 Hi, this is ThinkTech. I'm Jay Fidel. This is ThinkTech Tech Talks, as a matter of fact, with Larry Jordan. You really have to know who he is. Actually, Larry, you have to be one of my biggest gurus. And it goes back to the days when you were teaching movie editing, video editing, I should say, on Linda. And there were some things there that really appealed to me, the way you taught, the way you developed those courses. And then you left Linda and you started your own, gee, it's a multifaceted shop, isn't it? Thank you for coming on, Larry. And tell us about your shop. Jay, thank you so much for the invitation. I've been looking forward to our conversation since you first had the courage to invite me on. Actually, back in the old days, I got my start in broadcast radio. And that was back well before you were born. And I lasted in broadcast radio for three months, three months. And the program director called me into his office. He said, Larry, you are a second tenor. What we need is a baritone. Enjoy the rest of your life. And that quickly, my broadcast radio career was over. Fortunately, I got the same day. I got a job as a camera operator at WHA TV in Madison. I shifted my focus from radio to TV and I've been TV for 45 years ever since. So talking about this stuff is one of the loves of my life. Yeah. And you know, you've been riding it for the period of time in which it has come out over the clouds. I mean, it was not an everyman kind of experience when you started, but now it certainly is, which makes it all the more interesting. You're following a social change more than a technological one. Social and psychological and technical and distribution and business model. It is so completely different in the old days, which is what I call when I was in broadcast. In order for me to do what you and I are doing, I'd have to have a crew of five people and a half million dollars a year. I'd have to set up the day before with lights in your home for us to be able to do an interview. Now it costs nothing. We're talking trans-planet and it's instantaneous. Plus, it's distributed to the world without any gatekeepers. This is such a mind-bendingly different shift in terms of how we communicate, both good and bad. And I'm sure we'll get into that in just a bit, but the world has changed in ways that were unimaginable even 20 years ago. Is it done? Is it finished? No, no, no. We're right in the middle of it and I'm not even sure we're in the middle of the worst of it yet. I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. For instance, Jay, look at this program right now. You're the CEO of this company that's got, what, 28, 30 shows, but how much money, I don't want the answer rhetorical, but how much money can you make from these shows compared to what a broadcast network could make from their network show 20 years ago? Their revenue then is measured in tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per show and I have a sneaking feeling that you probably are not recognizing that kind of revenue from the shows that you're doing now. Yet, look at your distribution. You've got every major social media distributor. You've got 28 shows. You've got millions of views and you're making no money. That's, I'm not saying no, but I'm using by dramatic comparison. The business model is so dramatically different. The access is incredible. The quality is beyond all imagining and the business model is a disaster. So this is why we're in the middle of it. Until we figure out how content creators can make money, continue to make money, have copyrights honored around the world and be able to reach the audience they want to reach. All it becomes in is a very nice hobby. Well, there are psychic benefits for us. I mean, no, we don't. We're a nonprofit to the fullest extent of the word, but there are psychic benefits for everyone involved. We're all volunteers. The staff is paid, but the hosts are volunteers. I'm a volunteer. I'm a vice president volunteer and we all have huge psychic benefits. We trade newspaper clips all week long. We're always talking to each other, trying to keep each other at a level of awareness and bring other people to awareness. There's a great benefit in that. I hate to say this, but it's more than money can buy. Oh, you're absolutely right. You're absolutely right. And for many years, Hollywood took great advantage of this, is that they would get people to work for nothing in return for the fame and in return for boosting their career, while people that had the money were able to make more of it. It was an upside down business model. What's happened now is that, absolutely, we have the ability to communicate about the subjects that we love to people around the world, which is huge, but I still have to pay the rent. So when you ask where are we going until people can earn a living the way they could 15 years ago, producing media for weddings, but we can't distribute on Blu-ray discs or DVDs because that's a dead technology. People don't pay to stream the way they used to pay when they hold something in their hands. So what's our business model? Now, I don't want to spend our time talking about finance because that gets boring, but you're asking, are we through it? No, because we haven't resolved how we're going to earn a living. Not how do we do what we love, but how do we pay the rent? And right now, we can absolutely do what we love and make it look gorgeous, but it's a real struggle to pay the rent. Yeah. Oh, I have so many questions. I want to ask you about that, but you're right. We need to get into the tech for a minute here. You can invite me back. We'll talk about this a second time. I will, absolutely. This is a really important question for us, not only to talk about in public, but to talk about among ourselves. So let's talk about what you're doing these days. When I first followed you, met