Hello everybody. Welcome back to all roads lead to archive callstar series about everything media broadcast and data and managing those tons of media and data produced every day. Getting into the back end of all this is what we're up to today. Uh we're sitting down with Jeremy Strutman, the senior director for Channel with Backlight, folks behind Iconic, and Bryson Jones with Northshore Automation, who've been about connecting disparate things together into sensible workflows for quite a while. Uh, I've known both these guys for many a year and they're well known in the systems design space for figuring out how to deal with media and workflow and they're kind of the best in the business. J, thanks for joining me here today. First, let's get started with you, Bryson. How'd you end up in this crazy awesome industry? >> Yeah. All right. Um, quick version of it is is I was working in IT at a television network and uh, it was right when they decided that edit bays were going to no longer be edit bays and they were going to be computers, right? And so I was hanging out a lot down there in their department and uh, they tried to hire me away and it was very funny. I just decided instead to go freelance because I I it was didn't want them to deal with the politics and and then almost immediately got pulled into installing avid media composers and uh that was late 90s and then over the next few years basically the next 10 years I worked on larger and larger storage and around 2007 I started to see that we were able to make more media than we could manage and so 2007 I started deploying asset management systems and really I had gotten deeply into media management consulting and then um in
2010 I met my partner co-founder Damen Corbell and Northshore happened in 2010 2011 we formed up and started actually building software solutions and so at that point Northshore was launched and I made the decision that storage in my opinion was going to become a commodity and uh and and that problem was going to get solved by people lots of smart people and but but nobody was talking about assets asset management. So, it was early, somewhat painful, but over the years, uh, you know, Jeremy and I partnered up. We met working when he was working at SNS and doing storage and then just sort of through the years, you know, kind of connected and did more and more stuff together till I mean, it's crazy now. We've been working together like, you know, almost 20 years or something. It's crazy. >> Yeah. >> True. >> That is crazy. Jeremy, how about you? I mean, it sounds like this we're going to get into probably career management as a service. [laughter] >> Yeah, that's a good good one. Yeah. Um, yeah. So, like Bryson, I was on the IT side, uh, primarily in in IT sales. Um, you I had done that for quite a few years and it wasn't something that I was particularly passionate about in terms of, you know, the the actual subject matter and uh I was living in St. Louis, Missouri at the time and ended up coming into contact with Studio Network Solutions, which is uh what Bryson had just mentioned. So uh so my entry into the business was uh building out shared storage solutions for um media editorial workflows, post workflows and things like that. So um yeah, worked with them for uh better part of a decade. Met Bryson during that time. Uh eventually
uh we're were partnering with uh other archive solutions and media asset management solutions and uh it it became very intriguing with me to to for me to get deeper into um you know how how the actual metadata informs action on media and so on and so forth. So uh yeah that's that's uh that's where Bryson and I did the bulk of our work together was on the on the MAM side. um you know moving data from storage to storage. >> It's important to note that in both those those days archive was integral to that transition for both of us. It's that's something that's really interesting. I don't and I don't think about that Jeremy as much but but a lot of the man work we did was driven by archive even. >> Oh 100%. Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. Exactly. >> Yep. And and the fun thing is we we used to archive at the beginning and then then work and now things have have definitely shifted. So I I know that you all have spent countless hours talking about lifting everything to the cloud with different clients and organizations, but we all know that really isn't going to happen, especially on the larger enterprise size. What parts are actually able to go to the cloud and then you can duplicate and use to keep track of things. What does having a duplicate in on prem give you that ability to pull off? Jeremy, let's start with you. >> Yeah, I mean, so so you're right, Jeff, like I'm I'm still there there there may be a mythical organization that moved everything to the cloud uh successfully uh and and and maybe they're talking about moving that back. I hear people like, "Yeah, we tried that. We tried the
cloud and now we're now we're, you know, we want a more on premise strategy or what have you." And it's like, I don't think that's fully the case. I think one thing that we've uh definitely noticed is the cloud. The the obvious thing is people started treating the cloud like an archive. But uh one thing that we've noticed a lot of is actually the other side where where folks who are um you know working remote or they're remotely shooting or there's event- based work or what have you. Uh the team is actually collaborating and using the cloud as like a hot tier of storage, right? So, so that's the thing that I didn't really foresee coming out of uh, you know, when when cloud started to become part of the conversation, but I'm seeing a lot of that where it's like, you know, look, the the cloud is the hot tier. It allows everybody to get access to everything whenever, no matter who you are or what your role in the the pipeline is. Um, and then, you know, the source of truth uh, for a lot of folks is is on premise. So, when it's done, it's wrapped and it needs to go cold. um you know it it can go to a source of truth that's that's sitting on premise and then to your point maybe that's maybe that's for DR purposes it's duplicated or replicated to the cloud >> yeah I mean I I I'll pitch on that a couple things. So, first I just want to say to to Jeff, to you, thanks for having us on. It's hilarious that you trust us enough because we are strongly the cloud guys, right? You know, and but we worked with tape though for year. I mean, I've worked with tape for I don't know 25 30 years now. It's crazy, but but it's really funny because I've been fortunate enough to actually see some of those unicorn companies that that do
everything in the cloud and they and I always tell people they typically are uh at the low end getting their start where they haven't made a big capex expenditure or at the extreme high end where the cost of management equals out if you're really going to deal with that. However, your point of that, the term that I use when when Jeremy and I talk about that that hot tier cloud, I I call it tier zero. So, virtual file systems like, you know, sweep, lucid, link, things like that, storage, all those those I call tier zero because you used to have the old tiers, you know, you tier one where you're editing and then tier two maybe nearline, tier three maybe tape. Um, tier zero for us is that ultimately flexible stuff. The big thing though and and I it's very funny. You probably people who meet me wouldn't like a a guy that looks like me probably wouldn't be thinking about the business case first. But I'm always thinking about that business case and I've seen people get bit by uh tied into a platform, right? Happened with Avid. Uh one of our largest businesses is Avid Interplay Migration at Northshore and we're pulling people out of that purple triangle because they literally trusted their media into a media format. So that media and metadata being able to make that be open. The same thing can happen with the cloud. The smartest people are keeping that own co that copy and the cheapest way to keep that copy for yourself is tape. Then when you get in a fight with your hyperscaler and you're like well I'm going to leave Microsoft and AWS is better or or vice versa or wherever you go you can just turn off that account you know. So there's so many things there. So I would say that like that yeah for us there's a certain
