 Welcome everybody to another exciting episode of logic live. This is actually episode 21 Building and running your flame business at home with Randy Mackenzie So we we now have all identified the first edit that I'm going to make before putting this up on on youtube Logic live is brought to you as always by our friends at sinuses oceanic sinuses is my own personal reseller I've had a great relationship with those guys for 15 years and we could not run our business without them Especially now when we're all working remotely They have always supported the logic community sponsored one frame of white sponsored user groups all over the country And I can't thank them enough for their support of the flame community solutions integration and support for digital content creators Find out all about their remote workflow solutions at sinuses.io sinuses oceanic supporting flame artists since 1997 So today's guest is the lovely and talented randy mackenzie randy started his flame career at film workers in chicago He then moved to new york where he spent seven years with the mill Where he worked his way up to vfx supervisor Then it was back to chicago where he spent seven years as head of 2d at the mill chicago office And this past february randy opened opened up his own business the department of external services He's one of the most active contributors on logic and an all-around awesome guy So let's please give a warm logic live welcome to the lovely and talented randy mackenzie. There he is Hold on. Let me stop my share here There we go. Hey man. Hello. Hello Welcome welcome. How are you? I'm good. Thanks for asking. How are you guys doing? Uh where I'm doing great. Yeah, we're uh, I'm broadcasting here at the logic live studio Which is our guest room and I see that you are in uh in the department of external services Incorrect incorrect. Yeah, this is my daughter's room Coronavirus does weird things to your home. So uh, yeah, I'm running cables Yep. Oh, I have them too. Oh, yeah, they're running along along this way power if um, if my if the cat comes in Um, which is always a possibility here, uh on logic live You'll be able to see the uh the gaffer state that's been holding down the ethernet cables that run to my living room Which you know, I told my wife was just temporary because we're only gonna be home for two weeks You know me too me too. I'm in the doghouse just like you are so don't worry. Oh wonderful Well, it's nice to have company. Um, you know, uh, I I wanted to uh Share this picture with everybody in case in case it wasn't seen on facebook But yes Yes, right. So two years ago. I believe it was two years ago. Randy, uh, rode his bike from chicago to new york As part of a fundraiser for the leukemia And lymphoma society if I remember correctly correct And you made a stop in peak skill new york, which is like five minutes that way And so I went down there and you know went to the peak skill brewery where you and your fellow compositing You know cyclists were having a beer and and a and a burger and um And we got to meet up and and he is that tall Look at those three coven bodies I know right, you know, what's funny is I don't know. I'm well that's I was gonna maybe share too much, but you know, my I've I've now gone back to my my coven body is now I've gone back to what I was before anyway too much sharing. Um But uh, it was always great to see you and uh, I don't know you told me you told me that uh Almost as much as you wanted to complete this amazing right for charity You wanted a picture with the andy milk a smile. So uh truth. I was happy. I didn't say that happy to make that come Word man So, uh, you know one thing that I think is really fascinating before we dive right in here is uh, you know I think this is it's so germane is We're here to talk about building your flame business at home. Yeah, and that's something that you did, you know, you you Started your business in february and uh, I don't know if anybody else Has been up on current events, but uh that kind of coincided with uh with a thing Yeah, you know and so uh, I kind of wanted to Really maybe ask you about that. Maybe it's just something that'll come up in the course of our conversation here of you know Yeah, uh about what it was like to start your business just as everyone else was stopping their business. Sure. Um Remember airplane the original one. Yes, uh, it feel Don't call me surely exactly. Uh, it feels like every week Um, I say something to my wife about uh, it's I picked the heck of a time just not stop sniffing glue Or you know various vices. Um It is Been interesting. Um, I wouldn't have it any other way. Um You know, I Yeah, I I'm I'm happy. I'm still happy with it even though it's uh, You know, you have to act like a swan where you're uh, you know up here. You're nice and chill But beneath the camera Yeah, you're you're just trying to stay afloat trying to stay afloat Exactly, but just but you know, I think you make a really valid point in that, you know part of the challenge that you have to Give yourself when you go out on your own when you start your own business is to be nimble is to adapt is to Kind of push yourself and not get complacent and oh, yeah You know talk about jumping, you know jumping in with both feet man. So congratulations. Well We'll see how it goes Never too late to screw it up, Andy. Oh We must we must have gone to the same like you you graduated with a major in philosophy, right? Was that one of the things that you learned? Yeah, but it was a bs Oh, yes. Oh, I have a bs and many things All right, man Let's get underway. So last week Renee took us through like, uh, some of the business side, which was wonderful And uh, and you're gonna take us a little bit through the tech side So why don't you go ahead and share your screen and and uh, take us through it. Let's get going. All right, let's do that Yeah, so last week Renee really set the set the tone for us. We've got a we've got a lot to get through To make sure that we uh, we make her proud Again, big thanks for Renee for last week for getting this ball. Uh, this conversation going Excuse me our goal In partnering for this series was was twofold. It was first to share timely and relevant information And aspects of our experience to uh to inspire a new wave of artists to come forward and to share yours And um You know, that's that's that's a big important thing I think our community is is filled with with with amazingly rich and talented artists and um, and hopefully this presentation serves You know me along with that other end of that spectrum, uh that people are just kind of getting your your your feet wet So, yeah, so um, so yeah, let's dive in shall we Let's do it. All right, cool. And I'm going to motor through a bunch of stuff and if anyone wants to uh to pause and linger Uh, let me know and I'm going to try and keep an eye on the chat screen and the q&a But I could use some help doing that. So if you see oh, I got you covered. Don't worry. Okay. Okay, cool So, yeah, just uh just barge on in um All right, so this presentation was developed to provide a process or a framework For those of you looking to build a flame at home for the first time um So again, there's a ton of stuff, but I'm going to motor through it Stop me if you have any questions and uh, we'll definitely reserve some time at the end for uh for some q&as Again, my name is randy macinty. I'm a chicago based visual effects supervisor and flame artist like any said six months ago I started a new adventure Um, I call it new adventures with old friends aka the department of external services I spent 13 years at the mill in new york in chicago Um, I'm totally into horizontal reels. I'm totally into smoke hotkeys. I just want to get that out now So if anyone doesn't trust me, you guys can bail now and send love mail and hate mail to uh me at the uh randy at the department of external services dot com Nice. I'm also going to warn you in advance. There there will be far too many food and cooking related analogies um, that's just how I roll so uh So bring it um And then also too like we