And joining me today is going to be Alex Lindsay of Pixel Corpss whose going to talk about all things podcasting, so without further ado, I'd like to invite Alex on stage.

Thank, thank you very much. This is, this is a really big stage.

And a really, really big screen. I, I was working on this thing and I, and I didn't realize how big the screen was going to be, so hopefully, hopefully the graphics work out well. So, so let me give you a little bit of background. The Pixel Corpss, we make a lot of podcasts. I think we make a total of about 15 podcasts, both internally and then also for exterior clients.

A sampling of some of the stuff that we do internally. We do one called This Week in Media. And we're actually going to have some of the guy from This Week in Media up later at the audio podcast on every week, whatever's going on in the media area.

We have the VFX Show, which is I used to work at Lucas Film and Industrial Light and Magic. So me and a bunch of other guys talk about visual effects and, and that type of thing. We've also got MacBreak, which some of you might, how many people have actually seen MacBreak, just so I get a sense of, okay, so you know what that is. And, and then we also have Inside the Black Box which is more of how to do visual effects.

Other ones that you probably haven't seen yet are, are some of our client podcasts. We work, there's a, there's a lot of folks that are working in, that are you know raise money to build a network. And they need the show is actually produced for them, so they hire us to do that. And so some of those are one called Local Wisdom, which shows you where the locals go. There's also Cocktails on the Fly, it's great to have a show that shows you how to make mixed drinks. Very rough to have the bartender showing you in the office.

The, we also have Food Science which just shows you the, kind of the geeky side of, of food and why food does what it does. And one called I am Blackness, which is all about Africans and Africans Americans showing kind of a different side of, of that culture.

So this is handful of them and, and so because we've done a lot of this stuff, we've really started to learn a lot about the, you know the podcasting realm. We started doing podcasts before there were podcasts. We just called them weekly web content. And that, we started back in 2001 doing stuff for my other company called DB Garage.

So let's see, the first thing, and by the way, this is the end of WWDC and you're going to find this one's a little lighter than most of the ones I've been sitting through. So hopefully this will give you guys a little bit of time to breathe. We're mostly going to talk a lot about conceptual things. So what we want to do is talk a little bit about how to think about what's coming. If you're thinking about building a podcast.

How many people here actually do a podcast? Okay, so a lot of you do podcasts. How many people are thinking about doing a podcast? Okay, well, I guess that is pretty much everybody right? You, you wouldn't be here if that wasn't the case. So the first thing is to realize that we're not CBS, we're not NBC, we're not you know all these, you know we're not a big network. We're not trying to do Lost. We're not trying to do 20/20, we're not trying to 60 Minutes.

We need to find a niche that we can serve well And that's one of the key things is to think about what we can serve. When you think about CBS, they need to have five to seven million viewers minimum or they're going to cancel the show. That's five to seven million people have to watch it. When we think about niche markets, what you want to be thinking about is 20000 to 200000. You know that is a much, much smaller area, a much more focused view on what's actually going on.

Now that may not seem like that many people. You're like, well how can I build a business if it's so small and CBS is so large? Well when you walk into, into Borders Bookstore and you look at a magazine rack, what you're seeing is a niche of most of those magazine are somewhere between 20000 and 200000 readers.

And, and when I, when I look at that, I actually walk in and I see all these niche markets that need to be served with video, and it gives me a headache. So, so anyway. That's, those are the kind of niche markets. Those are niche markets. That's, that's the precursor to what we're doing.

The next thing is that you, a lot of the stuff that people are really looking for is nonfictional and I'll talk about why in a second. And then finally if I can get my, my little controller to do the next one. Is a long shelf life. If you're going to make these things, now, we I just said that after we do This Week in Media. But, but you want a larger, a long shelf life for a lot of the stuff.

The thing to remember is the people aren't tuning in this week to look at it most of the time. So a lot of our other shows, we think about how do we have it be good for the next six month or the next year of the next two years because people will actually download them. We had I think probably, I was looking at one of our shows this last week that we released 18 months ago and it had 1500 or 2000 downloads last week.

You know to give you kind of a sense of, you know. And it, it's long over. There's no, there's no good reason to download that podcast. So now, the, the thing that we want to look at when we look at where we want to, where we're going with, with podcasting and where we're going with this kind of content, is what I would consider a new market versus a mature market. The new market is, is video. Remember these are video cassettes, just in case you're wondering. Yeah, these were, these were this thing that they put video on and they went extinct a couple of years before the DVD went extinct.

So.

So, and so anyway. These, this is 90 percent fiction. So most of what's happened over the last 100 years, and 100 years in the land of content is very old. I mean we started 10000 years ago scrawling and scrolling in stone, and that was, that was content. Wasn't very interactive, but it had a long shelf life. So, so the, the thing is that you have this new market that for some reason got into this, because of Hollywood, because of that's where the money was, was 90 percent fiction.

This is 90 percent nonfiction. When you walk into a bookstore, what you see is 90 percent of the content is about things that people are passionate about. It's about what they're interested in. It's about business or cars or philosophy or whatever it is, but it's not, the fiction section is one little section inside of a very, very large bookstore.

The difference between these two and, and this is what we're looking at is that the, the tension as I would, as I would, from a physics point of view, between 90 percent on end and 90 percent the other, is what I call a market opportunity. So this is where there's going to be an enormous amount of content that needs to be produced for nonfictional content.

