Hello everyone. Welcome back to All Roads Lead to Archive Qualar series about everything media, entertainment, and broadcast. I'm your host Jeff Sangpiel. Today we're talking with Jim McKenna from Facilus about their shared storage platform for production and some of the new uh wonderful stuff they've got coming out. Facilus is a story brand with a longer legacy than most of the shared storage providers out there. Um Jim, what do you feel has been key to your success in the media entertainment space? Oh, Jeff, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Um, I I think Facilus for a long time has just been really focused on the needs of our customers, and we haven't gone too far a field from from where we started, which is to support uh small and medium-sized post-production facilities that that require um high-end uh workflow tools, but without a high-end price and without high-end engineering or or technical uh uh needs. Uh so the the uh the facilus line has always been known to be simple uh and that's something that we we try and keep with every release although the feature set has been of course growing leaps and bounds especially in the f past 5 to 10 years um and because of that you know we're we're really reaching out to our customers every time we see them. We have a trade show coming up in New York soon and all the trade shows and events that we go to throughout the year. Um always reaching out to them with with what can we be doing better? um and not sort of overengineering something that no doesn't necessarily um fit their requirements or fit their needs. Um and and you know and by doing that I think we've we've kept a lot of loyal customers over the years and and we've
um we've been able to to upgrade them um release after release and and and sometimes you know um with multiple systems over generations. >> Well, I I know from from my own experience was my path to 4K production. there was nothing really out there that was able to to fit the need when 4K came to the party. Um and and now you've got all sorts of, you know, interesting methodologies for connection. Um you know, you dive a little bit into uh the multiple connection methods that you can use with Facilus. >> Yeah, Facilus has has really been all about access and connection. Uh if you can't connect and if you can't access your storage, then you can't work, right? Whether that's on prem or or anywhere else. And so we've been a we've been a big fan of sort of excluding unnecessary parts of the workflow that aren't required, you know, for for simple access, you know, wherever you happen to be. And so with with on-rem, of course, we we go one of the fastest out there, if not the fastest with getting data to the client workstations that are needed in this in this 4K, 6K, 8K world. Uh now when you're out of the facility and you need to get access to that same storage u we we want to give you a way to do that that's that's different than just the generic VPNs um or maybe a cloud upload or something like that where you know you you have all these different components and parts in place and you're you're now paying for rental storage. Um so our WAN link is basically designed around that exact uh feature. It's it's meant to connect between the client workstation and a and a server on a direct public IP without having a VPN uh through our own shared
file system. Uh and then by virtue of that we have some other tool sets like fast cache and fast cache is a client side caching system. Um clientside caching is really useful if you have a low bit rate connection like most of the internet is as compared to on-prem connectivity. uh but still over WAN link I can play something like a 145 or 220 media uh megabit that is um and and not worry about it but fast cache gives me the way to cach that locally so I don't have that uh latency when the internet sort of gets um when I get some when I get some issues in my internet bandwidth >> when it gets Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. And we're trying to we're trying to make it as easy as possible for people to use the storage that they have, connect to it, access it. Uh and now we have hundreds of facilities all over the world that are using this exact method. Some that are designed around complete remote access and a colo. Uh and all they do is is WAN link and and fast cache in to get their get their media and work. >> Very cool. You had some big announcements in and some reveals at the recent IBC show in Amsterdam. um new interface and and improvements there for FastTracker. Uh we able to dive into the features that new look and feel. >> Sure. Yeah. Fast Tracker uh of course our asset management system. One of the things that we did um you know several years ago was we decided that that partnering with an asset management system was a bit dicey because we didn't have control over how they interacted with our permission scheme and how they interacted with with our shared file system and and it just seemed to it seemed too um disjointed. So we we built our own and it took of course years you
