All right, let's get going everybody. Welcome to logic live. My name is Andy. I'll be your host today We have a wonderful Episode lined up for you today. We're gonna have a conversation with will Harris and yon la for a of Autodesk you know them you love them and Before we before we begin Let's just give a shout out to our friends at cynicism shiana who are sponsoring logic live. These guys are my own personal Reseller, I've been working with them for 15 years. We could not do what we do without them and they're a huge supporter of Logic and the flame community they host our our user groups in New York But also user groups in Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, Toronto, Detroit and probably more If and they've also been huge supporters of Like one frame of white. They're always volunteering prizes and just a great bunch of guys If you have any needs or questions Definitely reach out to to the folks at cynicism cynicism shiana provides solutions to keep teams connected and working Find out more about their remote workflow solutions at cynicism.io cynicism shiana supporting flame artists since 1997. Oh Right There's everybody So I just want to welcome first welcome will and yon to logic live. Hello guys. How you doing? Hi, Andy doing great. Thanks for having us of course Hi, Andy Nice to virtually see you again You know, I thought it would be great to to have you guys on and talk about Flame and flame development, but you know really take advantage of the time that we have To kind of dive deep and and maybe just get a little bit more detail or go into a little bit more detail About some of the the things that come up either online or in the forums or at the user groups But before we get too deep into Into the nitty-gritty, I figured let's let's introduce the two of you to the you know to the rest of the crowd here So starting with will will I mean I remember Meeting you at various, you know of flame events Before you became the product manager, but tell us a little bit about yourself and and your journey Sure. Yeah, Andy So I'm a I'm British originally, but you in the been in the States for almost 20 years Went went to university in Canterbury, England did a film TV program finished in 98 and Then and then ended to start started in the like the like a lot of people Maybe is like a runner in the post business in London and work my way through to to come into the States for a Edit company called media 100 if you remember those guys. Oh, I remember media 100. Sure. I didn't know that Yeah, and so I was like a tech support guy in the early 2000s there became a demo guy and I remember one of the sales reps there in Massachusetts said to me Do you what do you want to have on your resume? Do you want to have Worcester, Massachusetts? Or do you want to have Los Angeles and I was and I was dreamy eye at that point and and went out to LA and started showing off stuff and Got to work for key code media the average reseller in in LA and then and then I'd heard of this thing Like what's better than avid was kind of I was working my way up the ranks and and then I that was about the time Do I first heard of flint and flame and fire and then I remember once going to riot Santa Monica? And they had seven onyxes, which is now like method in like like staring at each other like iron man and Hulkbuster I Crossed the machine room and I was like oh wow This is a whole another level and it took me a few more years to finally get to work on that kind of gear at company 3 I worked on on the smokes on the Tez Rose Back to London to frame store to work in the DI department and worked on smoke advanced again and then Back to LA and laser Pacific and luster for a little bit And then finally I got the call from Dave Sampson at Autodesk who was very much an old discreet guy Hey, well, you know come come and come and join us and And the first assignment was just learn that thing for six months Because I didn't really know it very well, you know, you know, you know as a junior and kind of growing into I Didn't know everything about it and I just spent six months just learning the beast of flame and and it kind of was all It was all areas of my career all came into one right. I loved doing the 3d stuff. I did some of that in avid DS. I loved I loved the rendering lighting But I also liked you know online and color grading and and it all it's so I ride I ride at the mother ship is how I felt and that's how I became a demo guy for Autodesk did that for seven years Did the trade show circuits and then finally? I'm not sure if you remember that the previous flame product manager a guy named Charles was actually killed tragically in an accident And that was the time when I then started talking to Steve McNeil Who's our director of technology on the on the flame side and we sort of started thinking well Could this job be done remotely do I have to move to Montreal? Because one wonderful as it is it was a big shock We I visit there a lot, but these days actually live in Austin, Texas and And go to Montreal a lot when when the travel is allowed But I get to work with now these days I get to work with an amazing team of sort of combat seasoned professional developers QA folks and and They're really a very special team the flame team and I'd love to talk more about that But I won't go on for it. Go ahead onto. Yeah, that's great I'm just so thrilled that there's a you know someone else to add to the list of people who do a great Dave Samson impression That's an elite group I have to tell you What about you? Yeah Well, I guess that my journey is way less sexy than will but yeah, well here it is So I'm well, I guess you can hear it. I'm French Canadian. So English is not my mother language So we can just clear it out now I so Back in 98 I started a TV and film program So that's where I start learning flint at the time on a noctane and Then after that, I spent a few years in post working on some blockbusters like well I was looking at hybrid so I worked on the spy kids and Once upon a time in Mexico, so the Robert Rodriguez movie and Then I got the opportunity to join Autodesk in 2003 as a Q way so as a tester and Well, I guess that the rest the rest is history So I'm I'm with Autodesk since 2003 and that's pretty much Congratulations, the Pampers got a shout out in the chat by the way, so yeah, that's my sponsor. Oh Excellent Wonderful, I didn't know you were you were at hybrid. I I did a like three weeks there back in 96 or 97 like when they were still in the house Okay. Well, they were yeah, so it was just a bit before my time. So I was there at well in 20 Well from from 2001 to 2003 so Great group of people. Wow. Yeah, absolutely Let me ask you about about About flame. Where do you how do you describe flame to other people? Where do you see it in in its what is its place in the in the community and the ecosystem in the market? And that's the both of you really Well, I guess that the best way to describe it is flame is the Swiss army knife. So it can do basically everything on The the post ecosystem. So that's the main strength So I think that will can probably just chime in and just add more meat on the bone But I guess that that's I would describe it Yeah, it's I mean it's different things to different people, right? I mean to some people it's the greatest magic box of of creative Freeform tricks and that's a definitely a part of it. I love and I love to see the you know, the one frame of white crowd and the and the Gabriel goritos of the world and the stuff they come up with and the concepts which are like super CG supervisor level things And then to others, it's you know, it's it's the it's the Mac Daddy and le machine, right? And it's it's like Adobe Premiere and David and and some After Effects and some You know new all in one And then there's I mean, I just feel like there's other specializations And it all depends on where you where you come from, right? I mean, we've seen people come from avid DS, which was one of my backgrounds and and really like Really like flame in terms of its concepts of nesting nesting inside a shot an odyssey of Of a comp that is that is nested inside a timeline We've seen we see people Just just being pure conform conform easters if you like that they're they're building picture for the biggest blockbuster movies And doing it at a level of precision like I saw when I worked at company three And others like you know the Technicolors and the Encore's and the Molinares in London that are that are just like amazing at what they do in as well So that diversity Honestly, it's a blessing and a curse to us Because it's awesome, but it's also challenging when you come to have to prioritize Like how do we show something for everyone? Let's say each year in the cycle of what we of what we do You know I before we dive into that I want to go back to the team How how many people are on the development team and where are they located and what do they do? So, yeah, so so most of the team Really all the dash will developers are much are in Montreal in the famous 10 Duke office and You know the size the size varies based on projects. Yeah, we've we've seen ebb and flow There's sometimes there are projects that are combined like with the Maya team or with the shotgun team But we've kept like a yeah a real a solid core of a mixture of senior developers Some of our developers are 20 year veterans just on flame And and a lot of new blood actually coming into the team in the last sort of five to seven years We've we've had like interns come from you know the and the local Universities that like McGill University where a lot of the the original developers came from their Montreal and we've Pick them up if you will as as interns and brought them in and and now they're you know writing the Python API in flame or Refactoring code of how I tell them I said, thank you right We should do another live maybe one day bringing some of those individual like you know 22 year old developers that are like, yeah, I code for flame and that's what I do totally But so there's so there's so that's the that's that's all in the in the team and And it's a rich. It's a rich Kind of ecosystem of developers these days. I'm happy to say what would you say about about that? Yeah Well as you said Well like the flame community, I would say that the flame development team. It's much like more family Than a working team. So we are all brothers and sisters So that's the beauty of it. I love it Wonderful and we do sometimes argue like family Politics and Thanksgiving is that what you're saying? I was gonna say like like it is like, you know, we Talk about the creative problems our customers have and some of us are more tuned into Different, you know type of customer and we have that whole philosophical discussion of you know How serious are we about this aspect? You know this tracking or seen linear or color grading or and we and we try to You know, talk it out and balance it out and I think you know, I think maybe that that It creates the well-roundedness that hopefully we've achieved in this product and how many people are done in Sorry, can you say that again? Yeah, how many people are on the team in total? Well, let's see. So there's I mean, there's there's probably in total I mean, there's there's sort of there's 35 40 people involved and the developers the QA And then if you extend that, you know to sales marketing folks There's there's there's dozens more Wow, yeah, I'm sorry. What were you gonna say, yeah? Saying that well, sometimes we argue but it's all it's always in respect and love Yeah, that's beautiful. Thank you So let's talk about the your your process so you just had a release Come come to fruition the 2021 release like a couple of weeks ago. It seems That came out When did that start, you know, how long is the development cycle? Tell me a little bit about the I mean, I live in in 30 second increments. I make commercials You know, sometimes I work for a day and sometimes I work for a month That's a really great question Andy And I'm glad you asked it because I think it's something