Now what, what I mean by that, that's the how tos, that's the historical, that's the documentary style pieces. These are all things that people are going to be interested in I believe that we're going to get to a point where we assume that we can learn things through video.

You know we're going to be a little perturbed if we want to learn how to do calculus or we want to learn how to you know a lot of other things and we can't find a video on it. And, and it's really, really important because we can actually assimilate the information much quicker and much younger when we get it in video format. I, my daughter when she was 10 I was asking her what she was learning in school and she was, and she said, well, I been really learning a lot about string theory.

You know she's, she's 10 years old, you know. And I said, so, so what is string theory? And she went into describing it. There's this, you know there's quantum physics and then there's the big bang and, and they don't really get along, but there's this theory that if you keep on going into the molecules and you go in, you keep on going in, you end up with little strings of energy. And this ties together the big bang and the, and the, and she, I mean, she described it better than most college students. You know and I asked her you know how she learned that. And she was like, Nova.

You know and, and there was this Nova thing on, on string theory that tied it all together. Now she's a 10 year old that understands something that most graduate students had a, would have a hard time describing because she got it visually. She didn't have to have her ability to accumulate the ability to read and all the, all the historical stuff to be able to actually absorb that information. Because of that, there's going to be an enormous pressure, especially when we look at elearning for lots and lots and lots of video content.

So another thing to think about when you're when you're starting to put this stuff together is the frequency of the kind of thing that you're doing. And I'm really only talking about two different frequencies. Because in my opinion, these are the only two that work. Which is either once a week or once a day. Once a day you really have to be committed. That you're going to, you're going to actually produce that. We've tried once a day and it's painful.

So you can do it but you have to really think about how to build an efficient pipeline to make it work. Once a week is probably the best if you're getting started in podcasting. There's a lot of people that put out pod casts kind of whenever they finish them. Or they put a couple out, then they wait for a couple months and they, and the big thing is you're not really going to build a listener ship that way. You're not, or a viewer ship that way.

You're not going to build a following unless you're regular. And I say that as we, we've gone up and down of being regular, you know back and forth. We, we do it mostly once a week for most of our shows. But that is the, that's a much better approach And so you, the key when I talk about that is that you want to think about how you're going to design a set of shows. For instance, our new shows now, from learning from all the other podcasts we've done is that we generally have four shows done in the can, figured out before we turn the, turn the spicket on.

You know we're, we make sure that we have a buffer kind of built in before we get going to make sure that we get, that we have a little bit of room to start to work in. Then we try to keep that buffer going. MacBreak, that many of you have seen, has actually only been recorded about four times. So to give you kind of a sense of how much we buffer.

We, we can typically shoot 12 to 18 MacBreaks in a day.

And so, so those things get all you know buffered together. And that's one of the things that we do, we do a lot of. And one of the things to make this work is efficiency. Now if you start to think, and I'll get back to efficiency in a second.

When you start to think about how you build your podcast, you really have obviously two podcasts. You have audio. And audio, one of the things you have to think about is what are people doing when they're, when they're watching or listening to your show. With audio, they're working. They might be stuck in a traffic jam, if they're in San Francisco.

And also they might be just walking, exercising, so on so forth. What this equates to is a much longer format, a long length, 30 to 90 minutes. We have gone back and forth with This Week in Media going short, long, figuring out and for a while we thought that maybe we should really be doing it for 30 or 40 minutes. Like we should do a really short piece. People told us well it takes me about 35 minutes to get to work, that's all I want.

And so for about two or three months, I would ask every person who said that they listened to the show how long they wanted it. You know do they care about the long ones or the short ones. And almost every, everyone to a person said they didn't care how long it was or that they liked the long one.

And the reason is that they're just playing it in the background. They don't really care. It's just filling up time. You know it's just, it's just like NPR, it's just something that goes in the background. So you can do a, a much longer format with audio and people will be pretty understanding.

With video, they're sitting in front of their computer. They're watching their AppleTV or they're watching it on their iPod, their phone, their iPhone, all of those things. And what this equates to and this is the difference, is the audio you're really having it, it's a secondary activity. It's not really happening in the foreground. Video is a primary activity which means that you really are looking at three to eight minutes.

This is really the sweet spot when you're actually doing video work. A lot of people think about doing podcasts that are 15 minutes long and 20, you know 15, 20, 25, 30 minutes long. But we have to sit there and watch it. You know and there's two problems with that. One is that A, you're sucking up, now you're taking away my actual work time to get this stuff done. The second thing is that you're working typically on a lower budget than Lost.

You know or ER and, and it's gotta be really good if it's going to last 20 minutes. You know that's, there's, there's not many things you can do on a low budget that, that is worth actually putting that together. So, so anyway you, you really especially you want to keep it you know simple. There's a quote that has been referred to, back to both Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln, depending on who you talk to. Which is that it's better to keep one's mouth shut and look foolish than to open it and remove all doubt.

So this applies directly to our video of making sure that we move through things quickly, try to keep it short and not hang too long. Another thing that you have to pay attention to is the scale of what you're shooting now. So what you see in the lower corner is standard definition. That's bigger than a lot of what you would normally put on your iPod, the little 320 by 240, although now you can put much larger formats on there. But that's standard definition.

