The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP058: Revisiting Client Communication

Episode Date: July 2, 2026

In this episode we're revisiting our very first episode from all the way back in early 2024 - Client Communication.  In the past two years a lot as changed, and in service based industry like postproduction revisiting your approaches every once and while is a useful exercise. While we hit on some familiar themes, there's lots of new topics and viewpoints discussed in this episode.  Some of the specifics discussed in this episode include:How post is still (and will always be) a people/communication businessThe good & bad of video conferencingAsynchronous text communicationReview commentsSynchronous text communicationThe role of no communicationCheck out offsetpodcast.com for our entire library of episodes. You can also follow us on Instagram & Facebook - just search for The Offset Podcast. Be sure to like and subscribe to the podcast wherever you found it and be sure to check out our growing library of episodes.  If you like the podcast it'd mean the world to us if you'd consider supporting the show by buying us a cup of virtual coffee -https://buymeacoffee.com/theoffsetpodcast

Hey, everybody, welcome back to another installment of the Offset Podcast. And today we're revisiting our very first episode, client communication. Stay tuned. Support for this episode comes from Flanders Scientific and the XMP 270 and XMP 310, the accessible, lightweight, and versatile monitors helping to bring HDR monitoring on set while also being very well suited to post-production work. Learn more at flanderscientific.com. Hey, everybody.

Welcome back to another episode of The Offset Podcast. I'm one of your host, Robbie Carmen. And with me, as always, is Joey Dana. Hey, Joey, how are you? Hey, everyone. Well, Joey, it is hard to believe that we are this far along, but we're now starting, we're at that stage in the show where we're going back to sort of revisit subjects that we had previously visited

or discussed. And what's a better way to do that than start at the very, very beginning back in early 2004, our very first episode on client communication. This is an interesting one because this is probably, as we said over the course of, you know, dozens of episodes that, you know, it is a communication business. It's a client-facing business. It's a customer service business. And so, you know, of all the subjects that we could start sort of this retrospective tour on,

this seemed like a good landing spot to kind of go back and kind of just revisit it because, hey, it's been two, two and a half years. Maybe some of our thoughts have developed on this. And then, you know, looking at that episode, we didn't get into some of the, I don't know, some of the particulars that I think now we have a better grasp on or we talk about more or that kind of stuff. So this episode is sort of a, you know, sort of a rehash or revisit of that, but also piling on and adding on to some new thoughts and some new. ways of dealing with communication issues. Does that about hit it for you? Yeah, absolutely. I think it's just, you know, like you said, like we've said a dozen times, it's a people

business. And, you know, people can be your clients, your customers, but it also can be your collaborators or other vendors you deal with or if you deal with subcontractors, any number of different kind of communication lines pop up and down in every single. post-production project and workflow. And it's just gotten a thousand times more important now that remote work is so much more normalized and so much more common. You might have collaborators across the country in another country. So there might be language barriers.

There's technology barriers. There's a million different ways we can talk to each other and communicate. And the really important thing, the most essential thing is that, you know, you need to be clear, concise, and effective when you're communicating with, anybody in your workflow ecosystem, and there's so many different concerns with every different method of communication that goes into that. Yeah, and I think the other thing that sort of dawned on me about this is that, you know, these things are not just about client communication. Sure, that's like where we'll put our focus here, but I think also, I think since, you know,

in the two and a half years or so since we recorded that first episode, I think, I think a lot about like, you know, other types of communication that are not client, like so internal communication, like between you and I and other people on our team, you know, working with a third party. Like maybe there's a mixer involved on the project and I need to communicate with them, right? I think some of the lessons learned about client communication are apropos to internal communications as well, whether that be, you know, people on your team or people just involved in the project that are, you know, other than the client, I think that that that kind of thing happens to because I'm sure we've all been in situations too where it's like,

hey, project is going swimmingly and then there's one vendor that you have to deal with that's, you know, like, oh my gosh, this is like difficult, right? And so I think that that kind of strategy, the strategies about client stuff also will play into how to communicate with those people as well. Yeah. And I think it's really extra important for colorists because, you know, we are kind of the last assembly stage of the project, right? So we deal with, everybody. We deal with creative approval, we deal with technical issues, we deal with graphics, we deal with audio mixes, you know, we're kind of the very end of a very long and complicated process. So we kind of need to touch on how do we effectively

communicate with basically everybody involved. Yep, yeah, absolutely. Cool. So before we dive in, just as quick reminder, as always, you can check out the show on YouTube. Our entire library is there organized by season. So it's a great way to watch if you want to watch the video version of the podcast. Of course, the show is also on all major podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and so on. Perfect for your next commute or drive or a summer trip to check out the episodes that way as well. And then you can always head over to Offsetpodcast.com. And at the very top of that page, there's a submission button. It's been a while since we've done some user submitted questions or problems. So feel free to

drop us a line there. Maybe there's a... a subject that you'd like us to cover. That's a great way to let us know about it. Of course, you can do the same thing in the comments on YouTube or any of these podcast platforms. Also, just before we dive in further, I also just want to say, we'd love it if you could help us get to a thousand followers on Instagram. We're getting close. That number is a very psychological thing for us.

