And yes, Jeff, thank you for noticing. We've now updated to also include background music, God willing, so, and welcome. Welcome to another exciting Logic Live. Let's dive right in here. I'm going to see if I can fade the music out. Yes, success. Well, you know, if I was able to have background music and get it to fade out, I think we're ready to tackle connected conform. Welcome to Logic Live, everybody. My name's Andy. Today is episode 11, Connected Conform with Brian Bailey. Logic Live, as always, is brought to you by Cinesis Oceana, Solutions Integration and Support for Digital Content Creators. See everything they have to offer. See everything they have to offer at Cinesis.io. Cinesis has been my reseller for 15 years. They are huge supporters of the Flame community. They sponsor user groups all around North America and I would not be able to do what I do without their support. So thank you guys at Cinesis for always supporting Flame artists since 1997. All right, let me stop my screen share here and say, hey, here I am. So today we have a very special guest. Brian Bailey is a senior Flame artist at Treehouse in Dallas, Texas. And Brian is going to show us how he uses Flame's connected conform features to do the impossible, which is try to make sense out of our clients ever changing requests. I had the pleasure of trying out connected conform on a project over the past couple of weeks. And I think it's safe to say that if you embrace it for what it is, it's not a magic bullet. It doesn't make, all your problems go away. It doesn't make your clients somehow stop unapproving cuts or stop surprising you with versions you didn't know existed. But if you kind of embrace the workflow and then apply to it all of those great forensic skills that all of us Flame artists have, then you're definitely, there are some benefits to be reaped there as changes come down the line, which they always do. So with that little introduction out of the way, I'm gonna ask Brian Bailey to turn on his camera. Brian, are you there? Yeah, I can hear me. Hey, how's it going, man? Good, how are you? Good, good, good. Love your smile and face. And I want to give you mad props on the shirt, my friend. Yes. I figured that's something more than the T-shirts I've been wearing for three months. I love it. So you've decided to dress up now, which is great. I'm holding on to it, I'm still wearing shorts. And now at least the weather has caught up with my quarantine fashion sense. So Brian, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about Treehouse? Well, I've been running Flame for 15 years. Treehouse does boutique post-production, mostly commercials in Dallas. They also do a little bit of music videos, independent films. So what else? I think that's great. Are you like a horizontal reals guy or a vertical reals guy? Let's get down to what really matters. Never understood the vertical worlds. All right, moving on.  Why don't you go ahead and share your screen, share the flames screen there and let's get underway with some connected conform. What version of Flame are you running? I'm still in 2020.3. The pandemic came right when we were going to update our CentOS for the 2021, but we weren't able to do that yet, I'm not sure. Sweet. And yeah, if anybody has any questions, please be sure to put them in the Q&A panel and we'll get them answered that way. That way they don't get lost in the chat. All right, Brian, take it away. Uh-oh, we've lost Brian soon. There we are. Sorry, I have the kids screaming in the background. Oh, that's okay. And I'm making sure, you're getting my audio from my video screen, but you're getting this video screen. Oh, you're getting mine from the back side. Yeah, we're getting audio from your camera for now. Okay. So a couple things I'd like to say first, this project I'm gonna share thanks to the Home Depot and the Richards Group for letting me share it. It's a commercial we recently did before the pandemic, so things were normal back then supposedly. I think you mentioned the Dallas user group, I just wanted to mention our website there. If anybody's in the Dallas or Texas or Southern, I don't know, Southwest, try to come, we have guys that come up from Austin and join us, so that's cool. We do meetings four times a year. Awesome, and thank you for running the user group, man. It's a great thing that you do to keep the community going. And we're gonna do a really quick overview today. I wanted to promote the FX PhD class that Kristoff did because he really goes into depth with it. So you wanna really dive into this, look at this class. He does a great job. So with Connecting to Form, there's two basic paths I see of working with it, two approaches. One is BFX segments, and the other is batch groups, and they both have pros and cons. I'll go through this quickly. I don't wanna spend a whole lot of time because I wanna get to actual show and stuff, but with BFX segments, if you only need a few shots or if you just wanna connect being shot by shot, this is a great way to go. You can skip the sources sequence in the shot sequence completely if you wanna do this. You can just have a BFX segment, make it connected, and then go from there. You never have to deal with the sources and the shots. I like to use this method because when you archive with no renders and no cache, the project can be a couple megabytes. So it's real easy to restore and get back to work if you're able to work that way with your source media. Being available again to elect the way BFX segments handles the handles. You'll see with the batch groups, when you make a batch group, it rolls out the handles. So then you either have to deal with them or do the effects on all your handles or figure out the way to make the render node and not render all those handles. I do a lot of versioning where there's edits, it's like 30 or 15, and then as another layer on top of that, there's English and Spanish of the same things. So with BFX segments, it's really easy to duplicate a segment, say it's gonna now be the Spanish offer instead of the English. And then you can start forking off into multiple versions on top of versions. The main con that I see for the BFX segments is when I'll show you this, when you get to doing social deliverables like one by one, nine by 16, when you sync, you have to be careful not to sync the resizes or the repos that you're doing for those different versions. So I'll kind of show that here in a minute. And also another con is BFX segments with a lot of heavy stuff in them can really slow it down. And you might want to switch to batch instead so that you can close and load just the things you need. On the batch group sides, some pros are like the con of the BFX. Every shot is gonna have a lot of work and it's real heavy work and you're sharing it with other artists. Batch groups will be better. If you are in a big facility, you need to start on a certain frame and have a certain naming structure. Batch groups let you do that. You can always start on frame, you know, 1001. And for social deliverables, I'll show you how it handles that kind of better so you don't have to worry about messing up your resizes and repos. The cons to batch groups, in my opinion at least, is having to keep track of those batch group folders, you know, saving them to the library back and forth, loading them when you need them. You have to do lots of shot management. And like I was saying, the batch groups are created with the handles rolled out. So you have to figure out how you wanna deal with those. And with batch groups, you have to use shot names. I don't know if everybody, if I need to explain that, but your segment can have a name, but it also needs a shot name in order to have a batch group. Phil, so any questions? Nice one. Brian, I think I just wanted to cut in real quick. I think it's great that you put up that slide there to show the pros and cons of the BFX workflow versus the batch groups workflow because Connected Conform is all about creating connected segments, you know, and connected clips. And philosophically, I think how you approach, and you're gonna show this, but how you approach the Connected Conform workflow is different whether you're using BFX segments or if you're dealing with stuff that's coming out of batch groups. And so it's just good that you had this overview here, not to start another argument between people who prefer BFX or batch groups. There's nothing to do with this, but Connected Conform really does have it. The whole Connected Conform workflow has been an evolution. It was a rollout that happened over many releases of the Flame software. And now that we're finally, you know, kind of with it have a complete Connected Conform here, it's just very, very important that users know that depending on whether you're using BFX segments or batch groups, you need to kind of approach things differently. So I just wanted to throw that out there. And just like a lot of Flames features, they give you so many options that it can be overwhelming, you know, so many ways to get something done. So you kind of have to figure it out and pick and choose how you want to approach it. And I even do different things for different jobs. Like I might use the batch groups when I know every shot is going to be heavy effects. For the kind of example I'm showing today, I probably wouldn't, I would just do the batch effects route. Do we have time to talk about our customized things or should we skip that? No, let's do a customized thing. Let's go through it. Things that I wanted to share that I've customized that I think other people could benefit from too. The first one is action context menu. And you can watch a flame learning channel video on how to do this. But basically you can add your own group here in the action context menu. So I have the matchbox. These are matchboxes I use over and over and over. And if I have any kind of surface, the context menu lets you just real quickly add those things. So the matchboxes that I use over and over is what I mostly use that for. Yeah, that's a fantastic. The resolution list. This is another flame learning channel you can watch. You can customize the resolution list. So I've added social media folder here at the bottom. And it has social media resolutions. I use it in Python a lot. I know you did a class on Python recently. So I won't go too much into that. But I use one from, I think, Steffan created where if you right click on a sequence, you can color the time warp shots. And I deal with this a lot because my editors use weird time warps and they mess up the shot sequence of the connected conform. So I'll make the time warp segments red immediately. So I know I'm probably gonna have to deal with that in some way. Another Python thing, I just made a custom when I wanna create a new real group, make a real group with just the reels inside it that I want and they're colored and named just right. And then some preferences that I think are good to know about when you're doing with conforming connected conform. The first one is, I always have to remember where they are. When you make a batch group, what frame to start with? So you can put in your own there, 1001. Seems to be what a lot of facilities use. Make sure you go in and use the tokens to set default, iteration names, batch names, render node names. If you don't do a render node name, they can start to get confusing later when you're trying to backtrack from the timeline to a batch group under, or let's see, sources match. This I think is pretty new. I think this might have been in 2020, in 2019. So when we start dealing with creating a sources sequence and a shot sequence, if it sees two shots that are within this number, it'll treat them as one shot. So that could be good if you're using a source that is immediately cut to, and they've like zoomed in on it. The editor's repoted or something. It'll treat that as one shot for you. Yeah, when you showed me that, I almost had like an aneurysm.  