 live without having to set up another box or another input for that Skype, but one of the really neat features we helped with Akaku the other last fall was on their elections they wanted to bring in some of the constituents through Twitter into their live broadcast without having to type all that stuff in. So they make a Chrome browser plug-in that just lets you mark the text and send that to your lower thirds so that you can fill that in without having to have someone type it. And it just makes for instant live feedback and instant graphics. I've got to see this machine. By the way, welcome to Think Tech. Think Tech talks on Think Tech. I'm your host, Jay Fiedel, and we're talking today with about new products from New Tech. New Tech is our company, our supplier, through ComputerWise. We're going to talk to Kurt and Lisa Wood of ComputerWise. They're here today. They're here to talk to people who have tricasters and other New Tech products here in Hawaii. They do a lot of work in Hawaii. And they're just back from the NAB show. We're going to address the issue of whether New Tech is alive and well. I think it is in the video space, the video switching market. So if you want to ask a question or participate in discussion, you can tweet us or you can call 415-871-2474, as usual. So our guest Kurt and Lisa are right here. Welcome to the show, Kurt and Lisa. Thanks for having us. It's great to have you. They are the principles of ComputerWise. They are resellers of tricaster and other video switching technology. They're familiar, if not intimate with all things New Tech and bring us current on the new TC1 switcher. You want to hear about that as well as other great technology we saw at NAB show and the other lies tell us about. So let's begin with the TC1. The TC1, I just saw it at the NAB show. Caroline Lee and I, we went and we saw it and you talked about it and I was so excited about it. And that's the one you were talking about a minute ago when you rolled into the show, Kurt. Tell us more. TC1 is New Tech's newest tricaster machine. It's a 16-input switcher. Two of those channels are actually Skype channels. So you can bring in guests directly to your switcher without having any additional hardware or software. It gives you a great idea. Oh yeah, it's fabulous for this kind of a show or any kind of show where you want to bring Skype cars, but they actually allow you to bring in all kinds of things. You can bring in Macintosh. You can bring in an iOS device like an iPad. You can bring in, use Android phones for cameras or iPhones for cameras and all those can be brought directly into your switcher without really very little setup, without any real stress of how to do that. So I can send a bunch of people to an event. Everybody with an iPhone is this true? And I can have them feedback into the switcher using some kind of NDI type server? Yeah, what NDI does, it's actually a, it's a, what people are talking about workflow for IP. It basically allows you to bring in any connected device on your network, be it a computer or a camera, a DVD player, pretty much anything that you want to bring in, you could bring in directly into your tricaster as a video source. So I can send out half a dozen people with cell phones and they can go to the event, stand at opposite sides and walk through the crowd and reach out and get sound and video things that are happening around them. And nobody will know actually that they're broadcasting back. I can get it here in the studio downtown in Pioneer Plaza with a TriCaster 460 or my TriCaster 410. And I can use those as shots, each one of those cameras. And I can cover that event without anybody in the crowd ever noticing that there's no camera there. That's correct, yeah. Phones just for cell phones. Yeah, and not only iPhones but Android phones, whatever, whatever, tablets, anything that can get on to a Wi-Fi network. This is going to change things, don't you think? Oh, yeah. Big time. Yeah. So Lisa, you've been watching this for, oh, how many years now? You were kind of involved in this for, you know, it's amazing because you're only 17 years old. I don't know how that works. It must be really exciting because in your time, you guys, you have seen the thing expand like Topsy. It's amazing the way things have happened. And you're right there. And I envy you that. I want your job. I want your job. And so can you talk about, you know, the quality and the speed of that expansion? And can you talk about where it's going to expand from here? Sure. NDI in a nutshell basically is making all these connections available to you all the time, any time you want. And it doesn't matter what size of camera you got, what kind of resolution, if the cameras even connected to your machine anymore. As long as you can get to it through some type of an internet protocol, we can bring that in and use that as a source. You mentioned Live View a little bit ago and you guys use Live View. It's a fabulous product. You can do that same kind of thing as you described with an iPhone or with an Android phone. Yeah. As long as you can