The new Streamer X from RODE is a really interesting device for a number of reasons, not least because it is RODE's first foray into the world of video, as well as being an audio interface. It is, after all, a video capture device, and I'll talk about some of its capabilities there in a little while. But for me, it's also the positioning of this because, although it is called the Streamer X, and obviously, you know, the live streaming market is going to be a huge opportunity for it, it's also been aimed squarely at people who just want to level up their audio and video quality in Zoom and Teams meetings. And that's kind of one thing that, you know, I'm constantly on about on my channel and in the Take One Tech Academy as well, is helping people to level up their online appearance in their meetings and the way that they present themselves and their businesses online. And when I say that this has been aimed at, you know, partly that particular market, what I mean by that is, as we'll see in the settings, they've got some settings specifically for, you know, video calls, but also they've gone one step further with a really smart move in my mind, which is to have some integration directly with applications like Keynote, PowerPoint and Google Slides, which means that this could well be the one device that you have to give you that high quality video audio and also then actually control your presentation going into your meeting or your webinar. I know that there's people I've already spoken to who have been really considering this, and I've certainly recommended it to some people who just want to either, you know, take that initial step to get that high quality video or audio or even actually just simplify their setup. So I've spoken to people with ROCasters who are saying, well, really, I've only got one mic and all I'm using it for is to just get that high quality audio going into my Zoom meetings. So, you know, pairing it down to something like this, which is a much simpler device in many respects, but still has all of the same onboard processing power in terms of audio is a really smart move. So I think there's going to be a huge, huge opportunity there in that particular segment. Anyway, this is my first two weeks of using the device. I'm going to share my opinions with it. I should have to say that RODE did send me this device for review along with the PodMight USB and also the ROCaster Duo. So I'll make separate videos about those, but this is not a paid video promotion and all of these views are just my own, as I say, my experience of using them for the first couple of weeks. I'm going to run through all of the actual hardware itself, and then I'll talk about the software. And when I talk about software, there are in fact two different pieces of RODE software that you can use with the ROCaster, sorry, the StreamX even, forget the device rights, and that is either RODE Central or also their Unify software. Now, at the moment, Unify is PC only. However, it is coming to the max. So I'll make a video all about Unify when I've actually got that on my computer and operational. But for the time being, I'll just focus on RODE Central. Incidentally, the difference between those two is that Unify is going to give you slightly more options in terms of audio routing and the way that you can use the device. But I'll talk about that a little bit later. I do suspect that for the most part, most people will just be using this with RODE Central because it gives you the sort of easiest, quickest setup and least complications in terms of setup. But let's start with the overall form factor. As you can see, it's a really nice looking device. If you're familiar with the ROCaster Pro 2, which is what I've been using as my primary audio interface for the past 12 months or since it came out, in fact, then it's going to seem very familiar to you. It's got a very familiar look and feel in terms of the side view and so on, some similar sort of design elements. And also, when you take a look at all of the little dials and the little glowing buttons as well, it's got the same sort of nice tactile feel to it as on the ROCaster Pro 2. Another thing that they've bought over from the ROCaster Pro 2 is the quarter 20 inch socket or screw thread, I should say, on the back, which means that you can mount it to things.  This can be used as a standalone device. You don't need to have it plugged into your computer. You may have it plugged into a mobile device, in which case you might have a musical instrument plugged into it even and just have this mounted up on a stand next to you. So having that extra mounting option is really nice. I've personally done that today just so that I can put it up here and have it mounted up here to be able to show you what all of the connectors do. So, first off, we've got this Neutric combo connector here. That means that you can connect either your XLR microphone directly to that with an XLR cable, obviously. And if this is a condenser mic, then you're likely going to need phantom power. It does have phantom power 48 volts here, so you can just toggle this on and off by pressing the button. But because it is a combo jack, it does mean that you can plug in a musical instrument as well. So if you've got a guitar, for example, that can plug directly into the quarter inch socket there in the middle. Next to that, you've got your headphone socket. So that's going to go to your headphones, your in-ear monitors, whatever you're using to monitor your mix. Next to that, they've also got a headset socket. So that's a 3.5mm jack. So if you are using something like the Rode NT-H100M, this is actually the NT-H100, but the NT-H100M has got a boom mic attached to it as well. So that means that you could be using that as your microphone rather than or in addition to the XLR microphone input. Coming back to the top-down shot, and by the way, I'll talk about different mics a little bit later. Coming down to the top-down shot then, we've got the HDMI in, and I should say that my main camera that you're looking at right now is passing directly through the Streamer X and going into my video recording software, which is Ecamm Live. So my HDMI from my camera is going straight in there, and that's what you're seeing right now. You will have noticed that there is in fact two HDMI sockets, and that's because as well as the input, you've also got the through socket there. Now there's a couple of reasons why you may need to use this, or three to my mind.  So it would go into the in socket, and then the through would go with an HDMI cable from there into your monitor. So then you can actually just be watching your gameplay whilst it's being captured here on your streaming computer. And I'll talk about the specs specifically for the HDMI inputs and through puts and so on in a little while. The other way that you might use this is actually just to use it as a monitor for your camera. So if you are recording and you've got your camera coming into here, as I've got at the moment, you could technically just have a little field monitor or something like that plugged into that so that then you have that as a little monitor of your camera directly coming out of the Streamer X. The final way that I can see that you may want to use this, which is actually probably what I'm going to predominantly do with this, is to actually use this for a secondary computer passing in a presentation into your primary computer. When I'm giving webinars or demonstrations in Zoom meetings, for example, I'll often run my presentation or my demonstration on a second computer, and then I want to bring that into the main computer that's going into my meeting. So similar to the streaming scenario really, but just capturing something different rather than gameplay, capturing your presentation so that you can see it on an actual external monitor. But it is going into your primary computer. So that's how I'm going to use that anyway. Next up, we've got these three USB sockets. The first one over here on the left is a power socket, and it is, as you can see, 5 volts, 3 amps. Now, if you are running this into a computer, actually it can draw all the power it needs from the USB from your computer. So you can see here that I've got just this USB one. There is also a secondary USB, but I've just got this plugged into my computer over this USB one cable, and that is the one that is also powering the device. So when would you might need to use the power? Well, if you are using it plugged into an external device, like an external device, plugged into a device like either a smart phone or a tablet, if I can get my words out. So that's where you might use the power there. But these two USB sockets you can use for a couple of things. So either you could have it connected to a primary computer and a secondary computer. You may want to have a tablet or a phone connected into that second socket and have that going into your computer. Maybe you're bringing somebody in over the phone or whatever. Or it may be that you have both of those sockets attached directly to a single computer to just give you two separate channels there. And we'll have a look when we start looking at the audio setup as to how you might consider using that. But personally with the Rocaster Pro 2, for example, you there have two USB cables that give you actually three separate USB channels, but I have them all going into the same computer generally. So anyway, a few different options there which we'll look at in due course. Now, if we take a look at the actual buttons on the front, and I'll just come back to this shot here, then you can see what we've got. There's first of all two dials over there on the left-hand side. And that is for your microphone and also for your headphones. And if you press the microphone dial in, you'll notice that this little LED above is switching from basically these different inputs. So I mentioned before that you've got the XLR socket there that you can use for your or indeed for an instrument, for your microphone or for an instrument. If you are using that phantom power and you click phantom power on, you'll see that there is an indicator there showing you that it is on. I get this nice and straight. Then you can also click to go to your headset. So if you are using that headset option, that is how you would get to that. But you'll notice there is a third light and that is because as well as those wired microphone options, you can also use this directly with either the road wireless go or the road wireless means. And in fact, I should say road wireless go to the latest version of those. And you can actually pair this directly with the transmitter so you don't need the receiver in there at all. You can just have this paired directly. So if you want to have a wireless mic option, that is a great little feature that they've added in there. Now I should say that if you're using this with road central, one of the limitations of road central is that you basically have to pick which of those input devices you want to use. However, with Unify, you do get access to all three of them simultaneously potentially. So this could then be something that you use with an instrument plugged in, then you could have something wired into the headset potentially for microphone or maybe using that wireless option. So you've got some slightly more options there when it comes to the road central versus the Unify. Also then on here, next to that, you've got the dial for the headphone. And when you press that, what you're actually doing is muting the