786: Catching up with John Soliman
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Hello and welcome to Mac Power Users. My name is Stephen Hackett. I'm joined by my friend and yours, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, Stephen. How are you today? I'm good, David. How are you? I am very excited. We've got a good guest coming on the show. But first, there's a question that must be answered. I've heard from so many people since last week's episode posted. What happened to my iPad? Yeah, yeah. Give people the elevator pitch for what happened here.

Oh man, I tried to do that, that purchase migration and it went completely foobar and I won't explain what that means, but look it up.

the iCloud account went haywire, the iPad went haywire, it all went bad. Thank you. I heard from some lovely friends at Apple's offering to help. And I told them, don't worry about it. It's all good. I got it going. So I got everything restarted. I did the, what's the, what do they call that? Firmware reset on the iPad, DF something. DFU mode. DFU mode.

DFU mode. Yes. I put my iPad in DFU mode because it was, it was hung up. It wouldn't let me reset and that fixed it. And I got it rebooted and it's all new and shiny and working. And I still have two accounts. I kept the legacy account and I'm not going near that button again for maybe about six months. You know, me eventually I'm going to go near the button again. Drawn to it. Yeah. You know, it's like, you know, I'm a Star Wars guy, but in Marvel, what's a little tree Groot, you know? Sure.

You know where they tell Groot not to push the button? That's me. I always push the button. Like a moth to the flame. Yes. But for now, it's all working. It's all good. Everything, it's all joy in Mudville. Today on, I guess we should introduce our guest. Welcome back to the show, John Solomon. Hi, guys. Thank you for having me.

Yeah. John, you've been on the show before. It's been many years, but you are our man on the inside at Pixar, Mac nerd and doing a lot of cool stuff over there. It's always fun hearing from you about the workflows you're doing out there, making great films and using your Mac to conquer Pixar. Yeah.

Oh, thank you. Is that what you do out there? Yeah, I do. I don't know about Conquer Pixar, but, and I should tell you, I'm not your only man on the inside. After I was on last time, I got a few Slack messages from people being like, hey, I heard you on Mac Power Users. So you have a listenership here. I love that. I love that. I love that. That feels pretty cool. Yeah.

Pixar has brought me so much joy over the years. I just, everything you guys make is an instant watch for me. And when you told us on the last episode that, that like the keyboard maestro field guide is in use at Pixar. I think about that every time I watch a Pixar movie, it,

You could have just been making that up, man, but that made me so happy. No, certainly not. In fact, one of the Slack messages was somebody digging up the work request I put in to get a copy of Keyboard Meister, and they said, hey, is this when you got Keyboard Meister installed? So no, I promise I'm not making it up. What's great about working at Pixar is every little person is helping make the movies. So the person that works in the cafe is helping keep us fed so that we're not grumpy in the afternoon and we can make better movies. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, I talked to Merlin Mann once cause he used to do a lot of speaking and I was asking him, what were the best companies you ever spoke to? You know, cause he was back in the inbox zero days, he was making the circuit and, and he said by far it was Pixar. He said, everybody in that building was on message. You know, everybody there was there from the chief executive to the broom pusher was there to, to make great movies, you know? And, um,

I've always admired that about you guys anyway. So enough of me fanboying about your, your employer, uh, John, when you first came on, you were relatively new to the company. Now you're an assistant editor. You've got a project out. We're going to talk about that later today. But, um, as usual, when you come on the Mac power users, we got to start with the bona fides, baby. Um, what are you using these days? Okay. So last time I was on, uh, work-wise, I was still working from home. Uh,

I was using a Intel MacBook Pro to remote into a 2013 Mac Pro, like the cylindrical ones in my office. If you'll remember, the Mac Pro was literally on the floor in the middle of the room with nothing else in the room because they hadn't set up a desk for me yet because I was working from home. So since then, I now have a beautiful M1 MacBook Pro and a lovely Mac Studio built

and I do come into the office. I do have a desk now. I have monitors. I have the whole thing, but, um, yeah. So Mac studio and MacBook pro for, uh, work. And then personally I have an M I just bought one of the M four Mac minis, the new ones. And I'm, it's amazing. I've been, I'm upgrading from a 2013 MacBook pro, like something that was literally, I had to point a USB fan out to keep it cool. Yeah. Yeah. So you got the,

