go enter one of these places that you have to log into before you get the access.

I Okay, so this is just kind of an example of what you'd see if you brought up iTunes. And you can see there's the South by Southwest 2004 showcasing artists. And you get a list of all the songs and all the bands that are available on the playlist. And this year we had 600 different songs.

20-some odd. Yeah. And it's very cool because you can browse any -- use all the tools that you have in iTunes. You can browse by category or band name or song and find something that you like. And I think Scott's going to talk later about how you can even tie that back to find the band during the event.

So how does this work? Basically, the iTunes sharing is based on something called the digital audio access protocol that's proprietary to Apple. Now, even though it's proprietary, there are some open source repositories that implement a server technology that can be deployed on OS X, on Linux, on Windows, on pretty much anything. And you can run this open source server and serve your own playlist.

And then there's a second piece, which is the rendezvous piece. This is basically the service discovery. So this is the part that lets you, when you're in the access point service area, lets you know that there's actually a service here that you can use. And this was done using the DNS proxy sample code, the rendezvous sample code that's actually available from the Apple website.

Now there are other ways to do this. You can do the same sort of thing with Howl, which is another rendezvous implementation. Rendezvous is also known as zero configuration or zero conf. You might know it by that name as well. The point being is it's all openly available. It'll run on a variety of systems. And basically what happens is we have the tune served from a central server, and then at each access point you can run an instance of this rendezvous.

And then you can run an instance of this rendezvous client or this rendezvous server that can relay the server content to the local access point. The reason this is necessary, at least currently, is that the service is bound to a local subnet. So the server itself has its own subnet, and you need to bridge to the access point subnet. Basically this sounds fairly complicated, but it's really not.

You can download the sample code, and you don't really have to be a software engineer to run this. You basically need to be able to type make in the console, and it'll all work out for you pretty well. It's not difficult, but it was a bit of inspired work on David's part to pull all these pieces together. And I'd like to just check with David. I think David has a surprise kind of for the audience here.

If you have AirPort here, you should be able to log in with iTunes and actually see the playlist here. We have it relayed here into this room so that you can see it in action. If you're curious. And it's, again, it's a very powerful concept, but it's relatively simple and very inexpensive to set up. So it fit very well with the philosophy that South by Southwest has for getting maximum leverage out of the technology.

So just real quick, I promise this is as technical as we'll probably get in the session here, but I did want to kind of get this into the slides. Again, to do this sort of thing yourself is not difficult. You just have to go out and download the code, build it with your environment of choice. It might be Xcode on OS X. It could be just using standard GCC tools on Linux, and then install it.

And then there's some fairly simple configuration that you need to do to basically advertise the fact that you have a digital audio protocol service available, which is the first line of blue text there. And what you're basically advertising is your IP address, your database name, how you'd like your playlist to be advertised in terms of text in iTunes, for example, and then the protocol and the port. The second line basically just starts the audio service protocol, and it's just a single line. And it's not much more difficult than that. So, yeah.

I just like to add that the real benefit that this has had for us is that it's really increased the distribution using cool new technology while actually all of our audio files still live on one server actually in a co-location facility in San Antonio. So because serving up this type of content is actually minimal work for the processor, this is a pretty old box. It's like a 500 megahertz box. But what we've noticed is that a box is capable of pushing at least 60 gigs a day in content during the event, and performance hasn't really suffered.

Okay, and then just as a last note, that after the event, too, there is another way, actually I guess during the event as well, but there is another way to get this same content in the form of a streaming audio service. And so if you were to go to the South by Southwest website, you could actually download a playlist file that would show up as essentially a continuous streaming audio stream that you could play in iTunes.

And it's, again, that too is available through, if you want to try that. We've gotten a lot of feedback on this being particularly handy to our attendees because the big problem that people have when they attend our event is, what do I go see? You've got, at any given time, you've got 60 bands playing. You've got 400 bands a night. What do I go see? So this is one of the real problems that sort of drives the use of new technology for us.

