Larry Jordan is one of the creative-tech industry’s most intelligent, talented, and prolific trainers. This is a fun and informative interview with our host, Cirina Catania!
Larry is a member of several guilds, worked in live television and the broadcast industry as a producer/director for many years and started his company, Larry Jordan and Associates, because he enjoyed communicating with and helping people who wanted answers on how to edit smarter, better…and upgrade their skills so they could make a more lucrative living….Twenty-one years later, he has published over 3,200 reviews and tutorials, 570 45-minute training webinars, 700 YouTube tutorials and published 13 books!
Whether you are a trainer wanting to upgrade your skills, an editor looking for answers, or simply someone who works in the creative industry and would like some advice about your future…this is the conversation to which you will want to listen!
If you enjoy our podcast, please subscribe and tell all your friends about us! We love our listeners. And, if you have ideas for segments, write to [email protected]. We are always up for new ideas! You can find OWC RADiO at OWCRadio.com, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all other podcatchers!
ABOUT OWC: Other World Computing, under the leadership of Larry O’Connor since he was 15 years old, has expanded to all corners of the world and works every day to create hardware and software that make the lives of creatives and business-oriented companies faster, more efficient and more stable. Go to MacSales.com for more information and to discover an ecosystem that serves your needs.
ABOUT CIRINA CATANIA: Cirina Catania, is a successful filmmaker, former Sr Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at MGM-UA and United Artists and one of the co-founders and former director of the Sundance Film Festival. She is the founder, CEO and Executive Director of the non-profit, High School Media Collective. Cirina is Founder/Lead Creative at the Catania Group Global, Showrunner and Host of OWC RADiO and partner, Lumberjack System, as well as Tech Ambassador for companies such as Blackmagic Design.
Key Takeaways:
1 Great educators eliminate fear. Larry emphasizes that learning creative tools starts with confidence, not just skill.
2 AI is disrupting media, but storytelling remains king. While AI is reshaping production, human creativity and narrative skills are still irreplaceable.
3 The media industry is in flux. With 35%+ unemployment in LA media jobs, freelancers and professionals need to adapt and expand their skill sets.
4 Social media is necessary—but it doesn’t have to be painful. Larry avoids self-promotion and focuses on collaborating with professionals to handle social outreach.
5 Storage solutions matter. Larry shares why a three-tiered backup system (SSD, RAID, and server storage) is essential for professional creatives.
6 The future of tech is uncertain. As AI, automation, and economic shifts shake up the industry, the ability to pivot, adapt, and think ahead will determine success.
Chapter Markers & Timecodes:
00:05 – Introduction: Cirina introduces Larry Jordan and his incredible contributions to the creative industry.
01:30 – A Walk Down Memory Lane: The history of Larry & Cirina’s collaboration and how Larry became a media guru.
02:36 – From Radio to Broadcast TV: Larry shares his journey from radio broadcasting to directing live TV.
07:32 – Teaching Media Professionals: How Larry transitioned into training and why he loves helping people master creative tools.
08:39 – What Makes a Great Teacher? Larry’s three essential principles for effective education and why storytelling matters.
16:54 – The Future of Tutorials & Reviews: Larry explains how he approaches product reviews, tech training, and what sets his content apart.
22:57 – The Magic of Live Production: Cirina and Larry reflect on their live broadcasting days and what makes live content so exciting.
26:39 – SSD vs. Spinning Drives: Larry breaks down the best storage solutions and shares his personal workflow.
28:50 – The Power of Media Asset Management: Larry talks about Axle AI and how it’s revolutionizing storage solutions.
32:47 – The Passion for Teaching: Why Larry sees himself as a communicator rather than a teacher—and how he enables people to succeed.
35:42 – Should You Get Into Media? Larry shares hard truths about the current media job market and why creatives need a Plan B.
41:15 – AI’s Impact on the Industry: The hype, the reality, and how artificial intelligence is changing creative work.
46:41 – The Art of Visual Persuasion: Larry’s insights on using visuals effectively in storytelling and presentations.
49:37 – Surviving Social Media: How to promote yourself without selling your soul to constant self-promotion.
52:33 – What’s Next in Tech? Larry’s predictions for the industry and why creatives need to stay adaptable.
54:22 – The Bucket List: What’s left for Larry Jordan to accomplish—and his mission to help the next generation.
55:31 – Where to Find Larry: Website, tutorials, newsletter, and where to get his books.
56:39 – Final Thoughts & Cirina’s Sign-Off: “Go do something wonderful today!”
Cirina Catania 00:05
Larry Jordan is one of our creative tech industries, most intelligent, talented, and prolific trainers, and someone I worked with for over 11 years, so this is a fun interview. He’s a member of several guilds, worked in live television and the broadcast industry as a producer-director for many, many years, and started his company, Larry Jordan & Associates, because he enjoyed communicating with and helping people who wanted answers on how to edit smarter, better, and maybe just upgrade their skills so that they could make a more lucrative living. 21 years later, he has published over 3,200 reviews and tutorials, 570 45-minute training webinars, 700 YouTube tutorials, and in his spare time, published 13 books. Whether you’re a trainer wanting to upgrade your skills, an editor looking for answers, or simply someone who works in the creative industry and would like some advice about your future, this is the conversation to which you will want to listen.
Stand by. It’s getting good.
Larry Jordan 01:21
It’s time for OWC RADiO, tech talk with creatives, conversations with host Cirina Catania.
Cirina Catania 01:30
Welcome, Larry. I’m so happy to see you on here, and I know you’re really busy, so this is very special to me.
And for those of you listening, Larry and I have a long history working together, and I just wanted to say welcome to OWC Radio.
Larry Jordan 01:48
Cirina, it’s a delight. You know, we worked together for almost 12 years, and then you left me, in the lurch, all alone. I had no one to talk to and now being able to see you again is great. Thanks for inviting me on the show
Cirina Catania 02:00
Yes, it’s wonderful. Well, you are for many, many people, the tech guru, and I have been with you so many years when we were at NAB doing the Digital Production Buzz. And I watched these starry-eyed, young kids coming up to you going, “Oh, my God, you’re Larry Jordan.” And I don’t mean to embarrass you with that. But it’s, it’s just nice.
Can you talk about when you were doing a lot of live TV and because you’re a member of the Director’s Guild and the Producer’s Guild. So give us a little bit of your background.