place where like if somebody already has tape for instance and we come in to do a cloud transformation I advise in every one of my consults maybe you make a tape maybe you make a tape before you send it to the cloud but but we should and we're going to talk about it in a bit I know get into that case where what Jeremy's talking about which is uh you can't have tape in 17 locations around the country everywhere you hire a freelancer and managing that and making that pipeline work is is a big part of what we do today to make sure that the data is where it should be at the right moment. But yeah, largely forever. I mean, who's going to say a platform is forever, right? I remember Fster and MySpace. [laughter] >> Nice. So, the the fun thing is when you do talk about the cloud workflow, um, and I' I've seen this, you know, in my years as, you know, running facilities, you walk into the vault, there's a box left. So the optimum workflow for that cloud where you're dealing with other people's stuff is you hand over the bucket at the end. It's like the box of stuff you send from the vault or you're using the cloud bucket from the the user at the beginning but you're also telling them yeah I don't know how much it's going to cost. Uh you know that's it's not just a film and TV thing. It's corporate as well. And then we get to the whole point of most organizations do not know what they have or they just have too much or the state of it. So do you want to talk about the the way the waves of archive have happened in the past? And Bryson, let's kick this off with you. >> Yeah, I mean I so I come out of backup, right? And I moved into archive. So I was used to tape as backup systems and
then moved into archive. I just want one big pitch about that is that the reason a lot of times that that doesn't happen that dream it also happens to tape too because you choose some middleware that's not open and compatible and you're like well you have to have this brand or you can't read these tapes. So LTFS >> that but you really want to be careful about compliance because that's that's where the friction it's where tape got a lot of bad names because companies were like oh no no you have to use our format. So, I'm always going to advise people to use an open tape format. You know, not even when possible, just use an open tape format. If you're buying something that's proprietary, you're going to force everyone to use that. And years from now, we're going to be trying to find some way out of that or you're going to pay someone like Northshore a lot of money to get it out. >> Isn't that what literally like part of what LTO stands for is open? >> Yeah. Linear tape open, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But but you can put a semi-proprietary or somewhat proprietary format on it which is bananas, right? Yeah. It's like Yeah. So, but I would say that that for me the eraser you talk about the eras of archive. >> Um I talk a lot to people about this is do not and this is like I hope you guys all come yell at me at trade shows. Do not trust editors. Do not even trust post supervisors with your long-term content strategy because they're under pressure and they're trying to just make the video. And I have a whole presentation I give about this because you have to talk people out of letting the editors choose the media organization and the strategy
because the organization so we tell people uh editors never need a ma'am. They mostly don't in in our experience. The organization needs a ma'am. The organization needs an archive. An editor never needs an archive. So letting an editor lay out your strategy. If you get luckily enough to move up to the big leagues where you go talk to people that own libraries for a hundred years, you know, we of customers that they're they're stuff's going to go public domain. They've owned it and monetized it for so long. When you get there, you know that uh I'm never going to I always tell people I you say this, the original editor of Snow White had nothing to do with where they stored that film or how they stored that film. Right. So I just want to say that now that it's digital >> the first person that works for you is probably your editor and they they start that at every or but at some point you have to get a strategy and once you get that strategy then you do start working worrying about like something we're going to talk about today a good bit you're going to hear from us is acquisitions. If you build a company, if you build a property, you want to monetize it or you want to sell it. And when you want to sell it, you don't just sell it the first time. You sell it over and over. And in order to close that deal and for that check to clear, that has to be delivered. And I want to say that it's no longer a technical challenge. It is an organizational challenge. It is a business planning challenge to do that handoff that you're describing. And if you just spend the minimum amount of time with it, you can have a strategy where everything I don't care if it's a pabyte. I can give it to somebody and they can, you know,
nowadays you can put a pabyte in a almost like a legal box probably. You know, it's not that big of a deal. So, I think that that's a big thing that people need to think about is uh my statement I always say is, you know, your boss already thinks you're doing this. >> Yeah. >> Your board, your CEO CEO thinks you have a strategy. And if you don't, you probably want to flag to them that you've been busy making video, but you've not been thinking about the long-term retention or distribution of that video. >> Well, and and also like you mentioned, selling archives of things like libraries of stuff to people later. I' I've listened to the gentleman from the Library of Congress and he talks about the metadata that they need and that has nothing to do with any of the stuff that we use in production. It has nothing to do with any of the business case metadata. And the thing is those archives also exist. There's there's troughs of of metadata and there's troughs of archive because they're all associated. If you want something to be available in, you know, 2125, you got you got to think about that well in advance from the business perspective and that that's a thing a lot of people don't necessarily get into there. >> No, it's it's 100% right. We've se Bryson and I have seen deals fall apart in in in that arena because even if you do a great job of all this archive and and to your point Jeeoff you've got you've got uh metadata that's associated with the the creation of the project it doesn't necessarily have all the correct titled metadata you know that metadata has changed and whatever however you
know there are tools there are ways that like you know NSA and other folks have taken uh you know those archives and married those with um you source of truth metadata platforms that that that make this data available. But but yeah, it is it it it it is a challenge and I think you know Bryson kind of identified like there are kind of two there's customers that are fully in the cloud and customers who are mo you know hybridized mostly and the low-end customer uh you know or I don't call lowend but you know folks the small >> shops yeah small >> that built their organization you know off the backs of remote workflow and and all of that uh they don't have that kind of like single source of truth. So, uh, a lot of that becomes just like a dumping ground in an S3 bucket. You know, masters go to YouTube, you know, where's everything else? What happens if someone wants to buy that that library? It's not necessarily like prepped and ready to go. Um and it's a challenge because you know they might be sitting on hundreds of gigs of data whereas the other guys you know the the those guys have dedicated people who are archavists who are in the business of data retention who are not on the creative team. They they've got full departments that are that are armed with >> them have college degrees in it. >> Yeah. Even even college degrees. Yeah. And it's like >> I always love when people figure that out that that you can get a degree, you know, in archive science, you know, we work with some of those people. But >> yeah. >> Yeah. They call them librarians even. Uh those folks are are, you know, the sure they're they're probably putting