720p is kind of, that's really the, the largest size you're going to put on an AppleTV right now and 1080p is pretty much full broadcast, well full, I mean that's theatrical release size. But one of the things that's really is that you can shoot all of these fairly inexpensively now. There's not, I would, if you feel like you're producing content that is worth keeping around and hopefully if you're building a podcast, that's what you're doing. You know if you don't think its worth keeping around then you should find another podcast.

But if you really feel like its worth having, one of the things that I would highly consider is getting rid of the DVD camera and going ahead with an HDV camera. There are great cameras out here. We've been doing a lot of testing with an HD20, the Canon HD20. It is 1000 dollars. And, and the images are pristine.

You know for 1000 dollars. It's totally enough to do the kind of work that you'd want to do for your podcast. And you're going to get that, it actually shoots 1080p. And so you're able to get that full resolution or you can bring it back down to 720p.

Another thing that you want to you know think about is how much you need to do with a set. And I'm going to talk a little bit about this a little bit later, but here you have a, a shot we did, this was for Mac World and here's the actually piece.

And one of the things that you want to look at is, is how to piece this stuff together. This isn't, this has gotten a lot easier. And I'll kind of walk through some of the sets, some of the pieces of that a little bit later. But one of the things to look at is whether you can get away with doing you know doing green screen rather than trying to build a set for everything that you need. A lot of times you can make something look kind of nice.

When we did this, there was some guys that Mac World I guess that I was told that they, they were like, where is that office? You know, it's, that's a really cool office. We should sit there. And that's all done you know really, really quickly. That's like four hours of work to put that background together.

One of the things that we have to think about while we're doing this is the price per finished minute. We are not broadcast. You know right now we're a niche market, we're a new market. We're all these other things. And we have to think about how do we keep our production costs as low as possible. To give you an idea, we tend to try to keep our production costs below about 200 dollar per finished minute.

You know so a lot of the stuff requires us to think in kind of mass production. So for instance, a typical show, we will shoot a minimum of six shows in a day. And typically we'll shoot you know as many as 12 and as I said up to 18 episodes in a single day, because that lowers our physical production costs. To give you a sense of that, a small cable network might be 2000 dollars a finished minute.

So 10 times more than the kind of budget that we're working on. And something like Discovery Channel might be something closer to 5000 dollars per finished minute. To give you an idea of the kind of expenses that we're, the scale. To put one more, I didn't put one more in here because it, it'll screw up the whole graph. Which is that ER you know is 200000 dollars a finished minute.

So, so you're really looking at, I mean that's what, that, that's the difference. But what's exciting is that we can actually work inside of that, that number. We can actually make podcasts that are, that are interesting especially when we get back, when we come back to this nonfictional content. When we're making something that is about things that people are excited about, especially if they, if they're underserved. If they're not, if people who are really into knitting aren't really, don't really have a lot of broadcast shows.

I mean they can't tune in on Tuesday night on CBS to watch a knitting, knitting video, they're very likely to be pretty understanding about your technical quality as you started to put that stuff together. So there's a, there's a real opportunity and people are going to be much more understanding, especially as you get more and more into that, that niche market. Here is.

"Nitrogen is normally a gas."

- Can we turn that down just a little bit? There we go.

So this is an example of one of our little podcasts and this is all done in motion, all the graphics in the background.

But by adding those graphics and finding ways to use up that space rather than trying to put a big set in there, we actually use that as a, as an opportunity to make sure that we could you know add a lot of detail and, and do something that you wouldn't necessarily see in a broadcast show. But added a lot to the show. Another show here, this is.

Mostly because I get to have lots of drinks. So. We actually, we've now designated, we've started to designate stunt drinkers.

Because, because here's the deal. What happens is that Alberta is an artiste, you know. And we had, we had one conversation with her about, we had one conversation about her, you know we could just use water on the set. And, yeah, she almost quit.

So.

So she, so, so it was, it was a bad scene. There was a lot of swearing and upset and so, so we backed off on that. And then she made the drinks and we said so we can pour them into the, into the, into the sink. And then, you know she almost quit. And so.

And so, and so anyway. So she, she really required us to drink the drinks.

And, and one of the things that we learned is that if you let the cameraman drink the drinks, you gotta reshoot. So.

So, so now we invite guests to come and, and sit on the, on the couch. And they're only job is to get up and drink.

So.

It's not paid, but oddly enough there's a long line, you know, it's. ( Laughter ) So anyway, so. To give you an idea what that looks like, it's not that, not that complex a set up. And this is, you're pretty much seeing the entire set up here where we, we actually found my partner at, at the Pixel Corps or one of my partners, that's his kitchen.

So we, you know there was a lot of like figuring out what kitchen we could actually use to make this work. So we, we found his kitchen. We used pretty much one light. We have a couple other lights that we'll throw around, but a big light. And if you're doing podcasting, if you're doing any kind of broadcast work, there's nothing better than a big, diffused light.

I mean you can, you can use those little sharp lights and you can have all the stuff, but a really, really big samara is really the way to, the way to go. So that always makes everybody look good. We have a kind of a big camera at the office that you can see here, but you don't need to use a camera like that to make it work.

