The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP061: Communities For Post Production

Episode Date: August 17, 2026

In this episode of The Offset Podcast we’re discussing online communities and their value.  Way back when, it used to be ‘community’ was those you worked with and people in your local/regional geographic area. At the birth of the modern internet, community took on a different form that has progressed greatly over the past 30 or so years.  Some of the specifics we explore this episode include:The early days of online communitiesOnline forums and the power of search & moderationThe rise of OEM communities, private training websites and the modern YouTuberEvaluating an online communityIntroducing The Offset Podcast Discord communityAs mentioned in the episode, if you enjoy the topics and discussion of The Offset Podcast you can join in the conversation with our new Discord community Check 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/theoffsetpodcastSee you again in about two weeks for a new episode

Hey everybody, welcome back to another installment of the Offset podcast. And in this episode, we're taking a look at online communities for post-production. 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 Deanna. Hey, Joey. Hi, everyone. So, Joey, this was actually from your brain, but an idea for a show. And I thought it was a good one. And that is the idea of kind of just visiting the, you know, online communities and their role, you know, kind of in the current state of affairs of our industry and a post. Unless you've been living under Iraq, you know, the past decade or two, it's pretty obvious that everywhere from Facebook and Slack and Discord to dedicated websites, it seems like, you know, community-driven content is a big thing, right? And I think, you know, this for me is kind of like a funny evolution. And I'm sure it is for you because I feel like community, I don't know, used to be the workplace, right?

And, you know, and we've talked about this a lot over, you know, a bunch of episodes that, of course, everything's changed. More people working at home. You know, more freelancers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But, like, you know, I think community is one of those things that you don't realize how valuable it is until it's gone, right? And, you know, we had been talking about this offline about, you know, kind of what is community. And that was the first thing that popped in my head, like workplace. And that's changed now. And I think that puts like the importance or the the weight of like a real bona fide community actually to a little bit, you know, it's a little heavier.

It's a little higher level because it really is that important given the current state of affairs and the change in the way that people have been working over the past decade or so. Yeah, but even though, you know, yes, we've talked about this. It's a brave new world now of most people are working from home, working remote. The old school post house doesn't really exist anymore in a lot of places. Even when it did, even before the idea of working from home was even a possibility because you needed to be in these rooms with millions of dollars of equipment. I was still pretty chronically online as a young adult through most of my career. So that meant seeing the evolution of online communities all the way from early websites to early forums to things like IRC, internet relay chat. basically the precursor to your slacks and your discords and all that other modern garbage.

So the online component of this, even if you were in the top post house in the world, there wasn't advantage to the online component because it could take you places and meet people and interact with contexts and projects and things and just information that was never going to come into your sphere of existence before. Yeah, a geographic expanded geographic range, if you will, I think that's true. I mean, I think that one of the things I was going to say about community besides the workplace was that community back then was also, you know, people and friends that you had at competing companies. Right, your physical region, you'd run into them at a, you know, a happy hour or a cocktail party or something, and you'd catch up. And it would be like, oh, what are you doing?

How are you doing this? How are you doing that? Right. And a lot of that. And then you're right. It expanded online. But I think that, you know, one of the things I really want to explore today is just sort of that idea of the value of community. But then also, I think that there's, unfortunately, I think that there's currently a vein of community that is, there's like a nastiness to some of it.

There's also like a take advantage to somewhat, you know, to a certain degree with people just looking to, you know, pulling a little grift on somebody to get some money for them for something. So I think today I just want to kind of navigate the current state of affairs of community where it is, how we see it, et cetera. and then, of course, if you're in our audience, you have any thoughts on this, feel for you to chime in, which is a good reason to tell you to follow us on Facebook and Instagram. You just search for the Offset Podcasts.