And here, people, when they're sort of kind of figuring out... Oh, they're thinking about the event. They can launch this. And if they hear something, then they click back to iTunes. They see the band there, and then they can basically easily match that with our scheduling software on our site. So we got a lot of good feedback on just having a continuous random stream for those reasons.

So really the big takeaways here are just that, first of all, that Apple technologies and open source technologies really do play well together. It's something that you've probably heard before, our experience in trying to do it for ourselves is that it's really true, it really is easy, they really do work.

We get a lot of mileage out of using the standard Apple interfaces for media types through iTunes and QuickTime Player, things of that nature, because it gives a very standard experience for all the users that are coming to view or listen to South by Southwest content. And it works on Mac and Windows.

Excuse me, didn't quite go there yet. And again, it's also very simple and cost effective to set up. You can get, you know, everyone that wants to use it, you know, you can get a lot of people that want to use it, you know, you can get a lot of people that want to use it, you know, you can get a lot of people that want to use it, you know, you can get a lot of people that want to use it, you know, but they want to listen to this stuff, can go get iTunes for free, they can get QuickTime Player for free, there's no cost burden on the people who want to view or listen to the content, and, you know, that just, that's great. Nobody wants to pay a lot of money when they've already paid for Badge, they just want to find out what's going on with the bands, as Scott says.

This is just another way that we integrated audio content. For the last three years we've been developing a sort of schedule application for Palm OS. And we had basically a lot of high demand for, oh, I want it all in my Palm so that I can take it with me so that I can kind of see and navigate. So we've been adding more and more features to this over the years. Now this year we made it so you could beam your own personal audio content. So you could see what you were going to go see.

And also this was a first for us this year that we, via Pocket Tunes, integrated a connection directly to that same media server in San Antonio so that if you're on your Palm and you have a Treo or something and you're within a Wi-Fi hotspot area, you can listen to the music directly on your Palm. So that was a new sort of like interesting way to kind of integrate and again bring audio content and rich media in general through various channels.

Okay, the production quiro. Well, I talked about already how we use only mini DV, and what I found out when we did this the first year in 2000 is that I had a variety of camera types. I had a Hi8, I had a mini DV, somebody else had a DV cam, and essentially, given the fact that we're trying to get through so much production in such a short amount of time with resources, we really felt like we needed to standardize so that we had one type of tape stock.

So that, you know, we could really, we wouldn't have to worry about whether we had a deck available for a different type of media at any given time. So, again, it's worked to the extent to which now we turn people away if they don't have the type of equipment. In the future, we might create a higher quality production arm as part of our digital media program and kind of use newer high quality technologies that way. But right now, we've been doing mini DV.

So you've got those and you've got your editors and your quality reviewers and sort of the way it works since we're not normally in the convention center space is we take a room and we turn it into an editing suite in about six hours. And the way we can do that really easily is by using Apple equipment, Final Cut Pro. And we basically get a, you know, an Ethernet connect into one of our subnets. So that way, we can get a, you know, an Ethernet connect into one of our subnets. into one of our subnets, so that we can move content easily.

And we install Final Cut across all the machines that we have at our disposal, which varies from year to year, depending on all sorts of factors. We also load Cleaner 6 on them. One year we had a compression farm available to us, a Cleaner Central product. And we did things a little bit differently. We sort of like the minute we were done editing, we compressed. But due to sort of constraints of compression, what we do is we'll edit all day, and then we'll compress at night.

So we run this editing suite from, say, 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM, so that people are freed up to move around at night to get more content or to enjoy the event, heaven forbid. So that's how we sort of produce all of our digital video in a nutshell. So this is just a short clip on basically how to be a pros drummer.

Do you use storyboards at all or do you sketch out your shots in advance? Less and less. I used to more. I think that was just insecurity, like thinking I would be on the set and not know what I'm doing and everybody would wait. So I would plan out each shot much more in advance. But now I've enjoyed

We'll do 14 after lunch. Yeah, no problem. On my set too, though, we always have this joke of like, before lunch it's gone with the wind, and after lunch it's the Dukes of Hazzard. Right. Because we do three shots.

