Learn how the Microsoft Power CAT team make their awesome videos

Mark Smith: 0:13
Welcome to the Co-Pilot Show where I interview Microsoft staff innovating with AI. I hope you will find this podcast educational and inspire you to do more with this great technology. Now let's get on with the show. In this episode, we'll be focusing on PowerCat Live. How do they do it, what's the tech behind the scene and how does Phil know when to talk to the audience? Today we have guests from both the US and Spain on the call. Phil is a Principal Program Manager at Microsoft Power Platform Customer Advisory Team that's where the word cat comes from and Simmo is the founder of One man Shot. You can find links to their bios in the show notes for this episode. If you want to get in touch with either of them, their social media etc will be available. Welcome to the show, phil and Simmo. Thanks, nice to be here again. Thank you, matt. Good to have you back. Phil, it has been. Episode 246 was the last time you were on air with me. That's about three years ago.

Phil Topness: 1:16
I like that. You count time in episodes. The rest of us use months and years.

Mark Smith: 1:21
You use episodes. Well, I'm at 600 and I'm in the 640s now, so it's been a wee while Eight years of podcasting.

Mark Smith: 1:28
Yeah, and now we're getting into video. Yeah, I was going to say podcast. Why can I see you so well? If this is a podcast, so that's the thing. So if you're listening to this, you can go watch it over on youtube on the nz365 guy channel, or you can stay listening here, or, of course, spotify now has a video, so you can watch it there on spotify as well. So let's kick things off. Tell us, uh, phil, first of all, what was the, the thinking behind PowerCat Live?

Phil Topness: 1:57
Yeah, powercat Live was the brainchild of Saurabh Pant, who's the top cat we call him. He's the general manager that leads PowerCat. He was PowerCat number one and basically the thinking was you know, powercat is doing all of this work with the top customers around the world. How do we get those learnings out broadly? And also, we were having conversations like with the program managers on what they were building right now. Wouldn't we like to let other people listen to those conversations? That was the idea.

Mark Smith: 2:25
I like it, I like it and of course, you've got a lot, of, a lot of Microsoft stuff. You did a lot of episodes. Now I look today and it looks like nine months ago was the last published episode with James Omnick from you Is that the case.

Phil Topness: 2:41
Yeah, yeah. Simo also says when is the next episode coming? More are coming. We've got, I think, five that we're editing right now. One we recorded yesterday. More are coming. Took a little hiatus working on a different project that Simo is hinting to with this T-shirt.

Mark Smith: 2:57
Awesome, awesome, okay, makes sense. Hiatus working on a different project that simo is hinting to with this t-shirt. Awesome, awesome, okay, makes sense, makes sense. Life gets busy now. One of the feedback I I have, uh, some of the feedback I've heard from the community, is that they love the way your, uh, your setup works right. They love the way you know there's times that you can talk to the camera or talk to the audience. Um, in your setup, uh, simo, of course, is the editor. We're going to get his his view on things. But talk me through how your rig is set up, how your environment's set up. How did how did you work with simo to get to where you are? How did you find simo in the first place? Was it another microsoft staff member that introduced you? So there are a lot of questions there yeah, and so you're describing the rig.

Phil Topness: 3:43
Now, if you go back to look at powercat live number one, it's me looking off of a camera, the one on my laptop. It's very painful to watch and then through a lot of practice, but then getting introduced to simo. His uh, brother metty, is one of the founding members of power cat and Simo does a lot of other stuff for the team besides that. But really his role as producer on that helped helped make it what it is today. Right, like the any of the side cam, which I don't have today because it's your audience so I can't talk to them. But talking to the audience through that.

Phil Topness: 4:13
The setup with the teleprompter and the digital SLR and the three lights and all that was all Simo just making it better every time we recorded one.

Mark Smith: 4:25
I like it, simo, when you kind of work with a new customer like this. What are the kind of things that you like to get in place and get set up to start with, like?

Simo Slaoui: 4:35
Phil you mean.

Phil Topness: 4:38
Yeah, like Phil, like a raw piece of clay that's a little bit dried out that you really need to mold into something useful.

Simo Slaoui: 4:44
No, I think Phil was ready for the show. I just came with some tips, you know, just to have improved the lighting, improved the. To have improved the lighting, improved the image quality, the way to record the video to record like locally, and don't just count on Riverside compression and, yeah, just my expertise on making video and bringing that to online video production. So that was the thing with Phil.

Mark Smith: 5:18
So you just mentioned Riverside, and so Riverside is the software that I've used for the last three years for recording. How long have you guys have been using Riverside to do the recording of your sessions? As a part of the recording of your sessions?

