 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here at theCUBE. We're at NAB 2017, again with 100,000 of our friends. It's a crazy, busy conference. I think it's got three halls, two levels on each hall, more stuff than you could ever take in in four days, but we're going to do our best to give you a little bit of the insight and we're going to go down a completely different path here with our next guest. We're really excited to have Linda Tadich on. She's the founder and CEO of Digital Bedrock. Linda, welcome. Thank you, Jeff. Happy to be here. Absolutely. So for those that aren't familiar with your company, give us a little bit of an overview. Well, what we do at Digital Bedrock is we provide the managed digital preservation services that are required to keep digital content alive. Okay, so managed digital preservation. Yes. Okay, so what does that mean? Managed, meaning that we do the work for you. You just have to give us the files and we take care of it so you don't have to license software, you don't have to train people, you don't have to purchase all the infrastructure, no big capex, we just do the work for you. We're their staff and infrastructure. Okay. Digital, meaning it's all digital content. Any format, any kind of content, we don't care. And then preservation. And so what that means is keeping the content alive so it can be used in 100 years. So it's just pretend about that. Right. And that's not just storing it because that means you have to know everything about how that file was created so that you can monitor obsolescence because digital files will become obsolete over time. So it's a really different kind of spin because we're here in the HGST booth and a lot of talk about storage or storage people all around us. But when you talk about archiving and preservation, how do you delineate that from just, it's a backup copy, I know I have a backup copy on a server someplace. Yeah. So the preservation part of it, so yeah, it has to live somewhere. I mean, the bits have to live on something. Right. And so it can be spinning disk, it can be all this data, it can be tape. And so storing it, it's the easy part actually, but then the hard part is the managing it. So you want to make sure those bits are okay, that the bits are healthy. So you will be doing fixity checks over time, according to a schedule. And then you want to also make sure that the file formats themselves. So everybody's concerned about migrating the data onto other storage media in the future because you just have to do that at the end of life. You have to move things along. But it's those formats that can become obsolete over time. Which means let's say you have a format, a specific format, which requires a software to render it, which requires an operating system for it to run, which requires a chip or a piece of hardware or a file system to run. So what you have to do is you have to monitor all those vulnerabilities in order to keep that format alive. To know that if you have to need to migrate it or you can emulate it or use another software, there's some, or you can do nothing and just keep the bits alive until you can do something with it. So you do those things. So you'll, if there's a new file format that comes out next year to NAB, that's the new preferred whipped-y format, you'll take some of those assets that you have in your protection and go ahead and recreate them in whatever feels like a viable format going forward. Yeah, actually we don't do that. We don't do the transcoding work. What we do is we monitor it. We have a separate database that's tacked into our core database. It's called the Digital Object Obsolescence Database or the Dude, is what we call it. It's a pretty critical thing. So in the Dude, it's monitoring all of those, what version of a software can be used to be able to render a file. So if something in our database suddenly is flagged as being, oh, this is not, it's endangered now because one of those vulnerability factors has now been deprecated, will notify the client and will say, you have all of these files that you've given us to preserve that are now in danger. And so, but we can't just do the immediate transcoding because you know that those Digital Objects also then have perhaps these underlying files that feed up into that object. If you change one of those subsidiary files, you can't then render that final object. And so you have to be very careful not to just suddenly flip something and change it. So we tell the client, here's your files and here are the relations between all the files. So, and here's what you can do to migrate it or to keep it alive. But we won't do that work for them because they probably can either do it themselves. They have to choose first of all what they want to do or they might have a preferred vendor themselves who will do that work for them. Right, right. And the other piece you talk about a lot in doing some research before we sat down is the metadata and how important the metadata is. So there's a lot of conversation about metadata especially in media entertainment because there's the asset itself but you need all this other information. So I wonder if you can give us kind of the 101 on metadata and why it's so important and maybe not necessarily just the 101 but something a little bit more advanced and that people don't think about when they think about metadata. Right, well I would say that most of the folks here at the event at NAB, they're thinking about metadata in two ways. One is the description which is describing the content. So what is the nature of this content? What is it about? What's in it? Do you want to search for a particular scene, a particular clip? And that's based on the