you, you were into Final Cut Pro. I'm not even sure it was called Final Cut Pro at the time. And Adobe Premiere was just sort of emerging as a competitor. And then something terrible happened. The Final Cut Pro changed everything and they dropped off some of their functionality. And the New York Times wrote a really stinky article about what they had done. Then everybody ran over to Adobe, including us. But you're doing a lot with Final Cut, still you're doing with both, I know. Can you talk about the comparison in terms of the marketplace and the technology? I started my company back in 2003. I was a freelance producer and director. I'm a member of the director's guild and a member of the producer's guild and have been for decades. But I decided there was a market opportunity in 2003 to train people in terms of how software works. Because software is a very intimidating thing for people that don't think the way a computer does. So I started my company in 2003, worked for Lynda.com starting in 2005 through 2010. But the focus of my company was training. And the day that I started my company was when Final Cut 1.2 was released. It was before Final Cut Pro was the very first Final Cut. And the challenge was to explain to people who were used to cutting film physically with their scissors or razor blade or editing with videotape how this new digital stuff would work. And I was very fortunate because my background was in broadcast television. So I knew video. And I'd been a commercial developer. So I wrote software. So that's my software background. And my TV background merged. And for once, they actually merged into an industry that was growing as opposed to horseshoes. So I was in, Lynda asked me to do training. So I started with Final Cut. And then I branched out into audio. And then I realized before Final Cut 10 was released that Adobe was a significant product. It was older than Final Cut, actually. And I'd never trained in it. So now I train in both Premiere and in Final Cut. Final Cut 10, I think when it was released six or seven years ago, got a bad rap because Apple made three bad decisions. Apple decided for political reasons, not technical reasons, that they would instantly kill Final Cut 7. And it was only Final Cut 10. They didn't have to. It was the hubri of the person that was making the decision who will go nameless. But that was a political decision. Second technical problem they had is they did not provide any transfer capability between Final Cut 7, which the industry is using. And Final Cut 10, you had to drop the old project and start the new. Now, from a media creator's point of view, you say, how brain dead is this? Because all of our life is based on working with our past assets. But from Apple's point of view, Apple was thinking like an engineer. And an engineer says, when the new version comes out, the old versions just stick to the curb because it's always the latest version. So they were thinking like an engineer. They weren't thinking like a media creator. And the third big problem was that they released Final Cut too soon. If they had released Final Cut, run it in parallel with Final Cut 7 for a year and provided a conversion utility, the industry would have said Hosano because there is so much cool stuff in Final Cut 10. But the ego of the person making the decision and thinking like an engineer led to the train wreck that was the launch of Final Cut 10. If you compare Avid Media Composer with Grass Valley Edius and Adobe Premiere and Final Cut 10, every single one of them does professional grade work. If you do an edit that doesn't include titles, because that becomes too distinctive, but includes color grading, and you did a show and you output a color graded, non-titled show in Avid and DaVinci Resolve and Premiere and Final Cut and Edius, you'd be unable to tell them apart. How interesting. The quality is outstanding. So what you're really paying for is you're paying for effects, which vary widely. You're paying for titling. You're paying for programs that hang off it, whether it's motion and after effects, or whether it's Fairchild, or whether it's Adobe Audition. You're paying for the ecosystem, but you're not paying for actual quality. The quality is indistinguishable. So you're paying for the interface. And so, for instance, Jay, if you like Premiere, which is perfectly okay, the reason you like Premiere is not that you turn out better images, but it's the interface you use to create those images. And that's a personal choice of what car you buy. If I like to drive a truck, or if I want to drive a sports car, or if I want to drive a school bus, I still get from point A to point B, but the interface to get there is different depending upon the vehicle that I pick. Well, this goes back to that video I saw on YouTube that you made in 2013 with your attempt to get an assistant video editing job with a French woman who had an award. And that was very instructive. And it was great to listen. It's a great story. It's like a three-minute video. It's a great story about the award and your experience there at the bottom line of this. I wish people could go find it. They should go find Larry Jordan. I will repeat the story for you. If you did it the way you got it on your website, it was many years ago. And I've become certified as an Apple certified trainer for Final Cut. This is well before the launch of Final Cut 10. And back in those days, there was a thing in the industry that you may have heard about as a small child that was called Print. And in this Print magazine called Hollywood Reporter, at the back of it, there were want ads. And there was a want ad in the back of the Hollywood Reporter about this big. And it said, wanted assistant film editor. Must know Final Cut. Well, I said to myself, I know Final Cut. I can do that. So I dialed the phone number. A woman and a French