just started with a bit of a a bit of a preamble and understanding of where we are in this world And I think the first 20 or so episodes of logic live have been amazing to step into and really get into the heart of of being an artist um, and so today we're going to understand a little bit about what's happening contextually and and um and just be concerned and uh cautious and cognizant of unconscious of uh What an absolute dumpster fire it is to be uh in our business right now Um, so yeah, so this is all very topical. It might not necessarily be timely. Um, but hopefully it's helpful for you. Um, right now Um, so we all got problems and um, I just want to remind everyone that the gear that you choose to solve those problems It's um, it's a necessary piece of that puzzle, but it's just a piece and a small one at that Um, so yeah, so if your if your tech was uh, it was on this graph. Oh, there it is It's just this little like dangling bit at the back. So, um, you know Yes, this is a chat about tech But it's also chat about tech within the context of what's going on today Um, and don't forget to keep a little perspective You know what form factor you choose and how many clock cycles your cpu has is just a minute percentage Of your overall offering as a business It's um, it's just a garnish or uh, or an embellishment on the icing of your cake. It is absolutely not your cake. Okay Um, but don't forget it's also normal and human nature to compare yourself to others Um, and tech is perhaps the only objective way we can do that um So we end up just flooding ourselves with benchmarks And uh and perform various acts of technical self-flagellation Um, so just be kind yourself and keep some perspective um So the big four when it comes to your business and I promise this isn't anything more than a little perspective Sales production operations creative Find all the work choose the best projects service the project beautifully and make beautiful pictures Uh, so andy, where would uh, where would tech be on this graph on this pie chart if you could if you could find it? Uh, exactly. Yeah, there's exactly. Yeah, exactly. I think the The fastest computer in the world is sitting idle if you don't have any work to do on it. So that's right Um, so it's not that I'm not going to give you all the answers But I'm going to give you some questions to figure out and some some processes to go forward So don't worry. I'm not going to skirt the issue. I just want to make sure that you have the right mindset Um, and then the last before we jump in is just make sure that you really understand your priorities as a business You know the capability capacities and the the profitability and the quality are are They don't work in a vacuum and so just have an understanding and have a little bit of self-awareness to go through this process Um, and if your business was a camera make sure you've got the right stuff in your frame keep the right stuff in focus and um and let that kind of be um I don't know the filtration of uh of your choices if that makes any sense at all Totally, dude. I love this. This is like the 12 dimensional Venn diagram Upgrade to that production triangle their room quotes about like fast cheaper, you know are good, you know It's this is just also relevant. So absolutely relevant. And thanks for thanks for doing this to help frame the conversation We're going to have about tech. Yeah, sure thing um So obviously if you if you decide you want to jump in You got to be honest with yourself. You got to do some preparation um And don't look like this guy Now listen here, jimmy. Yeah He was uh, he was he did not find his own truth um So you got to start with kind of asking What kind of of business or kind of artist you see yourself as right or Where can you find value? Where can you provide value? I should say Are you working in a classic french kitchen with you know, all the classic bougie french words? um And all the different stations broken down or are you going to be like stephanie? Is there a style like rocking the iron chef doing her own thing? Maybe she's got a hired hand or two and she's got a client right over her shoulder just like what are you doing in there? um So you don't have to choose one, right? But it's just being again a little bit self-aware so that you can you can make good choices when it comes to Shelling out cash or or investing time and energy into technology And then what kind of work is kind of up your alley, right? Are you into fine dining with tweezers? Are you like a gimme a ladle in a scoop of mash and I'll just get these people fed kind of world? And both are valid neither of them is wrong, but you do need to understand where you are as an artist and and Where you can really, you know put food on the table um And then you have all different kinds of ways of earning money as a as an artist You can be an artist where you work on other people's machines You can be an artist with your own box, which is what we're talking about You can be your own artist with a box with a company And serve a variety of of of clients, right? So Like six months ago. I had numbers to try and figure out where I was gonna You know how much of my revenue would be from this guy and this kind of company and since coronavirus, you know, I've had Less than five working days on somebody else's computer um, and so that's you know For two of this timing lucky timing, but it's opened up an entirely new Level or a revenue stream that I'd never have access to Instead of just flying somewhere and uses somebody else's boxes and electrons um, obviously that comes with a variety of of revenue and it comes with a varying variety of risk Um, so that's something that I just wanted to kind of frame so you can understand where you want to be in in your world And then just like Renee talked about last week. I warmed up my network And I talked to everybody I knew I talked to engineers. I talked to resellers I talked to agency clients directors flame artists a lot of people that are that are watching this video And any guess what they all said So what WTF is what the heck is going on? We have no idea what's going on Everyone said different things And so right then and there I decided that I was going to be an expert generalist That I wasn't going to focus on a specific thing that I needed a variety of capabilities and capacities So that I could just offer myself as a as the new guy on the block You know, like if if Renee last week looked calm and chill and she had everything figured out It's because she's because she she has figured it out. Um, and I'm kind of very publicly understanding what all this means kind of in real time through a pandemic, which is um Interesting I think It's a thing. It's a thing to recognize and to publicly say Because a lot of people are are are forced into this Either already or possibly soon So, yeah, um, and then when I kept on talking with my network, there was another common theme everyone was like You know, everyone's like Just deliverables, right? Like it's just not so out there. It used to be a tape in a in a FedEx box now It's everything but um So yeah, so that was a common theme Okay, so I talked to my network. I talked to those people out there in the world Now you got a decision to make right you got Linux or Apple um, and it's so Such a common thing like every week. There's a thread somewhere on logic that tries to say that something is killing something flame nuke Whatever it is nuke here is not going to kill flame um And it's just in our kind of human nature to to to take sides Um, we do it in a culture. We do it with uh, ridiculous chicago pastimes and food We do it within our business with nuke and flame bowling each other out all the time We do it within our application and we uh secretly hate on the people that use the other kind of reels that we do So, yeah, so here's some some kind of choices that just some questions you can ask To figure out what might be helpful for you. So honestly Start with reading the manual. I know this is ridiculous Just go through the the flame system requirements and have a look