Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
I'd like to kind of give some of the background and the workflows of these folks that have been doing this for a while. And we're going to start with Josh.
And Josh behind you. I'm showing your LinkedIn account.
Josh. Mark is the broadcast operations and production for SOFI stadium at the YouTube Theater. Now, he's only been there for nine months.
Nine months. But rest assured, this guy is a monster. He was at Fox for, what is it, 20 years now.
[00:00:33] Speaker B: 24 years.
[00:00:33] Speaker A: 24 years live production and broadcast as a producer. And then of course we've got Nick Ferret here.
Nick Ferrett has got some interesting stories about how his business has started and the kind of content that they're doing now in live production workflows. And we'll get more detail of that, of course. We have Beth Layden here on the end that Pasadena Unified School District.
She's going to go through some of the broadcast workflows that she's doing now with her Ross infrastructure for both live sports productions at the school and then as well as school board meetings and events for the kids. And then finally Michael, you'll see Michael there on stage doing it for the kids as well, his live production space.
So I want to start off with a panel. I just kind of let everybody introduce themselves and talk about who they are and how they got here. I'm going to start with Beth.
[00:01:27] Speaker C: Hi everybody. My name is Beth Layden. I work for the Pasadena Unified School District. We're K through 12 education.
We've been in the news recently because of the Eaton fire.
So we are a district in distress. However, what I do is I run the TV production department. So we have a station, a PEG station called KLRN or Kaler in Pasadena.
And we broadcast. We have a YouTube channel, we have a broadcast station as well. But what we are doing, I've been there for 25 years and we have recently been able to upgrade our live sports production and our boardroom production to industry standard equipment, which is a really big deal for us in K12.
My philosophy has always been to do the best I can to prepare K through students for industry. And this is the first time we're able to really, really go beyond teaching theory and collabor and actually teach technology as well too that the students will find in places such as Sofi Stadium.
[00:02:29] Speaker A: So let me, before we move on to the next index, I'm going to just show a little clip here, make sure that my audio is running.
[00:02:37] Speaker D: Go ahead.
[00:02:38] Speaker A: Let me get my Spotify off we go ahead and turn me up guys.
[00:02:44] Speaker C: Hi, my name is Beth Layden. I'm the director of telecommunications for the Pasadena Unified School District. Pasadena Unified is a mid sized school district in Pasadena, California that is full of incredible untapped resources.
And one of the reasons I started with the supply pack is to promote some of the wonderful things about Pasadena Unified that might not be readily apparent. I first got interested in live multi camera production back in the 80s. I knew what I wanted to do back in 2000 was bring the excitement that I had from live TV to these students. I'm a board member for the Pasadena Community Access Corporation and at our last meeting, our executive director mentioned that the mayor and other officials in the city of Pasadena had come to him and said how much they really enjoyed the game and great job. And it was like watching NFL and I thought to myself it was like participating in the NFL.
My kids were so excited to do the replays, to do the graphics, to connect to the Rose Bowl. It felt like real sports production for the first time in years. So, you know, nobody ever sees what's behind the scenes, right? Everybody watches it on TV or they watch it on a live stream, but they don't see what goes into creating the show. For us who are creating the show, we know what this technology means. It means opportunities, right? But the people watching the live streams, what they're seeing is they're seeing more sports, they're seeing more musical performances, they're seeing more concerts, they're seeing more school board meetings, they're seeing more events from the school district. So for the community it means more engagement. This fly pack is just start. You know, there's going to be more people are liking what they're seeing and so that validates the decision to show them more, to cover more. And you can only do that with the fly package. So I want to thank the district for having faith in my vision. I want to thank the city of Pasadena for providing the capital improvement funds and I really want to thank Key Code Media for making it all happen.
[00:04:52] Speaker A: Ta da. Wasn't that cool?
[00:04:54] Speaker C: Oh, oh, I can.
[00:04:56] Speaker A: So I, I share that because it leads into our other guests who are really in it hardcore.
SoFi Stadium, the Grammys, the, the stuff that you're doing with gaming is insane.
How many people are having problems hiring people that know what the heck they're doing in broadcast entertainment and post production. It's a tough market out there.
Well, Beth has made the commitment to invest in gear and workflows that are real workflows. In the professional industry and that's pretty exciting.
Now I'm going to move on to Josh. Everybody's excited to hear from you. Joss, give us a little bit about yourself and the stuff you're doing over there.
[00:05:36] Speaker B: Hello, I'm Josh. I run the broadcast operations and production department at SoFi Stadium and YouTube Theater. So we have the stadium and YouTube Theater is a 6,000 seat theater right next door.
Mostly concerts there.
We oversee all the screens, video, audio, lighting, the control room, both control rooms and pretty much the whole broadcast infrastructure as well as support all the networks when they come in for their, for their broadcasts.
My department has about 25 people on a game day. We're probably at about 120 people for a game that support the broadcast team.
That's really pretty much for anything that's in stadium game presentation, any part of that event and supporting the broadcast network when they're there.
[00:06:28] Speaker A: And based on the schedule that you have and the cruise that you're working and I'm looking at sofi's calendar. Do you spend any time at home or on the weekends with anybody?
[00:06:38] Speaker B: No, not really. Yeah, we do probably about 500 events a year.
Some really small, some really big.
But it's, it's a busy.
[00:06:47] Speaker A: Your schedule's crazy. We're going to get into that and we're going to talk about some of the challenges he has working not just internally with his existing infrastructure, but outside partners. As you imagine how many people come in for different shows. Next, Michael from the Grammys.
[00:07:02] Speaker E: Hey there. Thanks Tony. I'm Michael Robacher. I'm the technical director at the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles. The Grammy Museum is a nonprofit organization from our parent company, the Recording Academy. We are five floors of music interactive exhibits that celebrate music's past, present and future.
