Frame & Reference Podcast - 138: Michael Cioni, CEO & Founder of Strada

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

Today we're joined by my friend Michael Cioni to talk about his new company Strada. Michael is a serial entrepreneur who's career includes numerous awards for his creative work and technical achievements. He is an accomplished director, cinematographer, musician, four-time Emmy winner, member of the Motion Picture Academy, and Associate Member of the American Society of Cinematographers. A U.S. patent holder of digital cinema technology, Michael was the founder and CEO of the post house Light Iron where he pioneered tools and techniques that emerged as global workflow industry standards. After Light Iron was acquired by Panavision, Michael served as product director for Panavision's Millennium DXL 8K camera ecosystem. He then joined the cloud startup company Frame.io where he served as Senior Vice President of Global Innovation at Frame.io. After Frame.io was acquired by Adobe, Michael he leads numerous workflow innovations including the breakthrough Camera to Cloud technology program as Senior Director of Global Innovation. He continues to be motivated by the desire to democratize professional workflows and focuses his efforts on inventing new ways for filmmakers to create through his technology. Michael is a well known and gifted speaker, advocate for the community, and serves as a mentor and educator throughout the global media industry. Enjoy! Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠www.frameandrefpod.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for everything F&R You can directly support Frame & Reference by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Buying Me a Coffee⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Frame & Reference is supported by Filmtools and ProVideo Coalition. Filmtools is the West Coast's leading supplier of film equipment. From cameras and lights to grip and expendables, Filmtools has you covered for all your film gear needs. Check out ⁠⁠Filmtools.com⁠⁠ for more. ProVideo Coalition is a top news and reviews site focusing on all things production and post. Check out ⁠⁠ProVideoCoalition.com⁠⁠ for the latest news coming out of the industry.

Hello, and welcome to this, another episode of Frame and Reference. I'm your host, Kenny McMillan, and you're listening to episode 138 with Michael Chione. Enjoy. Yeah, the other thing I was thinking about what you had just mentioned is, you know, the Gen Z ears, like having a really attuned eye is I'm noticing a theme now on, I got to get off YouTube because I'm wasting too much time on there. But there's a new trend of like everything's in 4-3, heavily film emulated, and whoever's presenting the thing is like in the back of the room holding a microphone. And I'm like, where is this? It's a response to something, but I don't know what it. I think what we're doing here, it's like this apparently is too, this is old now.

Yeah. Yeah. Boomers do. Yeah. And the new thing is to be shot on film a million miles away. Yeah. But it's not the like 4K revolution anymore. It's like, no, the children yearn for the stone age.

I couldn't tell you. I know, I do see those trends. But I think that's the lesson to. everybody is needs to be we are not the protectors of cinema quality like we're not the protectors of it we don't have to be like policing uh and to protect it it isn't something that needs protection it just is what it is and it changes and it can have different flavors and it's just like we we i think i think we get a little too possessive defining what is cinema what is filmmaking and i think that's a little bit desperate

And so the older I get, the more I realize that it's like flavors of food or music or fashion. There's just, there's no right or wrong version. There's just what you prefer and what you like. And certainly there are versions of it that more people like. There's, there's mass appeal and stuff. But obviously, there are people who like really weird music. There's people who like Yoko Ono, I guess, right? Not many.

They're there. There's people who like those weird fashions where they're wearing like a, a Christmas present on their head, you know, there's people for that stuff, too. I used to, I did a presentation once and I was like, the idea that there's flat earthers shouldn't bother you. What you should realize as a content creator is now there's content that you can create for people who believe the world is flat. They're now a category of people you can reach out to.

And there's just, there's more than one of them. And so it's just like, we just got to think about things a little bit differently and realize that we have an opportunity to connect with. a wider array of people. We don't need to protect four by three or 69 or nine by 16's bad or the dumb hat that's like make video horizontal again. It's to me it's kind of pathetic. It just doesn't it doesn't make sense or high frame rates evil or whatever.

You know, you know, I mean, when I was younger, I was told, I wasn't told there was a very prominent leader in the industry that said if you don't shoot on film, you can't call yourself a filmmaker and I remember how like how how how like dirty that made me feel like like how can you like how can you judge that it also felt super elitist to me because you because film was just so out of reach for me that principle that that was being proposed was like then I can never become one right and I didn't like being forced into like the the dark corner the backseat or like you're not allowed in this room it just felt like a you know know, like keep out sign. You're not cool enough, rich enough, white enough, whatever it is

to be in this club. And I really didn't like that sensation. I can understand, you know, like I just said, screw that. I'm not going to listen to those rules. You can't really define this stuff that granularly. And that really was part of the reason I got very headstrong on like emerging technologies and emerging trends and pushing that because I didn't really care what other people thought. I wanted to challenge the conventional thought and say, what if you're wrong? And I ended up finding they were wrong a lot more often than they were right. They were just protecting their own insecurities. They weren't actually protecting the thing they pretended to be looking out for. Yeah, there's two things in there that I've noticed. One is

there's a certain group of folks who seem to be going to bat for, I guess, like, traditional Hollywood that don't work in that space, you know, like you say, the make video horizontal hat. It's like, that's not, who's that for? Like, what are you mad at? I don't, I don't like shooting vertically. I mean, I don't mind actually shooting, but it sucks when you shoot, you know, you're on a gig and you shoot the whole movie, the video, and it looks good.

And then they're like, yeah, we need a nine by 16 cut out. And you're like, that fucks all my framing. Like, that's annoying. Yeah. But as a, as a device, as a, as a mechanism. for getting the video on a phone or whatever, like, I don't, it doesn't bother me, you know, it's just, it's, I would prefer if they just say, that's the only deliverable we want, sure, sure.

And that, but that's why I think, um, that's why I think, uh, actually, we, we have an opportunity, as you said, to understand where the distribution's going to go and then to build the ideal format for that. And when you do know, vertical video is, it's already losing its stigma. The people that were really defensive about it already seemed pretty out of, touch because, of course, they're looking at vertical video regularly. There's just no way to avoid it. And nobody holds a phone horizontally unless they have to. That just became the physical, it's just the way our hands are built. It really has nothing to do with the phone's

orientation. It's, it's, it's human physiology. That's really what it is. And you just can't hold a widescreen phone easily. I remember when I was a kid, there were really two schools The thought, if you think about it, it kind of depends. But Game Boy was sort of a portrait experience device. And then Sega Game Gear was wide, it wasn't widescreen. They're the same 4x3 screen. NeoGeo Pocket. Don't forget NeoGeo Pocket.

That was a wide one. That was wide. They were kind of landscape because they were made for two hands that way. And so it's just like, I think over time, these are early iterations of like handheld devices. And when it became one hand, it had to go portrait. And that's just, it's physiology at that point. And I think that's one of the things you just can't beat.

It's like where my thumb is kind of changes the rules, you know? It sort of controls the rules, you know? Yeah. One, going back to the idea of like film and emerging technology, one video I found of you, I think we talked about this like last NAB or whatever it was, where I had found this video of, I think you were still at Lightiron, which I would love to like get into that whole beginning thing. I know we just kind of took off running, but where you were having to tell,

a room of people that 4K was good like it was like no this is actually going to help you and I just imagine like the room full of people

going nah no we're shooting 1080 forever and honestly I'm not even happy about it yeah but you got to go even before that

as stupid as that sounds today stupid being a strong but appropriate word as stupid as that sounds today you got to go back even before that the same rooms of people said hard drives

would never succeed in cinema. No one would ever trust their footage to a hard drive. And I had to convince people to do that. I was part of one of the first people to ever present a, I don't know what to call. It wasn't a white paper, but a proposal that we should back up our files on data tape. I wasn't the first to invent that, but I was one of the people that in early insurance company reached out to and said, we're doing a movie, they're going to shoot on data.

And we heard you have a backup system. Back then before LTO, there was also a system called DLT, which was actually larger capacity than LTO at the time. And it's sort of like, it's not exactly, but it's sort of like beta and VHS, these two competing things. There wasn't a clear winner at the time back in like 04. But DLT and LTO were these ways to back up. And the insurance, the bond companies didn't know about this stuff.

And they were like, what's the reliability? How does it work? How do we retrieve it? Can we see it? I'm like, not really. You can't, it doesn't play. Well, isn't it tape? Yeah, but it's not video.