And when you showed me this the other day, I was like, you know, maybe I should pay more attention to the things that they add to the preferences menu. Yeah. One more preference. When you're dealing with social media, stuff like one by one, nine by 16, you usually want to start off with just the edges cropped. And then you're going to repo it further. So make sure this timeline resize is set to crop edges unless you know you're going to let her box it or do something else. Yeah, so there's a few things that I thought you might want to set up. Before we get started, one more thing, I just remembered, I deal with AAF files from Avid editors. And when they use Photoshop files, Avid names Photoshop layers a certain way. And what we want to do is go into format options for PSDs, Photoshop. Photoshop, change the clip options to where the clip name is this one. That's how Avid names those. And if you import an AAF that's looking at a Photoshop layer, this will help you find it quicker and link to it quicker. Oh, that's a great tip. Okay, so let's actually do something. If you click save right there under Photoshop settings, does that then make that the default? That might make it the default. All right. Okay, so you ready to actually do some conforming? Yes, sir, dive in. This is a, I'm going to try to take you through as if we're doing it over a couple of days. This typically happens where we need to start finishing but we haven't finished the edit yet. Or we haven't colored yet but we got to start doing effects for it. So what typically happens with me is we do start working before we get color. The first day I get some prep for my editor. They typically give me a reference video. So this is what they are off-winding and how they see this spotlight. They also give me the same thing, but with burn in so I can tell the clip name and the source code in case something's wonky. And then the AAF. So I'll just drag all of those in and also a basic idea with connect to conform. Everything needs to live in a real group. And it could be a real group on the desktop or in a library, but the real group is kind of the structure that keeps the links together. I'm going to open up the reference and I'll put the burn in as another layer. I'm making a version of the AAF up there. Caller at me if any of this is going too fast. Hopefully everyone knows general conforming and we're going to get to the actual social media stuff pretty quick. So with the AAF, I typically go through and kind of just look at it and make sure I know what's going on. Something happened here. Somebody did a comp and didn't put their name on it. So I don't know where that came from. Let's figure that out. Here's something I did during offline and it has my initials on it. I know I did it and I have that saved in my offline effects that I did earlier. So I'll trash that because I'll replace that later. And that's typical with foam screens. The clients want to see them during offline. So we try to do the work to make it as easy as possible when we're actually finishing. It's already done in flame. We just replace the footage if they have updates to the screen and we do it here on top of what we've already done offline. But as far as conforming, I just get rid of those because I'm going to manually kind of put those in later. Okay, so it's pretty clean. I've locked the offline tracks and the audio track. When I go to conform, I have an option here to filter locked tracks. I just don't want to deal with those at all because I don't need to relink those or see them later. I like to limit handles. If you are doing batch groups, you'll see later, you really want to make sure you limit that. Batch effects, you don't have to as much. But I usually try to do that. Create sources sequence and I forgot one thing, delete these. So I just have that edit. I'm going to create the source sequence. I have one segment for each source used. If it's something that's used multiple times, it'll only be in here once. And using that preference that I had for how close to merge them, it'll make it one shot. And another thing about this job, kind of trying to show you how we can quickly update later, we're going to have to start doing effects work on the raw footage. Hey, Brian. I don't have the color yet. I have the raw footage. One folder here, I'll scan in there. Typically keep the match, the source timecode and file name. You might have to play around with that a little bit. Most things look like they're going to link. And a few things didn't link. And this is something you're always going to have to deal with. There's always going to be investigating and figuring out what's going on. When things aren't linking. This, there's that comp I was talking about. Somebody did that, and I'll have to go investigate that. And they put the raw footage on top of it. I'm going to just get rid of that for now and make a note. I feel like my keyboard is super loud. I'm sorry, Brian. Great question for you. Someone had a question. The, what was it that you skipped over or that you forgot that made that extra long segment that you went back and deleted? I had the reference, the offline reference still in here. Oh, okay. Gotcha. And it treated it as an edit. Gotcha. Yeah, it's a really important step that I've learned when doing the Connected Conform is before you go ahead and make your sources sequence, which is the list of all the sources. You need to go through what you get out of the AAF or the XML, the EDLs, and really clean it up. Get rid of things you know you don't need. Like you said, you had references to offline comps or maybe titles, sometimes they even throw in sound effects and anything that you're going to end up doing later anyway, clean out of there. So all that you're left with is one tidy sequence of just the segments that you need to do your shots. And typically my editors or their assistants are good about cleaning stuff up before they send it to me, but sometimes I'll get an edit where they just we're in a hurry and send it out and there's 20 layers with all kinds of stuff that is old cuts or old takes, you know, and I have to go through and clean it up. Another thing that's, I've put in actually a request to fix this or change this. Whatever you're sitting on when you hit create sources sequence or update, it puts the source sequence or the shot sequence in that reel. But I like to keep them in their own separate reels, so I'm constantly moving them back into this reel. I've put in a request to somehow say always put it back in the same reel. See if that happens sometime. Okay, so going through, we're still missing something. This is a phone screen. Can I recognize that from a previous job? So somebody grabbed that from an old job and was reusing it. So I'll have to go find that, hunt that down. And then one more thing is missing. It doesn't solve bad habits. Yeah. Yet. The intag, if I look at the form, sometimes I don't know why this happens, but my editors workstations to the network location has a capital Z and I need a lower case Z. So I'll just manually change that and it finds it and I can look to that. And you can see here, despite the editor's best efforts, they needed it to just freeze at the end. So they, looks like they copied and pasted it in our sources sequence. It didn't make two, you know, it only used it one time. So that kind of shows you how the sources sequence works. But I prefer still to treat it as one clip. So I'm going to time more and then just extend out the end of that. So it treats it as one segment there. Okay. So this thing, I went and dug it up and found it. So my editor used a comp that I did last year. One of these somewhere, there it is. So I'll just manually drop it in there. We'll have to figure out if it's the same timing. So the offline repo date or something. I'll figure that out later. So my edit now, everything's linked. I'm going to update sources sequence and the markers tell me something happened here. So if I go to that marker, but that was that previous spot pick up that they use and the marker says new segment. And then over here, the red segments are unused, the red markers. And those are those things that I trashed because I was saying, I'm just going to figure that out on my own screen. That's part of that. That's another thing. If you update a sources sequence and you've used other material in a BFX, it'll add it all in there too. Not just the kind of backplate. So I think those are just broken because I'm working from home and I didn't skip ahead from that for now.  I know this was some kind of screen, phone screen capture. That's the tall kind of thing. And it added that to the sources sequence. So we've got our sources all good. Now we need to talk about shots. So doing the BFX method, what I would typically do next is, this is the raw footage of each shot. I'm going to copy that. And then I'm going to lock that bottom one.  