Well, you got the Apple Silicon transition at work, but you got it personally just recently. And oh, my goodness, it's night and day. We still hear from listeners that are, you know, because it's been around a while. And frankly, Mac PowerGazers listeners, we're usually at the sharp end of the stick. But we still hear from listeners occasionally that are upgrading to like

why didn't you tell me you open the lid and it turns on and everything's better. And, but yeah, I feel like we did tell you, you know, but yeah, you guys mentioned it a lot. Yeah. Upgrade cycles take a while and, and max run great. And I have a, you know, I keep banging on about this theory, but I think these Apple Silicon max are going to last even longer than the Intel ones did. So people are going to keep those even longer. Yeah.

But it does feel good, right? I mean, what was the biggest change for you for your personal stuff switching from the 2013 MacBook Pro to Apple Silicon? I mean, it's one of those things where you forget how many things you just mentally go, oh, I can't do that on my computer because it'll overheat or it's just too much. I can't run a VM on my old MacBook Pro or any kind of gaming or even video transcoding was a

a lot to put it through so there are all these things and just all the features that you kind of forget about like you watch wwdc and you go oh that feature looks oh wait i can't do iphone mirroring with my old mac okay i'll get it someday and then you turn on the new mac and you go oh that's so i forgot about this feature oh and this oh and i can do this now that's amazing i want to switch over to your to your work computer though well actually one more thing on that mini i

There's something about that M4 Mini that everybody loves. Like, do you feel like you bought it in the heat of passion? Like, it seemed like everybody wanted one when they announced it, right? Yeah.

Almost the opposite for me. Okay. You know, I am a, as you can see by using a 2013 MacBook Pro until basically the wheels fall off, that's kind of the kind of person I am. So I had been waiting, waiting, going like, maybe I should just wait for the new Mac Studio. Maybe I should wait for the new Mac Studio. My partner was like, John, you have to have a new computer. You can't keep living like this.

Pay for the upgrades on the M4 Mac Mini. And you know what? If the new Mac Studio comes out and you go, okay, I could actually use this, let's just trade it in, get you the Studio. But no, it definitely wasn't an impulse purchase. I tend to be the kind of person that waits for whatever the new Apple product is until it's announced and I get it that day or that week because then I feel like, you know...

I think I got burned. I think with my first iPod, I literally bought it like a week before a new iPod was announced. I didn't know what I was doing back then. And luckily, Apple had a nice return policy at the time and everything. But I learned, OK, just if you can wait six months for a new computer and it's not mission critical that you upgrade, go ahead and wait. You'll be happy that you got the brand new one.

Yeah, Steven is one of those guys who likes to wait, too. He waits like 10, 12, 15 months before he gets a new computer. Hey! Do I wish I could justify a tiny, adorable Mac Mini? A little bit, yeah. It would look really cute on my desk, I'm just telling you. I don't know. I could just sit it next to my Thunderbolt dock. They could be little siblings there.

I could, you know, you could do, you could put like a little bow on it and you can make it a hat. Just like a strap, put it around your chin. A friend of mine just got one. And I told him, I was like, you need to get googly eyes. Put it on the front. Yes. I love that. John, about your work computer. I was thinking about this as an editor. I mean,

You've got to be working pretty resource intensive or is all that editing done on a server? How, how does that work? I mean, what kind of rig do you use for editing? So editing is pretty work intensive, but you know, like the actual rendering of video files that like we're bringing into Avid is done on the render farm. Like that's a giant server. That's way too much, you know, for even your personal computer at hand. Yeah. But, um,

You know, Avid is a pretty resource intensive. Like if you give it RAM, it will use the RAM. You know, we do have to like, even though the renders have come from the render farm, you know, if you do certain things in Avid, like you resize something or you try and reframe an image or anything, you need to render it. And, you know, we're playing whatever, like 24 tracks of audio at any given time, like between music and sound effects and dialogue and things. So it does have to keep up with all of that. So it's pretty...

