End User

Greetings from the Future of Filmmaking!

I’m in Portland, Oregon, shooting an episode of TNT’s prime time drama, Leverage.

Just about every night after we wrap I meet up with my friend John Rogers, who is the co-executive producer and head writer for the show, to have a beer and decompress after a long day on the set. Whether we talk about filmmaking, comic books, nerdy geeky gaming stuff, or technology, a common thread runs through our conversations: it’s pretty awesome to live here in the future, we sure are lucky to get paid to make stuff up and entertain people, and holy crap has the industry changed since we first entered it.

Leverage is totally shot in the future. We use the Red One digital camera, we watch takes right after we finish them to make sure nothing went wrong, and we get our dailies via secure internet connection anywhere we have computers and WiFi. John told me that at least once, they realized they didn’t shoot a single or needed a tighter angle to make something work, and were able to create coverage in post-production, which is done entirely on Final Cut Pro. During production, we could send pictures and updates from the set to Twitter and our blogs, and engage the audience in a direct and intimate way that is unlike anything I’ve ever done before.

The Red One camera--relatively affordable, studio-quality, and used to produce many shows and short films

Evolution

I’ve worked in television and movies for so long, I have a hard time remembering a time in my life where I wasn’t going to auditions and spending most of my days on the set. I started acting in the mid-70s, and over the course of a three decade career, I’ve seen several subtle changes and a few paradigm shifts in how we get ideas out of a script, bring them to life on the set, and deliver them to the audience.

When I was a kid, everything was shot on 35mm film, which came in in magazines ranging from a few hundred to a thousand feet, and always produced a certain amount of noise. There were two main cameras back in those days: Panaflex and Arriflex. Everybody loved shooting the Panaflex, mostly because it’s a great camera. Arris were usually less expensive to rent, but were always louder. Even when they’d wrap the magazine in a baffle, I can remember some Arris being so loud, the sound of the film spinning through the camera would blast right out of the lens at us during a scene. There’s a certain romance to the sound of film churning past the gate, but as an actor, it was distracting and usually meant that we were going to have to re-record our dialog once the film was cut together.

Because film stock was a nontrivial production expense, if anything went wrong during a take, from an actor flubbing a line to a technical problem with camera or sound, we’d cut, reset, and start over to conserve film. Because developing film was a nontrivial production expense, depending on the show’s budget, a director could only pick a handful of takes to print and possibly include in the final cut.

Shooting digitally on the Red One means the camera is silent, and because there isn’t any film to load or run out of, shooting a scene is more like doing a little bit of a play. It’s so quiet, the director can stand right next to the camera and talk to us, and since we’re not burning film, we can quickly reset and keep rolling if something goes awry, and there’s no reason to stop rolling if something awesome or unexpected happens during a take.

How did we get here? I think it all started with the advent of video tape in the 1980s. Because video tape was so cheap and didn’t require a developing process, it lead to the home video revolution (and that unfortunate incident where Roller Girl stomped on that one guy’s face) but very few serious filmmakers liked shooting on video because it looked and felt so different from film. There was inherently less control over the entire process, and old habits died hard, you know. Video never really replaced film, but I think digital will finally provide an acceptable, game-changing alternative.

I think it was inevitable that we would get where we are today, and I think it’s only a matter of time before more shows (and networks who are scared shitless of anything new) catch up to where Leverage has been for over a year. This show is truly at the tip of the spear, and every day they rewrite the rules for television production.

 

Revolution

In the early 90s, emboldened by the type of unwavering certainty that only a twenty year-old can have, I went to work for NewTek, as a tiny part of the team that brought the Video Toaster 4000 to life. The Video Toaster was an absolutely magnificent bit of technology that took everything you’d expect from a television studio, and crammed it into an Amiga computer. (Kids, ask your parents ... unless they are Amiga fanboys, because it’s just too painful to talk about.) In these days of iMovie and Final Cut, it may not seem like such a big deal, but about 25 years ago, being able to do real-time digital video effects, 3D computer graphics and animation, and titles for less than $10,000 was unheard of. Also, there was Toaster Paint (Robert Blackwell, I hope you read this, because that one was for you.)