So I'm locking that down to be able to look at later. When I go to now make a shot sequence. This is the shot sequence. It'll put a track for every track or version you have, even though there's nothing in it. And you can see now we have the little link chain link. That means the chain link is in the actual edit too. So that segment can now be put in all different places and be resinked when you change it or do something to it. And you can- Another thing that I had to learn to understand was when a segment becomes connected, when it gets that little chain link there, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's connected to something else somewhere. It means that it can now be put in other places so you can easily sync them or update them across different cuts. Yes. And this whole method of making the shot sequence and the source of sequence I was saying earlier, you can just totally skip that if you want. Like, suppose I had an edit and I knew that only one shot was gonna get effects like. So let me back up and just undo making the shot sequence first. So if you don't wanna deal with shot sequence, you can just manually say create segment connection. And that adds the little chain link and that can now be linked other places. So you could totally do it manually that way and not ever deal with the shot sequence. Cool. Yeah, I've done that sometimes when I get an N tag from a client that's gonna be in five different spots. I'll just create that connected segment. And then I think I interrupted you. You were about to show the jump to connected segment. Yeah, so let me give you where I would create shot sequence. And now, if anything has a little chain link, I could right click jump to connected segment and see a list of everywhere that is instanced or used. And it's really great that it always gives you a, here's the longest version of it. So I've done this before too, where I have a 30 and a 15. I start doing work on the shot in the 15. And then I realize the 30 has 20 more frames on it. I gotta go put that down and do it. But if you always check this and go longest, work on the longest instance, it'll always, all the other instances will get that work too. So typically what we do next with the clients is we go through and make notes. And I like to do markers either on the timeline or on the segment, it kind of depends on the job. And just whatever the client says, you want that bottom blocked out. There's always little cleanup stuff. Is that your client right there? That's my four year old police car. Sure, it's your executive producer. Go through and make notes. Every screen, so many screens these days. Yeah, it's a great use of markers. So that's something, use of what? Of the markers to do like retouch notes or cleanup notes. That's a great, great use of that. And what I try to do is when the task is complete, I'll change it to green. Or if it's, you know, the feedback from the client, I'll change it to purple or something like that. And then I can quickly just look. Let me actually jump ahead where, so this just pretend this is a couple hours later. I've done some effects work, green means they're done, orange are still pending. And it's the end of the day and I'm going home. You work fast, man. I know, right? Just give me an idea for a feature request though. I'm gonna head over to, well, not, yeah, not to give it to Brian Bailey because you work so, you work so much faster than me, but I'm gonna head over to plain feedback and add a feature request for like a marker that links to shotgun. So we've been using shotgun. If I could get the status to change, but a market to change color based on the status and shotgun. Anyway, sorry. I made it without me. Yeah, that sounds great. Back to you. And another thing I'll do sometimes too, I've experimented with this is actually using the full segment marker. And there's a Python script for that. So you can make the marker the whole duration on the segment. And then if you're doing a posting for the client and some kind of feedback and burn metadata, you can use that color. That's a digression. We'll just, let's give it a, but anyway, we tested that out a little bit too. Cool. So it's the next day. It's Tuesday now. We've got the color in and I need to replace all the raw footage with the color footage. And this before connect to conform was a pain. You kind of do it shot by shot manually. But hopefully we can do it quicker now. I'm gonna look at my sources sequence. And since I've added some of those like phone screens and stuff, those are in my source sequence too. And that didn't happen automatically. I'm skipping ahead a day. I hope that's clear. I didn't mean to like infer that it just updated itself. But in looking at the sequences, I'm gonna look at the, even the things that are linked because when I'm relinking color footage, I don't wanna unlink stuff that's not, you know, those plates. So I'm looking at things that say raw and that's all I'm gonna say media. And I'm gonna search and where another color footage is. Scan there. And it found almost everything. Let's link those. And there's still something missing. As always, we've got to go investigate. Is this something that I want to tell you too? That's something I have. And after some investigating, I found out that the colors did go wrong. Take. Okay, so that's old. And he's busy and he's not gonna have time to color it. So I'm gonna have to do it. So that one, I'm gonna go back to the raw footage. Scan there. Relink it back to the raw again. And then I'm just gonna have to make a note on my editor. Okay, I'm not gonna edit the colors. So I'm gonna have to color too much. That's just another little thing I've dealt with a lot. We're always in such a hurry and that it's changed that the colors might do the wrong take or might do an old piece that we're using. And then I have to match his other shots that he is able to do because we don't have time to go back to him. Was that cool? That swapping out footage from raw that colored or if we got a new color version, you can do that. I don't know if people realize how easy that is now with these sources sequence. If I had a little edits, which I'll get to in a little bit. You would see that it would handle all the different edits for you too. Another benefit of connecting conform. Skipping ahead again. Let's say I've finished all the effects work. We have a beautiful 30 and it's two days later and I would need a 15. That happens a lot, right? Yes. And it's gonna be a perfect lift. My editor didn't change any shots. Okay. I did a spot last week. There were the first approved version of the cut was a nine by 16, 60. That was the first approved version. Yep, Mercury's in retrograde and we're all going to hell. Well, at least they, for me, they usually start with the 30 and get cut down to 15. We don't usually do 15s that develop on the 30s. Really good 15. Yeah. I've got the same thing from the editor again, a reference and a, I'm gonna put them in the same folder as my 30. Do the same thing I did before where I had the different things all into one edit. There it goes. And looking at the 15, I'm gonna walk those same tracks and just scan it real quick. Seems to be from the 30. I don't see anything new. Okay, this is new. This is kind of graphic, but then the 30. Okay, so this shouldn't be too bad. I'm gonna go back to my source of sequence again. And this time instead of create, I'm gonna update. It changed a little bit. And again, we've got those markers telling us something happened here. This is a new segment. So that was a texture I use in the effects. Yellow extended source head by one frame. So the editor use more heads on that shot. So I won't complain too much. There's not a left anymore. Brian, when that happens, when the update, when the update shows that a shot has been extended by like heads or tails, is that reflected in like batch groups or BFXs where that clip exists? Is that automatically, is it automatically extended for you or? It will when we do update the shot sequence. Okay. We're not to that yet. Gotcha. And I don't know if batch groups, I think you would have to manually do that with the batch group if you're using that route. That makes sense. There's a couple of other things here and I will kind of investigate this. That's the graphic that's new. If I look at the sources, I can tell again, that's one of those things where my editor's path is of capital Y and I need to lowercase Y. We should just clean that up on it. Okay. So those linked back up. There's new, something else in there that was some kind of reference I was looking at for that. Well, yeah, that was just a reference thing. I was looking at it. And you can kind of clean those up if you want. I typically just leave them, when I have like a reference in a BFX. The 15, also my editor named it something totally different. I like to keep the names consistent. If I know it's like left in the same spot. And if I go look at that 15 now, it has all those same sources linked. So we didn't have to manually go find all those. We didn't have to go back to the color footage folder. I just found them all when we did that sources update. I'm gonna do the same thing again that I did before where I copy this layer on the lower one. So we can do the before after stuff. And now I'll go back to the shot sequence. So I haven't updated it yet. These are all the shots in the 30. Let's do a update shot sequence. And you can specify the scope here of where it looks to see if it finds new shots. I typically use all sequence reels. I don't know what the cases would be where you would only wanna do it with the current reel or open sequences. If you know what you're doing and you're versioning up shots, maybe you would do that. When I hit update, here's a bunch of stuff that looks new. Marcus told me that's a new shot. Okay, but that's actually that. That'll pick up from the old spot. My editor reused that in the 15. That's that graphic. That's that new graphic. So it's treating that as a new shot. But here's that thing again where my editor had it in there twice to kind of repeat it. So it thought that was two shots. I will clean that up. Let's look at the 15. So it looks like he repeated that to hold it on the end, treat it like one shot. And then he did the same thing with the logo again. Does that make sense that I'm cleaning those up by using time marks instead of little segments? Yep. If I update shot sequence now, those second copies that had previously made, now it says it's unused because it's just using the one now. And that is something I like to trash and get out so I don't forget about it. And you can always