resource intensive, but at the same time, you know, we certainly couldn't be rendering things in real time. You know, I mean, I remember when they announced the, the Intel Mac pro, you know, the redesign, the one that Steve and I got to go to, uh,

They had a machine across the street there where they had the entire set of Toy Story 3 loaded into one Mac Pro. I think it was Toy Story 4, the carnival set, right? Yes, you're right. I lost track. Toy Story 4. It's all right. And they were very, that was an impressive feat as explained to us at the time. Yeah. But it sounds to me like that doesn't really actually happen much.

I think it does for other departments. I think they, you know, need to like, because, you know, some department like layout that they are the ones that kind of take the 2d storyboards that we draw when we were first making the movie, we're just drawing like simple storyboards and recording scratch or reference dialogue and

They take those in layout and make them into 3D, basically. Somebody else has built the set and built the characters and rigged the characters, but layout is responsible for laying out the scene, figuring out where characters are going to stand and things, and what cameras to use, what lenses to use on those cameras, what angles. So they're the ones that need to load a bunch of stuff at once in order to be able to see, oh, if I move the camera two inches to the right,

whatever it is, the poster behind her starts intersecting with her head weird and we don't want that. So, um,

Yeah, there are instances certainly where, but in edit, we don't need that so much because we're just getting kind of a final shot or not final, but you know, a rendered shot from other departments. Yeah. And you're yeah, you're working. In fact, in some ways the files you're working on so big that they could never fit. Right. Yeah. We do have we do have like Avid has its own proprietary kind of storage system that is basically a server that all the Avid's talk to. So yeah.

yeah, nothing, not much lives on my actual Mac studio work. Hmm. That always shocks me when I watch like a Pixar movie, like your show is about a baseball team.

And like you look at it and like every baseball glove, somebody had to make that right. I mean, it's almost like a parts shop. Oh, yeah. You know, every stitch like the stitches on the softball have to be designed by somebody has to pick what color they are. Somebody has to figure out what like what the thread should look like. The uniforms, every single thing has to be designed and modeled in 3D and designed.

You know, a character, you think of somebody designing the character and you go, great. And then they just use the character. No, no, no. There's a group called rigging that has to like go, yeah, that's an elbow. Like the computer doesn't know what an elbow is. It has to teach it, hey, this is an elbow. This is the way it bends. And even in our show, there are times when characters kind of

Go beyond like, you know, stretch. Do what's cool about animation is you can do things that aren't possible in real life. So we can have a character slightly hyperextend their arm. But most of the time we don't want them to hyperextend their arm. So you kind of have to teach the computer. Here's what it can and can't do and occasionally tell it. Yeah, I know that's the rule, but please break the rule just this once.

Yeah. And like in the history of Pixar, they've probably never made a character slide into second base. Right. I'm trying to think if we ever have, but I don't think so. Yeah. I mean, but now you might need to. Yeah. It's, it's one of the fun things. Yeah. It is one of the fun things of just getting to try new, like that's what Pixar loves to do is reinvent new or invent new things. Like, you know, monsters, ink was for finding Nemo is doing things underwater. Yeah.

You know, on Win or Lose, we had things where they developed a new method for it's called detached facial features. It's kind of above my knowledge level. I don't fully understand how it works, but basically it means that, you know, their eyes aren't really attached to their head in the traditional way that you would so that they can do sort of crazy things where they can go almost bug eyed like Bugs Bunny or, you know, have their mouth slightly off of their face if they're, you know, really shouting about something.

Well, let's get back to hardware real quick. Are you, are you an iPad guy at all? Not really. I still have an iPad air too. It's really just an extra screen. Yeah, it works. Um, you know, it mostly ends up just in the kitchen playing something while I'm making dinner or, you know, uh,

bringing up my calendar or, you know, a big part of being an assistant editor is processing dialogue after we've recorded it. So it's helpful to have the script up rather than having it on my monitor. I just open up the app on my iPad and just can read the script. But yeah, at this point, I'm not doing any creating on my iPad. It's really just a reference device. What year was the iPad Air 2? Like 2014? Yeah. So, I mean...