Simo Slaoui: 5:32
A couple of years, probably about two years. Yeah, we were the first user of free versailles, I guess yeah, yeah, we used to reach out to us.

Simo Slaoui: 5:43
Yeah, because I was looking for a solution to record remotely. I was working on documentary at that time and the covid hits. I was looking for a way to keep recording my movie, yeah, and I was looking for solution. I found some. I found skype teams and then I found riverside and, uh, it was like the only solution I found on online so can you explain why riverside is so good for remote based recording?

Simo Slaoui: 6:14
I think just because we have the ability to record locally and then to upload that. The idea behind it is simple. We don't have this compression that we have in real-time recording, so you have like kind of buffering.

Mark Smith: 6:36
It's recording locally and then that's it. So we don't lose quality.

Phil Topness: 6:41
So it's brilliant idea to do perfect and, and I will say, mark, like we, we do use riverside in our recordings, but like this is simo always pushing us to get better we're also recording locally on the camera, the same one that's feeding riverside. This mic is recording riverside. I've got one here that is recording to the camera or like. Like everything is in duplicate, so if something fails we still get that video out there.

Mark Smith: 7:03
Awesome.

Mark Smith: 7:04
So you're all taking multiple audio copies of your conversation and you're also taking multiple camera copies, and so just I just want to explain a few things here to the audiences that and how they think about their setup with Riverside because of the audience is at and how they think about their setup With Riverside, because everybody that is on camera, or if they share their desktop, so their screen, to illustrate something, that is all being recorded as a separate file, not only audio but also video, separately on their local hard drives of their computer and then, as Simo said, it just gets buffered up to the server in the next 45 to 60 seconds.

Mark Smith: 7:38
So what it means is that if the internet stretches you, if latency enters your connection, at that time you don't lose that high quality, high definition video because it's saved to your local disk, it's sitting in cache of your browser and then it gets uploaded to the server. So the key thing, the only gotcha in that process, is that you cannot close Riverside until the upload is finished. Now that's for just reusing Riverside, but just note here there's a second layer that Phil and Simo have talked about. Here they're recording direct-to-SD cards on their camera for the cameras that they have, and I take it, some of you just get those uploaded after the show and then you can see what the recording look like altogether from what Riverside gave you. But you also have access to their high quality footage.

Simo Slaoui: 8:32
Yeah, and we can also do that without Riverside. I mean we can use Teams and use smartphones. It's okay. It works For the voice, yeah, for both. I mean also for video. We can just drive people how to correctly frame, to correctly light and then record on their smartphone and we can talk on Teams. But Riverside resolved this question, so we have one platform and everything inside. I like it. We can keep using our devices and record locally and we also have this nice platform easy to use for our guests and for producing.

Phil Topness: 9:17
Nice, phil, and you mentioned screen sharing. Cmo has us do something similar for demos. We will share them in Riverside, but we'll usually go back and have them do a 4K recording and that way CMO can zoom in on it and highlight things and really make it more interactive than just a static demo where something's happening only in the corner of the screen.

Mark Smith: 9:41
Yeah, nice, because it's interesting that just last week Riverside made an update to their platform and now all screen recording is in high definition and stored locally New feature.

Mark Smith: 9:52
One thing I'm impressed with Riverside they're one of those platforms because they've been built in the modern SaaS era. The amount of times people platforms because they've been built in the modern SaaS era, the amount of times people go, oh, this is like a go-to meeting or no, it's not. It's a totally different technology play here. But what I like about Riverside is they keep adding new features. Just got an email this morning with five new things that they've added over the break and they are amazing. Things like transcription quality that comes out, the ability to edit via.

Mark Smith: 10:22
If I make a mistake, let's say I said, hey, phil was born in 1963, which he was, so it's not a mistake. But let's say he was born maybe a bit more recently and I made that mistake on air. I don't have to rerecord it, I can just go and edit that item of text in the transcript and it will, using my voice. It will actually use the correct. You know the fact that he was born in at about 1990, it will actually overlay that and you as an audience would have no idea that that edit was made and that correction was made after the fact. So incredibly powerful from a post-production editing point of view. There's a whole bunch of other features, like the ability to export clips and for social media promos things like that from the platform as well that have been added all the time. You can add music beds. I'm just experimenting with that now because I usually have my third-party post-production team do all that type of stuff for me and I'm wondering how much more of post can actually be done directly in the platform.

Phil Topness: 11:26
Will Spotify require you to put a sponsored tag on this ad Mark or on this podcast?

Mark Smith: 11:30
Spotify.

Phil Topness: 11:31
I only use Spotify for some stuff Sponsored by Riverside Not. Riverside Riverside yeah, I know, massive product for Riverside right, not what you posted.

