CineCast: A Cinedeck Podcast

Mike Nuget has always been ready to work from home.

As a freelance colorist, Nuget often goes to post-production houses to work, but he’s also had a home setup for years with the software he needs to do his job and work with producers and directors all over the globe.

With the COVID-19 pandemic creating the need to shelter-in-place, most people have become remote workers, putting Nuget in a unique situation as one of the few people in the industry who was prepared for that change.

He was working on a five-episode series that suddenly needed to get wrapped up quickly with people contributing from a number of places.

“When the pandemic kind of really struck and they were kind of shutting everything down, literally, at that moment, all five episodes were being worked on at the same time,” Nuget said. “It was literally the worst time that this could’ve happened, because we had so much going on.”

Nuget took on a bigger role, adding responsibilities beyond the colorist position.

He’s leaned heavily on tools like Cinedeck’s cineXtools and its file delivery system, which can shrink the time it takes to make changes a producer wants by hours.

“That insertion ability, it’s just – it’s priceless,” Nuget said.

Nuget isn’t sure if work will ever look the same after the COVID-19 crisis, but he was happy he’d prepared himself to work from anywhere now that working from home is a requirement.

What could be worse than finding a small issue with your edit with a fast-approaching deadline?

Luckily, we now offer an hourly license so that these major headaches become minor speed bumps.

Curious to see how an hourly license can improve your workflow? Check out cinedeck.com to find out more.

Noah Chamow and Conor Burke share the twists and turns of their post-production careers in this final episode in a three-part series on careers in post-production for CineCast, powered by Cinedeck. Host Shelby Skrhak sat down with the two founders of Assistant Editors' Bootcamp, an informal education program that teaches the ins and outs of post-production skills and duties for newbies, to dig into their specific paths to arriving at post-production.

Chamow worked in several different aspects of the film industry -- pre-production and production as an extra -- before landing on post-production as the right fit for him.

"Pre-production was such a heavily relationship-based part of the industry and I'm just not that person," he said. "I realized then I wanted to get into assistant editing."

Burke had no problem with the relationship aspect of the industry, but found it challenging to learn on the job until he met Chamow.

"Just having someone I could ask questions and call if I didn't know how to do something," Burke said.

Since then, Burke has gone on to help other editors learn on the job, just as Chamow did for him. The two discuss the specific and unlikely ways they found work in the film industry and share tips along the journey.

Assistant Editors' Bootcamp, a post-production training and education program for industry novices, was born as a way to combat the incredible Catch 22 that green candidates face in getting their first job. For the two founders Noah Chamow and Conor Burke, the struggle was all too real.

In this second in a three-part series on careers in post-production for CineCast, powered by Cinedeck, host Shelby Skrhak sat down with Chamow and Burke to discuss their how they arrived at the idea for Assistant Editors' Bootcamp

To land a gig, newbies need something on their resume that proves they're smart and talented enough to perform editing duties. But no studio wants to take the time to train unproven talent, or take the chance on being someone's first post-production job.

"Nobody wants to take a chance on anybody," Chamow said. "So for my first job, basically I had to stretch the truth to say I was qualified."

Chamow was lucky in finding a senior editor who taught him along the way, and he reciprocated the favor when he met Burke years later as a newbie.

"Noah taught me everything I know," Burke said. "I wouldn't be here if it weren't for Noah."

Assistant Editors' Bootcamp, which is taught by working industry professionals in small workshop environments, trains students on the talent skills they'll need for their first post-production job and the soft skills they need to work with a team effectively.

"We're training them for what we're looking to hire in an assistant editor," Chamow said.

Noah Chamow and Conor Burke, founders of Assistant Editor's Bootcamp, attended some of the best film schools in California, and yet their best learning experience was creating their own. On this first in a three part series on careers in post production for CineCast, powered by Cinedeck, host Shelby Skrhak sat down with Chamow and Burke to discuss their paths to becoming an Assistant Editor.

Chamow studied film at UC Santa Cruz, but his best training came at the grace of a co-worker.

"Fortunately one of the editors working on the show took me under his wing," he said.

The young editor learned more from this senior editor on set than he did from years of college and set a precedent Chamow would realize later as he moved up the ranks in post production roles.

