What do London and pistachios have in common? It's the Tim and Tim 2022 event recap. Join us! Hey everybody, welcome back to Tim and Tim talk event production. My name is Tim Kay the executive producer of Argus HD. And of course Tim Kerbavaz - how are you? The technical director of Talon Audio Visual. It's great to be here. Tim my friend. It's good to be back. It's great to be back. Isn't it? Listen before we jump into the episode, we have a good one planned for for our audience. Let's give a shout out to the audience Tim. Let's first thanks to the viewers that have been watching the episodes. We really appreciate it. This is an interactive show. So thank you to those and also a big shout out to the new folks that have been finding us in our more recent episodes. We hope that we continue the earning your viewership time. We know that's valuable. And speaking of this podcast, Tim. We've been kind of delinquent in recording why is that we've been really busy right? I mean delinquent Tim like just throw us right under the bus, right, but that's fair. It's it's a fair word and let's so that's what this episode is gonna be about is just Tim. Let's just pick a couple of our ones and you know what? Let's be let's just not we don't have to pick the most fanciest the sexiest shows that we've done the ones with the most bells and whistles. Let's just pick something that I don't know interests you and I and then share that with the audience and see if that connects. So what do you want to talk about first Tim? What show would you want to start this episode with? Oh Tim. Why are we starting with me? Fine? Fine? Let's go. Alright, I got this ready. Here. It is. This one's a first one as we like to say. We like to go to the other side of the pond on this one for what is a REMI production. Tim, do you know what a REMI production by the way stands for? I always forget what the acronym I think it's remote integration model? I think it's what it stands for. Remote and then integration at the end, maybe? I I don't know the answer- Remote integration model I think is what stands for but I'm not actually I don't actually remember. You know, this is one of these legacy words that are around so okay somebody in the comments maybe put what you think REMI is because I think depending on what coast you're from they're gonna have a different interpretation of this. So we have a REMI production. We flew to London. But Tim, what do you mean by REMI? We haven't defined what we're talking about. Gotcha. Good point Tim. So REMI production is essentially only sending out the core crew to the on-site location. And what we're gonna do is send the signals back to actually, Tim, right back here. So as you can see our control our inbound and it was switched right over here. And the event- Okay, this is a model that's used for sports broadcast a lot Tim, but not necessarily a lot in corporate. And it's new to sports, right? This is a new relatively new model. Now we're seeing this actually Pac-12 is a big one of the early adopters of this where they're just sending out connections. So yeah, we're really excited. As a matter of fact. This is one of our first shows that we definitely are furthest show that we've done a REMI production for. And so what we did was we sent a team of it was myself and my video director, Mark. And that's it! We flew to London as you can see in this space. It's absolutely a beautiful space and there you see our camera operators. They're actually local. The cameras are local. I mean Tim when I tell you that we just brought the bare minimum, that's all we brought. One of the big discussions that we had in this production one of the fun conversations, you know, you and I spent a lot of time is like, okay, how do we sync the cameras? And what is the best way but also the most cost effective way right or should we say cost prohibitive because some of the easiest solutions were ones that essentially just broke the bank, right? So what did you end up choosing and what technology and why? Cool. So this is we kind of actually did this REMI a little different. What we did was we brought our camera cut local so you can see Mark with the switcher in front of him and essentially instead of sending three feeds back. We're only going to send one feed back. And so you're basically saying well why not just stream that? Well, there's a couple more steps. We had video rolls that we had breaks, we had graphics. And plus our encoding over here is much more robust and powerful. So by sending just one person there to switch our feed, we now brought it all back here where we can control, we can add the graphics, we can add the elements, we could use our fiber gigabit, and also our satellite backup in case we needed to and what we used to deploy this was are our TVU backpack, you know, big s*** out. This is our first time we've we've we known of TVU for a long time, but this is the first time that we're really used it and they were it's an amazing product. Let me just tell you that. One second latency, 1080 30 P, or was it 60p? I can't- it's one of those two and no hiccups for a multi-day show. Absolutely perfect. And so you mentioned you have this control room in San Francisco that you're adding the graphics over this on. How are you monitoring that broadcast program from London? Yes. Yes, that was another one of the conversations that we had right Tim. So this is we had a couple different options with this. You could use the technology that they provide but Tim if I can be honest with our viewers right now, it's kind of expensive and at the end of the day, it's