headphones. So that is to mute your headphones. And down here, you've got a button with a microphone that is going to mute your microphone. Now you might notice this nice little glow around the outside of the dials, which is going to be familiar if you are used to the road caster or have used the road caster. But one thing that is different on these, because obviously there is no screen to give you any visual in terms of the levels. But one thing that is different on these little illuminated rings is that as you turn them down, you'll notice that the illumination also turns down if I change it from muted. You can see there that little blue glowing ring as I turn that down, that would be the level in my headphones would be going down there. And with the microphone, if I go to the mic input, then this is going to be a level of the mic input. So it's nice that you have got that little visual, even though there is no physical screen on it. Now just below the headphones then is a similar button to the microphone, but this is to effectively turn off the camera. And why might you want to do that? Well in gameplay you probably won't, but if you're using this in a meeting platform, it's nice to be able to turn off your camera, just like I've done right now. The camera will come back on. So I don't know if you've been like me before in Zoom meetings or Teams meetings where you're not really necessarily entirely sure if you are on or off camera because sometimes the controls can be a little bit small to see, especially if you are using a teleprompter. So I can see that there's going to be a lot of people who will really like this to just know that yes, they are muted or not muted and they've got that very clear indicator there of that. So next to this then you've got the smart pads and there are four smart pads here with the same sort of functionality as you've got on the Rocaster Pro 2. So these allow you to change your voice, you know add voice effects to it. You can assign audio to it. So if you want to play a music bed or sound effects and things like that, you can assign those to these. They can also control MIDI devices as well. So they can be used as a MIDI controller if you are using software that allows that on your computer. You can also use it if you are using OBS or ECAM Live to actually control the software itself. However, you do generally need to have some sort of intermediary application to do that. So for ECAM Live for example, which is what I use to make all of my videos and my live streams, there is a third-party app called ELMC, ECAM Live MIDI controller. And so in that case, you would be able to use these buttons then to switch your scenes, toggle overlays and whatever in ECAM Live. Now those four smart pads, but you do have multiple pages of these and you can scroll between them like this and you can have up to 64 actions assigned to those. I do think that it might be a little bit tricky to keep track of those. Obviously you can colour-code them, but you'd have to have some, you know, very good memory to remember what all of those different pages are and the different colour-coding on those. But nevertheless, nice to see for those who need them that there is plenty of options there. These smart pads though do sort of have a completely new use case though, as we'll see in the software when used in this new presentation mode because then these are used for advancing your slides. You've also got them for putting up a blank slide or starting or ending your presentation. So when you are in this new presentation mode, which I'll show you in a moment, then this becomes your presentation interface here. So this is what I was talking about with, you know, if you are looking to level up your audio and video and look more professional in online meetings, then here you go. You can easily toggle on and off your audio and video and you can control your presentation from here too. So really great to see that. All in all, the hardware, like I say, feels really solid, just the same as I've come to expect from other road products and a really nice sort of feel and aesthetic to it and a nice form factor too. Let's then take a look at the software and I mentioned before that we're talking specifically about Road Central. If you do come over to the Road Central app and open it up, then you'll find that the Streamer X is over here on the left-hand side. I will say that when you plug this in, I've spoken to a couple of people who have had some issues with the camera being recognized due to the fact that they're plugged into a dock. Now, with all of these devices, be it a roadcaster or a stream deck or any of these sort of peripherals that we use these days on our computers for streaming and the like, you'll generally see it's there somewhere that they'll always recommend plugging it directly into your computer. What can happen is, you know, if you don't have the bandwidth over the, you know, USB channel that your dock, for example, is going into, then it may sort of cause some issues. In all of the cases where, or, let's say, all of the cases, the two cases of the people I've spoke to who have had one of these where it hasn't been recognized or the camera hasn't been recognized, it has been the dock that has been the issue, and so just plugging it out and plugging it into the computer has solved that. So in those cases, though, once again, when you have got it plugged into your computer, mine, by the way, is plugged into a dock, so it by no means all docks, I should say. But in any case, once it is plugged in, then you'll see it show up in the left-hand side. You may see a little indicator here to update the firmware, and I just mentioned that because I mentioned that I've had this for two weeks in that time. There have been a number of firmware updates, so it's great to see that this is still under, you know, ongoing active development as well. And indeed, Road Central's had a few updates specifically related to Streamer X as well. But when you click into it, then you'll see something looking like this. And it's really nice that they've got this quick setup section down at the bottom. I'll talk about that in a moment, though. I'll actually go on to the more familiar stuff, first of all, which is the basic one, which is device configuration. This is just changing basically the brightness of the buttons. So it's changing the brightness up and down of those and the brightness of when they're on or off, or active or inactive. So that's what these two sliders are. That's when a button is basically in its inactive state, and then this is the brightness when it is in its active state. And then you've got device information set to the device there. Going back then, we've got the customized smart pads. And as I say, I'll cover this off because this is going to be very familiar if you are used to Roadcaster. What we've got in here is either you can add sound effects, if I click on one of these, or maybe this one. So this is just the Airhorn sound effect. But you can upload any file to this. It's got two gigabytes of online, of onboard storage. So you can just upload your files when they're stored on the device itself. As I say, you don't need Road Central or Unify Open to actually use the device. So you can drag and drop that. You've got some options as to how you want that to behave. So whether you want it to be that whilst you hold the button down, it plays the audio. You can also have it so that it's one shot. You just hit it and it plays the audio through to the end. Or the toggle is more likely if you've got sort of a music bed, some sort of longer music track, then you can use a toggle to toggle that on and off. Then you've got some options for what happens whilst it's on. Do you want it to loop it the track? Do you want it to replay at the end? And then some different ones that you've got there for those. And you can always just drag and drop things onto here. And you can also export the audio if you need to take it off there at some point as well. Next up, we've got the audio effects. So if I click into one of these audio effects, I'll just choose this one. So the pitch up, there's a few different effects here like the voice disguise, the robot, megaphone, echo effect and reverb. And then you've got the options of either momentary or latching. So latching being that you press the button and then it has that effect enabled until you press the button again. Or momentary is just basically whilst you hold the button down, it's going to apply that effect. Next up, we've got some mixer actions. So if I just come over to a different page, I'll come over to these mixer actions.  There is fade in and out.  And then you can have it so that it excludes the microphone. So maybe you want the music to fade out and your microphones stay audible. And then at the end, maybe fade the music in towards the end. So you've got a few options there and you can change the time that it takes to fade in and out. Ducking is where you are having all of the other audio reduced in volume slightly as you talk. You don't really get much control over how much that, you know, ducking is applied there, the level that it applies to.  So that's typically something that you'll hear in radio, you know, when the announcer, when the DJ, I should say, announcer is going to talk over the top of music it may well just drop it down a little bit behind that. Then you've got MIDI. And that is what I was talking about before where you would need to use some sort of MIDI controller. If you're using something like a DAW, a digital audio workstation, often they are, you know, I've got integration for MIDI so that you can control different aspects of that. Or again, if you were going to control OBS or Ecamm Live, for example, with some third party software, you could use MIDI for that. The one that's really interesting to me though on here is this presentation mode. So if we click on presentation mode, what that does if you click on the little information, it shows you in more detail. But as I mentioned earlier, the previous slide and next slide are assigned to these forward and backward arrows that you've got, which are ordinarily the sort of page turn arrows for the smart pads. Then here you've got this one for a blank slide in white or blank slide in black. So if you just want to put a blank slide up on the screen. And then you've got close presentation and start presentation in there. Now, one thing to note though is that this is essentially just sending the keystrokes. And you can see here the mode I selected keynote, because that's what I use. But you can also choose PowerPoint, Google Slides on Mac or Google Slides on Windows. And what this is doing is it's just sending that particular keystroke, so the W, the arrow key, or the B or the escape or whatever it is. It is sending those to that application. But the application does need to be active. So if you are using keynote and along with a Zoom call, for example, and you've got keynote running, but you're kind of clicked into Zoom. So Zoom is the active application. You just need to be aware that it's going to be sending these keystrokes at the moment to Zoom rather than always going to keynote. There are a few ways around that. So I use an application called Keyboard Maestro. So I can actually just program that to take these inputs from this device only and then send that to a specific application. But just note that if you go into the chat in Zoom or whatever, then, yeah, you may be pressing the little arrow or this one, and it's just literally