that I even as a demo guy for Autodesk did not understand The the lead time and the planning period that goes into let's say making a an NAB major release Because if you think about it, that's the very end of the process where you have to have a fully cooked Faked out the oven distributed to customers You know back in the day would be burned on us on a bunch of CDs and distributed these days It's a download that has to be uploaded, you know, a few days before and then is trickled to users But that's just the very very very end and if you start tracking backwards You've got you know, you've got a gold build that has to be finally stabilized that has to have bugs fixed That then has to you know, I'm going backwards There's a feature complete day as we call it which is where all the features have to be in and we start stabilizing and fixing and and Hardening the release and that you know, that's a whole kind of four to six weeks We're four to six weeks back at this point, right? And then and then the the main development part could be three four or five months So then if you wind the clock back there, you're you're starting You're starting coding features. Maybe let's say October Right and that what that means is that you have to have planned what features you want to code in the quite a lot of detail before that so when that clock that back more so let's say July is where we have to Be start the the detailed planning process of what we want in the next April release Well, wait a minute you you in order to start detailed planning you have to have all your prioritization or your All of your kind of big blocks established So that process probably starts as early as the previous April NAB tech taster. Hello And then and then and then that feeds into a prioritization process so that by July We can say okay We know we want to do these three things and these little things Let's say from play feet playing feedback and that's going to be the major release Let's start planning. So the short answer to that question is it's almost a whole year, right to from conception or like Let's start a new a new piece of paper or a new a new Jira page Say what is next year's release going to be like? Almost a year to fully actually realizing that as a shipping piece of software So so to come along as I did as a demo guy Let's say in February and say, oh, can you not do one more feature guys like that's just like connected conform Is a total, you know, it's you're totally off in terms of what you're asking for I mean if you're saying There's one little bug in In feature X that I've played with for the last two months in beta that I know that you're just about to put the lid on Can you fix a bug in that? Yes, absolutely. Or can you nuance where the buttons are? Yes? That's a February question But that the question that you know, can you have a new concept needs to be really a year earlier To actually be able to on ramp into the full process now That doesn't you know smaller things for sure like going down the feet the flame feedback list and adding elbow nodes and being able to say Okay, well, there's a there's a I wish we could add these more functions the to the Python API are certainly things We can pick up late, but I didn't realize how early you have to add the big concepts in order to So to put it through the whole entire, you know, the factory Yeah, let's talk about the big the big concepts, how do you how do you decide on specific features to develop? I mean how how much is How much do you weigh in industry trends? And I guess maybe another way to ask it is how much of it is planned and how much of it is a reaction to things that? You weren't expecting or you know that the the market has now said is the most important feature of all time, right? I'm thinking 3d. I'm thinking stereoscopic, you know specifically, you know, see what Tim Farrell just said about it's time to get the bull rolling on a new text Tim, um, you're late. We were expecting that somewhere around two minutes after two, so Thank you, but but yeah, so to answer your question it it's a combination It's a combination. It's a funnel of input that you have to take lots of different inputs into the funnel So so for example, it's it's I mean some of the inputs are naturally user groups. Well, those are kind of trusted consortiums of valued users where we really do take big what would you call it big big takeaways from a user group That that says we really favor this over this like if they vote on something And we should talk more about like auto bucks. Maybe in a little bit, but that's one aspect for sure another aspect is industry trends Seeing seeing the need for something whether it was like you say stereoscopic back in the day The little bit before my time, but that I know that that was a big driver that sort of hijacked the flame release In in the sort of summer time that led to the next spring That's good and bad especially because you consider, you know in three years later It may not have been that you know, or maybe five years later. It was not so so so valuable But there are still good things in there VR another trend that you know, you could argue we could have responded more to We were cautious And I think that ultimately that played out in our favor Just because it could have been a massive derailment and you could have had nothing else kind of thing the following year if you're not careful But but so yeah, you're watching you're watching standards. You're watching HDR Watching, you know the cloud Stuck well that as well. And then and then the other aspect of courses. We're starting to understand more about our users through analytics So people that press the button that says we'll you know share share information It really does help the product because because we're able to see okay Well, they import, you know, certain codecs the they're able to understand what modules people spend the most time in and not Which is all you know anonymous data, but it really helps us to see. Oh my goodness No one's no one's using that codec Why would we and why do we need that kind of thing or it's and find defunct areas of the software and that kind of stuff So so I would say that's another aspect. That's that's just kind of starting off is is analytics as well Gotcha. Yeah, you mentioned you mentioned auto bucks. I don't know how many of the let me let me just take a minute and explain that to everyone else in the In the audience a Few years ago at NAB you guys held an event called auto bucks and invited some users to Kind of give some not only give some suggestions of features, but then a sign like a Dollar value of auto bucks value to them. I remember we all showed up. We were asked, you know to pick our five Favorite things we'd like to see developed and it was great because I was sitting next to a colleague and he had five completely different things Than I did we submitted those we all went away. I think we had lunch came back and Those those feature requests were up on the wall With dollar values attached to them. Yeah might have been $10 or $50 or whatever and we were each given a hundred You know auto bucks and told okay How much of this, you know money would you like to assign to your favorite features? Yeah, why did you guys hold that event? I thought it was fantastic, but I'd like to hear from you what the impetus was behind it Yeah, I mean it really was like a focus group Like a Luma exercise if you've heard of Luma we use that And and Jan here has been has been heavily involved in these from the beginning We've done them all over the world. It seems I am we and then Vegas a couple of times London We even did one as far back as like version 2015 For the in the in the kind of post-anniversary recovery era And it really was as Quinn was just saying they're a tough exercise in that kind of timeframe, but but but I think what it does is it serves to to help people understand the challenges and opportunities I guess in prioritization a wise man once told me pick three things do them well Versus pick ten things maybe and do them partly Which I think is guidance and I think they're doing an order a hundred dollar test or a hundred dollar investment test when you have seven projects which are $60 each and Ten projects which are $30 and Three projects that are you know ten and fifteen that are that are ten or funny bucks or whatever You then get to understand like okay, you can have one or two big rocks this year And you can have a little little rocks. What what makes a story? What makes a package that moves forward, let's say the agenda of machine learning or the agenda of Tracking or and and per Release it makes sense to kind of have some sort of focus or some kind of threads But fundamentally the auto box exercise to me and I'll let Jan jump in on this as well Gives us so gives a kind of an M an empathy or an empathic way to do that prioritization together and and it helps people to just sort of say oh wow so you so I can see now why you can't do You know rebuild paint and rebuild you know rendering or At the same time you have to pick one big rock Otherwise you all of your energy is going to get split which will mean that you won't do either one well What would you say about that? Yeah? I agree with you. I think that them well, there are two main purposes Just for the the auto box exercise The first one is that it helps users to realize that their priorities may be totally different than the other users And I guess this is not something easy to understand when you are working in your shop The and the other thing I would say that it's important It's from a user's standpoint It may be pretty hard to figure out the cost of implementing something Something that you think it's pretty easy to implement me may may turn to me may turn to Into a lot of words at the end and a lot a lot of development weeks and days so I guess that This exercise help users just to have a better understanding of the development constraint and the choice we have to make just development wise Yeah, I also remember sitting next to sitting in one of the tech teasers that that will was holding and sitting next to a good friend who was When we'll showed up it was one of those slides that said, you know We can work on these ten things picked to that you would like us to work on and I believe one of them was Connected conform and another one was related to like deep compositing and The person I was sitting next to had never conformed anything in their careers Worked at a shop where they exclusively did shop-based work and Have a heavy nuke presence. So they were it was totally into deep compositing. That's a phrase I had never heard before I conform every single day I'm doing it today before and after this logic live session. And so I remember looking at him and going like well Maybe this doesn't mean anything to you But it means everything to me and it was very clear to me at that point that like you said This is a product that that appeals to so many different people on very different levels And sometimes it can be a challenge to prioritize what you work on and when Maybe you could have told him it was deep conforming. Oh, thank you What let me go see if that URL is available. Hold on. I think I We could all come out of hit this rich people Yeah, I wanted to ask you About the the shutdown, you know, I guess it was It was in mid-March that we all shut down because of COVID-19 That was close to the end of a cycle of a release cycle But if you guys could just tell me what has changed I mean tell me of course about you know shutting down But also what about the you know your process? Have you had to change What with all working remotely and and things like that Yeah, I mean we've more zoom meetings. Yeah So most most seriously well, I do not know if Probably will can can chime it here, but development-wise it didn't change a lot of things So we we are a bit more restricted to Aldware because because basically most of our Aldware is in the building which we cannot access get access now, but we Apart from that we can do mostly everything just