really just a web RTC. So you know what we did Tim? We just used a web RTC. And the beauty about this was we didn't have to pay licensing charges for each station that we put a drop at, we essentially created a Google video hangout we put and you can see one of the photos there. So basically one of the iPads in between Mark and myself is the program returned back here from San Francisco that was sent to London. I believe the delay was like just under just over a second. But what else is really cool is we had our camera ops log in and so they were using that as a return they could see graphics. Oh, by the way, we're talking with everyone with unity comms - worked very very well. And so that's how we just got away with it. You don't need to use the expensive licensing features. In this use case, just using a video conference whether it be Zoom, whether it be Google would work fantastic. And that also allowed folks off-site potentially to watch it as well, right? They didn't even have to be in the room in London or San Francisco. They could have been at home on unity and an iPad. Totally and you know just like you're saying, you know anywhere and you don't have to worry about you know paying, you know per license paying for fees you so that it was a we're really happy with that solution. Really interesting. You know, it's interesting you started with REMI and this remote production model because I have a project that's a very different implementation of remote production both different technology- Tim, we're gonna talk about your let me just let me just say goodbye to my crew by the way Tim. Can you look at the crew on stage this by the way, I- I'm so sorry to interrupt you. But this was the one where you know, when you bring a good crew together this you can see us on stage right here. We just met a couple days ago these camera ops, fantastic and this is what I'm gonna say in closing Tim here and

folks, make sure to work on your network. Make sure to expand your network because it's a two-way street. So now when we travel to Europe we can offer our clients a great value saving proposition because we're hiring local talent, but now you are also a known name to where you travel, and that production company that's coming to San Francisco. We get those inquiries all the time now give you a call give us a call because they trust you. So now does it save your client money, but it's in a weird way, Tim, gonna make you money because your name is now going further. And that's super important, Tim to both, you know, showcase the people we're working with here in this crew photo and also to recognize that our our networks are what make us stronger and I think one of the things I value most about our industry is really how collaborative we are. I mean, even though you know, ultimately we're competing for some of the same work, I think we make a better industry when we work together and support each other and I think you know as I talk about this project that I that I'm coming to this came out of that kind of referral where I just got a phone call that someone that I had actually never worked with just said, "Hi, I need help," because they knew who I was. and that was super- Wait so you're saying you did not work with this person before like did you even know this person that gave me this phone call? So the person who actually physically was on the phone was someone that I work with, but it was a production company that I never work with. And someone that I see and I still have not physically met it was all remote. And so one of the things about remote production right is you can tap into people all over the world just like you tap your team in London. And in this project, you know, I was coming in to a very very interesting situation where in this case it was we were doing remote production. This was there's a control room that was switching a show for a major company's All Hands meeting and this was like thousands of attendees virtually all over the country and this conference had an opening and a closing live musical performance being broadcast into this conference and it came to pass that the day before the opening performance, the artists team was unable to get the broadcast into the control room. They were unable to get their studio to connect to the control room. Well, I mean so so Tim like why didn't they just run like an SDI or HDMI cable? Why bring you in? So this was a very complex production that included multiple locations on the west coast locations on the east coast and locations in the Midwest and yeah, they were connecting all these different locations both studio and control room locations over the internet for live conference and life performance and it really came down to that the studios for the artists performances, the opening and closing performances were unable to actually get their studios to connect to the control room. And so this phone call that I got was basically can you be at this studio tonight in order to help them, you know, basically get the stream out the door. And so it was really interesting got on a plane flew down to this studio and ended up bringing a few tricks and we talk about REMI, and you talked about the TVU, I was using a very different uplink technology. I was using this product from Peplink, which is a bonded cellular SD-WAN solution to basically create a VPN tunnel from this venue over multiple cell connections, Starlink, satellite, and the local venue internet connection to go back this control room. And this is by the way, this is something that I think the viewer should know, Tim you