So it's different. And these were fun pioneering things that people said that'll never work. So it wasn't even just 4K. It was files. It was hard drives and it was HD. It was the early versions of log. You know, one of the coolest early cameras ever. It's very underrated.

But it was the Thompson Viper. And Thompson's a broadcast company. I was going to get there myself. Go ahead. And they stumble across the technology and they make a CCD because back then these were charged couple device sensors, but they were, you know, three chip sensors. But it was a big one. It was a half inch CCD. And then they had a way to do basically rectangular pixels. So you could get widescreen kind of natively and get all 1920 pixels inside of a 235 exposure. And that was really profound. And then they had a log encoding.

And we didn't even call it log back then. They called it film stream. And it was still an RGB way of doing log. It was very clever. And these are the types of things that scared people. But for some of us, it like made us lean in and be like, wait, this is different. And it seems better. And a lot of times people say, oh, Michael does different things because he just wants to be different.

And maybe on some level, that's why. A lot of us, punks and renegades and misfits, we do that because we just want to be different. But on the other hand, it wasn't just pure differentiation that attracted me is when it showed some form of promise or some sort of advantage over the incumbent. And I don't really have a native scale, but if something looked like a little bit cheaper or a little bit better and it was dramatically different, it made me feel like then that could snowball and a little better or a little cheaper can become a lot better and a lot cheaper or a lot. more accessible or a lot more malleable or whatever. And that became a foundation for me to understand how to explore these trends when they're in the fad or trend stage and see if I could be a part of that transition between fad to trend and then trend to standard. And when they move into the standard phase, everybody forgets who was arguing it or didn't believe it or threw a

tomato at someone when they were presenting it. And they get on board and then they become adopters. And some of us remember who was adamantly against these initiatives. And I sometimes laugh because I still, many of them are still alive. And I shake their hands. And I'm like, do they remember I was the guy they were throwing tomatoes at 15 years ago? Maybe they forgot. Or maybe they forgot they even felt that way. Or maybe they think I forgot. But I didn't. I have a good memory. And so I can remember a lot of those meetings. But, at the end of the day, I feel better if you can be a part of evangelizing people to come to the better conclusion because sometimes they were adamantly against something, maybe for something specific

at the time. And then over time when they, you wear them down or they see that they were wrong and they come on board, I'm fine with that. Like, let's move on and try to collaborate going forward. Certainly if I'm a vendor for them, I'll take their money. So, but it all, it all ends up. coming working out in the end well it's one thing you had mentioned in the uh the podcast the sister podcast to this one the art of the frame which by the way i had the frame name first they they took i had the frame in reference they took art of the frame damn it scott um but one thing you had mentioned was that like in hollywood fads are often dismissed they're very reticent to change you know focus um and it's

It's just such a, like, I get not wanting to change because of workflow problems. Like, it's very difficult, you know, like commercials are where you're going to find new tools and stuff because it's like a quick iterative process. But like on a film, you're not going to change whatever, cameras halfway through because something new came out. Oh, now we can shoot 8K. Let's go grab that one, you know. So I can see how people get stuck in their ways.

But it is kind of interesting to see how, you know, if there weren't people like you out there, still be shooting on, at best, to the F-900, you know, like Lucas would just be running around, like, this is still good. Well, you know, look, I am just one of many people who are willing to be early adopters. I didn't create today's digital cinema climate, but I had a hand on the steering wheel. And the people that were also having a hand on that, you kind of get to know them and you recognize them as individuals or their brands. and you see who likes to be an early adopter and push the envelope.

And then you see the mid and late adopters. And when the new markets are emerging, you try to keep track of that because you don't want to lean on mid to late adopters for this new hard stuff because they weren't there in the past. They're more conservative. That actually isn't a dig. As I get older, I learn that the conservative approach isn't at all wrong. It's just it may be better for their brand or their business,

their shareholders, their customers, who knows. But they're going to be a little bit more pragmatic in an approach. But other people who are Mavericks, they want to be on the bleeding edge and take advantage of that early market adoption because it might actually be a competitive advantage or a creative advantage when you need it. You talked about Mr. Richardson. He doesn't actually need a lot of competitive or creative advantages. He's earned his stripes. He has the access to whatever he needs whenever he needs it. But someone that's just getting started, I wouldn't say the Richardson book would be the ideal playbook to maybe.

make it in their industry or their career, right? And they got to look at a different approach. And I think that's why sometimes being a maverick, especially today, is really handy because you're going to open up your world a little bit wider to kind of see what opportunities come about. Technology used to be for the tech people and the creative people were the other parts. It was sort of like a junior high dance where the boys and the girls are really separated from each other and nobody's afraid to mingle.

That's kind of what art and technology was in the early stages of digital cinema. But that's changed dramatically. And now I think the next generation of creatives is just as technical as they are creative. I call that being technative because I think you have to weave those together to ensure that you're presenting yourself with as many skills as possible to maintain creative control of your work instead of depending on other people to get you out of that jam. or make a decision that might be bad for your project. And I found myself kind of obsessing about workflow

so that I could have more control and then bestow that knowledge under my customers and collaborators so that they felt informed and that we could together make the best decision. I ultimately think when that's done right, you increase creative control and you absolutely save money.

The worst, most expensive thing that someone can do is a workflow mistake. And it will cost you in two ways. One, you will pay money to get, through the workflow mistake that someone else didn't make. And two, you will pay with regret because the result will be some form of a result that's something you're, you know, you're less satisfied in what you create at the end. That may actually be more expensive than the money because in 10 or 20 years, you don't

remember what your budgets were on projects, but you never forget being unhappy with the result. And so it's important to understand workflow to simply protect yourself from making content wrong or making it with the wrong tools that costs you money or worse costs you satisfaction. Yeah. Well, I was going to jump on this a little later, but I feel like we're kind of in the same thing, but in the same zone here. But for people who don't know, you started light iron with your brother and a few other people. And when I like, I always thought of it as just like a colorist company, but it's not. There's like a bunch of other post tools there. And I was kind of

wondering, A, what got you to start that company? Like what needs in the industry did you see that made you want to start light iron? And then B, when we're talking about Mavericks and people who are always on the cutting edge, I know Fincher was always someone who turned a light iron to help things out. And he's certainly someone who's constantly trying to, you know, get workflow. I've interviewed three or four of his DPs. And each one, like, depending on what movie they were talking about, it's always like, this was a new thing we did or this is something we learned on the last one that now, I remember Eigle Burld, who shot House of Cards was saying that, like, the camera set up needed to fit in a sprinter van and be up in 15 minutes. And it's like stuff like that

that you would never, like, that's unheard of. So to actually ask a question, what could You got you to start Lightiron and how do people like David, how did they kind of like mold? Did he even change the way that you were kind of approaching new things and delivering those, as you said, to other people? Yeah, the answer is tremendous. The school of David Fincher, if I went to a film school, that would be the school to go to. But I actually started Light Iron. That was my second startup.

In 2003, I started my first post house, which was called Plaster City Digital Post. And that post house was the very beginning of digital cinema, at that time was videotape style post-production. But it was a post house in Hollywood that didn't have telecini. And there were only a couple other facilities that were trying to do high-end work that didn't have telecini. And only one of them is still in business. One of them, Rami Katrieb had digital film tree, which is still going. Mark Peterson on the East Coast had off Hollywood. And then we started Plaster City Digital Post.

And Rami, Mark, and I all had the same vision of this digital workflow future that wasn't really about film. And again, today that sounds obvious. But in 2002, three, four, that was not obvious. It was actually very countercultural. And so Plaster City was all about using file-based technologies and sand. Here's a funny story for the older people listening. I had a gentleman that used to come to my facility and clean the, the heads of the VTRs.

And every couple months, he'd come and do that. And I only had a few VTRs, but they were there. And he comes by one day, and he sees what was a rack, my first major sand, which was a 32 terabyte, seven foot tall sand built by the company huge, which eventually became called Cyprico. But he was standing there saying, what is that? And I said, that's like the equivalent of like 10 HD cam SR decks. And he's like, that all never work.

And at that time, I wasn't sure. I was like, what if he's right? But, you know, we'll see. And we started using Sands to give us 10 HD Edit Bays instead of having to have 20 VTRs, which would have cost, you know, something like, I'd say 20x, you know, probably 40x in infrastructure to have 20 VTRs versus one SAM. Even though the sand was 130,000 box, it was actually really efficient price per bay, if you think of it in that regard, what we can do. And this is four terabytes.