and just become familiar with what some of these things are So autodesk puts these out there because they Well Their publicly traded company they wouldn't guarantee but if they could guarantee they would say look you would have a good experience If your system looked like this and they do that for hp They do it for dels and they do it for a lot of mac platforms the latest mac pro 2020 aka the 7 comma 1 They do it with the old mac iMac pro. Sorry not the old iMac pro The iMac pro the iMac pro They do it with a mac pro 16 inch And they even do it with a seven-year-old Mac pro from 2013 that still fetches, you know, a couple grand used There's also others out there that are not Specifically flame or autodesk certified self certified by Lenovo box Those are absolutely valid and they're worth looking at because there are like I checked this morning and Lenovo's got massive deals going on. So just know that some of these should be on your radar Instead of just the hp whatever versus the mac whatever Does that make sense? Totally great advice. Yeah, again, these are these are recommended systems. They've been either if not They've been validated, you know, they've been tested. They've been checked out Um But uh, there is so much stuff out there and and you know and and not necessarily like going the the hackintosh route I mean, there's still like legitimate Uh, you know systems you can buy from a legitimate vendor or reseller that have support and all kinds of stuff But for sure deviate from the uh from these recommends, but this is the perfect place to start Yeah, just get I just kind of just get because six months ago I only laptop the only computers I ever bought in the last 10 years were laptops I had huge facilities with engineers who would take care of all that. So this just helped me understand the heck I needed to care about So just if if you think linux is up a rally here's some some kind of the questions to ask yourself Um, you know, if you live in a major market and you pco ip a lot and that's not a bad word That's remote control other other computers versus rgs or tear d g or any kind of remote control Protocol like andy you're doing that from home, right? Yep. Yeah, I I tear d g here Yeah, um, and if you if you expect to do that like I thought I would do that a lot because I um, you know I could figure that out, but it's been zero days so far this uh this year for me of remote controlling someone else's computer But if you do that like I know there's people on this group and that's what they do Linux could be good for you for various technical reasons like pen pressure sensitivity and other kind of nonsense Um, if you know what a dku is and how install one linux could be good for you If you know precisely who your clients are and they are linux-based Could be good for you Basic networking because you're gonna need a second machine Could be good for you second-based machine, sorry Um, and if you value value capacity more than capability Like if you need to squeeze out 10 more renders in a day versus being able to do these other things your client might ask for Linux could be good for you Do you have space for more of the one machine? Linux could be good for you and if you want maximum performance, again, Linux could be good for you um On the max side if you Live in a minor market, maybe you're remote like I am in Chicago, which is you know big market But still not as big as the as the coasts or overseas and um in london or or in os Matt could be good for you Uh capability is more important Matt could be good for you Only one machine to rule them all Do you expect to travel? And that could be a good option for you um, so this is Kind of where I ended up having to make a decision that I felt for me in my minor markets Kind of what I was after expert generalist. I was thinking the mat could be the good would be the way for me to go And I'm like, oh shoot. How am I gonna afford this, right? Because you look on the website and you speck out the pimped out mac whatever and you're just like, oh my god um, but I started digging and real quick I found apple business accounts So if you search for apple store business, they'll take you to a new web page And if you can create and prove with federal documentation in the us that you have that you are in llc Then you can link your apple id to an apple business account And as soon as you start adding stuff to a cart and choose your shipping boom They start taking giving you discounts in your cart between three and eight percent savings Which is definitely something to write home about right like that's that's that's important Um, also too when you do that you unlock the potential For and this is the usa right? uh for lease options So I don't have amazing credit. I got a good credit I was authorized off the right off the bat to spend 15 grand at You know a normal kind of market rate Which paid back over three years puts me about 500 a month out of pocket So three years 500 bucks a month you do all that you add up all the math and A total out of pocket for just under 17 grand I could spend 15 grand on a mac store and be up and running within seven business days So look into that. It's a great way of of getting some some Some billable kind of tech But not shelling out a ton of cash which just doesn't necessarily make sense for anyone right now And then for love of god you look for used stuff, right? Like there's tons of iMac pros There's tons of stuff that's used out there on the secondhand market and refurbished so This morning and I'm going to switch screens here this morning I was looking for at the refurbished page and Just this morning here's eight core mac pros 5400 bucks. Oh, this is out of stock now. Oh, you're making me a liar. Here's another one Doing it live. Oh, it's making. Oh, see like everyone's already going online to buy it But if you look at some of these they come in real cheap Oh, it's changing real time. This was different an hour ago. Anyway, what is fascinating Oh, these are all making a liar out of me. Okay. I'm a liar Well, you're not a liar. They just updated. It's a it's a it's a moment in time. Yeah, it's a moment in time Anyway, what's really great about these is that most of these devices are available to be shipped same day They can end up on your doorstop tomorrow Doorstep tomorrow, which is um, which is worth knowing Yep, I have uh, I mean I have a new mac here But this is the first one that I bought that was not a refurb every other computer I've ever bought from apple I got through the refurb store. Yeah Totally worth looking at and look if it gets refurb and it's got some stuff in it that you don't want maybe it's got um An afterburner card sell it Right, like everyone wants to pay to buy an apple an afterburner car After burner card from apple, um, and I want to pay two grand, but they'll pay 1750 for it So definitely worth looking at hey, maybe it's got a set of really expensive wheels Uh, what time is it 127 127 27 27 minutes in yes, that's too bad. That's too bad. Yep. I bought the rack mounts So you guys can uh, you guys can buzz off. Um, so But I but I actually do regret it. We'll get to that later Um, and then also to look at capex phases or build phases of your purchase over time You don't need to buy a 16 24 20th. You don't need you don't need to you don't need to max stuff out So here's a little example Of um, kind of some stages that I had set out, uh, as far as like the things I needed on day one So phase one was just me as an artist, right like business All the stuff for me talked about That's what I needed and then phase two is if I needed a box These are my extra level of expenses and then um, if I want to do a whole job It's a company again more expenses and Obviously I did this before lockdown because uh, I phase force as artist with a box with a company with an office Yeah So, you know, no, I'm still using my my aldi table instead of my uh My $2,000 budgeted desk chair. Anyway, there's still time. I still hope. Um, oh, yes. I've got a dream, can't he? That's the whole reason we're here, Andy So yeah, so just think