move stuff around in the shot sequence. Like to keep it nice and clean. So we got 15 again. So it got all of those same chain links. If I right-click on one and jump two, I can see it's in the shot sequence, the 15 and the 30. There must be some difference in the ins and outs. There's my shot sequence as it's two or two. So I would want to do any more clean up work on the shot sequence. I wanted to make sure I cover everything. Thinking about that one heavy batch I had in there. Okay, so we've added our 15. And it got all the colored footage. Got all the shots with all the work already done. Is that impressive? Since everybody's doing that already with Connecticut Confluent. The crowd's going wild right now, man. Great. So now to actually get to the social media stuff because I don't know if this would be the exact order most people work, but we typically have like a 30 and a 15, they're 16 by nine and then the clients want to start doing Instagram versions. Well, not my client apparently. Yeah. My editor. Brian real quick, before we jump into the social stuff, just a couple of questions from people about what you've shown so far. The first is, is there a good number to set that source merge preference to in the preferences panel? It depends on, I don't know, it's how much you want to do effects work on handles if required, does that make sense? If it's like real heavy roto, you don't want to do a lot of work on in between frames. Yeah, I had an issue with it. Again, like I said to you, I didn't even know that that preference existed and what I found was like if the default is 24 and this goes out to Brooks, what I've been using so far is like it defaults to 24, make that double what your usual handles tends to be. So if you're doing 12 frames of handles, make that 24. I happen to be doing 25 frames of handles because it was before the color grade process. And if I had set that to 50, it would have caught a couple of shots that really needed to be one source as opposed to broken up. So maybe that's a rule to try is, double whatever your standard handles are gonna be. And then another question is, is there a way to change the default marker color? Or remember your last marker color? Each time you set a new marker, it defaults to blue. If you change it right here, that becomes your new color for everything that you make after that. Gotcha. So, okay, I have orange there. It's not really like setting a default. It's just, that's what we're gonna use until you change it again. Copy that. All right. Any more questions? Okay, so social media. My editors typically sit with the client and recall the shots. So they'll send me a reference. Sometimes they'll send the AAF, but usually it's simple enough to be pan and scan and I'll just die match it. So I'll drag those into my form reel. And my editors, in Avid, for them, it's easier to work 1920 by 1080 and put black on the sides. But I really prefer in flame to have the timeline be the size that we're gonna export. I don't know, that might be different for other people, but this is just simple for when you're exporting. You don't have to worry about resizing it on output. It'll work with when you're actually using 9 by 16, where it's 1920 tall. If you're doing 9 by 16 within an HD frame, then you're kind of cheating it down a little bit. So I'll take the editor's reference and resize it to actual 1080 by 1080 change. And I wanna show you one thing here. You have to do this resize with something like the reference video, as opposed to resizing your actual timeline. And the reason is, if I go to reformat on one of my actual edits, when I hit reformat, it's gonna tell me if you continue, all the existing connecting segments will lose their connection. And this is something I've asked about if we can get around that way to make that work better. But if you reformat that timeline, it's gonna break everything. But if you already have something that's that size you wanna go to, and then you copy and paste into it. So I'm just gonna take that whole, everything that's chain linked, copy. You could also do like edit over rights and paste. That does not break those links. So if I right click now and go to jump to connect segment, it's in the one by one, it's in the 30. So it's still linked to the version in the 16 by nine edit. Another thing I like to do is actually make another reel. And this is gonna be one by one. I'll change this to 16 by nine. They're probably here at the last minute. They need nine by 16 as well. Again, not my client apparently. Okay, so this is something that has been the biggest discussion I think on how to do social media stuff. I wanna be able to update effects or change things and have it ripple through to those different resolution sizes. So the effects what you have to do is I can change something in the actual BFX. And I'll do something dramatic so you can just see who want this to now be. So I'm parked on my 30 and 16 by nine. And I've changed that BFX and I want that to ripple through. But also in my one by one, I have a resize where, you know, they wanted him to be over here, but that's just in the one by one. If I sync this connected segment, it's gonna sync all the timeline effects. So if I go look at my one by one, I've lost that repo that I did. I'll undo that and show you what you can actually do is just sync the BFX. So if you right click on BFX, sync batch effect connected segment, and I'll hop over to the one by one. So it's updated the BFX, but it's left to resize. So that repo is still there. That makes sense? Yeah, that's the key right there. This is just to be conscious of what it is you're syncing. That was my one big con for using BFX segments. For social deliverables, you have to be careful to not sync the whole connected segment. So I'll jump ahead to where I've got my 16 by nines. Of course, we did nine by 16s and one by one. And the one by one, most shots have a little bit of a repo. So I gotta be careful if we change any effects, adjusting that BFX. Hey, Brian, can you select like multiple timeline effects and sync them all at once? Like BFX, Color Warper, or is it BFX? How granular can you get with what you sync? Let's see. I'm typically doing like everything I can in the BFX. I'm not doing it as a timeline effect. So I usually just have like BFX and resize. But I wonder if I sync selected effects. So you can do that, except that it won't let you control select BFX and something else. Got you. The resize and the color correct I can. So does that answer your question? It's like BFX is a special case, but other ones you can. Yep, cool. Thank you. And thank you, Jeff. So I feel like that was a lot of build up to get to how I handle the social deliverables. Let me jump over to how I would do it in batch groups. So back to, all the way back to you. This is all from having to switch to work at home. But I'm just gonna try. We all know it well, man. I tried to set up home as close to work, network paths and everything that I could. Some of them got broke. I'll do it this way. Okay. So back up all the way to where we just move. Okay, so I've got my segments all connected sources. I haven't done that. Create shot group yet. But I'm gonna create the shot sequence. But with batch groups, one thing you have to do, batch group has to have a shot name. So I'll do just simple shot name. And now they have that. There's a segment name, but then there's also a shot. And with that shot name update, or create shot sequence, and it didn't have that lower one you want. You walk it. So now it's done the same thing with the chain links. Still the same as what we were doing with VFX. But now instead of just going and starting working VFX, I'm gonna select everything and create batch group. Hey, Brian, one question from the chat here while that's rendering. As far as doing your pan and scans, is there a benefit to using resize versus adding an action timeline effect? I think resize is typically faster if you're not doing any scale. And I feel like my editor is usually just left and right, you know, pan and scan. If there is something that's zoomed in or looks like it needs more adjustment then I'll go to action instead of resize. So when I did that create batch group, now on my desktop I have a batch for each shot. Go to batch and look at them. It's set me up with the source file, the render node, the render node that's smart replace on here. That render will automatically get slugged into the timeline. And that is a source now that is underneath any other soft effects or batch effects you do. Does that make sense? Oh yeah, the smart replace when it comes back to me, it goes underneath any timeline effects that you did. So if you had a scale or a color correct or something and then you re-rendered shot one, that same stuff will be applied to the new render shot one. So I'll do my crazy color correct on that shot again. This is my absolute favorite way to test these things, by the way is the crazy color, crazy color correct. And also this was one of those things I was saying about the batch group. It's starting on frame 1001, but it's including handles of what's in the timeline.  