Mark Smith: 11:37
That gets sponsored by? Yeah, sponsored by Riverside? No, no sponsorship. I pay all my fees for using Riverside, which, just on an aside, I'm just going to bring this up about the MVP program and the value from the MVP program. I just got in and jumped in to look at benefits that Microsoft give MVPs nowadays and they've gone from there being benefits to there being benefits in the last 12 months and that they have inlaid into the platform now the ability for you to access a lot of Microsoft licensing for doing this type of stuff. Not with Riverside, I'm not talking about that, but I'm just saying there's a lot of value, um, that microsoft is building now as part of the mvp program, giving back to mvps, which I think is absolutely epic. I'm uh, I'm not coming up for mvp renewal, so I'm not trying to do anything I'm just saying it is massively beneficial and what you can get.

Mark Smith: 12:35
Um, the reason I particularly notice it is that I'm listed as a power platform mvp and, of course, I've been a dynamics mvp all my life because I started with mscrm 1.2 this is back in 2003, so we're talking 21 years ago but I'm no longer a dynamics uh mvp. I'm only a power platform mvp because I saw the light. But I went to go oh, I should actually jump into Dynamics sales and do something, and I'm like I can't claim that because I'm no longer a Dynamics MVP. So it is a bit funny. I digress Tell us about Phil. One of the things you do is talk to your audience as part of your show, and I want to bring up the nuance of the mobile phone. Simone, you touched on it, it before.

Phil Topness: 13:19
Tell us about how that works yeah, so, uh, we're using riverside, as you've mentioned. I'll usually have a phone sitting here. Uh, this was simo's idea. Yeah, off to my, off to my right. Uh, and simo's like, talk to the audience. Like you know, I'm usually talking one-to-one to the guest. Yeah, let the audience know or react or give a reaction shot. Um, I think it's been very effective. I think it's a very unique thing. It was really difficult at first to remember that there's this camera over here and you know thousands of people here that I should be talking to. And now it's very natural, and now I do it almost instinctively. Even when it's not there, like it's not right now, I'm waving at it. Um, but yeah, that was just another example of simo like, let's try this, let's push this a little bit more, uh, and I think it also gives more editing flexibility too, so I think it's really a win-win.

Phil Topness: 14:04
Yeah, yeah simo.

Mark Smith: 14:06
What are your thoughts?

Simo Slaoui: 14:07
we know, when we have a show like this, uh, we cannot just stay on one shot yes, one side by side for eight minutes or 10 minutes. It can be boring. So editing needs more dynamic stuff. We need to switch between angles, to add more graphics, just to keep the audience connected to the show. So that was one idea to have this side cam and also to bring more graphics more. I don't know what we need to have Professionalism.

Simo Slaoui: 14:43
Sometimes Phil asks me to add like a background with some visual effects. This is the thing we need, just to bring more content to the video.

Phil Topness: 14:55
And we can see it in YouTube telemetry to the video and we can see it in YouTube telemetry. Youtube gives you, you know, all across the timeline. You can see where people are coming in, where they're rewinding to, and we see that when there's a frame change, or especially when there's some software on the screen, people will jump to that, and so one of our goals when we're designing the episode is to get the demo as early on as possible. I tell people like if I ask you what your feature is and your answer is let me just show it to you.

Phil Topness: 15:47
That's the right answer. Right Because that gets people engaged right in that first 30 seconds, which are key.

Simo Slaoui: 15:50
Yeah, and sometimes just reframing, like going from wide angle to close up and back to wide angle, helps to get more dynamic editing. I like it.

Phil Topness: 16:02
Yeah, this is the thing thing or we put text on the screen, or I'll be like hey, simo, can you make dataverse logos come out of nathan helgren's mouth? Yeah, or can you make clippy beside me, right, like I just keep trying to think of, like, what is something weirder that I could ask simo to do, to see if I can break him, and I haven't done it yet I like it.

Mark Smith: 16:18
I like it. I also noticed in some of the comments on youtube about your videos is that people they're just here for the sound effects.

Phil Topness: 16:27
That's also. That's also Simo yeah. I'm like hey you're making a squeak right there. I really like that. Yeah, keyboard or mouse clicking.

Simo Slaoui: 16:35
I like to add this kind of sound effect. It helps also. Totally, right yeah.

Mark Smith: 16:41
You know I remember years ago when I started off as a Microsoft certified trainer MCT back in the day and my mentor at the time said listen, you've got to understand. We are here to educate people, teach them new technologies, but you've got to understand there's an element of entertainment to this as well, and he called it infotainment Right as well. And he called it infotainment right.