everything in the cloud, but they're also probably keeping multiple copies on premise as well. Um but yeah, it's it's that middle ground which which is really like 80 or 90% of the customers that that we're dealing with where we have to guide them like how much is appropriate for you know where you put it and all of that and what talent and what staff do you actually have on the payroll that can help manage this and that's that's where we really run into, you know, a bit of a negotiation in terms of try like trying to guide people um to Bryson's going. >> Yeah. Wait. Oh, great. So, when we close that because because a lot of times we bring up problems in these things and we don't give that solution. So, I want to say if you're watching this and you're kind of getting a cold sweat feeling tightness in your chest because you don't have a budget to do that. Know that there's a lot of information out there, you can get a relatively inexpensive consult for somebody that will just say, "Hey, just do this." And then later when somebody has that seven or eight figure deal, nine to buy all this, we can figure it out. It may just be that you get somebody who's a media professional who's worked around ma'am who knows about this long-term business. Just do a small engagement with them and go just make sure we're not messing anything up. There are choices you can make now that will secure you in the future even if you don't have the best system in the world. So just want to say that that like there are things but you do need to shift your thinking out of this is a production and this becomes this becomes a property that is going to live for a long time. But that's just want to bring that up because that's
important for people to know too. Yeah. >> Yeah. And the other thing that's interesting is, you know, I've got a degree in television production. At no time during any of my education did anyone ever come and say, "Let's talk about how you archive all this stuff you you have made." It's like, "No, we got we got videotapes. It's not a big deal." Didn't even think about it. So, the the thing I've always said about this is I blame our nation schools. we haven't taught people about this >> and now we've got phones that make that side of it easy. Like, you know, my my phone my my things are are backed up. I don't have to to think about that. It just does it. Um, as long as I pay the bill. And I think we'll get into that a little bit later. Um, >> so, uh, Jeremy, let's start with you on this one. Uh, we can have a talk about folks who start out in this and they don't have any physical infrastructure. what are you seeing out there in advising these folks to do and at the end of that production or or or cycle? How are you able to then pack up and and go out of that? >> Well, yeah. So, I think um there's a couple things that I'm starting to see. I think when people are starting out with zero infrastructure, they're they're starting to leverage premium storage type solutions like, you know, Dropbox and Google Drive and things like that. and and you know if if the three of us were going to try to put together you know any sort of professionallook video we might be able to get by with it but obviously you know things start to scale uh you know those platforms aren't necessarily designed for the purposes of managing that volume of data uh and then in some scenarios you know when people
walk they walk away with the link and then the data's gone right it's like you know one of the beautiful things is is uh Dropbox figured out a way to sell you the same terabyte of storage to like like five people at the same time. But once that link disappears and it's happened where it's like, hey, I'm just the I'm just the uh the editor. I'm I that link expired. I delivered my my master and now I've walked away. So, we've lost all the raw, right? Like or it's just with that editor and we got to find that guy again, right? Um so I see a lot of mistakes like that uh that are going on right now and and those are things like hey you know really start to think about a storage strategy um you know no matter where that is but that the org itself actually owns or has control over the storage and not a third party vendor um you know I say I see people getting into dams and MAMS and some of those systems the way they're architected um you know would even require you to push your data into their storage. So I think you know at the end of the day you do want to retain the right to own your own data on your own storage that you own in some capacity and decouple workflow tools away from it, you know, like your MAM or your DAM or whatever and and and just walk away with your your raw data. So, you know, even though you're never going to own a cloud, per se, um, you know, you can own that relationship with, you know, your AWS and all of that. Um, and and even there, you know, >> and I think you can own the results of that, too. So, hey, I've got all this stuff I've had up there. I paid lots of money to get insights from, say, AWS recognition. How do I then take those
things and put them somewhere that I don't need to keep on a very hot tier of expensive storage in the cloud all the time? >> Yeah. And that's and that's key. I mean, I have I, you know, I' I've have all my data on premises and all of that. It's also in the cloud. Um, but I can walk away from those guys at any time and uh and and I'm in in great shape. But I think I think really what what it it's when people when when the data gets too big and there's just too much data for the likes of like a Dropbox or a Google Drive or something like that, that's when the pain starts to set in. And then it's like already it's like no matter what you do, it's still a pain to move or migrate or whatever. >> Like by the way explaining to it that uh that the that unlimited storage deal is not unlimited. you know, right? [laughter] My favorite like >> my favorite one is when Yeah. the argument of like, you know, like, well, but I have unlimited Google Drive. You're like, yeah, but you can only get you can only put 750 gigs a day in, you know, and you're like, oh, okay. And >> yeah, >> and that's going to take and and how long is it going to take to get it back, right? So yeah, my most successful customers, I have a customer right now that uh we're actually putting into into Backlight and uh and AWS, but they have everything on two geoloccated raids, which was a great starting thing. They had only a couple people into in production and so they were like, well, we have a RAID here and we have a RAID there and we share everything off of our they're in that case, they're using a virtual file system. So they have their
their cloud edit storage and they copy it all down and they keep that in sync between the two. Now we're going to add cloud as that third location. More importantly now especially with remote work uh the organization now because the organization those are people's offices or houses or whatever home offices and so you it's hard to physically lay hands on that. So now the organization can own the AWS cold archive you know and then they can own you know that with you know the the the metadata in iconic and have that set up. That's a big thing there. I'd like to see, you know, we'll talk about I think in a bit, but I'd like to see people take longer term storage more seriously. Right now, everyone's really comfortable. When we all three started, nobody was buying shared storage. No, not much. At least only just like Hollywood, you lived in New York or LA, Chicago, you know, Dallas. Basically, if you had shared storage, if you didn't in Atlanta, if you didn't go in a major market, nobody, everybody was just working on a local hard drive. It was a nightmare. And now you mostly see people able to buy shared storage. Now the idea is can we get them to where they mostly also own something that for 30 plus years will will be there and be solid. That's that's probably the next wave which >> and and it'll be there and and not necessarily at the price because the the thing is you know we get into this concept of tape as a service and most people are like you know I run into people all the time like well you know we don't do tape anymore. Well do you have deep glacier? That's tape as a service. You're just paying someone else to do it. And I was in in New York the other week with um at the SVG show and