typing the letter W into your Zoom chat. So that's just something to be aware of. But nevertheless, for the majority of people giving a presentation or a webinar, likely they'll be in the presentation software anyway. So that is presentation mode. Now I mentioned the camera as well, by the way. So here it does mention the disabled camera and so on. And I've already shown you what that looks like. But in terms of that HDMI pass-through, I should really talk about the specs a little bit of that because obviously this is something that's quite important. So the max input resolution that you've got into that HDMI in is 4K 60 frames per second, 2K at 144 frames per second, or at 1080p HD at 240 frames per second. So that's the input that it can physically take. Now, obviously that's a really high frame rate there. But certainly for gamers, that is what is going to be important. They want to make sure that passing it through this device is not going to be reducing the frame rate that they're getting, certainly on their monitor. However, it doesn't necessarily capture in those frame rates though. So let's take a look at this, which is the actual capture resolution. So it's 4K 30. So it means that you can pass through 4K 60, but it's going to be capturing just the 4K 30. Then you've got 2K 60 HD at 120 or HD at 60 for HDR. The other thing that I should mention is this variable refresh rate support, which I understand is important to gamers, not so much to little old me just going into my Zoom and Teams meetings. But nevertheless, it is there, so I just want to highlight it because I do appreciate that that is more important to some than others. We've got all the other specs in there as well. I will say in terms of the audio, it's got the same revolution preamps as on the ROCASTER Pro 2. So if you are familiar with those, you'll know that those are low noise and high gain. And if you're used to using something like a Cloudlifter or a Fethead, so some microphones require this extra booster in line to sort of boost up the gain on those microphones, that's not necessary with using the Streamer X, just as it is not with the ROCASTER Pro 2 as well. So that's something that is just worth noting. And in fact, they say that if you do use something like a Cloudlifter or a Fethead, it'll actually introduce more noise into the system. Now coming back then, it feels like we've gone forward a bit before we come back, but let's go back to that setup because having looked at the sort of device configuration and the smart pads, I just want to come back to here, which is the first thing that you're actually going to see when you get to the device, which is related to audio setup. And it is either you're going to select whether this is going to be for streaming, for presentations, for video calls, or for gaming. And what that's changing is the audio routing. So what you'll see over here on the right-hand side is that along the top, we've got these different options here, these are all the different inputs, I should say. So this is your microphone, and bear in mind that we've got those three options for microphone. Then this one is the audio from the smart pads. So if you are using the smart pads to play music or sound effects, that is what this is representing. Then you've got HDMI, and I've talked about there being four microphone inputs, but just bear in mind that HDMI can also pass audio as well. So if you are using your camera coming into this device, you may well have a camera that's plugged into your... You may well have a microphone, I should say, that's plugged into your microphone. Let me get my words straight, shall I? You may well have a microphone that is plugged into your camera that is then coming into this device. So technically, you could have four different mics that are all coming into the Streamer X. And then we've got these two USB channels, so USB 1 and 2, and those are those two sockets that we've got on the back. And then here on the left-hand side, we've got either the mix or your monitor. So the mix being what's actually going out into your live stream, into your Zoom meeting or whatever. And the monitor mix here, the one with the headphones, that's what you're actually hearing. So it may well be that you want to have something different going out onto your live stream versus what you're listening to. For example, if you've got gameplay, you may want that at a different level in your ears versus in the live stream. So that's what those different inputs are for the outputs. So what you'll see now is as I change from streaming to presentation, when in presentation mode, it is going to turn off those smart pads because, as I mentioned, when you switch into presentation mode, it kind of takes over those smart pads. And incidentally, when you are in presentation mode, if I just come back to my top-down shot, you'll notice that these all turn this out. So it's actually a very light blue color. It looks a bit white on the screen, actually. But if I turn out of presentation mode, those colored buttons back, but turning presentation mode on, you see that they all turn white. So that's kind of like just a visual cue as to the fact that you are in that presentation mode. Now, coming back over to the road central, though, I can also turn on and off presentation mode here. So previously, we were doing that in the smart pads section, but you do also get it here. So the first thing that people see when they're coming in is this quick start guide and presentation. You can toggle it on and off from there, too. Next up, if I go to video call, you'll see that it's changed the routing slightly again. So first off, it has disabled the HDMI audio. So that means that no audio is coming over HDMI. But then they've also toggled off here the USB 1 audio. So if you think about the way that this would be set up, you're going to have your Streamer X audio as an input and an output on your computer because you can feed stuff into this. This is a audio hub that stuff is coming into. Audio is coming into and then being distributed to your headphones and to these different USB channels. So it is both an input and an output. So if you're using this with Zoom, then you would have the Streamer X set to both your mic and also your headphones. Obviously your actual mic is going through this and into Zoom and Zoom is then feeding the audio from your Zoom meeting into the Streamer X and then through the headphones into your ears. Well, what you don't want is for the audience or your other meeting participants even in Zoom getting what they call slapback and they would all call it echo where they can hear themselves back a moment later. And normally we have a feature called Mix Minus to combat that. So that's what we've got in the ROCUSTER Pro 2 and that's the term whereby Mix Minus means that you're taking whatever audio is coming in down a specific channel and if you've got Mix Minus on it will remove that audio from the mix that is going back down that channel. And that's in effect what they've done here. So having the USB1 audio toggled off in the USB1 audio going back because that's what is coming out of the mix here then that means that your people in Zoom won't be able to hear themselves back. They won't hear this echo, this slapback. However, you still will be able to hear them because you can see the little green check marks means that you are hearing everything that's coming in over USB. They've also then got the USB toggled off for both of those. Now I will say this is just a generic setup. It may well be that for your Zoom meeting you actually do want some audio coming from your secondary computer for example and maybe even going into that USB1. So it may well be that you want that active, it just depends. And the same also with your HDMI. I've mentioned that you can pass audio over HDMI and if you're using a secondary computer and you want it to go into your Zoom meeting that may well be something that you want to have checked on. However, we can set a custom setup for this as you can see just down here and we'll look at how to do that in a moment. So just know that these are fairly generic setups. However, it is great as an initial startup setup process for people. Next you've got gaming and what this has done is turned off the mix from HDMI. So this is assuming that you're using this for gaming. You've got your gameplay audio passing over HDMI. Maybe you don't want that to go into the stream but you want to hear it and once again that sort of mix minus effect that they've got going on here as well. I will mention though that if you are using this for streaming and you've got streaming toggled on here if you are using this with your camera as a streaming camera it may well be that you don't actually want this HDMI on at all because if you've got a decent mic plugged into your Streamer X and so you've got that's your mic audio. If you've got your camera plugged in here, you don't necessarily want just the built-in camera on your camera passing the audio through. So you can tweak all of this to your exact specification and liking and if you click on custom it will take you through to how to do that but you can also access that directly just from clicking on this audio setup just up here. So if you click on audio setup now we can see a slightly more advanced version of that routing table that we're just looking at and you can also see those different options for streaming, for presentation, for video call and perhaps you can see as I click through them what it's doing. It's actually we've actually got separate faders here for all of those different things. We've got our mic here but now instead of just a single mic icon as we had in that table you've now got those three mics and in fact if I press the Streamer X button you'll see how it does toggle through which one is the selected microphone and then over here you've got the sound pads or the smart pads the audio from the smart pads, the HDMI the USB one and USB two. But as I say it's not just showing you the tick whether it's on or off. We've actually got individual faders for each one and we've got dual faders because we've got the mix and then we've also got the monitor out there as well. So you can adjust these together like this, just move it up or down there's also a little link icon at the top here. If you break the link then you could maybe set a lower level for your smart pads over here. Maybe you want to have a you know turn off the HDMI completely for your stream but keep it up in your monitors and as you can see just make complete changes there. So when you do make any changes to this it's going to revert to this custom setup. At the moment you can't actually save these which is I think it would be nice to be able to have some different setups that you might want to have saved. At the moment if I click into any one of these others it will pop up a warning to say that we're going to clear the custom mix. Click on continue now you can see we can just go back to any one of those but if I go back to custom it basically just leaves everything exactly as it was on the you know the last setting whether it was streaming, presentation, or video call. So if I change to video call here as you'll see it's made these changes now click back to custom it just leaves it exactly as it was. So it would be nice to see some presets where you could potentially save some presets. Nevertheless really nice to have this audio routing and there's lots of ways to do this you know as I say if you had got both the USB one and two plugged