Larry Jordan 02:36
Can I tell you more about my background? Yes, I can. Should I tell you more? Now, that’s an entirely different. You know, you and I have got to talk about how to ask questions.
Cirina Catania 02:45
(laughing) You would have made, and you still could do it, a broadcast television news anchor. I’ve told you that for years.
You are a Walter Cronkite. I’m like conversational podcasting. Hey, tell me about this.
Larry Jordan 03:07
I just think of you as Connie Chung, really.
Cirina Catania 03:11
I think…
Larry Jordan 03:11
You’ve threatened to make me a broadcast anchor since I first met you, and you know, I’m still waiting. I’m here. I’m saying yes, you just have to say go.
Larry Jordan 03:18
Cirina, an answer to your question I think if you were to categorize my career over the last, oh, I don’t know, 10 20 years, I teach media professionals how to create television and film programs.
I teach people all over the world now long before you were born. I got my start in broadcast television and went to graduate school the University of Wisconsin Madison and my first job, my first job out of graduate school, was at a radio station in Rockton, Illinois, I was broadcasting mostly to sheep and goats and It was doing beautiful music. Every 15 minutes It’d be the Montevanni strings, and then after the Montevanni strings, It was the Boston Pops, and we just alternated back and forth, and the sheep were dancing in a pen. It was great.
It lasted for three months And a program director called me into his office and he said, “Son (because I was younger then), “Son,” he said, “you are a second tenor. We need a baritone. Enjoy the rest of your life.”
My incredible career in broadcast radio shattered in that one that one moment of despair. Fortunately the same day that I was fired in radio, I got hired in television. Went to work for WHA TV in Madison and Worked there for the rest of graduate school and then from graduate school, I went to Montana and broadcast at a station in Missoula, and then from there went to Maryland, and from Maryland, went to PBS, and PBS to Boston
So the first third of my career was all broadcast television as a producer-director And I’ve done local shows and I’ve done national shows then second third of my career was software marketing This is back in the late 70s when the Apple 2e took over the world’s imagination of being able to put a computer on your desk, which was unheard of because before that it was mainframes and minis. And there was a computer store down the street from me, and I went in there and started working part-time as a straight commissioned salesperson, and fell in love with it, and for some reason which is completely lost to me. Since essentially the day I made the decision, I decided to jump out of broadcast television where I specialized in live events and get into computer, first computer sales and computer marketing.
And I worked for a variety of computer firms from then until about, oh the late 90s, and then from there I said, “You know, I’m getting really bored.” And I kept getting laid off from more and more companies because people would hire you. They’d work you for six months and fire you again, and I got tired of that after the seventh company. And I said I should start my own company so in 2000 and 1997 I started a company which specialized in creating informational DVDs back then as you know DVDs were the communications media because the internet had not yet taken off to the level that we know it today So we would go to trade shows like an NAB or a medical show we would record all the conference sessions Transcribe them into text and then put that as searchable text on to a DVD and we did about 50 of those we did , oh, I don’t know 24 a year for four or five years.
Then the internet rose up and all of that information was now available For free online, and I can’t have a business with 25 people competing against free. So that business closed down and I was looking around for something else to do and I started the company that I’m running now, which is a training company enabling media creators to use the tools to tell stories using pictures. And I train with Adobe software and Apple software and Blackmagic Design software and integrate production and post-production, but mostly post-production. How do you edit a story to have it make sense?
And that has taken off, and I’ve been doing that now for the last 21 years. And I publish a newsletter every week and do training and online speeches and webinars and travel around doing consulting, but it’s all trying to help people Improve their ability to tell stories using pictures. And that is a surprisingly easy thing to say and very difficult thing to do
Cirina Catania 07:32
It is, but you’re so good at it. You know what? This walk down memory lane is reminding me. I had totally forgotten. I took my very first Final Cut class from you. What was the name of that store?
Larry Jordan 07:45
And it was…I can see it right now. It’s in Santa Monica be video symphony
Cirina Catania 07:50
Yes, I think it was. It was Final Cut, the very first iteration of Final Cut. And for some of the teachers that are listening, one of the things that I want to ask you is what do you think makes you a good teacher. I can tell you, as one of your former students, you have enthusiasm, you have knowledge, and you’re also very, very organized. You go slowly enough to where we can stay abreast.
I mean, it was amazing. I walked away from that class, and that’s what got me started on Final Cut. I forgot all about that. That’s awesome. A lot of people are trying to do tutorials on the web now. Not very many of them are good. What do you think you do that makes you more accessible and more desirable for potential students?
Larry Jordan 08:39
I’ve never compared myself to anybody else, so I don’t spend a lot of time watching other people’s tutorials. So in truth, I can’t answer your question.
But if we flip the question around and say what makes for an effective tutorial? I think there’s there’s probably three things that we need to keep in mind. The first and the biggest by far is that the person watching the tutorial is afraid they’re not smart enough to learn how it works. And so the very first thing that we have to do is to reassure people that, yes, you can do this. And as a teacher, we’ve got to get past the fear. If you think about any time you’ve tried to tackle something new, the first and biggest obstacle is I can’t do this. This task is too big. It’s too hard. I’m not worthy. I’m not informed enough. I’m not adequate. And so we put all these obstacles in our own way that prevents us from actually learning because we’re so busy being afraid that we can’t learn that we don’t learn.
So whether I’m teaching at USC, where I taught for 10 years or whether we’re teaching at UCLA, which I taught for two years because I forgot to work that into my bio and I got to impress somebody anyway, Whether I’m teaching college students or whether I’m teaching adults, the absolute number one thing is I’m not smart enough to learn this. It’s not that they’re not intelligent, but there’s all the obstacles in the way. So the first thing that I want to do whenever I create a tutorial is to say, hey, take a deep breath. We can do this together. When you and I were doing the buzz together and I was hosting and you were producing, you would always ask me, “The guest wants to know what the questions are.” And I would always say, I never tell the guest my questions. Now, I’ll say we’re going to talk about these general areas, but I’ll never tell them the question. And there’s two reasons for it. One, we’re so nervous about being a guest that we know what the questions are. We then memorize all the answers and it comes off like someone who can’t act trying to read a speech. It’s just awful. Instead, I say, listen, what we’ve got is a dance. I’m going to lead. You just follow my lead, answer my questions. You already know the answers. It’s going to be fine. Just put all the burden on me, and we’ll get through and they walk away at the end of that interview saying that was the most fun interview I’ve ever had. And the reason is we took the fear away.