And to be a part of the community and represent all things music.
We do about 300 programs per year. We have our Clive Davis Theater which holds about 220 people. And then our new venue, the Ray Charles Terrace, which holds about 400 plus people. We usually have two and three different events going on at the same time per day.
My production department consists of about five people and about 15 to 20 contractors. And we manage multiple events and multiple live broadcasts and live streams per day. And I thought 300 was a lot, but it seems like, seems like you got me on that one.
[00:08:02] Speaker A: But here's today's lie. I'm super jealous of Michael. This is who he gets to hang out with. This is the kind of content he shoots all the time, I think Vampire Weekend, you go as well. They're playing just like heaven.
Michael's much cooler than I am.
Go ahead, Nick. Next.
[00:08:22] Speaker D: Hi everyone, my name is Nick.
My name is Mikola, but usually people refer to me as Nick because it's like quicker, easier.
I represent, we play studios over here. I'm head of broadcast department over there. We're having two studios in Inglewood. One is capable to host around 3K people. The other one is capable to host around 1 1/2. And I would just say the main attraction is one of them is fully transformable into virtual production screen and with a cap to live producing to live rendering, live broadcast and filming the pre produced movies and stuff. And the other one is your typical esports and gaming arena. That is, I would say that it is kind of a trendy right now to bring esports to the United States because pretty much you have a lot of great arenas all over the states that are ready to host esports. And this trend coming from Europe where esports is like super huge.
With ESL Blast, we play a Call of Duty, different kind of franchises. I would just say that this is kind of a future of entertainment for us and for the whole world as this trend is globally moving.
[00:09:33] Speaker A: For those of you that don't know, Fortnite is having a big event at usc, a big gaming event that's coming up right now and it's sold out like faster than concert series that have lineups of monsters. So this is huge. Everybody's known it's been huge if you've been to the SVG events that were here in the past. But it's not going away and Nick is a testament to that. So what I want to do is I just want to start with a round of questions and go through each, each person here, their different market segment and the challenges that they're going through. And you're probably going to be able to relate to some of this right now.
In the past two years, a part of everybody's production workflows had to rethink about how to rebuild. Whether it's video over ip, audio over ip, new camera infrastructure, new technology, new AI camera tracking, you name it, all of that.
What are the challenges that you have when you are considering making upgrades for your system while continually having a schedule of so many shows a year or so many shows a week. How do you manage that process of new technology, old technology?
As broadcasters we know stuff doesn't always work right the first time. So I'm going to start with Beth.
[00:10:54] Speaker C: Well, it's interesting that you would start with me, because my biggest challenge is always not having the money to buy the technology because I'm in K12 and we just don't have the funding that other people do. But I do understand that funding is a concern for everybody. And that's one of the reasons we went with our Ross graphite system, because it offered real world technology experience with a good price point that helped us do more, but also be more. So I would say our biggest concern is funding.
With that said, we have always been pretty or my focus has always been teaching kids how to think and troubleshoot. And I've always found that to be a soft skill that's valuable regardless of what technology you have. Because, Tony, you did ask in the beginning who here has trouble finding crew that can operate the gear. But it's also who has trouble finding crew that's collaborative, that can think, that can troubleshoot, that can see what's wrong and provide sort of a stopgap for that instant, especially in live tv. And to me, live TV is the most exciting thing there is.
I just love it. And it's what got me engaged in production. It's what brought me another family, essentially, and my students find that happening for them as well, too.
[00:12:17] Speaker A: So, Josh, I'd asked that same question, but I want to add to that about when you're thinking about your production workflow, what have you had to rethink and rebuild with the existing infrastructure coming in new nine months ago, and how has that affected your staff?
[00:12:34] Speaker B: Well, to answer the question of just upgrades, and we're very, very, very conservative.
If there's something that's not on fire and we're in the the NFL season, we're not going to touch it. We're going to wait till the end of the season. That's when we're going to do all of our upgrades and, and try things just, you know, we can't risk it. We're sort of, you know, we go from one game right into another. So the, you know, if there's a game on a Sunday, that Monday, we're already starting to prep for the following week game. So we can't have downtime.
So we're very conservative right now. We're actually talking about doing some major upgrades.
We're five, six years old, so that's sort of old in the world of technology. So there's definitely things that needed updating. The way we're sort of looking at it in a lot of especially the bigger things is sort of Building out the new technology independently, testing it, getting it all up and running, and then being able to cut over so we know it works. We know it's there and then decommission whatever we're replacing it with. That seems to be sort of the game plan we're going with. Again, just conservative. So we know it works.
We have so many events and things going on, we don't have the time to say, oh, we're going to be closed for three weeks or we're going to be closed for a month. We just can't do that. So we have to be able to be fully operational and then cut over to it. So it's really getting the new technology working and then disconnect.
[00:13:59] Speaker A: So in, in parallel. I think you had mentioned that, Michael, about how you do that.
[00:14:03] Speaker E: Yeah, we were talking about that briefly before we got up here for, for us integrating new technology. I'm always trying to look like where do we want to be next year and when we're doing our budget planning, you know, for, for purchasing new gear and new hardware, of trying to look at where do I want to be at the end of next fiscal year and what systems can we looked forward to, whether it be new cameras or new lenses or the infrastructure like replacing 3G SDI with 12G SDI, stuff like that. And then what's the time frame for us to get this installation done while still maintaining all these events that we're doing?
I never introduce new technology without maintaining the current system. If we're going to try out a new camera or a new switcher or anything like that, it's in addition to what we have is a known working system.