Of course, you can watch the show over on YouTube. And if you are on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, you can just search for the Offset Podcasts there and find us as well. And if you feel generous, you could always support the show here with this link on screen to buy us a couple virtual coffee. Every cent spent supporting the show

goes directly to support the show. and the cost that we have to make each episode. So, Joey, let's put our wayback machine on because I am old enough. I am old enough to remember like the very early days. You mentioned IRC as one. And for those you don't know IRC and Joey's love affair of IRC, over the past, you know, 10, 15 years that Joey and I've been working together, I would venture to say that the phrase, the word, IRC comes up at least,

once a week, right? Whether that's a technical problem I'm having with like Slack or Discord or for whatever reason Joey puts on the hat of, you know, back when we were using IRC, and I have to be honest with you, I think the reason that he has, and I'm speaking for you, Joey, the reason that you have such nostalgia about that was for that thing that you described just a minute ago. It was like for the first time you're breaking your geographic bounds, right, in a way that you were talking to an editor in London and, you know, a camera person, in L.A. or whatever, right?

And that felt big. It felt important. It felt like your reach was there. And I agree with that. My first sort of entry into this community world was actually the early days of the internet as well, not IRC, but it was more about bulletin board systems and mailing lists, right? Yeah. Where, and for those of you don't know, like, the bulletin board system thing. Now, to be clear, the BBS was not the internet. No, it was not the internet.

It was its own, I would you say protocol, its own, like, how would you say that? It was a private group that you could dial directly into with a modem. Right, exactly. And I was big on those because my dad was, my dad would, had, was into a whole bunch of, like, engineering groups and stuff, and I was, I was looking at them. And that was my first foray into that where, like, you'd get to people who were interested in a thing, right? And then you discuss that thing, you know, as you waited for your modem to,

all the sounds or whatever, right? And then you connect. Later, that turned into sort of a hybrid of the BBS, which I think you maybe call it mailing lists, right? Yeah, mailing lists were very common in the early days. Yeah, where you would, somebody would like email a comment or a question or a follow up on something. And then you could get that in real time, like a real time stream of that in your email box or like maybe the next day get like a digest or something like that. Yeah, basically anything, anybody that emailed into the group.

it would then get forwarded out to the rest of the group. So then somebody else would reply that would then get forwarded out to the rest of the group. And it was an ongoing group conversation based around email. And almost every single mailing list that I was ever a member of had the problem where when people were first able to put their vacation responders on to the emails, that everybody was like, bro, turn your vacation responder off. because those were just perpetually, you know, but he's on vacation and he didn't get the thing to turn it off. Right, exactly. So all of these early platforms had their disadvantages as well. So when I sit here and be like, well, it used to be better in my day.

Remember, there was like, imagine a storm of I'm on vacation until next week emails filling your entire inbox. Yeah. And some of the ones that come up as like I have fond nostalgic memories of even though they had some pain in the ass factor. And more importantly, they had some pain in the ass people too. But the TIG, which was the Telestini interest group, that was a big one. Tell us in the Internet group, I believe, was the action. Yeah, you're right. Telesany Internet group.

The Avid had a couple of companies got involved in these. Avid had a very popular, widespread email list that I was on. Were there any others like that that you were around the same time that you were into? Tig was the big one for me. I was, I didn't say much in the TIG because I was young and didn't have much to offer. But the heavy hitters that were on that group and the information that you would get just from seeing it come in and reading it was invaluable. And it was an amazing group. And that was really, to be honest with you, like I agree with you.

That was people who, you know, now we lionized the idea of film emulation and color timing and that kind of stuff. Like that group was those people, right? Yeah, they were handling film on a day-to-day basis talking about the technical intricacies of it. It wasn't, hey, I want this to look super stylized and cool like it's hip. It was, here's a piece of film in front of me. How do I get this telecini to work with synchronizing this or that? And it was so dorky with like all of like the EDL and different lists that you could create. But even like technical stuff that was just cool about like, okay, this is my technique for, you know, super glue for gluing these frames together.

This is how I splice something. Here's what happens if you screw this, that splice. up like all stuff but it did it did evolve into the digital world quite well and all of these early digital intermediate pioneers were on there as well talking about the best techniques for dealing with digital imagery and again it was one of those places where if you had something to say it was probably like you were standing at the feet of giants a little bit so it was a little bit of apprehension to say something in a good way because I was like soaking it in more than interacting Totally. And so that kind of was cool, but I think as you kind of alluded to, there was a certain personality type that was drawn to that particular board and to that kind of, you know, the mailing list, the bulletin board system.