Mark Smith: 17:08
We are providing information, but we need to do it in a palatable format, not a boring you know mundane, you know type of experience and I see it more these days with the video. So we talked about the, the hardware. Is there anything else you want to cover on your um, the hardware, lighting anything else before we look at how you think about the storytelling of a particular episode?

Phil Topness: 17:31
Oh, is that what that is? I don't even know. Simo taught me how to coordinate, how to configure this camera and I don't touch it. So without these lights it looks like I'm sitting in a dark room, and that is the rest of my week.

Mark Smith: 17:40
Nice. Actually, why don't we just cover what's your lighting hardware, Phil Sure.

Phil Topness: 17:44
Oh, I've got these.

Mark Smith: 17:46
Yeah, they're Gato key lights here, then I've got some cheesy Amazon light for the side.

Phil Topness: 17:52
And then I've got some bulbs over the top. Yeah, exactly.

Simo Slaoui: 17:55
Yeah, nice, and I think you have the GH4 camera, gh4 camera Real lens yeah, yes, and then, is it a prime lens?

Mark Smith: 18:04
Is it a prime lens?

Simo Slaoui: 18:06
Yeah, it's 14 millimeter with wide aperture. Yeah, with no distortion, so we don't have this like distortion. It's close to fill, it's not too far from you, the camera is not too far you don't need like 10 meters.

Mark Smith: 18:21
So I take it, the lens is probably more expensive than the camera.

Phil Topness: 18:24
The lens was amazingly expensive. I don't know camera gear and I was like like what, yeah, zimo, like the lenses.

Simo Slaoui: 18:30
Yeah, but usually the lenses are more expensive than the camera. Trust me, yeah, totally.

Mark Smith: 18:36
So what's the brand of hardware for the camera?

Phil Topness: 18:38
Is it a Panasonic? Is that Panasonic?

Mark Smith: 18:40
Okay, yeah, yeah.

Simo Slaoui: 18:42
The only problem we have with Panasonic there is no autofocus. There is no autofocus, so you need to go on Sony brand or something more expensive as well.

Mark Smith: 18:54
I've used Sony until I've got rid of it recently and gone everything Elgato, even my teleprompter which I'm looking through. I'm using the HD Elgato camera which I've just found. It just works. I got overheating issues quite a few times with Sony and Sony has a reputation overheating, particularly if you can do 4K. Yeah.

Simo Slaoui: 19:21
And the thing with the prime lens is that we can get this real depth of field and not this fake one that we recreate in post-production and I like this, some nice bokeh. It helps to focus on fill Exactly To see everything in the background that can be disturbing yeah.

Phil Topness: 19:36
You mentioned the teleprompter. I think the teleprompter is actually a good hack. They're not that expensive and it is an important piece of equipment, right. But having that camera right there and then I've got a screen here that's showing us or words I want to say, or whatever, it's a hack. It makes. It makes you look like you know your stuff oh, totally right, totally.

Mark Smith: 19:52
I tell you what the when I was last at mvp summit, right march last year, I had delivered to me the algado um uh teleprompter because it wasn't available anywhere in the world, only just been released, and I had another mvp who's based in seattle, uh, pick it up, give it. You know, as an aborted had it sent to his home so he could bring it to me. I didn't want to miss it, um, and I tell you this algardo teleprompter is an absolute game changer, not just for this type of scenario here but for teams meetings. Yes, because in a team's meeting, when you're communicating with someone, right, most people in Teams meeting are like look, I've got a screen up here, so they're looking here because all their audience here, or I've got a wraparound screen here, or they're looking over here and there's a disconnect. That's happening and it was highlighted to me earlier this week.

Mark Smith: 20:44
I was on an internal meeting call. There was five of us on the call and I was saying some pointed stuff that needed to land, that needed to connect, and the thing is I could see everybody's faces and I could see straight away. Was I getting the connection I wanted? You know, um with people, and I cannot overemphasize enough the, the if you're do a lot of work through teams to get yourself the and once again, I'm not sponsored by Elgato in this case, even though my key lights are all Elgato or my stream decks. I've got two stream decks on my desk, plus I've got a foot stream deck underneath my desk um, that, uh interesting.

Mark Smith: 21:30
What I use that for is if I'm in a conversation and I want to record something, I can just hit a foot pedal and I'll actually start grabbing my screen If it's like hey, I needed that information, I needed that screenshot. It's quite a handy little hack, but the Algrado camera, the high definition, the most expensive camera and the teleprompter absolutely amazing pieces of kit to have. If you do, you're in tech and you're doing a lot of conference calls, I highly recommend it.