They don’t have to memorize. They don’t have to have a lot of notes. Just take a deep breath. You can do this. You’ve done this every day of your life. You know all the answers. Just follow my lead. So first thing is we have to reduce the fear.
The second thing is the hardest thing to teach is somebody that’s never done it before. How do you explain how a mouse works to someone that’s never used a mouse? Well, in today’s society, everyone, including two-year-olds, have used mouses and or their fingers. But the concept of a mouse back in the in the 80s, people were picking it up like the Star Trek movie, they’re picking it up by the tail saying, you know, what is this?
So the hardest thing to teach is the beginning student. Once you understand the foundation, then I can take you as far as you want to go. But if you never understand the foundation, you can’t go anywhere. So first I reduce the fear. Of course we can do this. This is easy. Just follow my steps. Here’s where you got to go. The second is I stress the fundamentals. This is where you start. This is how you create a new document. This is how you organize the document. That’s how you optimize your settings. I understand this interface. I can create it. I can save it. I can quit. I’m not going to damage anything. The machine’s not going to die. All the fear is gone.
I’m foundationally structured. I’m ready to go. And now we can say, OK, watch this. When you click here, look, that’s really when you click here. Look, and then if you put these two clicks together and suddenly magic appears and you’re the one creating it, so we have to reassure people that they can learn. We have to provide them the foundation. It is not my job in doing a tutorial to show you how smart I am. That’s not important for a lot of YouTubers. It’s critically important that they stress how smart they are. I don’t care how smart you are. I want to know, can I learn what you have to teach? If you can’t teach me, then you can be the smartest person on the planet.
I’m not here to admire your smartness. I’m here to solve a problem. I’m here to learn something. I’m here to to expand my horizon. But I’m not here to kneel at the altar of your smartness. I want to know. And this is a Dale Carnegie term, and you can write this on your wrist. The reason you’re watching YouTube. The reason that you’ve invited me on to your show, the reason people are spending time watching your show is not because Cirina is incredibly beautiful, though she is, and not because Larry is unbelievably smart, though, you know, I’m at least average, but the reason they’re watching and the reason you need to structure your questions this way, we’ll get back to your interviewing skills later, is everybody watching wants to answer one question. W-I-I-F-M. W-I-I-F-M. What’s in it for me? What does Larry have to say that I can learn from? What does Cirina have to ask that I can take something and action it in my own life? And if I always keep in mind that I need to be answering the question, what’s in it for me, that I need to focus that people are watching not because of me, but because they want to gain something from me, and if I also realize, and this is another key point, is that I don’t care what we’re doing, whether we’re standing in front of 2,000 people or communicating like you and I are online in our conversation, is regardless of how many people are watching this, it is always a one-on-one conversation. It’s just you and me, and the person that’s watching is watching with their eyes and their ears and thinking with their brain, and there could be 25,000 other people, it’s a small audience for you, 250,000 people watching your podcast, but each one of them is an individual, and as an individual, they want to be addressed as an individual.
They want to be treated as a special individual. So all of my training focuses on four points I’ve come to four. Reduce the fear, provide a strong foundation, remember the person watching is watching to find out what’s in it for me, and it’s always a one-on-one conversation between me, the presenter, and you, the listener. So I don’t use terms like all you guys or the huge audience. I never refer to anybody. Nobody else matters except you.
You’re the only person, and as long as I keep that in mind, and it’s a one-on-one conversation between the two of us, we’re going to communicate because who else do I have to talk to if not you? And the answer is nobody. It’s just the two of us. That’s wonderful.
Cirina Catania 15:36
It’s true. I learned a lot from you. I really did. And everybody always asks, what are the questions? And I always say, and I think of you every time I say it, I don’t work from questions. It’s a conversation. And for the same reason, I don’t want people to memorize.
Larry Jordan 15:53
It’s one.. well now, there. I disagree.
I always work with questions I always have a clear direction of where I want the interview to go. I know exactly what I want to learn I’ve got that all outlined. Yeah, i’ve got a script not a word-for-word script, but a question script. I always have that, but that doesn’t mean I share it with the guest.
Cirina Catania 16:13
I have some talking points here that I want to make sure we cover if we have time. But I don’t write the questions because I want to, and I think this is actually a little bit how we differ too. I want to just see where things go. You do that too. But for me, it’s more conversational.
And maybe I should get a little bit more technical. Maybe I should get a little bit more like Larry.. I’m curious, because you have so many tutorials and so many different things that you cover. Can you give us a little bit of an overview of the type of tutorials? If I went on your site today, what would I find that I could learn? And there’s so much. There’s hundreds of tutorials there.
Larry Jordan 16:54
I just wrote this morning my three thousand and two hundredth written tutorial. It was a review of a hard disk, believe it or not, it’s a review of a hard disk from OWC, it’s a ThunderBay 4 RAID. And I put it through its paces to see exactly how fast it was. And it’s a hard drive rate as opposed to SSD. So I spent a lot of time analyzing what’s the speed difference? What’s the application? Where do you use it? And I’m not supposed to tell you this.
OK, so you didn’t hear this from me. But whenever I write a review, in this case, I bought the gear. I bought it for myself because my storage needed expanding. But whenever I write a review, I always send a link to the review to the company that makes the product with the standard provides. So here’s the review. And if I’ve made any mistakes, let me know what’s wrong and I’ll correct it. I never give people a review in advance, but I do tell them the instance available. And if there’s something wrong, I’ll either say, oh, that was my error. Or, nope, you’re completely wrong. And I always give people the ability to compare it.
The Thunder Bay is a long- standing four drive raid that OWC has had for, I’d say, the better part of a decade. And it uses a raid controller called SoftRAID. And Tim Standing is the VP of engineering that it heads up the SoftRAID grpi[. And so I sent Tim and the VP of marketing at OWC this morning, I sent them a link to the review saying, here it is and let me know what you think. And Tim sent me a note back and I got it about. Oh, an hour ago, and I’ll just quote a couple of parts of it. He says, number one, I wish I could write my blogs the way you write your blogs. They’re inspirational, which made me blush. And of course, I read that out loud, everybody in the room. But the other one he said is one of the things that I’ve done is I forwarded your blog to two engineering managers at Apple because I want them to see what the real world is saying about a product that app, which is APFS product Apple has created.
