 It's theCUBE, covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at NAB 2017. It's not only 100,000, 102,000 people, according to the official press release, talking about media and entertainment and technology. The theme is actually met, because the technology is so intimately tied to media and entertainment that you can't separate them out anymore. And we're really excited for our next guest. He is right in the heart of it. He's in his happy place. He's leading the whole contingent here. It's Eric Weaver. He's the global director of media and entertainment, market development for HGST. Eric, welcome. Thank you so much. Glad to be here today. So first impressions of the show. I'm sure you've been here a thousand times. It's crazy. No, it's really amazing. It's always a wonderful show. There's so many great people here really trying to get an understanding of what's coming up, what's going to solve their problems that they're facing right now. And the problems keep getting bigger because people want more. I mean, it's amazing you walk around the level of gear and equipment, some of the green screen setups here. They look like professional studios. But now we've gone from HD to 4K to AK to Ultra HD. We've got 360 cameras, little commercial ones, like Samsung and professional grade ones that's only going to increase the complexity of trying to manage all this stuff. Absolutely. It's really becoming a reality now that 4K and UHD are coming down the pipe. I think I heard some number that like 56% of all sets will be that by 2020. And it's really great because you'll see the creative community starting to embrace HDR or UHD because they had never seen it before. And until they go into the color suites and see the difference, they're absolutely blown away. So you're going to have a drive here. You're going to have a drive between the directors saying this is what I want and this is my look. And the camera or the TV set saying this is what we can produce and the theater's saying what we can produce. And we didn't even talk about VR or AI. Oh, and VR and AI are absolutely with some of the hottest topics out there right now. Trying to comprehend, you're also seeing a big shift from 360 video to photogrammetry and computational photography and these things, volumetric capture. And those things are really going to be taking over in the next couple of years. And they're huge in understanding how they work for everyone. Okay, so you dropped a couple of new vocabulary words. I have to have you dig into a little bit. All right. So volumetric, photogemetric first. Photogrammetry. Photogrammetry. So what photogrammetry is, is recreating a room with photographs by stitching them together. So for example, I worked on a piece called Wonder Buffalo and in Wonder Buffalo we basically took 956 photographs of a room and then stitched them together at 50 megapixels each and created this whole new room environment. You combine that with what's called volumetric capture. So instead of 12 to 24 cameras pointing out where you're stuck in a locked position, which is traditional 360 video, you're now doing 36 cameras in and that 36 cameras creating an almost hologram. The big difference here is that now all of a sudden you feed it into a gaming engine like Unity and you can walk around and explore the entire scene. So it's the closest you've ever seen to the holodeck by like maybe Star Trek or something. It's really quite an amazing experience. Now on the other side of the equation, on the simpler side, you know, you've got a lot of independent filmmakers now have YouTube and Vimeo and all these distribution platforms and you know, I'm a huge Casey Neistat fan. You know, he's got his little 2K, $2,000 camera and he's out shooting and getting tremendous views. So the focus on audience and storytelling and kind of the democratization of distribution is another huge trend. Absolutely, really big. YouTube is, what's fascinating about something like YouTube is YouTube wasn't possible a couple years ago. Something like the cloud made YouTube possible. If you historically look back, you'll see something like an electricity is the juxtaposition and to tell Niagara Falls was there, we didn't have the ability to have electricity on such volumes and so some of the breakthrough cases might have been like Alcoa who produced aluminum. They were burning or tearing down whole forest to put together furnaces that could burn hot enough to make it. Now that they had cost effective electricity, they could do this. The same situation was like someone like YouTube. They can scale at a level that we've never seen before and was never possible. So it opens up whole new opportunities of democratization of the video. Absolutely amazing new tools. And then obviously cloud, right? Cloud is changing the world. The big cloud providers like Amazon and Google and Microsoft and a ton of second year service providers. But the knock kind of on the cloud for big assets is speed of light's too damn slow, right? Getting stuff up and down is a pain. And also, you know, that's where you really wanted a big machine with local horsepower. That's it, but now you got rendering, you got all this huge stuff that you need massive scale that your little machine can't do anymore. So a big confusion a lot of people have in cloud is they think about taking their concurrent data center and lifting and shifting it to the cloud. That doesn't work. You have to re-imagine how the whole structure works. What do you put up there? Why do you put it up there? Are you using a proxy? Are you using some kind of hybrid workflow to maximize benefit? Because if you're just dumping something up there and expecting to bounce it back and forth, you're right. Speed of light and other things are going to kill you. There's other ways out there to begin to leverage that. Principles such as IOA, inner oriented connected architectures. So placing your storage or your centralized data lake at an Equinex or some kind of Colo facility where you can centrally leverage it and then working off proxies. Most people don't know that when you're working in your color suite, almost all the time you're still working off proxies because you cannot see all those bits or we cannot get all the bits to the monitors that we have. So learning how to create the proper workflows there is absolutely critical and it will save you a fortune if you know what you're doing or go to the right people to show you how to do that abruptly. So it's really use the best attributes of both as much as you can. You have to figure out how to use the best attributes of both. So the other kind of knock on too much tech in this business is sometimes the storytelling gets lost. And I know I have a personal pet peeve on a lot of these big, huge cinematic explosions that because I still have a story. Yes. So I think having a narrative is still so, so important. Is that lost? Is that enhanced? How do you see that integrating with the tech? So I think it's absolutely critical. I saw Spielberg up speaking at USDA a little while back and he's like, story, story, story. Tech is simply