Yeah, it's a 11-year-old computer. See, this is why I think Apple Silicon Macs are going to last forever. Because it's kind of the same thing. It's a system on a chip like an iPad. Granted, it's more powerful.

But like those things just run forever. Yeah. It's still working great. The big problem I think Apple's going to have is number one, people aren't going to buy as many Macs, but I guess they're planning for that. And, and software, like how, how long can you support a 10 year old computer? Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting this year. Cause it feels like we're getting very close to the end of support for Intel Macs. Really the last couple of Mac OS releases, uh,

It's really only a handful of Intel Macs now. Like it's not many. And, and then, you know, then you get into Apple Silicon, like they're still selling the M1 Macbook Air. Like you can go get one new from Walmart and that thing will be, uh, what, five years old here pretty soon. So it's, uh, it is, it is interesting, uh, to see, see what's how, how that's going to play out.

Yeah. I mean, Apple has been pretty good about supporting, like I'm still using a, what's it called? Thunderbolt display with my new Mac mini and my partner, she uses with her MacBook pro. She uses the led cinema display, the one with the mini display port. Yeah. Still works.

Yeah, there's something about Apple that I love that of like the, as much as every once in a while they do go, yep, this is deprecated. Sorry, you can't get updates anymore. There are a lot of hardware things that they still support that you would think they, somebody would have forgotten by now that they even ever made a cinema display. Yeah. You know, and then some people, you always hear folks saying, ah, that's Apple. They're just trying to get you to go buy a new one. I really don't believe that. I think they run these things for as long as they possibly can.

Yeah. But they're also very into making it better. And like at some point, the old stuff just can't keep up. Yeah. You know, I think if you, I think if you tried to run Apple intelligence on an Intel Mac, I don't know how well it would run. I think there's sometimes, sometimes, yes, they're trying to sell some more Macs. That is their job. But sometimes, you know, they go, yeah, you could theoretically run this, but it's not great. Yeah. Yeah. It may hover off your desk because. Yeah.

Well, there's always, you know, weirdness at transitions. But so you've got an iPad Air that's powered by Steam. What about your phone? My phone is a iPhone 13 Pro Max. I think I got it right around the time I was on last time. It's probably about time to upgrade. I think this year will be the year I upgrade. Yeah.

So I haven't really played with Apple intelligence on my phone. But, you know, it'll be nice to have. I'm sure. I think the biggest thing I've noticed my partner has. What are we up to? The iPhone 16. She has the 16 Pro Max and the camera is a noticeable difference. So I'm really looking forward to that.

Yeah. I mean, that's the advantage of the phones, really. If you wait two or three years, you're going to notice the camera's better every time. Year over year, not so much. I mean, it does get better, but it's the sane approach of waiting three or four years to upgrade and then getting a new one. Then you actually get to see the improvement. Yeah.

But it's also fun to have a new phone every year. I totally get the appeal. Yeah. I don't know what I'm going to do. My kids are getting old enough now. I think I should tell them to buy their own phones, but then I'll lose the excuse of getting a new one every year to hand down. That's like, that's a real challenge for me. I'm going to have to think about that.

John, you know, you're working at Pixar, you know, the company that makes 3d movies. I was thinking, well, this guy probably has a couple of vision pros, but you don't, right? No. Um, one, I don't have enough money for multiple vision pros. I don't know anyone that does, but, uh, no, I, you know, it's one of those things where I'm, I'm certainly intrigued by it. I'm also worried that if I, I haven't even tried one, I'm worried that if I try it, I will like it. And then, you know, uh,

I will have to pay three mortgage payments just to get an Apple or a vision pro. So I'm kind of staying away. You know, I know what will happen is I will get whatever version three is. I think, uh,

Of all the Apple products, my first iPod was the third generation. My first iPhone was the 3GS. My first Apple Watch was the Series 3. They've just got me. I don't know what to say, but the third time, by then, I'm always like, oh, yeah, you know what? There's a Vision Pro-shaped hole in my life, and this fits it. The 3 is a magic number. Yeah. I'm certainly intrigued, and it seems interesting. I know there's a lot still that people have said that they need to work out, but...