content. There also may be thinking about technical metadata but technical metadata in the sense of interoperability with machines. And so you want to know that this software can work with this or with this system or whatever and that's where this camera can then work with a certain system and that's all because of the technical metadata behind the scenes. What they're not thinking about then is the metadata that is required to keep that content alive and that's all those obsolescence factors that I was meaning. And in order to monitor all that obsolescence as we do in the dude is where you need to be able to validate a particular format. And you know immediately, yeah, this was shot with this camera and it's a certain kind of raw format. It's this version of it which can only be used in this particular system. A lot of complex variables that are moving very, very quickly. A lot of metadata, yeah. I mean, in a typical bit of technical metadata we extract off a file. I mean, we'll get over 400 bits of metadata and that's not even the descriptive metadata. 400 bit, 400 different classification of elements. And we just pull it off the file. Wow. And if that's not complicated enough, we were talking a little bit before we turn the cameras on about virtual reality and a whole different way of really describing that experience. Right, experience is a better word than asset because there is no asset until you engage with what the software is feeding into your experience. It's kind of virtual metadata when you kind of think about it because it's like, you know, so there's the code, you know, that creates the software for the virtual reality to all work and it's all required. But the actual experience then is what the human, the person who's using the software and how they're interacting with it. And so that metadata about your experience and the content is in your head. Right. You know, unless you're recording it as you're going, your experience. And so then there's an output of it, but otherwise it's all in your head and your experience. It's fascinating. And then the other piece that we've heard a number of times here is, especially now with all the different content distribution methods, you know, there's many, many flavors of the same file. So are you keeping track of all the different variants as well? Yeah, and then if like, and so in fact in the research for like the dude, because it's humans who are doing the research to add the data to the dude. And they'll say, okay, great. This one software works with all these different operating systems, except for this one package that went out. So somewhere in the middle. So we can't even say this range from here to here that will work with it. Oh no, there's always an exception in between. Right. So it's very complicated. So it's complicated and expensive and a lot of versions. And storage is getting cheaper every day, but it's not free. And managing is not free. So it begs the value question. And I'm sure you can bring up all kinds of sad tales of phenomenal assets that were lost in the past. But how are people thinking about the value of these assets so that they feel comfortable making the investment in this preservation and archiving? Yeah, two things, two different mindsets. I think that people have to start adjusting to. One is they're just creating so much data. They need to start doing appraisal and retention policies on them. You can't save everything. You shouldn't have to save everything. Right, right. So that means you should really in reality set those policies at the point of when you're shooting, when you're creating them. So that it's automated. So it's not at the end of a huge project when you have a petabyte of data there. Then that's not the time to just choose what you want to take. You need to set that policy in advance and try to automate it. So they're best practices. I mean, what are some of the best practices? Or are there some reference points that people should kind of start from, I guess? I think the bottom line that they should be thinking about is let's say that in 100 years, so thinking about Paramount. Paramount has had its 100 year anniversary. And they were able to go back to their original nitrace and digitization and they're showing films that were made 100 years ago. So what about the content being created now? What if in 100 years you want to be able to have your own 100 year retrospective? What would you need in order to be able to render the files that you're creating now in order to show it them? Right. So what elements do you need to keep in case you need to be stored or recreate it? So that's one thing you have to think about. That just feels like it could be a complete rabbit hole, though. It could be. So that's why you have to think about the bottom line in 100 years. Now, of course, in 100 years, who knows? Because of all of this artificial intelligence and all of this automated capture, then there could be just systems that will just be created for you. So you might, you know, I'll be out of business. You know, as I call it the virtual Linda, I'll be out of a gig in 100 years, you know? So this is a fascinating area. How did you get involved in this area? I started out as a creator. So I was a composer and a filmmaker, way back when. But then I got into the archival community, archival field. So I've been working in audio, visual, film, video, audio, and then digital, really starting 2000. All my work's been in digital format in doing that preservation because all of this content is important to me. And it's like whether it's your own personal home videos or images of your kids when they were born. You know, it's all digital or whatever. To a studio product, a