about this way right and uh, and if this is helpful for you Make sure you're you're purchasing the machine that allows you to upgrade over time Um, I'm I'm going fast. I think that's that's not you're going fast. I think that's really really great I also just want to encourage anybody if you do have any questions, please put them in the q&a, but uh It's so important to to do a roadmap for yourself Like you put there because all this stuff is so daunting and we all know so many people Or so many companies that overspent at the beginning and then just collapsed under the weight of that payment And you're right. This is all modular stuff You know even in an eight core like even it's still better than the computer you didn't have You know, it's still 100 faster than the no computer that you currently didn't have, you know what I mean? It's true. Very true Uh retribution. This was this was a screen grab from last night. Uh Anyway, so yeah, um look at refurbished. Um, and then here's just a couple examples of old trash cans Look, they're still fetching a lot of money, which is both good and bad It's it's expensive to purchase, but they also hold on to their value quite well Um, so here's like an owc, uh an illinois-based company max sales comm is their website Um, so again, you can still find ways to get in and have a good experience if you have nothing or if you just need Something to start your business with Um, so one thing I want to show you too is just start measuring stuff um If you have a laptop right now if you have Um, if you don't have anything or if you're on a machine start measuring and let me show you what I mean um One of my favorite tools ever is Um is iStat pro so um up here iStat pro lives in in my these little windows up here Let me get rid of this stuff and um so for example it has Uh, it keeps snapshots of what you and your your computers are doing over the last one to 24 hours or seven days so whether it be internet speeds or CPUs going or GPU usage like one of my biggest things is you don't need Like if you're like if budget isn't infinite, which it never is then you necessarily might not need To max out a laptop Right It'd be nice if you go 100 right, but 100 so I've gone through and like for the first six weeks I worked on the default 32 gigs of ram And I used my little ram tool here To figure out what my usage was And I've got 128 gigs of ram right now and for the last You know on and off obviously there's a gap here when I was traveling for a shoot But I've never used more than Whatever this is 60 of 128 gigs of ram So if I love god don't shell out anything that you don't need to unless you like Have measured sorry, um and kind of developed a science or at least some kind of need for it So 100 right. I keep iStat pro running All the time when I got this new macbook pro here. I maxed it out at 64 gigs I was coming from a 16 gig machine, which was constantly swapping especially running flame And there's no upgrade capabilities with things. So I I bought it maxed out and I haven't gone I think maybe the highest I've gone is 34 gigs of ram even on doing like a big big flame project So I I guess I clearly could have gotten away with less but but again the Um, I didn't know and you know the machine isn't upgradeable But you make such a selling point like I remember pricing out a mac pro and going like oh, you know, whether I get my ram from Uh, owc or I get it from apple or whatever. It's like but the autodesk spec says I should be getting this much Memory, you know, and it's you know, yeah, it's autodesk. They probably had ram land around from their certified hp build like Would it improve your experience? Sure. Is it necessary to get your company going if you need to put milk or oat milk or Yeah, because oat milk's good, right? Oh, absolutely. Yes. Yeah. Yeah less wasteful than almond milk Sure, so so a big part of a big part of affordability is whether you need to spend the money or not totally Okay, so let's say you do want to go with the new option form factors are obviously a big choice for the apple side Whether go laptops or iMac or iMac pro the new iMacs were released a couple days ago Which are interesting don't know much about them yet. So if you ask I'll I'll have to punt um And the mac pros are are are worth options as well And look like there's none of these are wrong like they're all certified By autodesk to give a good performance But you have to figure out like do you need portability? Do you just need like two or three or four grand to get in because you can hide it somewhere on a credit card or I don't know pick ash for it And on the other end, uh the mac pro it's it's customizable forever You can crack it open without any tools. You can clean it and it's got good scalable performance And that's ultimately why I decided on the mac pro because Oh This is not mine. Um, I've got three kids and a dog in an old house in the suburbs and Just dust is just everywhere and I knew that I needed Something I could just crack open once a year and just take it outside and blow the dust off it Um, especially when I was going to be banging on it all day every day and that was going to be My single income three kids spouse dog mortgage health insurance all that stuff So that's uh, that's boat milk is the reason I went into it. So Here is what I ended up buying This is not everything I bought on day one. This is accumulation of of day one plus scraping the other other things Which we will get into in three seconds. Um, but I just figured, uh, 34 minutes in you'd want to see At least a list of what someone bought Um, so you can do that uh that comparison thing But let's get into somewhat why I made some of these choices You know really real quick before you jump into that, uh, I just wanted to point out a couple things that were in the chat um One, uh, susanne sharping pointed out that uh b and h offers a credit card with a horrible name. It's the pay boo card Uh pa y b o o, but uh, if you buy something with the pay boo card, uh, they you get the tax back So it's essentially it's like buying something without tax That's a good thing to know tim farrell mentioned that there are small business loans available for very low interest Yes, very low interest. Um, definitely check with your accountant, uh, depending on where you are You know, the rules might be might be different. Those are great things to know But but right now you can still get a 20 000 low interest loan from the small business association Um, and that's enough to get anything going. So again, there's options. This is not I don't have the answers for you. These are things that you should be aware of in case this is helpful Um, and one just sorry just one last thing I'm going to uh at the end of this or later in the in the conversation and definitely when I post the The video up randy has uh created a google sheet with links to all of the equipment And uh and options and things like that that he's showing off today So if anybody wants to follow up with that, uh, that will be available. So thank you randy for putting that together Yeah, sure thing. Um processors right so Autodesk for flame recommends 12 or 16 But look guys if a seven-year-old trash can's gonna work an eight core is going to be fine, right? Um It may not be what you want eventually. It may not be what you need eventually, but it it will work Um, and everything in this computer is upgradable, right? Like you can put any intel z on w-series processor in this mac pro and use Within six screws of stuff and some thermal paste And there's videos out there of people doing it. So you don't need to spend a ton of cash If you don't have Have to or don't want it in the first place I wanted 16 cores because I knew that I needed other things like encoding and compression and all that other stuff So for me more cores are better than clock speed And using i step pro which i'm not affiliated with Measuring stuff like I keep it on and I just run different flame processes and see a lot of stuff still uses cpu So, you know, you just need to do some homework if you can To figure out what