Okay everyone, thanks for joining our session today and we're very excited to have Todd Little from Oracle join us for a presentation about the Oracle Blockchain platform. And we're going to make this really a great interactive discussion with Todd today. So anyone who has any questions I want you to feel free to post them in the chat. And I know we also have people that will be joining us on YouTube live as well. So feel free to post questions there and we'll get to them right away. But at this point I'd like to just kind of jump in a little bit and introduce Todd. So Todd has been really a great contributor to Hyperledger over many years. And he's currently the chief architect for the Oracle Blockchain cloud service. And that cloud service was released initially back in July of 2018. And he's responsible for the overall architecture and security for the service. And he's definitely been at, you know, high contributor in the Hyperledger community. And he's contributed in the privacy and confidentiality working group. As well as a great contributor to the performance and scale working group as well. And Todd, you know, today I want to get in and really talk about performance and scale. As far as one of the questions I'll have today. And then, you know, Todd is also the chief architect for Tuxedo in the Oracle Fusion middleware development organization. And really define the technical strategy and direction for the Tuxedo product family. So at this point, I'm going to kind of turn it over to Todd a little bit here. And Todd, maybe you want to give an overview of some of your background and give, you know, some insight as to your work with the Hyperledger framework. Thanks, John. Appreciate the introduction. So yeah, I've been in this business for a long time. I won't, that won't indicate how many years, but you can tell from the gray it's been a few. So I've been working with Tuxedo since 1997 I was acquired from Digital Equipment by BEA Systems and then Oracle acquired BEA Systems in 2008. So I've just been sort of getting dragged along. And so Tuxedo if you're not familiar with that as a transaction processing monitor and platform. It's probably one of the most scalable high performance transaction processing platforms in the world. And then our group in 2016 or 17 got this idea about what other transaction models are there. And so blockchain basically comes into that area of sort of transaction processing. So we decided we should create a blockchain offering. We made a proposal to our management got shot down because I think they thought it was Bitcoin. And because that's what everybody thought that blockchain was Bitcoin and blockchain were basically identical. Anyway, took a year before we were able to then go ahead and so we spent 2017 building our platform and hyperledger fabric and we've been enhancing that ever since. So what I want to talk about today is a little bit about our product and our offerings and as well something Hanson's we've been making to hyperledger fabric both directly to fabric code as well as to tools and stuff like that we've built something called the blockchain app builder. So with that one and I get started here and we'll get going. You see my screen okay. Everything looks perfect Todd. So what I'm going to cover, if I get my mouse over here is on first cover a little bit about what our blockchain offerings are so we have several different products in the blockchain space and then to talk a little very briefly about some customer options on our partner solutions, and then largely I'm going to spend most of the time on so the updates that we've made some and some of the more recent changes that we've added to our service, and then finally Q&A session. So our vision is that we want to make blockchain available for enterprises organizations in easy and quick for them to be able to build deployed and run basically manage their applications and the blockchain applications. So basically blockchain is being relatively pervasive. Many, many industries all of our verticals are looking at blockchain solutions. So we're, we're working with a number of different partners we're working with our own internal SAS organizations for what we have fusion apps and their interest in blockchain I'll talk a little bit about some of the work they've done to integrate in with our blockchain service into their SAS offerings. So our strategy basically is to make it quick and easy we want to build a market leading platform for blockchain adoption. And we also recognize that, you know, people want to do this both in the cloud but they also need to do on premise and Oracle has a large number of regions for our cloud offering, but we don't we're not in every country we'll probably never be in every country at least with a separate data center so things like data residency and stuff like that require that you have an on premise version as well so we offer this product basically in two forms one is a cloud service and one is on premise service and I'll explain a little bit about each of those and how they function. And as I mentioned as well, you know, our SAS offerings, they picked up for our cloud ERP application, they have something they call intelligent tracking trace, and this does track and trace based upon transactions that are recorded in our blockchain platform. And then as well, our database team, which I'm part of by the way the blockchain team is part of the database team. We have something we're going to a crypto secure database so this is moving or leveraging some of blockchain technology in the Oracle core database. So, as I mentioned we have a cloud based service. So there's a provisioning mechanism to be able to basically control plane to be able to provision and monitor or provision and you know deploy cloud instances. We have an admin console that allows you to do such things as create peers add channels deploy chain code all those sorts of life cycle operations and stuff like that are done through our admin console, as well as monitoring. And then we also then have an on premise version which we call this they say the Oracle blockchain platform enterprise edition. And this is largely the many of the same bits it's a separate control plane though because the we can't use the OCI control plane in an on premise offering. We provide a VM that acts as the control plane and then it's used to manage a set of VMs that are provided by the customer and then we have we run Docker containers and Docker swarm in that and deploy basically the same kind of elements so our admin console, our API gateway which I'll talk about in a minute, and as well as integration in with identity management because that's something that doesn't come out of the box with fabric. We integrate basically into an identity management system, typically through that sun through your fabric CA. So we've integrated that with the identity cloud service for our cloud offering and we for the on premise offering we support things like el dapper ad for identity management. And then we have those of this intelligent tracking trace so this is pre built SAS applications that are leveraging our blockchain technology.  So things that have to be refrigerated so those are being monitored all that stuff is being monitored then by our cloud based services but leveraging our blockchain to be able to record this information. And then finally we have these that what we're calling the crypto secure database so this is using blockchain technology in the database create what we call blockchain tables. The blockchain table is a table that can be insert only and each row is chained and hashed to the next row as well that the rows can be signed graphically signed. So you know who made the modification or who inserted it. You know, it's a append only so the records cannot be deleted. And it's, it's, it's part of our database so standard SQL procedures are used or statements are used to be able to update and add things to the blockchain tables. This is our cloud service so at the center here I show our blockchain cloud service. This could be the enterprise edition as well. As you say we are based on hyperledger fabric. So we support smart contrast and go to JavaScript and Java. We have a library that we provide customers to be able to use or client fine grain access control. So fine grain access controls a way to be able to define a set of policies or access control lists that are stored on chain, and are never and then the access to assets on the on the blockchain. So at the library we provide. We also then have you know integration with some of our other services so things like event management. We have the ability to be able to do what we call off chain data sync. So we can automatically pump data into other environments like Oracle data, Oracle data warehouse. I'll give a little bit of example about why we did that and what kind of use cases we have.  It's open as they were based upon hyperledger fabric we'd hear to all the fabric code standards and stuff. We do provide these plug and play integrations besides the ones with our SAS offerings we offer this API gateway. I get a little bit details that in the second but our API gateway provides a set of rest services to allow you to be able to interact with the blockchain network. This is something that we felt was absolutely necessary for integration purposes. Very few existing applications can make g rpc calls they can easily make rest calls so so rest tends to be the integration standard that is used. So we provide a proxy that basically takes rest requests and turns those into fabric invocations either queries or transaction submission as well as things like administration stuff like that so we have a full set of rest services to be able to do that. So this enterprise grade when you when you create the appropriate shape whatever we spread the instances around availability domains or across fault domains within Oracle cloud. And you know we also then do the DevOps it's a fully managed service so Oracle takes care of the patching the management the ensuring that the system is up and running. Upgrade so when we go from one version of fabric to another version of fabric Oracle takes care of all those operations for you. It makes it much easier for customers to be able to adopt blockchain as a service. As I say the enterprise edition. This is essentially the same set of bits they're just packaged in a different way. And the main difference they say is that we can't use the OCI control plane so we built our own control plane that runs in a VM. And then that control plane is used to manage the other VMs that are provided to it to deploy things as such as your peers your proxies the console all the various hyperelectric components and our components. I'll get deployed then to this cluster of VMs that are provided to the control plane. So we provide you know it's feature parity with the Oracle watching cloud service. One of the things that we do this is I say because of things like data sovereignty issues and those sorts of things. So we do support, you know, multiple cloud environments multiple on premise deployments.  