If video was an incremental shift for filmmakers, the Toaster was a paradigm shift, because we made it affordable for just about anyone to produce high-quality video television, eliminating one of the biggest barriers to entry for a lot of hopeful filmmakers.

Despite all the magic NewTek brought to the world with the Toaster, we could never cross two vast chasms: What we didn’t have back then, that we all take for granted now, was digital, nonlinear editing. Hard drives were simply too expensive and computers weren’t fast enough to make that sort of thing anywhere close to affordable for average people, so filmmakers had to invest in additional editing equipment that was cool at the time, but seems as elegant as a Civil War field hospital today.

There was also a significant problem with distribution, which was still controlled entirely by the same moguls who controlled the networks. Today, a filmmaker can pick from dozens of different online options to put their work in front of the audience, but in the early 90s, it was a different world. We were still waiting for the Real Player to even start buffering, 56k dial-up was considered screaming fast, and our online porn arrived in ASCII art or .gif files that took an hour to download. (Er, I heard from some guy, because I never would have even dreamed of looking at Kimberly Conrad online in 1992.)

 

Get Excited and Make Things

Every day I work on Leverage, I can’t help but think about how much the entertainment industry has changed in my lifetime, and how what we did at NewTek fits into that.

Right now, if you have a creative idea, you can produce it and get it to an audience for under a thousand dollars. Right now, you can get your very own HD video camera for about the cost of feeding one of those kids in Africa for two months. Right now, if you have a Mac, it ships with everything you need to cut and finish your story. Right now, you can have a screening for more people, more easily, than at any other time in history, and they don’t even have to be in the same room.

In the 1960s, film stock, sound equipment, and cameras became (relatively) cheap and affordable. This put advanced tools into the hands of creative people, and lead to the greatest decade of filmmaking in history: 1970s. I think we’re poised for a similar revolution.

See you at the barricades.

Sonos + Rhapsody = Crazy Delicious

A few years ago, I was pretty excited to pick up my first Apple Airport Express, so I could start streaming music from iTunes straight into my stereo system at home, instead of through my tiny laptop speakers. I liked it so much, I picked up a second Airport Express and a cheap bookshelf stereo system so I could also stream music into my office. I like to listen to music while I work, but headphones distract me, and for reasons that are best left to the realm of Weird and Irrational Artist Ooga Booga™, I need to have music come from some place other than my computer or desk, and the Airport Express was perfect for this.

The system served me well for a very long time. I added a nifty app called Airfoil to my Mac, which enabled me to take any audio source from my computer and stream it to an Airport Express, so I could listen to my favorites at Magnatune.com, as well as some online radio stations that only had web-based players like KROQ of the 80s. I could also take my last.fm player or Pandora, and stream them. Then, about 8 months ago, something went all hinky (that’s a technical term) with the airport card in my Macbook, and streaming music was like watching anything in the realplayer circa 1997: buffering … buffering … buffering … and now we’re crashing.

Sonos: Decidedly Not Hinky

I went on a quest for an alternative, and ended up with the Sonos Multi-Room Music System. Sonos is, as the product description implies, a system that makes it easy to stream music all over your house. You do this by defining zones (living room, kitchen, office, bedroom, etc.) and attaching a Sonos player to each one. Once you’re set up, you can stream different content to each zone, or link them all together for something called Party Mode (woo). This lets the damn kids in your house listen to whatever it is the damn kids today listen to out in the living room, while you listen to something sensible in your office while you work, like The Circle Jerks. It’s almost as easy to set up as the Netflix Player from Roku, and the controller software for the iPhone/iPod Touch is really slick.

Sonos accomplished all the tasks I missed from Airport + Airfoil, plus it gave me access to about 25,000 online radio stations from all over the world, searchable by country, genre, and even by program. You obviously don’t need a Sonos to listen to all those stations because they’re already online, but the interface makes it as easy to search the entire planet for a station as it is to spin the dial on your car stereo during your morning commute; there’s something outrageously cool about listening to a classic rock station from Japan and then tuning into a local music show from a former Eastern Bloc country while you’re waiting for the Joe Frank show to start.