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. But 36 terabytes. I think that's what it was. It was on 30 or 40 unformatted. But it was about seven feet tall. But you could do a lot with that if you knew what you were doing.

And at the time, it was very profound. So we started moving on this train of file-based workflows, which got us a lot of traction. opened us up to a whole bunch of new world. But then I started seeing the file-based move to 4K. Obviously, Red was released in September of 2007. And that's when I saw this tipping point start to move when we really doubled down on the red workflow stuff. And so by 2009, it was time for me to own a business

because even though Plaster City Digital Post was a company that I helped start, I didn't own anything of it. I didn't know any better. I was like 23, so a paycheck was plenty for me at the time. But eventually I realized when we were building a business and I learned how to be an entrepreneur and had these big aspirations, I wanted to control the story better. And so I needed to own that. So unfortunately, we had to leave Placer City, but most of the staff followed me,

all of the customers followed me, and we started Light Iron. But Light Iron was founded now on a new principle, which was all about DIY. And we were all about 4K plus DIY. And it was in that approach that we started doing films for Soderberg and Fincher. We did a film called The Informant and... I love that film so much. Yeah, it's a great film. I still quote the glutamine guy.

I don't know why. Just glutamine guy pops into my head all the time. Yep. At the time, Terence Malik was messing around with red cameras and Chivo would come by and test red cameras there. And the very first, he went to Burns and Sawyer, got a red one, came over and he just, he started shooting around, you know, the Hollywood and Highland intersection. Chief will just walk around with the red camera. And then we'd bring it over and we put it on the screen.

And we were just learning as we went. And it was the most exciting time because it felt like I felt like a professor that was only one semester ahead of the student. And so we didn't know where we were going, but a few feet in front of us. And that was just enough to not fall, right? But that's it. And it was so liberating in that time. And we started experimenting, you got to think, what's so clever about 2010 and 11 is here we have the real increase in digital acquisition for the first time.

But film exhibition was still the dominant way to consume it in the theater. So this was the actual peak of the digital intermediate because we had to color correct these things digitally, but we had to make film outs. Now, Lightiron was never going to invest in airy recorders, and so we were never going to make film record as part of our business model. So we would go to Technicolor and E-film, a little bit of photochem, a little, yeah, that was mainly who we would go to. There weren't a lot of choices, but these were the companies that could actually do the record to film. And the one that we liked the best was Laser Pacific. And Laser Pacific, which was mainly a television company, started moving towards theatrical. And they had a really great image scientist there.

They had several. And the three main people, there was a guy named Doug Jacques were there. But there was another, he was a brilliant scientist. And then Glenn Kennel, who's the president of Airy U.S., he was a color science and engineer there. And then Leon Silverman, who went on to Disney and is just kind of a mogul across all of post-production. These three people, incredibly intelligent people, were inside the Laser Pacific Brain Trust. And it was through them that we were able to get our REC-709 color correction red camera outputs to look close to film. So the true story is when the social network was shot, it was the first film shot on the red MX sensor.

So Redhead made a red one. Then their first Mysterium X upgrade came out in about 2010. And light iron had been established. We were still very new. We did not have a facility yet of our own. We're building one. And David had shot on Viper before, and he had shot on F23. So Viper was really a zodiac was pretty much Viper.

And then Button was a little bit Viper, a little bit of F23. And now he was going to Red. And so for social network, it was shot on red. Jeff Cronin-Weth shoots this MX sensor. I think he rated it at 600 ISO, which at that time was incredible for a digital SEMO sensor. Like 600 was, today's 600's very, very, it's fine, right? But this idea of 250 ISO, which is where the Airy D21 was and the red one, like it's hard

to shoot in 200 speed, you know, lighting. But the red MX was 600 to 800, no problems, right? And so it was a very different, clean, beautiful look. So what David wanted to do was best for the film. He didn't really care about light iron. He cared about the look of the film. But he knew this red thing was going to push everybody to their limits. So what he did is he went to the three major post houses.

I think he did four. But I know three for sure. And he made them all do a color correction pass, gave them all the exact same footage. We were all given about, I'm going to say about two minutes of footage, about 120 seconds of random takes, no sound. We had to conform it to prove we could conform red because in 2010, some people couldn't.

So we wanted to conform it And they were, his team was asking us They wanted to see how fast we could conform it And you talk about David insisting That a camera can come out of a sprinter van And be ready to shoot in 15 minutes It's the same thing with post production He doesn't want you to have someone

Overcut it all night long Because when there's a problem You might say well that's our problem We'll take it on he's like no Because it becomes his problem If he wants to do a change list Which inevitably you will So it's important that he could see

That things could be conformed instantly So we wanted auto-conform, which at that time was not easily and not automatic and certainly not prevalent. And then he took all four tests and he let you pick where you wanted the film out to be. And so you could go. So, of course, e-film would color it and then film their own film out and tech would color it and do their own film out. And we didn't have a film out, but we had this partnership through all these other films we had been dialing this in at. So we dialed in our film. Now, here's what's ironic.

Laser Pacific was one of the places that was doing their own color correction pass and they had to film ours out. So they were actually competing against themselves in a way. They're like, yours got really scratched. I don't know. Yeah, right. Yeah. No, no. These are good people.

These are good people. But it was a little, I was a little concerned. Sure. But I trusted these really brilliant minds behind it. And their job isn't to win the account. Their job is to make the best film record. That's what these people are. So I'm not worried about those politics.

And what happens is David wanted all the slates chopped off the film and wanted to play the film back in random order, blind taste test. And he was going to watch all four DIs of his footage out. And he attended each session of the color correction so he could get a taste of what coloring with these facilities and these people was like. What was the facility like?

What was the system like? How much rendering did it work? require. How long did it take? Personality, all that stuff. So, you know, he's keeping track of that in his mind. And then we go to Laser and we watch all four unedited, blind, no countdowns. And he had to blind pick the one that he thought matched the digital projection, the one that looked the best.

And Light Iron won. And Light Iron was demonstrably better, I think, because he made us do it again. And I subsequently did three movies in a row. We did a dragon tattoo after that and then Gone Girl after that. And David is so particular about the progress. He made us bid for the jobs and proved that we were still up to the task. And I actually learned a lot about that. The lessons that I learned from David are not purely filmmaking lessons, although there are many.

He taught me about leadership and about team building and how to hold the Because someone like David that has a reputation for being so precise and exact with his films and his filmmaking, the only way to do that is to keep working out. It's like as soon as a bodybuilder or an athlete stops working out, your body starts to decay a little bit and your performance goes down. And here's a man that's really pushed the performance up. So he's getting more and more tone. And the only way to do that is to keep forcing people to stay in shape. And I really appreciate, you kind of think a lot of these facilities, we've had this customer so long. We don't even have to try anymore to get them in the door.

That's bad because you're not going to push yourself harder to keep them there. And then all of a sudden, one bad move, and they're out as they lose their loyalty. And you didn't realize that was going away. So it was at light iron that we started inventing new ways to color crack for film. Eventually, that went away. But I couldn't tell you what my last film out was. but I would say certainly more than 1,000 prints were made of the social network, and a lot of eyeballs saw that on celluloid.

And I don't miss those days. That was hard work, and it wasn't that pleasant, to be honest, dealing with film record processing and even things like real changeovers and all those, you know, two pops and stuff like that. But I'm thankful for the DCP. Let me just say. I'm thankful for the DCP. I'm certainly, I wouldn't say nostalgic.

I enjoy going to Tarantino's theater and watching film prints and stuff. Like a few years ago, I went and saw The Matrix and I was just, and it's like one of my favorite movies. So seeing it like as quote unquote as intended, you know, it was very cool. But a lot, you know, eventually the print will get like bleached out or it gets scratching and stuff. I'm like, I don't. This is the one film thing. Like I love film. But that was, like, film distribution, I was just like, I'm fine with this being digital.

Like, it's fun, but I'd rather just see it good. Like, I don't, I don't need the version that, you know, the bulb is too dark or whatever, you know, it's the things misaligned. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it's, it is, you know, there's something special about that stuff. I don't mind that people are into that. A lot of people like records and they like classic rock.

