>> Narrator: It's The Cube. Covering NAB 2017. Brought to you buy HGST. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We're at NAB 2017. It's not only 100,000, it's 102,000 people according to the official press release talking about the media and entertainment and technology. That theme is actually met as the technology is so intimately to media entertainment that you can't separate them out anymore. We're really excited for our next guest. He is right in the heart of it. He's in his happy place. He's leading the whole contingent here. It's Eric Weaver. He's the global director of media, entertainment, and market development for HGST. Eric, welcome. >> Thank you so much. Glad to be here today. >> So first impressions of the show. I'm sure you've been here a 1000 times. It's crazy. >> Yeah, no, it's really amazing. It's always a wonderful show. There's so many great people here really trying to get an understanding of what's coming up, what's going to solve their problems that they're facing right now. >> And the problems keep getting bigger because people want more. I mean it's amazing you walk around the level of gear and equipment. Some of the green screen setups here, they look like professional studios. And now we've gone from HD to 4K to AK to ultra HD. We've got 360 cameras. Little commercial ones by Samsung and professional grade ones. That's only going to increase the complexity of trying to manage all this stuff. >> Absolutely, it's really becoming a reality now that 4K and UHD are coming down the pipe. I think I heard some number that 56% of all sets will be that by 2020. And it's really great because you'll see the creative community starting to embrace HDR or UHD because they have never seen it before and until they go into the color suites and see the difference, they're absolutely blown away. So you're going to have a drive here. You're going to have a drive between the director saying this is what I want, and this is my look, and the camera or the tv set saying, this is what we can produce in theaters and what we can produce. >> Right, we didn't even talk about VR or AI. >> And VR and AI absolutely are some of the hottest topics out there right now. Trying to comprehend. You're also seeing a big shift from 360 video to photogrammetry and computational photography and these things. Volumetric capture. And those things are really going to be taking over in the next couple years and they are huge in understanding how they work for everyone. >> Okay, so you dropped a couple new vocabulary words. I have to have you dig in a little deeper. >> Alright, so volumetric. >> Photogemetric first? >> Photogrammetry. Photogrammetry. So what photogrammetry is is recreating a room with photographs by stitching them together. So for example, I worked on a piece called Wonder Buffalo and in Wonder Buffalo we basically took 956 photographs of a room and then stitched them together at 50 megapixels each and created this whole new room environment. You combine that with what's called volumetric capture. So instead of 12-24 cameras pointing out where you're stuck in a locked position which is a traditional 360 video. You're now doing 36 cameras in and those 36 cameras doing an almost hologram. The big difference here is now all of a sudden you feed it into a gaming engine, like Unity and you can walk around and explore the entire scene. So it's the closest you've ever seen to the Holodeck by maybe Star Trek or something. >> Right. >> It's really quite an amazing experience. >> Now on the other side of the equation, on the simpler side, you know you've got a lot of independent film makers now have YouTube and Vimeo and all these distribution platforms and you know, I'm a huge Casey Neistat fan. You know, he's got his little $2000 camera and he's out shooting and getting tremendous views so the focus on audience and story telling and sort of the democratization of distribution is another huge trend. >> Absolutely. Really big. YouTube is, what's fascinating about something like YouTube is YouTube wasn't possible a couple years ago. Something like the Cloud made YouTube possible. If you historically look back, you'll see something like the electricity juxtaposition, and until Niagara Falls was there, we didn't have the ability to have electricity in such volumes. And so some of the breakthrough cases might have been like Upcoa, who produced aluminum. They were burning, tearing down whole forests to put together furnaces that could burn hot enough to make it. Now that they have cost effective aluminum, or electricity, they could do this. The same situation was like someone like YouTube. They can scale at a level that we've never seen before and was never possible. >> Right. >> So it opens up whole new opportunities of democratization of video. >> Right. >> Absolutely amazing new tools. >> And then obviously cloud, right? Cloud is changing the world. The big cloud providers like Amazon and Google and Microsoft and a ton of second tier service providers. But they're not kind of on the cloud for big assets is speed of light is too damn slow, you know, getting stuff up and down is a pain. And also you know that's where you really wanted a big machine with local horsepower. >> So. >> But now you've got rendering, all this huge stuff that you need massive scale that you're little machine can't do anymore. >> So a big confusion a lot of people have in cloud is they think about taking their current data center and lifting and shifting it to the cloud. That doesn't work. You have to reimagine how the whole structure works. What do you put up there? Why do you put it up there? Are you using a proxy? Are you using some kind of hybrid workflow to maximize and benefit? Because if you're just dumping something up there and expecting to bounce it back and forth, you're right, speed of light and other things are going to kill you. >> Right. >> But there's other ways out there to leverage that. Principles such as IOA. Inner Oriented Connected Architectures. So placing your storage or your centralized data link at an Equinox or some kind of colo facility, where you can centrally leverage it and then working off proxies, most people don't know that when you're working in your color suite, almost all the time you're still working off proxies because you cannot see all those bits or we cannot get all the bits to the monitors. >> Right, right. >> That we have. So learning how to create the proper workflow there is absolutely critical, and will save you a fortune if you know what you're doing. >> Right. >> Or go to the right people to show you how to do that properly. >> So it's really use the best attributes of both as much as you can. >> Yes, you have to figure out how to use the best attributes of both. >> So the other kind of knock on too much tech in this business is sometimes the storytelling gets lost. And I know because I have a personal pet peeve on a lot of these big huge cinematic explosions that they could still have a story. >> Yes, yes. >> So, you know, I think that having a narrative is still so important. Is that lost? Is that enhanced? How do you see that integrating with the tech? >> So, I think it's absolutely critical. I saw Spielberg speaking at USC a little while back and he was like