And there’s several things there. Number one, you never know who’s going to be affected when you write something. I’ve changed products with the reviews that I do. Not that I’ve written, but the developers look at it and make changes. I’ve changed policies. I’ve had new products created because I’ve been doing it for 21 years. But the other thing is to get people to read this and say, I can make an informed buying decision.
The M4 chips came out recently, the M4, the M4 Pro and the M4 Max. How do you decide which one to buy? And well, Apple doesn’t really tell you. Apple says, well, if you’re a beginning user, go with the M4. If you’re a medium power user, go with the M4 Pro. If you’re a power user, go with the M4. Well, what the heck does that mean? Well, Apple really can’t answer that question because there’s just too many options, there’s too many, the world is too big. But I focus on media. And if you’re a media creator, the M4 makes sense for these applications.
And I list them. But here’s your trade off. Here’s what, here’s what you’re going to give up. If you get the Pro, you’re going to get this. And this is what you need to spec with it. Do you realize that the number of CPUs for video editing doesn’t really make any difference? It used to in the past when dealing with Intel chips. But today, the number of GPUs for whether you’re working with Resolve or Premiere or Final Cut, the number of GPUs affects performance far more than a number of CPUs.
Well, that tells you what kind of chip you want to buy. We are all excited about the new Thunderbolt 5. Thunderbolt 5, as I know you know because you’re a geek, is that it gives you data rates which are twice that of Thunderbolt 3, and Thunderbolt 3 is twice that of Thunderbolt 2. So we’re jumping up and down saying, yay, this is great. I have to get Thunderbolt 5 and I’ll get my work done faster. Except if you look at the render speeds that we get out of Resolve and the render speeds out of Final Cut and the render speeds out of Premiere, none of them achieve Thunderbolt 2 speeds.
When I’m doing a review, I always look at the review of where should you be spending your money? Where are you going to get the benefit? Where are you not going to get the benefit? What works? What doesn’t work? Which gets me to another problem that I know you’re going to ask me about, and that is, who do you trust for a review? And one of the things that I’ve found, because, again, my website’s been up for so long, I get at least one and most often two emails a day from people who want to post a paid post on my site. As soon as somebody posts a paid post on my site, you can’t trust it because they’re there pitching a particular product. So my standard rule is and always has been I don’t accept paid posts. Now, I’ll take a guest post if somebody wants to contribute, but it has to affect media. What I’m getting are guest posts from casinos or essay writing systems or games, the educational systems, those I don’t get at all. But there’s so much hidden paid reviews that there’s very, very few sources you can go to where you can actually trust what the viewer is writing about.
And there’s so many sites that say, you know, the five best X. I don’t care what it is, but whatever it is, there’s a five of them and there are these are the best. Well, who picked them and what do they know about? I have never been able to rank the five best of anything. But what I can do is I can say if you get this gear, this is the performance you can expect. This is where it’s good. This is where it’s going to be weak. This is what it’s going to cost. And when you plug it in and do this, this is what’s going to happen. I’m trying to provide people a real-world analysis. When they spend the money, you spend $2,000 and buy a hardware raid. You want to know what you’re going to get before you spend the money, not afterward.
Anyway, I’m done with my soapbox. We were talking about tutorials. So in addition to 3,200 tutorials, I also have 575 webinars, which are 45-minute video training sessions. I have something like 700 YouTube videos and I have 13 books. So we can talk about whatever you want.
Cirina Catania 22:57
You know, there were so many years on the Buzz every Thursday night, 6 p.m. sharp. We started our clock and we had four guests, sometimes more, every Thursday night live and you pulled it off without a hitch. You had that clock running and everything went smoothly.
I learned so much doing that, but there’s also always that a little bit of butterflies in your stomach when you know you’re about to start that live show. I love it. I love it. Have you seen the movie September 5?
Larry Jordan 23:31
I have not.
Cirina Catania 23:31
Or Saturday Night Live? There’s a movie about Saturday Night. You have to watch both of those.
And I was thinking about you because they’re both about live TV productions. And if you’re listening and you want to get into live TV, watch those two shows. And if you still want to do it after you watch those shows, then you’re suited for the job.
Larry Jordan 23:52
The problem with recording is you want to make it perfect. That’s just the feeling that I can’t let a mistake go by.
The thing about live is, live has got this visceral energy that doesn’t exist when you record. So just to give you an example, back in the days when I was directing television news, I was directing news in Boston, and I looked around, and it took 17 people, 17 people to get the news on, excluding talent, talent was another six people, but 17 people between master control and videotape and Telecine and the studio camera people and the floor director and the people in the control room and audio and audio assist. Seventeen people to put the news on. Well, you’ve worked in the studios, you know, it’s people intensive. When I left broadcast, there were the 17 people.
I was talking with the director that took my place and he said, two years after you left, we replaced most of those people with the spacebar because all the video was on the server and we just went to the next event by hitting a spacebar and it rolled out.
And today I went through, Disney is building Hudson Yards, where ESPN is going to be in New York City, and my cousin is doing all of the data builds, the wiring, the internet protocol, which is way past my pay grade, but he was giving me a tour of the studios, and it was all robotic cameras. There’s like one stage manager, all robotic cameras. The control room is designed for a very small crew, a lot of producers, a lot of people watching, but a very small technical crew because so much of it is so automated.
And that’s not why I got into media. I got into media because I love the collaboration. I like building teams and working with people. So although I don’t know why I got out of broadcast television when I did, I got out at the right time, but I still miss it. Every day I it, which is why I like live.
Cirina Catania 25:49
You’ve still got many, many years ahead. I’m really curious about what’s going to happen with you. And before we go, I’m going to ask you about your bucket list.
But when you were talking about the Thunder Bay, and you mentioned there are spinners in those, I’ve always wanted to ask you, a lot of people are putting SSDs into their servers and into their raids that they use. I’ve got a bunch of equipment that I bought here. It has a combination. Do you trust SSDs? I mean, I have a server down the hall, and it’s all spinners. And it’s got over 200 terabytes running 24-7. And I worry that if I had the SSDs in that machine, it’s a Jupiter, all of a sudden, one day, would just go pftt and be gone? And you can’t get them back. Can you give us some advice about that? What would you tell me?
