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    15 min read

    Working From Home Securely Webinar: Best Practices for Creatives with Nathaniel Bonini

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    Did you miss the “Working From Home Securely: Best Practices” webinar featuring BeBop’s Nathaniel Bonini (Technical Sales Director)? Here’s another opportunity to catch this webinar, we’ve uploaded a copy of the video here for you!

     

    If you have any questions or would like to find out more about how you can integrate BeBop Technology into your existing editorial or VFX workflow after watching, please click the button below, fill out the form and one of our professionals will help you get started.

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    TRANSCRIPT:

    Nathaniel Bonini:

    Hi folks. It is a five o’clock here in New York city and we’re going to give people a moment to join us. So, we’ll pause for a moment or two as people join the webinar. Good to see some familiar names here folks. Just to make sure I’m going out correctly, if someone wouldn’t mind chatting with me and letting me know that they can hear me all right, I would appreciate that. Very good.

    Thank you very much. So, we’ll just leave it for a few more moments and let some additional people join. Thank you very much. I’m not great at vamping so we’ll … I’ll make something up in the meantime as we go along. Let’s see. Folks if you have a question, please click the Q&A button and send us that question. You can send it anytime and I’m happy to address your questions as we go along.

    So don’t be shy, ask away we’ll be … We’ll get this going and just another moment, let some additional people join. I hope everybody is safe and sound and staying six feet away from everybody else in their home or if you have to go to work that you’re a cautious about that in you’re commute. Well, folks it’s two minutes after the hour, I want to kick off our webinar here and I’ll start this.

    I’m not necessarily looking to demo what we do, I’ll show you a little bit about the BeBop platform in a moment. But I really want to talk about working from home or working remotely and collaborating with people. So, one of the points that I want to make here is that if any of you out there know me and several people do that I see on the attendee list, thank you, you know that I’m an engineer and that I’ve worked for 30 years behind the camera.

    So I’m going to go ahead and start my video. Hey folks, my name’s Nathaniel Bonini and I’m the director of sales engineering here at BeBop Technology, and you are looking at my home office. And I’d like to point out a couple of things about working remotely, especially working from home in these times. One of the most important things I think that you could do is, turn on your camera.

    And what you have to understand is we’re all in the same boat, we’re all working from home. We all have pets, cats, dogs, whatever, kids running around. There are a lot of distractions going on. These are not a normal times. So what I urge people to do is give each other a break and turn your camera on and get those social cues that we don’t normally get when we are on a video conference or collaborating with people remotely.

    I think it’s very important to do that. I want to give you a little bit of of my background and how I got here today. And I think it’s important for the conversation of working remotely working from home. I’ve been with BeBop for about a year and a half, almost a year and a half now. And prior to that I was a director of video engineering for a large media company. And prior to that I was running a very busy integration department at a small integrator in New York.

    And some of my experiences over the past say 20 years, especially as we moved from film to tape, tape to pure digital on hard drives, we’ve seen a lot of transitions over the last 20 years in the industry. And I think this is one of them where we’ll see more people working remotely, more people being able to do their work as they live their daily lives. And I think that’s an important thing for people to keep in mind is that, you can have a great work life balance if you do work remotely by scheduling in those life things into your calendar as you go about your day.

    It’s important as you do your work and as your day evolves, to make sure that you take care of yourself while you’re working remotely. And no time more important than now that’s incredibly important. But my background as I said is an integrator in a busy camera shop in New York city and in digital cinema technology. And I think one of the most valuable things to happen in cinema and media and entertainment is this move to move into the Cloud and into virtualization of the work that needs to be done for production and post production.

    One of the interesting projects that I had started to be involved in many, many years ago if any of you remember the shooting gallery, was their production software. And it was an exciting thing to build a software to help people run their productions as they were running around. I was the location manager in the 90s working on set. And if any of you have done production work, you know how much you run around and how much your life depends on your cellular telephone.

    Because at the time we didn’t have smart phones, so we were still working with faxes and cell phones. But my point is, is that we were still able to have some collaborative work going back then. One of the wonderful things that happened … Has happened to work over the past 20 years is smart phones and tablets, and the ability to access the internet from anywhere. So, what are we talking about when we talk about remote work and remote collaboration?

    Some of the elements of collaboration are the flexibility that … Some of the things we talk about when we talk about remote collaboration and remote workflows, is the flexibility that it gives you. And one of the wonderful things about moving media and entertainment workflows into the Cloud is that if your data is there and your workstations are available to you, 24/7 you can work from wherever you want, however you need to work. That’s one of the beauties of the BeBop platform.

    And truly that’s one of the things that drew me to the technology that BeBop provides, and the workflows that it enables. Having run a small post facility where in essence we were a Dub shop, and we also fixed footage when it came in from various cameras for various issues including … But we also did tape to hard drive transfers and we fixed footage with time code breaks and with negative image lag and printed on it and high-speed off-speed footage and making sure that that worked in things like Final Cut Pro and things like that.

    Some of the benefits there are the very powerful technologies that are available in the Cloud, and the ability to experiment with workflows that you may not get access to if you didn’t have that horsepower behind you. So the ability for us to experiment with Novel workflows and to utilize more and more of the processing power that’s immediately available to you in the Cloud, I think is very important.

