Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Thanks for tuning in to broadcast to post. I'm Brad Kaplan, senior solutions architect at Key Code Media. In this episode we're talking about lighting smart choices before they become expensive mistakes. Joining me today is lighting legend Mike Grabowski from Lighting Design Group. Together we spent decades deploying professional lighting systems for broadcast sports, corporate. The list goes on and on. In the next few minutes we'll explore real world upgrade strategies, swapping legacy tungsten systems for camera aware LEDs, designing LED, designing DMX over IP networks at scale and choosing fixtures that won't flicker with high speed shutter. Mike, thanks for joining us.
[00:00:46] Speaker A: Thanks for having me.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: I guess. Mike, let's start with costs and you know, cutting corners. You know, if, you know, budget wise. When you're looking at lighting, what do you, what do you see when you're putting projects together?
[00:01:00] Speaker A: Yeah, it's an interesting thing.
We're in an interesting space where cheaper equipment has made things a little more democratized so everyone has more access.
But I think at the same time there are, I won't say pitfalls, I'll say considerations that need to get made. Right.
Like the biggest thing I see a lot of people overlook, especially when they're talking about it. You have to talk about this in a more broad and holistic way rather than just lighting or just, you know, anything else.
For me, flickering issues are really the crux of a lot of what you see is an issue a lot of lower end fixtures are not going to have. What's it called?
You'll typically see it referred to as frequency or pwm, Pulse width modulation. It gets into a whole sort of technical background on LEDs, but they don't really dim. They just sort of turn on and off at different frequencies to give the appearance of being brighter or dimmer.
And sometimes that disaligns with a camera.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: I'll just go from there. I think what you're talking about Mike, is that as people are investing in lighting products, this may not be something that they're thinking of right away because it's not, it's not an option or in a setting, it's not, it's not something they put on the side of the box that says, you know, frequency modulation or hertz is, is, is a common feature. But when you're investing in lighting, the, when you go for a cheaper product, those things are kind of, it's not something that they dial up first. But when you go for a more pro line, those things are thought of in advance. Like those are issues that are going to run up so correct.
[00:02:42] Speaker A: And you know, again, like the manufacturers, it's an easy way to make things more expensive. And if broadcast is not your consideration for a room or something like that, it's less of a concern. And you can find high end stuff that doesn't have PWM editability and things like that.
You get into architectural fixtures and things like that, which again, broadcast and cameras are not usually their concern.
But again, it's one of those things I always have the conversation with my clients about is we have to be aware of it because cell phones, right, like everyone is videotaping, photoing, you know, everything is recorded in some form or fashion beyond what a lot of people will think of as traditional broadcast. You know, it's a consideration for concerts at this point. You know, you want it to show up the way you designed and intended.
Well, flicker and refresh rate becomes a real issue.
[00:03:46] Speaker B: Do you have discussions with engineers and control room operators as well, or is this just something as you as a designer consider?
You know, because I, I bring that to people and say, listen, you've got a, you can go with these, you know, lesser quality lights. I said, but you're just going to put the pressure on your control room to have to deal with it.
[00:04:03] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's, and that's sort of where it boils down to. Right.
It's not a problem you're avoiding.
Right. It is where you want to deal with it.
And here's the thing, if you have, and I don't always want to call them lesser quality lights, they have different priorities, you know what I mean? Like they want to make them more inexpensive, more affordable.
If you have all of the same ones or all of them that hit the same frequency, you can sort of get away with it and frankly sort of shift it over to cameras because you can edit the shutter speed and you know, get into some technical stuff on the camera side in order to accomplish getting rid of that camera roll or anything like that. But right. You have to sort of go into that eyes open, you know, you certainly do.
[00:04:57] Speaker B: Excellent. Well, I think it's really important. I think it's something that, you know, consumers need to think about when they're making choices, products presented to them, whether they're doing their own research or taking advice from you and my design group or myself.
You know, these are, it's not just a feature that's like, oh, by the way, these are important things to think of on the giddy up.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: Yeah. Because especially if you are buying from two different manufacturers. Right. That's where you get into those complicated scenarios where you might have dissonant PWM frequencies, in which case camera might be able. Is able to solve one of those. Camera can't solve multiple frequency issues. So if you have cameras operating at A frequency, one light type of light operating at B frequency and a third and a second type of light operating at C frequency, you can align cameras to one of those, but not be able to.