So then when sort of the web started to get democratized and people could create websites and that kind of stuff, things kind of slowly but surely moved from mailing list, bulletin board systems to, you know, the web proper. And I remember early communities like this, like Tupop comes to mine, creative cast. CAU comes to mine. That's creative cow, I think is actually still running. I don't think Tupop is. Creative cow was huge. I will, this might be blasphemy to some of our listeners. Never got into it.

I just never, I never was involved in it. It speaks to something that I want to talk about later. And that is the idea of online expertise and acknowledgement of like, because you get a lot of that in communities, right? People who want to dominate the conversation, people that are really smart that just don't care and like, don't want to like, hey, it's not my circus.

I'm not going to contribute to this. We'll talk about that, but I agree. You know, that led me to, you know, sort of the OG of color forums, which was Lyft Gamma Gain, which has been around for probably 20 or so years now, I'm guessing, at this point. And to me, those communities represented a couple things. They represented the geographic expanse thing that you talked about. They also just, they really represented the idea of like, of knowledge sharing, right? that there was like at the time especially when it came to the world of color this was not stuff that people were running training websites with right they were like this was hard one that that that dark art that you know that wizard behind the wall that was that time frame right and when you would see somebody go no this is how you properly load 35 or 16 on a spirit or whatever or no this is how you know the early days of you know whatever an 888 system you

or a 2K system, this is how like the, you know, whatever controls work. That was really, it was like kind of like awe-inspiring cool, but it also allowed a young Robbie, and I'm sure it did for a young Joey, to go, wow, like, not only are we interested in this stuff, but we like how the communication part of that works. And I think that's really shaped your and I career into a lot of degrees. And for me, it ended up doing, writing books, doing thousands of hours of training and so on. Support for this episode comes from Conform Tools. Conform Tools allows you to translate timelines between Premier and Resolve and other NLEs

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, colorist, and conform artists move faster and finish stronger. Learn more at conform. Tools. And here's the thing with the online forums, right? And I'm going to throughout this episode, I think, be nostalgic for two things, IRC and online forums. Because as we'll talk about later, a lot of this has been replaced with Slack

and Discord. And those things definitely still have value. There's still really valuable people, personalities, things you can learn, people you can meet. But the format, I think, has evolved into something less useful on the whole. And the reason I say that is when we had internet forums and we get this also a lot in the world of classic car and motorcycle restoration and operation as well, it's all moved to Facebook groups. And the problem is this. I know you've seen it when you go to the resolve Facebook groups.

Every other question you've seen it before because searching and is almost negligibly impossible. That applies to just about every current format of communication because most of the companies running them sell ads and they want you to keep coming back and having churn. In the days of the internet forum, it was maybe a little bit more awkward because, yeah, you had like the format of you had to go to a website and log in. It wasn't everything in one place, like a Discord or a Facebook. But before I even post a question, I hit a quick search.

Oh, where's the preference for? for this. Somebody already had a post about it. It's already set. What's the torque spec for the subframe on an R1150 G S from 2002? Refresh the BMW forum and it's all there with diagrams because somebody's already posted it. Try that on Discord. Try that on Facebook. It's just, there's a large like library of knowledge that was established in these forums that has one kind of stopped in time, right? Most of these forums still exist on the web, and you can still go to them and search them,

and it's useful, but the, the origination, the point, like, there's an end date of the valuable information. And you just can't get that in a Facebook group or in a Discord group effectively. It was one of the great advantages of a Lyft Gamma gain. And there were other forums, too, that I frequented. Quantel had a private user forum. Avid ended up having one after their mailing list that was that was very popular.

Let us not let us not forget because it's been about four episodes since we've mentioned this. Let's not forget the amazing DS community as well, okay, right? I guess that's part of the avid like. Yeah, that is. Well, so the DS started as a user as an email list. Right, right. Then it became a Google group. Then it became a part of the Avid forum.