there to empower the story. And if you lose sight of that, you're absolutely lost. It really is the truth. So for example, I have two shorts out right now and one's at Tribeca, one's at South by Southwest but we focused on the story. Although it's an R&D research project, you have to have a story. Right, right. That's the only way to move this thing forward. And if you don't have that, everything else is lost. Right. Now the other great thing that's happened with cloud and cheaper storage and all these advanced infrastructure components is now you can keep everything. Yes. Data is no longer a liability that is expensive to hold and manage and you got to figure out what you're going to throw away because it's too expensive. Now people finally understand it is an asset. So it opens up all types of opportunities to store it and do things with it. And you're seeing a lot of this shift from tape to object and other things like that because they want to monetize this content. There's so many new mechanisms to monetize content between the Netflix and the other distributors, Amazon and everyone else, that they are realizing this is not just an asset for the closet that you might someday use or sell in some broad agreement to some secondary station in Europe or somewhere else. These are things that you can monetize on a regular basis. But that actually brings you to the next problem is understanding what you have. Right, right. People get very confused. They assume that there's one film. There's not one film. There's about 120 versions of a film that are released between the different versioning, such as culturally sensitive areas like the Middle East to different language titles, to different ad pieces or other inserted parts. There are a lot of different versions to our film. And so people don't always understand that. Well, that's interesting. But the other kind of knock on film or video traditionally from a metadata point of view and a search and a consumption discovery point of view is if I search for a picture and I find the one that I'm looking for, I immediately know that's the one that I want. But if I want to find the thing that's seven minutes in to an hour long video, how do I find it? How do I consume it? How do I share it? That's an age old problem with this media type. So part of the problem there is that we have not broke down metadata tagging within each of these pictures and these pieces. This is coming. I actually help with ABC build a tool that created X-ray like Amazon has for production side. So that you could scour and tag all these pieces and begin to say this is an action scene with this character in it at this point in the movie. That is coming probably a year to year and a half out. But all of those things will begin to evolve here very, very soon. Right, certainly a great application for AI. Where you need that horsepower. AI is absolutely hot as well. And this is what the studios are trying to get their hands on right now. People like Netflix have really pioneered some of this work. And originally it was to understand how to find content or what people like content like so they could begin to produce content that was relatable to their audience. They've now moved it into things like QC'ing because they are the largest studio in the world at this point. Over a thousand hours. Are they the largest studio in the world? Netflix is the largest studio in the world right now. Wow, I didn't know that. So they're doing over a thousand hours. I think a season at this point. Yes. Amazing. But the studios are really trying to are really doing a lot of work to get their hands on some of this. And so there's a lot of really great high level private meetings going on that's bringing these industry leaders together. ATC is a wonder place to see that. Talk about these innovations. So you're in the middle of it all. You've been doing this for a long time. What are some of your priorities for 2017? And what are some of the things that you, you know that still just get you up in the morning right now. You're excited about. So absolutely my priorities is going to be cloud. Over the last about year, 18 months there's been a massive shift. It was before it was all no, no, no. And I actually heard this exact quote from somebody at one of the major studios. He said, it used to be no, no, no, you better have a darn good reason to now. Yes, yes, yes, you better have a darn good reason not to go there. Right to say no. Number one, very hot, very on board. The next one again is VRAR. Understanding how VRAR is going to begin to change our lives and produce things. I wasn't originally a big fan of that. I thought of it as kind of 3D, but then I went to USC's VRLA meeting and there was over 600 students in this group and every single school was represented, medical, architectural, journalism. These students understand that this is going to touch everybody. I don't know if you've ever really got into genuine good content. Someone like Anoni de la Peña does stuff that touches on more towards journalistic. For example, she did a beating in San Diego and it's a very terrible rendering, but it's the audio's good and you see a man being beaten from the police and people are calling out saying stop, stop, stop. And you've never felt it so emotionally in your life. This is like, bam, it hits you. The VR part of it or just because she had great content? The VR part of it, in the context of telling a story and what's going wrong, wrong with the story. This is going to affect us in a different way and it might not just be the clip pieces for TV shows, but it's going to be touching us in a lot of different ways. Very powerful stuff. We talk a lot about the AR. I think that the AR piece from a commercial point of view is tremendous too. It's absolutely a bigger market. So what's really going to be biggest is mixed reality or MR. MR is going to come in and it's going to fade you between the two things. So that is really where it's going to meet in the middle. And then how do you just distinctly call out the differentiation between VR and 360? How do you split those? So when you look at it, if you're looking at 360 video, 360 videos as a camera rig stuck in one particular location, it's got 12, 24, 36 cameras all pointing outward. And when you're watching that, you're stuck in a location. You're hostage in more of a traditional film way to what within that 360 scope they want you to kind of be from my spot. When you look at volumetric capture, volumetric capture is the opposite. It allows you to walk around, choose your own point of view, be wherever you want to be within that scene. So it's where we're going to be going. It's going to be much more like the holodeck from Star Trek. Very amazing stuff. All right. Well, Eric, thank you for taking a few minutes. Congrats. I'm sure you're going to be busy, busy, busy for the next three days. So thanks for taking a few minutes with us on theCUBE. No problem. Thank you so much. He's Eric Weaver. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from NAB 2017. We'll be back after this short break. Thanks for watching.