Here's a photo from this year. And this is what we used. Some G5s and then we had a couple of people bring in their power books because they were like, I really want to edit on my thing. So we let them do that. And then we used Final Cut Pro and Cleaner 6, as I said before. Because of the simplicity of the sort of plug and play nature of this equipment and software, we don't need to take two days to build an editing suite.

You really just bring in the power books. You bring it in and set it down and plug it in. And so this is really a really good thing for us because then we have editing stations that kind of come and go throughout the week according to, well, we need to put this one here. Oh, and then we need it over here. So we kind of just balance how many editors do we have and who's good and they'll get heavier workflow.

Again, here's the guidelines. We really try to find that moment. Rather than get really fancy and put in motion graphics and do all sorts of things like that, we just try to find the moment, keep it simple, make a few cuts, and keep the audio processing to a real minimum.

Sometimes if you've got a sort of low quality production on the tape, we'll use sort of built-in EQ and filter, audio filter effects that come with Final Cut. And that's a big reason we don't use, that we use Final Cut, say, over something even more basic like iMovie.

It's because it has the ability to do the more advanced things, but it's also really good at just doing something simple. So I'll have an editor who's like, well, I've worked on Avid forever. And I'm like, oh, you can learn Final Cut in five minutes. minutes. This is a really good thing for us.

So this is just kind of a, this is another short example of a piece that I think somebody who was relatively first time videographer did. A couple of years ago, yeah. Yeah, so it's short, but it talks to the things that Scott was mentioning earlier about trying to really capture the salient key moment of a particular event.

This is a very important point, which is I want to first of all thank my wife. Here he was doing an introduction and Q&A at the Paramount Theater, which is one of Austin's oldest movie spaces. Well, there you have it. Oh, you might have noticed that all these pieces have like a motion bumper sort of graphic thing on the front of it.

Well, it's something we've tried to do for the last three years is basically make one for interactive and one for film and one for music. And we'll basically just take a finished motion graphics piece that a friend of mine was doing for us and we'll just drop it in. We'll put it on all the different editing stations and say, oh, before you finish up, we need to drop that in. And it just becomes easily part of the final cut movie.

So let's talk a little bit about the delivery aspect of this in terms of what the goals are with actually making the media available. And the goal was to have, basically we recognize that not everybody has DSL or even ISDN source of lines. We still feel like there are enough people out there that have slow connections that we need a low bandwidth version of the media. But we'd also like to provide a really good experience for the people who really do have the fast connections. So we want both high and low bandwidth versions. And obviously we want this to play in as many platforms as possible.

And of course we get that with QuickTime because it can play in a variety of different browsers on Mac OS and Windows. It's perfect for what we need. And you get the standard user experience no matter which platform you're using or what browser. Glenn Bulycz, Scott Wilcox, Gary Woodcock We also get the benefit of we want the playback to begin as quickly as possible. We don't want the guy to go click on a link and then wait and watch a progress bar.

There are also cases where we want some basic content protection with the media where you can't just sort of arbitrarily download it and go post it wherever you want. We really want people to come to the South by Southwest site to get this media. Also, we didn't want any particular licensing restrictions in terms of whatever technologies we use. Glenn Bullich, Scott Wilcox, Gary Woodcock We want to make sure that we're using the technologies we use to produce the media and deploy it.

So basically MPEG-4 and AAC actually fit the bill very well for us. It does well at low bandwidths and relatively high bandwidths. It's certainly available since it's in QuickTime. It's on Mac OS and Windows. And since we're delivering as a QuickTime movie, we get all those nice things like we can get progressive download and fast start. Glenn Bullich, Scott Wilcox, Gary Woodcock And we can disable saving and all the standard things that you get as part of using QuickTime as your deployment media.

So in terms of preparing the media, in keeping with the keep it simple sort of philosophy, we really don't do a lot of filtering, and we're always starting from the same media. So we don't need 50 different settings, we're always starting from DV. And we have a low bandwidth setting that we used in Cleaner, and those are the parameters for those who are curious.