get to the internet and get it somewhere that we can see it. Live View, by the way, is it really company? And they make this technology about the size of a Sivar box. And it bonds up like six, you know, cell phone providers. And it takes all that, all those connections that makes them into a very high speed broadband, you know, connection through a server. And we get it as a shot. No matter, you know, how far away we are, most places in the state, we can get really good pictures. So we send people out for think tech on the street and report back on a regular basis. And, you know, to me, that's the future of all of this. It's not so much that, you know, we're going to get perfect pictures and, you know, national network quality of switching. It's that we can get the news. We can go out into the crowd. We can cover things. Stack right now. We don't have to bring a satellite truck with us. We don't have to have 27 people in the field. We can do it with one person, actually, hot Live and Raw. It's what the people want. It's what the people want. They want those short takes. They want those, you know, a minute maybe or two. And they want it on scene. They want to have it happen right there. And you guys are involved in that. That's a tremendous change. Oh, yeah. And what so where's it going to go from here? Well, I, I assume what's happening now is this this change over where we lose, we lose all these different kinds of cables and different kinds of connections, we go we lose worrying about if it's an SDI camera hooking to an SDI input or if it's a component camera hooking, can we get that in there or an S camera or composite? We lose we lose all that what we end up with and Lisa was supposed to bring a bundle of cables. I bet you forgot that we basically come to how do we get this particular piece of machinery or this piece of software to our tricaster, which is basically going to be ethernet or wireless. And once that change over occurs, you'll see cameras that basically will produce NDI, which is a network device interface, streams directly out of the camera, so if I kept all these different component and SDI cables, etc, you're just going to have probably ethernet cable. So all this wiring that we see in the studio will go down to one wire to a router switch. And that will be that. Yeah, well, that'll be amazing. And then this wireless through a wireless, you know, module of some kind. Yeah, you can do wireless. However, you can get that signal to for the tricaster to see your network. There doesn't have to be a tricaster any longer. There's a lot of people who have adopted NDI already. There's probably a dozen switcher companies have adopted that NDI is available to anybody that wants it. Do Tech will give you the SDK. And you can produce your own product or interface your product into their to use their stuff. It does not have to be a new tech device, if you want, there's other companies. Panasonic, for example, they just showed a little switcher that they've adopted NDI on and v mix has one and Streamstar has one. And even even some of the people that make the particular graphics engines like Chiron, Chiron has an NDI type of device to give their graphics. And so does bizarre T and so does I guess Ross has adopted it for their graphics engine now too. Well, you know, we're walking around and the nav show, we're seeing you guys there. That was my my thought to that. We have NDI everywhere. Everybody is is communicating by by the internet, including cameras hither and yon. This is going to change the cable situation. I mean, we don't have a camera to show you all the cables on the floor, but this is a live. I have this bouquet of cable over VGA and then I was to hold up a cat six cable and compare the two. But yeah, literally just tons less cables. And even is it the NFL that was doing all of their switching from one switching to do their replays. Oh, yeah, there's a central office for doing replays. But yeah, the whole the whole dream is just that you get down to a regular old and everybody has a network already, you already have a network. I have a network if we could get if we can put our video on a network without replacing all that stuff with expensive pieces, which since we've already got let's use it. And that's the holy grail of IP workflow and NDI does that. It takes your existing infrastructure for your network and makes it into a video to a video distribution system. That's the thing of the future wireless. But you know, question, have you seen I mean, I didn't work for this at the nav show and we should talk about the nav show in general. But have you seen anything where you take an existing camera, and you plug into one of the ports on the existing camera, and it's a little module that you know, straps onto the camera fits on the back of the camera. And that is the wireless. In other words, no transitional problems at all. Yeah, besides I view there's many other manufacturers that do that. There's a company called terror deck that is really popular right now that does kind of the same thing. There's all kinds of companies