someone was talking about how NBC did an entire costbenefit analysis and the cost to have it in the cloud was five times as much as to have it on LTO. So they they said, "Let's just we're going to keep it on tape." And you can keep stuff in in in the deep archive in the cloud that you're going to need to pull out in other regions. Uh if you don't necessarily have that, you know, connectivity between your existing data centers that's fast enough, though, that's coming up pretty dang quickly as well. So let's get a little bit further into that whole tape as a service where it's either your own or you get service providers that give you the access you need. Um, and that it gets also wider with the concept now that's coming out and and we're about to embrace that as well of basically it's tape presenting as S3. So it kind of begins to smash that easy button for folks like, oh, I just put it in the S3 bucket. No, you actually put it on tape. You just didn't know it. Which is, you know, for me a wonderful space to be in. >> Yeah. >> Well, and and let me let me hit that for a second. uh what you just said like because this hopefully this podcast gets shared out to bosses who may or may not be technical and understand what this is. You can own a tape drive, a library autoload or whatever your form factor you want to talk about and not be able to put data on it because you need some sort of middleware or translation layer in it. That's something that really confuses people. It happens in hard drives. If you have a raw hard drive, you can't put data on it either. You need like some kind of box to put it in. So that middleware we're talking about. So what Jeff is talking about is taking
S3 is a type of storage and it is also a a protocol an API that connect you can connect to storage using an S3 you know API and so in this case what we're talking about is being able to put tape behind an S3 interface because most of the MAMS or systems out in the world can use S3 even even FTP clients can use S3 so you can do that. So you no longer need this kind of uh other software. You can just anything that's compatible with the cloud is compatible with tape. So it's a really interesting sort of situation that's opened up. I just want to kind of pitch that in a quick explainer on that. >> S3 back storage. >> Yeah. I wouldn't have written I wouldn't have paid money to do that survey on you know what is more cost effective tape or or or cloud because I would have just done both you know now I'm from a place of convenience with an unlimited budget in my mind where I can do that right but I think the correct answer is really both right >> that's from the folks who are doing the Olympics this year they're the ones saying yeah we can't >> both doesn't make sense financially because somewhere up the line someone's asking questions like why Why do you have these two dollar items in these budgets? Aren't these the same thing? And that's why they that's why it makes sense for them to start they're they're at that scale where it it keeping that money in in hand is is much better for them. >> So I've had to justifi justify my business's existence for the last 15 years, right? That's been that's been something we've dealt with for years now. And now you just hit the point where you're there because now you go,
"Well, wait a minute. Oh h how do I do this?" Well, you need orchestration. The reason it's Northshore automation is that a is about the fact that like manual labor will fail you if you start trying to say you know what I want to copy on disk I want to copy in the cloud some of it not all of it and then I want uh everything on tape so at that point you need automated systems to do that normally a ma'am helps orchestrate that it's not necessarily required >> but that's where the number one driver for people implementing media asset management across mine and Jeremy's career has been someone says I need to archive uh and it used to be everything goes to archive is more like a backup. Now it's like, oh, I need to archive, but I need to know, for instance, talking to you, Jeff, I need some of this on a very hot cloud tier. I need some of it in a very cold cloud tier. I need a certain format created that's a mid-level mezzanine that's good enough that can go to the cloud and be shared. And then I the the high-risk here. Once you start managing all those versions, it gets really confusing. The only other option is to put everything everywhere which is expensive as Jeremy was saying or then you can implement some sort of media asset management solution where you can say I have rules my proxy my low res is in the cloud my high-res is in the building and whatever I do and oh I'm going to distribute a mid mezzanine to some people in Europe great I'll put that in the cloud all of a sudden your cloud spend is less because proxy and mez you've got everything high-res high speed in your facility and then you can archive that maybe to tape or to cold managing that with human is nearly impossible.
>> So I think that gets into why ma'am is really an important thing that structure that does things that probably even AI can't do for you yet. That gets into the whole taxonomy, the curation and incremental use of it. So what do we do with the archive infrastructure? Who's going to support it? And why is MAM so important there? Well, yeah. And as as Bryson pointed out, you know, it's it's it's funny because like a lot of people think a ma'am you is just going to help you find where stuff is. And it's like it's actually kind of directing where stuff goes more more realistically if you're doing it right, you know. So it's it's, you know, initially you get to that because of what Bryson had said. Somebody comes along and says you know what we've documented a policy in a spreadsheet and we've you know there is a rules of engagement that we're going to make a copy here and a copy there and do this and do that and then you know a few you know personnel changes and you know next one thing leads to another and now data is just everywhere and no one knows exactly why and you know we have that challenge in naming conventions you know you can tell when Susan was in charge cuz Susan had had that naming convention and then Jan comes along and all of a sudden it shift ed to a totally different thing. Um, so that's usually what drives ma'am is to enforce policies and enforce data movement based on policy. Um, you know, that's that's when we get invited to the party usually. Invited to the party usually. >> And it keeps you covered in case someone, you know, gets hit by a winning lotto ticket. Just says, "I don't care." >> Oh, yeah. No, no, not us, Jeff. We're not that lucky. But [laughter] but
>> No, no. I mean it no it's usually I'll give you an example business case of that right because people know like it's hard we we joke about you know it's hard to do the ROI on a ma'am and so uh here's one for you we all three were on this client I won't name the client but all three were there of course I caught as usual I caught the short end of the stick so I pulled the short straw so here you go Stan by the way let me just say publicly on every podcast we do together Stuan has put me in more difficult situations than anyone in my life so the fact that we're still friends shows what a great Yeah, he is. [laughter] So, here you go. Customer >> incredibly forgiving to me. >> Yeah, maybe it is just that >> the same mistake twice. I just >> I know. I will say that. Yeah. So, here's one that an editor did. One of the things that happens that in the real world uh editors and and the media manager made a decision uh 200 projects at a large corporate account, 200 projects in a file system, and they had put all of their final masters in the project folder. six layers deep. And someone said, "You know what, guys? We need all the manageers. We need all the masters together. We need every one of the masters." And so the editors had named some exports and some masters, right? So you had some folders called exports and some called masters. They had certain formats that were in there and certain formats were higher res than others. And they were buried in files, 200 folder structures, six layers deep. And so the poor person when we we were working with them and we caught them doing this and they were like, "What are you doing?" They're like, "Oh, I'm going