You know, you definitely don't want to be in the middle of a show and find out that a new piece of hardware has a driver issue or you know, some type of application issue that, that cannot happen during, during a live broadcast, you know, so we. It's same thing. We're very conservative about introducing new technology and we'll generally do that in like smaller events that aren't mission critical.
Try it out on, on some smaller stuff. Make sure all of my crew gets plenty of time to get hands on, whether it be board time or camera time.
[00:15:21] Speaker A: And do you even have unique challenges though, Michael, when, when you have sync sound? I mean, you're so involved with music and it's such a big part of making sure that your content comes out with this new technology, whether it's DANTE or video over ip.
[00:15:35] Speaker E: Sure.
[00:15:35] Speaker A: The challenges you're faced with sync sound.
[00:15:37] Speaker E: And Light redundancy is the, the biggest thing. Having multiple safety copies of stuff.
You know, we still burn cards and cameras, we have multiple audio recordings, we have multiple fail safes. If something goes wrong, never try out something new in a critical situation, you know, without having multiple redundancies and backups.
[00:15:59] Speaker A: Nick, with some of the stuff that you're doing, it's a little bit more bleeding edge.
You have frame rates to contend with with gaming systems and not just three or four camera shoot, it's like a gazillion cameras.
[00:16:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:16:15] Speaker D: So firstly I want to just say that what Beth said previously is super important because technology is, technology is great. The better technology is, the better the broadcast is. But what's more important is people behind this.
People need to be capable of fighting the stress, to be cool headed and pretty much willing to adapt, willing to adjust and willing to create. This is like one of the most important key features.
Talking about implementing new stuff to the broadcast. For somebody it's new, for somebody it's not. But we're leaning towards the remote production. So for example, we Play Studios is coming from Ukraine. We're right now in the US in Englewood, but part of our team is still in Ukraine and operating from there. So during our esports events we're usually having either TD or spectator or observer guy who is doing all the in game direction. We have in the replay operator who is operating either wemix or EVS remotely from Ukraine with like almost zero latency and like one second delay the biggest time if the connection is unstable. But it's pretty much always stable and we're like pretty much happy with this. Talking about the multiple cameras. Yeah, multiple cameras is a challenge for engineers, for directors, but it's something that you need to do a make show. But what if I say you when we're doing the like Vtubing events and virtual events, we're having around like 17 virtual cameras, then we need to operate with the help of only like three physical cameras and only like two cameramen and one jib cameraman. This is a task, this is a challenge. And what's more exciting about this, this is something that, you know, it's strong words right now. It's something that nobody has ever done before. And being a pioneer in this one, we Play Studios is doing really great job because it's a combination of a new technology and people who are willing to do this. And I'm not talking about, you know, like when we were saying about VTubing and new modern trends, we're thinking, oh Some bunch of teenagers or like 20 years old are doing this. No, we're having a lot of 40 years old, 50 years old who are like willing to get into this and willing to make their mindset wider. Not about the technologies only, but about the like getting the content, getting into the new trend. So people are the.
[00:18:40] Speaker A: There's a lot of 40, 50 year old out there still playing college and you know who you are.
That being said, see I. We. We're no stranger to multicams. At. At Key Code Media, we famously are dealing with the Beast games episode where it has 1,005 cameras all simultaneously. The difference between us is that we're live to tape or we're just finally managing it all in post. You're doing all of that live? Yeah. And that's insane. And then what I want to lead into from there is graphics. I want to have a quick conversation about graphics and I'm going to hop over to SOFI after you because these two have some really unique graphic workflows within their their productions. Let us know the kind of stuff that you're doing with immersive technology and stuff that is not reality based.
[00:19:28] Speaker D: So during one of the main challenges for esports for you know, different kind of game shows, gaming shows, they're there to promote the new game is that the game not usually interesting. The game is not usually easy to get into. Right.
And one of the challenges for creative and technical approach.
[00:19:47] Speaker A: Apologies and still beginning water up here.
[00:19:51] Speaker D: Yeah. One of the challenges over here is to get extended reality in all the meetings is to get extended reality into all the meetings. So for example, we are having the physical reality as we see right now, but just imagine the camera pans and you can see the whole virtual world that completes the physical reality and brings you to the game. So instead of just watching, observing or spectating the game from the third point of view or something like that, you're directly straightly into the game.
With one of our events for Genshin Impact which is like hugely popular all over the world as a game.
We've did few esports tournament for their game which included the full extended reality set with a mix of the physical location built up in our studio from the real props, real decorations and the virtual reality segment which completed this from like to fully in game location. And talking about the Hoyoverse as the main client, they are pretty skeptic about usage of their ip especially when we're saying about recreation. And we nailed it. Pretty perfect. So the initial feedback was hey, so can you please remove this one I know that you create like you took this from the game, but it looks like kind of better than in the game. And we're like, well we created this from scratch. So for sure. And pretty much this brings the solution to the challenge, how to promote the game if the players have never played it. The game is complex and hard and you need them to get into the game. You stun them with visuals, you stun them with gfx, you stun them with the virtual reality because pretty much you bring the people on screen who are in some kind of stage arena, esports players who are not getting into the communications and easily, you know, like, hey, yeah, I'm a cool dude. No, they are pretty shy and stuff like that. So we're bringing them into the game.
[00:21:49] Speaker A: So you're able to see some of the content that they're able to do. And within the gaming environment it does, it moves fast, it's a fast environment and it's engaging to watch.
That being said, what I think is also very interesting, what Josh does. And Josh, I'm going to ask you about your graphic challenges.
So everybody who's been to Sofi or who hasn't seen it, you've seen it. Anyway, that big graphic dome around there and that is being run by Ros Expression. I thought, oh, that's really cool. They've got one Ros Expression running that.
Josh, you want to explain what's going on there?
[00:22:24] Speaker B: So we have the infinity screen. It's a double sided halo.
