Alright. Hello. Hello.
Welcome, everyone. Thank you for your patience, while we got this started up.
You know, it's not a good Tuesday if we don't have a few technical snags to get us going, in the day. But, I wanna welcome you all to this great conversation we're about to have. My name is Dave Leopold. I'm the director of strategic development here at LucidLink, and I am so excited to be talking today to Miles Friedman, group director of production at Designery and EG Plus.
Unfortunately, Alex Budzinski, who was also supposed to join us, who heads up their postproduction, is not gonna be able to join us today. But, Miles, we are so excited to to have you here today. Thanks for joining us.
Great to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
Can we just kinda start by learning a little bit more about Designory, e g plus, what the difference is, and where you fit into all of this?
Yeah. Sure. Let's start there because it's a perfect example of the confusion of trying to get onto Zoom because it was to one email address, not the other, and I have both email addresses, which are very fun.
So Designroom and EasyPlus are actually both under Omnicom, you know, one of, like, the world ladies agency leaders that we handle a lot of creative and production services for a lot of different clients.
Designory is more of our traditional agency, creative agency, customer experience, services. And AG Plus pairs with that as the content production services, content production, origination, adaptation, localization.
Both of those kind of fit together in kind of a narrative to offer our clients. Like, we can offer, you know, bringing in your products, designing a brand, and and, consumer story around that, and then going to execute from start to finish all the way from, you know, live action production to post production to delivery.
Wow. And so how often do the two teams or or really companies, work together?
Yeah.
Great question. Really, really often. I mean, we're we're often paired to hip, and we find that our most successful narratives for our production project journeys is when they are attached to the hip. When we have the opportunity to be and think as a creative agency and bring in production from the very beginning, it gives us the opportunities to really develop better projects, and even more effective projects than if we were to partner with a different production third party or a or or, you know, working with a different creative agency that has, like, you know, we'll we'll do creative and then we'll hand it off. That helps solve that, pretty drastically.
Got it. And I I do see a quick note.
Is is anyone else having, issues hearing?
Is volume low? Feel free to put in the chat, and we'll see if we can troubleshoot that.
But, yeah, Miles, so what kind of projects, do you tend to be working on? What what's the common type of project if there is one at all?
Yeah. There there isn't. So we definitely work on all types of projects from video production where we're doing live action production, capture in house ranging from, you know, going to an event and capturing some talking heads all the way to TVC and running footage for some of our automotive clients.
We do postproduction where we have, you know, editorial, motion design, finishing, color, visual effects, sound mix design.
Then we get into, like, banner automation, static production, photography, retouching, and all this stems from where we start creative origination, then adaptation, optimize, reuse, and then localization, global delivery to all the different regions possible.
So any kind of content, print, video, you know, you name it.
Yeah. But every single type of content requires its own, specialties, workflows, you name it. Do Do you do you have a favorite that you really like to work on?
Yes. Video is definitely my, my background, just starting with visual effects and work on film and from my past.
Love video. I I think it has a lot of complexity and, you know, a lot of different moving parts and and team and creative thinkers to bring that together. It's, you know, my my favorite.
Awesome. So it sounds like you have a lot of, video professionals. You have animators, graphic designers, people who specialize in color, audio, you name it.
How big are these teams that you're working with?
Yeah. So our North America unit is about a hundred and fifty people, and that's split primarily between our postproduction team, with editors, motion designers, color, you know, everything I mentioned, and also our digital team, retouching, production artists, designers, proofreaders.
So those are probably two major hubs. We also have our agency producer team out of the ones that are working with creatives hands on to bring projects, you know, to light, to bring them into production.
You know, print and CGI is definitely a growing area as well. We just it's all kind of encompassing whatever we can, you know, angle any project towards with a production service, opportunity.
We try to do that.
Awesome.
Now, as far as the offices that you have globally Yeah.
You know, we're we're gonna we're about to dive into this a little bit more, but it seems that the the commonality, the way to bring them all together is you had to move to the cloud. You know, that that seems to be the the mechanism of choice.
Can you talk a little bit about some of the challenges that you were facing before you made that dive head first into the cloud?