So it's easy to deploy is because I say it's all pre pre assembled. You essentially answer three or four questions in the OCI console and wait a little bit and your blockchain instance will be up and running. So it makes it really easy to experiment with this. We say because of the rest apis and the client is the case. We can integrate with many, many other systems including you know third party apps on premise apps other applications as well. Very critical, by the way, because oftentimes watching is used an integration mechanism between different systems of record. And so, you know, having these kinds of integration capabilities makes a big difference. Identity management, that's something that you know fabric doesn't really provide doesn't provide an identity management solution. They have the fabric CA but as far as being able to, you know, take care of the registration enrollment passwords all that sort of stuff typically you want to integrate in with some identity provider. So we allow in the blockchain cloud service we integrate with the identity cloud service from Oracle block from Oracle. So it's also to say it's easy to manage a monitor we provide a console set of interfaces that allow you to see what the activity is going on to be able to monitor the state of the various nodes to be able to as well that console is based upon a set of rest apis. The apis can be used by your own tooling so you want to add a new peer there's a best command for that you can do all those sorts of operations through the rest set of apis. And as they say as mentioned that we when we do deploy this with what we call enterprise shapes, because we do have a developer shape that you can deploy but for most people that once they get past the development stage they need to deploy and they want to enterprise ready, to be highly available, support things like disaster recovery and the like. Another thing that we've done as well as we tried to make it easy to add new members if you've ever built a blockchain network before out of fabric, you have a lot of work that you have to do to be able to exchange things like MSP information certificates all that sort of stuff. That's all handled through our console so we can integrate multiple instances of fabric into a single fabric network using our console. We also have a going portfolio of industry solutions. So we have a number of partners that are building on our on our platform. And I'll talk a little bit about those just basically a an eye chart of logos and stuff like that you'll see in a minute. Something that we're really really proud of but really feels a differentiator is that we have something we call the blockchain app builder. So the blockchain app builder is, if you if you're familiar with composer, the old composer project in fabric. It's sort of the idea and that gave us the idea for this tool. It's fairly different, though, composer was built upon the idea that you created a model. And then from that model, you would then generate smart contracts and the like. In this case here, what we do is we start with what's called a specification file that defines your assets or tokens. And then we generate code and scaffold projects for you that you can then use something like VS code to be able to edit as well as a VS code extension. And if I get a chance I'll demo a little bit of that we'll see if I've got time. And as well with something we've just recently added to the app builder is a support for tokens. So the idea here is that you can define in the specification file that some of the assets are tokens. And we follow the token tax it token taxonomy framework TTF, which is an open standard for defining tokens. And then we implement basically all the methods that the token token support so is it mintable burnable. And is it fungible or non fungible. At the moment we're only supporting fungible tokens but the plans are to shortly assume to be able to support non fungible tokens as well. So the basic flow is they say as you start with this thing called a specification file it's either a YAML or Jason file that defines the assets or properties, things like the field requirements so you can specify that a field is a string and it has to be no more string characters, or you can match it against a regular expression so we have a variety of validation techniques that we can validate the field so that make sure that the data is already is correct before it gets entered into the blockchain. And as well as it describes sort of you know the structure of all your assets field names and other properties and the like.  And so we can take care of all the code generation we generate the project artifacts do all that sort of work.  Typically you're going to add custom methods because we generate CRUD methods so you automatically get you know create an asset update delete read an asset. But typically you want more than that in your blockchain so you know things like in the marbles example is trade a marble or buy a marble or you know any of those sorts of custom methods. You can define their interface in the spec file but the actual implementation has to be provided by the developer. Once you've added your custom methods, you can then deploy this locally to a local fabric instance that we start up and manage for you. And that's that's typically how customers test and get ready to go. And then once you've got your smart contract ready, you can from the app builder you can automatically deploy this then to an OVP network, or any fabric network. Yeah, should be any fabric network. We also support through the EVM. We can support Solidity contracts. There's some instructions here on how to do that but this is something we've had a number of customers asking about how do I deal with Ethereum how do I deal with Solidity. So you can then say you can compile and run your smart contracts and run those in our in our blockchain, but in our blockchain platform. And then from from their tooling you can do things like invoke the smart contract but you can also then because we expose all of the smart contract operations through a set of REST APIs you can invoke all these through REST. So here's an example of being able to invoke a solidity chain code and some arguments have been passed to it using a curl command. So we also say it is a team sport we like to say that fabric is a team or block chains a team sport, and we mean that in a couple different ways one is clearly that you know typically have multiple organizations right a single organization blockchain network is not particularly interesting, although we have a number of customers who are doing that. But we typically see where they're multiple organizations and they're probably multiple instances of fabric running and even different, you know, under different environments. So one of the projects we did with a company me pasta. So this is a blockchain network that's deployed across Oracle IBM and Microsoft as your nodes. Well we have another customer cargo smart who's tested this and you know operates without le clouds blockchain as a service. Now we also support dammel through third party integration. So we can run dammel smart contracts and salinity as well as I mentioned before using the EDM. So we have another partner called over ledger and so over ledger provides essentially as a way to be able to do cross ledger transaction integration. So this would be to be able to do things across OVP quarter quorum other blockchain networks. So this is a partner of ours because we see a lot of customers that are interested in this being able to get blocked cross blockchain interaction. So quickly here some examples of what we have in in you know sort of production or whatever. So we have a large number of customers that are doing a variety of things so we have you know a lot in the financial services things like know your customer applications point of sale for what do I see. So a number of different things in the financial services area in the, in the supply chain area. We have a number of customers ever ledger you may have heard of they track the provenance of diamonds from the time their mind until their time they're sold in retail store. So we're seeing this in a number of different areas. And then as well we've got things like we're doing for certificate of origin. I think cargo smart is building their global business shipping network, this is that work based upon hyper ledger fabric and our instances certified origin tracks olive oil from the time that the olives are harvested pressed about the process and bottled and delivered to the store. The circuit is doing the same thing for for cobalt batteries and the like to see we have we have this is only this only a small fraction of the customers we have and the kinds of things that they're using our blockchain platform for. As well we also have a set of partners. So industry partners here that are building their applications on our block on our platform. So Sedema is using this for doing what's called non performing loans so how do you how do you what do you deal with a non performing loans like create a marketplace for other financial institutions to be able to buy these non performing loans. We are using, we have a number of customers who are using this for KYC related applications, a number of I should say partners. Well we have you know as I mentioned like circulars managing and taking care of conflict minerals track and trace sort of out the operations. So you get a feel for them I'm not going through all the details and all these but we have a large