The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast axle ai CEO Sam Bogoch at NAB Show 2019 Booth Interview

Episode Date: April 10, 2019

axle ai CEO Sam Bogoch at NAB Show 2019 Booth Interview

Hi folks, Chris Voss here from thechrissvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming here with another booth interview. We are at NAB 2019. Oh my gosh. Wow. And NAB show, we are here at the Axel AI booth and we're here with Sam. Sam, how are you doing today, bud? Doing great.

Doing great. All right. So you guys got this wonderful booth. You guys are in South Hall. If you guys get a chance here at NAB, come to booth number SL15116. They're kind of in the corner of South Hall and the far east side, if you will, if you know your northwest east. And Sam, tell us about Axel AI and what you guys do. Sure. Well, we do radically simple software that makes it easy for anybody who has a lot of video to search and manage that video.

Okay. Awesome. And so you guys have your software here on the beautiful screen that you guys do. And so it will take all my images, all my movies, everything, help me categorize it? Exactly. So what we find is that, you know, especially nowadays, people are shooting a ton of video. It typically piles up on hard drives. Or if they're really organized, they get it onto some kind of network storage. But either way, there's no good way to search it all.

Because if it's loose hard drives, they're plugging and unplugging them. And over the network, Spotlight on the Mac doesn't actually reach that far. So what we do is we give you a new kind of software. We call it Radically Simple Media Management. It uses artificial intelligence to help you figure out what's on your storage. It does things like automatically find everything that everyone said, find all the faces, find all the objects, even use OCR to get the numbers that are on screen. And it gives that to you in a searchable form in this browser interface. I'm taking a closer look at your guys' software here. So I can put this, I can say I have a cam in.

You kind of have your folders on the left. Folders on the left. You can put your brand up here, which is nice. Your search bar, so you can search for stuff. And then all the clips, and you can have things like approval status, archiving status, and other information about the files. And if I click on one of these, then you'll see that there's, there's,

oh wow. You can zoom in, you can zoom in and basically get, you know, a full H264 proxy view, scrubbing over the file. You can also post comments, like here's somebody posted, please change this effect.

Oh, so for like editing? You can say, hey, somebody needs to cut this scene out. Exactly, exactly. It's not just for the editors, it's for the assistants, for the producers, even for clients. And then the other thing is you can have custom metadata fields here on the right, which you can edit. Now, these are typically edited by people, but we have all these new AI features so that you can have the automated transcript, automated face, and other information. And here at the show, actually literally today, we're announcing a new sports logging feature

that we've developed in conjunction with a company called Really. What that does is gives you automatic highlights of sports footage. So you can have like a football game. In fact, the Chicago Bears were here earlier. But you can have a football game and you can figure out, hey, all the touchdowns, all the third downs, all the penalties, automatically from the material. So you don't have to have interns logging all that information.

So is the A pretty smart where it can tell me like how many male faces, how many female faces? It doesn't currently do a count like that. It's more about identifying the individual people. So it finds celebrities, politicians, sports figures. You can also train it so that if there's somebody like for corporate video, if you have a few executives that appear all the time in your videos, you can tell it, oh, this one's, you know, Joe Blow. And then it'll bring up Joe Blow's name every time it sees their face. And so there's all kinds of uses for this because traditionally people are just basically scrubbing around through their footage for hours and hours it's one of the biggest time sucks of the editing business

it's just not knowing where to find that that one take yeah now you know the ai isn't perfect but it'll get you 80 or 90 of the way there and then you can use our search function to drill down and get closer to what you're looking for that's, that's pretty awesome. And, you know, that's one of the problems I've had with my videos or even photographs in my systems is I'll, like, it'll be, like, years ago by, and I'll be like, where is that one guy, my one friend, and what was that one time? Remember that one time? And I'm like, where's that photo? Good luck finding it, right, especially with the amount you probably shoot.

Oh, dude. And we have customers that have shot tens or even hundreds of terabytes. We have a few customers in the petabytes. So, for instance, we work with Bleacher Report and iHeartMedia in New York. They both have over a petabyte of storage at their places. So that's becoming less and less unusual as, you know, things like churches, they're capturing all of the sermons. Sports teams are sending people

out one of our biggest customers is madison square garden they send teams out at every game not just to shoot what's going on with the players but the crowd you know random stuff going on in the stadium so it's it's amazing how much footage is piling up and again searchability is the key uh the other thing we try to do is not to get in people's faces too much. There's traditional systems called MAMs, media asset management systems, but they're much more complex to deploy.

And what we're trying to do is say, look, give us the storage you have, we'll catalog it, we'll put it in this nice browser interface, and we also have, by the way, a Premiere panel. So in the browser in Premiere, but you never have to reorganize everything you've done. It just kind of works as you go. That's awesome. That's awesome.

I can see this being really useful, especially now with more video. And the thing is, too, is the files now that are 4K, they take a long time to process. It's just, you know, trying to go through them all. Right, right. And that's why we make these low-res previews of everything because they're actually pretty nice to look at. You couldn't send them to air, It's just, you know, trying to go through them all. Right, right. Oh my God. And that's why we make these low-res previews of everything, because they're actually pretty

nice to look at. You couldn't send them to air, but they're perfectly good for scrubbing through and finding stuff. And suddenly, instead of having to sit there with your editing software to go through the 4K, you can do it from any browser, even from a mobile device. So Android, iOS, we give you remote access to your material. That's awesome. Mobile device. Yeah. Yeah. Because on the run, when you've access to your material that's awesome mobile device yeah cuz I run when you gotta find something and I like that preview

feature because sometimes that it helps jog your memory and you're like oh this is that video that is the one I'm looking for exactly and then you open the high res and premiere and you can color correct and fully edit and so forth that's awesome anything more we need to know about what you guys are doing yes one other big thing which is that we're rolling out a product called Connector. And this lets you create custom workflows. It's a little more techy, but it's for people who want to build like multi-format publishing. They want to go out to multiple, you know, say they want to go out to HD, 4K, mobile,

different formats. This lets you script all of that so that you can push one button and create multiple formats in one go. And it'll also do things like notify you by email or transfer files by FTP. So it's like a little robot in the background kind of doing all the stuff that you don't want to spend time doing yourself. It's called Connector. Awesome sauce.

So give us the website one more time. Sure thing. Yeah, it's www.axle.ai. And come see these guys. Sure thing. Yeah, it's www.axle.ai. And come see these guys. They're at NAB Show, and it's going to be booth number SL15116 in South Hall. You're going to definitely want to check it out. They can, of course, probably get, is there a trial software?

There is. We have trial versions of both Axle AI and Connector, and it's lightweight enough. You can just install it on a Mac. You don't need a big IT infrastructure. Again, it's very different from these traditional tools that only run on Windows boxes and you have to set up a server. You can just take an older Mac Pro or the new iMac Pro. Even the new Mac Minis are really nice.

Load the software up and give it a try. Sounds good. Well, thank you very much, Sam. We certainly appreciate it, and thanks to my audience. We'll see you guys next time. Thanks a bunch.