Yeah. Absolutely. I think our first you know, knowing, and knowing where we are, located, we have offices in Long Beach, LA, Chicago, New York, Mexico City, Dalian China, India, and we're, you know, just rapidly growing globally.
And that's what we see. There's also our, others, Egypt plus offices in London and Warsaw and all that stuff. When we've started to open up the doors towards, more connectivity with our other offices, we ran to the issue of how are we gonna share files with each other? And before, we were sending drives.
Sometimes we would upload files, but sometimes, you know, we had massive, massive raw files from video shoots, gigabytes and gigabytes. And this was, like, you know, five, ten years ago where we'd have to ship a drive. It just be much faster.
So as our our company shifted to be more of central units, you know, US, Europe, Asia markets, every office within an heart had to start collaborating. And that opened up the channel of, well, how do we share files and work on files more consistently with each other versus, you know, every every artist has every single file and duplicates and, you know, passing drives off.
Yeah. And I would think that that would also enable you to pivot a a lot more seamlessly and sort of keep the flow of things going as you move from one project to another or bring more people on. Can you talk a little bit about how collaboration has, has really increased?
Yeah. I think when I I think this probably happened around the era of COVID where we had a lot of our artists in office, and then, you know, people started you know, we were at home for a while, then people started moving away. And also, not only that, we found more talent in a bunch of different locations. You know, even though we have our major hubs, we still have people in Seattle, Portland, Texas. You know, they're it's being able to have a way to connect and collaborate with artists and producers and talent across the country in a seamless manner is was our number one priority to solve.
We we know that, like, having everything on a local server and everything attached to it is a very great working model, but we had to start thinking about that in the lens of now we're global, and now we're working on large campaigns. And, you know, how do we bring it all together and allow our artists to feel that connection without actually sitting next to each other?
Yeah. And, you know, I think for for anyone who is not familiar with LucidLink, you know, Designery and e g Plus have been using LucidLink for a couple years now, and we were really excited because this was gonna be our way to show, what the value is that we can bring to really get that global collaboration going.
But for anyone not familiar with LucidLink, if you've never seen it before, what you need to know is we make cloud storage look, act, and feel like it's local storage. So that means that you have shared storage in the cloud that everyone accesses. It's a single source of truth. No one's filling up their own hard drives or ending up with their own copies of of files.
But so you're all working off the cloud, but your computer, your operating system, your applications, even the end user thinks that it's a local file. It just looks like it's on a hard drive. And that's really the magic is that we're not only trying to reclaim time in the day, you know, time wasted that's from, from sending drives, shipping drives, or downloading downloading your files, working on them, and then reuploading. That's tons of downtime.
We wanna reclaim that time of the day, but it's also about giving flexibility back to the users to work in the way that they are most comfortable.
So to that point, what was it like when you actually started, introducing LucidLink into the creative environment across your team?
Yeah. I I actually it's it's funny. Artists can be very particular about changing anything, for good reason. They they they know their craft.
They know their tools. And when you ask them to change, it better be worth it. And, honestly, this was one of the quickest and most seamless transitions from you we know at the point we were using Google Drive. And, you know, we ran into issues of upload and download and became such a massive challenge for us that, you know, we had to think differently.
And, you know, be, you know, working at a very fast paced, high volume amount of projects, globally that had to be solved. And so when we got connected with you and the team at LucidLink, we were nervous that we were gonna hit some walls with some artists being like, we wanna work this way, but everybody, it was such an easy way to, to gravitate.
And, and have artists feel like they're working back in an office, working locally, made this made everybody wanna jump onto it. And it became actually, so well liked. We were trying to slow roll it, to get, you know, us used to it and and get people on board and figure out size and and access.
But we had to basically blast those doors open, let everybody on it because it was such an effective workflow that changed the way we worked instantly. It was it it was crazy.
That's awesome. Yeah. People were banging down your door to say, onboard me next.
Yeah. Our IT department was not thrilled with how much we were asking them to to move faster than they were moving.
But, yeah, to to your point about, ease of getting on board and sort of that low barrier to entry, I I was a former, LucidLink customer before I came to work here, and I was a television editor. And so I know firsthand that, you know, creatives don't want to worry about where their files are located. They just need them and wanna work. And so it's it's really the hitting the easy button. It's the easiest way to just get the files where you need them to be, but not have to think about any other part of that process.