tools you use the most and but 12 or 16 cores Is going to be fine, right? Like you're just not going to choose You can't make a bad choice. It might be a better choice in five percent or three percent of instances, but that's about uh That's about it for those. Um, great to know the option is there totally well for sure, um Memory for love of god always by the minimum Okay, never and and apple is not the only one that does this apple del hp all those websites If you go to their part selector and configurators and you put in 120 gigs of ram They're going to charge a minimum two three grand for it When in reality you go to max sales.com and you can get 128 gigs of ram for under 800 bucks so Apple business account you save, you know, you spend a few grand you save that money instantly pays for your ram So, uh, that's huge thing and that's a common thread, but i'm sure there's someone out there that's that's That's looking at maxing out their ram From apple and it please don't Please don't um, please graphics. Please don't graphics cards, um This is a tricky one graphics cards are always tricky, right? Especially on the max side They're underperformers comparative to their linux counterparts I just buy as much as you can afford Right, and again, these are upgradeable too like the mpx modules Which are these little these cases that slide directly into double length double side double width pc iu slots in the mech pro There's no cable connections. You just slide the rascal in and it's super easy So, um, you know buy buy small if you want to start with an eight or 16 gig card and then upgrade over time Side 10 12 percent on each billable project to eventually upgrade yourself if you need to After you've measured yourself on is that pro maxing out your gpu in yep And then storage I have a little bit of a of a controversial Perspective and it comes to onboard storage. I like to buy just a little bit more than the minimum because On day one If i'm ordering a bunch of stuff it shows up and I can bill on it on day one, right? I can put my frame store on the on the drive. It's nvme. It's fast. It's three four thousand megabits a second And it'll serve you well So as a backup if my clients ever need disk encryption Any nonsense like that? I know that I've got for a few terabytes Ready to go for a frame store space no matter what? And it's cool and it's quiet. Did you partition that at all or do you just keep it as the four terabyte file? You may then just I just kept it at four. I'm not smart enough yet to know the difference um, but look you can also dual triple boot these rascals and you know You could set aside a terabyte for a linux a mac and a windows partition So those are all eventual interesting things to look at And let's just knock out some storage types, right? So you need a small system disk That's fast, right those for your applications is reduce your boot times that makes your your os feel good feel fast and quick and snappy You also need a frame store, right? So you need something that's medium sized As fast as you can afford so for me, that's two to kind of two terabytes and up for like frame store like if you're doing shot based or Or like pro rest stuff two terabytes will be more than enough But if you're doing 16 bitty xr's and holding lots of shows and conforms and versions and deliverables with every size rectangle You're gonna will kind of want it like three four five six seven eight terabytes something like that And then disaster recovery something big and slow and then archiving something also big and slow And you're going to need two or three of them that are local that are within your your premise AKA your house or your daughter's bedroom And uh and one off site whether it be web based or not Um, and then just a real quick graph for for people that are kind of new to disks So hard disk drives on the left They're super cheap You're super big these days and they're super great But obviously, you know, they don't quite give you the performance. You'll need to play back big frames So on one end is the hardest drive the spinning disks And you can get enclosures for those the the thunder bay and the pegasus are popular options 45 to like the 65 terabyte range for thunder bays are great And um, you know a little bit more for the pegasus Um, and then on the other end the NVMe's on the right hand side Like those are great sweet spots to be in for your frame stores for your caching The cost is gonna get you it's about 200 bucks a terabyte including Drives and enclosure or PCU cards or external closure if you're going that way um, so again just a quick kind of You know whistle wetter Sorry, um, no, that makes sense. I appreciate I appreciated Cool, uh, and then bonus for anyone that can share with me in the chat a medium fast animal To round out my chart here Um, so the the promise pegasus look it's super super popular. I don't own one actually I do I own the internal but not the one in this form factor Um, it's a hardware raid which means you can plug it into any computer or dual boot And it'll be recognized as a raid volume It offers a multitude of raid types if you don't know raid look into it and google that And look you buy it it shows up. It just works right and that's super super helpful The cons it comes with hard disk drives. It comes with spinning disks. They don't sell A chassis only version which is the reason I chose not to buy one But you can also get them secondhand and they hold their value really well So that's an option. Um, they're expensive and uh, currently there's no encryption Which is not a big deal for 95% of the people out there, but some for some people it is It's worth knowing to know Uh, here's the thunder bay and I've got a couple of these Um, they ship with hard disk drives or you can bring your own drives You can fill it with ssds, which I know is really common You could buy two or three of the small ones fill in with ssds and stripe all those three together to give you a super volume There's so many great ways to kind of do that Um, the cons are you got to bring your own disks. So you have to do research Uh, there's no encryption encryption And the soft raid that is a owc product is slower than a hardware raid. So it doesn't give you that max performance, but The performance is still pretty good. I still get eight or nine thousand megabits a second. Um, I'm sorry Wrong, you still get a few hundred megabits a second filling one of these with four or five disks Okay for frame store these NVMe raids are so where it's at right now for frame stores You can buy one of these uh, these cards for three 400 bucks sonnet makes one owc make one But you got to be careful. You definitely want pcie 3.0 with 16 lanes. Just know 16 lanes is your thing not eight They are silent and cool and Via if you if you don't use any of their onboard raid controllers and you just format it through Apple's disc utility you can support encryption Which still gives you encrypted volumes that can play back four or five to six k. No, no sweat, which is super great They are expensive and typically they're only raid zero or one Um, and for a cash disk controversial maybe but I think it's okay And I've been using it for six months. So, um You're my very have your set uh, you said you have your set to raid zero It's just you're they're all populated. It's just striped and you do disaster recovery clones or Whatever to the the uh, the thunderbays. Is that what you do? Yeah, so everything exists on an internal pegasus j4 that the the it's a raid five. That's so many letters Internal pegasus the thing that goes in the box. I got one of those um Everything that touches a job goes into that as like a project folder. That's my server And then anything that comes into flame gets cached to an nvme card like this So, okay, so the data is already in two spots Right and then every night. That's interesting. Okay, you know what I'm saying So if this thing dies, I can still read no problem. I can still read 3k spec off of A raid five volume in my machine so Anyway, that's so interesting because you know sometimes like the