Largest screen in any stadium, about 70,000 square feet end to end. It's about 120, 120 yards.
We feed that with Rasch expression. We have 32 nodes that feed that screen. So 32 expressions with a Tess Ro Master.
[00:22:50] Speaker A: So does that mean you need 32 people to operate it simultaneously? Now how does that work?
[00:22:55] Speaker B: We generally have two expression ops and then like four dashboards for a normal game.
So with those 32, they're all talking together. We, you know, big challenge for us is files. Files are massive. So just getting the content from people, people understanding how it all works is generally pretty challenging. We spend a lot of time educating our clients that come in. It's like they give us their files and we look at it and say, hey, that's not going to work and send it back and, and have them work on.
Takes a long time. We can't take something the next, you know, get it that day and play it back. That doesn't happen. It just because it takes so long to load something just because the files are so big and it has to talk to 32 nodes and we upload it and it has to upload and then it has to send all the nodes and sync and everything. That all takes time. So, you know, our big challenge is time.
And we're always.
We spend a lot of our time pushing our people saying, hey, you have to have this in this day, you have to have this in. And people aren't the greatest, always getting things to us on time, but we get it and we get it to work. And our motion designers on staff are awesome. And they take a lot of these people's clients work who don't really understand that whole 360world because it's a lot different than just a 16 by 9 board.
It's looking at everything in a really different way. And so a lot of times we have to work and sort of adapt their content to make it all work.
[00:24:26] Speaker A: And that leads into the live production too as well, is what the program out is, and that's tied in with the screen. I think it's important to understand that we always get on graphics engines and how important that is in live production. We're competing, we're selling our clients gear, and their intent is to make a profit, a return on that investment.
So it's incumbent upon us to provide the content and the gear that makes their content extremely relevant. And that's a big part of that graphic infrastructure, because nobody just wants to see three switch cameras anymore. It's no fun. Beth, do you want to explain what you're dealing with, your challenges with your graphics, with the kids?
[00:25:08] Speaker C: Well, we have two graphic engines, two expression engines, and we have one virtual one which is on a laptop with a dongle.
So why did we go with expression? Well, we went with expression because even though I'm not looking to make a profit on anything I do being in education, I'm looking for my students to make a profit in their lives as they transition into industry and possibly work for places like SoFi or we play studios or anything like that. But for me, with graphics, one thing that I really wanted to do was transition in live sports from doing all our graphics from PowerPoint and then keying that with our old tricaster.
Well, we've had a bunch of switches over the years, but having to do graphics from a PowerPoint that is then keyed over your live stream is not the best workflow and it's very not engaging. So for me, I really wanted to have that experience of live graphics during sports.
We did our first Game with Sinking to the Rose Bowls scoreboard back in October for our turkey tussle. And it was a game changer for us, for my students, they were excited.
When people here talk about stress of working in a stressful environment, if you're having fun and you're really excited to just be there participating, then it's a lot easier to handle the stress.
If you have had successes in the past, it's easier to handle this stress. I know for a kid, I know myself when I was young, going into a new studio situation, it was just being there was stressful enough, but I was so glad to be there and I had some skills that I could apply when I teach my students, which remember they're starting with me in 10th grade. So when I'm lucky, I have them for three years for them to go into the studio and say, yeah, I know Expression.
Oh, you can operate Expression? No, I can code expression. I know how to program it. I know how to design templates. I know more than just being able to operate it, which is actually fairly easy if you actually are in a situation where you have a well built template.
[00:27:23] Speaker A: So the next thing I want to talk about, I'm going to have this more of an open discussion. I brought up people's linkedins and I encourage you to go look at them. The resumes of these folks on the stage are impressive and long and they've been in this business a long time. So now I'm going to start a fight. Just so you know, I'm Switzerland, I'm agnostic, I'm objective and I sell it all. But we're going to talk about switchers now and I want to go down the line. I want to ask what switchers you use in your current environment, why what you've used in the past. And don't talk mean, because they're here, they're here and they're all good.
But I think this is really important. We've gone through the graphics side and there's tons of graphics. We sell them all and each tool is unique for its application.
But there's a caveat of switches out there and each one is unique. But I want to kind of start with you and go down the line. Tell me your experiences with the switches and what you're using now.
[00:28:19] Speaker D: So pretty simple when you're coming from esports background. The best kind of a switcher for you would be blackmagic because of the adaptation. It's super adjustable. You can adapt to whatever you might need. You're not being stacked with whatever you prescripted previously for the broadcast or for example, when kind of a change coming to you with, hey, we're changing the player, we're changing the video feed, we're changing the mix, it's done super easy, super quick. I wouldn't say that this is kind of, you know, something that differs them from the other players on the market. It's just the way of how they, how they work with all the other hardware.
[00:28:59] Speaker A: It's what about frame rates for gaming? How does blackmagic help you with that? Because it's really important. Nobody wants to see that fuzzy screen. It's a different animal.
[00:29:09] Speaker D: So talking about the frame rates and bit rate, we're streaming mostly in 59.94 as a standard for esports. And the blackmagic secures the good quality and not losing a single drop of a bitrate, not losing any kind of frame rate and mixing it to the television format standards with the Groot and smooth transition in between the real cameras and the people operating in the studio, analyst, panel, host, whatever on the stage and the gaming feed because the gamers, you know, when we're talking about the 60fps, it's been standard since, I don't know, 2010. But right now gamers are like, well, I want 120fps, I want 300fps, I want, I want the monitor that can go up to 320Hz and so on and so on. Well, that's not possible for the broadcast to handle yet in a good capacity for the resulting viewer experience because nobody has this kind of phone, smartphone, iPad that can handle this. But I would just say that blackmagic can secure you an easy adjustable esports broadcast. I would just say that I'm a big fan of Ros as well.