[00:05:59] Speaker B: Yeah, and it's an interesting topic that a lot of people really, you know, both in the lighting side, on the engineering side and then on the post side are all. They're all going to kind of to work together to solve that.
And it's as important as people who are getting into building their studios. That's something to consider, I think, kind of going from there. Like, talked about LED fixtures.
They're not just plug and play, you know, LED fixtures now have a whole host of technology embedded in them. They have menu options, they have modes.
A lot of times when I'm putting together a project, you have to think about like, how the client is going to end up using this product and are they just going to. Are they going to be getting their hands into the modes? Are they going to be messing with it in the future?
So the complexity of modern fixtures versus what used to be just a standard 20amp plug on the end of a light.
Let's talk about how that's changed because it's quite remarkable.
[00:06:58] Speaker A: Remember that it used to be very easy. Here, here's a Fresnel. Can you go plug that in and you know, we'll pick which gel we want to put on it. Right? Like.
[00:07:07] Speaker B: Right, yeah, just barn.
[00:07:08] Speaker A: It was easy.
[00:07:09] Speaker B: Just diaper some barn doors and call it a day, you know.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Like the, the complicated stuff was, are we building an arts and crafts, like, you know, foam core thing to shape the light and all that nonsense?
[00:07:23] Speaker B: Like, I mean, now a whole dedicated team.
Arts and crafts.
[00:07:28] Speaker A: The arts and crafts team.
No, but I think that's the thing, right? Like there's technology in all of this, right.
Some of the.
A good example is, you know, again, talking about some of those old school lights, right?
A standard old school leco. Right? Beautiful. Works great.
Plug it in, away you go. But like, if you look at more modern equip equivalent, whether it's. Etc or Chauvet or whomever, it's sort of manufacturer agnostic at that point. If you look at their equivalent of the current generation of this stuff, you have the option of controlling that light engine directly. Right.
So a lot of them are typically red, green, blue.
Now a lot of them are incorporating amber, lime and white and, you know, a whole host of different things to get the best rendered light out.
You have the option of controlling each of those spectrums directly from the console. Or you can rely on that manufacturer to give you simplified modes where you're controlling it via huesat or even simpler, where you're controlling it via color temperature, even though it's not just directly a color temperature fixture.
You know, and where it gets sort of funny is let's say you put a fixture like that in color temperature mode and this gets a little in the weeds. But you're using two parameters, you know, in a hypothetical, whereas if we're doing it in full color of red, green, blue, amber, lime, now you're talking five parameters. So if you don't necessarily plan out your infrastructure and lighting system footprint, you could be buggered up down the line if suddenly you decide, oh, you know what, I do want to open up all those possibilities.
So it's a, again, a lot of designers early on with LED stuff, you've seen it, right, would use LEDs, especially color changing stuff, as a way to avoid decisions. And a lot of ways you have inherited a whole host of more decisions and thoughts that have to happen.
[00:09:53] Speaker B: Do you think that programming time, I mean, it's obviously, you know, when you go to color temperature mode, you pick your intensity, you pick your color temperature, there you go. You're not worried about plus, minus, green, all those kind of things, they're not really part of that equation. But when you're going into these deeper levels of time of programming and you have different, you're bringing in more attributes to your fixture.
How does that impact your programming time versus what you get out on the other side when you get your final camera shots?
[00:10:24] Speaker A: Well, and that's where you inherit needing a lot more time, right? Because for example, I was just over at MSG last night and we were doing inside the NBA, we were doing the TNT broadcast of the Knicks game. And and to me, I tend to like to go more full parameter control of rgb, AL or whatever the picture will do, because going purely color temp or going in a fairly simplified way is ideal in more, I'll call it idealistic scenarios where you're in a very controlled studio and even then it's based on the assumption you're not really getting impacted by anything else.
You look at an msg, I have house lights, I have changing arena lights, I have the work lights in there, I have all this stuff that I am competing with. So even if I want to put out perfect 4500 degree light, I need to actually. Okay, well, take into consideration the house lights are a little bit to the green side. So I need to add a shade of couple hits of magenta so everyone looks really nice.