Guess what? Every one of those is still searchable to this day if you need to find out how to do something on DS. Thankfully, DS stopped in. in 2010 and there's no new knowledge to be had. But for the purposes of the modern world, I would like more searchable community resources. And I think that's something that we've lost in this kind of evolution of community.

So I hear you, but to play devil's advocate, one of the downsides of, well, two downsides, or two reactions to what you just said. Number one, one of the downsides is the real time capability of it, right? And I think you could argue that as a downside and as a positive. You could argue both sides of that coin, right? You know, on a forum, you'd post a question, it's an emergency to you, and then you're hitting refresh, refresh, refresh, refresh, did anybody respond to this, right? Whereas in some of the other platforms that you mentioned, yeah, it's a real-time kind of response,

and that has its pros and that has its cons, right? The other thing that pops to mind is that, especially these days, just, I think, a societal comment is that I remember back in that time period, moderators being heavy-handed, right? Like, you would get booted, you would get flagged, you would get yelled at to put this in the right place, it doesn't belong here. And I think one of the things that happened. Story for another day, but I've had, well, law enforcement agencies involved in some forum posts when I was in the 15, 16. year old range of ages.

That was not pleasant. Here's my surprise face, Joey. But I think what happened these days is that moderation is a really slippery slope because everybody gets pissed off about everything. And so I think one of the downsides of sort of the traditional online forum part has been they have tended to devolve into, you know, clicky, name calling kind of things because moderation has gone. Let's like the Facebook groups are a great example of this that I'm, you know, I'm a member of like some really good guitar Facebook groups. And I think that they're only really good for two

reasons. One, they're very specific and kind of regimented about who they let in, right? You have to have some level of knowledge, prove it, et cetera. Like there's a, there's a, there's sort of a test to get in, if you will. And the second, they're very well moderated. On the ones that, you know, a lot of resolve or post-production groups, nobody's really moderating all that hard. And so you end up with like a group called like, you know, professional colorist or something. And then it's like, hey, how do I open up the application? And you're like, like, what? You know, so there's not, it's a lot, it's a mixed bag of stuff.

But, but that goes hand in hand with the lack of search. Yeah, it does. It does. And I think the form, those, you know, the traditional forum, it doesn't have a 100% analog into the social mediated world. It really does. No. You know, and so that, that's a problem.

Now, one of the things I think. that happened as we started moving it kind of simultaneously we eventually you know by the mid 2000s a lot of companies were getting involved in this community because they saw soft value in it right like hey if we get everybody a community talking about our tools that is a focus group uh literally a focus group that can help us improve our tools find bugs all that kind of stuff so every all the big oEMs were involved in this you mentioned a habit earlier apple i was part of that ecosystem with the apple ecosystem doing the I wrote books for the in tech edited for the Apple Pro training series I didn't talk about moderation the most moderated web

forum that I ever dealt with in the professional space was the early online Quantel forum because you needed a serial number yeah and I tell you what I still talk to some of these people they've been you know great resources you know now now I'm friends with them in the more modern color grading world but when I was first starting out learning on Quantel it was a Again, kind of like TIG, it was, you know, standing at the feet of giants for one. But also it was you want to talk about signal to noise ratio, which is a big thing with online communities. This was a hundred percent signal.

It was premium level because they took the moderation to the extreme of you had to buy a quantel. Yeah. And you're only doing that if you were invested in a quarter million dollars worth of gear and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, I get it. So I think after that kind of like as the OEMs got involved in this, that was like a high i look back at that period very funnly when the apples and the you know the i even before quantels or same time as quantile like the discreets and the avids all stuff involved in this um i think that those companies kind of realized at that time that like this is way more difficult than it

sounds um we can't really put a value on the people that we're hiring to do this work for us so you you saw this all the time right people would get hired to be like i community manager or whatever and then like a year later they would get fired because that's the easiest person to let go when things are tight or whatever right so i think after the the oem push what happened was and we were part of this as well sort of like the idea of privatizing training right um you know from a in a in person like the future media concepts of the world were big on that um but then on the online side um like kind of before youtube like you know we were a part of or i was one of the one of the the co-founders of mixinglight.com along with Patrick Inoffer and Dan Moran.