I mean, it's all fine, you know. I got a shit ton of records. But I did want to kind of, you know, you said you learned a lot from him, but what, when you're constantly on the sort of cutting edge of tech in an industry that doesn't like to change, how do you instill, when you're talking about leadership and stuff, how do you instill confidence in people coming? Do they already have to be halfway bought in? Like people only come to you because they want to be on the cutting edge? Or how do you make it so that people's minds? are not coddled, but like you make it so that they feel comfortable changing workflows, changing what they know and trying something new. Absolutely not. I would say well over 50% of the people that came into my shops and my technologies over the years were not pre-bought into it.

There's something about human biology where our brains are cerebrally wired, not to change because it's dangerous. And if we can't predict a more likely route to survival, we sort of say, I'm not going down the dark path. And that's actually unconscious. A lot of that's like, why would I take, why would I go that way if this way's tried and true, right? There's another way that professionally this plays out.

I used to make a joke, had a T-shirt that said nobody gets fired for choosing deluxe. And what that shirt basically meant is that when I would, present all these things that sounded better, we're more efficient, we're going to give you more control, more power, save you money. The problem is people said, yeah, but if you make one mistake, I get fired. But if I go to Deluxe and they burn the film for heat, I can just say, hey, we went to deluxe. I don't know what to say. Like, it just, that's, I know, we went to the tried and true place. And no one's going to get in trouble for that. So people are risk averse. That's just the nature of things. Yeah, that kind of bothered me for a while. But I had to start to understand

the psychology that there was a pattern for why it was so hard to get customers to leave something they knew or something they didn't. And so the way to do that is to overwhelm them. This is a good trick for everybody. If you're trying to get a job, and I'm not talking purely about post-production here, if you're competing for a role in any production, whatever that job is, or an actor, or if you're trying to get a job at a software company or wherever, a restaurant, the best way to stand out is you have to be able to compete with people in a way that they can't compete with you, right? So it's like if I were trying to say who's stronger, me or Arnold Schwarzenegger, I can't compete with Arnold with dumbbells. It's just not even possible. So I have to think of a way that I can

compete with Arnold that he can't compete. And maybe that would be like fitting into a plane in coach. I can beat him in that, right? Because I've changed the game to my advantage, right? We think, and, you know, Malcolm Gladwell talks about this, the very first, like, 25 pages of his book, David and Goliath. He actually talks about his interpretation of the true story of David and Goliath, where we've been taught that this story is about David overcoming something that

seem impossible for him to beat. When in actuality, David had no intention of getting anywhere near Goliath because given a sword and actually the Bible says they tried to give him his armor and he took it all off. He's like, no, no, no, no, this is going to like constrict my arms. And they're like, what do you mean constrict your arms? You got to go fight this guy. He's like, I'm not going to go anywhere near this guy. I'll lose. I'm going to use a technology that is beyond him that I've been practicing so intently that I'm able to get this guy off at 50 yards and he's not even to see it coming, right? So in a way, David knew he was going to win as long as he could fight Goliath on his terms. This is a principle for entrepreneurs and creatives that have to fight

in circles that you're trying to jockey for position. You got to make it the battles on your terms. You go to an incumbent's battle zone. They call the shot. it's their ring, it's their rules, it's their crowd, it's their home field advantage, you're going to lose. And then you've got to try to beef yourself up and, I don't know, out dodge them or something like that. But what I always found with Light Iron and the other companies I've started is we started to compete in areas that they weren't even thinking about.

And if I could plant the seed of an idea in a customer or a potential customer, you need an iPad on the set. This is going to help you. You could go home with an iPad every day. Really? Yeah. Go ask Deluxe about their iPad solution. Oh, they don't have one. Oh, okay, that's interesting. You need to be processing, you're shooting your film in Atlanta, but your editor is in Los Angeles. You need to be processing dailies in Atlanta. Oh, that's a good idea. Find out where Deluxe Atlanta is. Back then, there wasn't one, right? And so it's like, oh, they're going to ship it to New York, right? Oh, well, your editor is already going to have the footage, if you go with me, before it even gets to last Los Angeles to go to posts. So I'm going to save you a day or two in turnaround times, right? Or another one would be we're going to help you get your, like we could take a red camera and we can work with it natively. Instead of conforming it to a mezzanine format like RGB files like DPX or EXR,

we were able to work with red files as R3D files, airy files as ARI files. Back then, people were just conforming everything to a flat file and there was less data and it was you had less flexibility you couldn't change your mind well that's what avid always wants right avid just wants one file one file that's right and so that that ability for me to posit to these people there are these alternative ways of working that are better for you i was i was i was knowingly planting seeds in their head that i knew my competitors didn't have a checkbox for and so all the sudden what i was offering couldn't be compared to the other companies and they were going to cost more and that's how i was able to to chip away and make this little startup. I mean, light iron, it's still around. It's a great

company. It's like six offices in North America. And I would say light iron is the smallest facility that does the biggest post-production. And that's what was special about us. In fact, that was the name light iron is I believed in there was a light side of tools. Like Pro Tools had an L.E version. There was a Final Cut Express, the light version. Imovie is a light version of Final Cut. I believed in that. Premiere is a light version of Abbott in a way. But I didn't believe that everything could be done on the light side. You still needed the industry term heavy iron. A DLP, a Christy projector, you need that. You can't substitute a Christie projector. You can't make a 10-foot screen act like a 40-foot screen. So I got to put in a 40-foot screen. So I need 15-foot

ceilings. That's hard to find in Los Angeles, right? And so we believed that the business that we wanted to serve was both light and heavy together. And we would, we would pivot where the light stuff would serve you and work versus the heavy iron stuff. And that's where light iron's name came from. And it allowed us to move up the scale really effectively and efficiently and compete with companies a thousand times our size with a hundred times more, literally a hundred times more operating history. Because Technicolor was a hundred years old and we were one years old. Right. And we were able to compete on the same jobs. And I didn't do the, volume that they did, but I wasn't after the volume. I was after the experience. And D.P.'s

like Don Burgess, I think I did like seven or eight movies with Don. And we became very close. And we really kept honing in. Talk about another cinematographer that learns something and then applies that knowledge to the next film and the next film and kept moving up. And you think Don doesn't need to get any better. He's so decorated. He actually won a Lifetime Achievement Award a month ago with the ASC. Yet that's not Don. He's always. He's always, always reaching for more and trying better and selling his cameras and buying the next one and trying more resolution. I did a movie with him called Allied. And it was a Brad Pitt, Marianne Caldwell film. And what's really interesting, a story about Don and that, Don really

bought in heavily. At that time, we were probably on 6K dragons. I'm guessing. I can't remember exactly. But I'm going to say it was probably the 6K dragon. And what Don was doing there was doing like a 4K extraction out of the 6K. And he was shooting flat for two, three, five scope. But it was, it was a flat circular lens, right? Getting two, three, five. And he would frame that in 4K. So he had something like a 25% extraction of the original Oneg.

And what Don would do, because he learned this over years and years, imagine a crew, all of you listening, you imagine you're on set, you're shooting an important close-up with a big actor like Marion or like Brad. and you're doing that close up and you shoot all that out and then you got to go and you got to do a turnaround and you got to make it work.

But that turnaround reaction time could be three or four hours later in the day, even though you're in the same room. Could have been lunch in between, who knows, right? And so what happens is everybody on the set starts to forget what they were shooting and you got to remember when this is cut together it's all interwoven.

Nobody's confused by what I'm describing. But here's what we learned. What Don learned over the years, and he would tell the story better than myself, but he learned that what happens is when you're doing these crossover and you're doing these OTSs, you're cross-cutting this in post, the eyeline and the actual scale of the head varies a little bit because it was shot several hours apart. And while in your mind, you're like, I think this is about the same, this is going to work. When you cut it together, it's different.

So what Don does is he takes the image and he frames one. So let's say it's Brad. And he gets Brad looking exactly where he wants him in the frame. And because he has this 25% extraction, he is got it. He's able to zoom and adjust without having to blow anything up. And then he cuts to Marion's close up. And he draws a line across the screen and he moves the eyeline so it's exactly on the same pixel. And when you're cross-cutting and then he can move her head a little bit like this.