One of the things that we do a lot of is capturing direct to drive. If you're doing production, it is a real pain in the neck to deal with tape. How many people here know how much of a that is a pain in the neck? Alright, so yeah, yeah.

We hate tape. So we're actually hoping by July, the end of July to be pretty much a completely tapeless process. And that's really become a, a real obsession of ours because we still have some tape in the system and it's the worst part of the entire process. What we use here, what you're seeing here is a, is a program called ScopeBox. And we use both ScopeBox and Final Cut to capture directly into, into the, ingests straight into the computer.

With most of these small cameras, you can ingest straight into a laptop. So you don't really need a big computer to, to make all of that work. And it's really worth it. You're going to really accelerate the, the amount of time. And once again, when we're trying to keep things at a budget, a lot of you are probably your podcast is a labor of love. But when you want to turn it into a business, you're going to really need to think about how do I cut every couple minutes here, couple minutes there, couple hours here, couple hours there to make it something that's actually financially viable.

Here's another.

This has to be shinier still. So I'm going to go in there and with my dodge and burn tool, I'm going to add a few more features. Let's add a little dark tone right there and maybe a little one right in there like that. Just a little tone in there. And with my dodge tool, let's go in there and lighten up a little chunk right there. And maybe a little highlight right there and maybe one right down the middle.

See?

So this is a show we do for a company, for Revision3 and it's called Pixel Perfect and it's with Burt Monroy and he, who actually taught me Photoshop. You know, 15 years ago. And anyway, so this is another style of capture and this is what it looks like in our office. That's actually what our office looks like. And so we, we you know kind of use whatever's available but it's simply a, a one green screen. We happen to use green screen from a company called Composite Components.

And we, we swear by them. They're lycra, they're washable, and, and they, you just spray them with water once they're up and they get all the wrinkles go out and, makes it really work. So but you, you can see it's not a very high tech set up. One of the things that by the way when you look at all these lights and you start thinking about how expensive that is, we barely own, actually own any lights. So when we do shoots, and this is one the reasons we shoot so many in a single day is that we rent everything.

So when we, when we're doing a shoot, we simply just rent an airy kit, rent kenos, rent you know all of those pieces. It's really, one of the things that may stop you from getting these nice light kits and or you know that you think you're going to have to spend 3000 dollars or 4000 dollars to buy it. Where you can go down to Gassers here or whatever you're at, there's always going to be, any major city there's a rental house somewhere.

And a good light kit, everything except for the kenos, all those little, all those lights and everything else is going to cost you about 75 bucks a day,u you know to 100 dollars a day to rent that stuff. And so, that is a way to just kind of, if you really want to have something like a lot nicer, you can throw those lights up and you don't have to go through that big expense.

Now the key is when is we don't worry about them too much because we're shooting you know 10 episodes. So we just think about it well it's not, we don't think of it as 75 dollars, we think of it as 7 dollars and 50 cent per epPisode that we need to. We do a lot of work, a lot of our pod casts are kind of worked out on Excel. ( Laugh) So.

Here's the, kind of the other angle, so you can kind of see where the lights are set up. The, here are the keno flows. Those are pretty much the best way to light your green screen. And you can see our very high tech way of getting that overhead shot from, from Burt up there with the, we've got a little HV, or HVX200 just sitting on our little tripod, kind of perched down. I'm sure we could think of something that looked better, but it works. So, this is MacBreak which a lot of you guys have seen.

So I won't, we won't go too far into this.

One of the things that does make a difference here is that we did spend some time on an open. And you know I was a little bit of a curmudgeon for a while about that. Saying ah, we don't need to do all of that stuff. But people, people really expect it.

And they, and they get kind of frustrated if you, if you don't give them their open, their little music. The one thing that we have noticed is that for a three to eight minute piece, it needs to move pretty quickly. So you know while you'd think on a broadcast TV show, you'd think about 22 seconds. And we're slowly moving most of our new shows to something more like 10. You know it's a three to eight minute show, don't feel up 50, you know 15 or 20 percent of it with the open.

You know, so that's kind of one of the things that we've, we've really gone into here. This is kind of what, what it generally looks like when we're shooting MacBreak. This is, we shoot this at a, at a the San Francisco School for Digital Film Making. This is right, right past the ballpark here. And so you can, you can kind of see, now once again, like I said, we use kind of big cameras because we have them. But you, you can use anything you want as far as this stuff goes through here.

But it's a pretty simple set up from our point of view. We're capturing in this case directly into Final Cut Pro. The great thing about Final Cut is that you don't have think about it at all. You know whether we're using a 950, which is what we're using here which shoots 4, 4, 4 uncompressed HD or we're putting a DV camera in, we can just, all of that stuff just goes in as long as you have a drive fast enough to, to pull it in.

I want to talk a little bit about green screen, because I know that I'm showing all this green screen. So I thought I would just show very, very quickly. I don't want to go too deep into this. If you have questions about it, at the end, I'm going to try to leave enough time for you to ask the questions that you might have.