So it's it's great to hear that people were so enthusiastic about getting on board with this.
When you were when you were integrating LucidLink into these workflows, were you kinda working from the ground up trying to reimagine completely new workflows, or were you slotting LucidLink in to fill gaps of excess of existing workflows?
Yeah. I I actually think we we when we were gonna be bringing in LucidLink as our, you know, cloud based solution, we were thinking that our workflows would have to change.
How because if that's how we were built before. When when we were using Google Drive, we had to build specific workflows that came from our local servers, you know, when when when everybody started going remote.
But this actually almost brought us back to our original workflow by working in, you know, on a local server at the office, but it was a local server in the cloud that everybody can access. So it kinda brought us back to our more effective workflow where we didn't have to change much in the ways of how we you know, labeling files or storing files or where are they stored or how are we storing them. It it kind of connected everything back together to, okay, an artist was working on an asset.
When After Effects or Premiere, they brought it to another artist. They don't have to relink anything anymore. Like, we had a process to help make sure that whenever an artist is gonna pass it to Google Drive and pass it back, the the volumes are gonna change. But this kind of made things easier and and allowed artists to then pass an an asset back and forth and collaborate that much easier.
So, yeah, it's almost like a reverse workflow where we had to build complicated workflows to make other solutions work. We rolled it back to we're kinda back at the office again.
Yeah. So so as you were building out these workflows, what challenges were you really looking to address? What were the most important things that you really need to needed to solve for?
Yeah. I think one of them is our connectivity with teams globally.
We definitely ran into an issue when we're onboarding some of our team in China and because of firewalls, because firewall access on both ends.
And that was a big challenge for us because, you know, we had a lot of really talented artists there that were working and collaborating with our our talented creatives here, and we couldn't share files with each other. So having that connectivity is one of the most important things I think that we were addressing in a workflow that things people need to be feel and be connected.
And that actually even says, you know, for the for the talent and the creatives and the artists that we have here, being able to feel connected to the work is so important where the second you start have to think about upload and download and export and file naming conventions and all kind you're you're taking yourself out like, oh, I'm working, I'm working, I'm working. Oh, let me stop the process and move into a you know, my transfer model. So having creatives feel like they're connected with each other. And even though they're not sitting with each other anymore, but they're able to render a file, that file pops up immediately to another person. It keeps that collaboration going and working very effectively.
So that is you know, that's been a really amazing, you know, kind of an unforeseen reoccurrence of working, like, in the office locally to using this as a cloud based solution, that collaboration connectivity. And, also, I think the the the bigger part from a client side is they're looking for faster speeds. They they want us to deliver faster. So we can't waste time on, you know, using a global network and uploading and downloading files constantly.
You're wasting hours on the day. Just drop a file up there. Let's see when the artist gets it. I'll relink.
So that you know, the speed and effectiveness is also another big part of it.
Yeah. And I think that, you know, people have always been looking for that silver bullet that allows them to remain for as long as possible in an uninterrupted creative environment.
Yep.
Because you're absolutely right. As soon as you're starting to think about, export settings or, you know, where your stock libraries are or anything that takes you out of the process, you've lost your train of thought. You know, they say that an administrative task, it'll take you ten minutes to get back on on track after one distraction, something like that. If it's a creative task, you're never gonna get back to exactly where you were. So so keeping everyone sort of working seamlessly, I think, is is so important.
But, also, you know, can you talk a little bit about on security side too? What what security means to your clients and to your business and, how LucidLink kind of addresses that as well?
Yeah.
So we're under Omnicom, as I mentioned before, and Omnicom is very, very, very strict about any technology that we use. Anytime we wanna introduce anything new, we have a whole panel of Omnicom heads of security specialists do an audit. And even sometimes for smaller companies, it can be challenging that even though it's a great tool, Omnicom won't allow it. So, you know, from from we don't even have to think about security because Omnicom is gonna do it for us, and they are very, very strict. So it's been great to know that, even LucidLink has been able to pair a lot with other Omnicom network agencies, and we're all using it now even more collectively and collaboratively.