and I we communicate all the time we share our ideas all the time and our execution sometimes could not be more different. Absolutely and we write so many conversations about this very question, right? Yes, we've decided to go down two different paths so so viewer, there is no right answer the right answer the tool that works for you. Take us as an example. Same solution two different ways to solve for it. Sorry Tim. Go ahead. No, absolutely. And so what we were doing and I'll show a picture here. I've blurred out the screens and some of the the information here to protect the integrity of the show here. But you know looking at this picture you can see a bunch of computers and some hardware up on a shelf. And what we're looking at here is the Peplink bonded cellular router. I think just out of frame we've got that actual cell antennas, and then on the table, there's these computers and there's this Epiphan Pearl Nano encoder and It was fairly interesting. We had two different streams essentially leaving the building. We had the Pearl Nano was doing an SRT stream for the musical performance. And we also had a laptop doing a zoom call and the zoom call was for a live Q&A with the artist after performance. Wait, so okay. Hold on Tim if I understand you correctly. So you have the SRT stream. You have the zoom feed. Why are you not just sticking to one why the SRT and the zoom also why the SRT when there's so many different streaming protocols that you could have used. Why did you ultimately settle on that? Right. So interestingly this performance had two components there was the actual live musical performance where the artist was performing their songs, and then there was also a Q&A with audience members asking live questions of the artist. And so the two components were selected for different reasons the Zoom call was selected for you know, the best two-way conversation have fluid two-way conversation and you know have the echo cancellation and really just make the the Q&A easy, but we really wanted the best possible video quality for the actual performance and the best possible audio quality for the musical performance. And so the SRT stream had a couple advantages there was no audio processing. It was just straight off the console what the audio engineer was sending to the encoder and it was you know full resolution video with very little compression and it let us manually dial in the resolution the frame rate the bit rate of the stream to maximize our internet connection and go back to the studio where there was a fairly fancy digital router that was able to ingest that signal and bring it into the production switcher. It sounds like you really, you know thought through I like this Tim and I'm actually really, you know, for for the viewers watching this they I'm really proud of Tim for all the work that he did building up this that your system and and just so happened like while when you got the phone call like you were just you were just still adding like brand new parts. I think these like manufactured just like releasing parts. This was literally you at the cutting edge delivering a great service and a great product. So I mean kudos to you for that Tim. Super exciting and super exciting to get to combine cellular terrestrial internet and satellite in a really innovative, and as you said, you know fairly, you know, innovative and exciting way. The Starlink. How cool is that, Tim? I love it. Absolutely. So we've talked about remote production. We've talked about some cutting edge technologies. We've talked about some really exciting things, but I want to talk a little bit about just like, you know, some really traditional AV you had a project that that had some really great fundamentals of AV, Tim. You know Tim at the end of the day it's about getting just it's getting your basics right. It's just getting your ABCs do them well and you have happy clients and you deliver happy shows and really that's what we're in the business for. I think us as technicians-let me speak for myself. We can get very excited that REMI production was awesome. We're using you know, six cellular bonded networks to create a fantastic feed and zero, you know, our latency was under a second all these tech specs that the clients will essentially just gloss over right? This is- so this show that we just did in San Francisco was none of that Tim. Absolutely. None of that. It was basic AV and we love it. And we love doing basic AV too. This is our- what we came from. Let's dive into this. So what we have here, we have a thousand in-person event. Tim those are back in case you haven't realized. At the cruise ship terminal in San Francisco. This is an active cruise ship terminal that's important to remember at the end of the story because we find out why it's active. The goal in this the goal that we were tasked to execute was the general session and I believe it's two breakout rooms and okay, you know what one of the cool things actually I'm gonna jump ahead here for the two breakout rooms is Silent Disco. Tim have you run into Silent Disco? They're- I think I'm a fan of them. Now. This is the first show that we've used them for- second show I would say that we used them for audio. Yeah, it's super great when you have crowded spaces or multiple sessions incurring in the same room. I've seen it a lot of trade shows we have just on the open trade show floor- Great in trade shows. -super cool. How did you implement that and what was- what were the challenges with Silent Disco specifically that made it different than you know, putting speakers on sticks in a