through and I'm getting all the masters out and I'm moving them over here." And we were like, "Hold hold on, hold on." And they had a ma'am. So we went to the ma'am. We searched for folder containing in this structure folder containing masters or experts in the name. We searched for a certain format that we knew was the version they wanted of the video format. We found all of the 200 high-res masters and with one click, we moved them. And at that point, they were like, "Oh, wow. We were going to spend days to weeks on that." We're like, "Yeah, you can do that in 10 minutes." And then the machine copies. Uh, it's one of the greatest quotes. >> If they had done that manually, there probably would have also been human error involved. >> They would have missed things. They would have done it wrong. Yeah. Exactly. And and they also wouldn't have had any accountability or reporting of what actually happened. Right. We were able to show them that 200 files moved and here's where they moved and we maintained them. Right? My uh my partner, my favorite saying of his is that's what the computer is for. When you're if you're doing something hard, Damian will stop you and he'll go, "Dude, that's what the computer's for." >> You don't need to do all this heavy lifting. It's things we got that'll do that for you. So, talking about heavy lifting, let's get into a discussion about migration and how those have behaved for y'all. Uh, what do you do when companies have failed to follow those simple rules of backup? >> Yeah, I you you charge a lot. I'll just say it. You just charge a lot. You got to know you need and you need to know that right now. If you're creating a
nightmare, there's not a company on the planet that's going to come in and clean that up for you inexpensively. So, migration is a big part of Northshore's business. And I will say that this is interesting to note. This is the net metric you need. If you kept your stuff clean and let's say you had an old ma'am and an old storage system and then you're going to move to this new one. If you kept everything clean and linked up and good, we're going to charge you X. If we run the migration and we find problems, it's two to 3x the original cost to clean it up. So keep it clean the first time if you can because we don't and it's not money we want to make. Nobody wants to do that job. But it's a really big deal because like you said, uh, we three have seen global organizations split. The craziest thing I ever saw was I saw two companies that, well, one company that was splitting and they had to split four pedabytes into two two pedabyte structures. And they were able to do that relatively quickly because they had media management. They knew what everything was. and they had automation to go you you get these and you get these and all the lawyers were happy. So just say that like along the way like at some point you have to stop and clean it up. Either you have to do it or and you get usually get brought in when it just would take years if you don't automate it. That is one place I am bullish. I I'm I am weirdly negative about a lot of AI right now because I work with it every day and I know the true state of it. I will say however we are starting to see a lot of help in that way and I would say that in the next few months that will start to help us and clean up. It's one of the first places we'll see. You should not do it
yourself because it's highly highly variable but being able to combine some artificial intelligence and machine learning does help you automate faster and that's going to be probably the next year for us is using those processes >> to get we start to get painkillers for the media root canal you have to do. >> Yeah. >> And that is exactly what it is. Yeah. Well, and Bryce Bryson, you know, he kind of flew by this one point that I want to kind of slow down on, and that's that's like the lawyers in that deal. The lawyers built the terms, you know, they put the terms around that deal, which, you know, they decide the timeline and salespeople decide, you know, the the the the comment that we made earlier about me me putting Bryson into painful situations is because I don't know what I'm selling half the time. and and there's there I mean I know what I'm selling but sometime there there are contingencies in there that are not up to myself or Bryson to determine, right? So that's when it gets painful. It's like when a salesperson sells the library or a lawyer decides when the term of the split needs to happen by, they're not thinking about a big messy bucket of S3 mess, you know? Uh, so they don't they don't know what it is they're actually pitching or writing down. They just think, you know, in a month this should happen, you know, and it's like, >> and [clears throat] it goes back to what Bryson said earlier. Your CEO thinks you're doing this already. Oh, no. >> Yeah. Exactly. >> The the lawyers, it's very funny, we mentioned this, you know, being older in our careers, the lawyers still think there's a a room full of this stuff
somewhere, right? They still think that you're going to go that one, not that one, that one, not that one, right? And so, yeah, it's a big thing. And Jeremy, I think the other piece that off the shelf and and send them in a box over to It's not how it works. >> Yeah. And the thing that I love that you that you said first people should know that like you're seeing us hopefully this is you you appreciate this like I to go back to the beginning. I love Jeff you and and Qualar brought us on because we aren't the bullish tape guys all the time and we have migrated people you know from and out of tape and stuff. We've seen a lot of the the warts on those workflows and stuff and all, but hopefully you get the feel that we are, you know, concerned for the industry as a whole and our customers and even the people that aren't our customers. Mr. What you said, the thing that you the way you I you wanted to say is I want to correct it because you always know you're you're you're one of the most technical sales people I've ever met in my life, but we can't know everything that someone hid in the deal for us, right? We're going to go in and we're going to open that and take a look in that digital closet and there's no telling what's there. And so I'm the person, Jeremy's talking, everyone's talking to him and saying what they think is the case. And then my team rolls in and then someone invariably calls me on my team and goes, >> "Someone was not clear about what they had, right?" You know, like, "Oh, what is this?" You know, there's, oh, there's 400,000 files, you know, in another piece of media that's in Cincinnati that no one thought about. >> Yeah. The first migration I sold for
Bryson, the the I I failed to qualify that the actual archive was going to be plugged in and turned on and still connected to everything and not sitting in a box in a basement somewhere unplugged. So like it's down to kind of stuff where it's like I we just assumed but I guess we know what that means. >> We we assumed that you would keep your system live until you migrated it. We we literally [laughter] had a called on the engineer and the engineer is like what are you guys doing? And we were like this thing. and he goes, "Oh, that's in a stack in the corner of the machine room disconnected." And we were like, "Well, you should try to put that back together because that's got all your data on it." I love that story. >> Well, we we hope it's got all your data on it sometimes. >> Yeah, exactly. We assume until we know, we're all going to be very scared. >> It's on fire. The dumpster is actually on fire. >> Oh, and and to a pitch, that's the thing. We I'm doing right now one of the big broadcasters in America right now, we're doing migrations uh for them coming off of a of a tape system that they had. And in many cases they have literally like e-wasted the hardware. But you know what they always have the tapes and that's the key thing of it. And then but then going back to that metadata the question is do you have the tapes and do you have a database? And so we're about to release actually guidelines for people when they are decommissioning old systems like please just do this like if you own this please get this and this and then the doctors can help you right and it's a big deal but I just want to