But but knowing that, you know, we have some secure files that we know we wanna have only certain artists and creatives look at. We have general volume files of like, we where's all of our branding files. Where's all of our sound effects files that all of our editors wanna use. Like, it's great that you can also have secure partitions for, you know, specific individuals, especially especially if you're coming in.
You don't wanna give them access to all the files. So it's done a really great job at that. And, also, the safety and security of the files being there when you need them and, you know, having backups, that has been that, you know, that all encompassing from the security lens to the safety lens, it's been able to solve for us, and we've never had an issue with anything that's been deleted that hasn't been able to be restored. Accents happen, and no issues of leaks or any data, you know, vault leaks that we've dealt with before.
So it's been it's been wonderful.
Yeah.
That's great. We have, LucidLink has what we call a zero knowledge security model. So everything that you have, all of your files are encrypted whether they're in the cloud at rest, in flight, or even at rest on on your local machine, in your cache. And so that gives that peace of mind for for, you know, heightened security, and we're dealing with some of the most some of the most secure IP.
You know, Miles, I know that you deal sometimes with products that haven't been released yet or new campaigns, and so that just there's no negotiation there. It has to be great security.
And I know that we've also talked a little bit about how at the beginning of the pandemic, there was a choice that had to be made. You could either go for security and make sure that you're hitting every policy that you have or you opt for business continuity and keep working. And I think the the chickens are finally coming home to roost, and the the security, infosec departments, content security, all those are now saying you've had your time to keep working, but now let's make sure that you're in compliance with our policies.
Have have there been any issues that you've had, or is InfoSec kinda silent as you as you proceed forward?
Yeah. The no issues whatsoever. And, you know, I mentioned even the Omnicom side being very, very strict. Our clients also had to be aware of our transition and change, and we had to let them know that, hey. By the way, we're gonna be working the cloud now for sensitive materials.
And and and we we assured them with reassurances that, yes, this is gonna be your your intent is safe, secure, and, you know, all of them were saw the value of being able to deliver faster than, you know, any of the risks lack of risks that that existed.
So, yeah, it's been you know, we have not heard anything, any issues from both sides, Omnicom or even our client side. And it's been that's been a really great thing for having years of this, platform under our belt that there's been nothing to worry about because nobody ever wants to worry about that kind of stuff.
Never Of course.
You you just wanna focus on the creative tasks, get the work done, and, you know, win more clients. Yeah.
Can you can you walk us through any new workflows that you've had that have really stood out as either great improvements on efficiency or creative output.
Any examples that really stand out where where teams across the globe are are working together?
Yeah. Absolutely. So, let me show up this slide really quick. So this is a high level view. We have a little bit more detailed view per client, but let's share. Let's make sure this works right here. Yeah.
Share. Can everybody see the, workflow examples?
Great.
Yes.
Okay. Let's slideshow this. So we created this not only for ourselves, but to showcase to certain clients, especially when we're selling them new services and how we're working in the cloud, how much more effectively we can be with LucidLink.
And so when we look at our old way of working, one of the things that I I I know I mentioned before is upload and downloads. When we were having, you know, master assets of files existing somewhere, whether we created them or not, we then whether it's raw data or a a content origination that needs to be added, adapted or localized, we might have four or multiple artists working on that project.
And when we were the the the previous way of working, we had that those files on a local probably at that point at Google Drive, and every artist had to upload and download their respective files. So if you have four different artists working the same project and maybe even the same kind of aspects of the project and have to pass things back and forth every single time, you have to upload and download.
That could take one, two hours per transfer. We did a whole outline of this for one of our clients, and we realized, like, we're spending, I think, around thirty to forty hours on a project uploading and downloading across all of our network. And so from that point, you know, even if you deliver it and you have revisions, you have to go back, and that has to go back and upload and download to every single group.
Lose link has allowed us to really act as, like, we're on a central storage in the cloud where everybody's remote in office or not off and not in the office. And it keeps all the files locally as you would expect raid server. And so that we did the math on that too. Our upload down speeds went from a thirty, forty hours down to about five, ten hours per project.
And the biggest thing was just uploading the master assets into LucidLink. And then, you know, anytime we had to deliver to a specific server, it was that was it. There was no we cleared all the uploading and downloading, challenges within our artist project collaboration. So kind of going back to an artist is able to work more collaboratively with each other and even share files with each other.