Larry Jordan 26:39
There’s a rule of thumb that says you need to have three copies of everything. You need to have it online. You need to have it backed up locally. You need to have it backed off off-site.
So if you’re telling me with a straight face that you have 200 terabytes of data with no backups, I’m going to waggle a finger at you and say you cannot do that. Do you have backups?
Cirina Catania 27:01
I don’t have exact carbon copy cloners of that 200 terabytes. I have original media.
Larry Jordan 27:08
If you lose the 200 terabytes, can you get it back?
Cirina Catania 27:11
Yeah, I could, but it would take a while.
Larry Jordan 27:14
Will there be gnashing and wailing of teeth? Okay.
So what my recommendation is, the way that my system works here, is I’ve got an 8 terabyte SSD that I use for all of my active projects. It’s blindingly fast, it has changed my life, and everything that I’m working on right now is on that SSD. Next to it is a 48 terabyte, the new Thunder Bay RAID, and it could be any raid. I’m not trying to pitch OWC, but I’m a fan of the company. I’ve got a 48 terabyte Thunder Bay RAID, which I then dump the active project when it’s done being edited, I dump it to the raid, and then I’ve got a 160 terabyte server, which I use for the office, so I have a backup of the raid onto the server. Then if I was really paranoid, and I can’t afford it, because it isn’t cheap, I would get an LTO drive and back stuff up to LTO. So active projects on an SSD, which I trust completely. So an SSD for active editing, an online hard drive RAID for short term backup, and then the server for long term backup, and the server’s got an expansion on it, so there’s expansion chassis that I back up to the expansion unit. So I have one, two, three, ultimately four copies, should I need it, of all of my media.
Cirina Catania 28:33
Can you search using Spotlight on your server? Because I know I’m on truTruNAS, and until I discovered Axle AI, I didn’t think there was going to be a way that I could search.
By the way, we should talk about Axle. But can you search using Spotlight on the server that you have?
Larry Jordan 28:50
Yes and no. If the server volume is mounted, I can use Spotlight.
It’s a Synology. I can use Spotlight to search it, but there’s also Ultra Search that’s on the Synology. I can dial into the server directly and search directly on the server without going through Spotlight, so I have both options.
Cirina Catania 29:08
That’s awesome. Well, now that I’ve mentioned Axl AI, you had a wonderful occurrence a few months ago. Can you talk about that?
Larry Jordan 29:14
When I started my company 21 years ago, I was the sole owner, but then we hit a rough spot around 2015, and I sold the company to another firm that owned us for nine years. This summer, they sold my company to Axl AI, and I am now an independent division of Axl.
And the reason I stress that is because Axle is focused on media asset management, and they have a large team of people that focuses on media asset management. But Sam Bogoch, co-owner of Axle, has always liked the work that I did and said, you need a home. So he said here, and he bought me, added me to part of the company, hasn’t talked to me since. So Sam is not busy doing his thing, and I’m just busy doing mine, but I’m respectful of the fact that my owner makes media asset management. So although in the past I’ve reviewed that, I don’t review media asset management software now, because it would be a conflict of interest, but I’m happy to tell people about it. Axle is a wonderful package that does media asset management that’s designed for people that don’t know rocket science.
And unlike many asset managers, like the Dalets and the CAT DVs, which are owned by large companies, Axle is owned by a small company, and it focuses on the small to medium market so that you don’t have to be an enterprise. Now they have Formula One, and they’ve got the largest broadcaster in Malaysia, a couple of other really big accounts, but the bulk of their accounts are the medium-sized production companies and post houses that need to be able to keep track of assets like yourself that need to be able to track stuff, but can’t afford a $200,000 annual fee just for tech support. So you can get two seats on Axle for like $1,500.
And if you have a Mac Mini, the new M4 Mac Mini is incredible for a server, and it’s all web accessible, and it’s all multi-user. So I’ve been an owner of Axle since 2014 and a fan of it since I bought it. I’m running a family database with a family that’s scattered around the world that has historical photographs of the family, and they can dial in through a reverse proxy server and see Axle and do all kinds of searching. We’ve got about 150,000 photographs and videos on there that they can search through.
That’s running on a what will soon be an M4 Mac Mini. It’s a 2018 Mac Mini now, and it does a wonderful job as a server. So I’m a big fan and have put my money where my mouth is a long time ago.
Cirina Catania 31:47
I’m a spacebar right now. It’s me. It’s just me, but I do have a couple of wonderful editors that do pitch in and help me once in a while when I get busy. Jacob Rush and Richard Taylor pops in and helps and Karen Bolt’s been doing some of the talent coordinating so I just shout out to them and say thank you and obviously take this opportunity to say thank you to OWC because Larry O’Connor and all the people there are amazing and if it weren’t for them I wouldn’t be sitting here doing this with you. So you know I have never thought of myself as the most intelligent person in the world but I love speaking with smart people and I love promoting you because there are people out there that one person that you talk about that’s going to find you and going to listen to you you. You can change their lives and I’ve heard people say that to you.
Why do you like teaching so much?
Larry Jordan 32:47
I’ve never viewed myself as a teacher. I never have. And people say that I’m good at it, and I don’t disagree, but I’ve never viewed myself as a teacher.
I’ve never been trained in being a teacher, but I have been trained in being a communicator. What I try to do is I try to respond to people’s innate curiosity. The mark of a good teacher is someone that tries to talk to the individual and communicate with the individual, as opposed to just standing up and lecturing, that reassures the individual that they themselves can achieve what they want to do, that it’s, yes, you can do it, and doesn’t try to impress them with how much they know, but impress them with how much the student can learn. And what it does is it flips it around so that my focus is on the student and helping them understand how a process works. When I write a tutorial, I’ll write a tutorial and say, here’s where we’re going. This is where we’re ending up. Now here’s the steps to get here. So everybody knows what the conclusion is before we start. This is not a big dramatic build. I did one on the magnetic mask for Final Cut, or it could be speech to text editing inside Resolve, or it could be captioning inside Premiere. Here’s where we’re ending up. This is our goal. Now here’s the steps it takes to get here, and here’s what you need to know, and here’s a couple of traps you need to look at. Now that we’ve laid this step by step, it’s much easier for people to grasp because it’s written. They’re taking it at their own speed. I don’t think of that as teaching. I think of it as enabling.