We started that in 2011 or 2012, right? And there wasn't really anything like that. And like clearly after that there was like, there was the low post and groups like that. But then I think by the 2014, 2015 era, 2016, we saw, my personal experience with us having, was, you know, I was running the training company. I was running, helping run mixing light was this. explosion, absolute explosion of YouTube color and post-production personalities. Really easy to understand why. Hey, it's an easy way to get content. It's free. Just post it up there, create an account, put it out there. But people, I think, sort of bought into that kind of the

general societal culture of influencer. And I think, you know, flash forward to where we are these days, not to name names, but you can think of probably right off the top of your head, 10, 12 people that are sort of post-production or color YouTube personalities, right? Yeah. And I'm, I'm 50-50 on the YouTube person. It's a hard line to walk here, and I'm going to try to walk it in the best way possible. Yeah. There are a range from complete, absolute, utter scam nonsense.

to really knowledgeable, valuable people that are, yes, building their own brand, which I can't fault them for. They deserve it because they're very talented. And they're offering, you know, free and then also other some paid stuff to the community through their YouTube influence that are super talented, super community driven, really nice people that reach out and help whenever they can. There are, there's, that's the range you get on YouTube. And I would say it's about 10.

to one scam to who I would consider to be their awesome. You know what I mean? That's the important thing. You know, it's all ratio, just like I said, signal noise ratio. It's all ratios. One out of 10 YouTube color people have value. Nine out of 10 are a scam. It's an interesting dynamic because I think in part, part of it is go to YouTube as the creator.

Go to YouTube because it's easy to get to start. You don't have to build a back end, build a infrastructure, whatever, right? You just need a camera and an internet connection and you're recording and putting stuff up, right? So I get it for that reason, but I think that what's happened is that there is no, from the consumer point of view, there's no way to to moderate filter, sort of easily consume, digest that content. And I think what the danger is is that you already know this stuff, then you won't be. able to tell who's the one who's the nine. Correct. And I think there's a certain like, you know, if you paid for a in-person course or whatever, right, like, oh, is this part of the official curriculum or whatever? Like, there's a lot

of ways that could be vetted and sort of, sort of litmus tests for that. With an online personality, you don't really know in terms of like going to a site like YouTube, right? Like, yeah, you can read likes and comments and stuff like that. But I still see a lot of people who have like, you know, millions of likes and I'm like, that is just factually wrong information. Yeah. Yeah. So it puts the, I think it put the, you know, YouTube, especially the rise of the sort of YouTube personality puts the onus on the user, the consumer, way more than it puts

the onus on the creator, right? We can get up there and be like, hey, I just, I have invented color science. My color science is the best. And if you're not using my color science, it's wrong, right? You think I'm joking, right? There's literally people who say stuff like, right? Exactly, right? So I think that's harder for that.

And I also think the thing is about YouTube is that as a community, it tends to be more transient simply because the number of people involved is significantly higher, right? You could get somebody who's a relatively successful YouTuber and they might have 50, 100,000 something subscribers. And it's really hard to like to form bonds. or community when you have that many people diving in and diving out, making a random comment, etc. You don't really know who's there and what their expertise are. So it feels very consumer to me rather than community.

But, you know, I don't know. Maybe I'm just, maybe I'm just old. There seems to be in almost every successful YouTuber, a place where they land where it is this rub against following and monetization. right so like you know you get big YouTube starts to pay you you get ad revenue etc but then like everybody comes out of the woodwork right and there's like why aren't you doing this for free why aren't you doing that for free and it seems to me one of the trends that's happened over the past few years you know decade or so is that once you get kind of to be a relatively well-known YouTuber there's then

a shift back to the privatization of this right what I kind of think of as like gated communities and I am I have first of all zero problems with that I think I understand that that, you know, people are free to monetize however they want. What I, what I get a little frustrated about with that kind of model is that it sort of, it, it devalues the content on YouTube clearly becomes a sales and marketing tool. Like, you know, you're right at the place where you're about to find out more. Oh, you can sign up for our community, right? And it's just sort of like, okay.