It's basically just the standard sort of postage stamp video that you would get on a 56K modem. But it's MPEG-4, it looks pretty good, and you have pretty decent audio with it. For high bandwidth, we went to a quarter screen 320x240, and it's full frame rate, and you get very nice stereo sound.

And in fact, the clips that we've actually been viewing here are the exact same high bandwidth clips that we encoded for the show. So they're not something we've used in the past. We did special for the show. It's just what you see up on our website. So that's what we've been watching here today, and it looks pretty good.

So I think Scott touched on this a little bit earlier. We do try to do some basic automation. Cleaner 6 has the ability to basically have drop folders where you can take your source media, drop it in, and just have it sort of automatically run through whatever settings files you're using.

We use the full resolution DV media output from Final Cut Pro. Just drop it into the desktop folder. The editor doesn't really have to know anything about it. It gets picked up and processed and dropped into a review folder for the quality reviewer to come and look at.

We also get film trailers for the people that are doing premieres, and we'll encode these in exactly the same way, so they're the high and low bandwidth versions of the film trailers as well. They're available during the show, so if you want to check out to see what's worth seeing in terms of the premieres, what kinds of things match your taste, you can go check those out. And they're available before, actually before the show, during the show, and after the show as well.

One thing I did want to point out is we have been experimenting with mobile media and it's a very important aspect to some of the future directions that Scott will talk about later. Something we've played with is Konoma. Now this isn't part of QuickTime, but it is a QuickTime movie exporter.

So it fits very nicely into the QuickTime centric flow that we have in terms of the production. It will run on standard Palm OS devices, things like the Trios will play it, any of the Sony devices. It can be targeted for playback on any color device. You don't have to necessarily worry about whether it's going to play on a particular version of Palm OS or a particular model. Konoma will actually take care of all that for you.

The interesting thing about this is that the Palm devices by and large have the IR transceiver. So once somebody has this, they can actually beam the media to another device at the show. They can, you know, hey this is a very cool clip or hey you might want to go check this out. They can actually just beam it to somebody. They can look at it. They can share it. It kind of just proliferates on its own throughout the show.

You can also download these things from the net. If you've got a web enabled phone, you can pull these things down and play them in the player. One of the questions you might have is, well gee, why Konoma? Why not 3GPP? We're very keen on being able to do 3GPP stuff.

Currently we find that there's actually more people with Palm devices that attend the show than people with 3GPP. Probably not a big surprise to most people in here. So we are doing the Konoma stuff right now, but to go to the 3GPP or say H.264 in the future really doesn't perturb our workflow at all. It's just another QuickTime plug-in. We can use the same production flow we've been using. It's really no change. So QuickTime really makes this very, very convenient for us and very flexible.

Okay, future directions as Gary was saying. 3G is definitely something that we've been interested in a long time. And given the sort of content sizes, the two minute movie, the 30 second movie, we think that this is going to be really not a very difficult transition for us in terms of our production change.

I think we'd also like to get into some more sort of full live broadcast stuff. But there's only so many volunteers and only so much equipment. And basically, there's just we have to dedicate more resources, more equipment, and better talent to basically put and say, yeah, we're going to do just the live broadcast. The thing is, because we use sort of volunteer camera people, everything they shoot is not good. I mean, you know, Right now we've got about 500 hours of footage from the last four years.

We did 200 of that this year. And I haven't really been able to watch or log it all, definitely not. And there's some great stuff and there's some just atrocious, like why were you filming the floor? And the thing about, you know, we basically have to put a higher quality sort of production team on the live stuff. But it's definitely something we're working towards and something we'd like to do in the future.

We also have been, we did RFID stuff for the first time this year and I think we'd also like to continue to look how our sort of badging authentication systems because we have the whole access control thing. How we can get that to play with the delivery of our digital media, you know.