I would just say that Ros brings you the stable kind of workflow and turnkey solution for all the ways of technical setup for the broadcast. If you are doing the scripted show but when you are following and sports as well. But don't get me wrong, when you're doing esports which consists of a lot of digital inputs, I would just say I would lean more towards blackmagic because there be.
They've been the king exactly in Europe for a long time in producing from smaller events to the big scale esports language.
[00:30:55] Speaker A: I won't contradict Nick, but I will say that I have seen esports workflows on all types of switches beyond Grass Valley, Ross, Newtek, everyone, the Sony Panasonic. But you're. I'm sure, you're right. I'm not doing it. You're doing it every day.
Mike, go ahead. Let me tell what are you using now and why are you using it and why? You like it or you don't like it?
[00:31:16] Speaker E: Sure. So in the Clive Davis Theater, we're currently using a Tricaster in the cloud.
[00:31:22] Speaker A: I'm sorry, in the Cloud or on Prem?
[00:31:23] Speaker E: Is it on Prem?
[00:31:24] Speaker A: Okay, cool.
[00:31:25] Speaker E: Yeah, the 410A plus is what we're using on Prem. We've been using that since 2019, I believe, when we purchased that from you. It's been a great system.
We're going to be moving that system up to the Ray Charles Terrace and we're in the next few months going to be installing a Blackmagic system.
The 4K8 I believe.
[00:31:43] Speaker A: Right.
[00:31:45] Speaker E: Is the switcher that we're going to go with in the Clive Davis. And then we'll continue to use the Tricaster up on the Ray Charles terrace.
And we're at 29.97.
We've done 60 and for what we're doing in our lighting situation, the 29.97 has been fine for us. We'll probably go to 60fps with the Blackmagic system, but the Tricaster will continue to be a 29.97.
[00:32:09] Speaker A: And have there been any challenges between both the Tricaster Biz system or blackmagic when it comes to routing an input off of the mixer, whether it be Dante or xlr? Well, how is that round trip workflow? Because that audio for you is so important.
[00:32:28] Speaker E: We originally, when we first were setting up the Tricaster, we had some issues with some different brand names of laptops, not wanting to play nice via sdi, whether it be converting from an AJA or a blackmagic box. The AJA stuff always seems to be the most stable, you know, which comes with a price point as well. But yeah, getting SDI or, you know, HDMI to SDI conversion sometimes can be challenging into the Tricaster. But our system doesn't really move around much and these are pretty hard lined inputs for us. So once we got it locked on and stable, it hasn't really been an issue.
[00:33:05] Speaker A: Right on. Okay, Everybody wants to know what SoFi is using.
[00:33:09] Speaker B: We're, as I said, we're basically a Ross and Ebert's house. We have two in our control room, we have two ROS Acuity 8ME switchers, which works really well for us. Everything is very integrated. So all just with Ros talk and everything just talks well together. So it, it works really really well. And it's it. I don't think we would want to have any other kind of switcher just tie ourselves.
[00:33:34] Speaker A: What kind of challenges do you have then when you bring in third party people? Josh, you know how many people have been out in SOFI and saw the trucks wrapped around the stadium? I mean, that's a lot of trucks. And each one of them has a switcher, right?
[00:33:49] Speaker B: Our biggest challenge is frame rate people.
When our system is very happy with 5994 and people come in with all sorts of different frame rates and that causes us the most amount of challenges of, you know, we can convert, put it through an FS4.
[00:34:04] Speaker A: So on a large event, do you literally have like a frame rate police that goes around and says get it right?
[00:34:09] Speaker B: We talk to them in advance and say, this is our specs, you know, this is what your equipment needs to be. And they say, great, yes, sure. And then they get there and they come in with every type of flavor of, of device. And that's where we spend a lot of our time just trying to troubleshoot and deal with the people's different frame rates and flavors of stuff. And we say, just give us 1080p1094. Give us 4k59.
[00:34:40] Speaker A: From an edu perspective, I think Beth has the most interesting.
I'm most curious about her response because I think you're using everything thing, aren't you?
[00:34:51] Speaker C: This is true. There is. I've not met a switcher that I haven't liked. I love switchers. I always wanted to be a td. I like pushing buttons. I like the colorful lights. I like Vegas mode. On the Cayenne, I have two Cayennes.
But you know, each switcher definitely has an application. And I really hear it from the panelists here.
We had in our school board rooms, which is probably our smallest control room. We have been using tricaster since 2015 team and that has been really solid for us and we really loved it.
When I was considering what to put in a fly pack and I remember I already had the two Cayenne switchers which, you know, I really wanted to use. But what made me go with Ross was the its flexibility.
I can. I have two fly packs essentially. I have one that is an all in one system and then I have just an audio only.
And so one thing that's really great about the graphite system with ROS is that we have the rave audio capability. So we have our own.
You know, I have another screen that I could just sort of swing out over to the edge. And I have another student position who can run audio for me. And then I have another arm that swings out on the other side so that the kids can run the expression. And then I have the switcher in the middle. Right next to me is Replay, which we're still. Cause we ran out of money. We're still on our three play system, but it integrated with the ROS seamlessly. So even though that's strikhauser, it's still, you know, visual. It still worked very well with the ros. So that's the reason why ultimately we went with ros because it's flexibility, its ability to fit into the tiny little box that we have that we can just roll out and set up our cameras, which are all, you know, wireless cameras. We use Teradex for all of our cameras.
[00:36:45] Speaker A: Now I've got another question for the entire group, because we're getting into different parts of gear. The question really is, what new tools are you currently using in your production or what are you looking into?