But one of the things that's really important is really looking at when you're lighting your, your green screen, thinking about the process in a, in a very mathematical way. And I know we're at the developer's conferences, so it's easier for me to talk to you about this and, you know I talked to artists about it, and everyone starts to glaze over. You know, so but we really do, tend to do our keying by you know by the numbers. So I don't have to look at a lot. I don't need little filters to look at the green screen.

all I'm looking at here, this is an RGB parade that after I've captured some, I capture some sample footage, I'll put it into the RGB and what I'm looking for is the, is the distance between my red channel, my green channel and my blue channel. Obviously if it's a green screen, I want my green to be the brightest. This one is actually is actually a little under lit. What I really want is that green to be up at about 90, 90 percent.

If we start to clip it, we're going to start to pull the edges, make all the edges really hard because the things that are light green, you know the green should be white and the things that are light gray are going to be the, my nice fine edges. So if I, it's not just a matter of exposing the green as hard as you can.

You really need to look at the numbers and know whether you're going to clip your signal or not. You want the red and the blue as far from the green as possible. This is about minimum, minimumally what you'd want. But the more, the further you can get that apart, the better.

So that's, you know how we kind of approach that process. I'll show the, kind of the process of keying. We're using a plugin. We, we developed a plugin with a company called Lacquer called Conduit. And what it is is basically like a mini shake that sits inside of Final Cut Pro.

And once again, this is easier for me to talk to developers about or people who are here at this conference than artists. So what you have here is basically a flow graph of being able to kind of work your way through, you know a set of instructions. So here you have the input, here you have a color difference. This is basically subtracting the, a average of the red and blue channels from the green channel.

And what that does is that the green, the red and blue channel were dark, so they're closer to zero. And the green should be white. And in the area where your subject is, all of those colors are the same or they're close to each other. They're the same in value. So when you subtract them and when you subtract the red and the blue, what you get is a black in the center, because they were very close.

And you get just a, kind of a little bit darker gray because they were close to zero, so they're not subtracting very much from the green. The other thing that we do is what we call and unspill process, which is using that matt to actually remove all of the green from the scene.

And we really eliminated all of the green. So including the spill and everything else. From there, there's a color correction. And this color correction takes into account the blue background that we're going to put him over. So we're kind of hedging the background a little bit towards that. Because we want to make sure his edges will fit into the, to the background that we're working with. And then here you can see the final composite. Where we just simply stack all of those pieces together.

So that's kind of the, the approach that most of our, most of our podcasts go through. The ones that are working in front of green screen. There's a lot more detail there, but I thought I would spare you for the last session. So, so here you can see the piece. Now another thing that's important here is, stop this here for a second.

So one of the things to look at here is you'll notice that the, from a broadcast point of view, from a broadcast point of view, this, these lower thirds are very big. So if I was actually putting this on an HD monitor and I was actually playing this, this is a really, really big lower third.

One of the things that we're working on is while we deliver almost everything that we do at 1080p, we have to remember that there are going to be a lot of people watching them on iPods, on iPhones, on smaller apparatuses so we have to really design for kind of both. And so we try to split it.

We try not to make it too big, so it looks like a cartoon on a HD monitor, but we also have to know that those are, that we have to make sure it's still readable when it's sitting in front of an iPod. So those are the kinds of things that you have to think about as you're starting to put this stuff together.

By the way, I'm not going to show too much of it, I'm not doing a lot of demos today, but, but one of the things to notice, this little animation that comes in here, and I'm going to talk about this when I talk about the tools just a little bit.

It all, it looks nice and complex and you know it's, I mean it's simple, but it's a nice little element to add these little 3D fly-ins. This is all done with a program called Pro Animator by Zack Wartz. And it is the secret weapon to logo animations and everything else for, for broadcast, for podcasts, for, what it does is it basically, this, this Macworld Best of Show that you see here? They sent me, they sent me an EPS, so an illustrator file of that, of that file, just the outlines.

And I had that model in about 25 minutes. % You know it was a nice 3D model, it was totally animated, I had the animation done about an hour later. I hope no one from Macworld is sitting in here because, they won't be that impressed with it anymore. So they, they thought it was great. So anyway.

So the point is that all of this stuff was put together very, very quickly. It just does it really, really quick for you. And it is, if you want to do any kind of impressive graphics, or I mean just like little flourishes that look bigger than you are. It's a must have piece of software. The rest of this is all done in, In Motion.

So let me go to the next one here. So to, to jump into some of the tools that we use to kind of give you an overview of some of the tools that were actually putting together. Of course we're going to capture in, in Final Cut. We're also doing capture in ScopeBox. The reason we use ScopeBox a lot is because we can, we can get that, that RGB parade live. We have a lot more control and a lot more feedback of live content while it's coming in than what we get in Final Cut.

And so sometimes we don't actually capture in ScopeBox, we still capture in Final Cut, but we, we measure everything and we make sure that all of our lighting is set up and everything else while we're working in ScopeBox. And then we use for the screen grab, that we're putting together, we use a program called Snapz Pro. I think a lot of you probably know Snapz Pro. The other one that we use occasionally is a program called iShowU, which we like to say iShowU. So, we, we find it, it sounds better that way. So, so anyway.

iShowU is from Shiny White Box? Is that right? And the advantage of iShowU when you're doing screen grabs and I think a lot of you if you're building training for software or your doing any of this stuff, the advantages of iShowU is when you're done, it's done. Like there's a QuickTime. You're not waiting for Snaps to do whatever it does to put stuff together.