You know what, we go into another sequence where I need to be able to pull that back because they shut off those house lights.
So for me, having those operability moments become part of my thought and design process.
Whereas if I had just had that at color temp, they would technically be the right color temperature, but then would be a little magenta or a little green at different points. And that sounds like a sort of out there scenario. But I've dealt with that in a studio with a lightbox of. A studio will change its lightbox from a beautiful morning sunrise with lots of warm colors and magentas.
And that just gets on your anchor either on the back, on the side of their face just a little bit. But you want to be able to control your light to sort of compensate a little for that. And then conversely, they go to the evening news or go to an evening look, and suddenly it's blue and cyan and all that. And now you need to compensate in a slightly different way.
So it's interesting. Again, there's a lot of interoperability, a lot of crossover.
That lighting never could really stay in one tiny lane. It was, amongst all the disciplines, the one that had to cross over the most. To me, it feels like it's even more.
I mean, what do you think? I think you've seen not dissimilar.
[00:13:02] Speaker B: And it's interesting in the integration side of things. And I was going to kind of bridge that into my next part of my question was conversation was that we turn systems over to clients. And so it's a question of how educated is the client and do they need that level of like, sometimes the client says, yes, I'd love to learn more about that. And you can go into some of that. And sometimes clients are just like, hey, we need the lights to work and just give me the color temperature I want.
And, you know, I think it's.
Education is super important in our. In this industry now more than ever because there's so many more layers. But, you know, a lot of times studios, smaller studios don't have lighting design, lighting directors on site, and they just have to kind of say, listen, our best educated guess Is to hit 5600 and call it.
[00:13:52] Speaker A: And then. And that's Fine. But to me, and we've all dealt with that, right? Like that's fairly standard, you know, especially you look at local affiliates or things like that that are operating on such slim margins and like one guy doing one man bandit, everything, those dudes are amazing.
Like, that stuff is nutto.
And I get it. But at the same time, I think a lot of it does fall to our responsibility to train, educate, inform.
You know, like one of the biggest pitfalls that I always see, that I always advocate for, and it's always a decent sized cost, and I always hate putting that out there, is the one thing everyone seems to forget about LEDs in general.
Shut them off. And when I say shut them off, power them off.
You know, a lot of them are rated for 50,000 hours, 70,000 hours, whatever that massive number is. And a lot of times clients will see in their head, oh my God, 50,000, 70,000, that's like 10 years. And I can deal with a capex hit again in, you know, 10 years of 70,000, you know, hours.
[00:15:07] Speaker B: That's not how it works.
[00:15:08] Speaker A: And that's exactly it, you know, like that's how long that machine is on and powered, not how many hours of light output, you know.
[00:15:18] Speaker B: Well, it's, you could turn your car on and leave the engine running and you're not going to burn the gas, the car's just going to sit there, you know. Oh well, the car's got all these full tank of gas, it's just going to sit idle. Well, eventually it's going to get through all that gas. And whether you drive it and you, you know, you go through the tank a little quicker, that's, you know, okay, you're burning your LEDs or if your car is just sitting in the parking lot but the engine's running, you're still burning gas a little slower. You got to shut the car off to not burn the gas.
And that's, yeah, that's a big thing. We actually, we, we tell our clients all the time, like especially schools and educational houses of worship, like when you're not using the gear, it's not enough just to hit the, the grandmaster and turn them off. You got to go to the breaker panel and turn them off. Or, you know, we put in, you know, these control of these relay modules. You got to shut this stuff off. You got to save, save your own, save your investment, you know, make your investment work for you and save it.
[00:16:14] Speaker A: Yeah, and that's exactly it.
And that's, and that's 100% it, you know, like we put in, you know, smart racks and the equivalent, you know, of DMX controllable racks. So literally you can just hit a button on the console and it'll turn off all the breakers. That's an expensive option. The other option, you set it, go over to the breakers and just click them off. Yeah, because again, they're computers, you know what I mean? You don't have, you're not, you're not putting runtime if you have your computer just on.
You're putting runtime on it. It is gentle wear and tear, but that's wear and tear and that counts towards that quote, unquote engine life that you'll see touted as 70,000 or 50,000, you know, that big number.