remotely so I didn't believe it's going to affect the value of flame or diminish the the The the level the quality level of the features in the future. So for us, it's probably a good thing I've been a learning experience for all of us, right? I mean we've suddenly got all our developers and QA is working from home some Some needing to literally kind of the last day the office is open Take take home specific specialized pieces of equipment to better do their job It's it's there's an anxiety level and I kind of what are we going to do and being able to sort of a few extra meetings to coordinate, which I'm sure you we've all experienced But but yeah technology in some ways enables this right, I mean we we build the actual flame build is it is done in California So they they were remoting onto Autodesk servers, you know from Montreal if you like to build the build the actual Software on in our daily You know debug builds Anyway They would it was never a So it was in a long time since with a server down the hall where you could go and do a hard reboot If you would Anyway, so and and I think that you know, it's we've all had to find our way to be productive You know, I've I've been working from home for a few years But I've always known that you know Yeah, I'm sitting next sits next to Louie so I can count on that if I say something to you I'm not Louie will know and and that he can shout across the desk to step on a bri and make sure that we're on for that Meeting of that kind of stuff that dynamic is not so easy now, right? And there's a there's a like we say no, yeah There's a creative kind of being together in the office and and you know I'd come into town for a week and we would all we would all kind of do some deeper planning meetings Quite regularly, but we've had to manage without that And we were planning to do one at the end of March and we had to do it over zoom And it may yeah, these things these things get a little harder I think it was kind of fortunate that we were near the end of the the release in March If this had happened to us in November or December maybe where you know, it's the core working time of a major release It probably would have been it could have had a much more impacts. Maybe delays. It's hard to say Are you thinking about or have you had to change Your your roadmap in response to now everybody working from home or that work working remotely is now a thing It was a it was a trend now. It's a thing, you know, yeah I hear you saying I would say not in terms of capacity or ability to achieve I think like the Amazon where it's amazing how Professional these these folks are in terms of they're still they're not saying we can only do 50% of the work We're looking at you know still doing full productivity But what is being injected into our prioritization is the is the industry trend of remote and cloud Right and all the facets of that So we'd already we'd already started to think about that over the last year or so And we started to investigate. Well, what is you know, what does cloud look like for for finishing and for you know high high speed interactive Composting with a with a video preview. Do you need a video preview? Do you need audio and video in sync? those kind of questions and You know even a year ago, there was some pretty big challenges including customers that did not want to be on the internet at all And remember that things have changed. Yeah, things have changed quite dramatically, right? And then suddenly in in like if you put chart back to like the HPA Meetup in I think it was what early February It was it was pretty clear that you know studios are really starting to take take cloud and remote work flows more seriously and Then come March. It's like we're starting to think wow, you know Remote is coming at us fast and then and then cloud might well be considered Not too long after so so we've really started to To factor that in it's still it's still kind of you know, it's still I feel Like it's still sort of baby steps in some ways where now whether it's people operating over, you know, HP RGS or or Any desk team viewer or you know, like a Teradici set up We've certainly tried to do some quick reactions to that like the the early DK you first sent her a seven six Yeah, but I think there's there's more to come right and and there's more concepts to think about in terms of remote reviewing Being able to being able to to kind of connect to your flame from one location and then connect to it from another location And then and then at what point do you start thinking about actually using a cloud data center to host your flames? Maybe one day, but that's kind of where we're we're at with that Gotcha, let me switch to some of the the questions that we're getting here from from from the audience Here's one will we see Python 3 anytime soon? Yes, that wasn't for me. Well, we'll have to I think I mean we'll we'll want to Look at it. Hopefully at some point next year Yeah And whilst others, you know bigger facilities, I'm sure struggling with making that change in lockstep with all their all their tools Not just flame. I can imagine, you know smaller folks will just jump right on it Gotcha Could you explain the the situation with luster? What's going on with luster? Sure. Yeah. Well, certainly What what a great product first of all? I use it in production And we we have I feel like we're still learning from luster In terms of its its speed and agility on in certain ways And I would I would then say that We've we've had some various kind of Dances with what what we do with color grading, you know in the flame family and if you cast back To if you think back to like 2016 We we launched this program called this this project I guess for connected color workflow Which was a way to jump across from luster to flame to do something and then jump back to luster And for some people that that was pretty cool because that would allow you to To to go from a kind of color grading environment and step into Compositing for an hour and then and then come back or maybe five minutes and come back or an hour and come back however What it wasn't was it wasn't It wasn't fully integrated Grading and it wasn't integrated finishing. So at some point we we pivoted to say, okay, we have to pick a horse here We have to pick whether we build compositing into luster and maybe conform and other things and floating point processing or whether we start Bringing some of those concepts that we know people need in flame today That was then and project forward to you know, 2020 and 2023. What are they going to need? So we we made a decision to start integrating color tools Inside flame. So so today we're at this point where you know, perhaps we're Perhaps we're 75% done 80% done how how you rate it where we're we're building An alternate really an integrated grading experience inside of flame that we think will will will ultimately be our our integrated solution there's certainly no problem you people are still using luster and still, you know, loving its merits And then and then others are are growing and learning flame as an integrated Finishing tool, you know people coming out of college these days and and are not seeing any boundaries between color grading and online And 3d modeling and lighting It's all just one creative process of post or previous post or whatever way you want to look at it So that's to me. That's the story of luster and the surrounding initiatives Gotcha. I remember I mean, I remember either either one of the user groups we've had or some previous session The you know the question came up about you know integrating luster with flame about having a luster tab And I remember I'm sure I'm paraphrasing but one of your responses was but would you really want that? you know, would you really want just a tab or Would you like something Like what are you really asking for, you know like that kind of thing and I think when you when you when you do those thought experiments when you really think that out it's It leads to better things at least a better more productive You know, right? I remember candidly. I mean we we launched like connected color workflow and said look We added we added a way to get to flame from inside luster And then I remember one person saying to me I can't remember who they were you you've done it inside out We don't want that we want we want color tools inside flame And in other words we we conform here. We finish here We want the middle part of the job to be like a super advanced version of color warper And then and we start then saying okay. Well, what does that mean really? Does it mean that you just need a better color tool and the answer is yes But we also need a new way of looking at the timeline that is more visual Oh, so you mean you want a storyboard? Well, yes, kind of And we want grouping and we want the ability to You know, why would you limit yourself at just color? effectors in In the shape system Right because it's in if we we could have built like a whole nother module that was exactly like luster But then you'd be limited in terms of that you couldn't use Maybe, you know The kia that you want in there or you couldn't use a matchbox that you want in there So we finally came to this kind of design philosophy of It actually needs to be built from action The action tool tailored to be To be basically the most flexible color grading tool you've ever had and that's and that's what sort of Begot the image node or the image node as we say in french And that and that is really kind of the the core with the effects environment around it as a as a concept And we haven't and by the i'm looking at some of the other comments there. We haven't forgotten some of the higher You know productivity tools It just takes time. We have to go do an order box test this afternoon Figure out what what order we should do it, right? You can Venmo you the auto box Um, you know one of the questions that comes up a lot for a topic that comes up a lot On logic and we we even had it in one of our logic live sessions here is you know I need to buy a machine for home or I need to buy a machine Do I get a mac or I get a linux machine mac or linux mac or linux and the conversation starts usually with you know Something at a higher level and it quickly descends into um, you know like what? What either doesn't work on mac or what works better on linux. I want since I wanted to ask you guys what? um, why are there differences between mac and and and the windows versions of the software and Maybe just dive into that a little bit So the windows I guess you you meant linux. Oh, I'm sorry. I meant linux. Yes There's a well between the mac and the windows version Yeah, well the thing is that well, I was just wondering if it was a trap or or not Well Yeah So so so the thing is that I well When when someone asked me the question If I should go with linux or mac I always reflect and just say You you have to think of your needs So if you need to run multiple application on the same box I guess the solution is probably is likely a mac compared to linux because it's much easier To to install multiple application if you want a full powerful system Flame dedicated maybe you can venture into linux. So you you have to think about what you need first But feature-wise well, I guess that the main difference between mac and linux is The graphics board so on linux the availability of a more powerful graphics board Is there compared to max and that has always been Basically the the main difference between both operation operating system So on linux you can get a much more Graph capable graphics board compared to linux The thing is that with the new mac pro This well, I would say that the gap between Mac and linux is much more smaller in regards to graphics board than it used to be So will do you do you want to add something? Yeah, no, I agree And I mean we we're all kind of waiting to see how the mac pro planned Panned out. It seems to be kind of impressing people There's the whole aspect of convenience and like I said third party Not needing much system engineering