 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. We are live from NAB 2017. I'm Lisa Martin in Las Vegas, excited to be joined by the co-founder of Avalanche, Josh Colden. Hey Josh, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So tell us a little bit about what Avalanche is. Well, Avalanche is a file navigator for filmmakers. It allows the difference being from something like Windows Explorer or an Apple Finder, is that it allows you to work with files wherever they are on different computers and the cloud, on different units of production as they're moving around the world without having to do all the low level coordinating of that data. So in media we're talking about massive files. How is this different from Dropbox, Box, et cetera? So those tools actually try to synchronize your data, so if you put a big media file in Dropbox, it'll try and copy not only that file to the cloud, but also of course to any other computers you have your Dropbox running on. What Avalanche is doing doesn't necessarily, it can move it, but it doesn't necessarily move it. Instead, let's say you're an editor or studio and you want to see what's happening on set, you can see all the files as they're coming off of camera and interact with them, rename them, make notes, whatever has to happen, see the notes that are already applied to them, and when those files show up in editorial and say a hard drive, that's when all that happens and gets synchronized locally. So it allows people to work in a very intuitive and natural production workflow without actually trying to copy huge amounts of data across the net. In terms of like the production life cycle, are we talking about pre-production, production, post-production or the whole kitten caboodle? It's the whole thing because what happens in production is you see teams of people kind of ad hoc join the production, they might have teams during pre-production that are there for a bit and then teams that come on in post-production. So there's always this coordination problem of knowing who has what, where is the camera, post-production is looking for camera reports that only people that were on set know about. And this provides a mechanism to kind of have a continuity between all those different teams across the entire production pipeline. Continuity is key. What, give us an example, so you had mentioned that this is really built for filmmakers. If something is filmed and the crew or the director just said, you know what, that would have been great if we actually shot that for VR. What's the process of them or how simple is it or seamless for them to go back in, pull something out, change it? Well, in those kinds of situations, I mean production generally usually has a lot of planning involved. So you're going to know going in those kinds of issues. If it's something as big as like we want to have extra footage for VR or whatever. But one thing that happens is, let's say for example, there's a costume change where you've got a product which is a suit or something that needs to be placed in the scene for the financing. And then somebody spills something on it but story-wise that works so they're going to keep it in. People that are in the product teams later down the line might need to know these changes have occurred so that they can either push back and say no, we need to reshoot that with a clean suit or whatever that information might be, that back and forth. So this makes that even possible at all. Before, it would just be making sure that somebody on production called that team and explained it to them. Right now, with this, you can just put a quick note on any device and it eventually will be findable. You can just search it like Google and find any information related to that suit or that shot or that production day, any kind of different ways of searching for the stuff you're looking for. It's facilitating a little bit of automation. You talked about the connectivity but also it sounds like the visibility is there. Right, it improves the visibility, yeah. Yeah, we call it discoverability because right now a lot of the stuff isn't discoverable. Once, say, you don't know what row database entry is once you've lost that row number, there's no way to find out where that data comes from anymore. It's just completely disconnected. So we use a framework that's open source underneath called C4, the Cinema Content Creation Cloud and that framework provides a mechanism that what they call indelible metadata where it binds attributes to media in a way that doesn't easily get lost. So downstream, you can discover relationships you didn't expect to be there. You don't have to pre-plan all the relationships and build them in advance. So one of the things that you and I were chatting about before we went live is how Silicon Valley approaches this cloud versus how Hollywood approaches it. Tell us a little bit more about your insights here. I thought it was very intriguing. Yeah, this is a really interesting thing because not a lot of people realize because a lot of people on both sides, Hollywood and Silicon Valley, we're using the same terminology. We're talking about the cloud, we're talking about files, we're talking about copying things but there's subtle differences that get lost and so what I've been working on a lot in the open source community and in standards is helping to communicate this new concept that what we really need is like a web for media production, right? With the normal web that most of Silicon Valley and cloud tools are built