So this is where if you're doing this batch group method, you really wanna limit those handles. If you think you're not gonna have to do any handle work later, you can make it zero or just a couple frames, but now you're gonna either have to do the work in those handles or you can manually change the render frames on that render node if you wanna just render what's currently in there. But I think you just have to do that manually. I don't know the way to automatically not consider handles when making a batch group. So there's my crazy color, I'll render that quickly. While that renders, hey, Mori, just one other note about the resize for pan and scans. When my editors, some of my editors use Avid and when the editor switched to using frame flex for their repositions, those get translated in the AF to flame resizes. And so once I started getting pan and scan stuff out of Avid that was using resize, I just naturally started using resize as a way to keep it consistent. I think that's, I don't know what effect they're using in Avid, but most of them come in good for me too. The main thing I have to deal with is they're using dailies that are HD and then if I have a 4K plate, you still have to go into the action that the AAF created and put a 50% scale on it. It's still typically winds up pretty good. Yeah, we've tried to enforce the rule of full size dailies. The dailies can be a lower bit rate, it can be a lower quality image, but the scale should match whatever was shot. I'll let you know how that goes. Okay. Everything we have gotten the last couple of years is either UHD or 4K. And those are pretty easy for me to drop a scale in on. There's some red formats that I really hate. Okay, so I rendered that and it automatically replaced what was in my timeline there. And the benefit of batch groups for social media is that I don't have to worry about blowing away my resize if I seek to segment. So if I do something else here on the timeline, like every size, and I haven't made my one by one yet, hopefully this makes sense. When I need to do more work in that batch, that'll all come in underneath whatever I'm doing on the timeline. And if I have a 30 and a 15, a one by one, a nine by 16, I can just hit, I don't even, I don't have to hit same connected segments because the batch group has gotten done automatically in their place. You're client again. They want to make a change to the four by five, right? That was really loud. I didn't think it was that loud. I've got a four year old. We're all working from home, man. I'm wondering what I'm doing. I'm gonna put some WD-40 on that. Yeah, three in one oil on that, on the hinge. So that was really quickly going through batch groups. I know we're running long, but I wanted to kind of show both methods. Did I explain both far enough? I think so. I've got a question for you here. How do you work around the fact that after you create batch groups, all of your sequences are now on a new version? You're hearing Brian respond emotionally right now through his four year old about this very, very challenging thing. Charlie, be quiet, please. And because you asked so nicely, your child will cooperate, I'm sure. Okay. When it makes that second version, it doesn't have to stay there. I can make it track and move them. So like, I typically do move it down like that so I can do before or after with the clients. But yeah, when it makes that another version, it doesn't have to live there. I can move anywhere. More questions? Anybody have any other questions for Brian? Brian, how many spots do you deliver a week, would you say? Or what is your average, you have like this is Home Depot. How many different versions do they hit you with on your average task? Home Depot does so much, 30s, 15s, English, Spanish, and then all of those might have five or six different offers at the end. So finishing a spot typically means 30 or 40 deliverables. Yeah, I'm looking at this. You can totally see the benefit of this workflow. Here's another project I'm working on. There's 12 spots. Each one has a 30, a 15, a six. Each one is 16 by nine and each one is one by one. So that's 60 deliverables. And there's a lot of just at the last minute, hey, we need to paint out that hair flying away. And I don't remember which spots it's in. I don't have to worry about it as long as I can find it in one spot. Yep, with that kind of volume, you can totally see the benefit of the reconnected conform workflow. Anything that can eliminate, either save the time or eliminate the chance that one of those 5,000 versions is not gonna have your updated shot. One more question. And also even just for, we're doing more and more finishing while they're still editing. So I try to be conscious of setting everything up and offline to re-link as quick as possible when we have to do online. Because I forget about online and the client approves the offline edit and says, can we ship it tonight? Because they don't remember that we have to finish. Right, I don't know, can we? One more question for you, man. You're using library editing. Is that, are you doing that as a personal preference? Like living in the library versus the desktop. Is that a personal preference? Yeah, working with the desktop, I just feel like there's a lot more loading and loading, moving to the libraries. If it's just already in the library, then I can just work from there and not have to manage the desktop. And I use the desktop as kind of a scratch pad where to throw stuff just for a minute. But also that reminds me, you do have to be careful if you pull something out of a real group, that'll break its connection. That the real group is a real kind of container for things that are connected. So if I had something connected in this edit and I copy it to the desktop, that copy on the desktop does not show up in my jump to connected because it's in a different real group. Gotcha, yeah, that is another good thing to know about the connected form workflow is that there's a relationship, like you said, with real groups or with sequence reels and things like that, that just needs to be paid attention to. Anybody have any other questions for Ryan?  Do you have one more thing too? Shoot, go ahead. With the kind of like English version and Spanish version? Say I just copy this or duplicate the edit. This is going to be English and this is going to be Spanish. So I've already done my English version, but the Spanish version has a different end card with Spanish. So that segment is linked in both edits. But if I go to the Spanish one and I duplicate connected segment and you can set the scope all different kinds of ways depending on what you're doing. And I just want to do it in this one sequence and I can say duplicate or replace. So if I replace and apply, it doesn't look like anything happened, but that little chain link is now its own thing. It's separate from the English one and I can replace it with the Spanish one. Let me undo that. And then if I do duplicate and instead of replace duplicate and apply, it adds a copy on top. And now the bottom one is still linked to the English version. And now this is its own Spanish version. So this is the way I do a lot of forking off into those different offers. All the offers have English and Spanish versions. That's great, man. One more question for you from the Q&A. Do you find that you choose BFX or batch connected conform based on the edit? Or do you have a preference? Like if you settled into one versus the other. I think like I said, the main thing is if I know it's an effects heavy project, every shot's gonna get lots of effects work. If I'm sharing shots with other artists, then I will do the batch groups so that I can manage that better. This home depot type of stuff, it's usually clean up a little bit of work on each shot. And I'll just do the batch effects. Gotcha. All right. Anything else for Brian? Well, I just wanna say thank you, man. Thank you so much for taking us through this. And I happen to know, because I've known you for a while, that you've been kind of the, you've been a champion of the connected conform workflow for a long time. And we're one of the early adopters. And thank you so much for like, always giving your feedback back to the team, the dev team, because that's the only way we get these changes in the software that we want. So as my weekly message to everybody it seems, if you do have a feature request, if there's something that you'd like to see or that you don't like how it works, definitely head on over to Flame Feedback and make the comment there as the fastest way to get it addressed. So I'm just going to- Yeah, and hit me up on the Logic Facebook too, if there are any questions. Well, thanks, man. Yeah, if anybody has any questions for Brian, please go ahead and find him on Logic. I'm gonna paste into the comments or the chat window here, the registration links for our upcoming sessions. Brian, if you wouldn't mind stopping your screen share.  It says here, sometimes reformat scales things wrongly. Oh, you mean like, Terri, you mean when rescaling something on the desktop, or reformatting rather on the desktop? Is that, I think you might be talking, referring what you were mentioning too, but you referred to Brian was, if you reformat something like a timeline that has segments in it, you're gonna, you could end up with problems as opposed to doing like a straight up clip. What's the question? But if you reformat a timeline? Some says here, sometimes the reformat scales wrongly for me. How stable is it for you? When I'm just doing those offline clips, like from the editors, those work great. The, if you reformat an actual edit, I think I know what you're talking about. Sometimes the resizes get changed weird. Yeah, I think if you like, if you right click on that whole sequence and reformat it there, you're dealing with, you're trying to apply one thing to a lot of different options, a lot of different segments and clips that all have their own, maybe individual timeline effects. I think it also matters if that preference is set to like fill, it'll try to fill. Oh, sure, right. If it's set to fill versus crop. Yeah, I just reformatted this timeline and because I had that center crop preference, I think they all behaved. Yeah. All right, well, Brian, thank you very much. I put in the chat the registration links for the next two logic live sessions. So if you haven't signed up already, please do. Next Sunday, June 7th, we're gonna do silhouette paint with Boris FX and we're gonna have two presenters from Boris. There's gonna be Ross Shane, who's gonna be giving the demo and then Marco Peolini, who is the developer for Silhouette. If you happen to have a chance to check out Silhouette Paint, please join us. It's gonna be, it's a really great piece of software and it's now available in plug and form and Boris FX is gonna be giving away a one license of Silhouette Paint to one lucky attendee. So you can't win if you don't play. So please be sure to tune in next week. That's gonna be followed on June 14th by Resolve for Flame Artists with David Johns. Then on June 21st, Advanced Flame Techniques with Nikon Stepanyan. Definitely looking forward to that. And on June 28th, Joel Osis, the man in the myth, the legend. I'm hoping that for next week, I'll be able to give you the lineup for July. We've got some great things planned for logic live throughout the summer. You'll be able to find this episode and all the previous episodes up on Logic TV. And please be sure to subscribe to the YouTube group or the YouTube channel rather. And thank you again to Synasys for their continued support of the Flame community. Synasys Oceana Solutions integration and support for digital content creators. Check them out at synasys.io. That's it for logic live this week everybody. Thank you so much, Brian. And thank you everybody for tuning in and we will see you all next time.