And, and the problem with it is that it tends to be a little bit more processor intensive. So when we're using something like if we're doing captures of Shake or a 3D program, it'll tend to be, it'll tend to bog down a little bit. And Snaps tends to be a lot better. So it's a little better mixture of the two of those. For production, we're doing all of our editing and I'll talk about this in a second, all of our editing in Final Cut of course.

We do all of our sound, all of the stuff from, for our sound shows in, in Sound Track. And we're very, I'm very happy with that. So and then we do, I think we do most of our, I think we, do we do all of our opens in? Not all of them? We do a mixture of the opens in Sound Track and Garage Band, so.

The reason we use Garage Band is because we can use keyboards and we can't do that in Sound Track. So, so we can make you know kind of do our little midi thing and put stuff together. But, but most of our opens and most of our little sound pieces are all done between Sound Track and Garage Band. The graphics as I said, Zack Wartz Invigorator, if you don't have it, you need.

You gotta, I mean you just, you want to make anything look like it, like you meant to do it, you need that piece of software. All of our 3D animation for broadcast work beyond Zack's Works, so if its more than just a simple little animation, we need to build a digital set, we need to build, we need to do larger animations, the open for MacBreak for instance, is all done in a program called Cinema 4D.

This by the way is not, we're not rebels in this, the majority of broadcast designers doing broadcast work, for networks and cable networks and so on, so forth are also using Cinema 4D. We use a lot of different 3D apps. We use Modo and XSI and a lot of other things that to, for a lot of the different things that we do.

But when it comes to broadcast graphics, this is by far the best application that we have to do that. And then of course, most of our, our 2D animation and now some of our 3D animation as far as basic 3D pieces is done in, In Motion which we're, we're also very happy with.

To give you an idea of how the pipeline works, and this is very simplified version of the pipeline, of what we do, just to give you kind of a process. For most of our stuff, we capture the two formats that we tend to capture in is HDV which is the devil. And, and uncompressed. So from, from there we take the HDV and we move it to Apple ProRes 422, we've been moving it to DVC Pro HD. But we've just begun to start turning over to Apple ProRes 422 which is much better.

And this gives us a very quick format that will edit easily and so on, so forth. Now we will, I will say when we're doing green screen, when we're coming from uncompressed, we'll actually do the keying first before we move into 422 because we actually have a higher quality format. Then we convert this all down to PhotoJPEG.

Now you may wonder why we do that, why we convert our nice ProRes 422 to PhotoJPEG. And the reason is that we send this out to editors. So our editors are spread over I think three continents.

So we have editors all, you know and going on four. So that what happens is we need to make it as small as possible. The resolution I think is 384 by 216. And if I remember correctly. And I think that's one fifth of 1920 by 1080. And it's PhotoJPEG.

The editors job is not to figure out whether the, whether the shots were done well or not well. Their job is just to cut the thing together. And so they don't need it to be any higher. And that may sound like a crazy thing, but the thing to remember is that Star Wars which is, when I was working on Episode One, they were editing, I wasn't editing. I didn't do any editing in Star Wars. But they were editing on what was called AVR6 from Anavid which is very low quality.

And the entire movie was done that way because the editor didn't have to figure out whether it was a good shot or bad, you know whether it was clean or not. That was someone else's job. Their job was to say once it's in here, I'm going to put it together and, and cut it. And so that's why we send it out that way.

This really, the difference in size goes from the 422 might be you know two gigabytes or three gigabytes. By the time it gets to PhotoJPEG it might 300 megs or something like that. and that becomes a reasonable file that we can put up on a FTP server, have the editors pull down and do the edit.

What happens there is they send, they only send the Final Cut Pro document back to us. So we don't have to you know we don't, Final Cut is not, is just doing a reference out to the actual content. So we just simply reconnect it with the high quality footage and then hit render.

So I mean there's a little bit more than that. we have some little pieces and graphics and stuff. But most of the work is done by the editors on a very low res version. We reconnect it to the high res. And that makes it very light. I mean the Final Cut Pro document is one meg, two megabytes, something like that. it's pretty, pretty small. And then from there we output to H.264.

So that's kind of the, the very, very basic pipeline of how we put stuff together here. So of our output considerations, computer. We have no true maximum resolution. So we do produce MacBreak at 1080p. And, and we put it out there. I think we have a feed that, the 1080p feed.

The truth of the matter is that when you start considering legacy, when you start considering legacy computers, you're real effective maximum really is 960 by 540. If you start making it bigger than that, you get emails from guys that are can't play it on their, you know their G3 laptop. So, so anyway.

So you get lots. And when you have enough viewers, when you get to 50 or 60000 viewers, those emails turn into its not like two people. You know you get like 40 emails a day of I can't, it keeps on skipping. So, so you're 960 by 540 is what you have there.

Interactive Max and why I say that is we do add a lot of interactivity which I'll talk about in a second. When you start making things clickable for us, the maximum is about 800 by 450 before things start to jump around. AppleTV of course, the maximum resolution is 1280 by 720 or 720p. And that is only 24 frames a second. So if you, if you go to 30 frames a second, then what you need is to go down to 960 by 540.