accent answered the phone. I said, I am your Final Cut assistant editor. He said, come on down. So I drove to Burbank Park in front of a one-story typical Hollywood bungalow, walked up the porch, knocked on the front door. A woman about, oh, mid 50s, six inches shorter than me, answered the door and invited me. And I sat down. I sat in the wing chair. She sat on the couch. And we started talking. Now, I know yourself. You are a very well-behaved and polite individual. And when you go to visit somebody new, you focus entirely on them. But me, I was very interested in scoping out the environment and looking around. And there was furniture in the room. There was a hallway that led down to the kitchen. And there were bookshelves and painting on the walls. But on one of the bookshelves, I saw something I don't see very often. It was an Oscar. Now, you think Rackentour and the trainer that I am, that I need Oscar-winning people all the time. But this, I think, was the first time, second time only, I'd met someone who had actually won an Oscar. And I said, Francoise, for such was her name. Francoise, I said, what is that? I said, oh, it's my Oscar. I said, I know what's your Oscar. What's it for? She said, build that thing. Oh, my gracious. I've spent my life in video. I looked at Francoise and Francoise. I'm not the right person for this job. I've spent my life in video. I haven't edited a, I've edited one film and my own mother did not like it. I am not your assistant for this film. But I would be really grateful if you and I could chat for 15 minutes. And I promised never to darken your door again. She very graciously said yes. And I wish, Jay, I could remember even word one of the 15 minutes I spent with an Oscar-winning editor. And I can't remember a phrase except one. When I said to her, how, how do you know when your films are done? She looked down in her lap. She looked up with a small smile and she said, done. Done. My films are never done. They take them with my arms wrapped around them and they rip them from my grasp and they release them to the world and I can still make them better. And I said, that just changed my life. Because it isn't a question of making our films perfect. It's a question of making our films as perfect as we can in the time that we've got. Which means that we can't focus on achieving perfection. We need to focus on achieving efficiency. And that changed every book that I've written that changed every class that I taught. Changed how I think about teaching video editing. It isn't about perfection. It's about being as efficient as we can be with the time that we have. Make it look as good as possible. But can we make it look better? We can always make it look better. The perfect is the enemy of the good. Absolutely correct. Absolutely correct. Jan Federico who used to work at WSTV in Chicago has a phrase, it's better than perfect. It's done. And that's a motto I've got written on my wall. Well, that takes me back to what you were talking about before. Namely, the two competing or actually the half a dozen competing video editor programs that are out there in the, what do you want to call it, the video editing world these days. And choices are based on many characteristics and all that. But it seems to me that one of the characteristics, how efficient is the program? How efficient is it for you? Because I think some of this is subjective. I mean, take a person, he might gravitate intuitively to one and not the other. He might be better at one, not the other. Not a matter of training or experience, just some kind of inner Gestalt that he likes one rather than the other. But, you know, am I right to say that you want to take the program that is most efficient for you, where you can finish the job in a fraction of the time that you would otherwise spend? Am I right? I think you're close. I think you want to take the program that you're most comfortable with that allows you to best realize your vision. Because really at heart what we are is storytellers. And we want to be able to tell our story to as wide an audience as possible and get it done and still have time to get some sleep and eat. From my point of view, if you're an experienced, I'm Mac based. So forget all the Windows stuff. I just I can spell Windows, but I don't use Windows. If you're brand new to video editing, and you've never edited before, you can learn Final Cut in half the time and you can premiere. If you want to work in Hollywood and work for one of the studios, you need to know avid, not necessarily because it's good or bad. It's just that's what you have to know. If you've been editing for a long period of time and you're comfortable with the whole concept of editing, especially if you were working with Final Cut 7, premiere is an easier way to move. Neither of these is better. Neither of them is worse. It's a question of what you bring to it. And when you think about it, the reason that we edit is not because we like to use computers. The reason we edit is because we want to tell stories. So if you're going to spend your life tied to a computer telling stories, pick one that makes you feel comfortable. And that I think is the important part is that you're really you're trying on a suit of clothes, which one feels good to me, which one can I understand the quality is the same? How do you feel with it? You mentioned in your story about efficiency that what I want to say is we are moving away from strictly video. As you say, there's video in this film. Those things are different. Then there's video and there's streaming. And that's what we do. Those things are different. And then there's video and there's zoom and the like. And those things are different. All of these things perform editing functionality, but they're all different. And the time involved, the result involved, the learning curve is different. Are you