know to get it to the point where it is now uh where it's a a fully functioning asset management system for proxy generation transcription AI tagging um file movement file copy push to archive archive tracking all that stuff uh as well as of course you know robust um search and find capabilities you know within within the database itself and and and having all of that robust tagging and and and metadata available for you. And what I can show you here is that, you know, I can bring up a version of my uh fast tracker and see that, you know, when I first open it up, I have this pretty generic uh interface. Um that's, you know, it's it's it's useful, but I may want to change it around. So, I'll go ahead and and load some media up here and see that I have, you know, a frame and and I have some area for metadata and markers and I have a thumbnail area for the search results. Uh but if I just want to be working on logging, I might not want to see all this other stuff. And the one thing we've heard a lot from our customers is, hey, this is all great, but my customers, you know, the people that that are coming in and hiring my services, they don't know what this is, right? They're not going to know what all this stuff is. So, can you make it more simple, you know? Uh, and so we have just generic logging mode. So, if I go here and and just bring down this logging mode, this this takes it into a much more simple method where it says, "Okay, well, now I can just hit play and hit M to make a marker and and type something in and and keep going, you know, and that way all that information goes to the editor. It goes into the database. I don't need to know much about what this thing does or what it
is, but all I know is that I'm I'm I'm reviewing the footage that I probably have some stake in as a customer of this facility." um and you know reporting what I want to to the to the editor and to the producer on the job. And if you know someone were to come in and just say want to view something and say let's say Jeff comes in on his Mac, right? And Jeff opens up the the fast tracker on his Mac and logs in as Jeff. I can make it so Jeff's user is defaulted to just this generic viewer and doesn't see anything else. All they see is the ability to open up this big window. there's the search results or whatever catalog he's he's able to see of all the the the shoot footage and then play it down and and review it. Uh so, you know, this is something that we've done more recently because Fast Tracker got to the point where the feature set, you know, was was pretty darn good and we we now had to sit back and say, "Okay, how do we make this more usable?" you know, uh because the features we just keep piling on features, it gets sort of like, you know, it gets complex and it gets disjointed and it gets all over the place. And so we said, okay, now now our job over these next couple releases, uh moving up into sort of a rewrite that we're doing on the backend administration, um our job right now is to make this more usable, you know, as an application for customers who we work for, uh who are the ones that that run the stuff and they're creative people and they want to see it uh in a more pleasing way to them. They want to be able to um customize it, you know, around different ways. And that's what we've done. >> I I want to be able to easily walk up and grab the screwdriver instead of
having to dig through the entire >> Exactly. Exactly. If you want to make it easy once again, that's the that's the that's the theme and and the the mission statement of the company for a long time is is anything that's not tech that isn't easy won't be used. Um, and we've seen that with so many other asset management systems out there where they get installed and a lot of money gets put into it and it just kind of dies in the vine because, you know, you can't convince people to to double, you know, the time it takes to do everything just because it's an asset management system. Uh, so we try and be as passive as as possible away from the people that don't need to use it, but still give all the functionality for the people that need to see this every day. So getting into that um you know give adding that more functionality AI integration's actually been part of fasttracker for a while now and making it one of the solutions that is really actively integrated inside the asset manager on a storage platform not as an add-on you know third party kind of deal. Um are there any cool features now and what's on the drawing board for the future that you'd be able to share about with the AI side of it? >> Sure. uh AI for us um it it's we started out as transcription and we had a transcription uh service that was local on the server which was kind of unique that you didn't have to push things up to the cloud to get them transcribed and you didn't have to have a secondary service sitting there making those transcriptions all the time. Um and so we we've enhanced that in the latest release using Whisper AI which is open AI. Uh and we've we've done we've done that um on the on the system as well. Doesn't require any push up to into the
internet. It doesn't require any um you know transcoding to a different format. Um and it just uh up to 30 languages uh automatically can be uh can be discerned and transcribed you know on the on the records. And that transcription of course is all available for search. Uh it's available for export as SRTs. It imports as a captions track you know in Adobe for example. Um so you know lots of things you can do with that after the fact. Everyone has transcription now. Every application has transcription it seems. having it in the database that overarches and all of your project files is important because that's that searchability is is there now um a lot as as far as the the object recognition everything goes we're now using Vertex AI through Google um we found it to be the most userfriendly because if you have a Google account it's not really that difficult to set it up uh the pricing is okay you know and and you can you get your feet wet into AI uh tagging pretty easily and now with the new Vertex AI um we have a lot more information that we can get on the clips. For example, before it was just object tracking. Here's a tree. Here's a car. You know, um now it's, you know, what type of car that is, here's the logo on the front of the car, you know, um what type of tree it is potentially, you know, and and um text in the frame. If you pan over a street sign, you're going to see the name of that street, you know, right now in the metadata for that for that file. And all those things, including anything that you've seen in the frame that's a logo is going to pop up and not just say there's a logo there and say who what company that logo belongs to. You know, it's not always right. I mean, nobody gets it
