 Hi, I'm Mitch Locky Lane and welcome to the next installment of Reel's Highlight Series. We have been focusing on the arts and theater industry. We had the honor of hosting this episode with John Whiting, Infrastructure Manager at the Sydney Opera House and we'll discuss the evolution of technology in the arts and entertainment space over the last decade. Today we have with us John Whiting from the Sydney Opera House. Thanks John for coming and having a chat to us about your experience at the Opera House and prior to that and what you're looking at beyond. How are you today? Well thanks, thank you for the invite. Excellent, excellent it's great to have you here. So you've had an interesting and varied career over the last 15 years. Can you walk us through what you've done in the past and give us a bit of an overview about your current role? Yeah, sure. I guess it all started when I was pulling apart my toys as a kid. I had an interest in electronics kind of made itself apparent and I'd studied that after I finished high school. I got a qualification in electronic engineering and had a few jobs that were not in the entertainment industry. I worked for the South Australian Police Department for a little bit and then I went to work for a company called Tech Rentals and I was there for a while as a calibration technician. All these things, no one here as exciting as the entertainment industry but I did end up sort of merging my personal hobbies which was kind of music production and audio with my work which was through getting employment at a company called Jans where I met you. Yes. Was there for five years and after that I kind of decided that wanted to change and a job at the Opera House was advertised and was actually really lucky timing but I did want to work at a venue. I hadn't worked in a venue at that point before. I didn't sort of worked as a contractor as such and that's yeah one thing led to another. Lots of things changed really quickly at the Opera House. We had a restructure where we wanted to merge the IT team and the theater technology team so this technology department was created and out of that I sort of ended up in a role as the Networking Communications Manager. I had to pick up IP networking very quickly and I did and I spent a lot of late nights doing that and I really enjoyed it actually. I was never interested in IT when I was first into electronics but I kind of you know you start realising that everything works on IP and over that period of my life things changed that way so it became a really attractive thing to learn about IP and then we had another change where the Infrastructure Manager left for he was kind of to a role. I'm actually still sort of temporary Infrastructure Manager at the Opera House currently. So the infrastructure role at the Opera House is theater and precinct, data center and network teams. There's three teams that I look after and we look after the obviously the production events, the building team, the food and beverage, the tourism team, the corporate team. And how do you see the role of IT has changed in the last five years and particularly in the at the Sydney Opera House? I think IT has become central and for most production and creative teams it's sort of becoming a base skill set. Audio and video are relatively late to the game for IP adoption when you think about streaming ACN and profinet and these sorts of protocols that are used in stage automation they've been around for quite a while. But yeah I guess the major role IT is playing at this particular time for us is the digital outreach that we have. We're looking to focus on you know particularly with COVID and this situation that's going on at the moment. We're looking to keep in touch and reach people in a way that we normally couldn't. I think it's not only the Opera House is sort of adapting in this way but we are doing a lot more live streaming and doing a lot more playback of pre-recorded content and also doing a digital education program which is more about an interactive kind of video conference between schools, sometimes multiple schools and a virtual tour guide walking around the Opera House. And do you think in terms of this this transition I guess off the back of what's happened with COVID-19 and more of the virtualized solutions that you're trying to provide as part of this outreach do you think that you'll see a lot more of that happening within the Opera House? Is this something that I guess off the back of not being able to have these productions and have people in and yeah okay this might be changing in the near future but certainly not being able to have that do you think that a lot of these maybe the production companies themselves but in particular the Opera House are going to push towards having this type of virtual technology or the ability to have these virtual events and virtual productions? Yeah for sure I think it's inevitable I think at times it there's a bit of a I guess a back end tour in terms of who's got the rights to the to the content and all that sort of thing but it's I guess if it's at the forefront of everyone's mind from the client to to us it's something that I think will gravitate towards for sure. And so at the Opera House you were talking before about the we call them kind of immersion technologies but again as you said you know we were talking about COBRINAD and ABB and so forth like 10 years ago and now it's coming to AES67 obviously the AES being more of a standard or a standardized system that's being put into place by these industry bodies do you see that the Opera House would be more inclined to put future technologies on based on standards? Yeah for sure it's kind of at the core of what we try and try and specify at the beginning of a project or at the beginning of a system design sticking to engineering standards just you know makes sure that things are going to work the way you expect them to