And I remember in the early days of LEDs, no one knew that. And then suddenly everything started failing at like a two year, three year point. And everyone's like, wait, no, the math says I should be good for another six or seven years.
[00:17:15] Speaker B: Right, right. Well, you didn't turn your, you didn't turn them off.
[00:17:19] Speaker A: It was just 24, 365. Yeah, exactly. You know, that was the big learning curve, I think, for all of us early on with it.
[00:17:27] Speaker B: Definitely. Oh, yeah. So in schools, schools and institutions have kind of learned that the hard way. And as you feel like, oh my gosh, we gotta go back to the well, like, you know, ay, ay, ay. What do you think that was your inclusion part of the learning curve?
[00:17:41] Speaker A: And I hate telling clients that because it's, it sometimes means they can afford less lights or things like that. But like, especially institutions that have limited capex access, it is something I, you know, it's boring, it is banal, it is unfun, unsexy stuff to talk about.
But, you know, and like, again, I just want to be honest with my clients. You know, I want to be honest with everyone.
Like, they're.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: Well, that's what we have to be.
[00:18:13] Speaker A: You know, like there are other people who are not going to put that, you know, boring stuff out there and just, hey, you said you wanted 400 lights. I'll just sell you 400 lights. All right, maybe you should probably get 350 and consider that now you can take care of them for some relay.
[00:18:29] Speaker B: Modules to help you to, you know. Yeah, there's products out there that it's, it doesn't have to be these massive installed relay panels. There are other products out there that are inline relays that, yeah, you know, you have to put in, you know, and that's. So the products are out there. Yeah. And you just go. And I see a lot more infrastructure and I want more lights. Like, well, do you have to have the infrastructure there?
[00:18:50] Speaker A: Yeah, you know what I mean? It's sort of like old school stuff. Right. We were talking about dimmers. Before you couldn't just buy an old Fresnel, you had to have a dimmer somewhere. I mean, you didn't have to, but if you wanted console control and things like that, you needed a dimmer in some form. This is just a different version of that conversation. You know, dimmers were always kind of boring, you know.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: Right. Because they're in the background.
[00:19:13] Speaker A: Yeah. But again, the upside is you're talking more of a one time investment with infrastructure like that. But. And there are, as you touched on, there aren't, there aren't just day zero items like that. There can be aftermarket, there can be down the line stuff as well.
[00:19:31] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It kind of goes into infrastructure planning. And you know, again, the dimmers and the relay panels aren't, you know, they're not out there on set in your line of site products for it. So in your history and your experience, what are the biggest infrastructure oversights that people don't think that they need to invest in? That in my situation, we get a lot of clients and we say the infrastructure is not just buying the lights and a controller.
Do you have a dimming system that we have to rip out and put in a panel or we have to convert your old raceways from Stagepin to Edison or do we gotta buy adapters? In your experience, what's often overlooked in the infrastructure Planning.
[00:20:22] Speaker A: Data.
Data infrastructure.
I mean, I think that fundamentally is always the. I don't know about overlooked, but it's always the under considered part.
[00:20:34] Speaker B: That's a very key under consider. That's a great way to put it.
[00:20:39] Speaker A: You know what I mean? Because everyone's like, oh yeah, no, it needs data. But again, like when you think about the technical logistics and like you can plan for your day one projects or your day ten projects and that's always the conversation I want to have. Like we redid MTV studios in Times Square. So I started at TRL and all that a million years ago and like that was awesome. We started that and that was old school. Fresnels, HMIs, the big windows and Carson Daly and all that. And, and that was pretty straightforward. But even for a show like that, we had a lot of data, a lot of moving lights. We were on the bleeding edge of LED stuff and all that. After that show Got canceled. We did a gut renovation of that entire studio. Not a lot of people know that used to be three studios. There was an Uptown, a midtown, a Downtown, and yo, MTV Raps would be in downtown, TRL would be in the Uptown. Midtown would be our flex space and all that. And sometimes we do performances out of there.
Well, I just remember New Years and I being a thousand.
I did a lot of New Year's, I did a lot of New Year's Eve in there.
There was.