breakout room? Tim I mean how much time do we have left here? No, let me be to be honest. It was really simple out of the box. It worked. No engineering. You literally turn it on. You set it to the three frequencies. You take XLR out of the audio board it really you would think that this would be a much more complex and robust process and it was the complete opposite. It was easy and it was effective because you know, what pipe and drape, Tim as strong as sturdy as that looks? Does not block sound in the least. That's awesome. And that's, you know, we talk about you know. super cool technology solutions. This is a technology solution. But it seems like it was a really easy to implement simple solution. So you talked about this space with three different spaces in this event in this, you know public building. How big was the crew and what were some of the crew considerations with this? I think that was something you maybe mentioned to me was was part of the the excitement of this project. Yes, definitely. So for the producers out there that are listening and watching this is one of the bigger ones right? This was I maybe 50? Honestly Tim as soon as we got over like four days. I kind of lost count of like who's who because there's a breakout also downstairs as well that we were crew. It was an Argus crew, but this was also a union venue. So we worked with IATSE Local 16 fantastic union to work with out in the Bay Area. So we collaborated with them and it was a really big I mean, I think this is like the potentially the biggest show that we hired for the year- 50 people right versus the REMI we're essentially- we hire two camera operators, you know, so it's really shows the range that you know, you go from show to show and week to week. And what were some of the other challenges besides crew, you know in terms of like logistics load in/load out what were things that that made the show, you know the things that kept you up at night about this show? Oh, well, the fact is and producers know this one well right, trying to get into the space. There was already a show that was in there before us so really like pushing the venue trying to get the earliest possible setup time. It was an absolute challenge to work with them the windows that they gave us were really unrealistic at the beginning and I think you know as event technical producers. It's our job to communicate this to the client and to the venue which we did which got us extra time and let me tell you that's important because we're putting basically the whole show together out of box truck. Well really it was five trucks as a couple semis as you could see and then it was a couple box trucks. I think it was three box trucks and two semis. So it was a pretty big show to load into and then you know, as you can see some of the rentals here, you know, always a good time when you get to rent, you know, big giant forklifts, they're fun to drive. Totally and you talk about that machinery did that cause you any issues? Ahaha, Tim...Tim. Did it cause issue? So let's go back to this being this is one of these situations where you never know the issue that the venue is inadvertently or unexpectedly going to cause you this was a perfect case in this. So we sub rented the forklift you can see this was a giant forklift that we rented it came on its own flatbed. That's how big it was. The company we rented from had a shortage of drivers and we were only contractually allowed to be in that space til midnight. Which means now let's go back to there. This is a cruise ship terminal which also means it's an immigration terminal so they're checking passports because these folks have come off of you know, international waters. So this is the first place that they're checking into the United States. So that means we had the CB- what the border patrol basically knocking on our door saying, "Hey, you've got to get rid of this here, we're going to impound it." And we're like, "What do we do?" You know, we're about to get our forklift impounded by the federal government because the trucking company doesn't have enough drivers to get it out of here. Tim it was a lot of phone calls. There's a lot of "If you want this back you better hurry up and come get it. You know. Otherwise call up Uncle Sam to get your forklift back." It was- that was a big surprise. A very big surprise. Wow, that's sounds exciting Tim. It's It was exciting but you know the talking about let's go back to the show not necessarily excitement parts of it or that's the challenges of it. But, you know at the end of the day Tim like this show. Once from a user experience pretty straightforward pretty much AV 101. Set up your projectors, set up your TVs, set up your monitors. Make sure everything is in sync. We had to replace a couple lines because of timing issues. But really just working within the challenges of the space and you know, this is not necessarily we need to bring in a ton of specialized equipment the equipment that you already have. How do you make that work? It's such an interesting and challenging space like this one. So it sounds like really it's the AV fundamentals and the logistical fundamentals of how do you make a good production? How do you fit into a space? And how do you make that technology work for the event that you're having? And that's in and that's really it, you know get down to the basics and I know like you now want to talk about yours, which is probably similar right? Well you tell like how is yours? So I had two projects at the end of the year that were both agricultural events. And so the clients here