help on the mac side that certainly seems to attract people to mac The I mean, there's I think it's worth saying that we're more likely to see linux in the cloud and of a remote versus mac That's an interesting factor It's it's mainly I think might come down to you don't see apple forming a big cloud presence and as a kind of a High-end it kind of platform the the the open sourceness of linux has probably been attractive Um, I mean you you've seen I see people saying well, yeah, you can use you can use your mac for the cloud by having a viewer that is a an aws linux machine on your mac for pro Right, so that's not really So there's some interesting dynamics going on there I would quickly follow up with That we don't deliberately Want to restrict anything on the mac? We've there's been some restrictions like hardware anti aliasing The way that shaders are computed, you know the way substance works the way The the matchboxes or more likely actual kind of rendering Engine of action has to be tailored a little bit differently on the mac So we pay a little tax We have to kind of you know, we have to make it work on max and linux and and that's And I don't mean in terms of slowing down linux I mean in terms of we have to adjust it so that it works well on mac as well. That's the tax Um, but I think it's worth it because I think that's growth area I think people that are coming to flame new are picking mac overall And uh, and even if they graduate into a super ado for a crazy linux machine after two years I'm that's okay and they can go back to mac again when they start their own post house And they don't have an engineer to help them. You know, I think there's a whole whole bunch of dynamics there But but like I mean the world of the world of more powerful max is now starting to emerge I would yeah, I think we just have to Prioritize, you know, what could we do to optimize that and take advantage of those that hardware Along with all the other priorities that we want to try and do You know Sure And I would also say that the well, sorry, sorry, india. I would also say that the portable aspect is important here because A lot of users freelancers need to to run flame on different just computers So run it on a laptop move it Let's say on use it on set and so on So and well, this is I would say that mac os is more a platform of choice for those type of users now Compared to linux. So that's probably another incentive just to go to linux if you need a portable system So keeping the product the same in terms of like being able to archive back and forth is important I think being able to keep the features and where the buttons are and it experience the same is something that Is required for that totally There's been a lot of chatter Lately about a windows version. Sorry. Yeah, it was there was it wasn't a trap, but it was it was an implied trap We know that it was coming. I know I know it isn't like you haven't seen it written, you know, all over Talk to me about that. Is that something that's Is that something that's in in the cards if if not, what what are some of the challenges to to taking on? You know a third platform, I guess Um, I I let me I'll I'll jump in there and you should you can you can give us some real facts. How's that? Yeah Not alternate alternate facts Well from my point of view as like if you think about it on the business side It's a question of What is the biggest thing that could impact flame in the long term positively, right? What if you had a magic wand or a big pot of money? What would you want to do? And and that's when maybe the conversation comes up retire But that's when you might ask that How big is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? If you were to start a three-year project that was a windows port because Because whilst you know whilst we're you might say is it really that big? Well flame is big, right? It's millions of lines of code. It's got a lot of network dependencies. It's got a lot of Uh different ways of calling hardware. It's not like putting a small app or a web, you know database It's it's like it's a it's a monster So it is a big project. So you can if you can trust us on that Then the question is okay. Well, is that Is it significant enough of a? addressable market on the other end Or are there other things that you could do to to achieve the same amount of growth that maybe are You know incremental or the outside of software development like An educational program. Could that be more impactful than then pull into windows or Or would you know some crazy marketing campaign or adding features that go after nuke or resolve or Is is there is there, you know, is there more incremental ways to to achieve something significant? So that's that's always the the the kind of dichotomy of of the windows argument for me Would it add to more users? I mean I could see that that was the conversation about You know doing the mac version, you know Yeah, I think that that was a natural step And if you remember back to november 2015 that was flame unleashed where we we kind of put off Put in the water with with smoke with flare with flame assist and then eventually Flame and along with that came the change of business model where it was no longer A turnkey system but also but now you know a software product Which which makes it more palatable to a big company like autodesk that sells software, right? and that's another factor that you need to to kind of put into the world here is is What makes sense for the company and the business model and are they are they able to do invest in education or You know going after a competitor. There's a lot of dynamics And much as much as I wish I could take on something as big as adding windows it probably It seems too big to to give enough results Gotcha, yon. Did you want to add anything to that? No, well, I think that my take on this is that Well, we we all understand and I guess you agree that Going to windows or porting flame to windows is not going to please any of the current flame users, right? It's probably something that would attract new flame users The thing well the counterpart is that it's going to take it. It's going well It would take a significant amount of of development time and resources to to get there so So so we have to keep that in mind just say that well Would our users just accept to To the flame team just to put some initiative on both while we are just doing something for future users or do we Well So so I guess that the use well the question we have to ask is guess is that Does the user want to do the user want us to work on what is meaningful for their workflow now Or just on something that would attract other users and that's the question we have to ask us So that's that's my take on Gotcha Yeah, it's a tricky one Andy. Hopefully that we gave you a reasonable answer There are maybe it's worth quickly saying that there are other like architectural initiatives that we are working on Trying to modernize in terms of the way we address hardware I'm not sure how many of you have heard of The language of open gl That has been you know, the historical way of addressing graphics cards since the 80s That flame was very much built on but how it's it's being you know It's ultimately the new generation of of technology to address GPU compute is starting to come in through things like vulcan or linux and windows But and metal for apple. So so that's an area where you know, maybe there could be some more incremental investment and and see See a nice growth over time in what we could do with the hardware Gotcha 3d tracking one of the questions here points out that 3d tracking has been in the number one position on flame feedback for about three years And are you working on it? That's a very good question and i'm not at liberty to say at this point That's good, man. We went 57 minutes without that so that I gotta cheers to everyone But but I wanted to say that I acknowledge it's been a number one. I'd like to point out that A defocus tool. I like a physical defocus type thing was up there as well And hopefully that you've seen some movement on that that came out of tech taster and autobucks consortiums But we have not we have not ignored the the desire for for improved camera solving and tracking and I think that all I'd like to say is that I think when you think about machine learning And the cool stuff that is happening with machine learning it it really hit me Like about I know it's six months or a year ago that you know Is there going to be a new generation of camera solvers that that are kind of machine learning enabled? And would it be worth some sort of research some sort of understanding? to not just rebuild a PF track or a 3d equalizer, but but see if there's options out there to do something more automated And I'm not sure if other Other companies are thinking the same way, but I'm just saying that it's it's one area where machine learning could You know could actually help us ultimately when we're not sure yet, but we're we're certainly I'm certainly something to think on Just a couple more a couple more questions for you Um, what about the threat from from uh competitors that give things away for free? I know that that was always a challenge. I remember that Was was uh very explicitly brought up about uh about like resolve versus Uh luster now. It's very difficult sometimes to compete against a competitors giving it away You know, yeah, well, that's that's an interesting. How do you combat that? And in a word the way to beat free for me is workflow In other words, if you have a better workflow, then you should be turning away a free product They should be paying you to use it if it's makes it for a slower workflow Um, but if you if you have the real value comes in if you can provide a workflow that That that is just better And then and then I would also point out that the costs of the software have not are not the biggest piece in a business's You know costing anymore, right? It's got to be the the talent and The space or maybe maybe that changes with work from home But but the individual talents should be and are the biggest cost and the biggest uh producer Of stuff software ultimately is kind of has come down to a point where it's a tool Like owning a laptop or you know buying the right tv or whatever Versus it being the room Or the the the main the biggest expense so so I think that helps What do you think could you name a couple of uh of of trends or new technologies that uh either you're excited about or you're thinking about or Might find its way into our favorite app I think we're still we're still in the kind of spotty teenage era of machine learning There's another another level of maturity those were great years. Well, let me tell you Yeah, well, I'm imagining that you'll start to see kind of AI stuff Not in the scary way, but in the good way find its way into all kinds of tools And maybe have more phases and breakthroughs as a trend We we're like we talked about earlier. We're still just waiting to see um, the the longer term impacts of Of remote to cloud. I mean our our CEOs and business owners going to Acknowledge, wow, if we can remote into our office Why don't we remote into a data center? That's a few blocks away and then All wall our office and remote into the data center and have the office be just another remote Site. I mean, I think that's a a possible trend um, I still think HDR is still kind of coming coming along. I feel like we'll see more and more content Done that way more easily as tools get easier And and I think HDR and VFX Might be another trend that we'll see people being able to monitor it earlier on in the pipeline Other than that, I think I think we're just going to see more pressure on Tools to be more productive, whether it's more automated tracking tools Roto isolation I can see that becoming more and more pressure As as there's you know kind of one person do it all on their home Home machine and produce a product project Those are going to be pressures that I think will also squeeze out of current era Cool There's