[00:21:53] Speaker B: I would just get stuck up on top of the Bertelsman building behind a follow spot on the Bertles. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
[00:21:58] Speaker A: Oh my God.
We would have something in the neighborhood.
12 performances in a 90 minute New Year's Eve show.
That was fast track chaos.
But again, it boils down to what you're saying though. Data, infrastructure, all that stuff becomes really important considerations in how all that works.
We ended up with data points all over in a way that wasn't really considered for a incandescent studio.
And then when we did the renovation, Aeropostale took over and then took over half the space. We gutted it and that was when we flipped, that's when we flipped the space to be basically conversant for led.
You know, one of the silly things that I'll always advocate for is hospital grade outlets. It sounds silly, it sounds boring.
It is.
Everything is generally Edison and we plug it in and away you go. But Edison outlets are not great in a grid. Right. They work on friction. Inside of each slot.
Edison outlet are two bits of copper sort of pinching and then you're sliding that blade of your thing in. And most of them are built for walls. So it just sort of works in a hospital outlet. Those, I'll call them the pincers that are inside the outlets are built built of thicker copper with higher tension.
So you always have more friction grips that.
[00:23:40] Speaker B: So that's the blade.
[00:23:42] Speaker A: Yeah. If you're, yeah. So if you're putting them vertical in a grid, that tension is going to maintain. They're, you're not going to fall out. So if you want to make everyone easy and conversant and Edison, that's what we did there. We did all hospital grade outlets. And now we did that first renovation in 2008, 2009. It's functionally, you know, 15, 16 years later.
We haven't had phenomenal, we haven't had to change one of them. You know, that's phenomenal.
[00:24:10] Speaker B: And that's, that's, that's a credit to like doing your research and doing Your homework and presenting. Hey, listen, there's a little more on your upfront costs but like listen, here we are years later and we still don't have any issues with this. That's phenomenal.
[00:24:22] Speaker A: Yeah. Fifteen.
[00:24:25] Speaker B: Yeah, that's remarkable.
Speaking of data infrastructure, there's a lot more wireless data and it's something I talk about with clients at a time, but it's also a scary conversation because data over wireless is prone to problems and we have a lot of clients that say, oh, we can just Bluetooth or we could just use our phone to adjust this.
Yeah. For like one or two fixtures. But you know, you don't want to be. A lot of schools, they don't want to, they don't have the money for, you know, infrastructure, so. Oh, just use wireless.
I think that that's, it's great. But I'm really nervous that wireless is not a catch all.
[00:25:09] Speaker A: I agree.
The short version is yes.
For me though, it's interesting. Like you sort of implied that the exact point I would go to is wireless takes more tech people infrastructure than not. You know, it makes certain things easier.
To me it is a way to get data to an inaccessible point. It is not an easier thing. It has the appearances of being easier. You know, I know a bunch of my buddies work on Daredevil for Netflix, right. And I was over there, we were visiting and they have smart lights, LEDs, you know, all over creation in a building, on a location. And if you're doing a movie infrastructure on location, oh my gosh, that is a godsend of being able to wirelessly send everywhere. That said, my buddy the programmer has a laptop and an iPad open constantly looking at frequencies and looking at. Because you never know, even if you're in a studio or something like that, who else is going to suddenly turn on, put on an access point or you know, add wireless interference into the infrastructure that on day zero you plan for. This is what your available spectrum bandwidth is.
[00:26:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:44] Speaker A: You know, there was, I was talking to a friend who's on Stranger Things on Broadway and she was telling me a funny story. They have so much wireless stuff, a necessity of the show, like down to like wireless DMX flashlights, all sorts of stuff.
But they had to put in such a robust wireless infrastructure that it actually was stronger than the WI fi in the building. So it actually knocked out the WI fi. So like, you know what I mean?
Oh yeah. But that's sort of the thing. It's an arms race. Like you're, we're treading on existing infrastructure like, you know, if anyone's ever interested, download. There's a million of them. Download a WI FI analyzer and open it up. And even in fairly remote places, things like that, you are going to be stunned by how much junk is sort of in the air that you're competing with. And again, you have to figure out antenna strength, latency issues. You know, again, none of it's not overcomeable, but you inherit a lot of logistics and I think part of it is across the board. All of it to me is about education, learning about this stuff. None of this stuff is magic. Like you, me, we happen to have done it for a long time and have accumulated a lot of knowledge.