Sonos also seamlessly integrates support for major online music services, like Pandora and Last.fm (bonus feature: it’ll scrobble eveything you play, if you want it to, increasing the relevance of your recommended stations quite a bit), as well as Napster and Rhapsody. I was curious about Rhapsody, because my friend John Scalzi has been praising it incessantly since digital watches were a pretty neat idea. I activated the 30 day free trial, and I haven’t looked back. I’m sorry I ever doubted you, John, because Rhapsody is awesome, and Rhapsody + Sonos changed the way I listened to music at home, even more so than when I discovered Pandora, or bought my first Slacker Media Player.

Rhapsody, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Yacht Rock

If you’re like I was until recently, and don’t know much about Rhapsody, allow me to explain. Wait, there is no time. Let me sum up: it’s a subscription-based music service with different types of membership. I have the streaming membership.For $13 a month, I get access to a music library that spans nearly a century of recordings, in every genre I could ever want, by thousands of artists I love (and many that I don’t care about; Jesus Jones, I’m looking in your direction.) I can search the library for specific artists, tracks, and albums, adding things I like or find interesting to my personal library. I can also listen to hundreds of different commercial-free, genre-specific stations, just like the ones I make with Slacker or listen to on satellite. It’s pretty awesome. If I get the crazy urge to listen to Hall and Oates (it happens more often than you’d think), if I’m curious if the new Depeche album is any good (it’s not), or if I wonder what the big deal is about Amy Winehouse (guilty pleasure, I’ll admit it right now and blame Secret Diary of a Call Girl) I can be listening in a matter of minutes, and when I get on some crazy Yacht Rock kick, I can quickly and easily build a playlist without investing a hundred bucks that I’m going to regret as soon as I realize that I’m listening to Yacht Rock. Oh! And I can also listen to stations inspired by artists, so if I get in the mood for some nice Bauhaus-inspired gloom, I just load up the Bauhaus artist station and let the Love & Rockets carry me all the way to Skinny Puppy.

Is Rhapsody worth the monthly fee? It is for me, without a doubt. My musical tastes are so diverse – it’s easier to just tell you that I don’t like Top 40 and Country than it is to tell you all the stuff I do like – I have built an immense library that takes up almost as much storage space as my comic book collection. Rhapsody is perfect for letting me virtually drag out all my 70s punk records, or my Grateful Dead live shows, or even my embarrassingly-comprehensive collection of lounge music whenever the mood strikes me.

Now, here’s the thing about Rhapsody’s streaming membership: you don’t own the music you add to your library, and when you stop paying the subscription fee, it goes away. But … so what? I don’t use it in place of actually purchasing albums, anyway. I know what I’m getting into, and if I like something so much that I want to own it, well … I buy it, usually from Amazon’s MP3 store (which really needs to incorporate simple gifting of albums via e-mailed online gift certificate, like the iTunes Music Store.)

Wonder Twins, Activate

I probably wouldn’t be as happy with Sonos and Rhapsody as I am if I had them in isolation of each other, but joining them together makes a musical baby that’s so beautiful, you’ll want to take it home and pet it and hug it and love it and call it George.

However, all this praise and heaping, bucket of stinky panda love aside, there is a huge, glaring, you-have-got-to-be-kidding me drawback to the whole thing: Sonos is incredibly expensive. If you’re looking for a way to get music from your computer and the internet into your home stereo system, there are other options which are less expensive...and less elegant. You absolutely get what you pay for in this technological arena, though, and I believe Sonos delivers the very best bang for the buck, especially when you team it up with Rhapsody. Like Slacker and Pandora before that, it's fundamentally changed the way I listen to and find music.

Wil Wheaton is quite content, now a little bit older.

2009: The Year Print-on-Demand Goes Mainstream

"2009 is the year that print on demand goes mainstream." – Warren Ellis

We are living in an incredible time, both as consumers and creators. As consumers, whatever entertainment we want, whether it's television, music, movies, games or books, is easier and faster to get than ever before. As creators, the barriers between us and our audience are falling faster and more easily than ever before, the time between creation and release is shrinking, and thanks to the Internet we can reach more people with less effort than we could as recently as a decade ago.

Earlier this week, I came across a post in my blog archives from September of 2002 where I said:

Remember how so many readers have been telling me to write a book? Well, I listened. Watch this space for details on how you can get it in about a week or so, maybe two.