There have been, I was one of the people who actually was complaining about the fact that the AppleTV didn't go to 1920 by 1080 and why isn't it 1080p? And it has been proven to me beyond any reasonable doubt that unless your monitor is larger than 60 inches, and you're closer than 10 feet to the screen, which isn't really healthy by the way. You're not going to see the difference between 720 and 1080.

So you really, 1080 is you really, really requires a very, very large projection to make any difference. So this is really a perfect resolution. Because if you started doing 1080 just because you could it makes the file that much bigger. You know and so this works out really well.

With the iPod your max res, I think the max resolution I mean the effective resolution on your iPod is about 320 by 240, but you can stuff 720 I think, 720 by 480 in there. The big thing with, with it is the max bit rate which is 768 kilobits per second if you're doing H.264. And there's no interactivity of course in entire the AppleTV or the iPhone or iPod of iPhone.

Well I shouldn't that for iPhone because there's there is isn't there? Or we think there will be. So if we learn how to use the web. So, so anyway. The other thing to understand as you're starting to put your stuff together, and I'm going to talk about this a little bit because people really treat compression like a mystery.

And for us it's not that complicated. I mean I feel like we just kind of, we've kind of just found our way to pretty small files. I mean people always talk, a lot of people ask us how MacBreak gets to be really, really small. And, and so I want to talk a little bit about it and hopefully it demystifies it for a couple of you.

So the first thing is there's really two types of compression that's going on anytime you're doing any, any work like this. And that's the first one is spatial compression. And what you're really looking at here with spatial compression is what pixels look alike in a single frame. So as I'm looking at this frame, the blues are going to be start, it's going to start grouping those blues together. It's going to group the grays together. It's going to group the purples in Leo's shirt together.

It's going to group all of that stuff together and it'll find as many pixels as it can to group those together. And if it can't, the higher you turn the compression, the more it forces those pixels to be the same. It says, well they're close enough, I'm going to make this block all, all the same number of, the same kind of pixel. That's where you get blocks by the way is because it, when you start turning it up, it forces those pixels into, in to corrals. So this is one, one piece of the compression technology. The second is temporal compression.

And the temporal compression is really looking at what changes between frames. So if I look at this frame and then I go down a couple more frames, between these key frames, and that's what you're looking at, when you're looking in, in QuickTime, what you're looking at there is it, you'll see this little key frame number. A 12 or 24 or whatever. What it's saying is I'm going to lay an entire frame down no matter what, what's happening.

And, and then its gotta have, these are kind of like if you're thinking about climbing up a mountain, it's where you're driving your spikes into the ground. In, into the wall. You know, so you're going to get up to a certain height and you're going to go I'm going to drive one in and then I'm going to walk up a little bit further. So what it's doing is adding these key frames in between.

The further out you put those key frames, the more efficient your compression is going to become. So one of the things that we tend to do is turn our key frames up to 100 and sometimes up to 200 key frames between, I mean you know frames between key frames. This makes a huge difference often times with the quality of your, you know or the size of your, of your file. Other things that make a difference are things like how you shoot.

So and how, how you shoot your podcast makes a huge difference in how you compress it. Now a lot of people don't connect these two things. One of the things you'll notice about a lot of our podcasts is the cameras don't move a lot. The reason they don't move a lot is because it, every time you move the camera, it has to add what you call a natural key frame. It has to go, well too much has changed in this, in the scene.

And so I'm going to add another key frame to make sure that things are based on it. If you move the camera too slowly, and you have big wide distances between key frames, that's when you start to see a tear. You know because it'll tear because it doesn't realize that enough, you know it doesn't realize that things have been moving too much. And so you start to see artifacts.

So that's what's actually happening there. So we don't, what we try to avoid is a lot of slow pans. And we also try to avoid the camera moving when we, when we, we'd rather edit, cut from one frame, you know. Cut from one camera to another than move the camera around.

The other thing that is will really kill your temporal compression is handheld shots. So its, it looks really cool, but you gotta be really careful about that because the handheld shot defeats all of the temporal compression. And so that's going to be something that's going to make your file literally five or six times bigger, to have your, those kind of pieces.

So we all want to be like MTV, but unless we're really happy with our, you know how we're going to feed this content out, you gotta be kind of careful of that. So another thing by the way, one of the reasons we use green screen is because the green screen, there's grain. You know I'm sure any time you've looked, you've looked closely at your video footage and you'll see little grains changing.

That can defeat your temporal compression as well. By using green screen with a still behind it, what happens is those pixels become identical. And it makes the, because there's no grain in the area that the green screen was in, what you end up with is a very, very efficient temporal compression because those pixels that its looking at from frame to frame to frame are remaining totally identical, you know perfectly identical which makes it much, much more efficient. So the, the next thing that I'm going to show here is what we would consider kind of the next frontier. And we don't need any sound in the back there.

The, this is a test that we actually did about a year, about a year ago I guess. Little over a year ago. And that when I had longer hair. And, and more hair actually. So. So the one of the things we're going to notice down here is this is kind of interactive frame. Now what we're getting ready to do of course is start to take some of the stuff that we learned this week and find ways to do this inside of Safari and all that stuff. But this is all built actually into the QuickTime.

I strongly believe that what we're looking at is this year is going to be a year of let's get our video up on the web. Next year is going to be a year of let's make it clickable. You know so we're going to want to be able to click on just about everything within the next 24 to 36 months. And so we've been doing a lot of research on that. What you're seeing down here is a little extra movie that's playing along.