This is a very, very difficult time to be in media. It is a scary time. It’s scarier than it’s been in a long time. I think even the conversion from film to digital or analog videotape to digital, people could see that there was a one-for-one correlation, it’s just that we weren’t working with analog film and videotape, we’re working with digital, but the same number of people were involved, the same process was involved. But now today we’re seeing, what was it? Michael Kammes with Key Code Media last week in a webinar said, LA’s got 35% unemployment in media. New York is close to that. Mike Cavanaugh at Key Code said that it’s depression level inside Los Angeles.
This is scary times. This is not just simply a conversion from one format to another. This is an existential crisis on the core of the market that we’re going after, which is the people that are not doing a hundred million dollar Hollywood films. What do we have to do to survive? This is not an intellectual question anymore. It’s a bread and butter. How are we going to feed the family question? And the answer is nobody knows. And that’s a very scary answer to have to deal with. It’s especially scary if you’re working freelance and not knowing where the next gig is coming from as opposed to working corporate and at least knowing you can count on a corporate paycheck until they lay you off.
Cirina Catania 35:35
What would you tell somebody if they walked up to you and they said, I really want to be in the business. What would you tell them?
Larry Jordan 35:42
I get that question every day. Yeah, I think there’s three big problems. Number one, I have a very hard time telling anybody that’s coming out of school that they should get a job in media. I think I have to say that media has to be your part-time job, not your full-time job to spend time in school studying to be a filmmaker. I think it’s going to be a waste of a college education to major in. I’m going to just use accounting as a placeholder, but to major in something where you can get a job, whether it’s a computer programming or accounting or something which will always exist and have a specialty in filmmaking, a minor in filmmaking. That makes a lot of sense because the knowledge that you have about your core curriculum, the knowledge of zoology, the knowledge of biology, the knowledge of accounting, the knowledge of computer programming, suddenly you’re able to tell stories that relate to that market. Filmmaking becomes a storytelling skill, but it is not your sole skill.
What is your main skill? I’m a zoologist. Well, wouldn’t it be cool to do a Jurassic Park? Well, funny zoologists can tell Jurassic Park in a way that an accountant can’t. So have a skill that translates into a job and then use filmmaking to tell stories about that skill. So that’s why I tell a young person – for people that are in the industry now that are trying to figure out where the industry is going. You got to have a Plan B. You just have to have a Plan B. I don’t see anything on the horizon that’s going to suddenly open up the floodgates of employment for media. So if you’re a freelancer, you need to find a way to continue to build the relationships that you have with clients, say, how can I help tell your story and think about what makes you unique? It isn’t that you know necessarily how to point a camera because cousin Fred knows how to point a camera and it isn’t that you know how to edit because editing is getting easier and easier. I mean, I can take a recording, drop it into Premiere, have it automatically convert to a transcript, select the transcript without knowing anything about editing and say, these are the clips that I want. It’ll drop down to the timeline and at least I’ve got a rough cut that makes sense. This does not require anybody spending any time in graduate school studying filmmaking. So knowledge of the tool used to be what differentiated us from everybody else because the tools were so complex and the business was so arcane. But as the tools get easier and easier to use, it’s going to open up the floodgates to people that have less and less media education but have a burning desire to tell stories. So what we need to do is we need to refine our storytelling skills and find the resources that we can count on that give us the technical answers that we need, which is a pitch for what I do, but refine our storytelling skills so that when we talk to clients, we no longer say I know Avid or I know Resolve or I know Premiere, instead we say, I can enable you to tell your stories in a way that converts into more sales. As an example, Apple recently released, and I know you remember this, their Crush ad.
They were talking about the iPad and all these wonderful creative things were going into this giant press and they were compressing cell cellos and violins and paintings. And for some reason, the creative community blew up.
Well, of course they blew up. Apple was trying to say that all of this artistry was on an iPad. Instead what the visuals were saying is all of this artistry is useless because we can do all of it now digitally, which is exactly what Apple did not want to say. And I point out Apple created that ad internally. They did not hire an ad agency to put it together. So all of their tech gurus were saying, look at what we can do with technology without paying any attention to what it meant to the broader market. Apple, one of the few times has ever issued an apology, said, yeah, we screwed up badly on that one. We apologize. We’re trashing. It’ll never see the light of day again.
Cirina Catania 39:48
I’m glad. I watched that, and I hated it.
Larry Jordan 39:51
Yeah. Well, you weren’t alone. Everybody hated.
Cirina Catania 39:53
I hated it. I went, What are you thinking? And you know, I have to say, for me, I’m watching everybody’s scared of AI. And there’s a part of me that is but another part of me, I’ve tried it, I pretended I was getting ready to give a speech, because I wanted to see what they would do. And I said, I gave it some prompt that my speech was going to be about new technology and what was coming in the future, and what I was going to foresee. And I said, You are an technical expert, you’ve been in the, in the business for years and years. And what came out of it was junk. It was just junk.
And I thought, you know, I’m not going to lose my job, because I am a storyteller. And most of us use, as you’re saying, we use technology to tell our stories. For me, what keeps me optimistic is I can react quickly, I can jump in many different directions. And I think if people are willing to learn new skills, as things change, and accept Hollywood is dead long live Hollywood, because it’s just moving down the street. It’s just going somewhere else. And I think we can tell people to be a little bit more optimistic.
Don’t give up. Yes, if you’re short on a job, which happens to all of us in the freelance gig economy, right, you always have your ups and downs. I want to encourage people to keep trying.
Larry Jordan 41:15
Allow me to play devil’s advocate. I do not think the world is ending. I think there will always be visual stories to tell and I think there will always be good stories that people can tell. And I also think you don’t have to go to school to study filmmaking to be able to tell a good story.
You have to be able to watch and learn from the stories that are out there. That being said, I think we’re dealing with three different realities and you point out one of them. There is the AI hype. The world is changing. Everything is going to be AI and people are going to kick back and never have to work again because AI will take over all of your jobs, which is both exciting and terrifying at the same time. So that’s the hype.