on, you're expecting to be able to transfer all your data each time. You go to the website, you get the webpage right then, you get all the images that it links to right then but you don't want to do that when you're doing media production because that might represent terabytes of data for each shot and you need to work relatively quickly, you might be doing renders or composites. These things might take many, many, many elements to layer together. You can't be requesting this data as you need it every single time. You want to kind of get there and do all the processing you can possibly do all at once. So an architecture like that calls for a different kind of internet and internet where your data moves less often, right? You get it to the cloud and you leave it there and you do all your processing on it or it's an editorial, you do all your editing with it. The pieces that you need are in the right places and you move them as little as possible. You move command and control and metadata between those locations but the media itself needs to arrive either maybe by hard drive or get synced in advance. There's different ways of that moving but it doesn't happen at the same time that the command and control is happening. So yeah, we are trying to communicate that difference that Hollywood is used to it happening because they have the data center in their building. Silicon Valley's used to it happening because it's small data across the network. And that's where that disconnect is happening is, they both think it's just a quick call but it works for them because of a different architecture that they're building on top of. Different architecture is different, I imagine, objectives. How are you helping to influence Silicon Valley coming together with Hollywood and really them influencing each other whether it's Hollywood influencing the type of internet that's needed and why and Silicon Valley influencing maybe get away from the on-prem data centers, leverage hybrid as a destination, as a journey, leverage the cloud for economies of scale. What's that influence like? Yeah, it's really fantastic because I think it's a perfect, it's really, really good relationships between the kinds of skill sets that Silicon Valley companies bring to the table and the content creation talent that Hollywood has. In fact, there's a lot of what Hollywood, production studios don't want to have to invest in. They don't want to have a data center if they can have a secure, productive, as you need it tool set that they turn up the performance on when they're in production and then turn it off when they're done. That's exactly what we do with camera equipment. We rent it for the production and we give it back. So we're used to in Hollywood that production model. So it's kind of teed up and ready to use all those services. It's just this kind of plumbing level that has been everybody's pain point. So from a collaboration perspective, are you facilitating like a big cloud provider meeting with one of the big studios and really collaborating to kind of cross pollinate? Yeah, so I've been working on with the Entertainment Technology Center, which is funded at USC, they're funded by all the major studios and have other members like Google and other big vendors for cloud and whatnot. And these groups are very interested in trying to collaborate with technology companies and figure out the best ways to work together. And I have a lot of experience with cloud and computer technology and Silicon Valley style services. And also for production. So I've been working extensively in trying to bridge that gap in terms of the understanding, but also in terms of some fundamental tools, like I was saying the open source framework, C4, so that kind of like the web and HTML and all that stuff came about, nobody could go to that level of the internet and create that new economy of the internet until those foundations were in place. So that's what we've been pushing. Speaking of foundation, last question before we wrap here, where are you in this kind of first use case example of the meaning of the mind? How close are you to really seeing this facilitated to really support what both sides need? We've actually been doing a number of production tasks over at ETC, we've shot several short films using these things. So all of these things are actually in place and usable today. It's just a matter of getting people to start using them, being aware of them, they're all free and easy to use relatively for technical people, for Silicon Valley people. And then there's going to be another layer that we're really, that's why we're talking a lot about it, that's going to be the software companies and the hardware companies supporting it. We're pushing it through standards, so it will be showing up on everybody's radar soon and we'll see higher level integrations. So the digital artists that don't know how to do that lower level software stuff, we'll just get it for free when the tools they use. And that's kind of what the Avalanche file manager does. It provides a lot of that kind of cloud technology underneath and you don't have to worry about it. It just looks like a file manager. Very exciting. Thanks so much, Josh, for sharing your insights and what you're working on. We look forward to seeing those things coming to the forefront very soon. All right, thank you. Thanks for joining us on theCUBE and we want to thank you for watching theCUBE. Again, I'm Lisa Martin. We are live at NAB 2017 in Las Vegas, but stick around, we will be right back.