one more question left in the q&a before we sign off and it's uh, just about atomize There was a there was a feature developed atomize. What was the impetus for? For it and didn't have any further trajectory than where it has landed Wow, let's think I mean that that's that's a good old one. It's it was a cool technique It gave us some kind of interesting Particle like things, but it definitely had some limits you couldn't you couldn't it wasn't really a true 3d particle system and I mean, I'd see it as kind of a An interesting foray of like the matchbox technologies um I don't I don't know of any I don't think we have any other other big plans for it to be honest with you Gotcha Does that oh I was about to ask does anyone have any more questions and boom Uh, man. Well, you had to say particle system. We almost got through this without Particles So, um c9 asks, um particle system It's uh, that's one of those ones where imagine we had an order bucks exercise where you You had to pick And you could only get one big rock in your hundred dollars and those two big rocks were camera tracking or particles that's exactly the kind of The kind of either or situation that we run into and it'd be interesting to To know if how this room this virtual room would vote between the two Would they would they would they go tracking or would they go? um particles I'm not sure maybe This one we'll do it on logic. Hey, they're coming in neither Oh, here we go Boom forest particles via o effects. That's queen. That's right. It is it works Yeah particle illusion as an o effects works with its limits, but Oh coloring keys camera tracking Asking you shall see there's a lot of tracking in there. Okay. Well, I think the trackings might have it. Oh wait Brooks Tomlinson save for particles ML camera tracking someone likes that text Did he tracking lens distortion workflows part of camera tracking I see from All right, so you can see that you can see the like the kind of flurry of Of stuff Even sign and set camera tracking that's cool Funny, yeah, but it is challenging and hopefully that's that's I mean that's that's laid bare here that That there's there's we're never sure of good ideas it's just a matter of time resources and planning and Packaging. Okay. We need to do that But we also need to you know update the red codec and the arry support and this new camera And we're we're always gonna come out with seven new cameras next week. So And that's all part of having a having a product in an ecosystem right that has to go together Totally so so that's the that's the rub Love it. Well, well and yon. Thank you so much for giving us your time today And we really appreciate it and uh, you know, I've always been amazed at at at how much of your time you guys give to the community And I just wanted to thank you very much for that Very welcome We can also thank you and before for everything you do for this community. Yeah, oh my pleasure, man. Thank you These things have been great because I've been learning stuff that I've come back and watching videos and This has been a real really cool initiative that you've got here evie Oh, thanks, man. Thank you very much and thank you to everybody who's given such great feedback about these. It's really been It's really been great to hear the feedback Um, so let's close this out for today. If anybody of course has any other questions for the guys you can you can reach them On logic you can reach them at the area Please make sure to give your make your suggestions on flame feedback Um We have a upcoming logic live sessions next sunday may 24th We're going to do Maya for flame artists with Yuri temposki fantastic artist. Definitely tune in for that Uh may 31st connected conform for social deliverables, which I am doing today Uh with brian bailey. So, uh, I'm definitely going to have questions for brian come may 31st June 7th, we're going to do silhouette paint with forest effects Oh And on june 14th resolve for flame artists with david johns As always you can find this and other past episodes of logic live on logic dot tv And it looks like this And please be sure to subscribe to our youtube channel And thank you again to cynosis oceana our sponsor. We couldn't do what we do without the reseller community So thank you cynosis oceana provides solutions to keep teams connected and working Find out more about their remote workflow solutions at cynosis.io Cynosis oceana supporting flame artists since 1997 that's going to do it for logic live today. Thank you everybody and we will see you next week


So, if you watched the Boydlands show on Twitch you probably would have seen the DLC4 teaser image they shared. Yes, this one is seen on screen now. Krieg people, he returns and today we discuss ideas on his actual return. As it goes guys, my name is DPJ and today I'll bring you another BL3 video. If you did enjoy it, leaving a like really helps out and subscribe if you do want to see more. So Krieg returns, although they themselves didn't confirm this. The teaser image they shared more or less did. Now unknown 95% of people watching this will know exactly who this character is, but for those who don't, let's just have a recap. So Krieg was introduced as the 60LC character in Boydlands 2. He was originally released on May 14th 2013, which was like a lifetime ago. So Krieg is basically what people would consider a lunatic, a killer, a maniac. You name it, that's what he was referred to. Not too many people like he did to me, he became a fan favourite. So reading from fandom, which has way more details than I can remember, though it is uncertain what caused Krieg's transformation into a psychotic killer, the game provides evidence hinting at an antithetical personality in the past. This is established by a fractured remnant of his psych, manifesting itself as an inner voice within his mind. It reveals that Krieg had previously engaged in Vault Hunter-esque activities, such as aiding the needy and getting paid with loot. The voice also seeks to control Krieg's lust for murder by limiting his victims to those deserving punishment. Anthony Birch has described Krieg's psychosis, comparing Krieg to a man driving an attic controlled truck. He cannot stop the truck, but he can try and steer it away from as many innocents as possible. These were originally introduced to Krieg as he wandered through Pandora's wastelands, eliminating bandits with his Buzz X. He encounters Maya, who initially believes him to be hostile.  To focus on Krieg, Maya fails to notice the rats approaching from behind. Krieg salvages the situation by throwing his Buzz X at the rats, saving Maya from peril. Afterward, Maya warms to Krieg, and the two congregate. Krieg is last seen clinging to the train carrying the original Vault Hunters to Wingshia Waste. And after the events of Handsome Jack's attempt to destroy their croons and raiders, Krieg exiles himself away in the waste of Pandora, having become smitten with Maya and wishing to see her again, his inner voice tries to coach himself into speaking more, coherently and overall act less hostile around others. With limited success, during his time, Tiny Teen manages to refine Krieg and wishes to have him instruct her on behaving like a bandit. Shortly after the destruction of Sanctuary, he somehow hears about Maya planning to leave Pandora and goes to track her down, with some effect. Krieg is able to convey a message to her wishing that she would stay. While upset over her determination to return to her home planet, Krieg takes some solace in Maya promising to return back to Pandora to see him again. So it's quite clear from his exit from the game. The one thing most of us remember was his connection to Maya, besides his split personality which was absolutely incredible. And while now we all know, spoiler alert, 3, 2, 1, Maya is now dead. So with his return in DLC4, I'm guessing he learns of this. I mean does this then send him mad, I know that's a weird one as one would argue he already is. But looking at the teaser image, in my opinion what we are seeing here is that of a split persona. He seems to be hinting at his mental state, one side of it being a normal image while the other side being broken into pieces which would in reality represent his cycle mind. Now this doesn't really tell us much because that's Krieg from the first day we met him. But what if this DLC is called something along the lines of inside the mind of a cycle? Because although I think many may have forgot, Randy Pitchford teased this idea at Pax a little while back. And the Moxie Ciced definitely is in the upper echelon of anything we've ever done in Borderlands in any previous game and we're keeping that trend up with all of our campaign DLCs. This is going to be the most value-packed season pass I think in the history of games. And we can see ahead. Now working backwards from the end, we're just beginning DLC4. So I can't, I don't, there's still so much uncertain about it. But I wanted to give you a little list of hints about what the nature of DLC4 is. There's a character that I love that a lot of us love that was not in Borderlands 3 and we think that that character deserves a showcase. And not just that, there's going to be lots of characters, fan favorites, and new and old. And basically the hint that I'll give you is we're going to see, and this isn't locked in stone yet, so don't crucify me later if we change things, because we're just getting started on this. But we're going to see if we can experience what it's like to be inside the head of the wildest psycho we know. I'll just leave it at that. So what he suggests is what I think this DLC will revolve around. Us entering the mind of Krieg, maybe living out some of his past memories. Maybe learning much more about him, how he became this way. And well I'm sure we will learn the effects on him from the fact that Namayah is dead. How will this affect the mind of Krieg? Now there have been some clues about Krieg through Echo Lugs fans throughout the game, and we saw evidence that Krieg tried or is trying to tell Namayah he misses her. Take a listen to them. So yeah guys, what I feel is upon Krieg's inevitable return, we enter his mind, maybe play through some of his memories, maybe learn more about him, hear his thoughts along the way, know that himself noting his own memories as we are experiencing them. And also maybe experiencing one way or another the outcome of his learning of Maya and her demise.  I mean that would be amazing, but I feel us actually playing through his memories and not playing as him is better for the game. Let's face it, we still have loads to learn about this dude, and it's that learning which I believe is the important part of this fourth DLC installment and the game and the franchise. I highly doubt he will return as a playable character. I mean if you want to play as him, go back to Borderlands 2, because random pitch would say is, we will get to experience what it's like to be inside the head of the world's cycle. That's the statement right there. So yeah guys, really exciting times ahead, and do please let me know your thoughts down below in the comments section. How do you feel this DLC will pan out? What impact will Krieg have on the game? How will he learning of Maya's death affect him? What do you think? Will we meet Krieg as a cycle? Already knowing about Maya? Or is it something we experience with him? Man I got so many questions, but yeah for sure great times ahead and guys, be sure to let me know your theories on this DLC down below. And on that note guys, we have come to the end of the video. If you guys enjoyed it, leaving a like really helps me out. If you're new around here and want to see more Borderlands, be sure to subscribe. And if you never want to miss a video where I upload content notifications on by hitting that bell button. And if you guys want to support me directly and become family, click that join button and become a member of my channel. But again, thanks as always for stopping by, hopefully you enjoyed the video and hopefully I will see you on that next one.