most of the time. Uh, in fact, I have some test footage uh from uh World Surf League. Uh, and they they're they're not called World Surf League anymore. Uh, that they have a new name now, but the the the logo itself, the old logo that they had, which is now gone for 10 years, it recognized that logo as World Surf League. And I was really surprised that Google sort of can go that far back and figure that stuff out. Um, so these are all u these are all things that are important to our customers because um they they want to be able to search on files, find things like for example, did you did you pan over, you know, if you're a if you're a um a public access television station, you know, were you down that shoot downtown once? Did we ever get a picture of that sign before that place closed? You know, it's like, well, just type it in, you know, and and you got it. So, uh, these things are saving lots of time, and that's what AI is all about. AI is about saving time having to go through things, having to to search manually through all your footage to find what you need. Um, and so we we want to in the future make that more robust, but we're we're being practical about it. You know, we're not once again overbuilding something that we don't know if there's a real problem right now that people don't have this. Um, so, you know, we're not going to put a put products put features in the product just because somebody else has them. We're going to hear from our customers that, hey, this is great. you know, it' be even better if you could do this, you know, then that becomes something, you know, from the horse's mouth, as it were, that that we can then take in and justify doing the work on it. So, we're going to sort of take it
in in this AI world and sort of take it a little bit slow and figure out what people are doing and what they want to do and what they can't do currently and and that's going to drive our um drive our development going forward. >> Yep. The best way to innovate is find something that people won't see. >> Find a problem because without a problem, there's no solution, right? >> Exactly. Um, so you you got some cool new tools to integrate with uh Blackmagic Designs Da Vinci Resolve in addition to the panels you have for the other creative tool set. Uh, how's the tool set working out for those folks as revol resolve is a deeper and broader tool set for a large number of parts of the post-production process than many single creative applications. >> Right? So we we love the that resolve, you know, from this one application can do so much. uh and we were looking forward to to getting access to the SDK and working with them on that. And so that that was shipped earlier this year. And um you know what our customers really said was you know I I want to I want the ability to be able to bring metadata in. I want to be able to bring markers in. You know that was their kind of number one. If I put a marker on something it has to transfer into the application so I can see that it's there and and that's that's the way I'm I'm moving you know ideas back and forth between different people in the production. Um, and then to be able to attach proxies, you know, which is which is really cool to, you know, toggle on the proxy, toggle on the timeline for Adobe, for example, prefer proxies and then for Resolve. Um, so those, you know, the proxies that we're creating in Fast Tracker then become those proxies
uh that you're seeing on that timeline in Adobe and Resolve now. Um and all those things, you know, are are are really interesting for for customers and it gives them um a little bit more of a motivation to take an asset management system and make it part of their daily life. Uh because once again going back to the idea that if you don't have buyin from the creative people on the asset management system, it's really tough, you know, because then it's all you, you know, and then well, why am I why am I doing this? Why am I dealing with you know this this uh this ma'am and and you know having to index everything and all this stuff even though it's pretty simple in background operations you know you creative people have to have to have to buy into it if they find that their life becomes easier because of this or they they don't have to wait for the proxy to be generated after they hit the hit the application and they can just start working u then that's that's the kind of thing that they're they're looking for. Um we also uh are going to be working on an Avid panel. Now, this is something that, you know, we've see out there. You know, that that's uh some of our other uh folks out there have done. Um and Avid has an SDK for for panel. Uh it's it's something where, you know, we're not announcing a product yet. Uh when that happens is, you know, everything will be sort of tidied up and buttoned up and ready to go. Uh but we're we're working on it in development. Uh so that's another thing that we're they're looking to do because we have a lot of people who are moving away from Nexus storage, moving away from AD environments. Um and still using media composer. Uh so this is something that we think is very important for us.