So if you have some friends or colleagues that could give us a follow on Instagram, every little bit helps. that is a great way to grow the show, get it in front of more eyeballs as well. All right, so let's start out with this idea that it's a people business. I think that you hit on this and sort of the intro that, you know, I think that it's more normal than not now for work to be done remotely. I mean, that's weird to say, but I think that it's just the new norm. I think with more people giving up office spaces, working from home, getting out of, you know,

costly rent, et cetera. You know, it's not as common anymore as for people to just get together. And, you know, internally, we've talked about this a lot. And I just want to be transparent with the audience, too, that I've recently discovered that I have a big problem with this. I recently got sort of, I guess, a diagnosis of ADHD, but not that kind of ADHD where I'm like, you know, not pushing everything off and procrastinating. It's specific, one of the specifics about it is that I have a real.

hard time inferring tone intent, even direction when something is written, right? And that can be an email, that could be a text message, that could be a frame I.O comment, right? And I couldn't figure out for the longest time why this was, I was having difficulty, because I pride myself a little bit and being a good communicator. But I realized one of the things, especially with clients, Joey, is that for 20, 25 years, they were sitting two feet in front of me. I could read their body language. I could read their hand gestures. I could hear their tone. You know, so they might say something innocuous that they think is innocuous in a frame IO comment. And it lands totally different for me when it's a frame IO comment versus hearing them say it, right? So let's dive into that

a little bit because it is still a people business. It's still sort of talking to people, learning people, but just the method has changed. And I want to just start with you. First of all, you had mentioned this in the intro, this idea of clear, concise, you know, effective communication. What does that mean exactly? And how is that a little bit different now that we're not, I mean, because that's always been important, right? But how is it different or why is it more important when the person's not sitting directly in front of us? Yeah, I mean, to me, it comes down to that variation in things like tone and reading, you know, body language, intent. judging sarcasm, jokes, things like that, stuff that we took for granted in the in-person world.

Now in the text or video conference or email or frame I.O. world, what we're running into, and you touched on this clearly, is that every single person individually has their preferences, whether they kind of realize them or not, for how they communicate, and they have their blind spots for how they communicate with these different methods, whether it be text, whether it be video, whether it be phone, whatever, these different kind of avenues and methods that you can communicate with, bring along with them. Every single individual has their own interpretation of them. And some people really like to only work in text.

Some people want to jump on a video conference all the time. Some people don't really realize that maybe they're texting in a way that could sound really rude to someone else that doesn't really read a lot of text. But to them, it's just, you know, free-flowing thoughts. and if we were in the same room, it wouldn't be an issue because you would see it in their eyes that they're not being disingenuous or they're not being rude, but it can come off rude in a text. So when I say clear, concise, and effective, what I mean is clear, no matter what methodology you're communicating in, just think a little bit extra of you are getting your point across. You're not implying something. You're not like leaving something unsaid. Just make an extra effort to. be clear, concise because no one wants to read a billion line email, people are going to start

to kind of fade off. You know, you don't, you don't lose focus when you're face to face nearly as often as you lose focus reading a long, rante email, right? Yeah. And effective is just kind of bringing those things together. So what you're saying gets the idea across without dropping into any of these potential mindfields of, oh, so and so doesn't really get tone. from a text message or so and so over here really doesn't check their email very often and this might go unread or something like that. So you kind of put all those things together and just take into account the medium and you can't predict everybody's reaction to everything, but you can use that to inform your decisions when you jump into a Zoom call, when you write an email to a client, or when you drop a frame I.O comment.

You know, I think it's easy to think about these techniques, these strategies as being on your side only, right? Like that, like, you know, your job as the service provider is to provide excellent communication. And I think that's true. But I think one of the hard problems for me in this new world has been is how can I, and I'm using this term loosely, but how can I train the client a little bit better for effective communication? Because I think that's the thing too is that like, you know, we've said, you know, hey, the client has preferences for how they want to communicate, text, email, video, whatever. Like that same thing is true on your end too, right?

Like I said here like, hey, I don't do a particularly good job at, you know, reading some of the stuff where I read tone or intent or whatever. And I've said to you, even internally in our communication, like, like, hey, I'm way better when we're face to face or on a video call or whatever. And I think that that kind of training is also something that you can kind of subtly put into play. Right. So like, if you're writing an email and you're like, hey, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you're doing all the things that we've just talked about.

And you get one word answer like, fine. Great. Awesome. Or the opposite of that. It's verbose. And you're like, I can't tell if this person's digging into me or not. I think those are opportunities. to sort of to state it clearly.

Like I couldn't tell exactly what you meant by this. Maybe we could jump on a quick call so I can understand better and like be proactive about that before there's before there's a communication breakdown or misunderstanding. Like you have to do what works for you too. So yes, in one hand, you want to do what's best for the client. Hey, I get it like you're busy. Uh, email's better than voice or video call. But at the same time, like, it's your job as the service provider to also stop potential miscommunications in their place.

And if that means, hey, dear client, I need you to do what's best for me for this one time. Like, that's better. And I also think along the same lines, too, like, you know, one of the things in the past, since the past two and a half years since we've done this episode was that I've thought about the frequency of. communication. Here's what I mean by that. So like when I'm getting confused, right, I'm not, I tend to not, I, now these days, I tend not to send an email at ever, or, you know, call at every confusion point. I let three, four, five things build up. So then I'm like, hey, you have a history of confusing me, right? And then it's just an easier response of, hey, I need clarification on this bucket of things rather than just this one thing. So I'm not coming back

every time too. Yeah. And you know, what I like to think about when it comes to kind of nudging the client into maybe a different type of communication, which is a very useful thing to do is think about signal the noise ratio. As you're going back and forth, you know, kind of keep track of how much noise there is and how much intelligible signal there is. And if you find yourself that the signal the noise ratio is going down, going down, going down, maybe it's time to, like you said, hey, client, let's just jump on a quick call and we can talk this through. Now, you. You know, You gotta think about these methods again because the opposite could be true. You could have a client that loves to jump on Zoom calls,

but none of them are productive because they're sitting there like, they're catch jumping around, they're chit-chatting, they're distracted, or they're just like really easily driven into tangents. So you could kind of like, okay, schedule the Zoom call to be only 15 minutes. And you get to the end of that 15 minutes, say, okay, great. We made some progress here, but I've got this link up on Frame I.O. Could you write up some notes? And then we'll jump back on a call and review them.

