>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, It's the Cube covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. >> Jeff Rick here with the Cube. We are live in Las Vegas, California at the convention center. At NAB 2017, 102,000 people, a lot of production people talking about everything that has to do with media and entertainment, and also technology. MET is actually the theme this year. Media, Entertainment and Technology. The three are linked together in a way that they've never been before, And we're really excited to have someone really with the content side and the tech side as our guest, it's Justin Simmons. He's the director of technology at the Sundance institute. Justin, welcome. >> Yeah, thank you. >> So everybody knows the Sundance Film Festival. There's a lot of press every year, a lot of cool movies and independent movies. But you're really on the IT side. I wonder if you could explain a little bit. People don't know probably there's kind of an IT story behind Sundance. >> Yeah, I mean when you've got an event that's as big as the Sundance Film Festival, and really the eyes of the world are on it for that period of time, there's so much preparation that goes into it, because you have one shot to get it right. So we really start planning as soon as the festival ends. Sometimes we have multi-year projects. And there is a lot of technology behind it, from websites, to big flash sales, to all the photos that are collected, and all the video that's collected during the event. Also, a lot of people don't know about the Sundance Institute is that we have a year-round program, so we have about 30 lab or educational events that happen year-round all over the world, and those are also generating more media, more files that need to be stored and saved and tracked. >> So what's interesting is back in the day when storage was so expensive, and media was so expensive, storage was actually a negative, it was a liability. Now everyone's finally figured out that data's an asset. You've got to store it, there's ways to store it, you need to get the metadata to make it accessible. So that's really changed the dynamic of the way that people look at keeping all these assets. >> Yeah, I mean we saw really unfortunately a lot of times people would say, don't record it because we don't know where to put it. And it was really frustrating from a technology perspective to hear things like that. Now it's, "Capture everything." >> Jeff: Right. >> And what's happening in such a compressed period of time like that, it is all about metadata and all about workflow to make it efficient. Because if you get behind, it just keeps growing and growing and growing. >> Right. There's a great quote from Sable, from NFL films from back in the day, and he said, "How did you know "to get that in slow motion, that shot?" And he said, "We shoot everything in slow motion, "because you just don't know when "that great play is going to be." So it's a very different mindset to capture everything. So I wonder if you can explain with that mindset, and now you have 4K and 8K and Ultra HD, and tremendous amounts of gear here. How do you attack it from your role? How do you put together a plan that you can capture and manage all this content? >> So for us the first step is really getting the digital asset management system, and incorporating that digital asset management system into the workflow as much as possible. Like I said, you can't be happening behind. If that work's happening behind, it's just never going to get done. So putting the digital asset management system in the center of the workflow was extremely important. And now that we've got a great digital asset management system, we're using Reach Engine by Levels Beyond. We're looking at ways that different things can plug into that and automate as much as possible, so that when the work's being done, when the scenes are being shot, that metadata's captured and it goes right into the system, and everything flows into storage, into archive, into preservation. >> So you're populating metadata in real time as stuff's being shot. You're not doing it kind of after the fact. >> Yeah, there's a couple of different things going on. One is with photos. Everyone's got badges around their necks, so we're shooting their badges at the festival, and then right at the ingest, those cards come back from the photographers, all the metadata gets tagged in it right then, and it all goes into the digital asset management system. They're selecting their target photos from that set, and then it's off to being posted on the website for press, it's being incorporated into video. And then for video we're using Prelude to tag things in real time that's going right into digital asset management system, and then using Adobe Premier, in conjunction with the digital asset management system, we're able to make sure all the metadata that's done during the editing process also stays with those assets, because we have 35 years of history at the organization, and we want to make sure that we're keeping that indefinitely. >> Jeff: Right. >> So there's no point we're like, well, we don't need the 1988 festival anymore. >> (laughs) And then how's cloud impacted your world, and added a new asset class. The knock on cloud before, one of the knocks, especially for film and video, the assets are so big, right? And the speed of light is just too damn slow, some