Hey everyone, in this video, I'm going to give you a definition of innovation, break it down into very non-fluffy language to show you exactly what innovation is and how you can apply it to your business or your clients in 2020. For many people and many companies, innovation means one thing, and that one thing is cool or new or interesting ideas. But that's actually a really dangerous and very simple and actually wrong way to think about innovation. Thinking about innovation as just pure ideas can lead companies down the wrong path to creating interesting and cool things that really have no market need and are often badly executed because they have so much weight on how important an idea is. What innovation actually is, is the combination of an idea, which could be maybe even a mediocre idea, with execution. So how is it executed? How does the promotion work? How is the marketing working? How much does it cost? How much does this new solution cost? How much better is it than the competitor's solution? How well is it integrated into the current systems that the company has? So it's really a combination of three things. It's the idea, which you could also say the solution mixed with the execution and then that meeting market needs. And the market needs are either known, basically something that people know exists on the market that people need, or they could be unknown. For example, there wasn't a clear market need for something like the iPhone, but it was still an innovative product that managed to change the entire market and move the entire market towards that product. So as you watch this video, what I want you to think about are which companies are actually secretly innovating in the background. So I'm going to show you a formula for innovation, but I want you to write into the comments which companies are not obviously innovating but are actually innovating. So I think right now when you think of innovation, you're thinking of all the big flashy ones. But in a few minutes, hopefully after watching my formula, you're going to have a different thought about what innovation is. And I want to know which companies you think are innovative by the end of this video. One of my favorite illustrations of innovation and how to visualize it comes from a book called Anything You Want by Derek Sivers. And right now I'm going to go to my whiteboard and show you how this works in real life. And I think this is going to be a great little way of you showing other companies. Are you showing your clients? Are you showing your colleagues? Hey, this is kind of a clear definition of what innovation is like physically. Okay, on this board, I hope you can see that it says idea and execution. Maybe I'm even going to finish off that circle here. And so on this side, we can see awful idea, weak idea, so-so idea, good idea, great idea, excellent idea. And then we can see numbers next to it. These numbers are the multipliers. So on the other side, we can see that we have execution, no execution, weak execution, so-so, et cetera, et cetera, down to excellent execution. So let's do some simple math and look at a product like the iPhone, okay? So the original iPhone, I've even got a print out of the Apple logo here, which is great for the video. The original iPhone is sort of an anomaly. It's one of the few products that has ever existed that's actually high on sort of the innovative scale. So I would say the original iPhone was actually a great idea. So we're going to give it 15 multiplier. And I think the execution was, compared to what was on the rest of the market, I think the execution was excellent. And this is a rare case where you have great ideas and a great kind of solution and something very unique and excellent execution. And the result of this is we have the $15 billion product. And that's kind of the idea is you can add up and see how much the innovation is worth, right? That's not true today, but that's kind of the idea. Let's look at something a little bit different. Let's look at something a bit more normal. What about the iPhone 11 Pro? Let's get a bit more boring. So here's the iPhone 11 Pro. And one of the biggest innovations in this product is it has more cameras. Now, would you say this is a good idea? Callum, where do you think that in terms of an idea, where do you think the iPhone 11 Pro sits here? For the cameras. Just in general, that product. I think so too, agree. Really? I don't know. I would say it's at max, at the max level, it's a weak idea. Because this product exists on the market already today from every other company. But I think the thing that Apple does well is that they still execute these things excellently. And so this equals, you know, one billion, right? It's not now this industry changing product anymore, but because they're still excellent at execution, it still works well for that company. Think about something different. I always love to give the... Do you have any things you want to? There's Netflix. Netflix? Netflix is... Well, that's actually another example of something that once they did the streaming product, I mean, there were not so many other streaming products out there. So that's almost an iPhone style anomaly, I would say. It's one of these great ideas with excellent execution. How about something like the Tesla Model 3 or even the Tesla Model S? I think there were... I mean, I don't think there were other electric cars on the market. People knew what electric cars were. Those things didn't need to be invented. But the idea of... So I would say it's a so-so idea. The original, like we're skipping the roadster and going to the mainstream Tesla car. But the execution once again was excellent. So when you had a company coming along like maybe the early versions of the electric cars coming from Nissan or other companies like that, the same idea but less good execution. And so they just didn't manage to take the market or win the kind of hearts of minds of investors the way Tesla did. Another nice example I like to show is the Wii U, so Nintendo's Wii U product. So let's actually... They have three products in the last few years. There was the Wii, maybe you can show it. The Wii, the Wii U and the Switch. And the Wii was unbelievably successful. It was an excellent idea. It was something completely unique and it had excellent execution. It completely took over the market. It was one of the fastest selling and biggest selling games consoles of all time. And it was genuinely unique. It was something very different. Now, the next product was called the Wii U. It was also a very interesting concept. It was less interesting, but you could say it was a great concept. But the execution was absolutely terrible. And so that product, even though it was very innovative and very interesting and very new, it had very weak execution. And so it just didn't do so well on the market. Now, what's really interesting is they took the Wii U concept, which was this portable concept and tried it again, which means for me the concept is actually, you know, weak or let's just say so-so because they were just repeating the same thing again. But this time they executed it excellently. So you can have the exact same idea executed crappily like the Wii U and it makes no dent in the market and Nintendo's shares drop. And then you can choose essentially the same idea again, but with a much better execution and that hits the market hard and Nintendo's shares start to skyrocket like crazy. And so that's like a good more kind of... I mean, of course, these numbers are not accurate, but it's a good way of looking at innovation rather than it just being ideas. And rather than thinking that ideas are super important, understanding that ideas are actually just the multiplier of how well executed something is. Right? When we look at the first foldable phones that are coming to the market, let's say foldable phones are very innovative. So maybe they're even like great ideas, but currently nobody is executing them well. So there's no market for foldable phones. Or the first smartwatches that nobody cared about great ideas, weak execution, nobody cared about them. So when a company like Apple comes along, that's one of the things that people don't realize about a company like Apple why they're always considered innovative, but people actually don't realize they're innovative, is that they come along, they wait generally, they watch what the market does, they let the market iterate on the products, and then they come to the market with the same idea as everyone else, so-so idea, but they execute it better than everybody else, which is a super interesting thing. And what I always find interesting about it is that the media doesn't understand this. The media only wants to talk about exciting products, and Apple doesn't really release exciting products. This is why the AirPods, for example, nobody really paid attention to the AirPods in the beginning, because like, oh yeah, great Bluetooth headset that looks crap, and it somehow looks like cigarettes coming out of the ears. So a Bluetooth headset has existed a million times, so it's a weak idea, but excellent execution. And I think one thing that a lot of companies could do with is stop, especially if you're not a company that's very excellent at making products, especially if you're a company that's new to sort of the digital space, it's to try to get better and better at execution and not necessarily focusing too much on having the crazy new idea. A lot of companies try to do things, they try too hard to be unique, and it's often like these large telcos or large companies that really don't have any right to try crazy things, because they just can't pull them off. Often if these companies just tried something a little bit safer, but with really interesting execution, they could have an innovative product. And I think that's one of the biggest, biggest warnings I would have for companies, especially larger businesses, when they want to make an innovative product, when they want to disrupt the market, do understand that there is this sort of equation happening in the background, that it doesn't matter if you have the coolest idea of all time, we're going to have a streaming service that's like 5K and it's VR and it's AR, if you're not able to do it well, if you're not able to market it, if your company's just unable to do these things, then the product is not going to succeed regardless. And that's why I really like this almost depressing way of looking at innovation. All right, I'm done standing at this whiteboard. I'm going back to my desk and, you know, Callum has to set up all the lights again. So, well, here's the transition. All right, so hopefully that little overview of what innovation is and what innovation maybe isn't, gives you a better idea that innovation isn't this kind of fancy idea generation. You have to be a genius to innovate thing. It's actually the kind of almost slow and boring culmination of being able to execute something well and being able to execute something better than your competitors. And often it's really not about, you know, having the greatest creative director in the world. It's not about having someone like Steve Jobs running the company. It's about being able to give your employees or being able to teach your employees or your colleagues how to actually build systems so that they can execute better. It's not necessarily about how to be more creative because actually everyone has enough ideas. It's about how do you capture these ideas and how do you execute on these ideas better than your competitors? And of course, many of the ways to do this are by learning systems and, you know, companies use things like agile, companies use things like design thinking, design sprints. These are all systems that can help your company execute better rather than focusing just on when's the next big idea. I mean, if you look at a company like Facebook and Apple, two companies like Facebook and Apple, both of these companies are right now working on completely changing the entire computing landscape with augmented reality. Everyone knows it. Facebook are being super open about it. And it's not about the idea. Everyone knows what the idea. The idea is out there now. Everyone has the chance to work on that idea, but whoever executes it the best will win. And that's the kind of thing I'm super interested in seeing playing out. I hope you liked this video on innovation. I know it was very simple, a very quick overview. But if you head over to our LinkedIn page, there'll be a description, a link in the description down below. You can get a much deeper, deep dive into the topic of innovation. We're posting every single day different tactics you can use at your company or if you're consulting different tactics you can use when you're consulting on the topic of innovation. So definitely check out our LinkedIn page. We make new videos every week. So if you want to see more videos on innovation, design thinking, design sprints or anything around the topic of innovation, make sure you subscribe.  And we've got new videos out every Tuesday. All right. Have a good one. Bye-bye. One of my favorite illustrations of innovation comes from the book Anything You Want by David Sir. F*** Derek Sivers. Yeah. Okay. I'm done writing here.  Don't do that. No. All right. I'm done standing at this whiteboard. I'm going back to my desk and, you know, Callum has to set up all the lights again. So, well, here's the transition. So I hope you like this video. Sorry, my energy wasn't as high as it usually is. A little bit tired today. We had a heavy night last night at the office. No. Okay. Did I say weak enough? Yeah, no, I think. I'll see you next, all right. We'll see you in one more bit if you want to do more.


