Working From Home Securely: The Business Side with Herb Dow, ACE and John Miller

Did you miss the “Working From Home Securely: The Business Side” webinar featuring BeBop’s Herb Dow, ACE (Evangelist) and John Miller (SVP of Sales & Marketing)? 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.

Transcript:

John Miller:
Hi everybody. Welcome to BeBop’s webinar today. Today we’ve taken a little twist. We’ve been showing you a lot of technology, a lot of demonstrations. We’ve had some guests come on, but we’re going to go talk a little bit on the business side of it today. So joining me today is the one and only Herb Dow. Herb?

Herb Dow:
Hi.

John Miller:
How are you doing today, Herb?

Herb Dow:
I’m good, I’m good. It’s very strange to be doing this now. I started in this business back at DesiLu in 1966 as an apprentice film editor, and your job as an apprentice is to carry film from projection rooms to edit rooms, from edit rooms to the sound effects, to the music affects building. And it’s strange, but here I am 54 years later, still carrying film. Except now it’s lighter and it’s in a cloud, and I don’t get a bicycle anymore.

John Miller:
Yeah, that’s it. Okay then, [inaudible 00:01:09] don’t know, I’ve been in the business for a long time. I’ve held positions, I was one of the original Discreet Logic people, which was a time when we saw a big transition into how you work in digital workflows. I spent time at a company called Maximum Throughput, which we sold to Avid. Spent 13 years, I was the worldwide VP of Autodesk Media and Entertainment. And once I saw BeBop, it’s something that I knew was going to change the industry once again.

John Miller:
And I think nobody has really talked about the heritage of the company. Bebop has been around for about eight years right now. And it used to be DSB consulting. So we’ve been building cloud infrastructure for many years. So our heritage has always been about creating those workflows, and it’s come to this point that right now it’s not going to happen, it has happened. So Herb, you’ve been here probably about a year before me, and you’ve gone through seeing the changes and talking to other studios and everybody else. And I think from both of our experiences, they’ve been trying to get there, and they’ve gotten there now.

Herb Dow:
It’s an interesting thing. I was involved with leading the revolution to nonlinear editing from film back in the mid eighties, and we got them off of film, but they were still stuck in those little rooms. And I counted it up, and in my years of editing I was in 27 cutting rooms.

John Miller:
Oh wow. 27.

Herb Dow:
Only one of them, did I like.

John Miller:
The living room that you’re in now? That’s your new cutting room.

Herb Dow:
The one I’m in now. [crosstalk 00:03:07] I was chatting here. With the refrigerator next to me. I love it.

John Miller:
Exactly. Yeah.

Herb Dow:
It’s changed.

John Miller:
A couple of things, let me start off. When I got to BeBop, we probably have one software package that we were touting on. Adobe’s been our greatest partner since day one. But as you can see over the years, the transition is happening. And the workflows are happening, and companies are adapting to what it is. And it’s all about planning. And we’ve been planning for this to happen for many, many years right now. And people are coming on board, and they’re getting to the same place we are, in terms of how you get all the work, the benefits of whatever it is. And during this presentation, those are some of the things we’re going to be covering for you as well.

John Miller:
And I know all of us have been staying at home and watching some TV programs. I’ve been seeing these commercials with Jimmy Fallon working at home, and it made me think about… I want to say thank you to some people as well, in a Jimmy Fallon way.

John Miller:
So I get a lot of sales leads, and a lot of people come in asking me about, “How can BeBob help me?” So David sent a request from Burbank, asking, “I want to work remotely from home.” David, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Are you a laundry service? No. Are you a delivery service? Do you want to do post production? So it would be helpful for all of us to know what type of software are you going to work on. Is it editing, is it VFX, are you doing graphics? How many users are you going to be having? These are all the ways that people need to start thinking about how we’re going to work in the cloud, or how do I approach planning for it. Most people haven’t planned for it. Most people are being forced into planning for it. But today the answers are there, the solutions are there, and people are working on it. So thank you, David, for your question.

John Miller:
We’ve had this in our presentation decks to transition workflows to the cloud. Today I put a big X over it, because we all know that it’s happening. We have companies that have 40, 50, 60, 80 virtual machines currently in one of the different CSP providers, whether it’s Azure, whether it’s [inaudible 00:05:33] whether it’s Google, we have the flexibility to get you where you want to be able to go.

John Miller:
But there is so many more benefits of you being able to work with the licenses. I showed you that the licenses, that’s a bring your own license model. So you will have the flexibility and the financial advantage, because you already own those and we can just run them on the BeBop platform. Support, we manage the support that goes along with it. We configure it. BeBop builds you an ecosystem. We don’t build you a specific platform and tell you how to use it. We build you an ecosystem that accommodates the way you love to work. And Herb, like geographical flexibility [crosstalk 00:06:15]

Herb Dow:
It’s one of the things… Oh, sorry. One other thing, every editor or artist has individual plugins they like. And that’s one of the benefits of working with somebody like us, BeBop, because we are able to add the plugins you want for your individual system. When you fire up your Google station, your BeBop station, you’re basically turning on the same system you want, the plugins you want, and with usually a more powerful computer than you can afford.