 

I was talking about my book Dancing Barefoot, which was created from material I cut out of Just A Geek. I looked at that post and felt a little nostalgic, because that's where my journey as a published writer and champion of indie publishing began. 

In 2002, I was just another struggling actor and fledgling blogger. I figured that, since I was having such a hard time getting work as an actor - where I had a huge resume and a lifetime of experience - it would be nearly-impossible to sell my books to a publisher. I did some research, figured out that I was able to reach a few hundred thousand people with my blog, and decided to reject the "traditional" publishing route in favor of self-publishing.

I needed an education in self-publishing, and read two books that made all the difference: The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing and The Self-Publishing Manual. They were both filled with great advice, like the importance of hiring and respecting an experienced editor, a good designer, and putting together an intelligent marketing plan. I'm not sure what the current versions of the books say, but in 2002, they both warned authors away from using print on demand, largely because the per-unit costs were unreasonably high, and when you held a POD book in your hands, it really felt like you were holding a POD book in your hands.

My, my, my, how the times have changed. The prejudice against POD persists, but that tactile difference in quality has vanished, and after a couple of my friends used print on demand from Lulu to release their books, I decided to give it a try myself. I wrote in my blog:

If this works the way I think it will, it's going to be super awesome for all of us as I release books in the future: You don't have to worry about me screwing up your order, I don't have to invest in a thousand books at a time, you get your book in a few days instead of a few weeks because I'm not shipping it myself, and I can spend more time creating new stories while remaining independent. Best of all, I'll have the time to write and release more than one or two books a year.

Just one month after releasing print and digital versions of my chapbook Sunken Treasure, as well as a short audio book, my only complaint is that I didn't use POD sooner. The whole experience has been so overwhelmingly positive, I don't think I'll ever use a different publishing method again. If you're a writer, you owe it to yourself to examine the self-publishing and POD opportunities you have available to you right now, keeping in mind the advice in those books I mentioned: if you want people to take you seriously, you have to invest in a good editor and designer, and you have to be willing to listen to them both. This is the fundamental difference between someone who is a self-publisher, and someone who is a vanity publisher.

As a creator, I have an unprecedented opportunity to use POD technology and Internet distribution to take more chances and release more material with less risk than ever before. Before POD, I never would have even considered a wide release of something like Sunken Treasure; it was just too risky to invest thousands of dollars into something that I was unsure would sell the quantity I would need to order from a traditional printer. But with access to print on demand technology, and using the Internet as a means to market and distribute the book, there was no good reason not to give it a try. So far, it's working out really well. Reviews are good, sales are good, and I've really enjoyed every step of the process.

I know I'm just one guy with a very small operation, and my way of doing things isn't for everyone, but I believe that this is the future of publishing, 

Last week, there was a significant change in the institutional prejudice against print on demand. It's not in book publishing, but in DVDs:

Warner Brothers is putting their DVD back catalog into a POD service: Warner Bros on Monday became the first studio to open its film vault to "made-to-order" DVDs, as it sought new revenues in a slumping DVD market by making it possible for fans to buy decades-old films.

Warner Bros, owned by Time Warner Inc, made an initial batch of 150 titles available for purchase online at www.WarnerArchive.com, including 1943 comedy-romance "Mr. Lucky" starring Cary Grant and the 1962 release "All Fall Down" with Warren Beatty and Eva Marie Saint.

The on-demand service allows Warner Bros. to avoid the risk of manufacturing too many copies of old or obscure titles and shipping them to retailers because customers directly order only the titles they want to buy.

The Warner Bros film archive has 6,800 titles. Since it entered the DVD market in 1997, the studio has released only around 1,200 of those titles from the vault. By comparison, the company expects by the end of the year to have more than 300 titles available via the DVD-on-demand service.

I completely agree with Warren Ellis (who, full disclosure, is a friend) that 2009 is the year print on demand goes mainstream. It just makes so much sense; why waste warehouse space, shelf space, and limited-investment capital on something nobody's interested in, when it's just as easy to show them the entire menu and let them pick out what they want? All of the elements that we need are lined up and ready to work together: decentralized distribution online, long tail publishing, high-quality on-demand products, and creators who have enough direct contact with their audience to make giving huge portions of their profits and their rights away to publishers totally unnecessary. 