would say, for moving this stuff around. That said, you can put a tremendous amount of capability and compute and store and power at the hands of anybody worldwide, consistent distribution. So how have you guys integrated a cloud strategy in what you do? >> So we went really aggressive on cloud about 2011, 2012. And we ran into the limitations really quickly. The speed, and the cost when you start going at scale. This started to impact us. But there was areas that cloud was really successful, like our frontend web servers, we could just scale them up, during that event, we really need this kind of extreme performance for just a couple days a year. So being able to spin up 30 instances of the web server, bunch of database, have a million people a day hit that. That's great. Where we've struggled is on the media and entertainment side, to make cloud cost-effective when you're going really big with storage, and then also getting the performance that we need. So we've pulled that back, more of the media storage from the cloud, but where we're going to continue to use it is on collaboration. So now I'm sure we're not unique in this, but we've got creators and collaborators that are everywhere. And the content's being created all over and everywhere, so we want to use the cloud to capture that content, and we also want to use the cloud to help collaborate with whatever editor, sound mixer that we're working with. I also think cloud has now become increasingly important to the independent film community. A lot of these productions have small budgets, and they're looking to be as effective as possible, so they are collaborating globally, and so they're going to cloud. And I think it's going to be really interesting over the next couple years to see what solutions come up really targeted towards the independent film community that make it accessible for these productions. They're going to be around for a year or two They need a solution to get back up. They need to collaborate, and it all needs to happen very quickly, and for a reasonable cost. >> Right. Right. And what about on the distribution side? So it used to be you went to the movies, and then you got it on Netflix, or you DVR'd it, or TiVo, but now there's so many ways that people are consuming media, whether it be a social media like Twitter or Snapchat or Instagram, versus YouTube and Vimeo, those types of platforms. How are you kind of addressing the multi distribution opportunities within the assets that you guys have? >> So we do a lot of livestream, we do a lot of YouTube, and we've been doing that for a long time. But what we've seen recently over the last couple years with the filmmakers themselves is a real shift toward using, doing electronic delivery for large digital cinema packages. So these DCP files can be 100 gigabytes plus, and we just started seeing people really adopt digital delivery for those in the last couple years. So the Sundance Film Festival comes in kind of at the beginning of a film's life. And what a lot of these filmmakers are hoping to do at the festival is get distribution. So from there, they're able to now take that DCP file, they're not shipping hard drives, they're not shipping film prints, and they're now taking that through the distribution path. And it's not something the institute's directly involved in, but we facilitate that where the industry comes to meet with these independent film and independent artists. >> Okay. So last question before I let you go, what are some of your priorities for 2017? >> So my priorities for 2017 is preservation. So we've been doing a lot of work around organizing our files and our media, but we didn't have a really effective way of preserving the content. So we had just a bunch of big file servers sitting out there, and we had a replicating thing between them, and so I needed a solution that would actually take those files that would be integrated into the workflow, and actually protect it. So that's where we're working with Western Digital as official provider to help us actually protect and preserve our digital media assets. So using our digital asset management system with Reach Engine as part of that workflow, we're going to have the files that are sitting on our production storage but then another copy is going to be put onto the HGST object storage. So, and there the preservation is at a level that I haven't seen on any other device. It's using erasure encoding and splitting the file into multiple parts, and now that file is far better protected than it has been in our current systems. So that's a big priority for us, to get that going and really get these assets protected and preserved. Because like I said, we're planning on keeping these indefinitely. >> Right. Right. It's so sad the stories you hear coming out of Hollywood of an earlier time when it was all on the film, the film wasn't properly protected, so many of these great films didn't survive, or only pieces of them survived, or they've got bits and pieces that they're trying to restore. I'm glad that era has passed. >> Yep. >> All right Justin, well thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. I know you're busy, you're conference-hopping, and thanks for stopping by. >> Justin: Yeah, no problem. Thank you. >> All right. He's Justin Simmons, I'm Jeff Rick, You're watching the Cube from NAB 2017. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (digital music)