into the same computer then it gives you slightly more control over that and obviously in your computer you could decide you know what audio goes where as well. But Unify is certainly going to give us a lot more advanced audio than that. Now I should say that for the whole of this video my audio has just been passing through my ROCASTER Pro 2 because of all these different changes I'm going to be making tweaking everything on and off. However I will say that the preamps are exactly the same as we have got in the ROCASTER Pro 2 and that means that if you click into the settings here on the microphone then that gives you access to all of their onboard processing and that is really the sort of heart of this that's what you're going to be getting this device for whatever mic you've got you know it's all about how you apply that processing to it and so when you click in the little cog icon there to go and make these little tweaks and adjustments you start off you can adjust the input gain there you can also toggle on and off the phantom power directly from within here as well and then also if you are using that Neutric combo socket there for an instrument and you can toggle this on and off for an instrument now they do have some really sort of I say basic processing it's a basic interface for some really complex processing but they've got what they call VoxLab which has got these three different sliders here you just click into one of them and rotate your scroll wheel here on your mouse to turn that up and down depth is going to add that sort of low end depth to your sound sparkle adds more sort of higher end clarity and punch is going to also add some elements to the sound but what all of these are doing though is effectively tweaking their advanced settings and just as on the ROCASTER Pro 2 you can go into the advanced settings here and from there you've got all of these different onboard processes so the first one is a high pass filter that is going to be used to potentially knock out any low end noise for example from road noise or an air conditioning unit or something like that and you can adjust the frequencies and so on there I'll talk about some of these different elements in here in terms of what all these settings do in a little while next you've got a de-esser which is to remove those S sounds from your voice and you can target and then you have a noise gate so this is going to be for when you depending on how you're using the device like for me I have my noise gate set so that when I stop talking basically no audio comes through and that's how it goes completely silent when I stop talking however you may want to have this set up slightly differently but it basically just eliminates background noise that's going to come through whilst you don't necessarily want the mic sort of open as it were next you've got the compressor this is going to basically help to level out the audio in terms of the volume so bring down the higher volumes in your voice but then potentially also boost up the lower volumes to just make everything a little bit more equal next you've got the equalizer which is actually to add different elements to the high end the mid end or the low end and you can see that that is the three different things you can adjust there and you can adjust exactly what frequencies these are affecting by adjusting this way and there's a few other ways that you can adjust this double clicking on this will actually open up some further control there so you're adjusting effectively the range of frequencies that are being affected by that and then you can move those things up and down like that again I'll talk about these in a little bit more detail then you've got the big bottom and the aural exciter and these are essentially adding either a more sort of richness to the lower end tones in your voice or the aural exciter is adding more of that sort of clarity and sparkle in the higher ends and then we've finally got the panning now I've always found with the ROCASTER Pro 2 and with this and also with the ROCASTER Duo as well that these things here are really the secrets to adding some extra polish I would say to your sound and yet when people go in and try to make adjustments to these you know there's a lot of unfamiliar terms here so what exactly is threshold, attack, hold and release for example so I did cover all of this in a recent live stream where I went through all of these and give some introduction into exactly what they're doing so I'll talk about that a little bit later overall then I think that this is a great little device if you are looking to really level up your audio and video quality going into either your live streams or your recorded videos using Ecom Live or OBS or obviously for levelling up your audio and your presentations in your Zoom and Teams meetings now I've talked so far about the audio using Road Central once again when Unify comes out I'll make a separate video about that that is going to give us some slightly more advanced audio routing that certainly is something that I'm quite interested in as well now when it comes to those advanced audio settings I did mention that live stream so do check out that video if you want to learn more about how to get the most out of the stream X, the ROCASTER Duo or the ROCASTER Pro 2 when it comes to that advanced Apex processing that these road devices have. I hope this has been useful and I'll see you soon in another video


Yeah, I just had him Leo work with on foundation the theorem foundation on the solidity team Doing language design work and compiler work and also doing formal verification Which is what this talk is about. I'm going to talk about solidities SMT checker Which is a formal verification component that gives compile time results about safety safety checks so have two Questions, so how many people here are solidity developers? Okay, cool, and how do you feel about audience participation? Okay, cool You asked how so the question the answer is You're gonna help me solve this So I want to first introduce what is SMT what's why SMT checker so the SMT comes from satisfiability module theories And an SMT slover is a tool that will take a formula like this a first order logic formula and try to answer this question Can we find integer values for ABC such that? This formula when we substitute the values for these variables evaluates to true So just to I can go together over the formula Just to give a little bit of context to whoever's not familiar with Natural Connectives and this kind of things Okay, so it's a Boolean formula right it's a conjunction of constraints so this formula Kind of returns true or false right a Boolean value these constraints are satisfiable together or not So first we have this part of the formula which basically says it's kind of like a function definition, right? So there's a lot of syntax abuse here, but we're gonna ignore that for now So this has that for whatever acts f of facts equals x times 42, okay? Then next we have two constraints over The input variables we chose so we're saying that a has to be greater or equal b and b has to be greater or equal c and Then last we are we applied function f we defined before over a and see saying f of a has to be greater or equal F of c so now the question again, can we find integer values that Evaluate the formula to true Yes, okay, can you give me values for ABC? Yeah, so now you told me that it's possible right it's possible to give values for ABC such that the formula is true Zero zero zero Does that work? It works right? Zero greater or equal zero true same thing for BC f of a zero f of his f of c zero It's true, right, but unfortunately. That's not the one that I had here. So Anyway, so this one works, right? Also, this one works and this one works How many do you think how many solutions how many different sets of values for ABC do you think we can get for this formula? infinite right Now it's like the different question What happens if we change this if we change the comparison of f a and f of c to this and Repeat the question Is there a set of values for ABC that make the formula true? so there's a consensus saying no and that's correct and When that's the case we say that the formula is unsatisfiable because there's no set of values that satisfy the formula so in the previous case was satisfiable now we have unsatisfiable and Why did I choose this formula could have chosen many other formulas? So the reason Is we can read this formula in many ways right? You can be just a logical formula But this formula happens to we can we can also read this formula as this part here highlighted right now Being a property we want to prove about a function right application of the function That part being local constraints say on input variables and here basically a function definition So this is basically how we just proved correctness of this smart contract Here we have a function definition which Would be encoded in the SMT language as the first term of the of the conjunction Here we have two local constraints right that evaluate that are encoded sorry As those those two constraints and here we have the application of the function But you will probably notice notice right now that in the code I have assert f of a greater or equal f of c because it's a property. I want to prove right And here in the logical formula that we give to the SMT solar it's actually last then so it's the opposite operation right the reason why We actually ask for the opposite is if this is unsatisfiable if we try to prove the negation of the property and The solver says it's unsatisfiable. This means that there's no behavior There's no values for local variables with that encoding that actually break the assertion Right So in this case the solver will tell me it's unsatisfiable Which means assertion is safe again because there's no way you can go through the program and break the assertion So for all cases you can ever come up with the assertion is true But let's change a little bit. So is that assertion true? Is that assert correct for every input? It's not right so for our query to the SMT solver We negate the property right so I want to find values. I want the SMT solver to give me values for My variables that actually break the assertion So I want f of a to be different from f of c and in this case the solver will tell me it's satisfiable and here are some values and This is exactly the output that solidity compiler will give you at compile time when you try when you run Exactly that code. So here we see that Compiler would say assertion violation happens here for this assertion for a one B one C one C zero, sorry so the SMT checker as a summary after the example as you saw it's a SMT based so we use SMT solvers. So it's an SMT based smart contract formal verification framework It's built in a compiler which is for us one of the one of the big advantages Compared to other ways to formally verify your code The way it works the way the approach our approach is that we encode program logic from solidity into SMT Statements and use SMT solver to run those queries that I just mentioned and we use those to check for assertion failures overflow underflow Triple conditions and reachable code and all of that happens automatically when you run the compiler One characteristic of this approach which is closed to from the formal verification community called bounded model check-in is that This approach is sound but not complete and what that means is If it's sound which this approach is whenever it says the assertion is safe, it is actually