Then there is the reality, which is, well, maybe the hype doesn’t live up to it. The woman’s got six fingers or whatever. That’s not the reality that we’re dealing with. The reality that we’re dealing with is the perception of the clients toward AI. And if you think about the Coke commercial that Coke rang this Christmas, they decided that what they were going to do is to do an all AI generated commercial. They hired three AI firms and they put together this Coke commercial. Well, number one, look at all the people that didn’t get hired to put that Coke commercial together because the client felt AI was good enough. So number one, there was an instant job hit. Number two, the cloak thought it was good enough. They could put it on the air and it’s been on the air a lot. But if you look at it, the trucks are driving down the street, but the wheels aren’t turning. Santa has got some very strangely shaped hands. There’s this very unreal feeling to it, but from the client’s point of view, it was good enough that it replaced the traditional production process with this new AI driven process.
So which of these three realities is the true reality? The answer is they’re all true, which is why I think this time is so unsettled.
We’re seeing that actors voices can now be cloned perfectly. So which is one of the reasons SAG-AFTRA was out is they didn’t want to be cloned digitally. But the truth is that an actor’s face can be cloned no different than if they were real life. Their voice can be cloned no different than real life, which means that one of the defining characteristics of what makes us human, our voice and what we look like, can easily become part of an AI simulation. Well, what does that do for actors? The answer is for the famous ones, not much because they’ve got good lawyers, but the less famous ones, they’re going to get less work.
What does it do for filmmakers? Well, filmmakers, if you’re doing a hundred million dollar film, you’ve got the budget to do a hundred million dollars worth of hiring people. But the middle range, does the client invest in that second ad or do they say, well, let’s just take the first ad running through AI and now we’ve got a second ad, but nobody is involved. We’re really struggling right now to figure out how much of AI is going to translate into lost opportunity and how much of AI is going to be enhanced tools.
Apple right now is taking the approach of enhanced tools.
Larry Jordan 44:18
ChatGPT right now is taking the approach of I don’t care if it’s copyrighted or not. We’re putting it out to the world and I don’t know how we’re going to make money at it, but I’m sure we’ll make money somewhere even though they’re destroying the creative economy.
And that’s a range from support to total destruction and everywhere in between.
Cirina Catania 44:38
There is a feature on chat GPT, and I’ve wondered if it really works, but you can turn off. You can tell chat GPT not to use what you are discussing for them to learn from. You can you can turn that off. I don’t believe it, but it is there.
I am upset about all the scripts that they stole, you know, somebody who writes scripts, partly for a living. I don’t appreciate that at all.
I think that AI has its place, but I think the human brain is so complex and so wonderful that it’s going to be really hard for AI to take it over completely.
Larry Jordan 45:15
Well, I hope your optimism proves correct. That’s what I think.
Cirina Catania 45:18
I hope so because it’d be a pretty boring world. And by the way, I hated that Coke commercial. It just didn’t resonate with me. The old one that they had done previously was just so much more magical.
So there is a subliminal reaction that we have to anything AI. Now it’s getting better and better, and it is getting to the point where sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. But there is a subliminal reaction that people have to those ads. And I think that the clients may try it a lot in the beginning, but until AI gets better, they’re going to find that the long tail and the customer, it’s not going to be their friend, because I don’t know how effective that ad was in making people want to go out and buy more Coke. We will find out.
Your book came out last year. How’s it doing?
Larry Jordan 46:07
I got my royalty statement. I went out and had a cup of coffee to celebrate and then blew the entire royalty.
Technical books are not selling like gangbusters because it’s just too much stuff on the web. But I’ve had two books out the last couple years. One is on techniques of visual persuasion, which I want to talk about a little bit. And the other is my most recent book is on Power Tips for Final Cut Pro, which really takes 20 years of experience and distills it down into a single book. I’m really proud of that one. But aside from my mother, you know, a few more people buying it would always be appreciated.
Cirina Catania 46:41
The whole distribution of books has changed. Talk about techniques of visual persuasion.
Larry Jordan 46:46
There’s two ways that we can approach this. One is to put it as a book and the other is to do online training.
And when I wrote the book, I hadn’t even considered using it for online. But O’Reilly, which is a division of my publisher, does nothing except online training, and they invited me to to present Techniques of Visual Persuasion as an online course, and I’m talking to thousands of people a quarter. I mean, as an online course, it is it is beyond a hit. As a book, maybe not so good, but as an online. Oh, my goodness, I am blown away by the size of the crowds.
Cirina Catania 47:22
Where do people go to find it?
Larry Jordan 47:24
For the book, any, you know, Amazon, it’s called Techniques of Visual Persuasion. And for O’Reilly, just go to O’Reilly and search for me, Larry Jordan. I have four courses on O’Reilly and that’s one of them. O-R-E-I-L-L-Y, OReilly.com.
And search for my name, Larry Jordan. What I’ve learned is that, as you know, we’re in a very, very distracted environment. Nobody has any attention span whatsoever. The entire world is suffering from ADD. And the biggest challenge that people have is, how do you hold someone’s attention long enough for you to convey their message, whether you’re trying to train someone or excite someone or change an opinion, how do you get their attention? How do you hold it? One of the best ways to do that is to use visuals, not to replace you, but to reassure and enhance and continue grabbing attention.
But if you’ve been trained as an MBA or, you know, an accountant that we were talking about earlier, you don’t know a picture from anything else. How do you use pictures? Well, this course talks about how you use pictures to improve your presentations, how you use pictures to communicate your ideas from simple design tips like how you use fonts or how you use color or how you use images or how you do lighting. It’s not designed to turn anybody into a filmmaker. But I am so tired of death by PowerPoint. If I can at least make my life easier. It’s all about me. If I can just make my my time spent with your presentation more worthwhile than I benefit. So this is a course that teaches people that have never had to think about an image before how to use images for PowerPoint. And I’m blown away by just the incredible response that that’s been over the last three years, it’s been phenomenal.
Cirina Catania 49:19
Well, I thought it was a wonderful book. I really did. I bought that book. As soon as it came out, I bought that book.
You know, I’m curious about how you feel about social media and the use of social media, because for me, you know, we’re of a similar generation.
Larry Jordan 49:37
You’re much younger than I am.