I do know that I think a bunch of the Pixar movies are available in 3D to watch, I think, through Disney+, possibly through iTunes. And I've heard that they look beautiful. Somebody told me it's even worse. You know, you'll cry even harder, and it's awkward to cry in a Vision Pro. But, you know, as long as people get to see the movies, that's what makes me happy. I have done it, and I kind of wrecked part of my Vision Pro doing it. I'm sorry. Yeah.

It was Moana, though. That one wasn't you guys. That was Disney. But they're our friends. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, I still have tear stains on my little eye thing on my Vision Pro because of Moana. I think we titled an episode something about that, like a tear coming out of the Vision Pro. Yeah, I'm very curious over the next many years, like,

How 3D content will fare. You know, we kind of went through this season where like 3D TVs are going to be the thing. Like if you went to CES and drank the Kool-Aid, but it didn't really take off in the consumer space. We've had 3D in theaters for a long time. But if something like the Vision Pro becomes mainstream, you know, I think creators will need to treat 3D, you know, on a much more even footing with 2D than they possibly do now.

Yeah, it'll certainly be interesting to see, you know, I think it's one of those things where we're not Pixar specifically, but just creators in general are trying to figure out what to do with a bigger screen, like, you know, a wider field of view. I've tried various VR like storytelling things where they kind of guide you through either sound or a visual to like, oh, yeah, now you should turn your head 90 degrees to the right.

because there's going to be something over there that you're going to want to see. But we're still kind of figuring out what's the best way and what's the most intriguing way to use that.

So you mentioned Apple Watch Series 3. Are you still an Apple Watch user? How does that fit in? I do have – I've upgraded, thankfully, to a Series 7. It's great. Honestly, the biggest thing – it's a small feature, but I love it – is unlocking my M4 Mac mini with it because I didn't get one of the Touch ID keyboards. So this is the good alternative for me. But, yeah, I use it pretty much every day, you know, every day.

notifications from Slack and email, like, you know, when you step away from your computer for 15 minutes, sometimes that's when the important thing is happening. And it's nice to be able to know, oh, shoot, I should go back to my desk or, oh, I can see actually that's not urgent. I will get to that in 15 minutes when I'm back. You know, back when they announced the watch, they made such a big deal about all the things it could do. And

Here we are. It really is a notification and health tracker. That's what it is. Notification machine and health tracker. And it's great at those things. So I'm glad they've embraced it rather than trying to, you know, they haven't kept pushing. No, no, no. You really want a circle of your friends and you want to send your heartbeat to them. Yes. And draw a fish when you need sushi. That's right. That's right. I was going to say you draw, you draw what you want from lunch.

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Okay, John, we mentioned your project a few minutes ago, but you're the assistant editor on a show called Win or Lose over on Disney+. Tell us a little bit about the show.

Yeah. Well, first off, I want to give credit to there's another assistant editor who helped out a ton. Or no, she was on the show the whole time, Dana. And we also had other assistant editors that helped out. We had a first assistant editor named Eric. So it's definitely not just me. But the show is eight episodes that are released every two weeks or two. Sorry, two every week. The first two episodes went up. What was it? The 19th. And then as people are hearing us, there will be four episodes out.

It follows a youth softball team in like the week leading up to their championship. And each episode focuses on a different character and their perspective on what happened. So all the episodes are connected, you know, so it's a really fun show to rewatch and go, oh, now I see, you know, something in the background that you didn't realize was actually something that is happening in a different episode.