And it's not even share files. They just they have access to all the files. That that was a big time saving. We showed that to our client.
They were stunned and thrilled, and then they asked us to deliver faster and, you know, how that goes. But at the same time, it was it was a really great win to sell this on clients and other clients that we've used this for in the future of how we're working effectively in this new era.
Yeah. Thank you for, for showing that to us. One of the things that I love is that, you know, as you show as you showed that to us, I'm thinking that something that's so cool is that if if I had a project and I needed you to just open it up and make one small change and that was it, you could have actually done that in less time than it took to walk us through those slides. Yep.
Just Yeah. Exactly.
It it take it could it could potentially take less time to open up a project, make a change, and save it, and have someone else have access to it. That could happen faster than describing the process of the old way of doing.
Oh, absolutely. And then you have your, like, your lead artist maybe work on the project and have the master assets, and then, oh, that that lead artist is taking a vacation as as all talent and creatives should.
Those files still live in that that, artist's computer. How do we get them transferred to another person, and how do they open up? Oh, they gotta relay things. Like, yeah, it's it's significantly faster across the board.
And, yeah, faster than I showed that presentation.
Yeah. And and so how often are you sort of adding people at the end of a project, get a few extra hands on, maybe have somebody new work over a weekend? Is that happening often?
Yeah. It Okay. I think one thing we've been focusing on too is a better way of sharing resources.
So we're allowed we're we're able to cross utilize talent even more. And even as a project goes on, especially for, like, a creative project, you might be down one path where your creative team and your artists are leading you down, and then all of a sudden, there's a change the client wants to do that's gonna pivot to a whole different direction, might require different graphics, might require different, like, visual effects. We can say, okay. This artist may not be best suited for that specific output.
This other artist might be really great at that craft. Let's pivot it over there without having to worry about how are we gonna get the files over. And it's allowed us to to adapt to new and creative requests both from internal clients, or or internal creative, team members, but also client, requests as well. So and and that's been wonderful for us to have.
That's great. And, you know, as a creative, I also know that it's pretty amazing to either sit down at your computer and you know, I have a MacBook Air with five hundred gigs of internal space, but I open it up and I have terabytes available on on LucidLink.
It's it's really just sort of this infinite, magical hard drive that I have.
But the other part is that I don't need to wait. And so to be able to click right into that, creative mindset is is really important when you're getting started on a on a project or if you're especially jumping into a project partway through.
Yep. And from, I'm more of a production minded person, so it's very fun because, I know how fast it is. So I know that an artist can't use the a creative can't use the skills. Oh, well, I'm uploading big files.
So it's like, no. I know you can get to work. It's it's been a really fun blessing where you can you can say that. But, yeah, I I clearly agree.
Like, I've seen, you know, I've seen some of our town come in and, you know, back before they were they were frustrated to have to download something from Google Drive and then relink things. It just they it it, like, it takes you out of just being able to do really good work. And and, yeah, they don't it's it's thoughtless now. They don't even think about it.
It's like, plug in, get to work, you know, be able to really focus on it without having to add three extra layers just to get started.
That and that that's that's the ideal goal is to work at the speed of your own creativity. You don't you don't want technology getting in the way of things. You want it to speed things up and enable.
Now, I believe it was about a year ago, we actually released our, our panel for, Premiere Pro, and we updated it recently. And so now it also supports after effects. Are are any of your creatives using the LucidLink panel within Adobe?
Yeah. We started using it for Premiere Pro probably about six, seven months ago, and we're just getting on speed with after effects. But it has been a great panel to keep it it's it's almost like it's allowing like, what we're talking about, it's allowing the creatives to do less thinking about workflow or process.
It just allows them to connect to their files easier and lets them work. It's almost like, you know, anytime we see a distraction for our creative team, we wanna we wanna open up those channels so they're not having to stop, and they can keep that creative flow going and work with other creatives to keep that journey going without having to say, okay, we have to stop these new these new integrations within Premiere, After Effects, I was gonna say Adobe, but within Premiere and After Effects have really allowed that same story to continue to move it further where they don't have to think about which files that they need or anything like that. It's all connected and just allows that artist and that creative to work just, you know, one less thing to worry about.
Yeah. And and, personally, I I think these panels are great.