safe But whenever it says the assertion is not safe Here's a counter example. It might be that might be not true. So you might have to verify it and see that This this might have been caused by an abstraction of some unsupported features or functions, which is the case for our approach But then being sound but not complete also gives advantage that it's pretty fast and light compared to other approaches And it gives useful counter examples because it's applied directly on solidity code Instead of EVM bytecode, which then you would have to map back to solidity program variables, which Doesn't necessarily work So here's some other frameworks that have been already in in the ecosystem for for some time In the EVM formal semantics side you have ETH, Isabella and KVM which are Okay, VM specially is pretty established as a really good framework for for for verification of smart contracts It's more expressive, but it also means that it it's harder and takes longer to give you proof So these two approaches have pros and cons KLab is a really nice debugger for K for K proofs With and they will have a workshop tomorrow. So make sure to check that out For EVM bytecode verification, there are tools like Quientimutri and Mayan which do symbolic execution on the bytecode and try to find bugs basically and there were other projects that were translated and solidity to language that were already verifiable like Y3 F star and Zeus did that with LLVM if I'm not mistaken So how do we use it? You just need one line of code Right now. It's an experimental feature. It's a very experimental feature right now So if you use it, you will find internal compiler errors, you will find unsupported features and all kind of things, but we are working on it to make it Of course much more usable and hopefully non-experimental one day But then the next question is how do I actually use it? So if I just insert this line of code there, then sure It's gonna enable the run of the SMT checker, but what is it? What is actually doing? So you need to write formal specifications, right? So whenever you prove your program safe, you only prove it with respect to a specification otherwise you're not proving anything So you need to specify what properties you're actually proving in solidity or with the SMT checker You don't need anything extra. You use the normal require and asserts from the language itself So requires an asserts in a compiler are translated into runtime checks, right? When it's compiled to even bytecode But here in the SMT checker We use them as as the formal specifications. So we use requires as assumptions and Asserts as verification targets. So whatever conditions you write in a require the SMT checker is going to assume it's true and Whatever you write inside in the third, it's going to try to prove Okay, so How to use a require actually so there's a lot of debate For quite a while already on requires and asserts and when to use each or what it what which one means So I just copied it. I'm going to read it from Slytherin docs The require function should be used to ensure valid conditions on inputs and contracts it variables or to validate return values from calls to external contracts So here in this example, we have a contract that has a state variable a a bunch of functions g and h which Supposedly that we don't know right now what they do and we have this function f that takes an integer X So here we're using requires requires to filter values for a and x, right? So we want for some reason a to be zero and x to be less than a hundred then we sum both we put it in a and then after that We know That a less than and a hundred is true right because of the requires before so if you want to prove that the last statement Should actually have been a require sorry an assert and not a require because a require We're just going to assume it and with this with the assert We're actually using past knowledge to prove a new property about your code in the end of the function So what about asserts? The assert function should only be used to test for internal errors and to check invariants properly function code Should never reach a fail in a search statement and this is really important if this happens. There's a bug in our contract Which you should fix Same example now just using asserts everywhere Can we assert a equals zero over there? Very likely not right of course it depends on what what g and h are doing But if we don't really know what it's doing we cannot say assert a equals a because a can be whatever right and Especially for acts here if you say assert acts less than a hundred It's a public function So anyone can call this function with x equals to a hundred and your assertions are already wrong Right, so this is really important to notice like you should only assert things That you're really sure are true at that moment for every single execution path that reaches that point And here the search is correctly placed at the end because it's a new property you're proving Yeah at this moment Yeah, so for example when you have I'm gonna talk about this later But if you call an external function for example, which you don't have control over or denote a code Then when a function comes back we have to reset all knowledge about state variables, right because you might have This contract you called might have called your contract back which changed a so you can't really keep the knowledge about it But yeah, but modular verification One of the research goals that we have is to actually infer properties from different functions and see what State invariance we can come up with automatically. This is not done yet, but it's under to do list What about false positives? So I mentioned earlier that The approach is sound so if it says it's safe, it's safe, but it gives count it gives false positives Which is basically false counter examples. So your assertion might be correct and safe, but the tool says it's not safe Why does that happen? It happens because we have to abstract the encoding sometimes so for example for complex types and Functions to like cryptographical functions. We it's not a our approach is not expressive enough to actually implement it so we have to use symbolic variables on On the application of the function and that's as far as it gets So we don't really know what the actual value of the function call is going to be So in these abstractions might lead to false positives also if you call external function if you do it if you yeah call external functions We might have you we do clear the knowledge after the call after after function call so It might not have been the case that the that state variable a got rewritten But you never know so to be safe again We have to clear the knowledge Also with contract state invariance you as a developer of the contract might know that certain properties are valid throughout your contract, but the SMT checker is not yet smart enough to deduce those properties automatically, so And one point that I wanted to mention in this talk is you can actually help the SMT checker You can help the tool to actually find the proofs and it's a very simple way to do it. You can Flood your code with requires so every assumption even Very simple things that you know are true at that point Even if it's if even if it might sound redundant to you It might help the solver because the more constrained to give the last false positives the tool is gonna it's gonna issue So I'm gonna run a couple examples right now Think I have like eight minutes can everyone read Not in general, but the screen What I did push Yeah, I'm gonna start with this one like Okay, so this is like a very tiny token and not very interesting so We have a map in with balance constructor initializes the balance of the message sender with a bunch of tokens and Accounts can transfer tokens to each other right so there are few line a few extra lines in this piece of code right compared to Normal token implementations So first of all here, this is a normal one right we require that the message sender actually has the amount in their balance, but here I'm actually storing the old values For the balances for the person sending the transaction and the person receiving and yeah the person received the account receiving the amount Here the balance are updated right and here you have an assertion that says That the sum of the balances before the transaction before the operations have to be equal the sum of the balances after the operation Oh, sorry. Yeah, this should be the right Assertion, but I wanted to break so Okay, so here the tool tell the compiler tells us the assertion is broken and Gives a bunch of values for for our our variables right so but there's something weird right So it's saying that it gave zero to both to and message sender Which commonly people prevent right so we can just add that here I want message sender to be oh, this is actually not gonna work. So I'm just gonna say they have to be different It's fine if there is zero So okay now it changed right so two went to one before was your message sender to zero but that's fine because you're different and The assertion is actually saying that the balance before Was greater than the balance right now, which means that some tokens vanished, right? So the assertion is basically saying every time there's a transfer tokens vanish Which hopefully is wrong and the tool set is wrong can see balance from plus balance to is actually the same as Balance of zero and plus balance of one which are the accounts So if we actually fix the assertion There you go. If there's no If it doesn't complain it means it's safe I'm gonna move on to a slightly better example with a bunch of false positives. Oh not this Okay, so here we have Yeah, this contract see this there's external contract doesn't matter for now Oh Sorry about that. It's not the one I want to show this one. So we have Just like kind of an account that has some it stores the sum the balance of Like it's its own balance and here it counts how many transactions How many times the fallback function was called increasing the value increasing the balance of this account? So here we have the fallback function that says That the value send has to be greater than zero and This is just to Give a constraint and avoid over flows later requiring that This account cannot have more than one million the balance cannot be greater than one million So here we just increase the sum and increase the count, right? And here we have a function called average that competes the average The average value that was sent per transaction All right So here I put this require because if if there was no transaction doesn't make sense to compute the average But here we have an issue here We compute the average and we assert that the average has to be greater than zero, right? Because if you did have a transaction because of this line We cannot compute we cannot we don't count zeros in the transaction so The assertion is true agreed Okay, so it's telling us that the assertion is actually not true And give some value so it says that if count is one and some is zero Then the average is zero, which is correct, right? But then the question is Can this ever happen can count can it ever ever happen that count is one and some is zero? why Exactly, so message value is an integer, right with this require is saying message value is Actually at least one here and count only increases by one So this property here is true, right? It's an invariant it's true like at any point of the contract, right? But it's hard for the SMT