guys welcome to another episode of baslally quick one today i will be showing you some simple basic gospel movement you should know i will be breaking down this song for you this song a beginner can play this song intermediate can play this song advance bass player can play this song okay the song is as easy as it can be okay so get your base let's get started just a quick one now the key of the song is on e flat okay okay so that is the key of the song i think you must have come across this song in your look at churches now i will show you how to play the song and the feelings are added to it i'm going to break it down for you okay so that you understand it now the backing track i used i will put it under the description of this video okay i will put the link there so click and do not forget to subscribe to that youtube channel okay you want to go get the backing track on all right so let's get started the song is on e flat okay main progression of that song is one seven six six four go to five then back again to your one one seven then there is a flat seven there on the progression part of the song they always hit the flat seven okay they always hit the flat seven one and so they're going to okay so that is the basic progression of that song now let's start adding the passing notes now any beginner can play this song okay i will teach you a way you can spice it up okay now let me show you the movement there are some basic passing notes i use going to the main chord progression now you might not have a five string bass okay if you notice i came here to hit the third that's my three this is my key again on the b string the e flat is on the b string okay this is it one two three so you might not have this string so if you want to go hit the third you can do and also watch the fingering third so that can reach out to the six one seven three see here on the far then you go to one again okay one you are going to seven use this movement to the seven two one seven then you're going to flat seven this is what i did on the flat seven okay so flat seven slide to four one flat seven six flat seven slide to four hit the one lando on the flat seven hit the six here not the six hit the six here then go up on the six again then drop on the three two there is like you that's how you end it okay it's very very good let me put everything again one seven three six two one then you're going to seven two one seven flat seven that's how you go flat seven four one flat seven six six three two there that's how you end it you want to try the same song in more advanced way you can do it so i came here to do kind of spelling out the melody of the song okay okay so that's that was what i did and you can also do it here that's if you're using four string flat three three six one passing notes to the seven then two flat three chromatic walk down to your three two flat three three then this time around you're not going to six you're going to that movement is leading you to your flat seven two flat three three flat seven this is it this is our key so we said one two three four so this is our flat seven this is our six this is our five this is our okay so let me go this is our flat seven so that movement after the movement to the third that's it next step is to land on the flat seven then we hit flat seven four flat seven one okay that's the one then we went to two so guys this is how you can just take it from the beginner way of playing it to the next level of approaching the same song okay of playing the same song okay you can you can do it so everything i did is as simple as it can be if you're new to this channel please do not forget to hit the subscribe button before leaving hit the subscribe button turn on the notification bell so that you'll be getting videos new videos from me and if you need private lessons every information is right there in the description below all right so that is all for today i will see you in my next video okay peace out one love bye


Thank you. Hello. Good morning. I am Georgina Lewis with Shazam Media. Thank you for having me today I'm gonna talk to you about reoccurring revenue I have the slides up here at our website if you want to pull them down There's some other little giddy, so we're gonna be talking about at that site that you can pull down during this session I'm gonna be talking pretty quickly. So Let me tell you a little bit about myself first I Graduated college in three years with two degrees from Westland College all women's college and Computers and business I went to work for IBM bar business Which then within a year from that I bought that business out 14 years later We I sold that multi-million dollar business and the majority of the revenue was reoccurring revenue now in the IBM world Reoccurring revenue was licenses that we sold and then we could lock down the computer And they had to pay us for an annual renewal of that license. It's a little different from WordPress type environment in 2008 our oldest daughter Was number three pro golfer in the world so she turned professional and I thought I'd retire sold my business And wanted to be a caddy So that worked for like 12 months until I realized I don't like her being my boss and Complaining that I need to walk faster and I need to get to the ball before her and I need to have the yardage done So I retired we had a real caddy for the pros work and I became her agent, which I liked a lot better during this time a lot of People that I knew in golf golf magazine sports illustrated A lot of the top 100 golf instructors in the world were just 20,000 of them They all vote in the top 133 of those are now our clients today and they came to us to help us build their brand so today What I do with Shazam media is I'm a social media Ecosystem strategist and basically I help companies fortify their brands on the internet which I love to do and I'm empowered to do that because of our reoccurring revenue that comes into the company So I make money while I sleep and I get to choose what I like to do out of the plethora of offerings that we have So in 2009 2010, I am my husband who never worked with me before in the IBM business partnered with me and we started a website design business we started small we picked WordPress and We started using premium themes and we hired contractors to do custom work for us Even though I know six programming languages. I didn't want to really go out there and learn Java and build themes so What we're going to talk about today is ways that our company makes money and it's a little different than What a lot of people do in the WordPress world and what I'd like to challenge you to do is think about How can you take that model and maybe think outside the box and add some base revenue to your? current revenue stream So that's why you should focus on reoccurring revenue okay Why reoccurring revenue can help you is because it's profitable and it's sustainable So if you give a good product to your clients, you will hold on to that client for a very long time we have Something like a 95% Retention rate and a lot of people that we do lose is because they either went out of business or they you know, we help them find a better WordPress provider somewhere else and that's what I learned from coming to WordCamp was how to help your problem clients find a better Consultant so There's a lot of ways to learn Do reoccurring revenue? I'm gonna touch on the three main sectors and You're just going to have to figure out what sector is the best for you Now I am not talking about reoccurring revenue is not You selling a package of your services that you have to perform somewhere in the future and get in the revenue today reoccurring revenue is you selling something that you don't have to do anything for Every month for the next four years unless you choose Okay Before you pick one of these options you need to research and you need to plan you need to figure out what your competitors are doing so No matter what we do Chazan media whether it's helping a customer brand themselves or we pick on a new topic Ourself or an offering Re-research we want to know how profitable and how much Energy we have to put into doing that and how you know, we're gonna win So how are we gonna do that and do that? Well? First thing I'm talking about is subscription and membership based revenue Okay Here's some examples Magazine websites newsletter websites forum websites Freed and paid content websites. We often build these for our clients Well, if a client comes to me and they say, you know, I really wanted these are all premium offerings that we issues Am offer to our clients So we have base price for that's fixed and it's been the same price for three years for our website solutions Because we're in a growth model. So I should tell you that We are not an agency that wants 50 clients that we charge 25 to 50,000 a year for We are an agency that wants which we have a hundred and fifty clients That we have on hosting that pays about a thousand dollars or more of month a year So that's a hundred fifty thousand dollars. We know is coming in and that's our base that we can then Take December off if we want, you know But that's our sustainable income and we would rather sell good quality volume sites as our base That empowers us to do all the other Alucard services So we a lot of we've divided up our solutions into base products And then if we do a LinkedIn offering or we do Facebook solutions, those are all a cart Okay So magazine and newsletter sites, right? Typically those are sites that are put up and people pay for ad space to be on those sites most the content is free Foreign-based websites are where people come together answer questions for the general public And if it's a good topic and it's been SEO'd properly You should get a lot of hits off your forum website But you've got to have two or three administrators moderators to answer those questions and Part of that content can be free and part of that can be paid So we have an example of that and my golf pros. We found that several of those top 100 teachers They want to come together in their very Philo-thropic golf is a very Philo-thropic industry probably the number one philanthropic industry in the nation and so they're donating their time to answer Questions and the cost of the website is covered by the paid content membership portion of those forums, but there's something like 7,000 topics in that forum that's being supported by ten different golf pros at any one time Free and paid content sites You know, that's a that's a great way to get revenue and It's a great way if you don't get revenue through Paid content you can at least capture the name put them in a newsletter Use something like MailChimp or constant contact and upsell them every month on You know information that's coming out and things that are being offered and that type of thing. We have a client That had us build a website Called junior golf ranking dot org and they are the worldwide junior ranking site and everything is free except Your child's lowest level Results and how you got a thousand points, but Joe Smith got 1500 you have to pay to get to that lowest level So you get to see your child's oh ranked number eight and believe me if you don't know this term of helicopter parents And you could figure out how to tap into helicopter parents. There's a lot of revenue in that kind of a website So we have these obsessed parents go on they want to know why they're not ranked tire They try to figure out the math behind that when they get to the lowest level they have to pay or join to get to that level Okay, so those are some examples I have resources for you. So if you choose to go down a subscription Magazine paid content type of a website for yourself or for one of your customers There are three different resources you could go look at Makota does a really good article about profitable subscription-based websites In their article, I think they give you something like seven different examples of types of subscription-based websites One of my favorite things which I subscribe to every Monday morning is my quiet time in my pajamas Sitting at my computer and I read an ink ink.com has an online subscription That helps me think about branding Growing my business What's going on in? social media and marketing All of those great topics and there was a gentleman who went and spoke at the grow conference If y'all heard of the grow conference and he talked about how subscription-based Companies are the way of the future He happens to you can go to this