number of partners, largely because of fabrics popularity so a lot of these customers are built on fabric, which means they should run and run without a problem in our platform. So what I really want to get into is the major purpose of this talk is to talk about sort of the updates that we've made and what's going on within Oracle bound fabric. So as I mentioned this, you know, do the side sorry about that. So what is some of the things that we've taken care of things like the provisioning so they say you know we take care of provisioning you're in a cloud environment or as well as an on premise environment by providing a local control plane. In the Oracle cloud this is all done through the normal OCI cloud management console. So you can create containers you can create your blockchain instances there. And I would say we automatically take care of starting up the instances spreading the instances across availability and fault domains to ensure things like availability and disaster recovery. We manage it, which is a really critical point if you've ever managed a fabric network. It's a lot of work keeping up with patches making changes upgrades especially, you know, recovering from certain kinds of failures and stuff like that we provide tools to be able to help with that. An example that might be is that you end up with non deterministic chain code that you didn't realize. And that doesn't necessarily show up right away until your peers start to start to result with different results. So we have a mechanism basically be able to detect some of that basically be able to rebuild the ledger should be once the the the non the non determinism has been removed. We also take care of them, you know, taking back ups of the configuration we provide backups of the ledger so we can recover from failures. We have integration was mentioned with the identity management. So that's already taken care of. We do provide an audit we have this ability to do the crypto hash integrity validation so we can go through and validate to make sure that your world state isn't consistent with your with the lead blocks in the ledger. We provide this bidirectional API gateway so that's what I was mentioning before what we call a rest proxy. So this supports essentially a set of rest calls to be able to interact with your fabric network. This also allows things like event notifications you can specify that you want to get a call back when an event is generated by a fabric chain code. So this makes it really easy to integrate in with other systems it also makes it easy to test you can simply use a curl command and test against this, your rest proxy. So what we take care of is say many of the administrative tasks so when you want to see what the performance is like we want to examine the ledger you want to add new peers deploy chain codes all that stuff can all be done through our console. The app builder I'll get more into we're going to talk a little bit about that. The most recent thing that we've added here as I say is the token support so this is a completely new set of features that we've added to Oracle. App builder, watching that builder. And we think there's going to be a lot of interest in this because there's huge interest in tokens right now. And we've also done some optimizations around that. So I'll talk a little bit about how we handle tokens in a an environment where we use a balance base as opposed to I'll take a term I've got anyway. Something else we did very early on is we replaced the ledger DB and the couch DB options for the world state we place those with Berkeley DB. And the reason we did that is that Berkeley DB has a SQL light driver that it can be used on top of the DB. And so this only means that you can do full SQL queries inside your chain code, which is much more powerful than the couch DB query language. Although we do support the couch query language we transform that into a SQL statement basically and then return the results as couch would return them. This is significantly faster than couch because like level DB Berkeley DB is a in memory basically database so it's not a client server database like coaches. I know the caching capability they added for couch has helped some but we still get far better performance for many things using Berkeley DB. And in some cases we get dramatically better performance because with full SQL we can push computations down into the database. So as an example let's say you wanted to get the average account balance for a bunch of accounts. You can do that a single SQL statement with one round trip to the database, where is if you did this with something like couch or level DB, you'd have to go and get every one of those accounts and do the average calculation yourself, which would result in a gigantic read right set potentially, and and much much longer to execute. One thing that we do is we support we're calling the rich history database. So what we do is inside the peer we siphon off your transactions and store that information into an Oracle database. Then we maintain two things that we maintain basically the transaction records themselves and we maintain the state. So you can go back and do rich queries using standard SQL against the Oracle database instance to be able to do queries about the data base as well as about you know the transaction history and this includes the actual the full transaction history it's not like the transaction history that's provided by fabric which just provides you an index into the ledger to be able to get something. This returns the actual actual transaction information. So this is an example this is the OCI console we see here so we're under the developer services you select the blockchain platform. We take care then of you know, configuring all the VMs we set up the block storage for you we define your load balancers we set up a front end security service. We say we allow you up to 16 nodes per instance. That's probably an artificial limit, but it's what we're supporting right now. We can create new channels you add members of channels all that stuff is done through the admin console that's provided. And then as well this is a so the OCI takes care of all the deployment so it's the control plane but the data plane is where we have all the administration operations for the various components. Here's a picture of the console on the upper right here so it's saying that the instance is healthy, what the utilization looks like what kind of activity is going on and you can drill down into your channels your peers ordering services nodes and other organizations that you may have joined into your network. So that gives you a nice gooey interface to be able to manage or monitor your blockchain network so you can you know you can bring nodes up and down you can configure your channels your peers that policies do all this sort of work all through the console. We also take care of the smart contract lifecycle management. So you do we can deploy smart contract packages from the console to take care of the things like defining your private data collections and mapping transient data and like. And I'm gonna say we also provided this the sort of the monitoring and troubleshooting so you can do your topology you can see the status of all of your components. We collect operational metrics you can see what kind of transactions history you're getting what kind of volume you're getting. And as well the ability to be able to drill down into blocks and specific transactions within the ledger. So query support I already mentioned a little bit about this this is a say there's replacement for couch. So we can use full SQL select statement capabilities. And so this is this gives us the speed of level DB but gives us the query capability of couch DB or much more than the couch DB actually. And so this provides us as well is that bdb supports through the SQL light interface provides record level locking and so we can do concurrent endorsements and commits at the same time. Normally fabric locks the database and does only commits or endorsements it doesn't do them simultaneously. We can interleave these so we get better performance lower latency things like that. And as I say so the disability due to select statements you can you can you can do an awful lot in a select statement put it that way. And that's all supported out of the box and as I say we also then we'll take the couch query syntax as well provide that and then we translate that in a SQL statement. Another huge benefit here to what we've done is that we re validate the query at commit time. So if you use a couch DB as an example and you make a query and you use those results in a transaction to make a modification.  And so we can verify that the query returned the exact same results we basically a computer Merkel tree and get a hash of that. So we get, we get, you know, the ability to be able to do rich queries with using SQL statements, and as well this ability to prevent phantom reads or other issues associated with not having the query re validated. Rich history database this is I mentioned before this is this is where we automatically siphon off data from the peer into an Oracle database. So we define a schema that is used inside the database once that scheme is created, then we will update the Oracle database history database at the same time that basically the information is being committed inside the peer. So we model this using, you know, Jason in the Oracle database. And what does those this makes us available for other tools. So you can use things like analytics tools and stuff like that to be able to analyze your blockchain transactions, or some other uses and I'll show that share those in a minute. Donna season we've got some stuff in the chat. Any questions that we should address. Yeah, Todd, you know you're doing such a great job on your presentation and covering a lot of ground.  