And then he says, watch this scene cut. now. And of course, this is in D.I. Not an offline, because in offline, nobody would care. But in the D.I. That precision moment where now these cross-cuts, it's just smoother. It's like feathering an edge versus a hard edge, right? Or radius versus an angle.

And it's subliminal, but it smooths out this stuff. And when you're trying to build a scene and you want to make the camera invisible so that you're just focusing on what's being presented to you, they'll slight up and down of an eye line. You're reacting to that because your eyes go right to their eyes. That's how your brain

focuses in on what to look at. We just go for the eyes. Walter Merch 101. Walter Merch 101. So this is one of those techniques that Don did that. And when Don got that down so well, we would tell everybody else and show everybody else how to do it. And we could apply that to everybody else's films.

David pushed us on collaboration tools. Like he wanted multiple online editors to be supporting the DIY all at once. And the company, which is defunct now, but it was called Quantel, was the only DIY tool that could really do that with Rothel. files. And then we, when David pushed us to modify and get that working and we push Quantel to invent things to make it work, then we got to give it to every single film. The $2 million budget films got the same Fincher treatment, right? And the same Don Burgess extraction treatment, right? And that's a type of thing that we wanted to say, a rising tide floats all boats.

If you have the luxury of learning from a master of the craft, then it's kind of your obligation to share that with everybody else who is in in pursuit of becoming a master of the craft. And that's one of the things that I love doing at Lightiron is really helping people do that. And my mentor, Leon Silverman, he once said to me, Light Iron's the perfect size business, because what you want to be in a business is you want to be big enough to serve you, but small enough to know you. And that's really what we tried to run that line. And I miss it.

It was a really great time of my life. But on the other hand, I don't miss it because I'm glad I'm not doing with post-production change lists and midnight orders anymore. But I learned a lot in that process and I'm applying it into everything I've done since. Yeah, I want to get into the strat of stuff next. But now I have a cheap question, which is specifically for this podcast, which is, are there any other DPs or directors besides those two who taught you something that listeners could potentially apply.

You know, I'm more thinking small teams or maybe individuals who like the eyeline trick or anything like that where they could apply that now on their own shoots that they brought to you. That's come to mind. Yeah. Well, you know, I did a lot of movies

with Keanu Reeves, several movies with him. And he used to spend a lot of time at Lightiron. And at Lightiron doing that, I learned about, and Keanu did a documentary with a guy named, Chris, who was called, you have it over there. Okay, so you know the film, right. So it's called side by side. The film was called side by side. So what's interesting about Keanu is he was

really interested in the craft of filmmaking, not just the performance art of it. And so he started pushing the technologies. And he directed a film. We did that. He, we, I did the first John Wick movie. We actually cut that at light iron in New York. And they lived there for like a year cutting the film. Um, and these were, these were pushing the edges. Um, and, uh, in fact, uh, we started using, um, you know, just, we're pushing Airy in some cases because back then, Erie didn't have ProRes XQ. It didn't have ProRes, uh, 3.2K back then. And it was through working with Keanu and Airy that prores 3.2K actually became a thing. Um, uh, one of the product managers at, um, at Airy, uh, Mark Shipman Mueller, him and I,

to talk all the time about this idea about unlocking pro res and pushing it further because to me, Airy Raw was such a financial burden that it basically separated a classification of what who could afford Airy Raw and who couldn't. And ProRes is the great equalizer. And it's not to say prores is better than Airy Raw or if you can shoot Airy Raw, you shouldn't. It's just that if if if Ari Raw isn't the right format or you can't afford to do an image sequence based or an MXF based workflow that's uncompressed or at that time was uncompressed, then ProRes is a great middle ground, right? But ProRes back then was limited to HD. And so by working with the camera processing and improving on the XT models and so on, they were able to get ProRes 3.2K. And then

we started applying that to anamorphic. And we were actually getting high resolution anamorphic files because ARI sensor was one of the rare sensors at that time of being a 35 millimeter gate that allowed for anamorphic, where the other sensors, which were 16 by 9, were not as good in animorphic yet to take a haircut vertically. Obviously, all this is moot because now everybody makes full frame sensors that are, you know, 21 millimeters tall and it's different. But in 2010, 11, 12, it was a different story. And so it was like working with Keanu. So the story there is like never underestimate like the talent on the set. And you wouldn't think Keanu would be super passionate about workflow and that he could be an agent of change. But it was exactly that.

And it was so awesome to go through a few years. When I worked at Panavision, I'm actually wearing the shirt. We made the DXL. The original DXL launch, Keanu and I, we made a deal. He had a new motorcycle company called Arch. And he needed footage for marketing campaigns and stuff. And I had a new camera with Panavision and we needed footage. So I was like, we'll go up to, um, big bear and stuff and we'll shoot you will block off the streets we'll shoot motorcycles up there and we'll give you the footage and he was like deal and so we just made a handshake deal and so the Keanu footage in the DXL launch was just shared with art for marketing promotion stuff and that's the type of thing I could never have engineered that with intention

it just had to happen through relationships and through just pushing each other and asking questions and realizing that there are there's more to offer everybody's multi-dimensional and i also think it goes to actors a couple of friends of mine uh um that are really really uh forward thinking um indiana underhill and haley royal have this club called cinematography for actors and they're really their their their their thesis is that actors don't know enough about cinematography and if they knew more they could probably do better because when they hear a DP call for the 80 millimeter, an actor, especially a newer one,

doesn't know what that means. And whatever they're doing with their hands probably doesn't matter anymore after they call for the 80. But they don't know that. And if they did, would they change their behavior? Of course they would, right? And so CFA is about trying to help cinematographers

and actors speak the same language because they are really, they connect to each other. And I think working with Keanu is an example where there is a cinematography relationship with actors, you know, that's sort of different than the director. And I think there's a lot of opportunity for growth in that space. Yeah. I do want to get to this. When you mentioned T-shirts, I got the closest thing to the Strata logo I could find. This is a record company, hilariously enough. But when we first met, that must have been four years ago. I think you were at Frame I.O.

And we used camera to cloud on a lot of that coverage, which probably would have gone better had the LA conventions or the Las Vegas convention center not been a Faraday cage. And they charge, dude, we were looking at NAB coverage this year. They want $86,000 for internet a day. I know. It's like it's, it's, it's, it's actually a crime. But it's a different argument. Yeah. Yeah. But all your work there was pretty cool. What did you learn there that then made you think, oh, I got to start strata. And then also for people, because Strata is like brand new. So I was listening to a lot of podcasts and interviews you had done. But normally I tried to do all this research so that people, because usually people are like fans of the guests. So they already know this stuff. So I don't want to rehash it. But this is so new that I think a little bit of rehashing is apropos. But yeah, so frame Iota, what was that?

Well, the answer is actually kind of interesting because you've got to go back to the beginning. What I learned later in life is that my first company, Plaster City, was all about HD digital cinema. Then when I saw an opportunity with 4K and files, I started light iron. When I got that going, I saw an opportunity with cinematography and high-resolution large format, and that moved to Panavision, and then we teamed up with Red and built the Xcel. Now, remember, this is eight years ago, eight, nine, nine years. ago, nine years ago to say 8K large format was laughable. There were no lenses. There was no infrastructure. People did not understand it. They thought it was terrible. Now, of course,

large format and AK are normal, right? Nobody's picketing that, right? But at the time, it was really what I saw an opportunity is like, oh my gosh, we're going to see cinematography changed. And the ingredients for massive change in cinematography through a wider, larger sensor and then lenses that could do, you know, have these new, entire new sets of large format lenses, it exploded, right? Now it's common. And then after doing that,

I saw the cloud was going to be the future. So I moved to Frame IO and started building into cloud technologies. And then what happened last year at NAB, so NAB 2023, which is 51 weeks ago today. Yes. I was at NAB and I started looking around and I started noticing that there was really no AI tools inside of these workflow

halls of companies. There was really no AI tools. There was a lot of companies that I recognized and have seen forever showing the same stuff. And I was like, I bet in three or four years, this place is going to look totally different and AI is going to be everywhere. And so the best way for... Adobe Max was all AI. Right. And that was only what, like 20 weeks later? That's right. And and so what I saw at the time,

was a picture of the future, like a little snapshot. I was like, oh, this is going to look so different. And the best way for me to position myself to figure out what that is, just like those other iterations, was to start a new company. So I either start or join a new company in order to hitch my wagon on a new emerging trend when it's still in the fad or trend stage. And it's nowhere near a standard, right? So HD wasn't a standard when I was doing that plasticity.