Right? So you can kind of, if the text isn't working, nudge them to a call. If the call isn't being effective, nudge them to a more concentrated, you know, sit down where they have to focus aspect, like a text or a frame I.O or something like that. But you can kind of monitor that and just figure out, hey, what's the signal and noise ratio in this feedback? And is this the time to try to intervene and try something different? Yeah. I think a lot about the idea of having agendas and plans. I think that that is better than, hey, let's just get on a call and talk about it.

It's kind of open-ended, right? It could go a lot of different directions. It could lose focus really easy, whatever. You know, so like one of the things I've started to do, too, with clients is like, you know, maybe it's in the title of the Zoom call or maybe it's when I email them the link or whatever. It's like a bullet of, hey, this is what I'm trying to cover. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. to keep us both focused and to make that communication a little bit more effective in that regard as well.

The one other thing that pops to mind about this in terms of overall strategy, too, is that I think it's awkward, but at the same time, I think we've all made plenty of mistakes assuming that, hey, this seems like it's good communication and it's working. I think it also pays to be a little awkwardly overt about this, right? be like, hey, listen, you know, I'm speaking for myself, hey, client, I'm a very verbose, talkative kind of person, right? And I'm going to be throwing a lot at you. I don't want to bog this down. What's the best way for me to do this? And just like, it's kind of a weird, like, you know, situation, but like at the same time, get them to just say, you know what? I appreciate that. That's very thoughtful of you. You know, hey, the best way for me is just to send me a text when files are ready. Like, like, overtly getting that information.

I think is better than just assuming which way it is. Now, let's switch gears a little bit because I think one of the things that has, and you kind of alluded to this, people, you know, people cats jumping around, etc. The video audio conference is, it never went away after the pandemic, right? I wish I had one-tenth of one percent of the income that Zoom makes or, you know, or Google Meetup or whatever, right? Because it's just, it's crazy. Let's talk about that a little bit because that is a, it's a new way, it's like a weird medium ground.

It's not maybe as good as being in person, but you're hearing inflections, you're seeing body language, that kind of stuff, right? But I think there's still a lot of problems with it. And I want to give you two or three problems that I have with Zoom or video conference calls and see if you agree and amend them. So number one, I find it actually easier than in person to be a bad communicator in terms of interrupting, right? I'm really bad with that to begin with because my mind is racing and I'm like trying to complete somebody's thoughts. But when you add in potentially like a little bit of latency plus and I just almost stepped on you to mention latency because we're on a Zoom call and I. Stop myself just like, wait, I'm about to, you know what? I was in my head, but you're right.

The latency, every user has their own latency. So that flow of conversation, it's very easy to step on people, no matter how good the conference is. And it's exponentially worse when there's three, four, five people on the call. And in the, you know, places like Zoom, or companies like Zoom know this, right? They have the hand raise icon and all that stuff. One thing I would say that I've been working on,

to various degrees of success. I definitely do it better with clients than I do it with you because I still step on your all time or interrupt or whatever. But one of the things that can help is with a stream deck with a keyboard shortcut or whatever, like use that mute control, right? And it really can help you like,

like configure it to where it's like, you know, it's a press to talk, not a press to mute. And that will get you a little bit more conscious about like that inter, is somebody done? Is that interruption done? I also think that, we have a tendency, or at least I have a tendency,

to not let silence fill the conversation. And that can be good and bad. Like, I think it's like my attempt to, like, not make things weird or keep the conversation going. But it also has the end product, especially in video calls, of making it feel like an interruption, making it feel like you're stepping on somebody, right? So don't be afraid, too, I think, of that extra, you know,

beat or two of silence after somebody finishes their thought. it can actually be a very good thing to let somebody know that like you're processing what they're saying you've thought about it and now you're going to return it to them and so i think that's one thing to be to be aware of support for this episode comes from conform tools conform tools allows you to translate timelines between premier and resolve and other nlees while automatically solving common issues that normally need to be fixed by hand avoid time-consuming trim and transfer issues and securely send large media files to collaborators at a fraction of the size and in minutes instead of hours. With a growing toolbox of features, let Conform Tools handle the tedious stuff so you can focus on the creative.

Built by Post Professionals, Conform Tools helps editors, colorists, and conform artists move faster and finish stronger. Learn more at conform.tools. Now, you mentioned also like people feel uncomfortable. I feel like I kind of understand what you're saying about that. We extrapolate on that a little bit because that's an interesting thought. You know, it's because look at our setups here, right? We have professional cameras, professional lighting, real nice microphones because we're recording a podcast, right? We're the minority of people.

Most clients, you know, we've set up home offices for dedicated actually doing our work in an office. A lot of people, especially clients, any of the stakeholders in this process might not have that luxury, right? Yeah. We might be in their living room. We might be, you know, interrupting their day in a way that is physically different than if we were in the office, right? If we're in the office, there's a set of expectations.

If I am coming into your house in your living room, that's a different set of expectations. And that can make some people really uncomfortable. That's why, you know, Zoom has some tools for this blur the background, stuff like that. or background replacement. But even with that, you know, the inherent possibility of distraction, the all of the things of bringing someone into your kind of personal space in a professional context can really turn some people off and make them kind of close down mentally. And I think it's just important to be cognizant of that, right?