Phil Topness: 21:59
And I use it for the videos too. Like you can see it on the side cam, I have the talking points that we've discussed ahead of time so that I could be there and I could scroll up. I'm basically listening like did the person talk about everything that they wanted to talk about Nice, or do I need to ask them a question to get them back around? I'm just kind of keeping a mental checklist while they're going. I like it, because it's easy to get going like this and you forget.

Mark Smith: 22:21
So are you using the script feature inside Riverside to do that on your screen? No, riverside to do that on your screen.

Phil Topness: 22:27
No, I've got some software here.

Mark Smith: 22:28
You've got some additional software.

Phil Topness: 22:29
Yeah, from the window store it's like $8. But it does a nice semi-transparent kind of overlay and you can drag it around.

Mark Smith: 22:36
Beautifully so. The Elgato teleprompter has that all built in and because it's been built as a teleprompter, it has its own screen about I don't know, let's say eight inches across, maybe 10 inches screen on it. It does all that reverse screen, all the pop around and I can quickly edit up my script here and it will instantly appear. I can control the scroll speeds, all that type of stuff. It's just part of the Agata system.

Phil Topness: 23:05
That sounds great. I had to buy a reversing monitor and they're not easy to find.

Mark Smith: 23:08
No, they are very difficult. In fact, I even at one point reached out to the Microsoft team on Windows saying, hey, could you provide a monitor function that allows me to flip for teleprompter? Nobody has it. Nobody has that type of. It's a more modern request, I suppose, but anyhow, this tech works. Anyhow, this tech works, phil. What are your thoughts? How do you scribble out an episode? How do you make sure you've got good storytelling? Length of episode.

Mark Smith: 23:38
And I'm going to just give you a bunch of questions and then just let you riff on your thought process around it. But how do you think about? Hey, here's the topic. This is how we're going to break it down. These are the talking points we want to land. These are the talking points who want to land. You know, if you bring somebody on like a James Olnick or you know, charles Lamanna or Ryan or any of these types of folks, you know they're obviously not across, necessarily fully where you want to go and how do you bring your guest in on that journey with you?

Phil Topness: 24:03
Yeah, there's there, you're right, there's kind of two different types of episodes. There's the feature focused ones, and then there's there, you're right, there's kind of two different types of episodes. There's the feature focused ones, and then there's the kind of the charles ryan james.

Phil Topness: 24:13
Yeah, exact ones for the, for the feature focused ones we start with with the arc, that is, what is the feature? Why is it better than what was before? Uh, how are customers using it? And call to action. Right, that's kind of our basic arc, but we didn't.

Phil Topness: 24:23
We pull that apart and expand on it based upon the state of the feature. Right, how preview it is. Do we have licensing terms to sign? Does it, you know, defined yet or is it just really out there in preview for free? Yeah, and really, what the what the presenter, what the PM, wants to show?

Phil Topness: 24:40
My job really is just to take a PM who's used to having an audience of half an hour with a customer to describe this feature, to be the audience, right, say, okay, well, what would someone else want to know who isn't fully invested 80 hours a week building this thing?

Phil Topness: 24:55
Right, and then try to bring in some of those sort of things and to be the customer, right, like, frequently I'll be, like I'm going to ask you this question, correct me so that we can raise this point right, just try to really kind of shape that conversation at a high level. Yeah, and then the exact ones. The exact ones, of course, are much more structured or anything especially dealing with AI right now or anything like that. Right, we like have you know parameters we want to work within Totally. And, of course, like talking with Charles or Ryan they give these talks every day, yeah, and so part of that is just. What we talked about earlier is like we hear these all every day at Microsoft, but how do we get it out to more people? How do we just get some of those nuggets out to everyone? And so a lot of that message is already established from what they, what they tell people.

Mark Smith: 25:39
How much does relationship come into play? And I say this because you know you had James on and I've had him on my show a few times and there was a bit of banter up front about looking good as hair and stuff like that Sorry, I need a haircut. It's stuff like that that makes I feel these type of things personal. It makes it feel like this is not a excuse me a hyperscripted marketing message. We're keeping it real. We're humans here, we're having a conversation. There's kind of that warmth in the communication.

Phil Topness: 26:19
I appreciate that. Yeah, no, we work really hard at that, and I mean we do that for a couple of reasons not with James, because James is really comfortable, but sometimes we get people who are not used to being on camera, and so we'll do a lot of that banter or I'll make a mistake or something, just to get them a little more comfortable, right, and it always gets some gems that we can stick in as well. But also, I mean these folks, this, this product team you've met them. They're really good people, they're very smart people, and so it's just a good chance to sit down and talk about something that we're all passionate about, Right, those moments are genuine.