story, story, story. Tech is simply there to empower the story. And if you lose sight of that, you're absolutely lost. It really is the truth. So for example, I have two shorts out right now and one's at Tribeca one's at South by South West but we focused on the story. Although it's an R and D research project, you have to have a story. >> Right, right. >> That's the only way to move this thing forward. And if you don't have that, everything else is lost. >> Right. Now the other great thing that's happened with cloud and keeper storage and all these advanced infrastructure components is now you can keep everything. >> Yes. >> Data is no longer a liability that is expensive to hold and manage and you got to figure out what you're going to throw away because it's too expensive. Now people finally understand, it is an asset. So it opens up all types of opportunities to store it and do things with it. >> And you're seeing a lot of this shift from tape to object and other things like that because they want to monetize this content. There's so many new mechanisms to monetize content between the Netflix and the other distributors Amazon, and everyone else, that they are realizing this is not just an asset for the closet that you might someday use or sell in some broad agreement to some secondary station in Europe, or somewhere else. These are things that you can monetize on a regular basis. But that actually brings you the next problem. Understanding what you have. >> Right, right. >> People get very confused. They assume that there is one film. There's not one film. There's about 120 versions of the films that are released. Between the versioning such as culturally sensitive areas like the Middle East, to different language titles, to different ad pieces or other inserted parts, there are a lot of different versions to run a film. >> Right. >> And so people don't always understand that. >> And that's interesting but the other account of not gone film or video traditionally, from a metadata point of view in a search and a consumption and discovery point of view, is if I search for a picture and I find the one that I'm looking for, I immediately know that's the one that I want. But if I want to find something that's seven minutes in to an hour long video, how do I find it? How do I consume it? How do I share it. That's an age old problem with this media type. >> So, part of the problem there is that we have not broke down metadata tagging in each of these pictures and these pieces. This is coming. I actually help with ABC help build a tool that created x-ray like Amazon has for production sites, so they could scour and tag all these pieces and begin to say this is an action scene with this character in it, at this point in the movie. That is coming probably a year to a year and a half out. But all of those things will begin to evolve very very soon. >> Right. Certainly a great application for AI. >> Yeah, AI is absolutely hot as well and this is what the studios are trying to get their hands on right now. >> Right. >> People like Netflix have really pioneered some of this work and it originally was to understand how to find content or what people like content like so they could begin to produce content that was relatable to their audience. They've now moved it into things like QC'ing because they are the largest studio in the world at this point. Over 1000 hours. >> Are they the largest studio in the world? >> Netflix is the largest studio in the world right now. >> Wow, I didn't know that. >> So they're doing over 1000 hours I think a season, at this point. >> Amazing. >> But the studios are really trying to, are really doing a lot of work to get their hands on some of this and so there's a lot of really great, high level, private meetings going on that's bringing these industry leaders together. ETC is a wonder place to see that. They talk about these innovations. >> So you're in the middle of it all. You've been doing this for a long time. What are some of your priorities for 2017 and what are some of the things that still just get you up in the morning right now that you're excited about? >> So, absolutely my priorities is going to be cloud. Over the last about a year, 18 months, it's been a massive shift. It was before it was all before no, no, no. And I actually heard this exact quote from somebody at one of the major studios. He said, "It used to be no, no, no, you better have a darn good reason, to now yes, yes, yes, you better have a darn good reason not to." >> Right, to say no. >> Number one, very hot, very on board. The next one again, is VRAR, understanding how VRAR is going to begin to change our lives and produce things. I wasn't originally a big fan of that, I thought of it as kind of 3D, but then I went to USC's VR LA meeting, and there was over 600 students in this group and every single school was represented. Medical, architectural, journalism. These students understand that this is going to touch everybody. I don't know if you ever really got into genuine good content. Someone like a Nonny de la Pena does stuff that touches on more towards journalistic. For example, she did a meeting in San Diego and it's a very terrible rendering but the audio is good and you see a man being beaten from the police and people are calling out saying, "Stop, stop, stop." And you've never felt it so emotionally in your life. This is like bam. It hits you. >> The VR part of it or just that she had great content? >> The VR part of it and the context. >> Okay. >> Of telling a story and what's going wrong with the story. This is going to affect us in a different way and it might not just be they clip pieces for TV shows but it's going to be touching us in a lot of different ways. >> Right. Right. >> Very powerful stuff. >> We talk a lot about the AR. I think the AR piece from a commercial point of view is tremendous too. >> It's absolutely a bigger market. So what's really going to be biggest is mixed reality or MR. MR is going to come in and it's going to fade you between the two things. So, that is really where it's going to meet in the middle. >> You distinctly called out the differentiation between VR and 360. >> Yes. >> How do you split those? >> So when you look at it, if you're looking at 360 video that's a camera rigged stuck in one particular location, it's got 12, 24, 36 cameras all pointing outward, and when you're watching that, you're stuck in a location. You're hostage in more of a traditional film way to what within that 360 scope they want you to kind of be from one spot. When you look at volumetric capture, volumetric capture is the opposite. It allows you to walk around, choose your own point of view, be wherever you want to be within that scene. So, it's where we're going to be going, it's going to be much more like the Holodeck from Star Trek. >> Right. >> Very amazing stuff. >> Alright, well Eric, thank you for taking a few minutes. Congrats. I'm sure you're going to be busy, busy, busy for the next three days so, >> I know. >> So thank you for taking a few minutes with us on The Cube. >> No problem, thank you so much. >> Alright, he's Eric, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching The Cube from NAB 2017 and we'll be back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)