When little things go wrong, ignore it, let it pass. try as hard as you can to make people feel comfortable in the conversation without being too overt about it. It's just one of the many things I think that now we really need to be cognizant about versus, you know, in the office, there was just this normalized set of expectations that has now gone completely out the window, and it was like a light switch that flipped when they went out the window, right? So we had this set of expectations. They don't apply to my producer is sitting at their kitchen table. now talking through notes over Zoom. You know, it wasn't like, we're going to slowly transition to that and figure out how best to utilize that technology. It was, oh, this is what we're doing now. Cool.

Hi, Kat. Hi, uh, you know, bright sunshine coming in through the window. You know, it was just, it was like a light switch. And I don't really have any actionable, like you have to act this way or you have to act this way. It's just something when you're talking to your clients, You're talking to your collaborators, be aware and have some patience because they might not be feeling the same way about their little Zoom environment that you are. You know, I never really thought about that, but I think that that is true, that people are, they're not focused on the conversation. They're worried about the screaming kid in the background or the dog barking or whatever it may be.

And they're less focused on the content of the call and more focused on, that's a really interesting perspective. In person, you never looked at a mirror of yourself while you were talking. Yeah, that's true too. You know? Yeah, that's true too. So I think that, you know, those, all those things are good. I think the idea of, you know, sort of meeting agendas for video calls, sort of the expectation of the environment, all that kind of thing. The other thing that strikes me about video call communication that I think, I don't know, I go back and forth a little bit about this, right?

is that, you know, you said something just a second ago about the mirror on the wall. I think that one of the things that is, is in our line of work, in post-production and communication, that you should always be prepared for. And I think it helps is when things are discussed in abstract, right? And this is, again, one of those things where I feel like we're trying, we can do better jobs at replacing the suite kind of thing. And I'm not talking, I want to be clear. I'm not talking about.

like a streaming review session per se. I'm just talking about the interaction that happens in those kind of moments and the sweep where, you know, picture this, there's a problem, right? And so you know, you turn your chair around or you go over to the couch and you're talking through the problem, right, or the issue or whatever. And oftentimes you'll be like, oh, yeah, you know what? Let me switch back to this other shot and see if it's there. Or let me point something out on screen or whatever, right?

And I think one of the things that can be helpful in video conferencing for communication is if you're discussing especially something technical, before you jump on that call, like, I'm not saying like you have to build a slide deck or something super professional, right? But be prepared to demonstrate and show things. I mean, because like after all, like, why are you on a video call if, you know, like you could just do it as a phone call if you're not going to show and tell a little bit? take advantage of the technology a little bit to have those opportunities to show and tell. So sharing your screen, showing them a thing or whatever. Like all of those things I think can help in the long run get the points across

because I find with video calls too sometimes where it's like, yeah, I think I know what you're talking about and it could click for them instantly if you're just going like, here it is, look at the problem. Do you understand what I'm saying? Yes. So like a little bit of show and tell on video. calls too I think goes a long way. Yeah and you know that's kind of replacing you

could just point to the screen in the office you could kind of make gestures and explain things you know it's just kind of trying to find these little ways to make each one of these methods just a little bit more effective and that kind of brings me to the next category of method for communication which I'm going to call asynchronous text as in it's not real time it's not slack it's not discord we're not text messaging it is all text-based, but it is completely asynchronous. So that basically encompasses email communication and things like frame I.O. comments or Dropbox comments or something like that. And that's

another thing where we always used it, but now that we're primarily leaning on it, I think the expectations have changed a little bit and we need to be cognizant of that. When it comes to email, you know, it's tried and true. People are comfortable with it, but it's also. very easy to get overwhelmed and have email overload. Oh, I sent you one thing. I sent you another thing. I sent you another thing. And email doesn't organize very well in terms of hierarchy.

I know some apps do it different ways and that can be helpful, but, you know, like you were talking about before, when you're confused, it helps to, instead of saying this confusion, this confusion, this confusion, kind of aggregate things into, you know, individual blocks blocks where we're not flooding the signal, right? Instead of 10 small emails, make two medium emails. Again, like we talked about earlier, though, being cognizant with not making a gigantic email. So like, yeah, so it's a balance. And that applies, I think, to frame Io comments as well. Yeah, the gigantic email thing is, uh, I mean, I said this in that first episode. It's a problem that I have with being too communicative and too detailed about things. One of the things that I

I've tried, I think, so I think that one of the obstacles is the wall of text in an email, right? Somebody sees the wall of text and it looks like a novel. They don't read it, right? And I can't tell you how many times I've had clients be like, oh, it'd be great if you could do X, Y, Z. And I'm like, yeah, that classic snub, right? Per my last email, right? I did say that, right? And they just didn't read it because it was this huge part.

So one of the things that I've, I've experimented with in the past year, a couple years since we've done an episode, is I try to, a couple things I'm trying to do in email that I think makes it more effective. I'm trying to separate, like really kind of build sections in an email, right?

So like here's like, you know, a classic example. Let's say I'm sending somebody a review link, right? Very first thing, that review link is above all else. It's here's the link to the file right at the very time. I don't want to have them read.

Where is the link? And that's the end of most of my emails. It's true. Followed by, I think, breaking up paragraphs into bullets, dashes, some sort of like, whatever. And then I think the third part of that is that it's that internal litmus test. If I have to write more than two, three bullet points to explain something, that is my opportunity to be like, there's some other details here that I want to discuss, but we can do that after you take a first look or something like that. Maybe we can jump on a call or a live stream or something like that.