out there that are doing that to make it easier for you to get your and basically it ends up to be a little box that takes it from whatever you got into either a video signal or possibly live use one of the adopters of NDI to enter that both of them do that. They will provide you an NDI signal so you can just plug that into your network and your tricaster or whatever switcher that use NDI will see that. You guys are a fixture. I mean, a well known fixture. Everybody can recognize you. And it's not because of your red hair curbs. Clear about that. But I mean 104,000 people showed up with millions square feet of space, something close to 1000 breakout sessions, and 1,800 exhibitors including New Tech and all these other guys. So what was what was it like for you? You've been there every year, I think, and how is it changing and how will it change? Are you going to Shanghai? Are you going? Are you going to New York? It's coming soon. You know, basically communications are changing enough. And the way that we do things are changing the point where are going to these shows can be virtual now. So we could see that with with someone else going there or someone else showing us that show, you're going to see online training, where you have interactive training and I'm actually set to do this right now, or if somebody wants to be trained, they can call up instead of paying me to go out and be on site, I can actually train them via Skype and show them how to do things right in my office. So this virtual visit visiting and virtual tours of things are really going to be big this next little bit. Now video is a great thing for education pieces like we use the lynda.com for you know, premium and all that's very useful. And you know, it's all about software as far as I'm concerned too. So like for example, I was inspired, I'm always inspired by the NAB show by some of the software vendors, there's a lot of software scheduling software, for example, and playlist software. So we started writing our own software and file maker Apple's file maker product. And that's really changing the way you know, we do business, we schedule things, we communicate, it's all virtuals on the net. It's right there. Anybody, anywhere, even in jammies, you can get information that you need to have. It's all coming together as a confluence, or may I say a further confluence of software. Have you followed that? I mean, I know that's at the heart of all the new tech products anyway. But you know, what's the sense of it? Have you talked to the programmers? I haven't for a while. I used to once a year, we'd kind of sit up front with Andrew and Dr. Cross and he would kind of give us a little bit of insight of what they're going for. But this year was such a busy year, we did not really get a chance to talk to those guys about that. But really, this whole changeover of what you're talking about, I think, where, yeah, you go to these sites and you can download the videos, or you could maybe have a life professor at Linda. Linda would basically provide you a life professor so that you're having a two-way conversation with that person and getting the actual question that you have answered online right there. And that's where it's really headed. The picture of the equipment. So if you have a problem on our tricasters, I can call you up on Skype, and you can flash a picture of the ports involved or the boards, or I can flash a picture and we can communicate, at least as well as if we were together in the studio. Like virtual technical support. Yeah, that's the greatest thing in the world. Why didn't we have that before? If you have to use your own technology, eh? Yeah. But that's what New Tech actually has been known for, is the fact that all of their technology is software-based. So it's so much easier for them to upgrade because they don't have these specialized pieces of hardware that they need to change at. It's all software. So as the hardware pieces of the computer get faster and they're able to do more, then it's just simpler for them just to change the software up to meet whatever the hardware specs can do. So is New Tech global? Is it out there in Europe and all that? Absolutely. I would bet their greatest market right now is China. I would dare say that I've seen them, I know some of the people that work in their EMU division and they are constantly visiting all over the of Asia and Europe is heavily involved in it. Most of the television companies that you see in Europe are now using Tricaster and New Tech products. So I saw a study the other day that 80% of all Fortune 500 companies use Tricaster in one way or New Tech products in one way or another. So I mean, they're a huge presence all over the world, all over the globe. I just got a message last night on my phone from a person that we know that's also involved in New Tech and he was like, ah, there was like New Tech posters in the background. He's like, hey, are you guys here? And I'm like, where? And he says, we're in Singapore. Or they were at a convention at the New Tech booth in Singapore. Just assumed we would