I mean, again, that's a minor complaint. I understand why it's done. It's smart business, the whole nine yards. But I think we're seeing a lot of that happen now where a lot of the popular YouTubers are realizing, no, if I can exercise more control over this community, my earning potential is more. Yeah, I get that. It's just, I think that part of me, maybe I have a very naive, and I think people will also say, well, Rob, you ran a training website, a four-paid training website. how can you have this attitude that to a certain degree I think you follow the same role that like if we know something there's like I'm just going to tell you I'm just going to share

it I'm just going to put it out there right so like I see some of these communities I saw one the other day Joey that was five grand a year okay five grand and my question is first of all who has five grand just lying around just to be a part of the community but it leads me into my next thing that I wanted to talk about. And that is the idea of what to be worried about or pay attention to when it comes to a community. And the first one that's always a reg flag for me about communities is sort of this cult of personality and sort of insistent on like, I've built the recipe. I've built the system. Just follow these 10 steps and you'll be rich, right? And there's a lot of that out there. Right. And I think if you talk about

to any professional colorists, they'll tell you it's not, it's like, it's situational, it's learning, it's through experience, it's not about following one set of rules every single time, you know? And I think there's a lot of people out there who are like, they're selling systems. And that's just not how, honestly, it's not how real world work happens. You're not sitting down when you sit down tomorrow morning to, you know, color a spot, you're not going, cool. Okay, I got four nodes. I'm going to balance in this one.

I'm going to just do, like, you know what I'm saying? Like, you might. Yeah, I think people have, it's the flexibility of the, the million different ways you can approach a project, specifically in DaVinci Resolve, but in all software in general, has been a double-edged sword of the snake oil sales, been coming up with some gigantic formula of, like you said, these 10 steps will make everything perfect. And then all of your grades will look the same and match and be wonderful. Like, no, nothing ever is going to always be the same.

Right. It's never going to be a one button. You know, if someone's trying to sell you a single button fix, that's your first clue that this is something sketchy. Right. If someone's saying, here's how I do it, here's a detailed exploration of how I do things generally and I'm going to charge you for it. And because I think there's value there and you'll agree as a customer that there's value there. Great. In your learning things along the process of why, how things were built in that workflow example, let's say. I think anybody that is, you know, what we were put in the qualified camp, none of them would ever say, this way I'm prescribing right now in this example is the number one only way to do this. It's the teach a man to fish kind of thing, right?

Like, it's like, you know, I can give you the way that I do it, but I would always be clear. Like, this is the way I did it for this particular situation. Like, it's more about understanding the thought process, the motivation, what goes into it. other than it because like... And even if you're like me where generally most of my projects have the exact same setup, I'm pretty dogmatic about that. And I evolve it over time. But in general, yeah, I use the same recipe as a starting point.

Granted, there's much flexibility built into it on purpose. Yeah. I would never claim this is the only way. That's the, that I feel like is the key differentiator. If someone is charging you money and then also saying it's my way or the highway and everything else is wrong, that's the biggest red flag you're going to get. Yeah, I mean, a related thing on that, a related riff, is this kind of the constantly revolving door of upsell,

drives me crazy too about a lot of these things. I told you last week that this was the be all end all, but now I have a new thing. But now I have a new thing. And it's just sort of like, well, if you just pay for this particular session, I'll give you the five inside secrets that you need to, like, and to me. me it feels that kind of marketing while I understand it um you know it works to a large degree um

it feels particularly predatory to me that you're especially for the younger person just getting in who you know they might idolize whoever's talking and they go oh my gosh I could learn how to do if I okay you know the next thing you know they're borrowing 500 bucks from mom and dad or whatever and it's just sort of like eh no like it's it's a slippery slope like I it's also you know like You just put a bunch of money into this. Somebody said it was the greatest thing ever. And now they're coming out saying this is the new greatest thing ever. It's a hard one.

What about what I just bought before that? That was supposed to be the greatest thing ever. Yeah. And I guess it's, and again, I don't know how to articulate this very well, but I understand the slippery slope of this. The creator needs to make money.