All right, so My name is Cameron Barrett as he mentioned. I'm the senior manager of website technology for Newark public schools It is the largest public school district in the state of New Jersey around 38,000 students six or seven thousand teachers and professionals and Of 66 schools 67 depending on how you count them My background is kind of interesting Pioneered the blog format way back in 1997. I initially wrote an essay called Anatomy of a web log that kind of defined what blogs are and I started blogging I was like I'm like easily the second oldest blogger on the internet I mean blogging for the longest time, but I don't really blog anymore But everything that I wrote back in the 90s in the early 2000s is still up online at camworld.org I'm an old-school web guy I used to build a lot of stuff for the Apache software foundation Sun Microsystems Motorola I was working in the open-source software development field where I was taking those software development Methodologies and taking them into these big corporations and teaching them how to do software development in a better way I'm also a UX designer information architect web designer. I've been doing this stuff since the mid 90s I've built sites for Clark for president in 2004 US Army World Economic Forum. You guys know who they are they're the Organization nonprofit in Geneva, Switzerland that runs the Davos conference The Davos conference is where all the business leaders and the world leaders get together once a year in January in The out in the Swiss Alps and they talk about what's going on in the world and how can they help? Move things forward in the world. It's a very important conference Sadly none of those websites were on WordPress They were in net they were in Drupal in 2003 I was at the open-source conference in Portland, Oregon the O'Reilly open-source convention and Out of that conference grew this mailing list called the CMS list the content management system list And so me and this guy named Phil built this mailing list and it grew within a year to like five or six thousand people in the CMS business Communicating about what's happening and promoting the product and talking about CMS is this back in the day where the CMS was still kind of a new thing You know, I was using movable type which is pearl based and Drupal, which is PHP my sequel But WordPress at the time 2003 2004 was still kind of like a little blip on the radar I wasn't paying attention to it very well. I was so focused on other things I just didn't pay attention and so at this conference This kid comes up to me And he's like Are you Cameron Barrett and I'm like, yeah, he's like I've been on your mailing list. I just wanted to meet you That was Matt Mullenweg 2004 maybe it was 2003. I can't remember it was one of those two years and Matt goes I've got this product that I'm building. It's called WordPress. I'm like, oh, yeah, I've kind of heard of it I still brand new at the time, but you know, this this is Matt. I think he was 20 21 He's pretty young kid, but he's done such a great job in the past 12 13 years of Getting WordPress to be what it is today and I really applaud him for that He's done a fantastic job of leading the leading the community and getting people involved Here's a real example of what I was doing back in the early 2000s This was a website for the US Army it was for the Army Board of Generals was built in Microsoft net on a proprietary CMS and we spent six months for developers UX person project manager bunch of other people we spent a million dollars on building this website out and We launched we got it ready for launch and we're like here we go We're gonna launch it what's called the Orion project. We're gonna launch it and then we got an email from somebody down in DC And they're like Now you're gonna cancel the project so we spent all that money all that taxpayer money on this project That ended being canceled and I'm like, you know think of the kind of money we do have spent We would have saved if we'd used something like an open-source product like Drupal or WordPress The good news is that same project Years later is now migrating to WordPress So WordPress is starting to creep into the federal government Starting to creep into our Defense Department and people are recognized the value of an open-source product like WordPress Yay, right? So good. It's really good news But what about schools right my session is WordPress for schools and that's where I've been working in the past Four or five years of just helping school districts move to WordPress In the summer of 2013 I Got a job offer from Toys R Us, you know the big toy store chain Director of UX global e-commerce They're redeveloping their entire back-end platform pre-commerce They're moving it from a close source system to something else and they're like, oh, this is a great opportunity it was so excited to take it and Then I realized well The development team was in Poland and It would have required me to travel from New York to Poland six to ten times a year back and forth back and forth Easily week at a time which kind of meant a bit of a hitch there I just spent two years working for the World Economic Forum in Geneva And where I was traveling four times a year to Geneva from New York to Geneva and back and it was awesome It was a great job. I loved it doing really get important work But I had a wife and a baby daughter. This is my daughter when she was like one Look how cute she is. I Love this picture So I had a wife and a baby daughter and my wife basically because she's like no My wife said You just took it you just left a job where you were commuting to Europe too much I don't really want you to take this job with Toys R Us She she she went so far as to say It's not gonna work out. If you do this I'm gonna be home alone with our daughter and you're just never gonna be home I just she said no and so I'm still married. Thankfully. I'm still married So I actually said no to this amazing job with Toys R Us Instead what I did is I took a job It's a New Jersey state job with Newark public schools where I migrated the entire District all of their public-facing websites to wordpress Now it's a local commute 10 miles. It's like easy. I loved it. It was great No more going into the New York City. No more, you know, 90 minutes every morning on the train or the bus I can get my car and drive to work. It's great But just a little bit more about me because everybody likes talking about themselves, right? Are we all a little bit narcissistic? A little bit more about me and this is an important factor. I Grew up in places. I was I'm part of a teaching family my parents were school teachers They worked for the Department of Defense dependent schools. So every time of a military base overseas There's schools on these military bases that teach you the kids of American servicemen, right? So my parents worked in this in this Dodd system And so I grew up in places like Pongo Pongo American Samoa. Anybody seen Moana yet great movie, right? Just a new Disney movie. It's all about the Polynesian Islands. It's fantastic. So I grew up in places like this This is a a Top secret military base in Northern England. It's not even on any maps and from as far as a cartographer Is concerned it doesn't exist, but those Big white golf ball looking things are weather coverings for radars for big satellite radar dishes This is a top secret communication space in Northern England. I lived there as a kid as My parents were school teachers But I mean the point is I care about our schools. I Mean I love our schools I think the American public school system is the best in the world And I think it can continue to be the best in the world But I decided not to follow my parents into the teaching profession I decided that I'm a technologist, you know, I grew up with computers in the 80s and the 90s I wanted to work with computers as a as an adult And so I went into the technology field in the 90s and I realized that in The early 2000s in the and the early 2010s I realized that I can use all of the skills that I've learned as a Technologist and I can use those to help our public schools solve their technology problems There's 14,000 plus public school districts in our country. I mean that's a lot of school districts and You know, they all have websites, right? I mean, there's a couple that don't they have a page or somewhere, but they all have websites Important to the school have a website. Oh, wait, wait, wait, correction Most of them have Crappy websites. They're just they're not that well done. They're not designed well. They're just kind of thrown up They're never updated frequently enough They they kind of look like this they're like Wall of text, right? Who's gonna read all that text and it never changes. That's been up.  Probably not because there's no new information there for you Just another real-world example, this was one of the New York public schools school websites in 2012 Using a proprietary CMS vendor solution every one of those red boxes is a flash file Like okay, 2012. We're already five years into the iPhone Everybody knows that flash doesn't work on the iPhone this website while the content was there was completely inaccessible I mean, this is what it looks like on an iPad. You just I Mean seriously and this was a vendor selling very expensive content management system software to a school district You know, I think WTF, right? Everybody knows what that means. What the flash, right? Mobile view, I mean it's even worse. I mean, can you imagine trying to use this website on an iPhone in 2012-2013? This Unacceptable really. I mean these are your taxpayer dollars being spent on this Proprietary CMS from a vendor The sites were complete failure It's no surprise that parents don't they report that they don't regularly go to their children's website children's schools websites just They've learned through experience that the website doesn't serve their needs of the way they want You why okay? Well, it's not the school's fault. It's not the district's fault It's the schools are being sold these closed source There's a long phrase there, but it's holding closed source of vendor controlled horrible barely working confusing user interface offers a service solutions, you know, they're just This is what the vendor offers and the schools lap it up because they don't know any better You know, which leads to websites that are not updated frequently enough there You know because it's too hard, you know, not just the fact that the saw the CMS is Failing to provide a quality website. It's never being updated because the CMS is hard to use again These are administrators and teachers and principals trying to update websites. It's got to be user friendly It's got to be something that they were going to be able to easily figure out even with a little bit of training that they can figure it out and actually Update their website on a more frequent basis Yeah, bad templates bad design. I call the bad clip art mania. Everybody everybody remember what Microsoft word clip art looked like in in a I think early 2000s 2000 up through like 2008 and this is Terrible even clippy is sad. I mean even clippy is going going what I mean, it's just I Mean this is but again, these are the tools These are the tools that were being provided to the school districts to use to build their websites They weren't being given the better tool to use. This is just what they had to use And so they made the best of what they could they made the best of what they were given If you talk to the technologists in the schools, right? Programming teacher or a CTO or something. They're going to go. Yeah, I could easily fix this problem Easily not a hard problem to solve But I don't have access to the source code. It's a closed source system The vendor doesn't give me at give me the code. I can't do anything can't help you hands are tied The solution of course right we're all at word camp The solution is to migrate all of these school websites to WordPress Let's get them off the proprietary system. So let's Move them to an open source solution where you have more freedom and more ability to Build the websites that our schools need You know You guys as who's who here's a parent who here has children in schools. Yeah, I'm just about everybody, right? You guys are the WordPress experts You should be going into your school districts and saying hey, you know our websites aren't that great But unlike I'd like to help, you know, I know the system called wordpress that I think would be perfect For our school district. I'll help you migrate or I'll help you find a company to help to migrate All of our websites to WordPress and we're gonna have then have better websites and better serve our community You know, you guys are the experts get involved and then you can fire the vendors right these expensive proprietary CMS