following these things? Or are you talking about film and video? I disagree with that. I disagree with that. There's two ways that we can communicate, basically mass communicate. One is via text and words and one is via pictures. Whether we go to a cinema, at some point we can, I hope, whether we go to watch broadcast television, whether we're watching a video on YouTube, in all cases, we're looking at different forms of distribution. We're not looking at different ways to communicate. We're still communicating with pictures, with moving pictures. And in fact, I just wrote a book, which I will do a shameless plug for, which is called The Techniques of Visual Persuasion, which looks at exactly this one concept. And the concept is if we're trying to affect an audience or change an opinion or effect change, we're going to be much more successful at it doing video with pictures than we are using text. For instance, why are you and I talking on video? There's not a single visual element that's essential to this conversation. It could easily be done in audio, on radio, it could even be done in print for that matter. Why is video that much more compelling? Because we want to see, our brain is wired to see pictures. And the way that we compose those pictures, why do you have your camera positioned in such a way that you've got a nice medium close-up? Why do you have the background selected that you have? Why couldn't it be a different background? Why did you decide to wear that shirt versus a different shirt? And the answer is you're looking to tell a story with the visual environment in which you present yourself, with the lighting that you use, the costume that you wear, the background that you have. All of this is designed to represent success, casual, informed, conversational, believable. Those are all words that you want to have applied to yourself as you look at this image. Same thing with other communications. If you want to persuade someone to an opinion, first you have to attract their attention. And then second, you have to deliver an effective message. How do we attract attention? We're going to attract attention with pictures, still and moving, much easier than we can with a big piece of text or with somebody standing on a street corner or putting a headline in a newspaper. Why are we using video? Because our brains are wired for pictures. And that's really what fascinates me right now is how do we use pictures to influence other people, whether for good or ill? There's definitely a two-edged sword, but how does visuals fit into that? And that's what my book is about, how to deconstruct an image, how to build video, how to create a presentation that doesn't induce death by PowerPoint. How do words support your picture? And how does colors and fonts support the picture? There's actually, designers have known this for years, but now people like you who haven't been in broadcasts for years and years, but now find themselves a worldwide celebrity without a broadcast background perhaps, yet you have all these tools at your disposal, wouldn't it be useful to know how to use them? And it's expanding. I mean, you start out with, you know, editing video. Next thing you know, you're learning how to stream. And that's like on steroids in a certain way. I mean, if you want to do color correction on a regular video editing process, that's one thing. And you have, although you don't have a lot of time, you have time to check it out, you bring in add-ons, whatever, you know, to make it as perfect as you can. But when you're doing this on streaming, like we use vMix, which is like Telestream, and what happens is it's real time. And you can adjust it while it's happening, and you can try to achieve the same quality of color correction, but you better be quick. So, you know, it's different than just making a video or a film. It is. Well, if you think about it, it's the difference between filmmaking and live broadcast television. Yes. Look at the technology that you use for filmmaking is designed for each individual shot being perfectly crafted. Broadcast television uses entirely different gear to be able to do efficient chroma keys, to be able to do color grading on the fly, to be able to live switch between cameras. You know, I don't have switchers on a film set. That's just meaningless. But I do have switchers and I do have audio mixers on a live broadcast because I'm dealing with all these different inputs. It is the technology we use is in response to the distribution that we pick. I still think, and my heart is in live broadcast, there's just nothing more fun than doing a live show. And I believe that for 50 years. But at its core, if we don't have a compelling message, if we don't have a compelling story, we don't have a reason for people to listen, the fact that we've got $5 million in here in blinking lights over our right shoulder is not going to excite anybody except me. I've got to have some information that people are interested in learning. And that's that's really the other side is what's our content versus what's the technology. I teach the technology because it's hard. People don't understand it, but the technology is in service to the content. Yeah. And it's the story and everything contributes to telling the story in the way you want. And certainly you have to have content to start whatever you do. But before before we, you know, get run out of time, I did want to cover one other thing with you Larry. It's really important and it drives off something you called a warm voice. A warm voice. You wrote an article about it. It says EQ, warm of voice and improved clarity. You can say that the video, the color, the framing, all the elements of the video do contribute to telling the story. But the story is mostly, will you agree with me? Mostly in the voice. It's mostly in the sound because that's what that's