if they don't then there is an onus on the on the manufacturer to adhere to those standards and fix the problem it's a very great and effective mechanism for manufacturers yet. And is that something that has traditionally been at the Opera House that they have always tried to as much as possible stick to these standards from from your perspective? Yes and no it's um I think it's something that everyone as a as an engineer or a technical person people tend to gravitate in towards that there's also kind of widely accepted protocols you could call them but as a general rule we try and stick to the standards Yeah cool that's that's fantastic and from what we've seen and the way the industry trends are running we're definitely moving towards an IP focused way of getting not only just audio around but video around so you mentioned 70-2110 obviously that again is one of those standards that you know people are looking to implement as part of their product set so we'll have different manufacturers looking to put in you know the the 70-2110 whatever flavor of of 2110 that they're trying to implement whether that's audio video control whatever it happens to be is that something that really has kind of become more prevalent in your role in being able to roll out a lot of those types of IP based solutions for the event side but still having you know this whole layer of well we have an IT department as well that we need to we need to manage and you know everything else that comes with that IT department. Yep yeah for sure I think it's um it's historically a mindset that goes along with each of those technologies and trying to adapt the theater environment to the IT mindset has been a bit of a challenge I think it's exciting for the for the IT team and conversely I think it's um you know the theater team are quite excited about learning these technologies as well so it's not hard in terms of rallying the troops and getting everyone interested in those things that comes naturally the the priorities there come naturally when when people are familiar and aware of that and you know the opera house puts on events that's what we do that's our core business but that being said if you come to work every day and traditionally you're you're keeping an eye on the exchange server or something like that then you don't really think about the events and even though you're right in the middle of it so yeah I think the exposure there to the team is important. Yeah so obviously that that means that your your your teams or the the team that you manage is really about providing that that support and quick response around those internal and external stakeholders and the opera house being such a you know it's a fairly large environment in terms of how you get around the opera house and and the I guess all of the different areas of the venue that you need to be able to get to is having that the ability to transport a lot of what you need to do from venue to venue or from place to place does does that play a big role in the types of technologies that you put in? In terms of the the physical design of the equipment and portability and all that sort of stuff yeah um for sure I mean we we try and keep up with the changes and and we have a production warehouse and we're currently in this downtime looking at just improving the way things are racked up and there's obviously booking systems for events so you need to think about how ready it's going to be for a booking which I'm sure you guys in the in the warehouse at Reader were familiar with um but yeah we're looking at that and we're looking at you know we're constantly reviewing these things we're looking at presenting certain connections in a way that um you know where a plastic RJ45 modular connector or an LC fiber isn't isn't presented um in that in that sort of traditional IT way it's got to need to kind of something like this and it's um it's kind of resilient and all packaged up and ready to go and ready for the right types of connections for that environment. Yeah definitely and when we have a look I mean obviously there's been a lot of changes over the past five years at the opera house we've seen you know some major changes to you know what's happening with the concert hall and JST and so forth um with with the upgrades that are that are currently happening what do you think it's been the biggest challenge and the biggest change of technology during these developments? I think the biggest change might be the the shift into uh I mean there's a shift into the application layer that's happening where previously companies and AV is a good example with you know the Crestron or AMX evolved there's sort of it's a little bit of a clear system um there's not there's not a shared expertise um whereas now everyone is about being able to talk to everyone else um everyone's about open API connectivity extensibility and orchestration so yeah these things the orchestration side of it is obviously helpful when it comes to keeping the task at hand you know focused on what you need to do because IT IP networks are quite complicated and you need that ability to have a dedicated piece of software to talk to a system and do multiple things at once yeah that's great so when when we're talking about um being able to to have it as easy as possible to configure I mean that's that's something that obviously in the past hasn't really been a challenge as such because we've always just had hard panels that you'd be able to have buttons on and things that you can press and you know they most most buttons will have a function right or some type of function that you've previously programmed and and the user will actually know how that works do you think you'll see a shift and more customized solutions coming out from not the vendors themselves but actually the users and how they go and approach a show or or how they approach the technology itself yeah for sure I