prevailing wisdom is like I'm never going to cash anything to my Frame store, but uh, that that's true. That's true But in doing so you've created a clone you've created yet another like a redundant backup True and the only reason I do that is because I have a lot of clients last minute that need archives And I don't want to have to ship them entire project folders and structures I just want to be able to ship them a flame archive with media baked in So they don't have to relink and do all that stuff. So oh brilliant. Okay. There's so many different ways to do it I know some people out there right now are like, I never cash anything awesome. That works for you It's not how my business is rolling. Uh, this is great though. I mean, you know, again like, uh It's a workflow. I never would have thought about unless, you know, I had heard about it from you It's great. Yeah, and you know what in hindsight, I may never even bought the Pegasus I would have just gotten with two of these one for uh, like like near line of projects and one for a cash Thanks, yeah, I'm thinking. No, anyway hindsight, right? Um, 2020 man It's like this year And then here's just a really crude schematic of how my data exists. So the system disks, um Are fair four terabytes and they get cloned every night to a local disk And then those drip feed to backblaze And if you guys don't use backblaze at home, like you just should like thanks Rene and Zeke for for sharing black backblaze with me It's six terabytes per month per computer unlimited storage External hard drives are kosher Oh, and sorry just to create it's not you said six terabytes a month. You mean six dollars a month? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yes. Six. Yes. Yeah, unlimited Amount of a man of uh, yeah data, right? So yeah, super worth it, right? Totally. I use it here. I love it Super great Uh, the project files again, they hit this project pegas The project files hit the 24 terabyte like a cache of the frame store and then every night they get double backed up locally to The thunder based sixes And then when a project kind of wrap, oh go ahead What are you using for the yellow drives for the the system disk clone overnight? Is it just some Yeah, so I bought thunder based sixes and i'm only using five of the disks in that enclosure In in the stripe in the raid five stripes So each of the thunder based sixes has six disks But i'm only using of five of those disks to make the raid five volume And so each enclosure has this like, you know I don't know Yeah, extra disk and so it's loved it's loved equally with legitimate disks. Yes, absolutely It's certified. It's ready to go and if the world if the end of the world happens and i'll Truck one of those out swap it into the raid five to rebuild if necessary That's great to know them and I never thought about about that with the the uh with the thunder base Because I have one I just have like a little shitty western digital like usb powered like bus powered Two terabyte drive that is my system disk clone every night, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah super helpful And then wasabi um wasabi is my is my preferred cloud storage. It is uh six dollars per terabyte per month And as soon as I have a project that wraps I can press the crap out of it and upload it to wasabi for for all of eternity or at least until I don't want to keep it or I could potentially not earn any money from it Mm-hmm And then Oh, yeah, quinn. I'm right there, buddy. I'm right right right there with you. So don't forget Uh for hard drives bigger hard drives are not necessarily better There's a sweet spot with hard drives as far as raid rebuilds and cost per terabyte. Make sure you do your homework Um prepare for raid rebuild times when a raid isn't filled with all of its volumes You got to be careful soft raid could take you two or three days to rebuild an eight terabyte drive So two or three days your data is inaccessible. Yeah No, it's accessible But it was just super slow Could be super slow and if you lose another disk you're screwed. So you got to be careful for that. Okay and um It's a quinn's point. Keep uh, you know prepare for lengthy, um soft raid certification times A soft raid when you get a disc you chuck it in it wants to It wants to tell you that the disc is good and so it'll write Um data over the disc three times read it back make sure it's good and give you like it's certified. It's it's good to use Um, you need two local copies on one off site minimum I kind of like three because i'm learning my way and i'm making mistakes, but it gives me options Do not deploy any of these systems without testing Get it going put some crap data on it. You don't care about pull a drive Check the rebuild process because it will happen to you when That the worst possible timing and you want to know how it works Because disc failure is a when not an if it will happen to you. Absolutely Um And archive versus disaster recovery So we want to Andy's favorite discussion one of my favorite discussion topics For sure and we're running a little low on time. So we won't go too deep into that Um, but like quinn just said keep a budget for backup disks. Have it on yourself I've got mine right here. Yep. That is such a fantastic tip. Yeah. Oh my god Yeah, and no like for me I'm really lucky because new egg warehouses are in indiana and i'm in chicago So I get them within 48 hours, but if you're not, please know like, you know, can you get this and so that's an important thing to know Um, just to give you guys some some data. I create on average between one and five terabytes a month So it gets to be a lot. Um at the end of that month end of a project. I prune and get rid of all the crap I don't think I need and i'm still averaging about a terabyte per month That uh, that someone's paid for that I want to hold on to because that's a reputation for me and my business if that makes sense Totally Okay compression if you don't do anything if you Disregard everything else in this presentation Compress your flame archives when you're done with them Um It saves 40 to 80 percent of your flame archives. I'm not joking. This is not exaggeration. I will show you How easy it is It doesn't take that much time for about 100 gigs on on a decent machine takes about an hour to compress Which ends up saving you bandwidth when you're sending it to clients or storage. It saves cash and it's say and Sorry, I screwed it up, but kika is a is a great free example of a software that'll do that for you And here's example. So last night or a while back I wrote an archive and on the left hand side is just the original flame archive It's 117 gigs Use kika to compress it an hour later. It's a 29 gigs It's amazing. So I had no, yeah, I'm downloading kika right after this. I'd never really never heard of it before look into it Um internet stuff. Okay, just some quick internet stuff to look after You got to know your local isp options. You have to know your bandwidth limits and your costs For example a slow month for me. I still use a terabyte of internet bandwidth I've got three kids in red home schooling streaming all that when I'm busy. I'm using five or six terabytes a month and my Xfinity isp guess what over one terabyte they start charging me extra And that's because you're on the unlimited plan, right? Yeah, hello paying unlimited. Um, yes, I don't have I I don't have gig up and down I've got a thousand down and 40 up. So it's slow on up Still not amazing, but it's still better than some And I make it work But um, you know, they will cap you but I budget $200 per month plus taxes and fees for my internet, which is insane But you just need to know maybe you only pay 50 and you got gig up and down you lucky bastards But this is something you need to know about and then measure it use your Your iStat Pro to measure your bandwidth up and down and to see what's going on there If you are not paying for a fast software like free retransfer, guess what it's slow But that's okay. You might use it for all the free stuff the easy stuff, but just know that it's going to be slow um