Now what's going on here is that if what we did is that of course there's some stuff that some, some folks that have supported us and so on, so forth that's in there. But we're really linking to anything that we're talking about. We're not trying to make it an advertisement. It's not a banner that every single, you know that all paid for. This is a really, really important point when you start to look at this secondary piece because if, there's an ad.

So that's an ad but it's mixed in, 60 to 80 percent of everything that you see has nothing to do, it's not paid for, it's just what we're talking about. And that is, that keeps that area live. It keeps people interested and actually looking at it. And clicking on it.

While I can't really show this inside of a keynote presentation, if I click on any of those it takes me straight to the website, you know where those were, you know to the either the manufacturers website or a place that people can buy it. We, with one of the microphones we, we were noticing that every person that we talked to had said oh I got this mike or I bought that mike and so we called one of the mike manufacturers and asked them. You know we've link to your, you know to your site and literally it was just because we went into Google and just you know found someone who sold the mike and link to it.

You know we were just experimenting, so we didn't like try to get any deal or work anything out ahead of time. And the guy was just like, oh man, he goes we got in on Monday morning, we usually get 20 or 30 orders a day, we had 400 orders. You know it was like, he was like we had no idea what hit us. He goes, and we got through the end of Monday and we got to Tuesday morning and there were 400 orders.

You know you know and and I said, and he said, he said he had 400 orders every, every day. And I asked well why was it 400 orders and he goes well it turned out that there was a problem in the web page that it would max out at 400. He goes, we just never had 400 orders before.

You know and so, so it was, so, so the thing is that when you're and the reason that's important is that and that's one by the way I really wished I'd asked for 10 percent. So, so anyway. The, the thing that's important is that when you're creating content and this is what's different.

A lot of people think of interactive content like I'm going to be watching Oceans 11 and clicking on Brad Pitt's shirt and you know all that stuff. The problem with that is if I'm, if I'm worried about what Brad Pitt is wearing during a movie, you know can't be a very good movie. You know if I'm paying attention. Now I told that to a woman in LA and she said well you're obviously not a woman. So.

So, so anyway. So the, the thing is that narrative content I don't think is really a great place for interactivity.

I don't people, people just want to, they don't want branchy movies. I don't want six different versions of Oceans 11 or Oceans 13 now I guess, whatever. I just want to watch the movie and I want to go home. You know I have enough trouble just keeping track of Pirates 3, you know let alone actually having it branch or be clicking on things and so on, so forth. But when we get into actually doing how tos, things that about what people are passionate about, they are much more likely to be interested in clicking on something.

They're much more likely to be interested in what you're using. Now this is microphones, but it could be, I could be talking about cars and I might want to know about the wrench or the, or what, you know what type of carburetor is being used or what, you know all of those things I might want more information. As we get closer to what people are interested in, this interactivity becomes much more useful.

Also the viewers are much more likely to not be bothered by stopping the program so they can find out more about what they're doing. And what you're looking at it an interactive experience where they're watching video, but they're stopping, they're looking at the web, they're doing more research, they're, they're buying products.

So on, so forth. And this is going to be, as this starts to really move forward, you know we strongly feel that this is going to be a huge industry. As it, as it really starts to move forwards as long as the tools are there, which it all looks like its going down that direction.

Here you can see integrated in to QuickTime, it's contextual so the information is about it, its hyperlinked and the results as I said were pretty impressive. This is the second version of what we're doing. And so what you see here is this is a lower third just you'd normally have except that you can click right on the lower third. So there's not, I can't click on it here, but if I, if I back up here just for a second. I think. Or not.

Then I won't try that. so the, so what, but the main thing there is that if I click on that lower third, what I'm able to actually do is that way, what that allowed us to do is have an integrated pipeline where we just made the same product. All that is is a hotspot.

So we're, now we're not building an extra movie, we're not building anything extra, we just have a lower third firing in and we're able to just kind of click if it's interactive. So if you're watching on the iPod, if you're watching on the AppleTV right now, you wouldn't be able to click on it.

But if you're watching on your computer, you could click on it and get more information, so on, so forth. And so, so that's another, that's kind of a little piece that we've, we've kind of gone done the path. Now the next thing that we're, you know the next place that we're going is being able to click on everything.

So we want to be able to click on Leo's shirt, we want to be able to click on the monitor. We want to click on you know and distinguish between the monitor, the, the keyboard, so on, so forth. We think that's going to be something that is going to be very, very interesting.

And the reason is that it allows us to very subtly add a whole lot of extra content, extra information, extra areas to sell into, so on, so forth without bothering the person who just wants to passively turn it on and watch it on their TV. So they don't have to you know it's just there. Once you know it's there, like we tell you at the very beginning, by the way, if you're interesting in anything you can click on it. That's all we have to do.

You know and while what will happen, we believe is that people will start getting into the habit of oh I'll click on that. You know and they won't do it immediately, but they'll start getting used to it and before you know it, they're. You know and we think that that might be strange, but I also thought that instant messaging was strange you know a year ago. So, and now you know my bill comes in and I get, I get called in the CFO's office. And so, so that, that was strange and interruptive and everything else and now it's just commonplace.