say that before you decommission stuff just spend a just call just email us even if I even if you have no budget I would be rather take 15 minutes and talk to you and tell you what not to do than to than to see you call me a year later and go we now have the budget you know we've literally done pro sports teams where they didn't have the budget, they decommissioned something, they come back a year later and they we got the budget to get our stuff and someone made a mistake in decommissioning it and they've lost the data. And >> that's culturally significant data. >> Yeah. >> Right. >> Well, I mean, speaking of that, that gets to the and I've heard you talk about this in the past, Bryson, the digital gulf of 1998 to February 29th, 2009. >> I love that you looked it up. This is why I love you. Uh, yeah, man. And I've been talking for years about a thing that hit me. I I call it like the digital golf, the digital canyon. And what it is is that I realized that um I have all my photos through from up until 98. And then I have all my photos after 2009. But if you ask me for a photo from like 2000 2001, I I have almost none. And the reason was is because I made the transition from shooting film, 35 millm film to shooting digital on cameras, but I did not have any sort of media management. And I was just like downloading cards onto some laptop or something. And even as a media professional, your best plan of like, oh, I'll copy it to here how old I am. I copy it to a FireWire drive, dude. And those drives failed that laptop. So I started talking to my friends about it and they were like, everyone had a
story. Oh yeah, my um you I have a laptop. It's in the closet because it has all my photos from my wedding on it, but I didn't, you know, I h it broke and I can't really afford to do recovery or whatever. The only person I will say that does not have that story is Strutman because he worked around a tape company at the time. Strman, give your story. Where are your files from 2003? >> So I had a RAID. Uh being a storage guy, I was very heavy on RAID. That way I could sustain data, you know, drive failures and things like that. Um, you know, then the single point of failure becomes the controller that controls the RAID. Uh, so that controller died on me. And I said, well, that's no problem. I have all of this backed up in the cloud. Even at that time, I had it backed up in the cloud, but I was using a backup utility that was corrupting the data before it sent it to the cloud. So, I had no data. And the only thing that saved me uh was to Bryson's point, I was partnering with and working with a uh a tape company at the time, and I happened to have a tape machine in my basement, a drive, and I was just like, well, I'll copy these files to an LTO tape, two LTO tapes. Um, you know, just just to try this thing out. And I went I I fe I went back into a closet and I dug and dug and dug and I found those tapes and I pulled those tapes out and I asked another buddy of mine, totally different manufacturer by the way, which gets back to your point earlier on, Bryson, about the open format, plugged that tape into that completely different manufacturer and was able to restore all of that data. So when Jeff talks about the 321 rule, we talk about, you know, if your data is not triplicate, you don't have a single copy of it and all of that like
that actually that actually came out of my my uh my own personal experience. So yeah, >> and the reason that this came up to me was that I I know that culturally I'm watching people digitize their videotapes, right? And we know that you know the famous Dell statement which is true. They did the calculation that there are more hours of beta tape in the world than there's headlife to read them. So, we're going it's not what it's not if we're going to lose data. We are going to lose part of our culture. And I just wanted I I started trying to get this out to people to say like, "Hey, go find that stuff. Go get it." I was able to recover a corrupt photo library and get some of my stuff. I still myself have a drive that ended up not being properly backed up because I lost the backup like you said streetman right the 321 rule so for me you know having those three formats has become really critical and um yeah it's just an interesting thing that like you don't think about it's just something I want to bring up though culturally because it's important at this point you know uh you get older you want to look back at your life uh and things become important there one of my favorite things is uh old television commercials when I was a kid Nothing gives me more joy than the GI than G.I. Joe commercials or a evil conval like you know the windup thing and I love that. I see that stuff on YouTube and I'm like man thank goodness somebody took whatever that tape was probably one inch or something two inch at the time and and transferred it but you know it's much easier for us. But I just want to bring that up that like the idea of a bulletproof copy of everything you know it's not sexy. Nobody wants to. No one's
going to like come in and, you know, sexy salesman of selling you tape. But the thing is is that if if if you pin me down no matter how like if I'm in the room with everyone from AWS and Sweet Studios and and and backlight and all and they go, "What do you do? What do we mean? How what do we do when the zombie apocalypse comes?" You're like, "Well, you're probably going to want to have something on tape because it's the only thing that's affordable to us." Like that's not the Library of Congress, right? You know, their methods, which is >> Yeah. Amazing. >> Yeah. >> And the the other thing there is, you know, you said you mentioned FireWire. You know, some people say, "Oh, I've got everything on FireWire sitting back in the closet." And okay, that's great. If you take them out and they're still spinning, your Mac doesn't talk to those anymore. It's done. The drivers were abandoned. So, last month when I was in St. Louis at the supercomputing show, gentleman comes up and he says, "Oh, I I still have LTO1 running in my garage." like, "Oh, you want to upgrade?" "No, I don't need to upgrade. It's working great." So, he still has data from 20 25 years ago that he's able to use and keep keep running because the format is is valid. He doesn't have to worry about drivers going away or anything like that. I mean, yes, it's not LTFS because that came along in five LTO 5, but he still has his stuff. >> Yeah. Yeah. I think >> I got to tell you, I got to tell you, LTO1 running in his garage. Uh, not only is his data safe from 25 years ago, but that's amazing level of geekery. My hat
my hat is off. I tip my hat to you, sir. [laughter] >> I was going I I was going to take this conversation in a different direction. But it is true. It is true though that you know there's there's example after example of uh you know like the Nashville floods and all of that where it's like you know I mean at the end of the day can you get this stuff out if it was all in the cloud? If everything was in the cloud can we you get it out? Yes. It's just going to cost you money. The problem becomes that hard decision that people have to make is like on stuff that's like it's worth it but it's just not worth that much money. >> Yeah. >> So like of course yes I'm going to pay anything to unlock you know the masters of Snow White out of the cloud, right? But for you know that you know you know rodeo sport that's like important but like mildly important and doesn't warrant the kind of extortionary budget that you might need to get to unlock that like it's it it becomes a challenge where I think you know I don't think you're going to lose stuff if you put it in the cloud. You just may not want to pay enough money to get it back out of the >> Yeah, I'll give you an even better one. is your your CEO's, you know, kickoff presentation from 25 years ago, right? We want it, you know, we want to pay on we honor him. What is it going to cost to do it? I do want to one thing here because we're I love the fact that you don't do a hard sell on this thing. But I do want to say something that's interesting for Backlight and one of our tape partners, Zenata. Uh we had a customer that had a gigantic this good thing about media versus metadata here