John Miller:
Yeah. And some of the other benefits, Herb, geographical flexibility gives you the [inaudible 00:06:59] to hire freelances wherever you want. You can go find talent in different places. Tax credits. Tax credits is a big one. You can actually have your production set up, send out a bunch of [inaudible 00:07:11] clients, get your freelances, and take advantage of that. So there’s a lot of pricing benefits that go along with this as well.

Herb Dow:
Do you know, one of our major customers, whose name we can’t mention yet, had planned a… Planning a new location, and they were planning on spending three to four millions on video equipment, which they’re not going to do now, because they found out the cloud works. You don’t need that hardware.

John Miller:
Good point. Great point, Herb. So people were very scared to as they say, cut the cord. And what I would really like to say is, you got to think about what you don’t need anymore. And by that, when people say the cloud is expensive… Sorry about that. That’s my music for my Jimmy Kimmel, so that’s why I didn’t turn it off.

John Miller:
So when it comes down to this, the people do not compare what they’re spending as an overall budget, whether it’s the real estate… I have a lot of people come and ask me about real estate, and a lot of times I need to reduce it. And they’re spending 30% of their real estate costs on a machine room that housing a bunch of old equipment that’s going to be terminated. So there’s a lot of different advantages when you come into this model. And Herb, you’ve been around and you’ve seen this time and time again, you’ve been through the iterations of machine rooms and workflows and big film rooms, and your vision has come through in a long time that this is going to be the next wave.

Herb Dow:
This is sort of what we’ve been waiting for. You said geographically, frees you geographically. You can work with people from anywhere. We have companies where artists are in Singapore, in London and France, and they’re interacting with each other. We have a thing we named Over The Shoulder, which as an editor you used to hate that term because it meant somebody was standing behind you, usually in your room. Now they can be miles away, but you get that work together feeling, which is very important to an artist.

John Miller:
Yeah. So [inaudible 00:09:34]

Herb Dow:
I like your music.

John Miller:
My thank you. Julia sent in question from New York, and she said, “Can you send me a price for eight editors and 100 terabytes of storage?” Great question, and that’s the scenario you’re working today. But that’s not how we work today, Julia. I’ll sell you a configuration that has maybe one or two terabytes to start, because you don’t need to pay for what you don’t want to use.

John Miller:
And we can build this with that. We also have work flows where you can have less expensive storage, and we had a great product called Rocket that does all the file movement for you. So we’re here to educate you, and we’re here to help you plan. [crosstalk 00:10:18] thanks for the question.
Herb Dow:
Yeah, Rocket is like the bicycle I used to have. We just had a question from Matt Carter, asking if their limit… How much storage space BeBop can host, not that we’ve reached. It’s all [crosstalk 00:10:37]

John Miller:
Yeah, that’s one of the beauties of the cloud, Herb. We can build it to scale, and there are really no limitations on the amount of storage that we could build for you. But it really becomes a smart way you’re going to be working. I think one of the biggest things we love to educate our customers on is, how do you use storage? Whether it’s second tier storage, whether it’s online storage. And it really comes down to helping you with the cost and saving money. Same with virtual machines. We only spin up as many as you need, but if you have a project comes in and you need to have another five or six, we can do that within 24 hours, 48 hours to get it all up and running with your profile. So great question. Thank you.

Herb Dow:
Yeah. And one of the things, when he said you can add extra machines, we have a visual effects company using it, and what the artists love is they’re working on a shot on machine A, and they can turn that onto render and start another machine without buying another $10,000 Hewlett Packard box. And they can have as many machines working as they want, concurrently. A whole bunch of them rendering. It’s actually an amazing, amazing tool.

John Miller:
Yeah. And great point, Herb. When you think through about all the different workflows that we can provide, you know what, it really opens people’s minds up to how they can expand their business. Companies with multiple locations, it becomes a whole new way of thinking on how you’re going to service all these people, and your customers, and we are you going to be going. So great stuff.

John Miller:
So we get asked a lot, how is BeBop sold? So we actually have what’s called our subscription models. So if you look at the first layer, we have what’s called the BeBop Cloud Operating System subscription. Now you think of this, on our back end we have a lot of benefits to the customers. We have our MCP, we have our analytics, we have our orchestration layer. And it’s more to think about it, when you install an application on a PC or a Mac, there is that orchestration layer that makes everything work. Whether it’s a video card, whether it’s an audio device, and that’s where BeBop’s orchestration may has a ton of value. That’s where we build our features, that’s where we have… All our support comes out that back end. So for each organization, there is that subscription with it.