They need to earn income. Their knowledge has value, right? I get that. I guess what I'm reacting more to is just sort of the, the sometimes sleazy used car salesman aspect to that, which I don't think is great. Like, if you have a great plug-in or a great workflow or whatever, no problem telling everybody about it.

But the idea of like selling it about like, hey, you can only achieve these results. If you pay me another $500 to get this secret knowledge, I'm like, nah, bro. Like, it's not that secret. I'm good, you know? And there's just, there's too much of that out there. And it's like you said earlier, it's hard to filter that out sometimes.

Yeah. And likewise, you know, kind of the idea of like, you know, very complex community, community driven, very, very, like, complex participation rules. Like, hey, you know, you only get this. If you sign up for this at that particular time and like all that kind of stuff. And it's like, do you want me to participate or do you want to just like have a hoops for me to jump through, right? And so I'd be wary of that too. For me, what community really?

is about is honestly it's about the common interests obviously that makes sense right but it's more about like the friendship the fellowship that occurs it's about uh respect for those who are in the community it's about learning from people you know those kind of things and like i will say that probably in the past 10 years some of my good you know closest friends are people that i've met through these communities, right? And I've gone on to meet in real life and have dinner with and do things with and whatever. And to me, I think when you lose sight of that, when you lose sight of community is about, what do you always say, Joey, that this business is a people business. I think when you lose sight of that in the community aspect, that can have the

issues as well. 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. Gaia 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 a million different kind of formats for these communities to exist in.

The one thing that hasn't changed across all of those formats is you're connecting with people that otherwise you would not have been able to because they might not be in your geographical region or in your immediate business or in your immediate circle of collaborators. That's the key thing right there is you get involved in these communities because it gives you access to people that you would have normally never had the opportunity to meet or talk with, and you have value to bring to that as well when you come into the community and become a resource for all of these other people all over the world. Totally.

And it's a, you know, I think the one thing that I would always say, you know, whether you're, you know, Stephen Nakamura or whether you're a young kid who just, you know, graduated high school and your interest in this stuff, right? The idea that you never really know who you're talking to in an online situation. Yeah. So therefore, like, the idea of like respect, deference, understanding should always come into play, right? Like the idea of being like, and it's a subtle difference, you know, being like, hey, that's a stupid workflow is a lot different than that's an interesting workflow. Could you tell me more about that?

Like, subtle difference, right? And so like, I think a lot, that's why I said respect earlier because I think a lot of these communities, when they go bad, they tend to get a lack of respect, a lack of, you know, sort of good communication protocols and they just devolve into name calling, right? Just as we see on Facebooks and, you know, other places like that as well. The other, the last thing I wanted to mention here about the community aspect of this too is that, you know, I think I think the idea of how should I say this, the idea of sort of moderators or owners or whatever in their participation, I think, sets a big tone for this kind of thing.

Right? If you just, I think everybody listening has probably been a part of a group where it's like, you have no idea who the leadership is. You have no idea who the moderators are. And it just seems like the Wild West. To me, I think we need to bring some of the, I'm not saying like a heavy, like, you know, kind of heavy handed whip kind of thing about this. But like, one of my frustrations about a lot of these communities is that they are just

free for all's. And I think the best communities operate when there is a shared set of guidelines that everybody knows. And there's a shared sort of enforcement of those guidelines. Right. If you see somebody being a pain in the ass and being mean to somebody, say something. Report it, right? I think we can under, and there's certain people, what do they call those people, trolls? There are people who just get off on being, like, I mean, Joey's kind of a troll sometimes, but. Well, and it's funny because I was going to say, it depends on the type of the community because I tend to, to gravitate towards less moderation because it's,

Well, it's funny because we've talked about things like online forums, which we would, you know, categorize as asynchronous, right? And then you get to a real-time chat scenario, like a Discord or a Slack, which is more synchronous in real-time. I feel like the moderation approach to each of those should be dramatically different. Oh, for sure. I've seen so many synchronous things on, like, Discord and Slack that try to be more regiment than a real-time stream of text ever should be. And that's where a lot of those communities really fall down, where you have a conversation that, yes, there's going to be no history to this. It's not going to be searchable. So we lose some value there.