Mark Smith: 26:50
Yeah, tell me about length of episode and how you think about that. And I'm talking about what comes out in the final cut and then what went in to get, like you know, was it two hours to get 20 minutes? Like what are you, what are your thoughts?

Phil Topness: 27:07
so in our, in, in our telemetry, in our, in our youtube stats, we see a clear break at 10 minutes, like if we look at percentage watch time, we we get decreasing returns after 10 minutes. So we've been. I used to target 10 minutes.

Phil Topness: 27:22
I'm targeting eight or less yeah the idea is it's a movie trailer for a feature. You learn enough to know if it's relevant to you and you get someplace to go to more right. So I'm. We often cut out a lot of what the pms will say, because it's not just that nugget, right, just give me enough to move, move forward with it. Uh well, yesterday we recorded, I think, 20 minutes, for you know this, six to eight minutes. The most we recorded was probably a couple hours. To try to cut down, um, but it depends. But, and we'll sometimes do second takes on a question or something, give someone another run at it, or if we didn't catch something exactly right.

Mark Smith: 27:59
So are you? When you do these Samo? Are you always on the live record? Are you in the producer type mode and going, hey, I need you. Let's take that again.

Phil Topness: 28:11
Well, so I can answer part of that, so Simo is on the line always to make sure that everything sounds right. Yep, everything looks good. Simo, what else do you do to make sure that you get good material to actually make a video? You've got people doing voice memo recordings on their phone.

Simo Slaoui: 28:27
Yeah, I try to get backup. I'm always looking for backup for audio, mainly for audio because we can have bad video quality. But if we have good audio we can keep the audience connected. I cannot listen to one hour of video with bad audio. I leave after two minutes.

Mark Smith: 28:54
You're a purist. I love it.

Simo Slaoui: 28:55
I love it. The only thing we do before recording once Phil sends an invitation for a recording session, I try to reach the guests for a quick technical check. It takes like 10, 15 minutes, yeah, and we do that like days before we're recording and it really helps because sometimes we need just to like change the computer position to have more lighting coming in front of you, raise it up to eye level yeah.

Simo Slaoui: 29:28
Try to have eye contact with the camera and, yeah, that helps. That helps a lot to be ready for the recording. I like it. I like it.

Phil Topness: 29:39
To the part of your question about content, mark, that's what I'm listening for, like hey, you said this thing. That isn't quite right, or that people misunderstood.

Mark Smith: 29:49
Would you please go back and do it again.

Phil Topness: 29:49
Right, yeah, okay, so you're listening for that, for that angle. Um, usually we'll have other parties listening in to, to kind of make sure that we stay on the fast and narrow, depending on the sensitivity of the topic.

Mark Smith: 29:57
Yeah, and, and you know I was saying before, I've been podcasting now for eight years and for that entire eight years I am often interviewing microsoft staff and and I've been waiting for my um, legal check. You know, on something's been said that shouldn't have been said, and it's crazy. In the eight years we have never leaked a nda thing, um, uh or otherwise. I've only once had a microsoft staff as, and so what used to happen james phillips and and charles lamona as well, when I've had him on the show is said we will record something that is under nda but on, the agreement doesn't get published to a certain date until it's publicly announced right, yeah, so, so, but and I've had only one scenario in that eight years where a product feature that we discussed on the show before going live got axed, and so that was the only time I've had to go back and let's take that out, because preview means preview that won't exist.

Mark Smith: 30:59
I mean, it wasn't even a public in preview at all, like it was a feature that just never, ever made the cutting table, so I never got past it, and so I carry on I was gonna say I will say that we have.

Phil Topness: 31:11
We also will do things that get, get embargoed for an event or something like that. That we did a video with clay on co-pilot that was embargoed for a certain release day.

Mark Smith: 31:22
We did that in under 48 hours, recording and editing, and I was at an event during the day, so it was at night for me and it was the middle of the night for simo it was yeah it was a little bit of a slog, but we made the deadline yeah, and and so that's a crazy thing, even as we're in this world of ai now microsoft have whole groups of teams always monitoring, like you know. I suppose it's even harder to release features because I've got to go but before the council, before the board, for is this going to be approved to release? Is it, you know? Is there risk profiling etc with it? Does that mean that you, a lot of stuff more recently is not making the cut at all because you're like, just that's not going to happen?

Phil Topness: 32:04
not not from what I've seen and I wouldn't have full visibility into that but like there is a really rigid responsible AI process, which would actually be a great topic for an episode, and I think I did a video that we covered some of the responsible AI as well. But, like every feature goes through that and so by the time they're getting close to where they're becoming a real feature, they have gone through that process.