be there. Yeah. The new communication. Yeah. And the new teaching, the new, you know, influencing. And it's citizen journalism. It changes things. If there's one place you can do citizen journalism. It's with the Tricaster. It's with New Tech. I'm so glad. You know, sometimes you pick the right technology and you watch it and it grows under you and you realize you're on the right path. And that's what happened here. I am so glad we're using Tricaster. We're committed to Tricaster. We're committed to you guys. You guys are the ones who put us in touch and made it happen. Thank you. Thank you for that over the years. I wanted more. So what is your trip about this time? It's basically showing integration of other products from other companies. The Cindy, I think is really big because it basically, it lets you marry products that would normally not be in your production. In your production, if you had, for instance, a Blackmagic card that was in your PC, or we can actually use that as an input device. We can use Magewell or Bluefish or any number of other companies' products. So we're going to show that. We're going to show how the Skype works inside of the TC1. I made a little list of all the different devices we're bringing in. There's, I think there's 13 different kinds of cameras. There are, we're bringing in PowerPoint and some web camera stuff, some 4K stuff. And that's one thing I fell to mention is, NDI is basically resolution agnostic. It doesn't care if it's 2K or 4K or standard F. But it can be 4K, no problem. Oh, yeah, or 6K or 8K. Or 8K, or we saw that at the NAV show. Yeah, it really doesn't matter. It's future proofing your production, future proofing your ability to do things that you have now and letting you expand is something that we may not even know it's coming up, but it's going to work. So it's all about that. I'm trying to think of some of the other fun things I've got to show them. You always bring your bag of joy. Yes. All of this equipment so you can show it to people. And our purpose this time actually is the community college puts on a PCAT IT symposium, which brings us over. And we get the opportunity to meet with teachers from K-12, K-12, have them in a classroom situation for like 30 minutes. And basically it's just to educate our educators of not specific brands that are out there, but why do we want this technology in our schools and in our classrooms? And he loves to educate people so he's just happy, happy. And Olalo Community Television is always good to allow us to do a public event there where we can set up all of this equipment and again it's all about education. We want to educate people. It doesn't matter what equipment you already have, but let us show you how to integrate this new technology, the NDI. And that's what we hope to accomplish this trip. Well what I also like, further to that point, is that you can have a tricaster, you can have the new tech technology, but there's always a path to better. What I mean is when something new comes out like the TCI, it's not like your old equipment is not a value, it's a value. There's a resale market. It holds its value, it holds its price, right? And so I can trade it in or sell it at a good price and then go to the next one and you guys facilitate that. So that's, we appreciate that a lot and that's our track too, because you have to keep current. But we have to anyway, we're compulsive. But you know some of those educational institutions, they can go for something that's not, you know, not frontier. They can go for one step behind because they got to learn. So there's a whole passage, there's a whole process. Am I right? Yep. Well you can incorporate things that you couldn't incorporate. They may, they may seem that they're antiquated and outdated now to you, so that you might have shelved those, but they did something that was really neat that you wanted to bring into your show and you can't do it right now because maybe they've discontinued that well with NDI technology. You may be able to resurrect that equipment and bring it back into your show and use it. Yeah. As long as it's PC based or Mac based or some kind of computer-based thing, we can probably resurrect that and bring that into our productions now. You guys are resellers for other companies as well as some new tech and you mentioned that you're doing business now with data video. Can you tell us about data video? I'd looked, it has a lot of offerings on B&H photo, lots of lots of stuff and it has a website that doesn't quit, but can you summarize what they do? Sure, data video is a company that's been around for a very long time, much like NewTek. They, as a matter of fact, one of my very first switchers was a data video switcher, but they make all different kinds of solutions, much like you're using here, they may have an adapter that takes component to SDI or SDI to HDMI, that kind of thing, but they also make smaller switchers that will fit, in some ways they resemble NewTek and in fact they make a switching surface with a set of cameras and they have some very unique cost affordable