were essentially associations educating farmers about how to grow crops better and it's really interesting for me to have clients like this because it's so different than the projects that Tim you and I work so much on high-tech events on Silicon Valley tech company events on big corporate events and and to have these clients where honestly these are much simpler technologically, but in many ways, there's a higher importance to the content because it's really like how do you feed people and so it's really interesting to me to have that diversity of clients between some projects that are really, you know, exciting and high tech and you know, really challenging technologically and then these projects that are really like, you know, it's not a lot of technology, but it's really how do we get this right and support our clients who maybe aren't as comfortable with the technology, right? And how do we make sure they're comfortable giving their presentations and teaching, you know, you know their audience really, you know this content that that matters in the immediate moment, you know. Absolutely. And so this is a food-based one Tim. Do you work with food? Like are they essentially one of your when you describe like important clients? Why would this be an important client in you know the location that you were in- you haven't even said like where was this actually? Yeah, so two different events. One was in San Diego and one was in Visalia, California, which is in the Central Valley Fresno area. And with these projects I said, these are AG associations and so for me, it's really interesting to have that kind of like I said, client diversity where you know across our client portfolios. We're serving clients in different industries because from an event professional perspective, it provides us some like economic resiliency because you know different industries have different cycles and different dips and valleys and so really having that diversity. That's one of the reasons I'm proudest service clients is because it's projects that I feel good about doing because it's about feeding people but it's also really gives me the ability to you know, you know support different industries and have some that, you know economic diversity. One of these projects was- Client diversification is key. You don't want to only be on one sector sure, you know, you'll ride it up when it's when it's doing great, but you really want to be able to pivot and transition to another industry and you know as you and I have been in this industry for so long, we definitely see the ebbs and flows where one industry is not ready to invest in the event AV space and another industry is just absolutely taking off totally agree with you on that one Tim. We mentioned I mentioned diversity a couple times and one things it was really interesting about one of these productions was that it was an international event and it was really, you know, folks in the AG industry from all over the world. And so there was actually simultaneous interpretation, but on this event because of budget reasons it was done by AI. So it was basically a mobile app that we were feeding the audio from all four of the rooms into this mobile app. So that participants could listen on their phone headphones to a translation of what was being said on stage. Even even on basic AV Tim, I love it. We manage to somehow sneak in the most technologically advanced. Possible use cases in there. Yes, we can solve it. We just need artificial intelligence. Well done Tim for sneaking that in. Yeah, I don't just you know, trying to make things work and obviously it fits into my goals of accessibility and making sure that everyone has a good experience but one of the things that we talk about, you know, this being simple technologically other than this translation is, you know, it's not just about the technology Tim just like your event highlights just like this event highlights. It's so important that we maintain that client relationship and provide that support to the client and to the presenters because that's really fundamentally what we're there for is to make sure that the people in the room feel confident enough to walk on a stage and give that presentation. It is a rare client that knows A) What equipment you're bringing. It is even a rarer client that knows the equipment and models that you're bringing. I've seen it and it's surprises me. I'm like, why absolutely yes, that is a camera XYZ over there. How did you know that? Most of the time they just want to know does it look good? Does it sound good? When everything comes together, which is also why you know, one of these things we don't like just you know, I don't like to have the client on site until everything's put together because it will make them nervous sometimes when they see the sausage being made as we like to say in our industry has it all comes together. It comes together. Trust me on it. This is why you hired us, you know, sometimes it's not a pretty process, but you know what once we're there and once it works and and same with your show, you know, those pictures looks absolutely amazing. It looks like it looks so easy. Right and that's these the sign of a good show. Speaking of making things look easy when there was maybe some some trouble in the freight elevator, let's talk about a show that we did together Tim. In San Jose- This was a fun one. This was a great show. It was a client that came to us and said, you know, we've been working with the in-house AV provider and we want an elevated experience this year and they said Tim and Tim, how can