Let me finish up that's on the risk history I've just got a couple examples here and then then we'll take a break for some questions and then continue so. So as I say what happens here is when a block goes to get committed, the peer that's associated with this that receives this and has been configured for this rich history. It essentially then pumps that data into an Oracle database instance that could be autonomous data warehouse or any Oracle database instance essentially. And then at that point what happens is they we pump all this stuff transparently. So now inside the Oracle database we have the ledger as well as the state the state database because we do the same thing we maintain that state information in the Oracle database just as it would be maintained in the state DB that the peer is maintaining. So that once you've got this data here you can do you know visualizations you can run analytics you can export this to some other application. It gives you such a copy of the data without having to do things like query operations. Now it may lag a little bit because you know we we commit this in asynchronously against the database so it may lag behind under high volume. But we have a number of customers who are using this for like read queries so instead of performing a query operation against the blockchain, they simply hit their Oracle database instance and get the information. So analytics, you can do as I say it's now that it's in a relational database, there are tons of tools to be able to analyze this data. High volume reads this was the case is one of our customers where they do a significant volume of reads and they don't need all those to be to occur on the the blockchain itself. They're happy to, you know, have a copy of that data that they can read against. So you can also then you know compile this and consolidate this from other other systems or other systems that you interact with to be able to get a few full view of your transactions. Let me break here then. So why don't we hit a couple of the questions john. Okay Todd, let's jump in and I'm not going to take them in. The way they were put in I'm going to take them in kind of a interesting order here so okay, they were talking about hybrid cloud versus let's say on premise, or, you know, let's say blockchain as a service cloud. Do you support hybrid cloud for any of the blockchain service that you offer. What do they mean by hybrid cloud we do support, you know, we and we've shown that we can integrate in with, you know, the other blockchain cloud services that are built on fabric, as well you can integrate in with the on premise version of Oracle blockchain platform enterprise edition. So I think maybe they were just looking at it more and kind of the VMware style of hybrid. That makes sense Todd. Okay, let's ask another question here. Jay Jen has a question about does it require an upgrade from always free resource subscription. Okay, that's a good question. Unfortunately, our blockchain platform because of the compute resources that it requires is not available as a as a always free service, you can get a 30 day free trial. And then you can migrate that trial to a paid license, but are paid, you know, service offering, but we don't have this available as a free offering at the moment. Okay, perfect. And then there was another question here about explaining more about over ledger. And my question there is, you know, over ledger is blockchain interoperability. And are you doing anything with the hyper ledger cactus framework as well. Yeah, we've been monitoring cactus we've not been doing anything with it at the moment. Over ledger is handling this at a you know sort of a lot higher level I guess. We're basically relying upon them to provide this interoperability with things like Ethereum or Corda or the like so. And I don't know a ton about their offering, I will have to admit so. But I know we have customers who are using this to be able to integrate our blockchain platform with other other blockchain networks. Correct. And then, umit has another question here but they wants to separate his chain code smart contract app logic and executables from the blockchain database that he's running on. Is that possible. Blockchain database I'm not sure you mean. Yeah, we do it off of mute here. Yeah, if you want to explain to me that'd be great. Yeah, hi, hi. Can you guys hear me. Yeah. Hi, thanks. Thank you. So I was just wondering if it would be possible to separate the business logic smart contract automation script essentially from where the Oracle blockchain run so you can, you can have. We don't want to deal with Oracle maintenance like this is great platform. So we want to maintain that but we want to keep the smart contract logic and the affiliated data in our own on premise database. So there has to be some way of, you know, port communication over some TCP port connecting to Oracle database where you can, you know, leverage the blocks running on the on the Oracle cloud is this set kind of set up hybrid setup possible. So I can have full control over. Well, you have full control of the smart contract that's that's just standard fabric behavior. The unique part here that we provide as I say is this sort of data pump into the Oracle database. So the fabric doesn't use well, our version of fabric says it doesn't use a client server database so you can't run your smart contract in the cloud and have it use a database that's in your data center. Right. Yeah, okay. It's going to be considered a poor practice because I for your smart contract to execute against that everybody else that actually that smart contract would have to have access to your Oracle database and you probably don't want that if it's a multi organization network. I see. Okay, thank you. But what you could do those I say is you could set it up such that runs in the cloud and then it pumps the data into your Oracle database which then you could use it so you know for as a state for queries or for analytics and the like. And in that scenario, can can my smart contract query the Oracle database from a public cloud. You could do that but that would be as I say a poor practice generally, unless you're going to unless your Oracle database is accessible to every member, they won't be able to access that data so their copies of the smart contract won't execute. I see. So essentially the smart contract runs also in the Oracle cloud. It runs in what we call an instant so that baby in the cloud or if you're running the enterprise edition it could be on premise. Okay, God, thank you so much. Thanks.  So Jim if you want to come off mute and ask the question and be great. Thanks, John. I just want to follow up on that question from omit. I'm pretty sure he's referring to the external chain code model that's available in fabric 2.0 where change doesn't have to deploy to the PR law can be run somewhere else and then just need to be provided the endpoint URL to the to the chain code spec on the pier to be deployed that way. Right. That's that's a 2.2 feature we're not supporting that just yet we are offering support for 2.2 I think next month, but we won't so we don't have at the moment it means to be able to support external smart contracts. That's in our plan, but that's not present moment. Why don't I continue and we'll take some of these other questions in a minute. Perfect Todd sounds great. Okay, everyone told you questions and we'll get to you. So what another thing that we encountered was that customers want better control over the access to the assets to the, what's their story in their blockchain. So we provided what we're calling a fine-grained access control list so this is a library of smart contract functions that can be used to maintain access control lists, and these assets control this can be applied to virtually to almost all of the things that can be applied to the invocation of an operation on your smart contract they can be used to control access to specific assets. And all this stuff is maintained on ledger so you have you know complete visibility of the kinds of access control this and who can do what who can who can't do things. And so you use these functions inside your smart contract to be able to manage the access to the assets that your smart contract is using. So the app builder this is what I want to get bit into so this is this is our console showing up our development tools. So we provide you know as part of it we provide a set of examples we provide tools to be able to interact with your your smart contract. And that's done through either the app builder visual studio code extension. So we have an extension for VS code that you can use that will support our app builder model of scaffolding a project from a asset definition and then deploying that, as well as the command line interface. And as I said we support in most. We support a number of samples as well so we have a copy of this Fabcar marbles examples and many of these these you can actually interact with through our console. So these can be deployed into your network and then we provide a simple UI in our console here, and that's mostly just to be able to test and try things out and get a feel for how things work. You know the same we've made a number of enhancements around you know this the sequel queries so we believe that really provides a lot of value to the developers being able to stream it into you know database for analytics. We make it really easy to onboard low tech members so they could there's a ability within our platform to be able to onboard client organizations that don't have their own infrastructure so they they rely upon the infrastructure that's by one of the other members of the organization of the network, and then these are what we call client only, and that that helps a lot of cases where not every member wants to bring their own infrastructure bring their own compute resources basically to to manage an instance. I already talked about access control this by directional gateway things like that so the enterprise edition I talked a little bit about this and say it's a software appliance it comes as a as a VM as a VM image you can run in virtual box or Linux or Oracle Linux or VMware.  