Are there any trends or new technologies that you have adapted or are thinking about adapted that these folks should be looking into as well? I mean, when we talk about edu and education, gaming, live music. And I want to start with Michael, because you talked about a functionality that you're adapting with a Sony camera that is badass.
[00:37:20] Speaker E: Yeah, the. The A40. The Sony PTZ camera has a really cool feature where you can frame up someone. You can set the parameters of how it frames that person from the knees up, from the waist up, from the headshot, and it. And it stays with that person as it moves, as they move forward, back and forth in the room, which is super helpful for us with. When filming musicians, I can say follow that bass player and the PTZ no matter where that person goes throughout the room. And it. And it holds that frame.
So the other PTZ can be on the lead singer and the other two manually operated.
[00:37:53] Speaker A: The.
[00:37:53] Speaker E: The cameras that have operators can follow their assignments.
The. The tracking is. Is most impressive. I literally ran out one side of the theater and came back in the other side of the theater, and it found me immediately. The second I stepped in the other side of the room, the camera swung around and stayed with me. I tried hiding behind a couple of the pillars in the theater, and it waited for me. Kind of creepy, but super effective. When filming bands, it was like Call of Duty. It dotted you and stayed on you. And when I wasn't in the room, it was scanning our TV monitors, looking for faces.
[00:38:29] Speaker A: And this is a Technology that's not just Sony, obviously I love the camera, but they all have their unique benefits and challenges and I'm sure some of you have gone into those GUIs and said, oh, this one's cool and this one's not so cool or whatever. So today when that truck gets here, I encourage you to go in there and check them all out and ask about it.
[00:38:50] Speaker B: On the same vein, one of the things we're looking at is our replay.
There's some great new technology out there to do the same type of thing, tracking players and it's pretty amazing of.
[00:39:03] Speaker A: All what manufacturer is tracking on the replay. Is it evs?
[00:39:06] Speaker B: Evs, okay, we don't have that though yet.
But that's something really interesting looking at their tech of they're all in the same uniform and it's still able to follow that exact same player throughout a whole play. And so it's pretty amazing. And so for us on just advancing technology is like we're looking at things what can help the teams, what can give us a better experience for our fans.
So just trying to find that tech and, and that's really to be able.
[00:39:36] Speaker A: To pull up clips though and have that replay instantly. Are there any technology you're looking at on like a MAM asset type solution where you're trying to find things quickly or is that just based on shows? You said you did 500 events a year. I imagine finding content can be a challenge for you too.
[00:39:59] Speaker B: Most of our stuff is we do the event and then we're sort of done.
[00:40:02] Speaker A: Then you're out, we're out of it.
[00:40:03] Speaker B: We hand off, you know, if we're recording something, we hand it off to whoever we're working with.
So we don't have to store too much. We, we have a shared drive, we have a Google Drives that things go into and it's sort of sorted and we, we have some iconic accounts, different places, it really depends. But they don't have to deal with massive content.
[00:40:23] Speaker D: So yeah, talking about the replays and clips, it's. And tracking of some specific moments that's really important. And this is like one of the challenges right now because everybody's doing like five hours broadcast, six hour broadcast, right? But the viewers right now, they are getting used to fast food content. They're not getting used to watch the whole show from the very start to the very end. They are used to go to acts and like, hey, what was the highlight? What was this player doing? Or something like that. And this is like a really tricky thing because you Need a lot of people who are like kind of aware of what the show is on the clip inside, right. To place the clips to force them in the social networks to make the show valuable after it ended. Because pretty much all the shows getting engagements, interactions and stuff like that, not during the actual show but afterwards in the social networks, right?
So over here I'm leaning towards the right now kind of tricky AI driven solutions that are clipping your show on like based on the viewer experience and bringing the clips right after the show to the social networks, pretty much engaging the viewers and giving the outline of the show to the ones who are never watching the show at all. So for example, I have a lot of friends who never watched the late night show with Jimmy Kimmel or was Jimmy Fallon. But they know who these people are and they know what challenges they are doing there, what stars they were inviting their why? Because they watching YouTube shorts, because they watching TikTok, but they never watch the whole show. They don't even know what are the segments. They don't know what Saturday Night Live is, but they know some skits from there. Why? Because they're following them on social networks. And that's right now the king, the fast food content and all the solutions that are making the fast food content real right after the broadcast itself, make the broadcast itself.
[00:42:15] Speaker A: More people have kids that don't watch tv.
I think I, I saw this statistic that's going to blow you away right now for broadcast and I think I have it here. I don't know, let me see if I've got it.
We saw this at the HPA event.
Come on up everybody. See that there?
This is what people are viewing right now for live traditional broadcast.
It's insane.
11.1% the number one distribution of content on the planet right now to his point is YouTube. That's what people are watching. And the next down is Netflix Prime Video, Hulu, Disney, Roku. I mean traditional broadcast is a very small part of that and it's getting smaller and smaller. So that leads me kind of to my next question.
The challenges that each of you may have with regarding deliverable.
How is the content then immediately being disseminated and transcoded out to the world? Is it multiple channels and what flavors of technology are you using to get that done? Because we're talking about live production, right? And traditional broadcast out. I know some clients that are going to 30 different places simultaneously. And Beth, you want to go ahead and start with on the education level of what you're sending out to yeah.
[00:43:37] Speaker C: We primarily stream to YouTube because.
And then we point all our socials to YouTube so that we can drive more traffic over there. And then we turn our YouTube around and put it on our cable channel, which is on Spectrum.
[00:43:50] Speaker A: How about you, Joe?
[00:43:51] Speaker B: But just also on this list here of that broadcast, if you go to the top 100 shows in there, it's all sports, right? Those top 100, I mean, for us, we stream to our we from our content from our control and we stream to this infinity screen for all the people in the stadium. And then we work with the networks to broadcast to their truck. So we give them their connectivity that they need.