station, government documents. It doesn't really matter. If that content is important to you, it should be preserved because it documents your personal history. It documents our cultural history. It documents, you know, governments are going forward for evidence, for law enforcement. All of that, if it has to be preserved, you have to really focus on that and how to keep it alive. And it's all important. And that's how I got into it. Right. And as you spoke, you're involved in some really interesting cultural heritage preservation which is a completely different kind of value chain than a movie or my home video of the kids. I wonder if you can kind of talk us through that use case that you described earlier because this is a very different way to think about virtual reality, preservation, and digital assets. Yeah. So I also do some consulting work and I'm working with this organization in Dunhuang, China which is in the western part of China. So that's out in the Gobi Desert, far out. So what this organization is in charge of are these caves that were created by Buddhist monks starting in 364 AD, going up to around 1100 AD. Hundreds of caves out in the desert, carved out of sandstone and the monks within paint, you know, murals and beautiful, incredible murals showing like, you know, Buddhist culture, history and the culture of the time. You can see how people lived, how they farmed because they had that representation on the murals. Right. So the Dunhuang Academy, they came to me and they said they're doing digital capture of the caves, high-res capture of the murals and they said, Linda, these caves are 1500 years old. We know they will not be around in 1500 years. So these digital assets must be around in 1500 years because those will be the only representations of these caves that are there. So I'm helping them build a digital repository to keep those digital images alive because they are, they consider them to be the embodiment of the caves. Right. So I think that I've seen some great examples of virtual reality implementations in the cultural heritage environment. Again, thinking about some of these critical places around us and in the world and the environment, they won't be around in 1500 years either because humans have destroyed them, you know, through the environment or just natural deterioration and destruction. Right. So what virtual reality can do is go out and capture those environments, capture those sites. So that we can experience them or people can experience them when those sites are no longer around. Right. Because the humans are still around. Right, right. Fascinating. And what a great application of virtual reality. Yes, absolutely. It's my favorite. And entertainment is fun to pretend you're somewhere but it's that just to go to a different site, to go to a different place. All right. So I'm going to shift gears a little bit. As you've done all this archive and you look at these old movies because we hear it at NAB and it's all about media entertainment. I was curious if you have any kind of historical perspective of how the storytelling has changed over time. Is there a consistent thread that you see? Excuse me, or just reflection as you've spent so much time with this historical archive footage that you could share with the audience that maybe we'll get them to go look at things. Excuse me, that aren't opening, you know, this weekend at your local Cineplex. Well, just thinking about, okay, so think about film. So film in the early days was basically just a representation of theater because that was the moving art form of the time. And so it was really static, just a one camera standing there and people would act in front of the camera. And then of course I'd change, you know, what would DW Griffith and others doing, all the inner cutting and just the show and then things happening at the same time in different locations. That was really radical in 1912, 1913, just over a hundred years ago. You know, and then you go into like the Golden Age of Cinema in the 30s and the spectacle and so it's more, and so now we're in the age of virtual reality where instead of we're being told a story, it's more like we are part of the story, you know, going through that. And we'll see how, if people still want to go back and return to tell me a story, you know, just as like when we're little kids we all want to tell me a story, Daddy, Mommy, kind of thing. And so maybe we want to be told that and just be engrossed in somebody else's story and relax our brains instead of feeling like, gosh, I just want to rest and relax. Do I have to interact with this thing? Right, right, do I have to work? Yeah, I do. I'd rather have somebody who's really good at it, like Quinn Tarantino, you know, tell me his interpretation of this story. Yeah, so I'm really curious to see, it's still new with virtual reality and augmented reality to see how it's going to really expand and if people, it might just be a fad. You know, I know people don't want to hear that, but it has all these, that's a great usage, you know, as a cultural heritage or in gaming and that kind of thing, that's totally fine. But if for a narrative, sometimes you just want to story. All right, well, Linda, you're doing great work so we have to let you get back to the booth so that more people can take advantage and keep track and I think the word that you used a number of times, keep these things alive for future consumption, not just in cold storage and a vault someplace. Yes, absolutely. All right, well thanks again, Linda, for stopping by. Thanks so much, Jeff. All right, Linda Tadich, I'm Jeff Frick, we're at NAB 2017, you're watching theCUBE and we'll be back after the short break. Thanks for watching.