And it supports a variety of shapes. And so you typically what happens is if you want an enterprise and you create three plus one VM so three VM support peers and CAs and the like and one VM for smart contract deployment. So this shows the platform manager VM that's our control plane so we can manage instances you know it locally that you provide the VMs it could be in the data center. Basically all we need is access to the connection between our container and our VM and a network connection to the instance VM, which is where the data plane runs. So this is showing a little bit more into our app builder. So you can see over the right here, this is showing some asset definition so in the middle here is the asset is called a distributor it's got a property so it's got its ID. There's a bunch of properties are on the properties or assets properties on the asset fields. So you have things like you know this has got products to be shipped it's a number product ship is also a number of it's got a minimum value of three. So you can see there's a variety different validations here that can be provided as well as you know different data types that are supported for the various properties of an asset. So from this file then you can basically then scaffold a project. So this is all supported within VS code we also provide command line interface to provide the same operations. So from this tool as well we can then deploy to hyper ledger fabric local instance or we can deploy to a cloud instance, all that supported from the Visual Studio code extension.  We don't support that in the in the when deployed to the cloud only only to do the local instance at the moment. So, say we do from the from the scaffold or from the specification file we then generate the code necessary so we use a model controller pattern. So you end up with a model that defines all the fields and then a controller file that defines all the behaviors.  So your actual business logic that does more than just, you know, quad operations. We take care of the persistence of it so you treat these things as as objects. So these assets when you in your smart contract you simply say I want to I want to get this asset by its ID. You don't get back, you know, adjacent or whatever you get you get back an actual object in that chain code language. So either a go object or a type script object. And then, so that's what you deal with and then when you're done updating the object you can then say I want to update it in the database we take care of that persistence. So we take care of the model mapping into the chain into the state database key value store. Something to say we recently added it was tokenization support. So here's an example of an asset is called my red coin it's a type of token. It's fungible and it's fractional. And so it is well divisible. So these are all operations that can be formed in this token and we provide all the code to implement all these operations. So you can but you can also add your own custom methods again for the tokens, and you can mix things with tokens as well as with just normal assets that aren't token. So this is a normal flow is that you know for the number of things that are done by our SDK token SDK we take care of you know the sort of set up initialization creating accounts and add roles so they're all set of methods and operations do that. This is typically done by the administrator, and then there's the operations like I mentioned before so minting creating new tokens transferring those tokens burning them to destroy them. All that stuff is that is handled by code that we generate or part of our library. What we've done as well is we've updated the chain code operation and commit validation code to support the ability to be able to avoid MVCC errors. So, when you, when you do deal with tokens oftentimes tokens are accessed multiple times in a block, and typically in fabric that creates an MVCC error. What we've done is we've allowed your tokens to have numeric fields that we identify. And then what we do is when you create operations against those we create and store instead of the actual value, we store a delta as part of the read write set. And so that means that we can support the modifications to a particular token value, multiple times in a single block, we can then make sure that they never goes negative that that's requirement. We also want to make sure at the end of the block that meets all the standard requirements for that token, but we can do as say multiple updates to a single token because we record instead of the absolute value we record the delta between the previous value and the new value. So that can be applied in any order. So this is this, this, this is one thing we're doing to help improve the performance for token based applications because we found a lot of customers were encountering when they tried to do this sort of stuff they were encountering MVCC errors. This is showing the development set of samples here. And for these samples here all these then you know you can install and instantiate the chain code and then as well you can invoke it so we create a little simple UI for doing that. This is an example you can token actions you can say I want to issue tokens what channel that chain code was it on. And then when you when you do this we also then check and collect your queries and stuff like that, the parameter values and things. So we provide a little screen to be able to capture that information. So, where we're where we're going is more work on tokenization, especially supporting for NFTs. So that's a one of our things on our next plan release. We're trying to say what we're trying to do is make the developer and administrators life easy. So the more things we can do to make it easier for them to be able to integrate to be able to write their train and test their chain code to be able to make sure that their networks are deployed properly and the like, those are the things that we sort of focus on so on the development side also on the operation side. One of these we're looking at is to provide something like the operation system chain code that's been proposed so we've been talking to that team a little bit. We would like to incorporate that into our console so you could add new organizations remove organizations you can do all that on chain, as opposed to the current mechanism which is effectively, you know, a whole lot of out of band communication. And then as well we say we are upgrading to fabric 2.2 that should be done this month or next. Another thing we're looking at is we have customers who want to store large state databases. We have one customer right now when a single transaction contains something like 260 megabytes. I'm not sure that's a great idea, but customers are requesting some of the sort of stuff so one of the things we're looking at is to overcome the limitations of memory databases like level DB or the case of us with the BDB Berkeley DB. When they get really large performance suffers dramatically, whereas with Oracle database it doesn't you take a punch hit for the round trip to the Oracle database, but it scales much better for large databases as well for large number concurrent users. So that's something we're looking at is providing an alternative to BDB is to use Oracle database for state database. We're looking at to say, you know, ordering services so we've got some group within Oracle that's looking at BFT consensus algorithms and particularly smart BFT or Libre BFT, and trying to do a formal proof on that to verify that that it's, it's provably correct. So these are sort of the areas that we're working on and I want to stop here so we can take the final set of questions then so. Oh, yeah that's great information, Todd. And let's just go and try the easiest thing is I think Jim has a couple of questions here for you. So Jim maybe you want to come up and just ask your couple of questions about the fabric network and also the UTXO model. Yeah, sure. Thanks, John. Thanks, Todd for the great information. The first question I had is, can I have some notes running in the cloud with OPP and other notes running on-prem within the same fabric network? Yes, absolutely. Okay, perfect, cool. Thanks. My second question is the app builder, when it generates for non-fungible token or fungible token, is it based on accounts balance model or UTXO model? We're currently out well for our fungible tokens right now we're based on a balance model and that's why I was mentioning that we did this enhancement to avoid the MVCC errors. So that's the big issue with the balance model, right? The fabric is that it's not scalable, right? What we've done basically allows it to be scalable because we allow now multiple transactions executing against the same token in the same block. Yeah, basically you will avoid having to read it first and then set the value. Okay, I agree. What we store is we store a delta, right? So that way, at the end of the block, we just make sure that all the deltas end up with a value that's reasonable. Thanks for all my questions. Okay, okay. Perfect. And the other one I want to kind of just touch base on Todd, I know you've done a great job of going through this, but Gopi had asked a question about, you know, the versions of hyperledger fabric that are supported. So let's just clarify that for everyone on the call here. You know, what's currently supported today and the roadmap, what's going to be supported in about a month. Yeah, so 1.47 is what we're currently supporting. And I don't remember which dot release of that 147 something. And as I say, you know, we take care of so if you started with 141 or whatever when we first started the service or actually restarted before that one dot, I don't remember what the initial version was. So you take care of then upgrading that for you on your behalf. And as far as 2.x release we're planning that I believe I think the releases next month. So we'll be supporting 2.2.4 I think is what it is. Hello Todd this is Gopi and thanks for that information. Yeah, I do understand you are going to do it behind the scenes is the upgrades. I don't have impact on refactoring the code, because they're going to be significant improvements and to that point my question was to know when it's being done that customers could be aware of when they could plan for code enhancement on that. Yeah, as I say doing the upgrades, we will take care of that automatically, although there will be some things because of changes in fabric where there may be changes that have to take in place in your in your smart contract. There's not a lot we can do about that. And especially if you want to make use of obviously any new 2.2 features you'd have to make changes. But otherwise if the smart contract will 1002.2 we will take care of the upgrade and things will just run just fine. So we've been we've been testing that extensively we want to make sure that we