for love of god know about the difference between megabits and megabytes And what how that translates into your real world performance because you definitely need to know how long it takes you to upload and download a 10 gig file You just need to you need to have that knowledge because it'll dictate everything It's a totally underappreciated Bit of of data for your running your business at home is the amount of time it takes Renee touched on that last week too. It's so so so key Yeah, it backs you into every delivery and every posting and every time you share data for sure And also look if you're a pcoip friend, then make sure you know your latency to local markets And it has no I no relevance of where you are Geographically it has everything to do with a bunch of stuff. You cannot control. So if you're not getting Under 50 60 70 milliseconds depending on who you ask and what flavor or what time of the year it is and That could not be an option for you And then for you also definitely need to know some vpn basics All of my clients have them vpn into their places and you definitely need to have an understanding of how that works They will help you set it up, but you still should know basic home networking and routing Static ip addresses for you will save the day when it comes to flames. So definitely look into that 5g backup This is one area that I wish I was It was better at but I don't have a backup and I desperately need internet backup And then your typical workflow like if you're doing exr's Home internet might not work for you. You might need to switch to pro res quad 4 Something like that Yep, definitely do a test because sending one pro res file is a whole different experience than sending, you know 300 exr's Absolutely, and if you're sending flame archives You need to test that crap because using file zilla or ftp sites with ascii versus binary transfers It will totally bone you know, don't know what's going on make you miss a deadline So if that's a thing that you're involved with do the research and figure it out and test Quickly on some transfer things You need a free slow way to transfer small files like we transfer free or dropbox google drive Scripts emails pre-probooks all that stuff. That's really helpful You also need a fast way to send project At to present files to clients frame. I owe wire drive digital pigeon And I totally blanked on the evar's system, but he'll share it with us in a second. I'm sure I'm just not familiar with it Started a clock There you go And then you also need a fast way to share large files either the pro version or the paid version of we transfer Like rene mentioned last week She and I are both fans of massive which is a pay-per-gigabyte download service You can upload terabytes no charge you download terabytes. They charge you per the per the gigabyte And it's really fast and it's scriptable and it's helpful and it Integrates with a bunch of stuff like slack and it's so worth it Um, and then you need a fast way to back up your stuff look into wasabi or back plays to get you started Um, and then just be careful and use i-stat pro not affiliated But make sure you're measuring because very few services of these will saturate or max out your bandwidth Okay power Man, I didn't realize I knew this until until I did Yep The sunday before I deliver Personally my most important project in the history of my career What is my neighbor doing? Maintenance on his whole home backup generator fries a circuit brownouts around and I'm running Extension cords to my neighbor's house three houses down to keep working You don't think you're gonna need it for love of god buy one if it does nothing more then show you how Expensive these rascals are to operate Just chilling my mac pros a 400 watt average at idle Bumps up to about a thousand watts I pay 13 cents a kilowatt hour Cost me 50 bucks a month minimum just to have the darn thing on Right So it is absolutely a cost that you need to be aware of and look into and it could dictate whether you buy An iMac pro and have a laptop with direct storage to run your backup so that you don't have expensive machines Pulling a thousand watts an hour and you can have your 80 watt macbook air upload some stuff to the cloud with the car drive attached It's definitely worth looking into Battery backup helps. I like these they come in three different flavors and costs Honestly, I'd buy three I'd have one for my computer one for my monitoring speakers and one for my internet And that'll give you approximately 20 minutes To 25 minutes to 180 minutes respectively and it comes to battery backup, which is totally worth it And if you can get a dedicated circuit I can't tell you how many times my mac shut down before I got these things when my wife was in the kitchen running the the kettle and My kids were playing video games in the other room And also heat So I have a thermometer in my room. This room is 10 degrees warmer than any other room in my house Is my darn mac pro. So just know that's a it's a factor for you It's totally a factor. I have I deal with it here too and I just have a laptop two screens external storage and me So for monitors, I know we're running tight on time Um monitors are tough. It's hard to to know What to buy because it's they're expensive and you don't necessarily want to test a bunch of them um You really can't go wrong if you ask around the forums And logic a lot of people love the bend cues the hp the del and the isos I recommend a 4k screen and if you pc oi p you should match resolutions for your host computer Uh, if if at all possible, it'll save the day I like wire cutter.com for 4k monitor reviews. They're really helpful. So check out check those out Um real quick. I know we're running low on time But client sessions are a big thing um, I don't Offer much I haven't been asked to offer much my clients are stretched thin and the last thing I want to do is spend wasted their their fridays staring at my face So, um, if so, I would just use zoom or evercast. Those are good options. Zoom obviously Leaves a little bit to be desired with security, but there are other better options out there That are software based that are easy to get in and out of that don't require a huge deal And honestly skype and microsoft teams and screen share just see me those are totally fine as well for non critical color The black magic web presenter is totally great because it uses usb on board Which means that everything always thinks it's a webcam But that's the bad thing because everyone always thinks it's a webcam and it's only 720p Just know that this whole category is uh, it's just prepared to be disappointed because everyone's going through this There's low stock lots of limitations expensive secondhand markets and be careful for that Other just miscellaneous stuff. Um, look out for mike's back burner guide Do not install flame until you've read it. I'll link to it in my document It'll set up all of your networking and the host name so that you don't get burned once you long Launch flame and back burner doesn't work Definitely know about csru till the system integrity protection that katalina so eloquently offers It's a pain in your butt and anytime you have problems Installing anything. This is the culprit Again, just turn off os and software updates Usb is probably the third most frustrating part of my world when it comes to like extension cables and all that jazz um, and then flame versions Just because you shouldn't doesn't mean you can't and what I mean is Have a few different versions of flame. I know everyone thinks that's naughty But even just last week I took on a job and build the day because I was willing to rebuild my machine for an older version of flame Takeover someone's archive and deliver a job So just know that it should be in your repertoire. You should have the capabilities to do that Learn the install and install procedures Um, and I have three disc images ready to go of the three most common be used flame versions On my local machine ready to go And then other little things that help team viewer of vnc any desk make sure you