Because like you risk, again, the more like you want to be detailed. You want to explain what's going on. But you can also at risk of confusing people having them gloss over and not read it, etc. So I think email construction is also a big thing. And like that also goes back to what I was trying to say on about like. video calls too like if there's some if you're trying to describe a problem maybe be a little prepared to show it so like if you're like oh this lot's not quite lining up or whatever here are some attachments you can take a look at when you want i'm not going to go into like you know excruciating detail about it

like that kind of thing i think can help i think the other thing about email and i think you you and i have been talking about this a lot and i don't know why we haven't done it so i've gotten into this workflow where I've realized that my most effective time of day is usually between like four and like nine p.m. Right. But I don't necessarily want to like set the expectation that like if I email somebody at 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock at night that like they need to get back to me. Right.

And so we. Yeah, we're calling it asynchronous for a reason. We shouldn't pretend that it should be synchronous. Right. And so like I've had some annoyed clients being like, why are you emailing? me at 10 o'clock at night, right? And I want to be like, well, it's just when I'm choosing to work on this. And so, like, there's that thing that people have been adding to emails over the past few years that I'm considering, you've mentioned it too, is that, hey, my working hours are

not the same as your working hours. Like, don't feel like the need, the compulsive need to respond to this now, right? The other thing that I think is reliable go to for that as well is scheduling emails, right? Yes. Like, you know, schedule something for the next morning. I love, I love, it's part of a game to me. I love picking random times like eight, four, nine, seven. Right, 907, right? So it seems a little more organic maybe than it really is. But that kind of thing, like, it's helpful for you, right?

Communicate when it's on the top of your head, but nothing saying that has to go out then, right? So I would say, you know, leverage both of those things. Like let people know that maybe you're working hours or not their working hours and that's fine. And then, two, take advantage of, you know, hey, get it down on paper while it's fresh in your head, but schedule it out because, you know, nobody's, you know, the difference between 11, 18 p.m. and somebody looking at it at 842 a.m. is functionally really no different, right? And so, like, I think that's respectful, too, of people's, like, downtime, right? Hey, I'm not going to necessarily hit you up at 11 o'clock at night, even though that's when I'm working for you to respond to this and get into it. Now, we've been, you've been saying, you know, the past couple of times, things have been about email, but I want to say one thing about comments in particular, because this, just inside baseball, Joey and I have extremely different approaches to this, right? And I'm not sure which one is better than the other. So let's just say you post a film on something like frame I.

And somebody comes back and there's 80, 90 comments, right? Joey just goes, thank you very much. I've read through all your comments. I will address them in my next pass, right? I feel compelled to have a dialogue with the client, right, in that thread of comments. Actually, well, this is why I did this. Actually, that's why I did that. What do you mean? This doesn't make sense. So my 80 comments, if you look at a lot of films I work on, at the end of the,

at the end of a round, there's 230 comments or something in Frame I-O. And Joey goes, what the hell are you doing, right? I'm really torn about this, right? because in the suite, we arrive at a decision with some discourse back and forth, right? One of the hard things for me is the absence of that discourse when I get a frame I-O link, but I also see the danger of it, right? It gets really confusing. Maybe somebody's like me and they don't pick up on the tone or the inflection,

and it starts to look like an argument and a fight, and then they've lost trust in you. So, like, it's a really challenging area. that I don't think in the two and a half years since we did this first episode that I've completely solved yet, because I see the benefits of communicating like that within a comment thread or something like that, but I also see the downsides because the downsides have bitten me quite a bit, you know? And so it's like, I don't know. Yeah, and, you know, I don't really have an answer as to which one of these methods is, quote, better. I think it depends on the client, the project, a bunch of other factors.

But just like you said, you know, replying to Frame IO.com. comments in text when somebody might not be getting the tone could come off as argumentative or it could not. You know, you just don't really know. And that's kind of why I've always personally avoided it. I didn't want to, I know it's important to have that dialogue. And like you said, in the room, it's a conversation. Nobody ever really had a second thought about that. But on frame I, oh, I'm like, ah, are they even once, once they leave a comment, are they coming back to look at the replies? Not everybody will. I probably wouldn't.

So are we, you know, screaming into the void at that point? So let me interrupt you because that's what I do on Zoom calls. But you said one thing just now. That's a really important thing, though, I think is a distinction. Fine. They say it to you. And then there's nothing. That doesn't feel like collaboration to me, right?

And that's what I feel like the problem. Like, if that's the case, if we're just, if our job is just to push things out, get feedback, execute it blindly, I'm not like, I'm not a big fan of that, right? Because like, to me, like the best work happens when we're going around

and discussing it, is it too dark? Is it too blue? Is it too whatever, right? And let's try this. Let's try that. And I think that that's lost on that, that's lost on both ends.

So, like, again, you know, there's maybe a balance. Maybe there's a balance point to this, right? Like, maybe it's sort of like, oh, you know, just to say in the comment thread, great idea I did it because of this reason in XYZ why don't we do a live stream or get on a call and discuss this further yeah I was just to say another kind of in-between option is take all their notes

forget about replying schedule hey I read all your notes I've got them all brought into my timeline let's jump on a live stream and walk through each of them together depending on the project of the quantity of notes that's probably the best most effective way to do it now that I'm kind of thinking about Or even with like so like all the obvious ones, right? Like, oh, there's some blanking here or oh, the. Yeah, bang out the easy ones and then keep the ones that you need to talk about. I think that's a better way to do it.

But it also, you know, it's one of those things where we are considered, it comes back to asynchronous versus synchronous, just like we were talking about with email. Of not everybody is going to consider frame I.O. comments to be synchronous as in real time back and forth. It could just be, I'm leaving it. I'm never coming back to it again, whether you're the commenter or the reader. or it could be a back and forth comment thread as kind of a workflow question. It's one of those things where maybe it's worth having a quick discussion with your client about how they want to use a tool like Frame I.