checker to Figure that out on its own and that's what I meant with you as a developer of the contract No, this kind of thing then you can how you can help the SMT checker by adding those invariants whenever you have these harder checks Let's see. Okay. Now it's fine So I have one last example Which was the one that actually closed here Yeah, it's the same it's the same contract just with the extension that we have this external contract and we call Some function after an external contract and what's what happens here is that when we call the external function the knowledge gets basically erased and you would need to add new constraints after the after the After the function call you maybe even need to repeat constraints to In order to help the solver to actually prove it and not get false positives and One last thing that I wanted to say is Future plans that we have for for the tool Yeah, we have more examples and I'd be glad to talk about the tool more offline if you guys want to talk about it As future plans, we have what I mentioned, which is this sort of function modular verification part which is Is kind of involved with the state invariant automatic deduction Which is a very hard thing to do, but we want to try it anyway And also one other thing we want to introduce rather Soon is actually the ability to let Let developers give this invariant so something like you could can write something like you declare your invariants and this would be one of them and With this invariant this invariant would be applied as a require in the beginning of every function and asserted in the end of every function In the end we could even use that to get inductive proofs and Yeah, just get give more power to the checker and actually get harder properties proven anyway, even though they're pretty hard So yeah, open for questions. I'm not sure how much time there's left. Yeah, no time left. So We can discuss offline Time is gone. Thank you


Good morning, everyone. My name is Martin Diego, a steering committee member at Directors Lab West and I want to welcome you to Directors Lab West Connect's Eight Days of Conversations by theatre makers and live streamed by our partners at HowlRound to their website and to our Directors Lab West Facebook page where you can join the chat, tell us who you are and where you're tuning in from and also ask questions for the Q&A following our speakers conversation. Also, I'd like to say thank you to Jennifer Brazel. I'll say that again. Thank you to the wonderful Jennifer Brazel for providing ASL interpretation and to all our ASL interpreters throughout the course of this week. We really are so grateful for your support and you can also head to our Facebook page for auto captioning. So this particular session today is all about connecting with international theatre makers and hearing global perspectives from theatre artists outside the US. And I'd now like to introduce our speakers. We have Daniela Atiensia and Daniela Atiensia is a Latinx-Canadian theatre director based in Vancouver. She is a bilingual director, a dramaturg and divisor whose work has been seen in Colombia where she was born and raised and further afield in countries like Lithuania, in England, Denmark and here in North America. Gianna Fordemacone is an Italian theatre director based in Germany. She directs contemporary drama and works on projects that are based on songs or poems or short texts by contemporary dramatists and then reimagines those texts through a devised process. We're also joined this morning by Mikiko Shibuya. She is a Japanese theatre director currently based in Tokyo. She's lived and worked in Japan and in Australia and here as well in North America. As an artist she directs and writes and adapts plays and musicals. Actually musical theatre is her main focus and she also loves to create devised work. So in an interesting way this is one of the things that connects the three of you. I had a chance to discover when looking into your biographies in a little more detail. And last but certainly not least is our moderator this morning, Abavit Shaked and she's an Israeli theatre director based in Israel. She's also the founding artistic director of Instead Israel which is a director's lab and she is a theatre director, a playwright and group facilitator of community theatre. So these four wonderful people, theatre artists, directors, devisors, dramaturgs, are going to be in conversation with each other for the next 30 minutes or so and I'm shortly going to disappear from your screens and I'll return later in the conversation with some questions from the Facebook chat and also questions provided by some of the people that registered for this event earlier. So thank you everyone for being here and for taking part and please take it away Abavit and enjoy the conversation. I'll be back soon. So welcome and so wonderful to see everybody and for those who cannot see us with the visual impaired, I will describe myself. I am Abavit Shaked. I am from Israel and I'm in a room with Indian objects. I have a painting of mountains and river behind me and to my right there is a dream catcher and Anador. This is me. I look, I'm very pale actually. I have brown hair and most of it already white but you cannot see that and I wear blue t-shirt so this is me. We will just, I want you to hear and know who are the people that will talk in this conversation. So please describe yourself and let us know who you are so people can recognize also your voices. Okay hi I'm Janna and I'm in Augsburg. This is my place. Actually I don't think you can see so much in my place.  So very, very happy to be part of this. It's so great to be here. Thank you. Thanks Janna and Daniela. Hi everyone I'm Daniela. I'm in my bedroom right now. I think we could see a black, sorry a white wall and I've got some fairy lights behind me. I have dark brown hair which is styled to the side. My head shaved on the left side. I'm wearing a red top and long earrings and very excited, happy and honored to be part of this conversation so thank you for having me. Makiko. Hi I'm Makiko Shibuya. I'm talking from Tokyo and now it's 3 a.m. here so I have to close my curtain and this is my kitchen.  Thank you. Thank you very much that was super. Now we can start and I want to start actually with something that came up on my mind while thinking about what are we going to talk about and I just want you to have it in the title or maybe as a question or a phrase or whatever. If you want to refer to that during the conversation or it brings you something please do share and the phrase is we will make theater everywhere. That's something to have in our mind and the first question that I would love to ask you is what is happening right now within your artistic community as a response to the pandemic? We'll start from there. Whoever wants to answer it's your call just start talking. Okay I'll start so I'm in Germany and okay I'm Italian but I'm living in Germany so actually I've been I'm very in contact with Italy so I was experiencing this pandemic a bit earlier or also stronger than the German people here because it started before in Italy and then yeah you know in Italy it hasn't been so funny and what happened here is actually that everybody started to of course to think about what is this and what is going to make with us. What does it mean for the theater world and how do we want to treat this huge situation because we all feel that it's something so big it's something bigger than we are and we don't know how to cope with this situation and actually it's nice because I have the feeling that a lot of people are reacting very in a very creative way which is nice and of course yeah through the digital world which is not so the theater world so it's a bit difficult I think for all of us but there is a lot of I think we all want to not to not to die with this pandemic we want to react yeah. Okay great creativity creates creativity creates creativity yes yeah cool. Yeah I think it seems to be a bit of a global response in our industry to stay alive and say yeah let's be creative I definitely see that happening in Canada as well there's been an overwhelming amount of online response this initiative to go digital obviously has been very strong because we are all at home but for today I definitely wanted to highlight some Canadian artists who are also trying to think non-digitally and trying to engage with their audiences this way and I'd be curious to see if it's been in your countries as well for example a theater company in Toronto is doing something called mundane mysteries where you can sign up and they give you a call on your actual phone every day for seven days you give them a mystery to solve in your house obviously it has to be a mundane one but they do a series of improvisations with you over the phone and it's a phone call that you can look forward to every day in the hopes that they'll solve your mystery like my cup went missing in the kitchen or something like that and then there was another initiative where an artist was missing her friends and so she asked kind of her friends if they could pick a place that was in biking distance to where she lived and if they could just narrate five minutes of why that place was so significant and then she would bike to all these places while listening to her friends talk about the significance of this place and therefore invited other people to do the same and so she compiled so if I messaged her she would compile all my 10 friends and then I either actually do the bike ride or I can do it on google street view if I'm not able to leave my home and had several initiatives like this so yeah I'm excited to see artists in Canada also thinking outside the box and trying to get us away from the the screen so just to understand they are not on in between them they're not online it's just the audio you can't see the visual well it depends so yeah I mean ideally it's trying to get you out of your house and do a little bit of exercise and having your actual friends voices in your ear through earbuds and then you bike to these significant places and you hear them talk about it but if for some reason you can't leave your home then they encourage you to do google street view from your computer and walk walk it through virtually while you're listening to yeah that's super cool I think that this initiation this kind of stuff we should share and later on maybe there is a possibility on you know on a chat or whatever to put on the link of this great stuff because they are and super interesting to watch that or to see that thank you Daniella of course uh so for me in Tokyo actually it was very interesting because I just read an article about the similar thing about the phone improv it was written that they especially do for elders elderly people who usually live by themselves and it's very helpful helpful for them to communicate so that was one thing that was also happening in Japan as well but for me what's very interesting is that uh many of the theater people are being united and of course there was a couple of union here but now that we're starting a new kind of union and um trying to figure this out together so there are like several groups that is doing like theater people are doing that kind of fundraising to help themselves support themselves and another group is a bunch of associations they are asking um more support for the government which was very successful that we got another budget from the country and another group is about a bunch of big huge producers who are also having a