you help us make our show more seamless more, you know presenter friendly. So what did we do Tim when we came into this this venue? Well, this was a fun one, right? And this is one where we essentially you bring in just tons of pipe and drape you bring in the newest projectors. This is where you want a beautiful image to so you don't necessarily need the latest the state of the art 3D projectors. You just need beautiful bright projectors for this but you also need to really think about in a case like this. What are the clients going to throw at you? What are the curveballs as you can see Tim in our graphics station over here. There is literally tons of computers and I trust you. We're not doing this just to look cool. We're doing this because each one of these has a purpose and even a backup- Tim, how many inputs did we end up having on basically what was a one projector show? Over a dozen wasn't it? Yeah. I mean it was I don't remember the exact input count but we had backups for everything, we had multiple different kinds of graphics stations. We had polling we had you know playback and and so with all those things that they become discreet inputs into the switcher and you know became a challenge of making sure the client feels like, you know, we're there to walk through the process, right? And this is where and another kudos to you where you really excelled on this show and I was taken aback when I saw your work of art there, was your run of show was amazing it took into account to you took into account of the different inputs all the different sources you knew where to call them- a successful show even a basic one like this you're looking at it. There's nothing that complicated right? There's really not that much complicated. But when you get into it, you have an audio cue, you have a lighting cue, you have lights moving as a cue, you have graphics, you have video playback. There's many different ways to call that all need to be synchronously- synchronized! Synchronic... Is that even a word, Tim? Yeah synchronous, I love it. Great. And you did a great job on that. Like was that like a worry a challenge for you? How was that? This was a client that I'd work with before and so I knew some of the places that they were gonna try to throw us curveballs. And so I tried to build into that run of show, you know, really a plan for every scenario and have in the back of my mind that someone on stage might do something different than the script said, so being ready with what's what's what we're gonna do. What's our backup plan if they walk off the other direction or they call for something as an audible and we have to bring that up. And that's an important. So we've been talking a lot to the producer audience but for our clients for our event producers that are listening, you know sticking with your same vendor. You probably know this. I'm speaking to the choir right how important that is if you're happy with somebody also if you're not happy with somebody make that change quickly because you kind of know you have that feeling inside of you like, you know, it was good, but it could be great, you know make that change find a vendor that makes you feel comfortable because all of the clients that we work with they there's no doubt once they've left once that shows over. They're like, this was great. Let's have some ideas. Maybe we want to add more lights more monitors. Those are the happy conversations at the end right Tim, not necessarily, "Oh when you lost that image on screen," Totally and just make sure that everyone has confidence in each other that just as much as the clients have confidence in us, you know, we know that we're getting all the information we need from the clients and that communication is happening two ways. Fantastic. Well Tim, let's let's save some of these other projects for for later shows. I know we have some other fun ones. This was a great sort of recap. I like that. We just didn't focus on the technology ones that were, you know, the sexiest shows that we've done but also ones that are that are basic and I think what we can take away from those basic ones is it's all about client communication, client trust, and most importantly delivery for the client. Absolutely making sure that we're all in the same page and and executing really, you know, that show that everyone wanted to have. Cool. Well, so thank you for tuning in if by the way folks if you think that there is- if you have any technical questions, you know event questions, please feel free to hit us up. We love the messages. This is an interactive show as we said earlier. So definitely reach out. If you have a project in mind, we would also love to hear about it. If you think what we might be a great fit. We absolutely love this we do this so much that we end up talking about it in front of cameras for you guys, and it's a pleasure. Absolutely, and if you want to leave us a comment, we've been getting some comments in the last couple months in in our hiatus here and it's been great to see folks responses and whether they're folks calling us out for things they feel like we're missing or asking for other additional information. We really appreciate that. And if you do want to reach us by email, you can email us, it's Tims, T-I-M-S, at Tim and Tim Talk dot com- Was it Timsss- How many S's? Only one S. Only one S, Tim. Only one S. Timmssssss. We'll put that in the comments here that the description too. Yeah, fantastic. All right, so that's a great place to end. Thank you so much for watching. My name is Tim Kay. And I'm Tim Kerbavaz. And we talked. Bye.