[00:44:14] Speaker A: So you're not actually pushing anything. You said you're not pushing anything out. It just all goes to the trucks and they hand it most of the time.
[00:44:20] Speaker B: And we do some stuff in our control room that will feed out either by fiber to whoever they want to connect with, or we'll stream it, we'll code it and stream it for them. But most of our stuff is.
Is we help them do their thing.
[00:44:32] Speaker A: So for a company like the Grammys or the museum, is it just one or two? I mean, do you even have a Facebook output that you guys do? Or what is your we?
[00:44:41] Speaker E: This was originally set up during quarantine. We created our own streaming service. It's a Vimeo based system. Our particular, we have an app called Collection Live and it's.
You can get it from the Grammy museum website. But yeah, we created our own streaming app where all of our content goes to. It's a. The back end of it is a Vimeo based system. But we're currently really leading into upping our YouTube game as well. But yeah, our end content ends up on our streaming platform.
[00:45:11] Speaker A: And then you said this is a Frankenstein encoder that you have on software, Is that correct?
[00:45:16] Speaker E: Oh, gosh.
[00:45:17] Speaker A: As far as what we're pushing out, how you're pushing out.
[00:45:22] Speaker E: The deliverables in H264. Okay, yeah. And stereo at 48. 8.
But there are clients and all the artists that we work with. The turnaround time is insane. You know, people want to go home with a drive that day.
I'm sure all the cameras, you know, particularly with the private event, so they.
[00:45:43] Speaker A: Want the cut and the ISOs right now. Get.
[00:45:47] Speaker E: Yeah. Which to me, you know, having a camera that can record two formats at the same time for you, that you've got one card that's capturing the high res and another card that's giving them an H264 or whether it be, you know, an external recording device like a hyperdeck or something like that. If the client shows up with their own drive and they want to walk with the footage right that night, that we can give them something that they can walk away with. And then all our, all our final content and all our cameras, everything gets stored. Iron Mountain is our ultimate destination.
All our high res content.
[00:46:22] Speaker A: Nick, I'm sure Twitch is a no brainer for you, but what else and how are you getting it out there?
[00:46:26] Speaker D: So we're streaming, we're pushing the streams from our in house facility. We're pushing to YouTube, we're pushing to Twitch, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter X, Twitter X, the same thing. Apologies.
And also we're streaming right now our NFL off site show to Dazn, which is kind of a new thing for us. We've previously worked with them in 2021 with our ultimate Fighting link esports gaming show. And pretty much the challenges over there are pretty standard, I would say. Hyperdecks and stuff like that we usually always use for transferring the VODs in the cloud based system as well to whatever client, whenever or wherever they are.
But pretty much the challenge is to bring the adjustable frame rate to whatever platform we were streaming to. And if we're talking about The Twitch and YouTube, the specs on YouTube are kind of outdated, I would say.
[00:47:27] Speaker A: Really?
[00:47:27] Speaker D: Yes, the codecs and the resulting frame rate and the bitrate on YouTube is much smaller than on Twitch because Twitch is more used to the live broadcasting. YouTube is good, YouTube is really good. But the system of getting the signal and receiving the final data over there is kind of outdated to modern streaming. If you compare this to Twitch and Kick, because Twitch and Kick are more used to live streams, not to the broadcasting in the regular understanding, right? But like live, live streams from streamers from whatever they are, right? Like from the phones, from different DJI cameras, like action cams and so on when they're not at home, when they're like pretty much traveling and so on.
So yeah, live login is much better developed on Twitch and kick.
[00:48:17] Speaker A: Right?
[00:48:17] Speaker D: But YouTube looks good.
[00:48:18] Speaker A: It looks good.
So I bring up another slide and I want to talk about this. This is an interesting slide I've got up here. From 2020 to our current date, 2025.
This gives you the trends of revenue in TV and video marketing and who's spending money on what.
This is an interesting slide that I stole from Phil back there.
Hpa. Woo hoo. HPA in the house.
What you'll see here is a Scary trend for broadcast. It's going down.
I always say follow the money.
And the money means that it's non traditional broadcasts. It's going to ott deliverable and live streaming and YouTube advertising. That's where it's going to. And a lot of people are trying to, and a lot of people are here trying to figure out how to educate themselves and how to be available for new positions in this market that are non traditional broadcast.
And that isn't just people coming out of college, that is people transitioning.
People are losing positions and need to find out. So I want to go line by line and ask you all and start a conversation.
How do people get a job with you? You or what are you guys looking for in the marketing place right now? Because like I said, a lot of people don't seem to have the skill set that you require. So let's start with Beth.
[00:49:40] Speaker C: Well, that's easy. All you have to do is enroll in the Pasadena Unified School District and you can work for me because my kid, my staff are students essentially.
But with that said, my question has always been how do I get my kids jobs?
And so I was asking that about Josh earlier today. How can my students work for you? What are you looking for? And we had a nice conversation which pretty much validated what we do at Pasadena Unified, which is we teach students, we train them for jobs that don't exist yet. We train them how to think, we train them how to troubleshoot.
But, but ultimately from what I believe in is I believe in partnerships and I believe in people.
So my kids are getting experience on technology now, but what will better suit them is to meet people like the other panelists here so that they can go and intern there or they can go experience what is available for them in the future. So we are always looking for partnerships so that we can be trained and ready for you to hire us, essentially.
[00:50:46] Speaker A: Josh, how many people do you have on your staff and what does that process look like over at SoFi?
[00:50:51] Speaker B: So we have, on my staff we have 25 full time and freelance or part time, somewhere between 100, 150 depending on the events that we do.
I mean we're definitely always looking for people to work, you know, experienced people who've work in sports and know stadiums.