trouble of difficulty in this situation so for me it's very fascinating how we are so united and also the people who were used to be rivals are now becoming a team and for example uh one of the big like anime theater producer is trying to make a theater district virtually and he is gathering people from other genre of the of in the house of theater so i'm yeah i'm very excited of course it's a hard time but i'm really i'm seeing a lot of future and a new style of theater and people really wants to do theater yes gianna can i go back to the not digital theater world because i mean at the beginning i've done some streaming shows because it was the beginning and then i told myself okay this is not theater actually i i mean it's okay now like for um for like um how do you say provisory how do you say like that for for a situation that is not um that is not going to be the situation that we want to to have but i actually i don't like this so i was always thinking about how can i do it uh in a not digital way and of course i've done also here in augsburg in the city i'm leaving i've done a telephone action so it is called like five minutes of joy so we just offer i i've written to a lot of artists here in the city and i asked them if they want to join this action so somebody some people elder people in the city can just call the number and then an artist is going to call and to say a poem or to sing a song or to play something and so this yeah this is nice and then the second step is that we are going to have actually tomorrow we're going to have a live show in front of a building so all the people that are so elder people and people with disabilities are going just to watch from the windows and we are going to say some poems and to play some some songs and yeah i'm very excited it's going to be like real theater not digital i want to say that you just made me cry really i work with elderly population and this is like this is brilliant a lot of things happen here in israel in front of the elderly houses but not a theater people come out and and seeing there are singers that does that but but to do theater and this is so important for those people that appreciate it very much this is wonderful and if i want to share something that happens here and i'm connecting to what the kiko said before and the fact that we are sharing i feel that there is more and more sharing and i can say that also that a lot of artists in israel and they created workshops for the zoom and they are sharing the workshop for writing and for uh i don't know weird visual arts and a lot of stuff that they can share and people can try that at home so to create uh if we are talking about device work and i'm appreciating your your way and i myself love device work and i'm trying to do that as much as i can also so from that point of view i think that a lot of like there is a an artist i think her name is no far in israel and she's doing a workshop at her home and she arose arose as questions for people and they create together everyone from their own home from their own spaces and this is kind of a device work and talking about device work did you have i i don't know i it's not one of the questions but is it do you have any ideas or you know seeds of ideas for that for the next device work uh do you mean specifically digitally or in general i don't know it can be digitally and it can be not digitally it can be international or or not international but some do you have some stuff that you want oh my god i have to do that this is like my next device oh it's a secret okay i mean i have a lot of different things um so and lucky because on monday i'm gonna go to the north of germany and i'm going to be in a theater with actors with distance and we are going to rehearse in a normal way so i'm so happy and then i i actually um i'm actually trying to get the money for a project here that i want to do like in cabins i just tell you because i mean if this idea is going to be if if other people want to to get this idea and to do something i think it's nice i mean i just share with you i want to put all the actors like in cabins in like in the glass cabin or something like that so that you can keep the distance and you can shout because the problem is also that you cannot shout you cannot sing because if you're shouting then your your breath is can get more can get how do you say longer and more in the distance so it's yeah then the the audience should have a bigger distance to the actor so i want to put them them like in cabins and then i want my main topic is going to be the contact so you have in the form already like a way of of avoiding avoiding the contact and you have also the so the the situation of corona because i mean it is we cannot have this contact to the other people and the audience can just walk from one station to the next station and then i want to take just different poems or songs and also some some movements connected to this topic of contact okay it's interesting you say that jenna i i honestly i really hope this is the resurgence of site specific work and and really starting to think about theater outside of our conventional spaces i think that's what we are being called to think about especially since a lot of the conversation has been around how to serve our immediate communities and i think it's it's it's a good starting place to answer your question um i think it wasn't meant to like oh no secret it's just yeah i think it's um it's it's really uh fascinating to hear you think about um our immediate surroundings you know i live close to a hospital so um there's a lot of healthcare workers in my neighborhood right and so starting to think about how i could serve them um lots of conversations around um audiences being in vehicles and performers being able to perform for um people in their vehicles or if you're outside yeah through their windows and just non-conventional spaces if that is the future of theater that's really really exciting yeah so maybe like adding to daniella i also thought of site specific because of the distance and um for me my interest is now in musical theater so i was thinking some ideas for doing musical theater in site specific situation because musical theater is about singing and dancing and it's really hard to avoid the distance and in terms of it's not exactly device work but as a collaborative work i'm trying to put together something that we collaborate internationally of course online but because of this situation i'm focusing more on the writing process because that could be done internationally and it could be something for the future and that could be something that might be interesting to challenge as a collaboration but under the same theme theme because we are all under the same situation so that's something that what i'm trying to put on this is the word that you gave us jana the contact the fact that we are connecting but we are not in contact that's very interesting and the fact that you are sticking out of the box is amazing i like it very much uh i want to ask you the next question uh connected uh but not connected um have any international collaboration working virtually been successful for you did you experience something during this time the pandemic or or not even not virtual it will be okay um okay it was not during this time because um yeah you cannot do so much in a short time but so i don't know if you want to if you want to get to know something about that i had some international projects and of course we were just in contact digitally and it's i mean it was not a problem of course you don't have the the feeling of being together but if you want to do something international that you can also pay then usually like the digital way gives you the possibility of connecting and then bringing the other countries to your theater project so yeah yeah so actually i'm right in the middle of that uh process i'm trying to put together some musical theater artists from three or four countries together to work on one project and what i found now is um i found that the time differences really works well of course it depends on the country but now that we are all in a similar situation our schedule is more open and people are at home in daytime so we can schedule our meeting in a really convenient way and we can work on something in each country when others are asleep so i i feel like we are still and because of this um situation i feel the distance is the same even though you're in the same country or in another faraway like on the opposite of the world i feel the same distance and i feel more working to get a sense of working together so i'm not sure if it will be successful or not but i'm in the middle of trying to put this together the experience in this success i just wanted to ask you miciko if you could talk a little bit more about that in terms of how are you um so you spoke a little bit about um bringing people together for the writing so how is how is that structured did you um yeah like is everybody contributing a little bit of the story and then you come together and talk about it like how does that collaboration work um actually we haven't released yet we haven't announced the project yet so so i can't speak much of the detail but yeah very close to what you said like we we have the same theme and towards the same same theme each writer will write their own songs and i'm the person who put together as one work that's kind of thing that what i'm trying to do in a form of musical theater whoever hear us and want to join this opportunity this is this is amazing because we're creating opportunities and the fact of that that this is the lab i think this is the most amazing thing that happens during the lab and this is an opportunity to work to continue work because when you're in the lab when it happened actually then you separate and and maybe you can connect during the year if you have great ideas or whatever but this is actually an opportunity so if someone wants to call for someone to join the their own work so i think this is great to do that here and i want to share also something from myself that i actually i really love to learn to study and i studied i went to new york actually before the pandemics or at the beginning of the pandemic and we had to do i wanted to i wanted to study the check of technique in new york and i finished the half of the course and then it stopped because of the pandemic and i needed to come back to israel but then everybody was it was an international program and we decided that we are going to perform the the finishing show and to work on this on zoom so we did all the rehearsal process on zoom and we were it was a long christmas dinner that was the name of the the play and Leonard pete directed it and we just were on zoom and yesterday we two days ago we performed it in front of an audience on zoom so that's an international thing that also successfully happened from my side it's yeah go ahead go ahead jonah can i just go back to something because uh daniella and makiko um told that oh which is nice is also that uh the the artist community is getting together this is happening here as well so every time when the government says like yeah we're going we want to help you and then they don't do anything we just put all of us together and then we shout very loud and then demonstration to us so this is something that we really learned here in germany that putting us together is better because we are we can be louder and it is not about the being having a con being how do you say having concurrency