Uh not only just the fact that we can create you know optom DNx uh proxies within fasttracker uh but the fact that we can you know have that panel in the application makes it easy to move those into the bin and and and make all that work. Um so that's something to look out for in the future. >> Definitely. and and you you folks have always had been and project sharing since the very beginning of Facilus. So it just seems like a natural progression for that. >> Yeah. In fact, we we we we supported Avid to a greater degree and to I can say the correct way uh earliest uh back in 2009 when we first created our shared file system, we made sure that we weren't going to do the we were going to do the shared file system unless we had full Avid compatibility, you know, Allah, Unity, Nexus, whatever it was back then, you know, uh and so ISIS rather back then. Uh but um we we did that and we do it at the applica at the um operating system level. Uh so unlike some of the other folks out there that are sort of doing some things with the application to make it work, um we we report ourselves as compatible storage right to the OS. So you can upgrade your applications, you can use whatever version you want back and forth, different different, you know, clients, same client, different version, doesn't matter. Um it's all going to look the same, you know, as far as facil storage is concerned. It's going to work with the bin and project sharing and have the proper icons and distributed processing and all the stuff that Avid does behind the scenes. >> All all the goodness. Um, so Strata, very cool addition for your hub users. Uh, Strata is an up andcoming
alternative to in-cloud media delivery to end users. Uh, founded by the Chion brothers who I used to work with. Uh, tell us about the deets there and what the advantages and differences are to other methods this new partnership is going to bring for creatives that use use Basilis. Yeah, we thought it was really cool that someone was coming up with an idea where you you had full access to your on-prem assets without having to put them in the cloud. Um, because, you know, going back and just bearing repeating that that, you know, we we we like the idea of using your storage that you've bought and and not having to worry about um cloud cost and cloud components and upload times and everything else and, you know, whatever else you may you may have a problem with cloud. I mean, there's there's there's definitely some things that cloud is great for, including, you know, off-site disaster recovery and and really widely disparit uh workg groupoups and geocsynchronization of data and things like that. Um, but when it comes to day-to-day operations, putting 100 terabytes in the cloud just so everyone can see it is is not cost effective. Um, and of course, you know, anything you're doing that is cost effective in the cloud, including like deep archive and glacier and things like that, well, that's not accessible, is it? you know, so you're sort of in stuck between a rock and a hard place here. So the idea and you know, this this was the impetus for us to come out with the WAN link product is that everything should be available to anyone anywhere. Uh regardless of whether you have a corporate VPN or whether you're you know you're you're messing around with that
sort of infrastructure. Um and that's the way that we do it. But if you don't want to do port forwards through the firewall and things like that, even though it's fully encrypted and safe and secure, um with WAN link, um you can use something like a strata. And strata is basically the agent sits on our server. It runs natively on our server. Uh they did some work to to expose the virtual volumes that are chosen as sharepoints, you know, or whatever they call them into the into the strata agent. Um and then you can log in from anywhere on any browser and and just go in and see this directory structure, see that folder, see those files. And as soon as you click on it, it starts the player up, which basically is a real-time transcode into a bit rate that's suitable for your connection. So, if you're on a plane or if you're a plane, don't try it, but um if you're in a hotel or if you're in a coffee shop or something, it might be a five or or 7 megabit file. If you're at home, it's going to give you a nice 20 25 megbit high quality, you know. And the point of this is that you you have all this footage, you know, potentially that is being shot for you as a customer of this facility. You're being you're being given access to it, play it down, review it. If you really want to see it in greater detail, you download it, you know, right there. Uh and those are all things that you can do through the Strata app. And you can do things like they they will do a lot more than this, of course, that they'll explain to you if you if you ask them. Uh but they're going to be continuing on with their feature set as well. Uh, and I thought it was a really great product and I thought their price point, you know, free is the starting price point for