John Miller:
Next, we have what’s called our All Access Users. And it’s very simple to think about the [inaudible 00:13:19]. It gives you full access to all of the features within [inaudible 00:13:24] BeBop. And the way that works is for every virtual machine you have, you have an All Access Subscription. And then we have Additional Users, which would be above the number of subscriptions you have for the virtual machines.

John Miller:
And finally we have… What’s great, it’s actually part of our free offering, our Collaboration Suite. There, it provides the OTS, which we haven’t spoken about, the OTs review and approval. But I think everybody who’s on this call has seen BeBop, or has seen a demo or watched the four minute video. And if you haven’t watched that four minute video, I’ll tell you Michael Kammes did a great job on it. It’s well worth the watch. But anybody in your organization can have access to BeBop through this Collaboration Suite. And you get full access to OTS. And if you have some people who are just managing data, you can have them use Rocket, and they can upload the data because Rocket does not use the GPU systems in the virtual machines.

John Miller:
So, pricing. A lot of times, what does BeBop cost? So this does not include Azure costs, or AWS costs or Google costs. This is BeBop subscriptions. Now I talked about the organizational subscription, and we have price breaks as you go into larger organizations. So the organizational subscription starts off and 167 for the small work group. And then beside it, you’ll see there are two other subscriptions. The All Access, which we spoke about, and the Additional Users for the All Access. And the All Access, you can see the price breaks as you get into these larger enterprise type deals. But in the first two, they’re very affordable, they scale as your company scales. And I think the important thing is the additional user at the price level that it’s at, because it’s not a full time user. So if you have freelancers, or if you have somebody working on the weekends, or you just need to have some people to work extra hours or extra days, they can get a very affordable BeBop subscription to run all that software that we had shown you earlier in the presentation.

John Miller:
And I think in closing, one of the things that… This came out today, and I had to put it in the presentation, I saw the headlines, and it is so true [inaudible 00:16:01] And you can see the date on it, April 8th, it was released at 12:32 PM. And NHRA, great customer, great use case, we did a webinar with them a few weeks ago. But they started a year ago with us, with the vision of moving to the cloud. They took three years of their library, and they put it up into the cloud. They transitioned the editors, the graphic artists, where everybody had to make that transition and do it. And the wonderful thing about it is yes, they’re not racing. That’s terrible. But they have nhra.tv, and they’re still producing programs with it. People are working, they didn’t lose a step. And Herb, I know you met some of the editors there.

Herb Dow:
Yeah. Editors are editors, and they are so happy. They were in relatively small rooms. They were, I think, eight one room and six in another, and desk by desk. And they love the fact that they can work from home. It’s freedom [inaudible 00:17:13] The strange thing is, everybody who was working from home, I talk to a lot of editors and artists, they actually end up saying, “You know, I work longer. It’s like I forget lunch. At two o’clock I’ll realize, ‘Oh I haven’t had lunch.'” And they seem to get more done without all the people walking by their office saying hello. It’s a big transition in work.

John Miller:
Yeah, it is. And all the customers today who would have… Obviously our user base has grown tremendously since this incident has happened. But we have talked about DR and business continuity for years, and we’ve been trying to get our customers to plan ahead and plan with us. And I think moving forward, let’s think this thing through together. It really is… The use cases are there, the testimonials are there. And I hope today that we gave you a little insight into the business back end of what you need to do to, to think about and start planning how you work in the cloud. Not transition, how you keep on working in it. And it’s an ever-growing enhancing, and more and more companies are putting some glue pieces together, and you’re going to make the experience even better.

Herb Dow:
Yeah. It really is the future of production and post-production. Just driving it used to… I live in the Valley and work in a Valley, and it took me 45 minutes to get to the office, even though I’m 13 miles away. Just that time you waste every day. This is the future, and we’re very proud to be part of it. And come visit us on beboptechnology.com, there’s a lot of information on there for you.

John Miller:
Yes. Yeah. So I don’t know if we have any questions coming up. And if we don’t, we’ll give it a second to see if anybody has anything they want to ask. So… But exciting times, [inaudible 00:19:34] being at the forefront of changing an industry. It’s really exciting.

Herb Dow:
Yeah, getting to do this again. Yeah.

John Miller:
I know. I don’t think we have any questions coming in.

Herb Dow:
Okay.

John Miller:
So thank you. It’s great chatting with you, and everybody stay safe.

Herb Dow:
Thank you very much, everybody. See you on the flip side, as they say.

John Miller:
See you on the flip side. Thank you.

Herb Dow:
Take care.

John Miller:
Bye.

Herb Dow:
Bye.[/vc_column_text][vc_column_text]