how do you say to be in concurrence to be against to be one against the other it's better to be together yeah well i want to jump in there because you mentioned um governments and uh i i learned yesterday that uh shinzo arbe the japanese prime ministers just lifted the state of emergency so uh i think we've got time for a couple more questions and i just wanted to ask is there any specific government advice where you are about when we're going to get back into the theater um you know for example uh makiko um it is you know has life returned to sort of normality now in in in japan where you are or is there still social distancing maybe you could start with with that question yeah um of course we are not in normality but a step by step we're of course towards to open the theater at least there's like a strict guidance to open the theater that governments showed us and if we can do that we are allowed to open so for example from yeah from this weekend i think there's a small theater which is going to open with one one man show but without an audience and they're gonna do live streaming and i think most of the theater are aiming towards this summer because now that we are allowed to get out this is the time that we can actually start rehearsing so probably maybe like small theater might open without audience in june but not a big theater and especially if we want to tour that's another step so even though we are allowed to go out in terms of theater i feel we there's a lot of things how to run the rehearsal with avoiding the distances and we were even there was a discussion whether actors should wear a mask on stage oh really you don't mean theatrical masks you mean no medical mask okay yeah well it's interesting it sounds that actually that although there are restrictions still in place there that you are sort of some some way down the line from from the situation here where we're maybe looking at you know much longer before we can get back into the the theaters how about in where you are daniella have you had any specific advice about you know when you when you can get back into a physical theater yeah it's it's interesting i mean it's looking like government is saying that we're either in the last phase or pen under penultimate phase of what you know reopening the economy but i think that a lot of theater companies also experienced in the last two months making decisions and then having to go back on this decisions because of course the situation is so volatile and it's constantly changing that i think now we're at a point where it's it's trickier to plan and make specific concrete choices about making shows just because even if we're given that date of september experts are also saying that the fall is when we might get a second wave and so i think people are feeling a little nervous about depending on these potential dates but yeah as far as i know they're saying september for gatherings over 50 people but i wouldn't be surprised if it's not until 2021 where we're opening the theater again and does anyone else want to make a say something on that either either from your perspective avavita in in israel because i think you mentioned that you were involved in some street theater you were able to take some performance out onto the streets is that is that like a step in the process of getting back to live theater um it uh dealing with the obstacles so i said we cannot go indoors and we can't perform in venues so we can just go out to the street and perform as janet said before in front of places or on the street for groups that organized group so there there was an organized tour for people who wants to see street art and i suggested that hey we can do a short uh performance on the street during this because this is important and we have the chance to say something and my show my performance specifically was about actually it was a some kind of a protest hey we see everybody uh going back to work here in israel because we start going back to normal but the last and the last last last people are the people from the arts and this is crazy because you cannot survive without arts this is something that we know from our history uh and this is something that's so important for us just to just to shout for the artist to say we will create wherever it is and we will uh because art is our life and i think there is no life without art and uh janet um i think you've already addressed this actually when you said that actually you're going to do this performance uh in front of the building so it's so interesting to hear all of these ideas that when we're faced with these limitations our our drive and our creative energy is is kind of you know hardwired to find a way for us to to to bring communities together through uh you know live performance somehow and i have to agree with you um you know for me uh as a as a technophobe that i mean there have been so many benefits to being able to connect this way but also i feel that um you know uh that's this is something different and actually in a previous interview janet i just want to remind you of something you said you said that this is a symptom as well of of this pandemic and when this pandemic is over this will go away i mean i think that's that's true uh but also it will there will be artists who embrace this technology and employ it um so it's it's it's so wonderful to hear uh such a kind of diverse group of people and i've really enjoyed the conversation and sadly we are running out of time so now might be a good time to to bring you this last question and uh in closing um would you briefly share something that you've learned or discovered during this quarantine or pandemic that you plan to incorporate into your practice as an artist moving forward and um does anyone want to jump in on this something you've learned during this pandemic that you're going to uh incorporate into your practice as an artist moving forward um mackey yeah i thought like what what i gained was it was very useful to do rehearsal on zoom because we could focus more on our voices and text so in terms of like the process of reading i thought this style is was also very effective and something that we can also cooperate and this international like collaboration is something that i want to keep on doing and also personally i have four months baby so it was a great for me it was a great opportunity to try to figure out my life balance working at home and still try to direct something and it was a very good opportunity to keep that life balance in this situation yeah thank you thank you so much yeah and that's um so you're actually you're actually used to being up at this time of the morning anyway so it's it's fantastic it's fitted into your schedule but i really hear you on that in in the way in which it can serve us as well uh this kind of technology um janna how about you is there is there something you're going to take forward from this experience i guess it is something more about me i mean and it is more about the way i feel i really learned again that um what helps me is to be resilient do you say this yeah um and i think this is also like what theater and the arts can can help us i mean the art can help us to be resilient because through creativity and we can just create and so this is what what i'm going to to feel more for the future and yeah probably this is what i yeah what i'm going to have more in myself for the future thank you so much for that and um how about you daniella um i think something that's been highlighted in my own spirit is um how easily it is for our industry and us artists just because of the the pace at which we have to manage life is how self-absorbed we can become um in ourselves in our world in our art um and just a a reminder that that can take us away from having a generous spirit uh not just towards uh the work that we do but just our outside life and so it's um yeah i've just been thinking a lot about how i can practice more generosity once we start returning to uh somewhat normal life and just remind myself of how easily and quickly i can be absorbed into that um self-world and and forget about family friends loved ones or even my community or even the people that i'm working with because i'm just so absorbed in what i'm doing and uh yeah i would like to practice more the act of of that generosity that we're all feeling through these times yeah that's a wonderful answer and one i really connect with this the limitation of being in your own apartment or and and slightly sort of cut off although this is so wonderful to connect this way uh we have the opportunity at least to do this and i also want to include abhavi in that question because you know she's been asking the questions but i'm also interested to learn from her as a theater maker um what she's going to take forward from from this time in this pandemic abhavi thank you very much i appreciate it uh so actually what i've learned that uh it's a lot connected to what daniella said what happened here uh that during this time short very short time we had so many holidays and the biggest holidays passed over and we celebrated it through zoom with all our families around the world so basically people that you would never see so much then you see them and you get the get together so and there was a production that i really wanted to do for a lot of years and it occurred to me that they just connected the the threads connected and i'm like oh my god i can do that through zoom and it is it is that it's actually some kind of a ceremony that ceremony that we need to do all over the world at the same time these different places in different languages and to see each other and exchange information and it was written in the 70s and i don't know but the the artist wrote she wants that to be online at the same time i don't know how she knew online or video or whatever but this is amazing this is crazy and yeah this is liana clan she's a very interesting artist she already died thank you so much for that's wonderful and i just want to say i wish we had another two or three hours to chat about some of these questions i've got a whole page full of questions here um but but i just want to finish by saying thank you to all of our fantastic speakers this morning and also to our partners at howl rounds and of course to the wonderful jennifer brazil our asl interpreter and who's done a fantastic job thank you so much and this conversation will be archived and available with closed captions on both howl round dot com and the directors lab west dot com um we should also just take a moment to say thank you to our long-term supporters people like sdc and the pasadena playhouse and boston court theater so so people like jessica kubzanski and um you know dany feldman and before him shelvin epps all of these partner organizations have helped keep directors lab west alive with with uh selfless um support over many many years so we really are so grateful for them especially during this difficult time we want to show solidarity to our fellow theater makers and theater arts organizations here in los angeles and further afield so we hope you'll join us tomorrow uh when the the conversation is going to take place between scarlett kim and matty barba bacheman and they will be discussing reimagining liveness and connection for virtual space so that sounds like a very sort of timely conversation so finally just to say one more time thank you everyone for being with us today and we hope that this conversation sparks more conversation thank you and goodbye thank you thanks everyone