0 100%. 100%. And it's funny because I've talked to a lot of people over the years that have encountered these problems. And the interesting thing to them is sort of, to me rather, is sort of the, the way that they approach this by combining sort of the video conference, live streaming, asynchronous part together as one thing. And here's what I mean by that.

Plenty of colorists I know will start a stream at the beginning of the day when they start working and just keep that stream open all day for somebody just to jump on, jump off, take a peek, whatever, right? And that's a really interesting approach to me because it's like, you're emulating, so I'm in a room, I'm working, you might be on a phone call or have to do emails or pop out for a second and you can pop back in, take a peek. And like, I don't know, I've never really tried that, but that's it because, you know, there's some expense involved in it and all sorts of stuff. But like, I can see that as an interesting middle ground where all this kind of stuff meets together, right? Like, I'm just going to create a stream, feel no pressure to join, but it's here if you want.

to, you can come in any one time you want, and if you have some feedback of what I'm doing at that moment, great. If not, I can explain it to you, you know, that kind of thing. And so, like, I don't know. I haven't tried that yet, but that's an interesting one to me to sort of just start a stream and then say, anytime you want, just bounce in if you want. Yeah, and you know, that could be good for some types of projects, not good for other types of projects. The other thing you've got to really keep in mind is, is this method going to be effective for this particular type of project? Support for this episode comes from Flanders Scientific and Gaia Color Direct Connect volumetric autocal.

Calibration of reference displays is critical in our industry, and there's no easier way to calibrate than by using Gaia Color, which is standard on DM, XMP, and XMPC series monitors. Gaya color calibration allows supported probes to be plugged in directly to the monitor, for fast, accurate, and automated calibration, with no computer or operator expertise required. You can learn more about this powerful system at flanderscientific.com. We've talked about synchronous and maybe semi-synchronous communication. The one that is now very common, and I think the most divisive, and I think the most misinterpreted by everyone, is what I'm calling synchronous text communication.

That is, I type something. it appears on your screen, you type something it appears on my screen, it's a chat, it is a live chat. That can be text message, that can be Slack, that can be Discord, that can be whatever internal tool a client is using for collaboration, right? It is literally just a chat room where things are happening, things are happening, you can tag people, you can add files, things like that. This is where I think most miscommunications happen, right? For better or for worse. I'm not saying it's a bad way to use it. In fact, for a lot of projects, I love having a Slack channel because little things can stay little and big things can become big separately in communication. If it's, hey, I just uploaded that new logo for you, right? That is message clear, concise, and effective. It's gotten to me. I've acted upon it. No other conversation needs to happen. This doesn't need to sit in my email forever. It doesn't need to confirm. It doesn't need to confirm. It doesn't need to confirm. fuse me with my 10 other emails about this project, I've got the new logo, we're all moving on with our life.

Okay? That kind of stuff, synchronous text is incredibly good at. You get into more strategic things, discussing workflow, discussing creative. That's when the synchronous text can get real finicky. Or reusable things where I need to go back and reference something someone said. Now do I search for it in this long? long stream, right? It's disorganized. Or you have the opposite problem, which I've seen in a lot of projects and a lot of Slack groups, everything like that, where you have organization overload. They try to take that stream and organize it into channels where you have 15 different channels, all saying however many unreads, you know, because you try to itemize everything in such detail that nobody can focus on it because they were expecting just kind of a text stream. So I, I, I I have such a love-hate relationship with Slack and Discord and all that because, you know, I've been on the internet for almost 40 years of my life.

And a lot of that, I was always on what used to be called IRC, internet relay chat. We did open source projects like this. We did, we all, all our friends talk to each other like this, where it was just one room, long stream of consciousness. People came in and out whenever, talked a little bit and then went away. It was never serious enough to be archived, so it would have been kind of the equivalent of like, here, I sent you the new logo. You got it? Great. Those low level kind of pulses of things.

I think we're trying to use synchronous text now for more critical things than that. And I don't think it's as effective at it, at least for me. Yeah. I mean, sorry to completely rant about it. No, no, no. I mean, I think this is important. I would I see the problem with Slack you know discord others you know next cloud talk whatever like any similar instant messaging kind of tool is that ostensibly it's like yeah I'm sending when this is you know convenient for me but it really does make the other side feel like oh they've seen that I've read this

or whatever, and it's there, that I have to respond immediately, right? And so I think there's a lot to unpack there, but let me start with that one. And that is, I think that one of the ways of handling this is to, it goes part and parcel with understanding what their preference are is, right? So like, you know, if a client's like, hey, cool, let's use Slack, but maybe like, how would you like me to use this? Would you like me to use this to like ask like your opinion on everything? Would you like me to use this only on like things that I need from you or things that were delivered?

Like get some sort of parameters about that communication. Second, I think that, you know, this can be like the expectation of response can be managed a little bit. And that can be done through, you know, of sort of availability status. hey, I'm here, I'm not here. You know, whatever, it's after 10 o'clock at night. They won't respond immediately. Well, those kind of little messages you get. The other thing I think that's interesting about that, too, is that you can sort of, as you said, get a little too deep in the weeds.

And I think that it's one of those things where it's not such a big deal in like, you know, just two people on the chat. But if there's like 10, 12 people in the chat, I think there are ways to mitigate the noise. I think certainly threads. I mean, that's something that we, I know that you have a sort of a hebie-gib-gmy response to threads because of your IRC experience. But I do think that like threads in general are a good thing in multi-user text communication like this, right? So it's like, okay, you guys go over here, have that conversation. I don't have to deal with it.