File-based 4K was not a standard at light iron. A.K. Large format was not a standard at Panav when I was at Panavision. Camera to Cloud is not a standard at Frame I.O. yet. And AI workflow, who knows what that is, right? So Strata is my newest startup, which is a workflow company that's powered by AI. And the reason that's significant is because when we read about the AI story, we always think about Gen AI. And while I have my mid-Journey and that kind of thing. Dolly, mid-Journey. Yeah, SORA, right.

When I think about Gen. I have my own positions and opinions on that, but that's not what I'm interested in. I actually think Gen. I is overrated, and I actually think that the real money and therefore the real value to us as creatives is actually going to be in utility AI. The jobs that are going to go away are not going to be taken by generative AI tools. I really don't think you'll see mass jobs. eliminated through Gen. I agree.

You'll see mass jobs eliminated across any industry by utility AI because it's the jobs in the back room that are easily repeatable that are going to go away because they're easily repeatable. Anything easily repeatable is not a safe job no matter what the state of the world is, right? And why is it usually a fun job? I mean, certain people love that kind of thing, but generally people want to move up. Right, right. And if you think about a job being easy, you.

easy, then creative people actually, we like hard jobs. We take that stuff on, right? And the act of creating, it's hard to be satisfied by a job that you do the same thing every day. And if you're creative, the satisfaction component is really important to how we're made. So I really think that utility AI is the opportunity that we are missing in the AI game. And I say that, and maybe some of you think I sound like I know what I'm talking about, but I didn't know what I was talking about when I came up with this concept, I had to figure out what that means. I just, I just like, there's, there's a little nugget there, but I got to keep mining to figure out what that means.

And my brother worked at Netflix. He was with me at Light Iron. He went to Netflix. And then it was actually his idea to say, maybe we should start a company again, because we were very successful with Lightiron. And he said, let's, let's start a new business. And so we started Strata together in pursuit of utilitarian AI. in effort to automate, accelerate,

and simplify workflow, and not to generate it. All the generation that we talk about with Strata, you do the same way you do today, whether it's pictures, stills, video, audio, but how you sync it, organize it, share it, upload it, analyze it, tag it, transcribe it, translate it, assemble it. That's all what I sometimes qualify

as the laborious stuff that creative people wish we could skip So we could get to the good stuff of actually crafting the story or the song or the photo array or the poster that we really were hired to do in the first place. And if we can get rid of that utilitarian stuff, we can spend more time polishing the creative and less time preparing the creative. So some of the examples that you have shared on the beta launch, which was a couple weeks ago, two months ago, something like that. was like borderline live transcription, there was the auto tagging. I thought that was fascinating. The idea that your system could, well, and also Strat is a marketplace you've said.

So we'll get to that in a second. But the demo you had had this thing where like it knew not only objects in the frame, but actions and was like laid out in a timeline. And I was like, that's fascinating. Because so many times you'll be talking to someone and they'll be like, it's that clip where they like ran across the street and then you got to go through the camera report or whatever and be like, uh, A6, you know, whereas you can just look and type in like running across the street, I guess. And it would just bring up the clip. And like stuff

like that, I think is incredibly valuable and the transcription, obviously, multi-language and all that. Here's an anecdote that a lot of filmmakers have either heard of or been a part of. You're sitting there and you're either the editor or the director or the assistant editor. And the director says, hey, find that shot where they actually get out of the car and close the door. And the editor says, no, we don't have that. They never got out and closed the door. Everything started with them

in the car. No, no, no, no. I'm sure that we have them getting out in one of the takes. No, I looked at all the footage. We don't have them. They're in the car. And then the director's like, look, I was there. You weren't there. I know. And then they fold their hands and they sit back and they just wait.

And then, lo and behold, the editor goes, oh, oh, look, here it is. Okay. What do you want to do with it? That is an allegory, but it happens, right? And so what the opportunity is, that could have been 10 minutes, not only have wasted time, but a little bit of friction, a little bit of frustration. And it could have been avoided if there was just a simple way to search for that, because the editor is not trying to bamboozle the director. They just never saw it by some way. That can happen. There's a lot of footage. It's hard to watch hours and hours and hours of dailies.

You know, sometimes you do just go skipping through it to get the general idea. Depending on the film, many editors will even openly say no one person has seen every frame of this film, depending on the film. That can happen. Certainly, it's hard to store

every single frame of the film in your frontal lobe memory. It's hard to remember everything. Although, I always say good editors have really great recall, like short-term recall. They're so excellent of remembering where things are in short-term.

but it gets busy in there. So you got to search for it. So what Strata does is it analyzes objects, locations, people's, and even emotions. Which is huge. Yeah. I could have used the idea. I was just editing something. I could have loved to have that where I needed like two more clips of, quote,

people having fun. Yeah. Yes, yes. I had all these clips of people standing. Yeah. It was an event. It was like a bar party for St. Patrick's Day. And all I needed was like two more people smiling.

And I'm just scrolling. scroll this this will find that but the beauty of it is you can can catenate together multiple directions so you could say i want to find people now look you have you said it's at the bar but what if you had like all your footage like you had a drop box of 10,000 assets right right and you say i want to find people smiling at night and i need to have you know something specific like drinks in the park right now all of a sudden you can search all that and and a thousand or 10,000 assets can get down to like five truths, right? Because as you add a new factor, the list gets shorter and shorter, right? And so it's like, I want to find De Niro at the

diner. Now, all of a sudden, it takes a whole movie and De Niro's only in half the movie, and then the diner is only one scene. And for a lot of editors, you actually don't need to go any deeper than that. I think a lot of editors and directors and story producers don't actually want to get the exact bullseye, they just want to get near it because it's almost like, they're like, I can take it from here. I just want to get to this zone and find my way around this particular zone. I don't actually need the one take that is the, you know, and I'm not expecting AI to tell us what is the one take, because that's where our intuition comes in and says, I actually want this one for this weird abstract facial reason he makes, which AI is not going

to know the difference about. So this is where searching really slows you down. Here's another example. We can transcribe and translate everything. So if you can't remember what scene something is, but you would remember it's the scene that they talk about the graveyard, then all the sudden, you just type in graveyard and it will automatically find every image that there's a graveyard. It'll find every time someone says the word graveyard and give you those options right there. and so it could be a scene in the graveyard or could be seen in the kitchen when they talk about the graveyard

and you decide, you might say, that's close enough, I'm going to figure out what I'm trying to do here. That type of stuff, if that even saves you 20 minutes a day, well, times days, weeks, months,

this comes into extra days of editing. And when people say AI is going to replace jobs so I'm anti-AI, which a lot of my friends have criticized me of, I'm trying to help them understand that there are utility forms of AI that not only are safe, you're using them today because if you go to someone's house or an event,

you're going to use probably Apple or Google Maps to get there, and that's an AI tool as a utility that helps you get there a little bit faster. Why does that matter? Because you saved a little bit of time, so you can do the stuff you intend to do with a little bit more time. What I'm sort of talking about is not that dissimilar.

Get people ability to save time so they can get to the editing process, to make the editing process faster, not eliminate the editing process, right? Right. But help people that are in it to spend more time editing and less time hunting and pecking.

Well, it's the difference between assisting and taking the reins, right? Because like whenever people go like, this will automatically edit your whatever podcast. I'm always like, yeah, but then, first of all, I hope I can undo something in the middle that it did, you know? But like it's, A, that's not fun as a creative,

as you mentioned. you can't trust, then you have to watch the whole thing. If it's a two-hour movie and it auto edits, now you've got to go through, watch the whole thing, now you're taking notes. And it's like, did that really, sure, you got a product at the end of the day. But like, is it, you're going to have to go through

and tweak so much of it. You might as well have just done it the right way. Yeah, there's no way to do it that way. Actual AI editing is so far away. And I don't want to get too presumptuous, but maybe it's impossible or it's just not desirable for anything that actually matters. When something doesn't matter,

Think about a disposable asset. A disposable asset would be like highlights from tonight's Dodgers game. It's interesting for maybe 12 hours. That's about it, right? So it's a disposable asset. If AI, what you could do even with a product like Strata is you could search the marketplace, which we haven't released yet. The marketplace is coming.