them, which is a great price point. Uh, and so for our customers to dip their toes a little bit in this type of of global access uh to on-prem assets, it it fits right in with with our sort of theme, you know, of of not having to use cloud for for daily operations and daily workflow. So, it was a good fit and so it's a good partnership. Well, you know, the nice thing I think about uh being the last or one of the last Windows-based servers, and you know, people cringe when they hear that, but you know, we're not using any of the Microsofty stuff in our in our shared file system. it is basically another level you know uh underneath I guess the operating system because um we we don't have to pay Microsoft for the amount of people that hit the server at the same time. We don't have to worry about you know any of the the Microsofty you know network subsystem and and how they cache and things like that. We don't we we we sort of float above all of that. Uh but we still run with a Windows operating system which means that we have a lot of stuff that can run Strata being one of them. uh we are the only I believe the still the only shared storage provider that can work directly with strata because of the fact that we're on a Windows platform and it makes it easier for for people to develop applications into that can be compatible uh with with basillus. So there are there are multiple NDI based agents. I know Killer View uh has been tested and used on our system uh for direct NDI ingest. Um lots of different log monitoring and security applications that can be used because um when it comes right down to it, it's uh it's it's you know and it's Windows. Uh so I think for the folks who are who are sort of more comfortable with um that
level of of um control over their over their workspaces and control over the operating systems that they use um if they're not familiar with Linux, you know, maybe they don't want to go there. Uh which means, you know, a Windowsbased system would be better for them. Um and you know, there's there's certainly, you know, a bit of FUD out there about it. Uh and you know I'd like to you know discourage that because our systems have been you know every day every month every year reliable you know for a long long time and and it's going to continue to be that way. >> Excellent. General thoughts on the health of the media industry. Uh you know you may have picked up some things talking to folks at IBC and talking with folks in other verticals. Uh what would you say the vibe is these days? >> Um tentative. I mean it's hesit it's hesitation. Um it's a bit, you know, about, you know, tax relief and what programs are in place and what programs are leaving. Um, you know, and that's always been a concern, you know, with the industry and and being able to get access to to the money that they need uh and being able to credit themselves, you know, for that at the end of the year. Um and so those are the things that that really are uh are keeping people on their current technology I think you know for the most part and and hesitating you know when it when it comes to new technology that's um uh that could be deployed is is just that you know where's where's the money coming from and and you know how much of it is mine how much of it can I claim um and you know is is this going to be something that you know the you know we disruptions are out there disruptions
whether it be government shutdowns or strikes or you know transit transit uh walkouts or anything else. I mean so disruptions are something you need to deal with every day you know as a facility owner uh and a company that can sort of help you through that by doing a couple different things. One making sure that you're not on a subscription plan where if you can't pay the subscription this month your system is bricked. I mean we we don't want ever want to hear about that. Um, the second thing is that not charging you retroactive fees uh when it comes to support and warranty contracts. If you have to lapse for a little while, that's fine. I'm sure there's a good reason for it. I'm not going to make you pay for the time that you've lapsed, you know. So, that's just things that we've done over the over the course of our lifespan as a company uh that we've tried to, you know, keep on the on the better side and the right side of of the ups and downs in the economy by making sure our customers can can feel like they have a partner, you know, in us. Um and so you know regardless of where the industry goes at this point uh I think we have a solution that is certainly compelling at its price point uh and competes well up market punches above its weight in many ways uh and does things that that no others can including you know way link and fast cache as I mentioned earlier for remote access and of course you know disruptions you know will cause you to further investigate remote access as a as a workflow that you can use. Um, and as as companies are are shutting their doors, going to coloss going to, you know, remote full remote, um, you don't have to worry about buying an on-prem system today that's not going to be
compatible with that workflow in the future. Um, so that's where we want to be and we can't wait to see the industry sort of turn around and and get us back to sort of prepandemic levels. But, uh, you know, until then, we're happy to keep our customers working and chugging along. >> Quite understandable. Jim, thanks for joining me here today. Great to catch up and hear about the great advances Facilus has been making keeping this industry on the cutting edge. U and thanks to you out there for clicking in to spend a bit of your day with us. If you get a chance, I'd love to see you like and subscribe below. Uh buttons are down there. And remember, all roads lead to archive where QuStar is LTO.