solutions as well. And portable. Very portable, yeah, they make one that's in a briefcase and I've seen a couple of those on B&H. One of our compatriots was supposed to be here to show up, but he took sick, but he was going to bring one of those and it's a very small little box like this that basically that's your switcher, much like a tricaster without not as many bulk bells and whistles, but it's a hardware-based switcher, it always works, or very solid, very good company. Yeah, there's a lot of them coming on the market, I mean, namely 1800 of them. Yeah, that's a nab show. A lot of them coming from outside the U.S., I mean there were manufacturers from South America, there were manufacturers certainly from China, with a lot of stuff that looked American, sorry, but very American. And you're up for that matter, so you know what you have is a complete movement, it's a movement in equipment and it reaches everybody and allows these kids to learn, these kids learn that what does that mean? I mean we had some sixth graders here yesterday sitting in these chairs, right, who were into video and that's what they were already dedicated, at least as dedicated as a sixth grader can be dedicated, and they want to do that for a career. Well, all these people want that because there's something really sexy about video, isn't there, that's why you guys do it, I know. You know, I gotta really hand it to Hawaii for outfitting these elementary kids, we've been to probably 30, 40 elementary schools and they are educating these kids young and they're some of the best cameramen or fifth and sixth graders I've ever seen, but yeah, we've, we've, especially in Maui there's, oh, probably half a dozen to a dozen schools. The state of Hawaii in their younger education has just embraced this technology and it makes me frustrated with some of the other states on the mainland, you know, it's like why don't you get it, you know, these guys get it, and that, all of that that you just said is why it's so important that NDI is here now because they can take new tech products, they can take some of these new products, if they see redeeming values, you know, in certain products, bring them all together and they, they no longer have to choose one brand and stick with it, you know, or be left with a doorstop when the technology changes, it's just, it's allowing everyone to bring whatever they have to the table, hook it up and and do a production. It's a democratization, it's happening around us, it means that anybody and everybody can get in, the price of entry is really not burdensome and you can get in there and do journalism if you want, you can do a feature like we do, and you can make movies, you can do art, all these kids are being empowered and I, once they get hooked, I think they stay with it, a lot of them stay with it, so they go on for careers in that regard, and it also means, I'm sure you guys have seen this, that Hawaii has a special creative streak in it, Hawaii has people who like this stuff and hopefully, and I'm knocking wood, I'm knocking wood Hawaii, you know, will have them stay here, they will stay, they will do art here, they will, you know, make us famous for the art, I think that's coming, like we have music, the music is coming back at a rapid rate and it's all connected, music and art and video and we can be a very expressive state, this is an alternative to tourism if you will, but you guys have seen that, you hear a lot, you come a lot, you talk to everyone who's involved, who wants to get involved in video, you're sort of the godfathers, I mean godfathers and mothers of video in Hawaii, I mean, you know, serious video, so we really appreciate that you come around, we appreciate that you come around and do talk shows with us oh thank you, in Las Vegas and even better here, we appreciate that Yeah, you're great you guys, well okay, we'll make a closing statement here, take that camera, camera one, it wants you, it's the people A closing statement, oops Gosh, I think the closing statement would be that I think that the vision of having people make television around homes is now possible, not only possible, you can do a great job at doing it, if you want to be creative and you want to get a message out, tell a story, anyone can do that now and it's a wonderful time to be alive Wow, how much of that do you agree with Lisa? Oh, I agree with everything What would you add to it? I would add that it's wonderful to be, you know, available in this time and just to, I just, I challenge everyone, reach out and grasp this new technology and don't be afraid of it and use it because once you use it and you'll feel that creativity that Jay is talking about, then the world is your oyster Everyone has a story, everyone has something interesting to say Absolutely, wow Let your story be told You guys are not so much technical today, you're artists today, you're financiers today Thank you so much, Kurt, you're our guru Thank you And Lisa, thank you, you're our access to Kurt Thanks very much for coming down, you guys are great And you talk to me, thanks