Cirina Catania 49:38
I don’t know about that,(laughs) but social media is something, it’s difficult for me to adjust to the me, me, me, and that constant advertising. And I’m trying to, and maybe have some advice for me, what’s in it for me, some advice for me, and a lot of people that might be listening, how do you effectively live within that social media environment and still get the message out about your company and feel good about it? I just don’t feel good about it.
I’m not one to get up there and talk about, look at me, look at how great I am, and it feels like you have to do that to be successful in social media. Am I wrong?
Larry Jordan 50:18
I am a curmudgeon. I hate social media with a passion. I try to avoid social media as much as possible. And I realize that in today’s environment, we cannot live without it. So I hired somebody to do it for me.
And I’m a really, really good content creator. I’m a really good person. If you have a question, email me. I’ll be glad to give you an answer. So I support anybody that reads my newsletters or comes to my website, but I have no problem with that. But the constant self-promotion of social media just drives me nuts.
So there’s three things you can do. You can say social media doesn’t exist and you pull the hole in behind you and you just cower in the darkness, which is fine, but nobody will ever know how good you are. Or you can be an influencer and say, look at me and look at the spaghetti that I’m eating now and look at the soup I’m about to have, which is just narcissism run amok. Or you can say, this is not a skill that I’ve got. It’s a skill that I have no interest in developing. So I should find someone that really enjoys it and have them do social media on my behalf. And I have done that for the last 20 years for this whole company. I’ve always had someone else do social media who has enjoyed it and found it challenging and found it interesting. And I have no problem with turning that on. I don’t ask them to be me. I’m not saying they should certify and say they’re speaking with my voice, but we’ll decide what we’re going to talk about. I’ll create the content, but then they go ahead and promote it and set the relationships up. And to me, being of that generation, one older than you, that works the best because I find that social media is a detriment to society and I don’t want to support it, but I have to support it to some extent so people know what we’re talking about. So the way that I’ve balanced that is just get some help. And if you think about it, it’s exactly what a filmmaker needs. What do we as filmmakers do? We’re very good at telling stories, but that doesn’t mean that we have the content at our disposal. We need to have a client that gives us content or a wedding that we have to somebody else is doing something that needs to have a story told. So it’s a partnership. It’s the same thing with social media. It’s a collaboration and a partnership. I don’t have to do all of it myself.
Cirina Catania 52:33
When you think about 2025, what are you looking forward to on the tech basis? Is there something on the horizon that you’re fascinated about?
A.I. aside, I’m talking just our tribe, our tech. What are you looking towards in 2025 that you think would be really interesting?
Larry Jordan 52:51
I’ve had the same breakfast every day for the last 12 years. It’s exactly the same. It doesn’t change. I still can’t tell you what I’m going to have for breakfast tomorrow.
There is no way I can predict what’s going to happen to 2025. Clearly, the hype for A.I. is going to accelerate. Clearly, computers are going to get faster. But for the first time ever, computers are fast enough that we don’t need to keep upgrading to be able to do any kind of media work. So that means the computer manufacturers are going to have to find something even more processor intensive than video to be able to hype their latest releases. But any computer release in the last five years is enough to edit 8K video. So we don’t need that constant upgrade cycle. So I still think the cratering of the media industry is not over. It’s going to continue. I wish it wouldn’t, but I just don’t see anything turning it around.
I think 2025 is going to be challenging. I think it’s going to be challenging. And it’s going to test us to see how good we are at tap dancing. Some of us are going to decide that I’m tired of dancing and find something different and some of us are going to discover we have dancing skills we never knew about.
Cirina Catania 53:57
Well, you are the brilliant curmudgeon. I think I’m the enthusiastic Pollyanna. Somewhere in the middle, there’s something valid.
I’m curious, you don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, but I’m wondering, Larry Jordan the man, what’s on your bucket list? That you’ve done so much in your life. Is there something that you want to do that you haven’t done that is on Larry Jordan’s bucket list?
Larry Jordan 54:22
Misha Tenenbaum, who runs a wonderful website called Edit Mentor and Edit Stock, has been focused on the education industry for a long time. And he interviewed me about six months ago and asked me a similar question, not what’s on my bucket list, but as I look back on my career. And I think the overwhelming feeling that I have is that I haven’t done enough. I’m wrestling with the question of what is enough?
What more needs to be done? Where can I best help? So I don’t have a list of I’ve got to climb Mount Everest because I have no interest in that or I have to go deep sea diving. But what can I do that will enable more people to be successful? What can I do that will enable people to earn a living? What can I do that will enable people to tell better stories? What more can I do that will help you? I wrestle with that every day. I feel like there’s still more I can do, but I’m not quite sure yet what it is.
Cirina Catania 55:18
Well, I, for one, I’m very grateful to everything that you have done so far. And I’m looking forward to the future.
Will you tell people where to go to find out more about you and your newsletter and all your tutorials?
Larry Jordan 55:31 d
The website is Larry Jordan, L-A-R-R-Y-J-O-R-D-A-N, LarryJordan.com. The newsletter is free. I’ve been publishing it for 21 years. It comes out every Monday at 6.05 in the morning.
And on my website, you’ll see a link that allows you to sign up for the newsletter. I also am doing media news on my homepage, LarryJordan.com. If you scroll down just a hair, there’s a list of news stories, which I update whenever new news comes in. And I was just scrolling through it because I knew Serena was going to ask me a whole lot of questions. I better review the news.
And I was surprised at how many news stories have been there for the last six months. So we’ve got news. And I’ve also got a store where you can purchase training. But all of my tutorials are free. The newsletter is free. My website is free because I really feel that it’s important for you to understand how the tools work. And sharing knowledge of those tools really is what gets me up in the morning. So LarryJordan.com.
Cirina Catania 56:30
Larry, thank you so much. It’s so nice to see you.
Larry Jordan 56:34
The honor is mine, really, it’s a delight talking to you. I always enjoy it.
Cirina Catania 56:39
Always will. We’re in this business together for a long time to come. I’m going to call that a wrap for today, and I’m going to tell everybody what I always tell you. Get up off your chairs and go do something wonderful today.
Whatever it is, go do something that gives you joy, makes you happy, and try to learn something new. And he’s Larry Jordan. I’m Cirina Catania, and you’ve been listening to OWC Radio.