So lots of possible things to do in the future. And we're just trying to figure out how we can come at it at different angles and utilize the new technologies for a huge real time sort of deployment. Kind of, you know, it is a case-- it's a built in case study because every year we're trying new things. Oh, that didn't work.

Or wow, that kind of worked. And you know, and that's just sort of how we've developed. And I find that integrating new technologies available, especially along the lines of what we've been using now, is a great thing for our attendees to see. Because they're in the entertainment industry and they're thinking, oh my god, what are we going to do, you know, with all this new stuff? How are we going to play in digital space with the relationships we have? So, I mean, just some closing remarks that we'd like you to go away with here is that, you know, as we talked about at the outset of the session, South by Southwest really has kind of a different problem than perhaps a lot of you are used to.

It's really about trying to process a lot of media at a very good quality level very quickly with high turnaround and to make it simple. You know, to keep things very easy, very simple, very reliable so that things don't break down during the show because it is a very compressed time scale. It can be very stressful. So, QuickTime really helps us with this problem because I think one of the things that perhaps people miss.

about QuickTime is that If you just do the simple things with the tools that Apple has, the base quality level is really quite impressive. Yes, you probably could make some better video output or perhaps some better compression than what perhaps you've seen today, but just what you do out of the box with the very simple stuff with fairly untrained people or novices is really quite amazing.

And QuickTime really makes that possible. And South by Southwest with the kind of resources we have, it really wouldn't be possible without something like QuickTime. Well, it eases the learning curve for the people that are doing the work, too, because, oh, I've played with that. Oh, I'm familiar with that. So we've got a whole lot of people that we work with who have already used the products, are already familiar with trying to put their stuff out there.

And so we kind of follow along those lines because there's already enough to do with getting our volunteers who have never worked together before, except maybe the year before, all sort of in this rapid production environment and working together and answering each other's questions. And so the less obstacles and the less variables we introduce to this situation, the better off we are. And then we also have the headway with the tools to increase quality. As people become better or as we get return volunteers from years past, their skills increase, the tools are the same, it scales as their capabilities and experiences scale.

Now I guess the other point we'd like to leave you with is just, you know, hey, it really is easy to integrate QuickTime technologies and Apple technologies with some of these open source solutions that are out there. It takes a little research on the web, but there's really some amazing things that you can do integration-wise that may seem sort of intimidating to start with, but really with a little bit of investigation you can do some incredible things, as David has certainly shown with the iTunes app. stuff that we deployed this year. And with that, we have a parting clip of John Landis talking about digital tools in filmmaking.

There's no such thing as the artistry of filmmaking. This is interesting about film. Film is not art. People don't understand that. Film is craft. Filmmakers are craftsmen, just like carpenters. But a carpenter can make a chair that The Carpenter can be Charles Eames or Chippendale, but the vast majority of chairs are just that, chairs.

And they're sturdy and they function, they sit on them. I have a very dear friend who's a great filmmaker named David Cronenberg. David actually considers himself an artist and he's one of the few filmmakers I know who can seriously discuss his work as an artist and not sound like a putz.

I mean he's very serious about it and David's brilliant and I always say, "How do you do that, David?" And I come off like a jerk, you know. Because I know a lot of filmmakers, very famous filmmakers, who discuss their work like that and I think, "Oh, shut the f*ck up." Like who? Never mind.

A little bit more. People always go, "How do you feel about the lack, you know, the fact that there won't be film in ten years?" And there won't be. It's just, well, that's what's happening. Filmmaking as a craft is so new. I mean, we're talking about something that's a hundred years old. A hundred years old. I mean, sculpture, painting, you know, I mean, they've had a lot of time, you know. Filmmakers had a hundred years.

And so, the equipment's evolving all the time. And I think the biggest change in film was probably talkies. And the first time that happened, that was a shattering blow that I personally don't think film has ever recovered from. Sound? Absolutely. Because before sound, film was completely international. And sound came in and made it the Tower of Babel. And it just, it's sad. It's sad. Anyway. But in terms of tools, they're tools. And I think everything depends how you use it. Thanks very much.