Mark Smith: 32:24
Yeah, and for transparency and bias and hallucinations and all that sort of stuff. I like it. I like it one of the things I was going to say before. Simo, you're talking about backup on audio, based on the court case that was settled last week with apple. Apparently, you just contact apple for, uh, they're recording everything all the time on your, on your ip, which came as quite a shock to me, right? Because it's kind of like I've always trusted Microsoft and Apple, as in, to look after one's data. Now, microsoft is the only one I trust. They're the only one that I haven't seen drop the ball and sell to advertisers.

Simo Slaoui: 33:00
Do you really record?

Mark Smith: 33:00
everything, yeah, yeah, everything. They've been recording.

Phil Topness: 33:04
It seems like it could have been so much easier.

Mark Smith: 33:05
Yeah, yeah, they've just it seems like it could have been so much easier.

Mark Smith: 33:07
Yeah, yeah they've just settled a 96 million dollar court case on it because it's come out that the end. But they didn't, uh, and they've been selling it to advertisers, which is my biggest rub. If they were just using it for telemetry, so much that that. Oh, how many times did I blame facebook for advertising to me about something we discussed? And it probably wasn't Facebook it probably was, but it probably wasn't. It was Siri listening and or the mic listening and then handing it off to the advertisers that are going to pay for it. Hey, I was just talking about going to Malaga or something like that and then posting me an ad on that topic. So interesting.

Phil Topness: 33:49
But another backup source. You have all the people I wouldn't expect to be afraid of being recorded, mark, here's the thing, right.

Mark Smith: 33:53
I've been saying this a lot lately In the Western world we have this unfounded concept of privacy that we think we have privacy and it's probably not, as the world's not as private as what we think we have, or that privacy is not there. Yeah, I do suspect that. Tell me.

Simo Slaoui: 34:08
So next thing, we just have to call Apple for a backup. Yeah, yeah, that's what I was thinking. Yeah yeah, could have been so easy, that's it.

Mark Smith: 34:14
That's it. It might cost you a couple of mil to get somebody to look at it and find your backup. It's there as we move on. Tell us about how much planning Phil goes into an episode for you. Is it just a quick? You note down some thoughts in OneNote or Loop these days to get your ideas together.

Phil Topness: 34:38
I do a 30-minute prep call, except for the execs. The execs are a little different, like Charles and Ryan and all that. We do a 30-minute prep call. Go over that arc. We talked about it. What does it do? Has it different before? Talk about what do you want to see it on screen? What do you want the call to action to be? You know, what are the things we should talk about? What are the things we?

Phil Topness: 35:00
can't talk about uh to a public and non-NDA audience right, like given the scope, because we have to kind of reset people and then we just kind of script out the questions and I take bullets on what I expect them to say. That's what I put in the teleprompter.

Mark Smith: 35:10
Yeah, but 30 minutes.

Phil Topness: 35:11
Then we go off of that and we kind of riff within a structure.

Mark Smith: 35:14
Yeah, so they're just bullet points. You don't have full word-for-word teleprompter.

Phil Topness: 35:21
No, no, no. In fact, every now and then someone will type all that in and I'm like, please take it out, because you can tell you talk to them, and then you ask them a question. They're like, sure, and they come over here and they start reading, right.

Mark Smith: 35:30
Yeah, yeah.

Phil Topness: 35:31
We've even had some time where people go through the demo and they turn into a demo robot and then they'll just say just now, describe your demo to me. That's the version we kept, and then is completely different nice nice, so, so, so important.

Mark Smith: 35:45
You know um switching context in that scenario. Okay, so you've got your script together, you got your camera hardware etc. Set up. What happens from a post-production process? What is that for you? How does it work? How soon, simo, do you turn it around? What's your workflow? Um, I suppose it's waiting on me?

Simo Slaoui: 36:04
yeah, can I share my screen with you?

Mark Smith: 36:08
yeah, show you like share your screen case of editing, so you can, and you're using da vinci resolve, right? You're using da vinci resolve. Is that right for this piece?

Simo Slaoui: 36:17
yeah, yeah, I love this tool. We have everything inside. We can do motion graphics, vfx, audio mixing, grading. I have all my editing process inside DaVinci Resolve. I've created the intro, all the motion graphics you see on our videos.

Mark Smith: 36:35
So you do all that intro and outros. You're doing them all in DaVinci, yeah.