don't break a whole lot of cloud instances. But yeah, so we that's this is a that's a huge advantage we believe is that you know you don't have to worry about the upgrades we take care of that to the extent that we can. That's great. So if we have that modeling language or scripting language that we have that takes care of generating the right code based on the version. Am I interpreting it directly. No, no, no, no. So, well, a couple things if you're using app builder and when we do the upgrade there will provide upgrades to app builder and to the libraries that it uses and the like to be able to support the new version. And you'll basically go back into app builder and say, I want to upgrade my chain code to use this new stuff. And then it will get rebuilt inside of inside of app builder. But as I say, there are some changes that have been made that we can't take care of inside of the smart contract that have to be made in some scenarios. Got it. Yeah, that's fine. Thank you. And just one other question. Some interesting information I saw about the interoperability have one for ATDM and with other blockchain frameworks. Any time frame on when the interoperability would be available with you mentioned someone with ATDM which I could see that about the other blockchain frameworks also. That's where Overledger comes in. So Overledger is a say provides a solution that allows you to be able to integrate different blockchain networks. And they support our fabric instances. So that's the extent of I guess I would say the interoperability at the moment for two different ones as you mentioned already Ethereum obviously you know we can run Solidity smart contracts and stuff like that. Got it. Thanks. I don't, I don't have much knowledge on Overledger. So is that another product or another framework from Oracle? I'm sorry, what is it called? You mentioned Overledger. Overledger. No, that's a partner of ours. Oh, partner. Okay, got it. Thank you. Any other questions? Yeah, Jordan, if you want to come up mute and ask your questions, that'd be great. Yeah, sure. Thanks, Todd, for a great presentation. Just two questions. One question is about, you know, identity support. And so I'm wondering if you have a plan for supporting DID based identity solutions like Hyperledger Indy. That's a really great question. And we've been tracking DIDS for a while. Yeah. And we do want to support them. We don't have that yet. But we have some ideas about how we want to support that. So to say, you know, Fabric doesn't provide any identity management on its own. So you need something to be able to, with your CA, you typically need integration with some kind of identity management system. So we did it with IDCS and LDAP and Microsoft AD. And we're looking at what we can do with DIDS. So we have not tried it. I think we've got some customers that have tried using Indy with Fabric. But we don't have that support yet. But clearly, that's something that we want to look at. Okay. Any time frame? Early, this would be late next year. It'll be a little while. Okay. All right. And then I had a second question with regards to the tokenization support and supporting tokens. Are you supporting any particular wallets? And if so, which ones? No, no, we're not supporting wallets at all.  But we're not providing anything along that lines. We're basically using the existing identity management to be able to say who can do what.  And so like if you're an admin role in the identity management system, then you'll get admin capabilities. If you have that particular role, then you'll be able to do admin functions against the tokens. But no, we don't have any wallet integration at the moment. Okay. So I guess if, what about if you're working with like verifiable credentials? Is there any support for verifiable credentials as a tokenization solution? Not yet. Okay. All right. Thank you. Okay. Todd, we're coming up at the top of the hour here, but I'm going to jump over to Ron, if you want to come off mute and ask your question about contracts and pricing. I don't know if Ron's still with us. I don't know about what the cost is. And also enter and contract between me as a developer in Oracle. I'm sorry, I didn't hear the question. You asked that one more time. What is the cost of you have some pricing information and isn't necessary to enter a contract between myself and Oracle. Oh, no, it's just another cloud service. So you use cloud credits and it's based upon the number of OCPUs basically that you have. So, you know, it's our normal cloud based pricing. And it's just offers others. I don't, there's no contract that I'm aware of that you have to do. But you do, after the 30 day free trial, you would need to get purchased cloud credits and to be able to continue using your instance. Do you have some information? I mean, I've had contracts with Oracle in the past. Do you have any contracts information or any credit information on what that price would actually be? Yeah, if you go to, where's that? That should be, yeah, if you go to the, where it says try OVP and Oracle cloud free tier, you should be able to get the information, the pricing there. It turns out that for like a small configuration, it's several hundred dollars a month, something like that. So, I mean, it's not particularly expensive, but it also depends upon the size of your deployment. I mean, if you just, we have deployments that are go to extra large, which means 24 OCPUs. And that's obviously going to cost quite a bit more than what we call an enterprise small instance. So I don't have those numbers on the top of my head, but that should be available at that link here about blockchain platform. Thank you. Okay. And Todd, I just had one other question here. I was on another presentation by Mark from Oracle, and he was talking about a collaboration or dealing with Zua around NFTs. Is that going to be one of your partners going forward in the NFT space? Yeah, so Zua offers an NFT solution based upon our platform. So they're a partner of ours. And that's who we're recommending right now for NFTs. But but we also know customers want to do, you know, NFT development and normal asset development, like so that's why we're putting this stuff into app builder. But right, but Zua right now is our go to partner for NFTs. Okay, well, I really appreciate everyone's time this morning. I want to kind of keep it right to our our time frame here. Todd, exceptional presentation. I say that any shop that really is familiar with Oracle and has that installed would greatly benefit from the Oracle blockchain platform. And if there's any contact information you want to offer, Todd, for them to get a hold of you if they have questions. Sure. Yeah, it's just my first name dot last name so Todd dot little at oracle dot com. Okay. Perfect. Okay, everyone will thank you very much for joining the session. And we look forward to the follow up with Todd, and feel free to reach out to him with any follow up questions. Thanks. Thanks.


Hey everybody, welcome to the Wallach way. I'm Jessica and today's video is going to be all about our brand new literature based history and science units. Now ever since we released the very first who was many units, you guys have been begging us to do some sort of bundle.  So we did that by creating two themed bundles so far. There will be many more like this, but to start with, we have an exploring history bundle, which is a living history unit study through the eyes of adventurous explorers. And we have a studying STEM study, which is a unit study on notable inventors and scientists throughout history. Now both of these studies include 12 many units, as well as a few optional free many units.  Now in the lesson plans, I have tried to make it as easy as I can for everybody. And so I have included a two, a three, a four and a five day option, as well as a suggestion for how you can complete this monthly versus weekly. In case you don't wanna do it, you know, two, three, four or five days a week, you could do it once a month instead. So all of that is included. That's the bonus that you're gonna get. Now what makes this so amazing is that 12 many units, if you were to buy five and get one free and create your own bundle, would be $60. And so you are going to be able to basically get these 12 many units for 50% off. So you're getting them for $30 plus the bonuses of us telling you which order to do them in and giving you ideas for lesson planning. So there is the saving you money and saving you time components. Okay, let's go ahead and talk about exploring history. So 12 many units included and they are, what was the age of exploration? Who was Amelia Earhart? Who was Christopher Columbus? Who was Ernest Shackleton? Who was Ferdinand Magellan? Who was Jacuzzo? Who was Leif Erickson? What was the Lewis and Clark expedition? Who was Marco Polo? Who was Neil Armstrong? Who was Sacajawea? And who was Sally Ride? That means that you're gonna get a chance to explore by sea, by land, all the way to the depths of the ocean and all the way into outer space with this explorers unit. Now, if you're not familiar with what is included with each of our who and what was many unit studies, I will link look inside videos here so you can get an idea of what the 12 many units that are bundled are going to look like. Okay, now let's talk about what's included with studying STEM. The 12 many units are, who was Albert Einstein? Who was Alexander Graham Bell? Who was Galileo? Who was George Washington Carver? Who was Henry Ford? Who was Isaac Newton? Who is Jane Goodall? Who was Marie Curie? Who was Nikola Tesla? Who was Rachel Carson? Who was Thomas Edison? And who were the Wright brothers? So you are going to be learning about animal science and chemistry, gravity, famous inventors. There's so much wonderfulness in this studying STEM unit. And now I would absolutely love to hear from you. So if there are some bundled topics that you would love to see us do next, please leave them down in the comments because we are always taking suggestions from you for products. And again, I will leave a few links in the description in case you were curious about what is included, kind of what happens with a who was many unit or a what was many unit. There will be look insides linked as well as blog posts that describe all of this and what many units look like.