They're available for free on the Adobe Exchange. They work in both, Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects.
But one of the things that I love is that it's not just that it is, makes it easier for file management and pinning and caching and, you know, for any LucidLink users out there. You you probably know what I'm talking about. But the other thing that I like is that it brings more people into this environment and this, this sort of creative, workspace where we collaborate with each other. So it's not just for the video side. It's also now for motion graphics and compositing and visual effects. And so everyone can start to really benefit from from the value of working this way.
One thing that I do love to mention is for any after effects users who are getting deeper into LucidLink, one of the things that I love is that you can export directly into your LucidLink file space. So export directly to the cloud. If anyone has ever heard that god awful sheep sound when you run out of disk space, you will never sheep out again if you're if you're uploading directly into LucidLink. I I'd just like to mention that.
So how has moving into the cloud and and collaborating globally affected your your business from an operation standpoint, from a creative standpoint? You know, what what has happened with your creative output and, you know, from an overall business and and revenue side?
Yeah. So on the operation side, it's allowed us to sell to our clients. This is kinda maybe operations and sales, and I'll get to the creative in a second. The operation and sales are kinda connected where our clients are asking us to deliver faster, higher volume of content, more personalization, which means more localization and adaptation work and optimization and reuse of assets, but at speed.
And I think the speed factor is is being able to solve on all parts from, you know, having access to all the files immediately, having artists be able to work faster and chair files, immediately, you know, or be able to work on the same files at the same time is is been great. But it's allowed us to do what we call, and I hate the word, but we're gonna say it, follow the sun model as we have offices around the globe who are all connected globally that, we you know, our clients are often asking, like, a twenty four hour cycle. And, you know, we don't wanna make anybody work twenty four hours.
But if you have a team central to each, you know, territory that can help pass a file off to the next person, next person works on it and keeps that going, you can really hit a better production cycle and, and be able to reuse assets across different territories a lot easier without having to figure out where is that file. So our clients have been really thrilled about it. It's it's definitely challenging in nature, less so about now the the where our files are and how they're stored and how we're sharing and how we're collaborating, but more on the workflow between, you know, how each artist may work on the top end.
It's nothing to do with, how we have our files, which has been great. And, you know, creatively, it's actually allowed our artists to work more closely with each other than they ever have we've ever had before, where, a t our team in London and our team in the US might have worked separately for a long time. And and if they had to pass files back and forth, it felt like a you're working with a whole different team that had to have their hard drive, ship it over, get into it, understand what the artist was doing. But now an artist from the US anywhere in the US can connect with an artist in London, anywhere in London, and be able to look at the same files and talk to each other in real time versus having to wait where that artist might be on a different project by the time that hard drive arrives.
It it just it it makes that creative collaboration move even more effectively, than than before. And and to our clients, delivers a higher output, and we've been able to deliver faster. It's you know, the number show for it year over year.
That's great. And, you know, I one of the things that I really love, though, is that, you know, you're saying that it has opened up better just communication.
That's what is going to propel creative industries forward is creatives communicating with each other, learning from each other, asking questions, being inspired by each other. And so it sounds like this has become a next level communication for your creative teams globally.
Yes. Absolutely. I think continue that thought. It's it's allowed not only those artists to share a project file with each other and be able to do work, but also allow artists to share their craft with each other, where you might have a really talented, motion designer in London, and you might have this junior motion designer in New York.
And that junior can look at that artist and see their files and be able to kind of look, open it up themselves and say, like, how did this person do this and be able to ask that person and not have to say, like, well, you don't have the right files and you're not on the right server or blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it makes that artist connectivity and growth, even more possible. And actually we've because we've had LucidLink, we've done, artist challenges, creative challenges, where we bring all of our editors together and have them work in the same on the same projects and be able to, like, see what other artists are doing.
Same with motion design. We've actually done two motion design challenges where we gave each motion designer a same exercise to execute on. And we can see that even from the first motion design challenge to second, everybody had improved four different ways by, by them understanding, be able to talk to other artists and open up a file and they both have it open. They can talk about it live.
So it's made it really, really great from a creative growth standpoint that you wouldn't really think to consider when you're thinking of just like, oh, it's a it's a cloud based, you know, technology. Yeah. We can share artists, share files with each other faster, but there's so much more to that that we're finding, you know, as as we use it more often.