Soon Chamow was in a position to pay it forward when he met Burke, a newbie, on set.

"Noah basically taught me everything I know," Burke said.

On this episode, Chamow and Burke share what they learned by learning on the job and how one person's hand up put an informal mentor/mentee relationship into motion.

Taking Cinedeck from the hardware world to the software world impacted leaders' outlook on the company business model and shaped the company in an unexpected way, COO Jane Sung [contributor page] said in this third of a three-part conversation on CineCast, a Cinedeck podcast.

"When we first launched the software, we launched with our same hardware mentality," Sung said. "As a matter of fact, we launched because it was an easy thing to do, almost like an addendum to our hardware product."

Six months later, clients were choosing cineXtools software instead of Cinedeck's legacy hardware tools.

"As a business owner that's scary because our software was 1/20th of the price of our hardware," Sung said.

The success of cineXtools taught Sung and the company the importance of process and structure to manage scalable growth, and that's advice she shares with other young software companies.

Cinedeck COO Jane Sung says there were huge barriers when it came to entering the software technology market with cineXtools.

"Especially when you're bootstrapping that new product," Sung said in this second of three-part discussion on CineCast, a Cinedeck podcast. "Basically it felt like we were starting as a brand new startup."

Like a startup, Cinedeck was reaching for a new audience that was unfamiliar with the company and its prior product offerings. Though they were a well-established company, they had to break through like a brand new player in an increasingly "noise-filled" marketplace. They teamed with marketing and other experts for outsourced operations and kept a large in-house development team in-house.

From its inception, Cinedeck has worked tirelessly to bring innovative video recording and editing tools to the market, but that was no easy feat persuading the industry their solution was feasible. On this first of three-part conversation on CineCast, a Cinedeck podcast, COO Jane Sung takes us behind the curtain to reveal the challenges they faced and how they solved them.

"With any startup, sales is the number one thing you're focused on," Sung said. "But it's a big challenge. It was certainly our biggest investment of time, creating that strong sales pipeline." But creating that pipeline meant more than selling a solution; it was opening up two-way communication with their customers.

"Offering a space for our customers to opine about the state of the industry was important for Cinedeck," Sung said.

Gone are the days of waiting long hours for media files to render thanks to insert-editing software, like cineX. On this three-part CineCast podcast, we have discussed the evolution of cineX with Cinedeck CEO himself, Charles D'Autremont. On our last and final episode with him, D'Autremont wrapped up the conversation with real stories from the industry and cineX users.

“It can’t be done. It can’t be done,” was the repeating affirmation D'Autremont heard from the media editing industry. But as it turns out “data can be manipulated."

This notion, at its core, is how cineX came to be and how the software eliminates hours of costly and cumbersome exporting.

“Even though you’re not changing the way the frames are compressed, you’re changing the way they’re stored in the file,” D'Autremont said.

As a result, editors are eliminating hours, even days, from their workflow. This is no more evident than in the case of cineX freelancers, who work with residential internet on at-home hardware. cineX freelancers can now make changes that would have taken days—in seconds.

“People are very averse to things that are new, and aren’t the way they’re used to,” D'Autremont said.

But in the case of cineX, the proof is in the software and the adopters of the time-saving software.

On this episode of CineCast by Cinedeck, we are joined once again by Charles D'Autremont, CEO of Cinedeck, to discuss the innovation of insert-editing software in the world of digital media. If you haven’t listened to part one, start there to learn about D'Autremont’s early career and how the idea of insert-editing came to be. On part two today, we explored how cineX evolved into a working program, and the challenges of introducing this revolutionary software into production media workflows.

“Because we were editing files, there was initially pushback about... ‘How do we know you haven’t screwed up the file?'," D'Autremont said of early naysayers.

Even now, he said, there are reluctant adopters still clinging to the idea that “a file is this inviolable object.” But as the cineX demonstrated its capabilities, editors began to change their minds.

“As soon as they saw it worked, they were totally psyched about it, and became great advocates," D'Autremont said.

Today, D'Autremont said cineX is “...used for hundreds of thousands of hours worth of television...” But the journey to where cineX is today was not easy, and continues to overcome challenges as it must simultaneously remain cutting edge, as well as compatible with the past.