And that's one way of doing what I was talking about of, you know, the little things in the stream, the big things can be a thread. Right. But I think there's a difference between thread and like channel, right? And so I, and I see, I see benefits of both. I think when something is, every conversation is constantly getting threaded, that's a, that's like a line in the sand of like, hey, maybe this kind of conversation needs to move to a channel, right? So it's just easier to follow, easier to organize, easier as a search, whatever. But I think that, general people don't use the idea of threads enough especially when it gets to a multi it can get very confusing very quickly who's saying what who's communicating to you in the same regard though it's

pretty simple right like it's just an at joey at rob whatever like to direct your communications a little bit i think is a small thing that can help right because i think i've been in all been we've all been in that experience where there's 10 people in a server and it's like who are you talking to what who is your question for you know that kind of stuff and there's small small things like that that you can do. But as with everything else, especially in text world, that's its own pitfall.

You might look at that as saying, hey, I'm just keeping things organized by tagging people. Somebody else might look at that and say, hey, I've got all my notifications turned on to a million because I'm neurotic. And now my cell phone is pinging like crazy with unnecessary stuff. So all of these things, like everything else we've talked about, it's not a good or a bad.

Well, there are a few actual definable bad. But in general, it's not a good or a bad. It's a figuring out what works for the client for the project. And part of that is when you're going to use something like Slack or Discord, treat it like a workflow tool. And what I mean by that is actually define the parameters. You know, you don't have a facility-wide NAS without a folder structure and organization built into it, right?

You don't just randomly throw files on there. We all know that's a horrible workflow. If you just throw everybody into Slack and say, cool, we did communication. That's also a really bad workflow. It's a tool that you need to kind of structure and define with informed decisions. I agree. I think that's well said. And I think it's also one of those things where I find that people try to extrapolate what works for an internal tool to necessarily getting it to work with an external set of people.

And that might not be like, in other words, I think sometimes, like if you're, if you're dealing with a series or something that's going over many months or a whole year or whatever, something like Slack or Discord makes a ton of sense. If you're doing one 30 second commercial

with somebody, right, the whole idea of getting them set up, hey, invite them to our Slack, whatever, like, it's just a level of complexity that's just like, it's just not needed, right? You're trying to over-end, you're forcing somebody into a system that might not be really required, right? And I think that part of this thing is also a little bit of a subconscious thing that's happened in the past five years or whatever where, okay, great, everybody's working at home and people are working in their underwear or whatever.

They don't want to get on a video call, as you said, because things are awkward. So then they treat Slack Discord sort of like that for everything piece of communication. And that's not right. That's not right either, right? Like it's not, it's just as annoying as, you know, you sitting there. and your tiny whitties while you're on a Zoom call, you know? Yeah, and the last thing I'll say about what we're calling asynchronous text, whether it's Slack, Discord, whatever platform,

I know I'm an old man yelling at the clouds here, and I know I'm going to get some backlash on this, but anytime I've used Slack or Discord or any of these in any kind of professional context, stop with the emojis and the GIFs and the graphics and the silly child is crap. Like, I know, you know, the upside of this is, oh, we're trying to be lighthearted

and have a nice conversation like we were in the office. I'm not saying people are like wrong to do that. I'm saying in this text format, we have enough difficulty with every different personality inferring different things from words. Like we talked about, this could be argumentative, or it's not argumentative, or are you pinging me because you need me to respond to this right this second?

or are you being organized? What the hell is a fire, smile, whatever emoji mean? I have no idea. Multiply that by 10 people on the team. We have 10 people with 10 different ideas. And they're all sitting thinking to themselves, do I need to respond? Do I need to?

What? Right? It's one of those little things where it's like, I just avoid it altogether. I don't, I will never put an emoji or a graphic or something that's irrelevant into a professional. conversation and when I see them, I generally ignore them because I have no idea what like,

it's one of the things I have trouble trying to judge intent with and I don't want to make the wrong judgment. Yeah, I hear you on that to a certain degree and there's definitely a subset of people who have replaced normal language, normal language with strings of emojis or memes or gifts or whatever. And like the memes, gifts thing annoys me more. than the emoji in context. Like, I'm ridiculous, I'm ridiculous with the smile.

Like, one of the ways that I've learned to compensate and sort of try to inflect some tone is by, like, things like the exclamation point or, like, a smiley face or whatever, because it's like my way of safeguarding that, yes,

what I just said sounds serious or whatever, but I mean it as like a lighthearted kind of thing, right? But certainly there's a balance point with that. And I think that I will play contrarian for one thing. I generally agree that there's a subset of people who overdo it. And I generally agree that for the most part, it's not really needed. However, I will say in this particular context, it can be used as a more effective type of communication for certain situations.

Let me tell you what I mean, right? You write a client and it's, or, you know, a client writes me like, hey, just posted these files for you to download you know, and that's it. Instead of having to respond, gee, thanks, I will pull them down now and let you know if there's any problems. Guess what?

The thumbs up serves the same purpose, right? So like I'm not saying, I'm not saying that like it's, hey, go, you know, download the biggest emoji library and start using it to replace words. Definitely not. But I do think there's certain situations where they can be appropriate to communicate

tone. And I think there's also certain situations where they're appropriate as a shorthand to communicate something, right? Yeah, it definitely hits the concise. It sometimes hits the effective. I feel like it rarely hits the clear. Yeah, no, I can, I can hear you on that. And I think, I think the default stance should be, if you're somebody who likes to use them, I think the default stance should be go without first, see what the other side is like, right? And in general, even if both sides are using these things, tread carefully because there's definitely a line where it's just like, what is this person doing? And I think, I think in the professional context, I think is the biggest clue about this, right? Like, if you're on a Discord server with your

bros or your friends or whatever, like, that's one thing, right? Sure. Like, you know, like, ridiculous memes fine whatever that's your thing go for it you're talking to a client about a twenty thousand dollar job you know using you know uh some sort of meme that you pulled down from the internet appropriate level maybe not and at worse it's like it could be like whoa like i find that offensive like why are you doing that right you know like so you got to be you got to be a little careful in that regards as well um now one other two other things before we close this out is that um I wanted to kind of hit on this point of the opposite side of where I think that this, this conversation is going, and certainly our first episode was going, is that we hit hard on the, on the idea of like how important communication, types of communication, all the things we've talked about here. I want to just go out there on a limb and say that I think sometimes no communication has its role to, right?