Hello, I'm from Tangent Animation, my name is Jeff Bell. This is my partner in crime, Ken Zorniak. So we're going to walk you through a little bit of who Tangent Animation is and why we chose to move away from Maya towards Blender and put our development... And we're also putting many, many development dollars behind Blender too because we see a great future for it. And of course he's coming from someone who actually developed the original Maya. Yes, we'll talk a little bit about that. Tangent was founded in 2014 with kind of the start of Aussie which was kind of our first major feature. And it released in Spain just on the 14th of October. This is going to be a third weekend in theaters and it's been doing actually quite well in Spain. I think it's in sixth spot right now. We were over, I think we did about 550 million euros last week or whatever. Not a million, 100,000. 100,000 sorry, Jeff. I'd be on a beach somewhere if we did that. But basically, and we have our next kind of big project coming up called NextGen which is our kind of big service show that we're working on coming up. But our kind of model with Tangent is to really have a kind of a distributed production model. You know, we have kind of two offices but that's, you know, we work in both Winnipeg which is kind of in the middle of Canada, a bit of on the kind of the prairies where it gets very cold in the wintertime. And of course we have a big office in Toronto which is kind of the animation hub in Canada for production. And we've worked distributedly but it also helps us in working with kind of other partners. And certainly on Aussie it was a co-production with Spain and we had a lot of kind of Spanish work in Spain that had to get done and we had a lot of interactions. We were very used to kind of working in a very kind of split method. We also are very technology focused. My background is that I had started kind of Frantic Films years ago which is a visual effects house. We had multiple offices but we also used our service production as a means to kind of basically fund our R&D department and we really aggressively went after doing development R&D and this is why, you know, service production is kind of means to the end of production because if you can strategically use your money that you're going to use to make a show to make lasting IP that you can then leverage for future projects it builds a much stronger company. And then finally, you know, the big part of tangent is really and the challenge of filmmaking and doing feature production is building financial models that really work. And certainly with Spain and the opportunity to be able to kind of access money that was there in Spain that could be spent outside of it we certainly know how to leverage a Canadian tax credits to be able to get close that gap on financing and then it's just a question of making a good compelling project that sells that can fill the rest of your financing. And once you have the model, you're in business. So basically tangent animation is three people. It's myself, Jeff Bell, it's Ken Zoniak and another partner in Winnipeg. So a little bit of my background. Is Jason Schleifer here? Hey, Jason. So we go back a little ways, right? How long? 20 plus years? So when SGI got the crazy idea to purchase alias research and Wavefront and stick them together as alias Wavefront, very creative, yeah? We were working on next-gen products at the time. So I was an animator that was hired by alias research to try and beat soft homage. So our next-gen product internally was called Maya. So I was basically the first animator to work on Maya and drove a lot of the workflow and feature set along with Jason and Corbin, who's also part of the Nimble Collective. So we got together, did a head-to-head, I think, of the products at the time, and then moved forward as a group to build and release version one and version two of Maya. Well, the last three years, actually since version 2.5, I really like what I'm seeing in Blender and this is why we're moving away from Maya and moving towards Blender and taking a lot of things that Ken was talking about in terms of doing development work. So we're rerouting all those funds that we used to spend on buying Maya or products like Maya to do our feature film productions and putting those into developers and money for artists. And we plan on basically taking all the development work that we do that's related directly to Blender and putting it back into the trunk of Blender. And this is certainly why we've sponsored two seats in the foundation. And also the other benefit is that, from a tax credit perspective, you're spending your X amount of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars on Maya, not tax creditable.  So again, the interesting thing is people think that the tax credit money is free. That's basically another way to put even more money up on screen. So those tax credit dollars will allow us to get another... Instead of two developers, it might be three. Instead of four, it might be six. So it's really important to us to try and leverage that and push the art and the technology forward. Blah, blah, blah, art goals, yeah. We kind of talked about this already, so... Yeah, we're not saving money by using open source. That's not the goal. No, we're just saving money up in fast movies. And we're also hoping that the work that we do and any other studios do, other studios will pick up on and expand upon so that it also helps our features going forward. I think also we hope to bring a blenders that obviously as a viable huge production, or as a production tool, we have to build a lot of shortcuts and things to kind of make things work and make it move fast, fast for production needs. And that's critical, too. I'm just tired of dealing with the damn licensing. Yeah, that's true. OK, so we talked a little bit about Aussie. Aussie's in theaters right now. It was released in Spain on October 14th, and I think it releases in North America. January. January, and also the UK in January, right? So I'm not sure what the other release dates are for the other European countries. Yeah, everything is, you know, the Spain and Germany are still being sold right now, but Scandinavia, Italy, and a lot more of the Eastern European countries will be all sometime this fall in January. And then US is sold, but not set yet, right? US and Canada going to go at the same time. Yeah, so we're pretty excited to have been able to do a full feature. Maya was not used for anything in this show. This show was 100% from front to back, from assets to surfacing to modeling, layout, animation, lighting, and render, and cycles. It was all blender from front to back. So it had a reasonable budget. It was about 8 and 1 half million Canadians. So that's about, what, $10 US? Yeah. $5 euros. Yeah, maybe five euros.  And we built the studio, we built all of our tools and pipelines at the same time that we're also trying to get this feature film done. One of our developers is sitting right here on the front corner. This is Todd Bade, if you want to stand up and embarrass yourself. So Todd's been working on cycles and improving cycles. So we've done things like, and these aren't checked back into the truck yet because we're bad boys and we haven't gotten proper approval to do this yet. But we're working on that. So we have things like light linking so that we can actually link lights and light characters a little bit separately from backgrounds. We have per object and per material sampling and light paths, right? Yeah. We did the ambient reflection mapping from ILM's 2004 white paper for the ambient occlusion, right? And what was the other one? There's one other one there. Oh yeah, an improved 2D motion blur. Basically something very similar to what we had back in the stars day. So the one interesting thing about Maya users to Blender users is we developed a bunch of training courses in-house that help guide Maya users over to Blender. It takes about anywhere from three days to like 10 days that we find to get artists to get fairly comfortable in Maya and to start actually performing their craft. The very first thing that we tell people is, what is it, Jason? Right mouse button. Yeah, well, the second one would be, don't change your hotkeys. Yes. People have this tendency to want to change over to Maya's hotkeys, thinking that will make it easy to work in Blender. And that's just the wrong thing to do. So we really extoll the virtues of the hotkey setup in Blender. Once you get to know it, it's actually very clever and it's very sensible. So we make that a sort of core to what's going on in the facility.  So, hey, hotkeys that I know. Yeah, so it's actually the transition's been pretty good for us overall. There's been a few hiccups here and there, but nothing that we haven't either been able to work around from an artistic standpoint, from a technical direction standpoint, or a development standpoint. So it's been quite good. So we'll show just a little, this sequence is actually a little bit, I think the footage in this sequence is a little bit old, right? Yeah, that's a few months old. Yeah, so this stuff was rendered back in November. There's probably another version of this that where some of the lighting and some of the hair work has actually been improved. But we'll show it to you right now anyways. I don't know if you're gonna get sound, unfortunately. Just an example on Ozzy, this is kind of a little diagram of how we kind of work and how the work flows. So we mentioned it was a Spanish Canadian co-production. We relied on Spain to do a lot of the pre-production work, art direction design, and the director and writer were there, and part of that helped to satisfy the co-production agreement. But then you see kind of all down the kind of, the right side, we have kind of Toronto Winnipeg and how we kind of break up a lot of our work. So modeling and surfacing tend to get done more towards in Winnipeg office, but rigging, shot layout and animation tend to happen more in Toronto. Toronto is, of course, a wealth of animators and that's where we tend to staff up more at that department. Shot funneling and visual effects come back to Winnipeg, and as I mentioned, years ago I'd founded Frantic Films and there's still kind of a group, a community of visual effects artists that were left in Winnipeg after kind of prime focus had shut down the office there. So they work with us within our office and now are part of tangent and certainly the reason why we specialize in visual effects. Lighting was kind of broken up between kind of two, the both offices because it was obviously a very big job. And then we, as part of our agreement, we actually used a render farm in Spain in addition to our own existing render farms which is the reason why we've kind of rendered across everything. And then a lot of the final kind of comp tweak was all done in Winnipeg before it heads over to post which was posted back out in Spain. But of course, speaking certainly of the financial model this certainly satisfied kind of the requirements to get the movie made. But it was certainly a viable production model to be able to actually get this picture done in the 15 plus months we've worked on it. I had the terrible, I had to actually go to Barcelona to color grade it. It was terrible. Yeah. Yeah, Barcelona is a beautiful city. Yeah, so it's kind of a standard animation pipeline. Some of the stuff is also parallel, right? Like effects and lighting. Sometimes shot flying goes directly to both depending on who has to control the lighting or who has to go first, but fairly standard pipeline. We're bringing a lot of the stuff that we did in the past at STARS and other facilities. And internally we had our own Maya based asset and production management system that we wrote internally. So we're doing the same thing internally for Blender. Bring a very systematic database driven asset management system to Blender which is actually proven to be a little bit difficult because of the way Blender's linking and file handling is more complex than Maya. So Maya files are kind of like these atomic level things that you can point to and manage. Blend files are just containers for various RNA types which is really interesting. It's proven to be a bit challenging, but quite fun. How much time? 10 minutes? 