It's all out there, it's all on the Internet. It's all somewhere like it's all findable.
But a lot of this is hard learned lessons and not just advocating my.
[00:28:27] Speaker B: Counter story to your For Broadway shows. We were working on a project up at the West Point Military Academy and we're like, oh, we'll do this wirelessly. And we ran all over tech, we ran all of our rehearsals, Everything was done over wireless. But for the show it's West Point. You don't know what frequencies they're going to pump out on a military base. We, we ran fiber optics for the night of the show because that was the only way to make sure that we didn't. And we ran several hundred feet of fiber optics. That's just what we, that was the guarantee we didn't. We couldn't take that chance to say, yeah, we're just going to run wireless to all 150 fixtures. Couldn't do it, you know.
[00:29:06] Speaker A: Yeah, but I think that's. But I think that's the counterpoint, right? I think that's the interesting part you hit on is to me, quick aside. I remember doing, we did New Year's Eve and we were doing Powerball and we were over at the Marriott Marquee in Times Square. And not many people know this. The Marquis theater at the time had Beetlejuice running in it. And we had a ton of set electrics and all that.
And in part the reason Stranger Things has such a robust wireless system. They're in the same theater as Beetlejuice was, was on their December 30th show.
We had a lot of wireless in the ballroom for a lot of set electrics and stuff. And we fired it up and man, did we bugger up that performance of Beetlejuice. Said electrics weren't working for them left and right. They were using low Powered, normal stuff.
But yeah, why would you think that in a ballroom three floors away, someone doing a New Year's Eve show is going to impact you like in Times.
[00:30:18] Speaker B: Square in New York City where there's a bazillion frequencies, bazillion frequencies between the police department, the fire department, any other, you know, you know, city agency that's going to be having communications plus all the other frequencies that are there. Generally you've got Radio City Music hall not too far away. You have everything there.
[00:30:36] Speaker A: You have a theater 100ft from any given direction with 30 wireless mics, TV studios.
[00:30:43] Speaker B: Nasdaq had a studio there at the time.
[00:30:45] Speaker A: It still does.
[00:30:46] Speaker B: Yeah, abc.
[00:30:48] Speaker A: But the other thing. And then what I was going to say and you mentioning the West Point thing, the biggest thing I'll encourage a lot of my clients to look at is backboning in an agnostic way.
Like, you know, I'll go to MTV again, right. When we did that studio, we there's always. You heard it too. I'm sure there's always talk of switching lights will switch over to Ethernet. All of them will be Ethercon or whatever.
So far no one's died. You know like for dual input light with light that are pixely and all that, fine.
But that's always been the conversation in the sort of like dealers talking about and all and manufacturers. But to me it means everything should be built agnostic. MTV being a good example of it. We did it in all of our studios. We've done it at cnn, we've done it at Bloomberg. Pretty much every studio. LDG is involved with what we advocate for Backbone IT in Ethernet, backbone IT in the most current high gen, high output Ethernet system that you can, you know, you had mentioned fiber. Look at fiber infrastructure. When I'm doing like us figure skating on the road, we end up having to go massive distances.
There's technology for moving. That's sort of the best part of everything becoming so data driven is there are established processes and backbone and infrastructure for getting data from point A to point B. And nothing we're transmitting with DMX or anything is particularly high volume or complicated data. You know, DMX is 20 year old protocol.
It's, you know what I mean?
It's tiny, tiny, tiny. So anything carrying current.
Yeah, so anything that's used to carrying current data can carry on stuff. So to me, backboning and Ethernet, looking at fiber infrastructure, it means construction teams know how to do it. I remember talking to guys about pulling, you know, when we built Time Warner center where CNN Used to be, before they moved to Hudson Yards, we had to have actual dm. Yeah, right. You remember in that install. But like I remember dealing with ECS and talking to them about what's this five wire thing? Like, what's dmx like, what's that?
That's not real. And they would. But it only says three are active. So can't we just pull three wire and all this stuff? Now there's no conversation.