    And I think that’s changing the way that media and entertainment is looking at the Cloud and looking at the power of the Cloud to get work done. One of the benefits that I’ve had throughout my career is being part of … Being a vendor, and also being a client. I’ve been on both sides of the fence many times. And one of the things that impressed me about BeBop when I initially met them, and I’ll never forget the day that I did my Google search and found all these great people that I now get to work with in BeBop.

    But one of the things that absolutely was frustrating our ability to get work done, was putting these giant systems together, for a hundred editors to work at the same time. And having to work with multiple other departments in a larger organization that may or may not understand how video flows through an IT type system. Where their job had been to make sure that email gets to a client, or make sure that you can access your Excel file.

    Well, that’s all well and good, but imagine that you’re accessing an Excel file that’s a terabyte and you’ve got a hundred people doing that at the same time. Then figure out how the systems need to work, and the ability to put these massive systems in place and really at the drop of a hat, and then decommission them as you need them or as you don’t need them, was really a tremendously powerful tool that that has allowed us to as I said, grow and experiment with a lot of the … With a lot of Novel workflows for media and entertainment.

    And particularly these days in cinema as the image wrestlers grow and frame rates grow. And the amount of data that you have to handle is it seen. I mean we’re talking petabytes of data that are generated on a feature film. That’s a lot of data to deal with and it’s not easy to move it around, and it’s not easy to manipulate it in all cases, where you need to render camera selects 20 different ways for 20 different people and 20 different reasons and those all have to come back and get reincorporated into the project.

    It’s not easy to do. So, some of those things where I was … I could see the light where as a client we struggled to do a lot of this work on prem and the ability to have access to these data centers, which are global and tremendously powerful in and of themselves. Not to mention multiple data centers and multiple regions and on and on and on. It really opened my eyes to what the possibilities are once you start working in the Cloud. And to see BeBop in action in my facility was great.

    But more important to see it in action from my home when I was able to pop in at it into the Cloud, work on it a little bit in the office, and then go home and continue working on the same workstation was tremendously a tremendous eyeopening experience. So those are some of the things that were particularly poignant and that I enjoyed working with on the BeBop platform. Some of the other interesting things that we’ve looked for and that we’ve worked with are asset management systems as well.

    A very powerful combination of tools is to bring your asset management system to the mix and utilize the BeBop ecosystem and build asset management into that ecosystem. And from that you have immediate access to searchable and index data with a tremendous amount of metadata. And you can build teams and you can build collaboration around that. And collaboration in the Cloud is one of the most important aspects that we have of working in the Cloud.

    And for those of you who work … I see a couple of people here who work in large facilities, imagine having your 10 petabytes sand unbolted from the data center and let it float around in the either. You don’t care where it is, it doesn’t matter where it is, it doesn’t matter where that workstation is, just that it can see the data that’s on that storage. And having the ability instead of being tethered to an on-prem workflow, to have the ability to go anywhere you need to be and tapping into that power is unprecedented.

    So, that’s really one of the important pieces of why I came to BeBop and one of one of the very incredible things that working in the Cloud allows you to do. It’s funny I opened this webinar by saying that I’m typically not the guy in front of the camera, and that I’ve spent 30 years behind cameras and behind the scenes doing this work.

    And find myself looking for the questions on the webinar chat to see if … To see who’s listening and what things you all are dealing with these days. And how BeBop Technology might be able to help you with that. Or on a personal note, how we can communicate and collaborate and help you with any of the landmines that you’re currently walking on right now. So I realize that a lot of you have come here to see the BeBop platform and what we do.

    I really simply wanted to talk about collaboration, working from home and working remotely and how my experience with BeBop and my experience with the BeBop team, and how that has enhanced my not only understanding, but enhanced my vision of where any of this can go from a media and entertainment standpoint. But also simply from a work standpoint, being able to work on a common dataset using different modes of interfaces.

    If you imagine you have a ball of data and everyone’s looking at it in a different way, there is your … As people joke, there is your Google docs for media and entertainment where everybody can work on this data at one time, and work on it in a different way where you have visual effects, you have motion graphics, you have editorial, you have all kinds of different artists and talents working on one common set of data to make a feature film or a TV show or any piece of content that you can think of.

    So, with that I’d love to see if any of you have any questions, or if you’d like to see anything in particular. One of the things that I do a lot is demonstrate the platforms. If you’d like to see a little bit more about the platform, I’m happy to show you. Feel free and shoot me over a question if you can. Just hit that Q&A button on the bottom and I’d be happy to answer some questions or discuss whatever you’d like.

    All right. I’m going to jump into a demo here. And what I’m going to do is, let’s see, I am going to … I’m already logged into my client so why don’t I share my screen with you. If you can all see my screen right now. You can see that I’ve logged into the BeBop client and I have access to six workstations right here. And these workstations, I’ve already got one spun up and ready to go. It takes about a minute or two to spin up the workstations when you do click on one.