But the marketplace is an opportunity for third-party developers to put their own AI models on a marketplace so you can buy. them as you need them to do specific tasks. Here's an example. There are people out there training sports AI models for very specific reasons. One would be just training jerseys so it can understand numbers on jerseys. That's all this model does. It's really good at reading wrinkled clothing and figuring out that's a 12, even though it doesn't look like a 12, but you and I know it's a 12, even though it's all wrinkled and dirty, right? AI models do that. Then there's an AI model that understands a difference between a home run, a strike, a ball, a bunt, a first base, a stolen base.

It knows those things. Love it to replace umpires. Well, that's a different type of AI. Just the home base umpire. That's the only one that I'm like with that guy can go. And so what happens is if you think about those two models as an example is you could easily take the model of number detection and then say, I want you to find every single. stolen base by number 12 and then you can run that through a whole bunch of footage and then you don't have to search that and it can put it all together and now you've built a disposable

asset really quickly and you could just cue see it real quick and put it out there if you have to even cue see it at all because you could prompt it and say give me just put together all the bunts of the game and you just put the bunts and say just give me you know 12 frame handles on every single bun or two second handles whatever you want and it'll just do that. That's the type of AI editing that I see is valuable, like little playlists and disposable things. But asking something to actually cut a story is so, I think, unnecessary. And I don't want to say it's fully impossible, but it's kind of improbable and unnecessary is more important than impossible. Because something that's possible doesn't mean it's necessary, right? So,

yeah. Well, and it also, like, the thing that's frustrated me with the whole, whole like AI discourse specifically with generative models, but just the idea of AI in general is that there seems to be this massive push. I mentioned this in a previous episode, but like there seems to be this massive push to automate creativity. Yeah. And I find that infuriating because the the what I can't say this is everyone. No one's a monolith. But there seems to be this weird thing where it's like creatives are the bourgeoisie and these, you know, they talk down to us all the time and this whole weird kind of it's like you know most of us are poor like this we took a job that doesn't pay well unless you're in the upper one percent because this is something we like to do it's

not like you know it's not preachy certain media can certainly be preachy but general artists are not necessarily trying to tell you what to do it's how we feel so why are we trying to automate that output i don't that's the one that i kind of get confused by yeah i i agree with that and And my take on it is that our, I did, I have a YouTube episode. I have a YouTube series at Strata Tech. Which is awesome, by the way. I recommend everyone see that thing. Thank you.

Super high production value. Yeah. It's intense, but there's a lot of data in there. It's very, very intense. It's definitely for professionals. But I think I'm guessing, I think it's episode 13. But one of the things, one of the principles I talk on episode 13, if I'm not wrong. is that one of the reasons AI is so important,

it might be 14 now that I think about it, but it's that AI robs us of the joy of creating. And I actually put that out there, and some people argued me, there were some people that I respect greatly that said they get the same amount of satisfaction in generating an AI result as they do in shooting one in real life.

Now, I would say, if they believe that to be true, then who am I to say they don't? But I would say, then they never achieved, they've ever received the joy I feel when I create something if they think it's equaled by a text prompt. It isn't.

And I actually love the discipline, especially I'm a musician. I write and record a lot of music. Nine instruments, right? I play nine instruments, yeah. And I am so exhausted after writing 12 songs and recording 12 songs and mixing 12 songs. But I'm so satisfied in the bloody fingers that the fact that it could sound. better through air or something, it isn't actually at all interesting

because it draws me the satisfaction of saying, I did this, right? And I don't think filmmakers are specific to this. Someone who carves a canoe out of wood probably feels the same way. They love it, you know? Little chest pieces. Why don't you just mill it out of plastic?

Because, you know, there's an interesting thing, Neil deGrasse Tyson says. He says, if death gives meaning to life, then it could mean eternal life is meaningless. And it's an interesting conundrum, but one way he waters that down a little bit is he says, if someone gives you fake flowers because you're sick or it's your birthday or it's Mother's Day,

what are they going to think versus real flowers? And of course, the real flowers in five days are going to wilt and be thrown in the garbage. But it's their finite time on earth as an existence, the creation elements that make them organic and real that gives them value versus something that's purely unadulterated synthetic. We attribute them differently. An email is not a letter in the mail.

Nobody argues that, right? Right. And so I really feel that for artists, we have the benefit of creating because it gives us joy. And I think that joy is passed onto the person who receives it and they can tell the difference. When you watch a movie and you don't know anything about it, and the first line, that comes up says the following movie is based on a true story. You perk up. You change. You recalibrate everything that you were thinking to this is true. And it changes how you receive the film. You judge it differently. And I think that the same principle may come across in films

that are recorded and shot and done in real life. And I don't know. We have to say the following film was made in real life, maybe in a decade, we have to qualify that. While some might say, oh, that'll suck. All right, well, get over it. Because if it's true and we have to do it, then it'll calibrate the person to receive it to know that this was all made in a way, even though we use computers, it's analog. Because we're controlling everything with little 10 digits, right, and two eyes. And it's not a computer synthesizing our thoughts.

It's us. And so I really think the analog approach to filmmaking is going to last, maybe forever, because I think the viewers can tell the difference, even if today it feels like they don't know it. I literally, you've hit on two things that I've used a million times in these discussions. One is the woodworking analogy. I'm like, it's not making something with your hand, you know, a desk is far more enjoyable than going to IKEA and buying it. Yep. IKEA's great. I have a bunch of our Kia furniture.

But like if I want something real, quote unquote, real, or it's not even that it's real, it's that I give more value to a handmade desk than I do to one that was kind of prefabbed and, you know, I put together with some Allen keys. And the other one is, I'm always just like, the audience that historically hates if CGI was even whispered on set is probably not going to be like, oh, this whole movie was made by AI. Hell yeah, I'm in. You know, like there's just like it feels like people aren't listening to each other, but it comes to the tech, what I would say, the tech bros who are trying to push that type of AI and the audience, you know, they're inventing an audience. But I know we've gone a little over time, so I just wanted to touch on two things. One, your program, the whole system strata does go back to what you were saying about selling results and not necessarily selling the tech. Because if one strata comes out for the vast people, you don't have to tell your client that you're using it. And they wouldn't really care if you sold them.

You know, we're using this new tech. They don't care. You know, I always tell people like, it doesn't matter what camera you're generally, doesn't matter what camera you're using. Your client does not care. They just want the end result to look legit. There might be a weird thing where you get on set with like an FX3 and they go, why did you bring the small one? But that's like a different conversation. You know, and then they see the final result.

And they're like, oh, okay, cool. But to that point, how do you know that what you're getting all these times you've done it? How do you have confidence in yourself that the new technology that you're getting into is not just a fad, but something that's going to stick? Oh, it's a great question. But the answer is you can't know. You don't know, you know. Because you have a high batting average. Let's be honest.

Yeah, but I have strikes, and the highest batting average people have a lot of strikes, right? There's an M. Night Shyamalan movie called, why am I forgetting? What's the one in the cornfields? Oh, the signs. Signs, right. So there's an M. Knight Shyamalan movie called Signs. And the character that Joaquin Phoenix plays, they say, didn't you have the highest strikeout record, right? and it's because he hit the hardest home run and he broke the record in the county or whatever

and they said don't you have the longest ball record he goes yeah but he's also got the highest strikeout record and his response to that which m knight shaman wrote and wakene femic reeds so well he just says it felt wrong not to swing and i think creative people can really know what that means right just feels wrong not to swing so whether i'm right or wrong i don't think it's it's it's it's it's it's actually a factor it just feels right to to do these things to take these leaves it makes no sense that I have quit really well-paying jobs and really nice title with really comfy plans and 401ks and stuff and I've quit them over and over I actually when I'm in the middle of my businesses I always feel like the captain that's going to go down with

the ship that's what I feel like Sean Connery and Red October we're going to scuttle the ship right? That's what I feel like. But then what I really learn is I get off first. And when I start to see the next thing, I look at my staff and one of my staff said this to me. I resigned in one of my businesses and said, I got to go. And he said, go build an arc because they wanted to follow me, but there's nothing to follow. I have nothing yet. And all of them are better off keeping the paychecks that they have for the mortgages and the family and the kids in school and all that stuff. And I'm like, I'm going to go out and my friend said, go build an art. And I was able to do that several times and pull people over when these ideas would materialize.