where people are getting more information about the substance of the content, I think, with some exceptions. And you mentioned before the show began that you were the voice of the, did you say the NAB show? That's quite something. National Association, of course, a huge thing. It hasn't met in the last couple of years, the last year anyway, but this is a huge organization. I've been there a couple of times and I know how big and important it is. And you were the voice there. And you talk about warm voices. How exactly do you achieve that? I know part of it is personal. You got to have good pipes to start with. But from there, how do you get where you are? Visuals show us what's going on. Audio tells us what to feel. So the way that we make a connection emotionally is more with the audio than it is with what things look like. When I say warm of voice, if you imagine a straight line with bass at this end and high treble at this end, our hearing goes from very low frequency to very high frequency. It's what's called a 10 octave range from 20 cycles per second to 20,000. Human speech is a subset of that. It goes about 200 cycles to about 6,000 for a guy and 400 to 8,000 for a girl. Women's voices are an octave higher than a man's. That which provides the sexiness, the warmth, the characteristic of a voice are the low frequency sounds, the bass. That which provides intelligibility are the high frequency sounds, the letter S and the letter F, P, P, K. Those are all high frequency sounds. In fact, the difference between the letter S is in Sam and F is in Frank is the hiss. That hiss is at 6,100 cycles or hertz, we call it now. If that hiss is there, you hear an S. If the hiss is not there, you hear an F. They're formed the same way with and without a hiss. Well, one of the things that I do as I've gotten older, one of the problems is that that our hearing starts to degrade and you start to lose high frequency sounds. It makes it harder to understand what people are saying. So whenever I do a mix or whenever I do a live show, it's running through a mixer. And that mixer is doing two things. It's boosting the base two or three dB around 200 cycles per second to warm the voice, give it a little bit more base, a little bit more bottom, a little bit more sexiness. And that's true for both men and women. Then I also add about five, seven dB around 3500 cycles to make the consonants crisper, to make it easier, especially for people that don't have perfect hearing, to be able to hear what I'm saying more clearly. This is called shaping the sound or sweetening the sound is that we want to take the dialogue, make the voices warm and friendly, sexy, happy, cheerful, not happy, cheerful, but to make them worth listening to. And the high frequency we boost because I don't want to have people have to rely on captions all the time. I want them to be able to hear clearly what's being said. And by boosting the highs a little bit, just makes it that easier for people to perceive. And you do this with an equalizer? I do it with what's called a graphic equalizer. Now here, I'm running through my end here. I'm running through an Apex system called the master voice controller. It acts as the preempt of my microphone, it's boosting the base a little bit, sharpening the highs. That's running into a Scarlett 2i2, which is an ADD converter which takes the analog out of the Apex, converts it into a USB. It then streams out to Zoom so you can hear it. And I'm using an AKG C202 microphone as a headset, so I've got really nice tight sound. That's what I use for the live show. For anything that's being recorded like my weekly webinars, then I'm running those through a mix on Adobe Audition, and I'm dialing in with a graphic equalizer to paint in exactly the frequency shaping that I want. So one is live. Remember, we talked about the technology for live is different than the technology for recorded. I have the same results, but I use different here to achieve it. So you like audition then? Is that because I know that I do all of I do almost all of my editing in Final Cut because it's just the fastest thing out there. There's nothing quicker. I do all of my audio mixing in Adobe Audition. Interesting, crossing over, yeah. Larry, we got to do this again. I will be back to you. Don't leave town. I will always say yes when you ask. It's fun. Okay, there's so many questions, so many things. Not only for what we do, you know, for the problems we have, and we're all amateurs around here. Amateurs studying hard, learning hard every day. But, you know, for people in general, because this is something that the world has to know about going forward, you know, going back to your comment about the business model, I think one of the things that's going to happen in the future is that more and more people, this is good for you and it's good for me, are going to get involved in this kind of communication. And they have to know these things if they want to do it right. That's right. So what is, how do I study about you? It's Larryjordan.com. Is that what it is? Larryjordan.com is my website, and there's a couple of buttons across the top to pay attention to. One, if you go to Free Resources, you'll find free step-by-step tutorials. I've got over 2,300 written tutorials to teach you everything you want to know about Apple and Adobe products. Second, if you go to my store, I have online video training, which covers Premiere and covers Final Cut. So if you really want to learn how I've got training that's used by tens of thousands of editors all over the world, it will get you started right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Larryjordan. We'll be back and we'll take a look at that site. I know there's a conicopia of things there, because every time I talk to you, it's a conicopia the same way. Thank you, thank you for inviting me. Aloha. Talk soon.