I hope that Warner Bros. has success with their POD publishing, and that it encourages other publishers, creators, and music labels to do the same, because I believe that this is the future, whether you're an indie creator like me, or a giant powerhouse like them.

--Wil Wheaton would love to change the world.

The Slacker Media Player: Nostalgia (the Good Kind) in the Palm of Your Hand

Kids, I want you to take off your jetpacks, and step out of your flying cars for a minute. Come sit down over here, and let Old Man Wheaton tell you a tale of a time when television didn’t have a pause button, renting videos meant actually going to a store - during hours that they set - and listening to the radio meant hearing the same 27 songs every two and-a-half hours, with ten to eighteen minutes of commercials every 60 minutes.

Now, I realize that some of you think I’m just making this up to scare you, but it’s true. We didn’t have any control over how we got our entertainment back then. We couldn’t skip songs we didn’t like, and we couldn’t tell the radio how frequently it should play certain songs. It was a different time, when nickels had pictures of bumblebees on them and the King of England would just show up at your house and expect you to make him a cup of tea.

Those of you who have grown up in a world where you have unprecedented control over your media (DRM, which is beyond the scope of this story, notwithstanding) may have a hard time believing that we who came before you would actually wait for a song we hated to go away, or sit through loud and obnoxious commercials and DJs because we knew a song we loved was coming up. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s true; that’s just how the world worked back then, and we accepted it without question.

Oh, how the times have changed!

The change came to me in 2002, when I got my very first XM Satellite Radio. No longer was I limited to a handful of radio stations that all played the same basic playlist! When I drove out of major media markets, I was able to listen to more than just country and right wing talk radio! There were comedy stations! Old Time Radio stations! Eclectic stations that reached deep into the catalogs of everything from classic rock to jam bands to truly alternative music from the 80s. It was absolutely glorious, and I couldn’t believe that we ever listened to radio any other way. We all thought that it was too good to be true.

Last year, when XM merged with Sirius, we found out that it was too good to be true. Most of the stations I loved on XM, if they stayed on the air after the merger at all, became as repetitive and pedestrian as the ones that drove me away from FM radio so many years ago. It seemed like the programming departments (with a few notable exceptions - the decades remain great, and XMU and XM Chill seem to have been left alone) made the inexplicably stupid decision to simply recreate the unsatisfying FM radio experience that drove so many of us to become XM and Sirius subscribers in the first place. The talk stations are all the same, the DJs are interesting and many of them provide great nostalgic value, but radio is ultimately about listening to music, and what’s the point of paying for satellite, if it doesn’t offer anything substantially different from what we already get with our basic radios?

I recently wrote that years of listening to Pandora and using social news sites like Reddit had conditioned me to expect a greater amount of control over the information and entertainment that I consume. Being able to train a service to give me more of what I want and less of what I don’t isn’t a luxury; it’s a requirement.

One afternoon last December, after hearing “Eyes Without A Face” for the third time in five hours on a station that used to play great New Wave music, I looked at my radio and I said, “I wish I could train you like Pandora, so you’d stop playing this crap I can’t stand and play more of the music I like. What happened to you, man? You used to be cool!”

My iPod, sitting unused on the passenger seat, said, “hey, I’m right here, you know. I have all your favorite music, all ready to go.”

“That’s not the point, iPod,” I said. “I want radio. I grew up with radio. I’ve listened to radio my whole life. Radio is important to me, and you, iPod, are no radio!”

“I also don’t play a lot of music you don’t like, tough guy,” my iPod said, nonplussed.

“Touché,” I said. “Now, let’s stop talking before the people around me think I’m nuts.”

“They already think you’re nuts. You have a bumper sticker on your car that says ‘There’s no place like 127.0.0.1’. You frighten and confuse them. They’ve probably called the police already. Hey, speaking of The Police...”

That’s when I put my iPod into the glove box, kids.

As fate would have it, there was a Woot Off that day, and one of the items offered was the Slacker portable media player. I’d heard of it before, but I hadn’t paid especially close attention to it; after all, I had XM and my iPod. Why did I need something else? What did the Slacker portable media player offer that I didn’t have already? Well, after a bit of research I determined that, distilled to its most fundamental essence, the Slacker is like Pandora-on-the-go. It combines a web-based music player with a portable music player where all your ratings and custom stations are synchronized. I decided to take a chance, and bought one for myself.