Wow. I I love that. First of all, I I didn't realize that you did the creative challenges. I absolutely love those sorts of things just to see how everyone thinks differently and where what's the starting point for everyone? Where do you end up?
And to see all all those people doing it in parallel is always super interesting. But I really, really appreciate the fact that, you know, you're you're calling out the ability for people to open up other people's projects and really see what they've done and reverse engineer it and figure it out because there is no substitute for that kind of experience or education.
Yep. We really need to be learning from each other. And so if this can can enable people to do that, that's great. But one thing that I do wanna mention is and I know you mentioned it before.
LucidLink has something called snapshots, which are read only versions of sort of moments in time of your storage captured.
So, therefore, a a junior motion designer can open up a project and not be afraid of accidentally messing it up, deleting it.
They can even just go to the snapshot and make their own copy from there for them to play with and and experiment without ever messing up what everyone else is working from.
Snapshots are are an incredibly important part of, of how how this works.
Do you can you talk a little bit about about snapshots, both from a backup perspective, but also maybe a past version, perspective?
Yeah.
I'll I'll give as much as we possibly can because, thankfully, we haven't had to use it that much, which is always a blessing. I can share horror stories in the past where we would have wished we had it, not on losing. We were using our, local storage, solutions. But it it's been it's been great to know that if you ever had a problem, you can go back in time.
I think we've we have used it a couple times, and it wasn't a stressful event. It felt very it felt like you know, if you ever delete a file, your first reaction is gonna be, oh, shit. What do I do? And how do I get this file back?
Do we have a snapshot or backup?
But with, you know, ever since being on, I've only heard of a couple scenarios of, like, oh, I think we may have had a file that got overwritten.
Can we go back? And it was like, yep. And within, I don't know, hours, maybe a day or something like that. We we had a backup of that same file.
And, again, just made things effort late for us. I I don't have much more than that because it's been working so well. But knowing that it's not a stress point is versus we have had definite issues with a local storage that didn't back up properly. It missed a snapshot and we lost files and we had to rebuild things like we have horse stories of the past.
No. Just knowing that that's no longer in our minds, is is peace of mind that you can just, again, focus on the creative work and less so on the an an oopsie kind of thing.
Yeah. I think a lot of people have lost sleep over over just the idea of potentially losing any any files. So it it's it definitely does give you that peace of mind to to just breathe and focus on the work ahead.
Pretty bad. Now you've you've you've given you've given a few examples of sort of things that were never before possible that you're able to do now, whether it's the follow the sun production or just the the enhanced collaboration. Is there anything else that that stands out in your mind as, you know, ten years ago, you wouldn't have even thought that you'd be working this way?
Yeah.
And and truth, we didn't even think we're gonna be working this way three years ago, two years ago when we're looking for solutions. We had met with a couple other, cloud based services, and we we got told this technology doesn't exist.
I think even today, it would be hard pressed to find a competitor that can do the same thing. So it's it's really changed the way we work. I've I've said this word. It's like it's like it is magic. It's like it's crazy how you can all work locally using, you know, working files, raw files, proxy files, all at the same time over the cloud because the the solution that we're using for is Google Drive, and there's no way that Google Drive can do.
It does it does rather, it doesn't do what what does.
And so it's allowed us to it it's allowed us to just think bigger by not being held down to, okay. We have to have an artist and a creative that sits in our office in Long Beach or New York or Chicago. It's like we can find great talent anywhere now. It it opens up our doors to a lot more different creative thinking. And even when we think about personalization within our content, being able to use talent in more local markets to lend on their expertise of their creative view of, you know, their territory, and be able to work seamlessly with each other. I mean, yeah, like, it's it's my my viewpoint of what's possible has changed drastically with this technology.
And, I I do wanna leave some time to address some questions. My last question for you, though, Miles, is, what would your team say if you told them they had to return to the old way of working?
Not they they would they would they would they would they would probably leave, or they would they would they would be like, great. Well, now it's gonna take me three action three eight times the amount of time to to get my work done that I did before.
I it Yeah.
It would it would crumble our entire department.
Yeah. That that's that's definitely a tough pill to swallow.