vendors fire them You know Save that taxpayer money. I mean, we're all paying crazy high property taxes with different levels of I Mean in where I live in New Jersey. It's ridiculously high like 55% of my Taxpayer of my property taxes goes to funding the schools, you know in some places. It's like 12% but It's a lot of money that's being spent to fund our schools Of course that money has to be spent on infrastructure things like websites. So why should a proprietary CMS vendor? Collect that money when you can do the same thing better in WordPress for free These these companies are collecting taxpayer dollars and delivering a bad product in a bad service Case study. All right So this is the district that I work for it's a big district around 40,000 students We migrated the entire thing over to WordPress over a summer Here's some numbers. You don't see this very often in presentations. These are real numbers. We spent $30,000 to migrate Everything including new design new templates new, you know new software new new WordPress back-end everything We're hosting on WP engine because we don't have a sys admin to maintain the security updates for like an AWS server So we just use a dedicated managed server. We rely on the vent on the hosting company to keep things secure Great company. I kind of like them. They're look expensive, but I like them Year one cost we spent $64,000, right? It seems like a lot of money when you think about it, but again, we're a very big district and When you compare it to the number below We were spending $59,000 every year Just for hosting websites Just for this proprietary CMS $59,000 a year That's actually lower. It used to be 88,000. So We they got it down, but it was still a huge amount of money being spent just for hosting websites and a CMS solution Yikes, you know we went from 64 from year one because you have to you have to fund the build out of the website and the migration To 14 so we in the year two we saved 50 grand Right $50,000 saved Look at that year three We actually realized that we overbought our dedicated managed server. We didn't need to spend $1,200 a month We could spend $600 a month and so year three year three early. So we only spent $7,200 Again, we went from 59 to 7,200 Just by moving the WordPress We also spent $9,000 On a content migration script. And so there's a story behind this. I have plenty of time, right? How we on time? There's a story behind this and this is important to understand I Was working with this vendor in Pennsylvania. I'm not allowed to mention their name But I called them up and I said Can I get a copy of the database just give me a dump to Dotnet at my you know, sq microsoft sql. So just give me a dump of the database and They said we'll get back to you That's all right foul the ticket A week later I'm like, hey, where's that dump I asked for I Got an email back and saying We can't give it to you and I'm sitting there going This is our data, right? School owns this data. Yeah, they agreed. Yeah, you own it. I Said well, why can't I get a copy of the database? And they said well our legal department will let us give it to you it's like What what are you talking about? It's our data. Give me my data. I just want to use it Their legal department got in touch with our legal department Lawyer says this lawyer says that And it turns out that they are correct They cannot legally give me a copy of the database because from that I could derive the DB schema Which is their intellectual property So Legally, they're correct. So I was like, all right. Well There's a way around that if I can't write a database of database migration script to go from SQL to my seagull for WordPress. I can certainly scrape the hell out of the website, right? So I had a vendor write a plug-in a custom plug-in You'll see it hyphen importer dot PHP and all that does is you run it and It goes out to a website you define in a config file and it scrapes every single page on the website So it basically sniffs the HTML Identifies where the content starts where it stops and just sucks it and copies it and copies it and injects it into the WordPress WP post table And it also grabs any associated images on the page and puts those in the media library So everything that we needed to do by hand we had done with an automated script and we missed a few things I mean It's a big website 30,000 pages and the database is like 40 gigs. It's huge The big website hundred thousand media assets images PDF files But to do that by hand would have been like a room full of 20 interns Copy-paste copy-paste and we just didn't want to do that So we scraped it didn't get everything but it got most of it and we were able to migrate over a summer as opposed to three months of interns doing a lot of manual manual migration It adds up right so in five years were projected to save a hundred and fifty eight thousand dollars of New Jersey state taxpayer dollars New York Public Schools is a New Jersey state funded District and there's a lot of reasons for that, but we're not funded by Local property taxes were funded by property taxes from around the state Due to a law that was passed in the 80s So we saved a hundred and fifty eight thousand dollars over five years Here's another example, so there's a I'm playing a time right Yeah, I've got time Another example, so I was on my way to word camp Dayton a couple years ago It was a year and a half ago And I'm driving across, Ohio in my car and The check engine light comes on. I'm like, ah, that's the last thing I need my car to break down middle, Ohio so I limp it I limp it to Columbus Mazda dealer and While they're while they're fixing my car my phone rings And there's this guy on the phone. He goes Cameron Cameron Cameron. I need your help. I found your videos online I need to talk to you. I represent I'm a I'm a lawyer that works with a board of education in Osceola County Public Schools in Florida big district 90,000 students I think or something like that He's like we're about ready to sign a contract $150,000 a year five-year non-breakable contract seven hundred and fifty million or seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars on a Ed Leo school messenger product so Ed Leo is a CMS vendor school messenger is like a Mass notification mobile app push notification vendor for schools, right? So these two vendors teamed up and basically went and ripped off Osceola County Public Schools for two hundred seven hundred fifty thousand dollars He's like I he's like I need your help Help me educate what's going on here that these we don't need to spend this kind of money And so while my car was being fixed in Ohio I spent two hours on the phone with this guy and I said look you don't need to spend this kind of money You can do it for a lot less Unfortunately, they were so far down the path of that contract being through the the legal paperwork with school districts that I was unable to convince them to Not sign the contract and they went and they did it so I feel bad for these taxpayers down there because That was a lot of money So just for for what they were getting a basic CMS and a mobile app Lot of money Starts to add up when you think about it fourteen thousand plus public school districts in this country You could do the math I mean school districts vary in size But it's easily millions and millions and millions of dollars of our taxpayer money being spent on these public on these systems that Sometimes don't work that well What can use that money for instead? Well, how about the more important stuff like paying our teachers better? Bringing back the arts program that was cut, you know Football players need you new uniforms. I mean, there's just so many things that that money could be spent for better than a crappy CMS product from a vendor By moving to WordPress we got a fresh modern responsive design One of the best things I think about WordPress and I think people here will raise their hand is The menu management. It's beautiful if you ever used a proprietary a management system The menu management is always bad. It's always a nightmare to use WordPress got it right a few years, you know five years ago and they've stuck with it and it's a beautiful system I think it's Easily one of the best things about WordPress is how to manage a really complicated menu system like that This is one of our school sites, so if this was the district site, this is a school website So we kind of parent-child theme relationship going on. It kind of works really well But it's not just us so this district in Utah Granite there are big school 90 in big district 92 schools even bigger than New York and I found this website online and as and I figured out who built it And so I called the guy up and I said I said Chris Chris I found your website. I'm really impressed How big is the team that built this website for you? And I expected oh, it was me and an agency and three other people and he's like no I did it all by myself one guy and I was like whoa One guy who was part-time Consultant with the district Did this entire thing? I was like whoa Amazing I'll hire the guy in a heartbeat. He does such a good work. I Was that really amazed so but that's the power of using WordPress is you can have one person Who knows what they're doing to go in and replace an expensive CMS vendor? Just with the skills and using and building on top of WordPress one guy You get you you ever one of you could do this What school is this Fairfield no, that's granite. This is one of their school websites Montclair, New Jersey migrated their high school website over to WordPress did a pretty good job Fairfield Connecticut started you know move their website to WordPress and so we're starting to see more and more school districts kind of wake up to this problem of Spending taxpayer money on something that doesn't work for them the very well and moving to an open-source solution like WordPress What else can you do with WordPress? Well We're building a district intranet for our employees. We're building a student portal I'm looking to build a new a Google sites plug-in for WordPress so that if all your teacher pages are on Google sites You can use the WordPress to manage those pages through the Google sites API The problem is Google sites 2.0 just came out last week and it doesn't have an API so I Don't know if that solution is even going to work anymore I gotta I have to look at their release notes to see if they actually plan an API for Google sites. We'll see We're building some more portals for PD and it classroom newsletters And we're gonna start turning on push notifications for our teachers so that if a a Teacher wants to send a remind homework do your homework reminder to just her class. She can do that through through the mobile app So what's next so I'm building a company called school press Which is basically a WordPress for schools services company and I'm starting to migrate districts Here's one Southside ISD down in San Antonio again. Look at these numbers, you know, they were spending 25 grand a year for a vendor And they came in paid me 15 K to build it out and 3 K to $3,000 a year for hosting it Save and taxpayer money It's another one. This is another district in New Jersey. They were already on WordPress. They just wanted a bunch of New themes and custom development.  