Pull some low voltage, pull some ethernet cable A to B and then. Great. We'll put on a face plate that flips it from ethernet to five pin and everyone's easy. You know, getting low voltage pulls makes sense to every EC on the planet.
[00:33:41] Speaker B: Yep. And they do it every day now, that's for sure.
[00:33:45] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:33:45] Speaker B: You know, what do you, what do you see as the next, what do you see as the next thing for lighting? Studio lighting.
Where do you see it going at this point? I mean, what's in your mind? Where do you see this technology going? I, I think the data side of it is just getting more and more fascinating because we're pulling a lot more ethernet and Cat 6 cable and just more data ports all over the place.
Lights are getting smarter, controllers are getting smarter, people are using their phones and their smart devices to control it. I mean, where do you.
My vision is like this is just going to keep going higher and higher. It was just, you know, more and more options. And where do you see this going?
[00:34:36] Speaker A: I think similar. I think the other part is in a lot of ways, lighting used to be much more isolated. Right. You'd have an ld, a programmer, a board op, a whomever bringing up the lights for the desk or bringing up the room lights or doing this or editing or doing little stuff.
And I think you're looking at more interoperability, more crossover, you know, more remote access stuff. I mean, that's something we've really driven home on a lot of projects.
There are products out there that let us log into the lighting systems. And to me that's its own problem. Like I'm still a bit of a.
[00:35:22] Speaker B: That's a blessing and a curse.
[00:35:23] Speaker A: Yeah. You know what I mean? Like I'm old school like that. Right. Like the idea of putting my lighting system on Internet closed or open or a way to access it from the outside world opens up the possibility that someone I don't want to is going to do it.
And there's generally a lot of protection and robustness around it. And realistically, in the long run, who really is going to want to log into a TV studio and turn the lights green. Like, you know, I, I used to.
[00:35:59] Speaker B: I, when I was on tour, the, the joke was to see you take your phone and you go into, and see if you could log into the console, then see if you, oh, if I could get the right passcode for, for, you know, tool, then I can maybe, you know, make fixture, make that movie, like go over there, you know, like it was kind of a joke, but like, yeah, it's actually kind of plausible now. It's not that complicated anymore.
[00:36:22] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it's something you and I have talked about offline is at this point in its own weird nutso way. Like we need to not really, but sort of have an IT degree at this point, you know?
You know what I mean? Or we just have much, we need much more familiarity with network, network infrastructure, you know, just computer networking in general, than we need it even three years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, you know? Right.
[00:36:58] Speaker B: No, I mean, years ago you just needed to know how to run some BNC cable between your console in your remote focus unit and your remote visualizer and in your studio, and that was it. Now just rebrand some BNC. Now you have to run. You get to have Cat 6 over this and you're going to connect into this network here and you have a rack full of switches and it's not just optosplitters and some, you know, and a couple of universes now where everything now is 10 plus universes and you're going to have a switch involved and it's. You got to be an IT tech and you got to coordinate with other people in that world too.
[00:37:35] Speaker A: Yeah, it's really interesting, like, but again, it's one of those instances.
I think every discipline always has to keep learning, always has to keep marching progress forward, but I think lighting camera tech infrastructure feels like it's on that much faster of a curve.
Because I think the interesting part is it's not just what's working and currently happening, but also manufacturers and all that trying stuff and us having to be willing to try it too a little bit, you know, I mean, who would have thought 10 years ago, the prevalence of the tiny little PTZ cameras in studios 10 years ago, 12 years ago. I'm probably timelining this a little wrong, but like at a certain point, not terribly far ago, those things were barely able to put out security camera grade footage, you know, and now they look beautiful, you know, are going to have as many handles or as much, you know, manipulability as like A quote unquote proper studio camera. No, you never will.
But they're remarkably.
[00:38:53] Speaker B: They've come a long way.
[00:38:54] Speaker A: Yeah. And they are remarkably affordable. And if you. Again, that is that collaboration moment. You are offboarding some of your editability with a camera. But now to me, you have to have a little more consideration on the lighting side. You know, it's Peloton in New York and London has a number of PTZ cameras and that was exactly what we ended up doing there.
Excuse me, was because they Peloton uses PTZ cameras that want to keep the footprint minimal in the room with members in the room. Entirely understandable. You can't have, you know, giant, you know, robo pads in the room. That would be silly.