Um, it's almost like back to the future and back to the future too, where, you know, you rewatch it and go, Oh, you can see what they were, you know, you're going back into the same movie over and over again. I think it's something that people are really gonna have fun rewatching and noticing things that maybe they didn't catch the first time. You know, that concept, I have to say, I wasn't sure about it. Like I'm, I'm much more of a linear story guy usually, but

But, uh, having now got into it, I, I get it. And I think it's kind of fun too, because the characters are all different and unique. Like each character's point of view is very different, at least from what I've seen so far. And, um,

I don't know. I just, I kind of like what you did there. Oh, thank you. Yeah. It came out of a Carrie and Michael are two directors used to share an office when they were working on toy story four and they would come back from a meeting and one of them would go, Oh, that was the worst meeting. Like we're, we're about to get fired. And the other one would go, what are you talking about? Like that meeting? Oh, great. I think they're really happy. And so they realized they, how can two people be in the same meeting, come out of the same meeting and have the exact opposite interpretation of what events happen. And,

And so that's kind of where they started their idea for this. And so it is fun. There are episodes where, you know, the, we're not using the exact same line of dialogue from a character from the earlier episode, because maybe they heard it slightly different or maybe they remember it slightly differently. Yeah. It's, I think, uh, and we really tried to, you know, there's a diverse group of perspectives. You know, one of the things was the second episode is, uh,

Frank the umpire because we wanted to be like hey it's not just going to be the pickles team you're going to see perspectives from adults kids people on the team people not on the team so yeah I'm really glad that you're liking it so far.

And I'm just so happy for you because like the last time you came on, you were just kind of getting started. But now this is a show you worked on from beginning to end. So, you know, in my head, Canon, this is your show. Well, thank you. Truly, it is a lot of people that do so many different things like Pixar. One of the nice things is there isn't really that much.

feeling of like oh no no we could we could get rid of you know the layout department they're not as important it's like they just do the work that the animators will you know do the actual animating no no every team is important because they contribute something and so truthfully like even within a department you know there are multiple editors that worked on the show each of them contributed something it's really really cool

Yeah, Ed Catmull wrote a book about it called, I think Creativity Inc. was the name of the book. I thought it was really good. But the book was really focused primarily kind of on the journey of Pixar, in my mind. Yeah. And I learned a lot from it. But there is something in the water up there at Pixar where you guys culturally have such a giving...

like culture i i really am impressed by that like everybody i talked to there has the same talks about this the same way you do it's like no we're all a team we're gonna use the person who's best at each piece of this for each piece and then when we get done we've got this great piece of art and i don't know i just kind of love that i i uh i think that's something that could be emulated even outside of 3d animation no i'm certainly um yeah i've read ed's book i love it um

And a lot of it is, you know, I think finding the right people like you've all got to be invested from the start from like the people you're hiring. I've got to be interested in. Yep. I'm here to help preserve that company culture. Not, hey, I've got an idea. What if we just, you know, cut some corners real quick and do this a little bit cheaper and quicker? Yeah, I'm really happy that Pixar focuses so much on company culture and tries to preserve, you know, what what makes us all happy and what works for us.

You know, another insight I got out of that book, if you'll permit me to put it on the rabbit hole. It's just in the book, like Pixar, you know, they started out, I guess, a division of Lucas. Actually, they started out before Lucas bought them. But throughout their history, they kept...

Like being on the verge of something really great happening. Like they were going to get, I think, bought by IBM or somebody. And then at the last minute, the rug got yanked. And all these things kept happening where they thought they were out of the woods and then something went wrong and they weren't out of the woods. But all of that happened.

And because of all of those problems, that's what led to the circumstances where they had a crazy millionaire named Steve Jobs that let them make a movie. You know, if any of the things that were that they thought was going to be good in the moment had happened to them, they never would have became the Pixar that we know. And that's a good reminder for life, right? You know, sometimes something happens and it's not what you wanted, but it's just part of the journey.

Yeah. And you know what? The older I've gotten, the more I've realized, you know, talent can get you a certain degree, but a lot of luck is involved. You know, during the in the in the more power years, there's all talk about how I got to Pixar. But my goodness, there were a lot of lucky breaks I had along the way that.

one slight, literally as a tease for that, what if I talked to one different person at one dinner party, I might not be here. So, you know, yeah, it's a good amount. Like you have to be talented and there's a lot of hard work. Like, you know, everything that you think is, Oh, like, you know, listeners probably think, Oh, David and Steven kind of just, you know,

freestyle talk through an episode of Mac Power Users. No, no, no. You guys have detailed notes. You spend a lot of time. You talk to your guest ahead of time so that you get to know them. There's a lot of work that goes into making the finished product that I think sometimes it's easy for us to forget. Oh, everyone's working really hard to write that email that looked really good or conveyed a thought really well. It doesn't come without any planning or preparation.