You know get involved bring WordPress into the school district and fire the vendors and save taxpayer money The school districts need your support. They need you to come in and say look I will help you Maintain WordPress. I will help you because my kid is in the school district I will help you be they'll become the WordPress expert for you, you know volunteer And now we have some time for Q&A. How's it going? You had 59 K I guess you mentioned was the what you had been spending and then When you first made the new plan it was 64 K I wanted to know if you had those cost savings projections worked out or Did it was that a great bonus later or we did you already knew we knew that we were going to save money? Because we wouldn't we wouldn't have to spend 59 K every year year after year We knew that we would spend the same you know year the budget from year one We would spend the same amount of money and then we knew that year two three four five would be an Additional savings because we weren't paying that vendor anymore Okay, that's good. It's just one of those things that came to my mind So what? Who are these? Who are the people that need to do the buy-in? At these districts and who are they taking advice from and what are those people saying? Yeah Yeah, it every district is a little bit different Sometimes you have to go directly through the board of direct Board of Education Because they make find all the financial decisions on the what's being spent and how Sometimes it's just getting the ear of a superintendent and selling directly to him sometimes it's a superintendent who Makes that responsibility to part of the information technology department and then sometimes it's part of a communications department so at Newark the Funding and the control of the what of the public websites is under communications department And then the websites that are public facing for Students and teachers are part of the curriculum department So you have to look at what you're trying to replace and which department controls it and then whose budget that money would come out of It really does vary from every district to district And who are they taking advice from because I've talked to a lot of People who say that when they try to pitch an open-source solution Generally, it's somebody in their team that's saying no don't use that. That's bad. It's there's not gonna work There's a big education component You have to go into the district and educate them Open-source is secure and you have to explain to them why open-source is more secure than a proprietary system so most proprietary systems are security by Obscurity meaning that because the act of the source code is not available. Nobody can hack into it That's patently false Because a lot of the security exploits across a Like a platform are the same So if you have a proprietary CMS running on Linux and an open-source CMS running on Linux The exploit vector is going to be identical between those two So you kind of have to educate them about this is the open-source software Actually because you have thousands and thousands of people looking at the code Eventually over time does become more secure because the bugs are patched faster It's an education component for sure Can you talk a little bit about why WordPress instead of other Open-source CMS is yeah, so I used to be a big Drupal developer. I Did I built some really big websites in 2003 2004 in Drupal Because that's kind of what I was steered towards at the time and WordPress was still kind of like this Unbirthed the baby and Matt Mullenweg's head He there was like a fork of B2 cafe and then it started to grow But at the time things were built movable type in Drupal so the reason that I didn't choose Drupal over WordPress is because Drupal 8 took like five years to release. I mean I was a big Drupal 6 and 7 user And I waited and I waited and I waited and it just was never released and the UX was really bad And by the time Drupal 8 came out I'd basically thrown away all of the experience I had in Drupal and I went with WordPress because it was a much more The release schedule was much quicker than with Drupal I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you manage roles and capabilities and how you handle training when you Have a lot of people like you're talking about teachers administrators that maybe have varying degrees of technical skills The roles and caps basically are defined based on what your district needs. So in our case, we have Administrator we have site administrator. We have technology coordinator teacher board member Student parent, but some of these we don't really use yet, but we've built them into there So those are basically the you know user role manager in WordPress. It's pretty easy pretty easy to find those For training we offer once a month. We have We offer WordPress training in our central office and in one of our computer labs And we have people sign up through a WordPress gravity form and they come in and we do the training It takes about four hours. We show them how to build pages how to edit pages how to add content how to edit content How to send a newsletter how to create a soliloquy slider? I mean it's basically they're the basic CMS functions that they need to manage a website So it's once a month And then my other question is are you building most of these as multi sites or they stand alone? It's all multi site. So we have one really big multi site And then we have a couple of one-off installs like our enrollment website is not part of the multi site It's a it's a standalone WordPress site in a different domain name Hi trying to convince a school to switch in the content management system that they are using. It's a very Political situation, especially if you are an outsider who benefits a who has no benefit in They switching the system. What will you say that are the three key? Reasons that will lead an organization to move from their current vendor to WordPress The first is the first is money you save a lot of money by moving away from a vendor The second is ease of use that you know using an open-source solution like WordPress is a lot easier for people to use and keep Their websites up-to-date And the third is the extensibility of the platform so if you're using a proprietary vendor and you need a new piece of custom functionality like for instance I was trying to use this proprietary vendor and I wanted to build like a pan and zoom Google map with With each of the schools and the four wards of Newark and so you can pan and zoom and see which schools are going to see it's Ward I couldn't do it inside this current inside the proprietary vendor CMS because they were Loading an older version of jQuery in the head of the dot of the document of the page document That I couldn't update so I needed a newer version So I called their tech support up and I said look I can't just want it. I just want you to upgrade jQuery for me because I don't it's outside of with a template structure that I have access to and They said oh we could do that for you, but it'll be 20 grand nice and I was like Alright, this is the vendor. I fired right. I basically oh I have a story behind that. How much time do I have? Can I have a lot stories? Quick story so this the VP of sales for this vendor after she learned that I was firing them and Moving to an open-source solution. She called me up and she's yelling at me on the phone.  You don't you know figure it out It's it's you have to use the the technologies that serve your purpose the best And this vendor was not them next question. I have a couple questions The these multi sites did you build them yourself or did you have a small team to build? Yeah, so it's a lot of work for one guy. I used a Company and I shouldn't mention their name, but they're here who helped me build the entire thing out Okay, yeah, we're services company now if I'm sure maybe you've had in the past. Have you had any of these multi sites have they been hacked before? No, never been hacked. Okay. I was gonna ask if it has who handles that Mostly us. I mean if it does happen, it would be me Experiencing it and then I would go to our hosting company, which is WP engine and say hey help Let's roll back to a backup and figure out what happened and then just go through the cleanup process. Okay, so Building multi-sites probably not so much one-man job. You probably would need a small team at the very least right not necessarily If you know multi-site you can certainly do it with one guy. It's not we're one one girl. It's not It's not that difficult. It's a little different than their standard WordPress But once you understand the differences between between them, it's pretty straightforward. Okay. Thanks So I work with our local school district I built them a sports website, but they use a third-party vendor for their district sites and all the school sites and when I go to this Vendor's website and I've experienced this with all the other ones that I've seen to find that that information about the price is very Very hidden. So are we looking at somewhere around $60,000 is a low ball figure for a big district? Yes, okay, so this is one of the bigger districts in the state of Kentucky where I live And so if I were to approach the school Like you had the issue with accessing that data and pulling that data down So how would I convince them that? Some of this data may get lost, but yet we see the cost savings on the other end So what would be your advice the argument is the argument would be is like if you migrate from one proprietary vendor to another Proprietary vendor you're gonna lose data. Okay, just there's very little you can do about it so migrating from an One vendor to wordpress you're still gonna lose some data But because you have a lot more control of what you can put into wordpress sure you can actually save a lot of that data And there's a lot of strategies for how to scrape websites and how to if you have the database itself You can actually do a table-to-table comparison and write a script to inject it It's there's guys here who could do it Webdose studios of Brian messing laner. He's fantastic at that stuff. Okay. Thank you I missed them the very beginning of your speech. So I don't know if you covered this or not. Have you Had to deal with ADA compliance see on any of your sites yet because there are several districts in Pennsylvania that just got sued for it Yeah Not specifically, but we did build the theme with ADA in mind so we made sure that it met the core level of the section of five-way guidelines and Mostly out of the box if you're using like a genesis or some kind of a framework all that's already done for you So it's just a matter of double-checking and making sure you don't miss something Now do you control the teacher sites with that also or do you educate the teachers? We have talked about moving all the teacher sites to wordpress But because it's not inside the department that I'm in it's a ownership issue So they want to use Google sites. We're like well, okay, you can use Google sites. We're not gonna stop you But we can find ways to get wordpress and Google sites to work together. So it's a kind of thing So I actually work for the school district of Philadelphia and we are migrating over to wordpress very soon It is a lot of websites and a lot of people managing content Over 300 websites that need to migrate over so my concern is how do I try to head off some of the issues? We think wordpress is very easy But some of those teachers and principals are not and I'm trying to figure out what is going to be the biggest hang up when I say you Now have to do this Again, it's again if you move from one system to another there's going to be retraining regardless So moving from a vendor to another vendor you have to retrain moving from a vendor to wordpress You still have to retrain there's no getting around it The nice thing though is that wordpress out of the box the ease of use for creating and managing content is By far the best in the industry For an open source product I mean you have to sell that over and over again that the ease of use and the usability of this product is so easy That you know a third grader can do it. I mean my daughter's in fourth grade and she's Programming stuff in scratch. I mean it's just like these kids are great And you know if you have the support structure in place get your high school kids involved get them you'll give them a mentor to work with and Get them involved in keeping the websites up to date because they're going to pick it up like that digital natives are like So there's no big hang up that we should be worried about as we proceed You're going to get a lot of pushback from the vendors of course the vendors are going to go Well, you know this and that and support and all that but if you can build those same kind of things in place You shouldn't have any issues. Okay. Thank you. Yep. Oh, we're done. Thank you everybody If you have any questions here for me I'm here afterwards


Hello! I am Dr. Himali Tekani. I am a consultant obstetrician and gynecologist at Manipal Hospital's Old Airport Road, Bangalore. When women are exclusively breastfeeding, they do not tend to ovulate and hence in the first 4-6 weeks, women do not ovulate and pregnancy is not a concern. After 4-6 weeks, ovulation can happen at any time and hence contraception should be resorted to. Now contraception in women who are breastfeeding differs a little from women who are not breastfeeding or who have not conceived at the time. Tablets recommended for these women are mini pills or progesterone only pills. These pills need to be taken on a regular basis every day and they have only a time span of 3 hours which is the window period. So if you forget to take a tablet more than 3 hours, then they need to use additional contraceptive measures for 48 hours. The same tablet forms are available in an injection. Now these injections are the DMPA injections which are given once every 3 months. The other forms of contraceptives which women who are breastfeeding can use are either barrier contraceptive that is the condoms. The other options included are the intrauterine contraceptive devices and when you look at permanent contraceptive methods, they include sterilization operations which can be either male sterilization or female sterilization operations. These can be done immediately after delivery or they can be done as interval procedures about 6 to 8 weeks later.