and one of the things that I have, I've tried to, you know, sort of tritate myself and sort of mediate a little bit is the idea of my tendency to over communicate. And I find this strategy I'm about to share effective because especially in long form work where let's say it's going to take me a week to do something, right? Or two weeks to do a film or whatever. instead of sort of narrating my every move, it's sort of setting up communication milestones, right? Hey, I got the project, it's received, everything looks good. Hey, that's a milestone right there. I've received it. I've loaded it in, looks good.

I'll be back in touch in a couple days to give you an update about where I am. So it's setting the expectation for them. It's not I have to narrate every move that I'm making. But hey, if I started this on Monday, hey, C-O-B on Wednesday. I'll check back in with you and kind of give you a status update of where I am. Hey, I've made it, you know, halfway through the film. Things are looking gate. I had a couple questions for you.

And so like that idea of sort of setting up a communication schedule, whatever your method may be, I think is an effective one to sort of sort of set those expectations because it makes you feel like, hey, I'm communicating enough. I'm communicating on a schedule. But it also lets the other end know of like, hey, Rob said he'd get back to me midweek about a status of this project, I'm going to leave him alone too to let him do his work.

Because that's the other thing that we haven't really spoke here to. It's like we've made it seem that us as the service providers or the one who are doing the over communication. We've all been a part of projects where Jesus, just let me work. Stop bothering me with nit, you know, tidbits about this, right?

And so I think that by setting up a communication schedule like that or something similar, it also lets the client off the hook a little bit, but like, okay, cool, I'm just going to let them do their thing. They'll check back in if they have any problems or questions. questions, right? And, you know, I don't know. I think everybody finds a little balance point for that, but it's one thing that since we recorded this, this episode a couple of years ago that I've really tried to focus on, of like right at the start of the project, I'm going to brief you kind of in this, the schedule. Does that work for you? Great. I'll just do my thing. Yeah. The only thing I would add to that is if you're going to do that, and I think it's a great way to organize kind of expectations for a project, you've got to stick to it. And If that means kind of setting yourself reminders in your calendar, hey, I said I was going to email this client back on Wednesday.

If you said that you're going to email them back on Wednesday, even if you don't have anything really actionable to report, you still want to send them an email on Wednesday because that's what you said you were going to do and you want to set the expectation with the client that I've frameworked when and how we're going to communicate, I'm going to stick to it. You can rely on me.

Yeah. And I think that there's a tendency in that regard to, at least for me, that I need to also moderate and prioritize what is important at that moment for that piece of communication, right? I don't necessarily have to share, hey, this is what the rest of the week looks like or this is a blow by blow

of what I've done prior to this communication, right? So it's like not only it's setting that expectation, but it's also like on you to sort of go, okay, Wednesday, this is day three of the film. What's most important for them to know at this stage, right? okay, yes, I've gotten through X amount of time, or I've encountered, you know, Y problems, whatever. And they don't need a blow by blow of everything you've encountered, right?

I'm thinking about a film recently where, like, day three, day four, I was like, man, this is really tough. And I can't figure out what's going on. You know, there was a levels problem or something like that. Like, they don't need to know that. I can just be like, yep, I'm working through it. Like, things are looking pretty good. I'll be in touch more soon.

Like, you know, there's a balancing point to over communicating in these regards to where you make people worried. And that should always be one of the safeguards that you put in place. Yeah, absolutely. And then lastly, Joey, I just want to, because at the top of the show I mentioned, you know, kind of communication differences with like vendors and your colleagues and stuff too. I want to just say that I think everything that we've discussed here and in the first episode a couple years ago is germane to that type of communication too, right? Like, yeah, you might be a little more casual, you might be a little more relaxed. God forbid, use more emojis, right? Like, my point is, is that all of those things play into the other people.

Like, if you're that colleague that's constantly yapping to another colleague and they're not getting work done, you're going to get a bad reputation for yourself, right? So all of the things that we've learned about client communication, I think play to vendors, internal communications, and that kind of stuff as well. Agreed. Cool. All right, so we've had fun kind of revisiting this episode. Again, this was our very first episode from two and a half years ago.

I think looking through the library, there's a number of these that we could jump on again. If you have any particular episodes that you'd like us to revisit, drop us a line by heading over to offsetpodcast.com and using the contact form there. As a reminder, that's also a great way to submit ideas for future episodes. It's been a while since we've done any user-driven episodes, user questions. So if you do have some questions or a topic that you'd like us to attack, please drop. us the line there. You can always follow the show on YouTube. That's where you find the video version of the show, as well as on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcasting platforms. And if you wouldn't mind, we'd love it if you consider dropping or visiting our Bias a coffee

link here on screen. Every little bit of support goes a long way to helping the show out to make future episodes. So we'd appreciate any support that you may give. And lastly, if you're on the old social media on Facebook or Instagram, just follow us there by searching for the offset podcast. All right, Joey. As always, this has been a fun one. Good revisit of these subjects. Good, you know, personal reminders of some of these strategies and that kind of stuff as well. So until next time for the Offset Podcast, I'm Robbie Carmen.

And I'm Joey Deanna. Thanks for listening.