Simo Slaoui: 36:41
Excellent, excellent. For example, just this lower third animation we did for the first version of the video. We can go here on fusion vision it's another tab here or we can go inside from here and here you have another application like another software for vfx and for motion graphics. Yeah so Motion graphics. Yeah, so I can start animate here and tweak this and change the name and do everything and then back to my timeline so I don't have to. When I was working on VFX years ago, we had to edit on software, then export everything to another one to add motion graphics and then back to the editing, then go to another software for color grading. So with DaVinci we have everything inside, I love it, and we keep focusing on our timeline. Yeah, and I have also my own presets. So, for example, I need this zoom effect. I have created this one, so I have just to move it where I want so I can customize everything. And I have all this preset customized for PowerCat Live. Okay, so I have this folder structure on my hard drive.

Simo Slaoui: 38:10
So when I get files, I get my footage here from phil, from gh4 it's what phil records, uh, internally, and here I have my riverside tracks. So I have this side camera and the front camera. So first I start by creating a track for Phil and a track for the guest. I just need to check if everything is synced and to sync the files coming from the camera. So I create this track for Phil and then one track for the guest, I sing the audio and everything and then I have to create a side-by-side track. Yeah, let me go back to the track with Phil and Clay. When I get this track from Riverside, I start color grading. It was before and after Nice, so I try to bring the skin tones to have like a darker background.

Mark Smith: 39:13
Yeah.

Simo Slaoui: 39:14
And the same for the guest before and after. Yeah, so I try to match the two sites. So once I have all these tracks I I create a multicam timeline with all the sites I need I. I have field tracks here, I have guest tracks side by side, the phone track and the screen share track, and let me create a new timeline. I can just bring my multicam track here, so I have everything inside, everything's in sync.

Simo Slaoui: 39:48
I can go side by side here and see the multicam, so then I start editing, just cut in here, choosing the. I have this, this thing from Blackmagic, ah yes, yep, switch between camera.

Mark Smith: 40:04
Yes, yes, yes, is that just running on an iPad?

Simo Slaoui: 40:07
Yeah, yeah. So then I have to just to switch between angles.

Phil Topness: 40:11
Nice, I have just this week co-pilot in PowerApps.

Simo Slaoui: 40:17
To make the video more dynamic, and I have this screen share here. I can see the screen, share and bring this when I need it. Yeah, superb. Okay, so once I have did it, I shared that rafkat with phil. Yes, so he can give me some feedback and he just add markers to tell me like to add the screen to highlight something.

Mark Smith: 40:49
Okay, so he'll put a marker and say can you put a screenshot in here or can you put something in here?

Simo Slaoui: 40:53
Yeah, exactly so we communicate like this. I send him the video. We have this Blackmagic Cloud where we can share project yes, and he start marking the video.

Mark Smith: 41:07
So just to clarify for the audience here. So that tool allows you to send the video up to the point. You've got it. He can then click on any frame in that video, add a comment. You can then see that back in DaVinci and be able to work On my timeline, yeah.

Simo Slaoui: 41:21
Beautiful. That is epic. It makes the work really faster yeah.

Mark Smith: 41:29
And so when you go to export, are you exporting ultimately to go to YouTube, and are you doing it in 4K or 1080p? What are your export formats that you tend to use?

Simo Slaoui: 41:41
I use 1080p for YouTube mainly and they have like higher version quality for archiving.

Mark Smith: 41:51
I take it you're not publishing to YouTube Microsoft. Somebody internally from there is then doing the publish to YouTube.

Simo Slaoui: 41:57
Phil is in charge of publishing from Microsoft.

Mark Smith: 42:02
Yeah, so you give him the raw footage right. The raw footage you give him the produced footage and then he has it. Yeah, exactly the raw footage. Right, the raw footage. You give him the produced footage and then he has it yeah, exactly.

Simo Slaoui: 42:09
The produced footage and I also have to create the thumbnail for the video. Ah, okay, so you do the thumbnail.

Mark Smith: 42:16
That's good that you added that little nuance. Now the other thing is does DaVinci Resolve? Do the SRT file for you.

Simo Slaoui: 42:25
Right now. Yeah, it's possible. Pretty flexible, you can generate subtitles from a timeline from the audio.

Mark Smith: 42:33
Yeah, Well, this has been an amazing episode. I really appreciate it. I think we've covered the process. We can see that you make film look absolutely amazing. This has been an amazing insight into the crafting of these videos. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Phil Topness: 42:53
It's great being back here.

Simo Slaoui: 42:54
We should do this more often, Mark. Thank you for the opportunity, Mark, my pleasure.

Mark Smith: 43:00
Thank you, sir. Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host, Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. Is there a guest you would like to see on the show from Microsoft? Please message me on LinkedIn and I'll see what I can do. Final question for you how will you create with Copilot today, Ka kite?