link that I have in the slideshow when you download it And it will take you to the ink magazine article and from there. He just published a book called the automatic customer So it's talking about customers that sign up for a subscription There's all these statistics about people who don't want to cancel their subscriptions They're afraid if they sign up today, it won't be as cheap as when they got it There's a huge retention of that income and he talks about those types of businesses. I mean, it's so basic it's like the We've all gotten those brochures in the mail where they want you to sign up for fruit every month being shipped out to you Because now you you're like I even think that's cool And I have orange trees and grapefruit trees in my yard, but I'm a go that's cool I want to sign up for that because I feel like I'm getting something every month I bought it for myself with You know, I think my husband's listening in Australia right now because he forgets to buy cool things for me so it's buying for myself, but um Marketing experiments this link is really really interesting if you go to that link They actually did some statistics about monthly subscription price points Quarterly semi annually and annually and what your retention is of certain client clients at certain price points So I really found that intriguing, but I do all this research So we do research on everything and I'm about to tell you about our hosting next Now Okay, love subscription based websites our first year I wasn't someone talking. I was like, oh, that's going to be so cool. I want to do that And we did that we have two websites out there that drive subscription based websites Revenue for us We spend a lot of time Getting a hold of other people to make sure they're answering questions or providing fresh content for that And at the end of the second year, I realized that we're just breaking even when we talk about the time that we're spending versus subscription at 1995 a month and then it goes through PayPal for us That vendor didn't have or that customer didn't have an updated Credit card. So then it expired on us and we're always chasing, you know, that revenue to get them to re-sign So there had to be a better way to do this. So in 2010 We said, you know what let's start building really good solutions Out there and let's focus on hosting And let's provide hosting to our customers. I think one of the You know Sad things about this industry with freelancers is everyone's going after the big sale for today and the work and the revenue they need today And they'll just stick their client on a shared server somewhere And that's fine, but that Solution that they provided is now hackable Right and not having a premium server is hurting their SEO So we realized that if we provided a really good hosting to our client We put them on a premium server We figured out the load that we could have on that server for our x number of clients without having to band with their speed issue right We control the Uh ip address so we get more google points. That's a georgina phrase, right? We always want to a plus on the test when I talk to customers I talk about how many points we get we're doing good things and we want to get to You know, 90 to 100 points So we get an a plus on our test and google put us on the first page So we have to do that by taking all these little things into consideration well, what I found out was Hosting is very competitive and people always ask me. Well, I can put it on google for 9.99 a year Well, yeah, you can but how we differentiated ourselves as we package services And maintenance with our hosting Now at my website with the link I gave you you can actually download Only because you're in this classroom today. I'm going to let you see our pricing for last year and the offerings that we do It's locked down. You pull it down. The password is shazam And you can go in and you can see we have three levels of hosting that we offer We have level one level two and level three And a level one It's 89 dollars a month because we found out when we did Some industry studies that our competitors were offering 89 dollars a month for level one support We figured out what their bandwidth was that they were offering How many hits per month they were offering Wp engine helps you out with that a lot because they charge you for different levels Based on performance and hits so that'll give you some baselines But then we have to differentiate ourselves. You know, what is our value add? right So in in order to get really good ongoing service To our customer and revenue and retention. We have to have value add for our hosting So the hosting with a premiere server. That's one number two We offer a basic package of support With every level so in our level one for example, we give you mr. Customer a half an hour a month Do you know we have over 140 websites around the world? And only 10 call us every month So it's a it's a great upsell It's a great value add that our clients are not utilizing because they're too busy And we built them such a good website at a low price point that it's just it just runs on cruise control They don't need to update that website that often Not only that but we gave them the keys to their car We let them in we talk them how to do pages. We do not change charge to change a page Customers love to have that empowerment now. We don't let them in the engine You know, we don't let them go in and install new plugins or change the menu things that are not recoverable If they can be recovered because you go to the bottom of page or a post you say recover this page You can have access to it But I've had a very big website That gets 50 000 hits a month Call me up because they had an intern go in and change a menu option You guess what when you delete a menu by accident you can't recover it And they're updating that website so much. I couldn't restore it from the day before So we had to go to web archive And chris, I know you're listening. I know this was you had to go do this But you need to go back to web archive figure out what the menus were and he had to recreate the man manually one at a time That next day our entire clients got blocked from menus So are we going to charge our client to change a menu? Absolutely not, but they get 30 minutes free of maintenance So they send us a little ticket At that time we were with host gator. So we got a product called wh mcs to manage our clients great tool It interfaces with subscriptions through paypal so I can send them an invoice through that It collects the subscription it puts all my subscriptions on the first of the month So I get all my money on the first of the month of every month for my clients And we're able to track our request our clients can even go into the middle of the night And enter a request for their 30 minutes on their own Again reduce in our management time and they wake up the next day. It's done Okay, so figure out a way that you can add a value add the other thing that we did is we went to a lot of work camps and Syed with optin monster a couple years ago in orlando Anyone who's at the conference he offered unlimited licenses for optin monster. Well, we spent the money and we bought that So now if our clients signed up with us at a level two or a level three Which is 189 last year or I don't know 225 if you'd have to look at my sheet They got that software Included on our servers and that licensed for free But they didn't cost us anything more. We'd already pre purchased That package and it was a great offering So when you hear about those kinds of things invest in them And make that a differentiator of yourself against your competitor Okay This is like the key I think is figuring out what can you do To offer to your clients and it's going to come in like clockwork And you don't have to do anything for that additional revenue Now we do we do a lot. I will tell you this in december of every year our kids are out of school We have four of them. Well, if you count my two 91 year old grandparents, that's Six and then you add my husband. We have seven kids Um And it's really hectic in our house at christmas. So I don't want to build websites in december We do not build websites. What we do is we send out a newsletter to all our clients and we tell them This month we're going to come through and clean up all your spam We're going to lock down all your passwords. We're going to and they love it They love that some mechanic showed up and maintenance their car and they didn't have to call us you know Okay My third reoccurring revenue idea for this presentation is ad placement Now everyone's heard of ad placement, but i'm going to give you a spin on it a little differently Okay, think outside the box We all have clients come to us and say, you know, I really want to do this, but I can't afford this and blah blah blah I need a discount well You probably don't want to call chris lewis and ask for that discount because he's hard lying. No He has to build it time is money But what we figured out is that we go ahead get a simple little agreement with our client And we say we will give you A discount But we reserve the right to put an ad on your website that we can sell to one of our other clients I don't need to sell my own marketing I We build six to ten websites a month and yesterday on my drive here. This doesn't happen every day But yesterday on my drive here I got three calls from three new prospects of my other clients and I turned one away because he didn't understand enough about his business He was not ready for us I can't brand him. I can't build a website if he doesn't know what he wants to target Now he can go find a five hundred ninety nine dollar website from somewhere else and get started and call me back in three years but You know, I've learned that mistake and so If I do have several clients that come to us and build a second and a third website because we've done so well and grown their Business 33 with the first website And then they want to discount and I say sure I want the bottom of your website that I can sell and it won't be to one of your competitors at any point in time And I know certain clients of mine are going to be successful with those ideas And I know those sites are going to get twenty five to a hundred thousand hits and when they do That's when I sell that that's based to another one of my customers They pay me because I own the spot And I make a money while I sleep So that's a spin on advertisement That you may or may not have heard before but we figured that was a great way for us to Have future sales So why focus on reoccurring revenue?  You have to perform in the future It's not plugins that you have to support in the future and try to keep selling over and over and over again It's not themes that you have to market and compete against someone else Recurring revenue is sustainable Sustainable income is dependable That's it Any questions any questions? Yeah Yeah, the question is how do we choose the service provider? For our hosting and We made mistakes. Let's start with that. Okay And at the time we didn't think it was a mistake but We learned and so first we went with host gator and blue host and did shared shared Server space and it was not smart. We didn't have the knowledge how to go to that next level Until a couple websites got hacked and then we're like, oh my gosh, that's not very smart We stayed with those same companies and moved to you know, their premium servers as a reseller server And the problem was about three or four years ago in our experience Eig bought blue host and then they bought host gator And so when they bought blue hosts and we had a lot of downtime We moved all our clients to host gator nine months later that eig bought host gator And they put all our clients back without our knowledge at the first set of servers So we started attending word camps and we started talking and we also got a lot of meetups with other word press users And what we have discovered personally is that Of course, I know you're listening now we're going to get this wrong Wp engine is where our level two and level three clients are that's a more premium price And then Site to ground at a mind block there for a second site ground is where we put all our level one clients And we know we have now after a year we're in year five We have zero downtime We have great support from them They answer us real time. So those are the two server companies. I would recommend that you do As a reseller You're welcome. Anything else? Okay. Thank you guys