But it felt wrong not to swing. And when I was standing at NAB last year and realizing that AI was going to, had already left the dock, but it was still swimmable. I'm like, I got to get out there swimming. I got to catch up. It's pulling away. And once it goes over the horizon, now you're at a disadvantage, right? because you don't know which way to swim.

And so I wanted to do that quickly and get in early and getting in early and all these technologies I've always done. But it's not luck. It is discipline, it's work, it's reading, and it's triangulating, it's doubting. We as creative people are a very squirly bunch. We are very easily started. A lot of times we're scared of our own shadow, right?

And other, so that's a problem. Then other times we're just like squirrel, right? And then we have that distraction problem. And this is just how right-brained people think. But we got to understand that there are benefits to that approach to things. And we have the eyes of a child and we're willing to look at things with fresh eyes. My advice to everybody is like, just stop assuming things. I recently did some experiments with iPhone 15 and I've pushed iPhone 15 pretty much as far as anybody ever has.

Those videos are great. Thank you. I have anamorphic lenses. I've got wireless file focus. We're doing vision pro focus. focus pulling and it makes people so angry and it's so it's almost comical to me and my staff they're like why does of all the things you can react to anger seems to be one of them but if I were to criticize these these critics back what they are like to me is like a fake fan in the first

inning and the opposing visiting team gets a couple of runs and they go kids we're leaving this game's over get out of here and it's like you you knucklehead like this this is this is the beginning of the game and so many things are going to transpire we're nowhere near the end and you have a choice here you can either stick around and be a contributor to the win or you can pick up and leave and have nothing to do with any progress right and you get to make that choice and being a troll is to choose to not contribute and that may be some people's place that's fine but when these things materialize and grow the trolls are the last adopters and so they're catching up and they miss out on the opportunities that the early adopters carved for

themselves because they saw the trends emerging. They invested. They became experts. And those clients pick up on that and say, oh, you're shooting on an FX3. That means you're saving me money and you're giving me good quality stuff. I'm going to hire you again, right? Versus the person that says, I need to show up with a with a canon, you know, to make myself feel important and get better pictures. And I'm not a literal canon, not the brand. Not the brand, not the brand. A very large oversized camera that you don't need. So that's just an allegory. But you know, you see the point. So I don't know where these trends are necessarily going to go. But I feel like if I find myself with a hand on the wheel with a bunch of other people that I trust, that I can ask and

contribute and communicate with, and we can influence the market, then we can change it. When you think of the big Lobowski and you think of the dude walking around L.A. with a phone that's a sling like a purse, all the movie, which is this funny thing ringing in the bowling alley and everything. If some of the people that see what I'm doing with iPhone and AI today said, we're never going to have cell phones. That's so stupid. I'm never going to walk around with a cell. So I'll never have a cell phone. Of course, the people that laugh at the cell phones that we used to where on a sling, of course, have cell phones that now fit in their pocket. And there's no question to me that cinema camera technology is going to look far more

like a phone in a decade than it will like an SR-16. And so, yeah, that is inevitable. I think the creator, what Greg Frazier and Orrin Sawford just did recently is actually, they didn't really- I just interviewed Orrin. Oh, yeah, right. That's right. I saw that.

And he is arguably, to me, he's one of the most underrated cinematographers, best kept secrets, but now the secret's out. Everybody knows how awesome he is. But I'm proud of seeing him, but he's always been this good, which is what's so awesome about, Orrin. And also extremely well read, which is this other side of him that isn't just purely visible in his beautiful lighting. Anyway, what Oren and Greg did is they brought the FX3 into this top-end cinema space,

and they didn't have to modify what Sony built in that camera. They simply applied it with their talent. And I don't think an iPhone's any different, because if you take the iPhone, I actually measured it on a DSC XILA step chart yesterday, and I have the results. The results are, it's a 14-stop camera, which is, It's crazy. I know the lenses are really tiny.

I know the sensor's tiny. I know all that stuff. But the Sony sensor, it's actually Sony sensor inside of the iPhone 15. That sensor can measure 14 usable stops. And that is why a new opportunity, a new branch of cinema may move in that direction. But the iPhone today, the Vision Pro today, these are the dude with the phone. in 1991. That's where we are.

We're in the top of the first inning. And you've got to separate the fourth dimension. You got to understand there's a future to this and there's iterations. And either you're going to help cheer this on and be a contributor or you're going to take your ball and go home. And everybody has that choice.

They're all allowed to have their choice. But if you choose the latter, then thanks for nothing when it matures. It gets good. It's like, this all, you know, I remember, I'm not going to say their name. But there was a cinematographer that was a very, very, very famous, very talented cinematographer that about 15 years ago was saying, I will never shoot on a digital camera.

No reputable cinematographer will ever shoot on a digital camera. And then, lo and behold, they switched and they shoot the most amazing digital movies now. And my response, my response is thanks for nothing. Because they weren't there when it sucked, when they weren't good, when they were overheated. when they were heavy, when you could only shoot six and a half minutes, when it was a terabyte for five minutes of footage, you know, and you needed a mini bar to haul around with it. And it was like two stops of dynamic range. I was there and a lot of people were there. But because we ignored that type of rhetoric, that's what got us to the point that the cameras

are not capable, that the best in the world are making the best pictures ever. And Greg Fraser and Orrin Software are not two of these people I'm referring to. But what they were able to get the FX3 to do is incredible no matter what you think. It's, it's a beautiful, beautiful image. And that image is because Sony engineers and Sony fans and Sony users help Sony along from the 900 to the 950 to the 23 to the 35 to the 65 to the 55 to the 55 and Venice and Barano. That's the story of Sinalta. I just listed the whole thing, right? And then after they got to Sinalta, they broke down Venice and they have the FX7, the FS, 3, the FX9, right? All those permutations, right? That's what it takes. And now you can see

amazing Venice stuff. You can see amazing FX3. And then you see what they're doing on FS7s with, you know, deadliest catching stuff. Like those cameras are incredible. So robust, so, you know, powerful. Like this is, this is what contributors, people who want to play and push the stuff are able to get. Now you can have a camera in so. salt water for six months and it keeps working, sign me up. Like, that didn't happen by accident and it didn't happen overnight. And it didn't happen purely by the manufacturer's schematics. It's our user feedback.

That's why we got to talk to each other. That's what I was saying about Keanu Reeves. It's like they want to be involved and we can help change Airy. We could change Sony. We could change red or Nikon or whatever they are now. We could change Fuji. We could change Apple. We could change Apple, right?

You know, when you just look at anything in the world, anything you see is made by people. And what people get up and decide to do is what's in their heart. Change it. Impact it. Because you could change anything with people, especially if you are close to them.

Which is why I always go to NAB because people say, why would I go to NAB if I can read about everything online? because you can't shake anybody's hand online, you know? And it's that human interaction, that community that helps us actually infect the positive chain that makes change that makes our industry better. Yeah. I mean, there's even bringing that all back to the beginning, like inside by side,

there's a moment where Fincher is talking about the Viper and he's like, I can't watch back the HD because it's the negative. I've seen the documentary too many. I have his whole mannerisms down. But stuff like that where you're just like that, that was an engineer trying to be too cool. Oh, no, it's like the film. It's like, look, it even looks like a film canister. It's like no one asked for that.

No one needs that. Yeah. It doesn't physically need to be the thing, you know, unless there's, I guess, cages or, you know, auxiliary stuff that needs to whatever. But, yeah, it's the people. Being people's important. Yeah. Yeah. Being creative.

Well, I will see you at NAB next weekend. And then I guess I'll tell everyone listening to watch that interview because then we'll talk more specifically about Strata. And Lord knows, something might happen in the next week where there's something newer to talk about. So thank you so much for spending the time. It's always good to see you. Awesome.

And I'll see you next week. Thanks, Kenny. Frame and Reference is an Al-Bod production. It's produced and edited by me, Kenny McMillan, and distributed by Pro Video Coalition. As this is an independently funded podcast, we appreciate donations from listeners and viewers like you. So if you'd like to go to frame and refpod.com,

you can click the Buy Me a Coffee button to buy me a coffee. We really appreciate that also of note on this podcast. You can see my interview with Michael at NAB to learn about the Strata project more in full. So look forward to that. Check it out. And as always, thanks for listening.