10. So, pre-production. Let's see, I'm trying to figure out whether we can get through these in 10 minutes. Go look. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, let's go here because this is kind of fun. Well then we'll talk about our next movie because that should take us about 10 minutes now. So yeah, as we said, Blender's our in-house tool now. There is another production in-house that is still on Maya but that's mainly due to the client and the history behind that show. So once that is done, that will be the last show that actually uses any Maya within our facility. Yep. We're about, let's see, after we staff up for our current movie, we'll be about 120, 130 people between the two facilities. Two facilities, yeah. Yeah, so we've grown quite a bit. We started with, hmm, Ken and myself. Yeah. About three years ago. It's erupted about 120 people. And again, you know, the Blender film is the biggest film that we've done today which is pretty cool. I guess one of the other big things too though, this summer I'm sure, I don't know if any of you heard but there's a large production facility in Toronto called ARC that shut down which Jeff was very instrumental in setting up years ago as well too and had a lot of really good friends and a lot of key artists we were looking to bring on but we were fortunately in the hiring mode with our show and we managed to grab about 30 plus of the top senior people for that facility. I think pretty close to 50 plus percent of the senior supervisor and lead staff from ARC. So the people that I worked with in the past, people that I worked at Pixar, Disney, DreamWorks and a variety of other very large facilities, very high level people that have done many, many feature films. And they're all really digging Blender and it's pretty cool to see some of the animation tests that are coming out on our next feature. If you didn't tell anyone, nobody would know what software did this stuff so it's pretty cool. And that's gonna be a great leverage for Blender too getting in those experienced people like that. Yeah, the budget on the show is four times the size of the previous budget. So it's a really fairly large budget feature film. So looking forward to what we're gonna be able to do. We're obviously gonna continue our development. Most of our work is gonna be focused on cycles because lighting for us, I happen to love lighting and compositing. Lighting is I think one of the things that makes or breaks movies. I know that our animators are gonna do a great job but if we can't deliver on the lighting side and take it, we gotta go way beyond what we did on Aussie. So to that end, we're looking at working with the Blender, the developers of the Blender Institute in implementing things like AOVs. Everyone know what AOVs are? Anyone use RenderBan? So AOV, if you look at the passes in the layers, instead of having preset passes, you would have a list of passes that you can add in and you can have as many of them or as few of them as you want. And you'll be able to do things like take, if you have your key lights or light, rim lights and fill lights, you can actually route those into separate buffers with separate direct and indirect lighting passes for glossy and diffuse and then reconstruct those in the compositor afterwards. So it really brings kind of the power of what's in V-Ray and RenderMan and Arnold over two cycles. That's a huge priority for us for this show. We're also looking to hire probably two to three more developers to work on Blender. We're looking forward to helping improve the physical simulations, so particle effects, cloth effects, anything that we can contribute back in that area we're gonna try to do. We've got some areas that we wanna clean up on the animation side, kind of based on Maya background and the background of the Maya animators. There's some things in the graph header that we wanna clean up a little bit and we wanna push the timeline forward a little bit because it's a little bit, it could use a few more features, so we'd like to add some stuff in there. And I know the node system is on hold, but we would actually like to contribute some development time to that because we think that's hugely important going forward. And as we stated earlier, basically everything that we do as long as we can get the stuff approved, we're gonna put it back into the open source. So in case you wanna read between the lines, if anyone's interested in coming to Canada for a little while, we'd be loved to entertain kind of anyone who had any developers who were interested and artists as well, too. So we still have quite a few that we're gonna be hiring for our show and we're really gonna be getting into that, the latter part of this fall, so. I'll show you a couple of design images from our next movie. We're right in the middle of doing our first three shots. These three shots are actually probably five months ahead of lighting.  Yeah, so the idea here is that we're trying to cram these things through our whole pipeline just to see what breaks and to sort of push the look a picture and figure out how far we can go with the rendered look and the effects and the character animation and all those sort of things. So the artist grumble leads grumble, but they understand why this stuff has to get done. Unfortunately, it's not ready to show yet. It would have been next week. We have a couple of images though that will show that gives you a general sense of what the movie's gonna look like. So as we discussed before, it's a very large budget. All in, it's about 30 million U.S. So we're currently in pre-production. All of the art and design work is underway. We're doing pre-viz. We're utilizing Blender's sequencer for pre-viz. So we love being able to put the shots together and retime before they get to editorial. So editorial sends over a locked sequence length. And within that, the pre-viz people are able to push and shove the shots around to sort of change the overall length to suit the sequence. Then that goes back to editorial for conform. We're also using cycles for outputting our playblasts. So in addition to doing the camera work and the director photography work that you have to do for the camera and the cinematography, we're also doing our lighting because we want to be informed of what our lighting's gonna be even way before we get to lighting because sometimes that actually helps you with the composition of the shots as well. So we're getting render times of like, but all the samples crank way down about anywhere from 15 to 30 seconds a frame. So and it looks really cool because we've got our motion blur. We've got like shadows and contact shadows and people have actually, the animators have actually started using grease pencil to sketch you in effects. Yeah, it's pretty cool. One of the most common things I hear is, Blender does that too? So yeah, it's basically a movie about a girl and her robot. It's got robots, guns, lasers and fighting. So yeah. It's a kung fu fighting, yes, martial arts. Yeah, so it'll be about 120 to 130 people. And as we said, we'll have at least four full-time developers dedicated to proving the features of Blender plus the developers that we're sponsoring at the Institute. So you are welcome. Glad to. So a couple of images. These are design images. Turn the lights down a little bit. So the robot is basically, well, tentatively called 7723.   If anyone's staying at the park hotel, we didn't steal it from the restaurant over there. He's a smart talking dog. Very interesting character. It ends up being a two-hero sort of story. You think it's about her, but in the end it's about her and the robot. One of the interesting things that we're doing with the lighting in here is typically we light theatrically. So we'll do things like 3D vignettes with spot lights and try and guide and direct the eye to certain places. In this, the production designers actually taking a look back at movies from the mid to late 70s, particularly movies from Kronenberg. And we're letting characters sort of filter in and out of lights more naturally as opposed to doing it completely theatrically. So it's interesting. We've had to sort of change our mindset on how to get this stuff done in it, but it's nice. You go back and look at some of the classics and bring some of that stuff forward in the work that we're doing. It's really kind of the, we're trying to capture kind of the look of the future from the 70s perspective. Yeah, essentially. There's lots of browns and lots of rounded stuff. A little bit of wood grain here and there, just like the old Atari. There you go. Robots, lasers, explosions, screaming, dogs. A soccer field. Laser soccer field. A curved laser soccer field. Laser soccer field, so. So yeah, we're really excited to go forward this and we're really excited to actually be doing it at Blender. So thank you for your time. We also have a 10 minute kind of making of video of Ozzy and it's gonna, obviously it has a lot of our artists on there kind of talking about the use of Blender on the show and how it kind of put together. And we'll get that up on the site or get Francesco as a link in that. So we'll have, it'll be circulated at some point. Yeah, we talk a lot about Blender on there too and how he uses it. A little bit of our facilities and everything, so. Thank you.


We are here to pause and take a few minutes to remember the lives of those involved in the construction of the Soto Dam. The dam was completed in 1944. Those that were there and survived remembered. Several kept secret diaries at great risk to themselves noting the names that died. 53 Americans and 14 Japanese workers perished before it was completed and this monument was established and dedicated to those who perished during the building of the Soto Dam. Today's small ceremony is in honor of our fallen comrades. From the ashes of war a strong bond and commitment to peace was forged and we are now two nations allied in the pursuit of that peace and that is one of the things we should remember today.


Tony Kukoch said that Nikolay Okich isn't at the level of Vladivostok or Dino Raja at the center position. Is this the craziest take we've ever heard? This is by far one of the craziest things I've heard in a very long time. I don't know what Tony Kukoch got against a joker, but this sounds ridiculous. If not better than those two gentlemen respectfully already, he's definitely in the conversation. So to say that, I'm not sure where this is coming from, but this is this is a wild. No disrespect to them, but Yolkich is. We shouldn't even say his name with these two cats.