But this conversation is meandered from one thing to another thing to another thing to another thing. And it's you've started, you know, you've made it to learn 10 different things along the way. But now you're in the wrong channel for this. Yeah. I see. I see what you're saying. I think that I should rephrase a little bit because you're absolutely right, that that that can be. just as pain the ass to deal with than the opposite.

I think it's more about the idea that when you become a member, you sort of instill kind of like this shared community ethos and things, right? Not necessarily being like wagging your finger of like, you posted this in the wrong place, you're banned for life. Yeah, like that's, yeah, that's not what I'm talking about. It's more of just that like there is a sense of the sense of it takes a village, it takes a community to do this. and everybody's kind of watching each other's back

and operating with a sense of, you know, everybody's here with good intentions, right? And I think when that's not the case, you get the one guy who just wants to ruin the party for everybody, and that's no fun either. So that's cool. So on that end, Joey, I think that, you know, you and I have been talking a lot about kind of the idea of community

and what it means to us. And, you know, over the past three years, we've loved doing these episodes. We do them every two weeks. and, you know, we've done, this is episode 61. Thank you for all of our listeners getting out there for our sponsors, conform tools and Flanders Scientific. You've made the past three years fun.

But now we're ready to kind of just like widen this a little bit. And so to that end, Joey and I have started sort of, we're not committing to this full time, but just sort of as a see how it goes kind of thing. Joey and I have launched a public discord for the offset podcast. You can join right here with this invite link right on screen. We'd love to have you over there. Now, just to preface this a little bit, Joey, because Mr. IRC has very distinct ways and beliefs on how things like this should work, we're going pretty simple with our approach, right? We have a lounge, which is sort of, you know, talk about this or that, whatever's kind of come to mind.

We have a questions forum, which operates a little bit more like a traditional forum, post something that you're interested, get asynchronous responses back. And we may in the future add one or two more channels, but that's pretty much all we got right now, right? Because we want to keep it simple. We want to keep it fun. We don't want to be bogged down by a system. But we will, you know, ebb and flow and grow and contract as need be as people join us. So feel free to come over to that Discord and join us. We'll be participating as often as we can with, you know, our regular workload and life and family and all that kind of stuff.

But we encourage you to come over, introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about what you do. And, you know, it's going to be, it's just getting started. There's only a handful of people in there now. But hopefully over the next, you know, a couple weeks as we advertise this a little bit more, we get more people, people joining us. So we invite you. If you have Discord or want to have a chat, feel free to join us. Again, here at this invite here on screen, we hope to see you over there. So, Joey, good stuff.

I mean, I think that community, it's vital to our industry. And it's probably more vital now in these weird times for the media business and post-production. than it ever has. And I think that, you know, the last thing I want is for somebody to feel like they're out on their own island and, you know, there's nobody to chit-chat with about technical things, creative things, business things, whatever. Hopefully we can provide a little help with that in a low-key, relaxed kind of way with this effort for our Discord.

So we hope to see you over there. Yeah, any other thoughts on community? No, I think we've covered it. Cool, good stuff. All right, just as a reminder, you can always follow us on Instagram and Facebook. You can check out the video version of the show over on YouTube where you can also leave comments. You can check out our complete library of episodes at the offsetpodcast.com, including some additional show notes from time to time. And that's, again, where you can also submit a question.

By the way, if you join the Discord, that's another great place to give us some ideas for some episodes. We'd love to hear from you. Yeah, it's a bit selfish in that way, but please. For sure. And just as a reminder, we do release the show every two weeks, so we'll be back. in about two weeks. And big thanks to our sponsors, Conform Tools and Flanders Scientific. They've been with us for a while, and they are fantastic, so feel free to visit them. They're doing some really, really fun stuff these days. All right, man. So for the Offset

podcast, I'm Robbie Carmen. And I'm Joey Deanna. Thanks for listening.