think um I mean it depends on on if the product that you have solved all of your problems and for that particular function um we certainly have used you know the some of the serial strings and GPIOs in in real artist of old um and we could definitely find ways to use a new a newer way to do that um we I mean Q-SYS is a good example of an AV product that we use where we we have utilized some some API calls and things to to control PDUs and uh that's a that's a great product that has allowed us to solve some problems where previously we would have looked for um you know a bespoke solution or a or an external contractor to design something for us so yeah I think giving empowering in an organization to solve their own problems where previously they may not have been able to is uh is kind of exciting yeah yeah definitely and I guess that comes a kind of brings up a another question so in terms of when troubleshooting products obviously you know a lot of this before was done where you would go to the actual product and you know there would be a hardware thing or you'd have to actually physically cite the product to understand what you need to be able to troubleshoot now with everything moving to more of a an IP set trick platform has that now changed your job in in actually like servicing these things for sure yep um I mean I guess the the the stage management system we have at the opera house is five years old now but um when that was designed it was designed with a future thinking mindset I think and you know we have remote servers terminal servers that we can log into from home if we need to Q-SYS has a similar functionality with our our new function center which is actually looked after by a third party but they they have that functionality in Q-SYS provides some really good remote support options as well so um anywhere where we can work out what's wrong with the system um and help someone on the floor um if we are at home or if we're not at work or if we're even just at our desk um it's a it's a very beneficial thing um yeah yeah excellent so with with the opera house you obviously have a significant amount of media net from marital what are you using that for primarily we're using it mainly to get video feeds from the venues camera feeds from the venues back to the recording and broadcast department uh recording recording and broadcast facility I should say but we also use it pretty extensively for the stage management system so there's there's a whole bunch of uh controllable visual fold back for the stage manager create quad splits for um yeah it's that kind of sums up in a high level what we use it for yeah cool and obviously you know moving to to a digital platform especially you know we had a conversation a little while ago with um with ollie from the adelaide festival center and he said one of the big things for him was moving to media net gave them the ability to have a low latency video feed directly to the conductor or whoever it was because prior to that when moving to a digital platform you had a lot of latency that was built into some of the products that were available so is that something that that's been of advantage to to the opera house yeah for sure yep we we trailed um the conduct conductive u uh system when the jst was renewed the jones subland theater was renewed a few years ago and uh we wanted to move to digital monitors and and the latency that that introduced as opposed to our old crts um was of concern for the for the musicians and they have a very good year for this sort of thing so um for sure it's it's definitely at the forefront of our minds when it comes to uh performer fold back vision visual fold back yep the opera house has a significant amount of artist frames that really cater for each of the event or the venues that are that are within the opera house and i believe that those are all linked up together as well so they create a a big network together to be able to talk between each other as required how do you think that uh that assists the venues when they do have quite a number of shows on oh it's it's great for i mean in terms of a daily sort of business as usual operation we would have the venues operating largely in in an island for each venue but um people people obviously belero or previously acrobat was was integrated into artist and people will be in the green room having having their dinner and waiting for the show call uh or you know an emergency scenery move or anything like that um people can be on comms at all times um for the larger talk fest uh like antidote or something like this where we have um teams operating the whole venue and and shows within these venues need to be timed together and synchronized together and obviously then there's this cross cross opera house communication that happens and and that's very important there's also calls for tech support and you know the tech support channel is we have a panel in the tech support office and a panel at every front house ops position and the stage management console and if anyone needs help they just get get you on the comms and we have also have outcomes um our real comms integrated into the Motorola two-way system as well so that that gives no one an excuse to miss a call really yeah yeah definitely and it obviously makes it quite easy to be able to get anybody at any time because you are integrated within the within the entire system that's located in the opera house so it does make it uh make it quite neat to be able to to get to people yeah the artist system is is fantastic it's one of those systems that we almost forget that it's there you know it just does its thing and never fails unless the power drops out it's um it's a bulletproof yeah all right john thanks so much for joining us here today it's been great to have you here at uh Rital Communications in Sydney once again thanks for for coming in and and having a chat with us thank you cheers