Battling "Feature Creep" with the Roku Netflix Digital Video Player

When I was in high school, a friend of mine got a TV/VCR/stereo combo unit for her birthday. It had a very small footprint, required only one remote control (a very big deal in those pre-universal remote days) and was a pretty cool media center at the time.

Then the VCR got messed up, and instead of just losing her VCR for a few days, she lost her TV and her stereo, too. We all learned an important lesson then, about the wisdom of buying something that tried to pack too much into one unit.

Today, you won’t find as many all-in-one units as you once did, but it’s increasingly difficult to find things that do just one thing, and do it very well. I blame this on something I call “Feature Creep” which I suspect comes from too many meetings, too much input from marketing, and not enough product managers and engineers who are willing to stand up and say, “You know what? I don’t think this coffee maker really needs an MP3 player in it. It’s fine just making coffee.”

Feature Creep is everywhere, bloating our software, lengthening our startup times, cluttering up our menus, and draining our batteries, so when I come across something that has successfully resisted it and stayed focused on doing one simple thing very well, I have a little bit of a pants party.

One of the best examples I’ve come across in the last year is the Netflix player from Roku. It’s a tiny little box that streams anything from Netflix’s on-demand library straight into your television, and that’s all it does.

It’s a wonderfully elegant little device. The user interface is clean, and the menus are super easy to navigate. It has outputs that range from RCA to composite video and HDMI, as well as digital audio. The remote has nine buttons on it - that’s fewer than I have on my cell phone - and they mimic the controls we’re all used to on a DVR or DVD player. It’s so small and simple to set up, my wife and I frequently move it between the two TVs we have in our house, and I’ve tossed it into my backpack and taken it with me to friends’ houses for movie nights.

Set up was incredibly simple, and it took less than ten minutes from the time I opened it until I was watching my first movie. Speaking as a life-long technology geek, the highest praise I can give it is this: I still haven’t opened the manual, and don’t think I’ll ever need to.

So I love it, but is it worth $99 to you? It depends on your movie-watching habits and your network speed. If your ISP throttles your bandwidth, or your download speed is slower than 3Mbps, you won’t get the best quality picture. I didn’t realize how much that really mattered to me, until I was forced to watch a bunch of movies that looked like they were VHS quality on my HDTV. I upgraded my service to a faster bitrate so I could get maximum resolution, though, and the next movie my son and I watched, Vanishing Point, was indistinguishable from DVD.

While the box itself and the technology that power it are awfully close to perfect, the Netflix side of the service could use some improvement. The studios still haven’t figured out how to fully embrace emerging technology, so there are only 12,000 or so movies and television shows available as of this writing, I know that 12,000 sounds like a lot (and it is) but there are some huge gaps in there, especially in the new releases department, and more frequently than I’d like, the movie I really want to watch right now isn’t available. Programs are also taken out of the on-demand service fairly often as licenses expire, which can result in some unhappy moments when you realize that all those Tom Baker episodes of Doctor Who you waited until after Christmas to watch are gone. However, Netflix is adding new movies every day, and in the very near future, the player will also stream about 40,000 movies and television shows from Amazon Video On Demand, costing between 99 cents and 3.99 per rental. I don’t know what the overlap with Netflix’s existing library will be, but I expect the studios would be happy to put more movies out there when they know that they’ll be playable for only 24 hours. (Not because it deters piracy, but because the studios like to pretend that it does.)

I love the Netflix Player not just because it’s simple and elegant in a world that’s filled with unnecessarily complicated devices, but for the future it represents.

In the future, we won’t have to go to the video store, or wait for DVDs to arrive in the mail when we want to rent movies. In the future, we won’t plan our evenings around television shows, because they’ll be on-demand to fit into our schedules. In the future, we won’t have to fill our houses with physical media unless we want to. Thanks to the Netflix Player from Roku, the future is almost here.

--Wil Wheaton

(Actor and professional geek Wil Wheaton is a new guest blogger for End User.  His column will appear the last Thursday of each month, where he'll review his favorite gadgets and talk about all things tech.  He can regularly be found blogging at wilwheaton.typepad.com.)