understand how to remote control on your computer It means you can get away from your desk means you can go the heck outside and kick off downloads from somewhere else If you like this stuff and you like more of it check out hugo's desk Six months ago. He did an amazing presentation that takes all this stuff And then like pluses it to 11 or 12 and walks through all the stuff. He's built over the last five years It's inspiring and scary but definitely worth it And then finally all the icons in this presentation were used on behalf of the noun project and thank you to these artists for allowing me to use those and Thank you Dude, that was amazing amazing There are a couple of questions in the in the chat and I have one from facebook live Let's see here. The first one from uh, the chat was susan saying, uh, what's your monthly cost approximately for all the tech Oh If you don't mind sharing Okay You know what? I don't mind Hardware is about 500 bucks a month for the loan A license if you do monthly is 560 something us um Other various bits and pieces like for me 100 of my internet counts You know 50 of my electric electricity counts Cell phone counts if you put all that, you know depending on what you want to include Another let's just say it's you know 1300 to 1800 all in a month Which for knuckleheads like us could be solved in in two days of booking per month ish So yeah, something something like that I can I have it all written out for accountants So if you want more specs like sit like grab me offline, but Something like that Totally Theo from facebook live is asking do you have any advice on remote setups? Not high resolution enough to see fine detail in the comps all based on bandwidth I assume are there any tricks to get a better preview A better preview uh I guess if you're having uh Low-resolution if you're having it's it really is kind of you know, it's funny It's all I mean we deal with it even the pc over ip connection. I have back to my office. It's all latency Yeah, and like you said, it's all out of your control Yeah, it's tough. I would say there's a few things you can control Uh, and the things you can control are spending as much money you can on your internet Um optimizing your router at home. For example, there are so many things on your router Um that you can do to improve performance like if you get anything from your isp Look like just turn off all the crap. There's extra monitoring stuff and that that increased my performance just through my router from 400 megabits to a gigabit Through my router not including up and down um Run ethernet cables like i'm sorry. Just do it buy a 50 foot one. I know andy. You got one. I got one Run ethernet and aside from that that's you know, unless there's specific use cases Um, that's about all I got for that. Yeah, I I couldn't believe like My wi-fi base station or whatever is right below me Yeah, and it's so it's like this much of a floor and I figured that was enough And when I plugged in that ethernet cable it was Like in night and day the other thing that's been a gotcha sometimes is The backups that I have going over back plays Sometimes what I need to do is schedule those so they're not happening during uh like peak time that that has been back to And so you can see using is that pro what specific services are using your bandwidth And then you can pause back plays and you can provide file zilla or massive or we transfer or safari With the maximum stuff and you would never know that if you weren't measuring it So measure it and then sometimes there are things you can tweak to at least get you to where you should be not where you Are that what you are Yeah, another question from facebook lab. I got eddie from eddie pinheiro How would you operate an hpz workstation by remote on a laptop at home? rgs Yeah, totally rgs. So hp Designed and ships for free with every hp machine Uh rgs and i'm not an rgs expert my experience at big studios has been with teri dici But rgs right now is by far the you know It depends on who you ask Let me say this there are many people that do what we do that publicly love rgs very much and rgs has been recently Uh helpful when it comes to solving Stuff like 48k audio and monitoring audio. So rgs it comes with every hp and it's free to look into that That's definitely something you need to have on your radar Awesome does anybody have any other questions for randy? Oh, right Well, thank you, man. Thank you so much. This is absolutely awesome Yeah, I hope I appreciate it. I kind of hope I got enough places With enough depth, but you can always reach out to me. Um Okay, don't tell anybody I've got family visiting and they think this is going for another couple hours. So, uh Right, so if anyone wants to email Just far away But you're really you're helping randy as much as randy is helping you Yeah, exactly. And even if you just want to tell me I've got something between my teeth that's appreciated. Um Yeah, if you can reach me you've got a very low latency good connection See zoom is working. See what I did there? You did great. Um, but yeah, you can reach out to me on um on logic or um or email me. Um Yeah, I'll help you out. However I can um So, yeah, I appreciate the time andy Awesome, uh, yeah, would you mind if uh if I publish the um The uh your google slide presentation Or if I shared the link to that, that's fine. Yeah, you can show it. Okay, cool. Yeah, wonderful So kevin, I'll put that up with uh with the when I post this episode on logic.tv. Yeah Um, all right, let me close this out then Thank you randy So coming up on uh logic live next week and I'm going to put the links in chat Next week we're doing using flame with shotgun We've got alan lettere and jesse morrow from instinctual and la are going to show us how they use Uh flame with shotgun every day and again, that was a recommendation from uh from one of the From someone on logic that they'd like to know more about that subject So please tune in and I did just put the link to register in um In the chat I'm going to be taking the week after that off and then thank you to morry rosenfeld for the amazing suggestion Of having like a little social hour. So on august 30th We are going to do logic live summer party a virtual summer party, of course Uh at 3 p.m. Eastern time. So if you just go to logic.tv slash 2020 summer party, you can fill out the registration form It's going to be on zoom. I've got uh a license of silhouette paint to give away from our friends at barris effects And it's really uh going to be uh just an opportunity for us to hang out to socialize Everybody will be able to turn their cameras on Chat with each other and really, you know, uh, it'll it'll be a way to say thank you at that point It'll be six months of doing logic live and uh, none of this would have been possible without all of you Being so supportive and tuning in and making recommendations. And so Uh, definitely let's let's all have some fun. It's going to be bring your own Bring your own drinks cocktails, of course, and I I moved it back to 3 p.m. So at least it'll be noon on the west coast here in america Which uh, at least is Kind of socially acceptable to start drinking especially on a sunday Let's abruptly end that music. Uh, I in the middle of production on a big job right now And so I didn't get a chance to post a logic podcast episode last week But I will try to get to it this week. Uh, if you haven't subscribed On either apple podcast or stitcher, please do And of course this episode and all of the past logic live episodes are available at logic.tv as well as some other great Logic content. If you get a chance, please subscribe to our youtube channel. We're up at over 500 so far Which is great. I'd love to get over a thousand So, uh, get your friends get your neighbors to go ahead and subscribe and thank you Of course, as always to cynosis oceana solutions integration and support for digital content creators find out more about their remote workflow solutions at digital I'm sorry at cynosis.io That's going to do it everybody. Thank you very very much and i'll see you next time