too had a gigantic uh tape archive uh run by Zen data and so Northshore has built a tape connector that actually allows you to archive using using iconic. So you have a cloud cloud MAM that can send files to any of the major hyperscalers or actually on prim from from the ISG scan over to the tape system. So you don't have to choose and they don't have to manually do it. So now if they apply an archive policy, they technically could have archive high-res in the building, tape in the building and then deep cloud on the same thing with one operation. So I just want to say that like this is not theoretical >> one one place to track it all which is inside of a backlight because you know I had with Zen data a couple weeks ago um you know we'll pop a link in so you can go back and catch that. that that's the connector just because you you you when you need to know it it's possible to find out. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. My my you mentioned the migrations. That's one of the most painful things that people run through is just finding that stuff and and it's wild. I go back to film. I I recently I've had twice in my life I've had friends I'm from the south. Y'all may not have picked that up, but uh I got it I got twice have I had historically significant pieces of film found. And because I live in Hollywood, everybody calls me from back home and goes, "Where do we go to get this transferred?" And uh one was a a pres a president, US president that was visiting Arkansas. And then another one is a huge uh civil rights action that happened that was a hidden clip and that came to me and and it's wild because you're trying to figure out what it is. You don't know
what it is. There's no providence. So there is no metadata of it, you know. And then we went to tape where we have like okay I have a video tape and I have what's written on it. Now thanks to AI we can read those instead of typing them like we used to have to do in there and all. Now the next step is like hey could we just have the metadata? So could I have an LTO tape and could I have a MAM and almost every MAM can actually pack your data up and go. So if any data that you put into any MAM that Northour's ever deployed you can have that data in open format backlight. You may not know how to do it. we have methods to do it. They have an open API. So the idea that your metadata is open and your media is open. Just it's my wish for the whole world that going forward that's the ability there is that that you have your media and your metadata and it's transportable to what you want to buy regardless of what the three of us want to sell you. You should own your data and that pack up and go statement is a really big deal. Can you pack up and go or are you beholden to someone? Is someone going to charge you to get your data back? And that's a big geekery open that's a really open-source, you know, internet, you know, forward com concept that did never existed until now in media entertainment. It was always some company owned your data and and charged you to get it back. >> Crazy. >> Yep. Yeah. >> And the other piece we're seeing now is people are concerned it's not just about the data, it's about the intellectual property you've got out there in someone else's storage. Um, I've heard of plenty of people who they've got everything in hyperscalers here and then they've got
it elsewhere. And if someone comes along and says, "We're taking your IP to use it for XYZ." They're just going to simply pull the hit the button and say, "No, there's no IP here. It's all gone." Because they can then and this is the whole thing about having that that archive there. You can act with impunity. You not you're not beholden to anyone for uh, you know, financial, political, or whatever reasons. >> Yeah. Let's let's put our let's put our XFiles tenfold hats on for a minute and get into that because I love that the physical the like the physical is I'm going to say it in a really interesting way. The physical limitation of tape is not always a bad thing. The fact that it is tangible and in a location, right? If you have geoloccated data, uh as you guys all know, if you ever dealt with the EU, EU's data laws are wild and you can't touch stuff there or and sometimes it's it's a pain, right? uh you know but the idea that you could say yeah my data is actually located somewhere else and it becomes you know uh you know in a way almost like international banking and things like that. So, it's interesting we think of that data, but I think it is important to think of that. And that leads us to this other thing that you mentioned before. It's like this fractional tape as a service, fractional tape ownership. Before we get out of here, I want to put together that like I I'm a person that's always pushed for, you know, all three of us. Actually, I look at your career, Jeff. It's funny because like a lot of us, you know, I think all of us started working for gigantic organizations. We've been fortunate to work for some of the best biggest media companies in the world. But a lot of my big customers weren't
big customers when they started with me and I love nothing more than that. And so for me, the idea to be say there's this there's this barrier to entry of cost for tape sometimes and complexity. And I love the fact that people are starting to work on this. I think this is something that I hope more people get into this business of saying uh you know there's a lot of private data centers now. Those of you who are out there considering whether you're on prim or cloud, there is a third option which is people offer uh you know the data center uh and you can locate your storage there. Uh even AWS does that you can put your own boxes in an edge uh you know data center. The idea that for me now is that this sort of idea of fractional tape because the ability to just have a tape I have a lot of customers that provide post and media management services and it's great what they do they collect the customers data. They do, one of them does this for a large uh heavy equipment manufacturer to global and they have seven or eight production companies shooting. They send all their media to this one little shop. This little shop indexes everything, puts it into a MAM. They send a mezzanine version up to the cloud. They send a cloud archive and they send they make two tapes. One stays in Southern California, one goes back to the corporate office. And they now have multiple copies of all that data with no one doing it. They never bought any infrastructure. And they also aren't beholden to any particular hyperscaler. They at this point they have them their copy, a contractor copy and then a hyperscaler copy. And that's that's autonomy. I mean I I wish that more people in that company knew how cool
that was and how rare. Yeah. But the fun thing is you you mentioned about how you know small organizations don't have the budget. The one of the things I I did for one of the largest organizations I worked for was I'd come in at 6:00 in the morning and begin deleting. Deleting, deleting, deleting, deleting. There's no backup. This was only digital records. You know that there's a there's a line cut somewhere that may live for another 5 years, but camera masters, they're gone. I've seen stuff that would have changed the course of elections that just no one ever ever thought about. And it's just amazing the way that works. >> No, it's Yeah, it's our history. And I I I've seen in physical media, I've seen dumpsters pulled up to places and they threw film away. I saw a a major like hot rod and car collection just destroy tons of Southern California history from the 40s and 50s, which how many people would love to see that? And there's no reason you can't now. We can make a low res copy. We can keep it. We can do all that. But I Yeah, I I I don't know, man. I spent a lot of time making horrible reality shows and helping people make really bad television. But I got to say that the way I wash my karma for that is that I help people preserve the historical record. And you we don't get to judge what's the historical record. Maybe, you know, maybe the, you know, housewives of Beverly Hills or whatever is part of, it is part of the cultural record, better or worse. And I think that that's something that also people look at. Corporate media doesn't get the play that it it deserves. like how how right now, you know, how much would you pay for early recordings of Steve Jobs when