[00:39:38] Speaker B: Hidden cyclists upside the head.
Watch out.
[00:39:42] Speaker A: I can, I can see it, you know, but like. But that new jib move, we've done it. We have put it is chaos incarnate. But we've done it. But the other part is like now everything has to rely on the lighting side a little bit stronger. Right. They don't have the handles to.
You know, I remember a few of the, you know, a few of the class teachers and all would come in having been on vacation and are a little red, a little sunburn, you know, and normally on a. In a studio you could sort of paint that out a little and you know, just help them out.
You don't have that option necessarily on all the PTZs.
So great lighting come in and hit some buttons and we can sort of just help them out, you know.
But like we were saying, you don't lose the problem. It just sort of shifts where you're going.
[00:40:44] Speaker B: Conditions.
[00:40:45] Speaker A: Yeah. You know.
[00:40:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:47] Speaker A: But I think it's also knowing that.
[00:40:49] Speaker B: You have that option that's remarkable. Yeah. Again, like, it kind of puts more burden on the department, the lighting designer, the staff, the programmers. But I think it solves the problem for a lot of people upstream of that, you know, like, it's like, oh, we don't, you know. So that lighting becomes more of a.
It's often the last thing people think of, but it becomes more of the. Hey, I'm glad we thought of that. Because they're going to save the day.
[00:41:17] Speaker A: Yeah. Because in post. Imagine having to deal with that in post. Right. Peloton, for example, has such a remarkable tight turnaround between when they do a live class and when it's posted, sometimes minutes, you know, imagine if they had to do the live class, except that somebody looked a little red, a little green, a little off.
They would have to then take that, put it in post, take an hour class and then have an editor scrub and like zone edit if you even wanted to go down that rabbit hole. Or you're putting out content where your host doesn't look their greatest. And that's not good either, you know, like it's sort of picking your poison over there and how you want to deal with it, you know?
[00:42:00] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's remarkable stuff and I think it's, it's only going to get more interesting in the future. And I think that like, you know, brains like yours out there and history that we have out there and the stuff that I've brought to the table, you know, for Kiko has really been kind of like, oh, let's, let's. This is, it's. The future is bright. You know, it is stuff like what.
[00:42:22] Speaker A: We, it's stuff like what you and I had talked about. Right there was the little project that Kiko and LDG collaborated on that I think is the crux of a lot of that sort of new media stuff. Right. You have a control room in city A. You have a studio, what, a hundred and some odd miles away?
[00:42:42] Speaker B: It was 60. 60 miles away. Yeah. Control room and facility was in city A and then studio and, you know, was in city B and there was 60 miles between and there was like, how do we control this? And you know, we could do that now. It's remarkable. That's not like, oh, that's crazy. How could you think of that? No, but again, it didn't take much to put it together.
[00:43:04] Speaker A: No. And it's small packet data. Right. Like it's, there's network, there's a lot of like again, we got deep in on network infrastructure portents and you know, like pretty heavy level IT stuff.
Ironically, the lighting and actual execution were the easy part, you know, and now the client, you know, the client in the control room has a big button that says, you know, morning show, afternoon show, evening show. Yep.
And it makes it easy for their tech. You know, like part of it's realizing what your workflow is. Part of it's working within your workflow, being honest with yourself of what your tech, your human, whoever you have has the bandwidth to do.
[00:43:50] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:43:51] Speaker A: Sometimes that honesty means it's going to cost a little more or, you know, there are harder parts to ve in that or not. You know, it just means being a lot of. It's about education and honesty. If we're boiling it all down yeah.
[00:44:07] Speaker B: You know, so I think that's, that's something for everybody. So cool. Like, that's the end of my, my questions list. And we've, we've gone 45 minutes easy.
I want to thank you for joining the conversation and really making this, making this very easy. And I'm looking forward to more conversations about as technology moves forward, as we uncover more opportunities.
You know, I think we're. Yeah, I think this has been a great. This has been a great conversation. I appreciate your time and thank you for, for joining.
[00:44:38] Speaker A: Of course. And I'm sure the same for you. Anyone, feel free to hit me up or Brad up. And we're happy to answer questions.