Big challenge in LA is there's a lot of big events coming up. You know, we have World cup coming, you have the Olympics coming. I mean there's going to be venue. We're going to probably be operating 22, 24 hours a day for 60 to 90 days into it's going to be the same Dodgers. Every stadium is going to be working non stop.
There's going to be a big need for experienced techs from all parts, from working in the control room, to camera people, to utility, to, to everything. So I mean, we really have to start planning now for these, you know, coming up a couple years so that we all have, you know, people who are trained and ready to go in the next couple of years because it's as it is right now. You know, look at these days where there's a game, a Dodger stadium into it us, it's hard to find people because everyone is working.
You know, that's one part of the business that is. It's busy. It's really busy.
[00:52:10] Speaker A: I'm curious also, Michael, for you, the challenges of finding folks to be able to go downtown and work, but do you have an extra requirement that they have to be super hip and cool and socially aware not to blow it in front of a rock star? Because I would completely screw that up.
[00:52:29] Speaker E: I would say the biggest thing is working for us is to be multifaceted and be well rounded. Because if, if I'm short an A2 or an A1 or an LD or a camera op and the person's skill set is, you know, they're a good audio engineer, but they don't know anything about lighting, or I'm short a camera guy today, or I need a tricaster operator or a video editor. If you're someone that has all those skill sets, you'll be getting phone calls from me all the time.
[00:52:59] Speaker A: Josh, you had said something earlier to me about what a new video or broadcast person really needs to understand. And that is, it's just important to.
[00:53:06] Speaker B: Understand everyone, what they're doing around them. So if you're a dashop, you need to know what the expression person's doing, you need to know what the whole crew is doing. You don't have to know how to operate it, but you have to know what the different people's responsibilities are and how you all work together. You know, the direct, it's a team and it's really important that everyone knows what everyone else does so that they work better together and they can help support each other too. And knowing what they, they need to do their job better. So I find it just really important that you know, like all the aspects of the different jobs also and this.
[00:53:41] Speaker A: Has got to be important for you and I want you to address this and all of you that are in broadcast live streaming infrastructure Even post production production, I'm sure you're experiencing this now.
There's the bumping of heads, there's the artists, post production, broadcast switchers and then there's the cto, the tech guys, the IT people. How many people are dealing with that challenge right now and how many people have had the foresight that recognize that this is all coming together as one?
I'm sure that you're dealing with that as well.
[00:54:15] Speaker D: Yeah, a lot of stuff that we're doing is heavily relying on the adjustments of the live broadcast pipeline to what we have pre produced back there on the pre production pipeline. And I would just say just to follow it up, the live streaming trends and the people in the production crew control room right now leaning towards more from how it works to what is happening, what we are doing, not how we are doing this, but what we are doing. If we're doing the game show, everybody should be at the same page. It's not like I would go to the engineer and he doesn't have a clue what we're doing. No, he should be in loop. He should be in loop because that helps him later on to adjust and to accommodate to the challenges that are there for the video inputs, audio inputs, communication stuff, you know, like how many inputs you need to have, how many channels you have to adjust down to network and so on and so on. So it's pretty much people right now should be like a multi toolkit but not only in terms of the technical knowledge, but in terms of what they are doing right now. Like to easily describe and understand what kind of show they are doing and how they can contribute with their understanding. Because every kind of person in a team is a valuable asset with the creative mind. Even. Even if your engineer is like super tech brain dude.
[00:55:40] Speaker A: He says everyone. I say most of them.
[00:55:43] Speaker D: I would say everyone because as soon as you say most of them and you can easily like, yeah, we can deal without this person. As soon as the person you need them.
[00:55:52] Speaker A: Yes, I've been there.
[00:55:54] Speaker D: How can I do this? I don't have enough.
[00:55:56] Speaker A: You want to.
[00:55:57] Speaker B: I was just going to note you said you know, IT department and other. Yeah, it's all one thing. I mean your audio engineer, your express, they're also working, they have to know ip they have.
[00:56:06] Speaker A: I believe you're right. It is all one thing. But I'm still dealing with challenges of video guys and audio guys. Just those two are still bumping heads. But it's all under one.
[00:56:16] Speaker B: It's all under one thing. They're all sharing the same switches if we're oversubscribed on a port. But it's not just one person and it's your audio guy that's figuring out. We're not necessarily just calling it to support. So everyone has to know IP and how it all works.
We don't have SEI cables anymore.
[00:56:35] Speaker A: Who do you fight with in your IT department?
[00:56:37] Speaker C: Chief Technology officer?
No, but one thing that is good to keep in mind, though, especially if you're talking about the next generation of production experts, is the kids these days are really, really good at multitasking and doing and thinking about multiple things at once. So it is much easier to teach them how to do multiple jobs now than it was back in the 80s when I was in high school.
So another thing that I find out is my, you know, I've been doing this for 25 years in education, and so now I have students who are successful in the industry, and they come back and they keep coming back and telling me that it's really important. You're not just an engineer. It's hard to find an engineer operator or an operator engineer now.
So one thing that the kids are learning are just naturally able to do is they're able to think like an engineer and act like an operator.
So it's good to know that that's the kind of kids that are growing up these days.
[00:57:38] Speaker A: Well, I want to just thank all of our panelists today. We're going to wrap it up. I want you to remind everybody this is kind of a mixer. I'm sure that truck is going to be here soon, and you're going to be able to see all the fun toys.
But like I said, it's the people. Come on up, say hello, introduce yourselves, find out who's here, because you're going to be really surprised. We've got some big, heavy hitters that come to this show that are doing some of the biggest productions on the planet. Kiko's very lucky to have a strong client base. So I just want to thank everybody for the panelists here. I really appreciate it.