Yeah. But, no, I I really appreciate you, sharing so much about about Designer, EEG plus, your workflows, how your teams work, and certainly, how LucidLink fits into all this.
I wanna do there I saw a couple questions come in.
First one is, are there any performance issues when working with raw files in LucidLink compared to using on prem storage?
I can certainly speak to this unless you have experience on that.
But Go for it. It did okay. Yeah.
So, A lot of color because I've, Yeah.
Yeah.
Go ahead and add color.
Yeah. So so, with LucidLink, it always comes down to your bandwidth. That's always gonna be the the lowest common denominator, but you can certainly still use raw files.
If you have if you have bandwidth to support the bit rate, basically figure out your video's bit rate, how many strings do you have, will that fit through your pipe? If the answer is no, you can always try and pin the files or precache the files.
We can certainly talk, offline about that, and I can walk you through the process, but that should make it so that all of your data, all your most important data that you're working on is accessible locally.
And we even have a, a solutions engineer at LucidLink who has pinned a bunch of data and then edited from the back seat of a moving car, using his cell phone as a hotspot. So you you do need at least a minimum Internet connection to sync your metadata.
But as far as the size of the files, it's not the size of the file that matters. It's the bit rate. So raw files are gonna be high bit rate.
You will need either substantial bandwidth or you can pin your data.
Yeah. Now I'll I I would agree with that because we it depends on, you know, the raw can be a lot of different sizes, especially when you bring in resolution to the table.
We well, our color team works on raw files within Resolve and uses LucidLink, I would say, sixty to seventy percent of the time, by, you know, cashing the media, what they need to do, and and working, within their local cache.
And the thirty, forty percent of time is where a raw file might be, like, eight k, eight k red raw. Like, it that that's gonna that's gonna probably be something where we would bring into our local raid, for our finishing artists to work on. So it it does depend, but it does work, for sure. But I think as the yeah.
Like you like you mentioned, David, like, is the bigger the bit rate the file is, the more it's like, yeah, we'll use our local rate. We've not had to upgrade a local rate for a very long time because LucidLink has been doing so well. We haven't had to really expand upon it. But there definitely are projects where it's like, okay.
That's those are heavy files and our colorist or flame artist wants to, you know, work on those and not have to worry about cash and all that kind of stuff.
So Right.
But one thing about about color too is or finishing is that, LucidLink actually allows you to work with the original data.
So you're not it's not like you're tapping into a virtual machine somewhere and getting a compressed video signal and you're trying to color correct that.
You're working with the the original file. So, and and the way that an offline editor is trying to consume data is different than how an online editor or colorist is gonna be doing that too. So the difference between playing down long clips versus sort of jumping around on a timeline. So a lot of that will keep up with you, but one of the great things is because you're working with the actual data that's coming locally to your machine, that means that your computer's consuming the original data and all of your peripherals too. So your broadcast monitor, is gonna be calibrated and pixel accurate, color accurate. Your scope is gonna work.
You can do a five one audio mix. You can use mixing boards with flying faders.
All those signals are interacting with your peripherals perfectly because your data is actually on your computer.
Any other questions that we have?
No. Oh, we did that well.
Then what I would like to do is, first, I wanna tell everyone that, if you haven't used LucidLink before, if you're curious about learning more, you can always reach out to us, reach out to me, directly. But we also have a two week free trial that's available on our website.
It is totally free, and we give you the keys to the car. It's not a watered down demo version. It is the full version.
We want you to really test it out, try it against your workflows, see what it feels like. And it's a little bit like trying to look at negative space where you're trying to realize all the things that you don't need to do anymore, but it's usually, an overwhelmingly positive experience.
If you're if you're not getting your socks knocked off, reach out to us too because there's probably something that we can help you, get to. But if you are interested in checking out the free trial, here, I just posted in the chat is a link to our website that'll get you to the to the trial. Sign up, create a file space, invite some friends, and play around with it. But, if there's no other questions, Miles, I really wanna thank you so much for joining us today, giving your insights, your expertise.
I'm always excited to hear about what you have going on because you're doing some really interesting things, and, we really appreciate your time.
Awesome. Thanks for having me.
Alright. Thanks, everyone.
Thank you.
Alright.
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