    And some of the tools we have here on the side allow us to look and see what the workstations are doing. It also allows us to ingest content into the high-speed block stores that we use for the workstations. And then of course we can download that as we need to download it. Or set up a hot folder if that’s what we want to do. So that we can push content right into our block storage and have it ready for work. I’ve already launched this workstation, it’s sitting down here on my toolbar.

    So, I’m going to go in and show you. Right now, I’m simply looking at a virtual workstation in the Cloud. One of the really cool things about this is, as you can see, there really isn’t any difference between what I’m looking at now and my desktop, except that I’m working on a machine that’s got three times more CPUs, it’s got 122 gig of memory and a really, really fast GPU. And I don’t have that in my machine at home.

    So what I’m looking at right now is a dashboard that allows me to see what’s going on, on my workstation. And as you can see, I have access to a project here, which is just a bit of shared storage. So for example, all these … All six of these workstations can access the same shared storage that I have mounted here. And it’s very simply mounted on the Z drive. And everybody can access it.

    The other neat thing is that with people that are geographically disparate, I’m in New York, I could be working with a motion graphic artists in Alabama, and they could be doing motion graphics and I can be editing away. And if you know how those templates work in the Adobe workspace, we can be working in real time together and collaborating on the edit and the graphics at the same time. And it’s a very slick way to collaborate.

    However, what I’m going to do is I’ve already fired up a premiere, and I have a 1080p project in here, which is a modest bit rate. I believe it’s 50 or a hundred megabits. And when I do these demos, what I like to show is I just like to show that the interface is fluid and I can rock and roll my play head as much as I want. I can get in here and I can work at speed as an editor. So I can pick and edit and I can do a quick insert edit. I’ll tell you again, I’m an engineer and not an editor and I warn people that when I do demos.

    However, if you watch editors and creatives work with these tools, they work with them so much. They’re very fast and they know they’ve got the creative process down and they just want to get that out of their head. And one of the wonderful things about this is that, I don’t necessarily have the horsepower at home to work in the manner or as fast as my brain thinks. Everybody finds it challenging when you have to render a sequence and then you play, and you can see what it looks like.

    And then you make a change and you render a sequence and then you play. Everyone’s had that experience. I don’t have to do that. I have enough horsepower at my fingertips that I can simply do my work at the speed at which I’m thinking about it and I’m … And there are no impediments to doing that. One of the tenets of my work over the last 20 years as I’ve been working with people and working with artists and working on previous project is that the technology has to be transparent to the creative process and I think that’s very important.

    So, whatever you think about the tools, whatever you think about the NLEs they’re there. They’re the same tools that you use on-prem. We give you the extra horsepower so that you can work as fast as you need to work so that those tools become transparent to the process of creating content, creating graphics, whatever you’re creating. BeBop allows you to do those at a speed which only people in high end shops had access to before.

    And that’s really one of the brilliant points of working in the Cloud and working on the BeBop platform. So I’ll let this play out a little bit. And with that, if there are any questions please fire away. I’m happy to answer any more questions. And really, I encourage any of you out there if you haven’t seen the platform and … Sorry I’m just reading a question here. The question is, can you describe the big picture, are you remoting into another machine or you’re streaming picture to a local workstation?

    This is a remote machine. This machine is in San Jose, California and I’m in New York city and I’m working on it directly. So that’s the scenario. It is a remote machine and I’m simply looking at the … To basically a screen share of that machine. It is a very different kind of screen share than you’re looking at right now as we’ve vetted a lot of technology and we’ve made sure that the technology that we’re using is the most color accurate and the most frame accurate that there is today.

    Next question comes in and says, “How would you deliver this cut to someone not in BeBop for post facility or not for broadcast?” That’s a great question. A lot of times NOCs will have a website or a place to post that or you can utilize an object store and pick the content out from an object store directly. So you can post it directly from the workstation, you can share it out into an object store and pick it up directly, or you can bring it back down and download it directly on your machine and post it that way.

    It really depends on how the … How your NOC or how your broadcast facility picks up that content. But there are many, many ways to do that. And the next question is about this being a BNC connection. This is not a BNC connection and I apologize folks because I didn’t share my sound with you. So, I’m going to go ahead and share my sound and I hope that you can all hear that.

    The next question is that, can you discuss audio and video playback on the local machine in an edit facility, direct video and audio to hardware and locally monitor for loudness broadcast monitors, et cetera? So, currently there is no facility for multichannel audio. So, if you’re doing a 5.1 at most that sort of thing, we have to use … The audio that we’re supporting right now is stereo audio, and you could absolutely put that into a loudness meter, but there is no … It is very different than having an HD SDI monitor next to you.

    Nine times out of 10 we find that people ask for those external monitors. They don’t necessarily need them, but as far as the loudness meters and those sorts of things, yes, they’re very important in the process. We do support a QC process that allows you to monitor for that. And with that folks, I apologize, if there more questions please email them. We’re happy to answer any questions you have.

    One last question is about NLE supported. No Final Cut Pro 7 is not supported. This is not a virtual Mac environment, this is a virtual Windows environment. And with that, I thank you very much and look forward to your questions offline. Thanks a lot folks. Bye.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]


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