he and he and was were figuring out Apple, you know, how much would you pay for all these people when they were when they weren't the powerful CEOs we know? And and we're we're in an era now where we can get that now. We have a few years of digital media, but but we got to preserve that. And and like you said, the answer is not just that we keep filling up hard drives and paying for electricity. >> No. and and and the answer isn't necessarily that it all has to go to the cloud because you don't have a four-walled brickandmortar building, but to your point, just because you don't have a brick-and-mortar building doesn't mean you can't get somebody to send you an LTO tape of your data and you can sit on it, right? >> Yeah. Yeah. I'm watching that right now in Los Angeles and there's another uh company in New York. I know they do this and they basically will colllocate your equipment. So it happened started during the pandemic in Los Angeles when these big companies, it's very interesting watching this transition. They would take their their edit storage, take their edit bays, they would remote into those bays and those bays went from having these giant facilities rough on Los Angeles real estate market, but basically they moved into you could be in two racks now. So there are major studios in Los Angeles that uh that used to like rent studio space and all that and they just started renting rack space people with remote in. Now that's moved out to like data centers and private data centers and you have people there that can manage it. They can reboot for you. They can do all those things but that remote work the media is not actually remote. The media is in one
location and they have all their infrastructure there. So I'm right now really encouraging those people to start to offer you know not just data recite data disaster recovery backup but also archive services with that. So you can say, "Yeah, everything that's in my magic little cloud shared bucket, even if I only have a couple of terabytes, all of it is going down into this thing." And that's a that's a thing for me. My I got to build a couple facilities in the last couple years that had no physical infrastructure. And I thought that was so cool. Now I want them to have no physical infrastructure, but I do want them to have physical copies of their media because that's their IP. That's actually what they got paid to make. >> Yeah. And and so Jeeoff earlier when we started this thing you you had mentioned you know when you got started you archived that was the first thing you did. Can you talk about this like >> that was that was working for for one of the big monoliths. The the thing is when we started in all of this we always archived first because we shot on film we shot on tape and you know it goes back to that whole >> that was the archive. See what I'm saying? >> The archive. Yeah was implicit in the capture method. Yeah. And the funny thing is actually we're getting to the point where with you know if you put eraser coding in front of a tape library where we could begin to record to tape again. >> There'd be some different caveats in there but we're almost to that point again. I mean 400 uh megabits a second writing to LTO10. Think about a 220 megabit stream.
>> Okay that fits. We can record that. >> You know provided you got a couple other things in place. Yeah. Yeah. So, >> Stan to pick. Oh, go ahead. Stubman, go ahead. >> Well, I was just gonna I was just going to There's no reason why I'm a big fan of archive upon ingest anyway. So, if it's not going directly to tape, it's you know, there should be the copy that goes on tape and then the copy that gets spit onto a file system. I people don't realize that I you know when I when I became the high def cowboy right during that high def the thing that happened during the HD transition from SD to HD was also that the that the actual tsunami hit Fukushima and all of a sudden you couldn't get XD cam discs. Around those same times, we had this situation where we'd been making these the last physical formats for these Sony disc and stuff and we're like, okay. And then everyone started to switch over to like, oh, there's no there there anymore, right? And so that's when I really really started to push on LTO because LTO replaced the actual physical camera media. And that's the way if you're looking to budget for it, that's the way you budget. first production, like not studio, but production archive systems that I was ever involved in were people that were replacing the $100,000 of tape that they used to have to buy to shoot. The problem was is the industry dropped that budget out of the production budget. We don't need to buy tape anymore. We don't need to buy those $50 discs or whatever. But when a when HD Cam tape was a $100 a tape, boy, it was pretty easy to get somebody to buy an archive. But that's one of these I love that Jeff that you you say it that way but it does need explanation is that
we always since since the beginnings of photography we archive when we capture and now we no longer archive as we capture and that's a change that should terrify every media IP owner and I'm going to say the professional is shooting it no but if you own IP it's your responsibility to be like whoa wait and most of them never saw that happened. Like you said, the boss thinks it's all worked out. Was never worked out. >> And the thing the question everybody in production asks is how quickly can we get those cards back? We've got more stuff tomorrow. >> So, and and that that's the thing. The the cycle just continues and continues and continues. So, if you're archiving as you as you go or as close to capture as possible, you're you're pretty much covered at that point. So, if something horrible happens, oh, hey, we lost the raid. Okay. Yeah, it's going to be a pain in the ass, but it's not a couple million dollars worth of re-shoot days. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And by the way, if you have a ma'am and you have an automated archive, it's not even a pain in the ass. You hit the button and it all goes. That's when you call North Automation, right? It's it's a pain if it was manually done. But if it was ingested into a MAM and it was already sent to an archive, it's literally a button. Push. Select all. Bring it back. I'll see you. Otherwise, you're all going to be there sitting there pulling tapes every all night and waiting on them, you know, to come back and stuff and all. So, I just want to say that like that's the piece of automation when you get too big to fail. When you get too big to physically do it, we don't we joke like people
don't hire us. People that don't hire us because they want to hire us. Norshore gets hired because you have to because you've exceeded exceeded the scale of human effort and and or the cost of the human effort is too high. That's the next thing. I'm loving what's going to happen this year. this year we're going to see wild, you know, jumps in productivity and and I love it. So, it's good. Yeah, man. Crazy. This is fun, dude. >> It's always good to be productive, right? So, Bryson Jeremy, thanks for joining me today. And to our audience, thanks for diving in. Uh there's a lot to unpack here uh on all ei dive as I have. Uh you know, please hit those like and subscribe buttons down there. And as always, a special thanks to Avid Technology for the editorial platform that we're using.