The other thing on Pixar culture that I probably mentioned on the show before, it was in one of the Steve Jobs books.

When they built that building, he wanted them to just have one bathroom. So everybody had to go to the same bathroom. So they would bump into each other to talk about projects. Yeah. We do have more than one bathroom. If anyone comes to visit, don't worry. I kind of, I do kind of love that about Steve jobs that that's like his mind where his mind went. Like, yeah. Yeah. How do we force him to bump into each other and talk about projects? Let's give them one bathroom. Yeah.

And truthfully, there have been times I've run into somebody in the hallway and go, oh, hey, you know what? I've been dealing with this problem. And you were on a show three years ago that dealt with a similar problem. And I hadn't even thought to ask you about this. But what did you guys do to solve this? So, yeah, there is something about that serendipity of interactions. Yeah.

And I would imagine that's changed as people have made it back to the studio, right? Your Mac Pro is not alone in a room anymore. No, yeah. I think a lot of us are back a lot of the time, and it's been quite nice. There are pluses and minuses to both working remotely and working here or working at the studio. But I think...

speaking from personally, there was like kind of that weird in between. You remember after COVID quote unquote after COVID where people were kind of doing hybrid meetings where there's like three people in the office that are on zoom, like one zoom together. And then there's one person at home and those always just felt a little off. Like, yeah,

And as uncomfortable as everyone being on Zoom was, everyone was on kind of even footing of like, yep, everyone has the same delay. Everyone's got their cat hopping up on their desk or whatever. But when there are three people in a room who can very quickly talk to each other and there's no delay and, you know, they don't have to unmute or mute. It feels a little you feel uneven with the people who are on Zoom who feel like, oh, I'm kind of just here, but not in the room. Yeah.

So, but yeah, it's been nice being here. There's so many people that, you know, one of the things that, you know, when I was working from home, I didn't really see any of the other people working on other projects. So I didn't really get to see how other shows were working. That's actually one thing that I really love working in person is the ability to be sitting there, you know, while an editor is working and see them do something. Oh, hey, how could you do that? And they go, oh, there's this keyboard shortcut that you didn't know about or whatever.

you know, it's really, really nice to be able to share these things with your coworkers. While we're talking about this show though, when, when or lose, um, you were there through the whole process. Talk us through the workflow of it. I mean, this is Mac power users. We got to talk workflows. Sure. Um, so the movie starts with, you know, or the show, sorry, it starts with Karen Yates, uh, come up with an idea and pitch it. And it,

through there's various ways that things happen but it gets approved and they start writing um in this case they wanted to also be the writers um sometimes we have you know a writer that's separate from the director but in this case the two of them decided to write and direct

And so they start writing and pretty quickly they hire an editor and an assistant editor and some storyboard artists and the storyboarders start drawing storyboards. The editor starts cutting them together. We start recording what we call reference dialogue where we just get people from the studio. There's somebody here that gets to play Woody. There's somebody that was the voice of Lori. I even got to hide in my closet using my iPhone recording on the voice memos app.

And we just use that voice for a character just temporarily until we know what the story is and have things more locked. Then we hire the actors to do it professionally. So we put together a version of the movie every, you know, couple months. We are sorry. I keep saying movie. I mean, an episode. Sure. Put together a version of the episode.

watch it all together and go, okay, what do we think? And, you know, the, there's the famous Pixar brain trust that, you know, is a group of people that are really, really talented when it comes to story and directing and writing, and they will watch it as well. And they will give us their notes and thoughts and go, Hey, you know, like, because they have a little bit of detachment, they haven't watched every single iteration, you know, every day when we're making small and small changes, but,

So they can sometimes have the detachment to go, oh, hey, you know, this character that you thought was really funny is actually kind of grating. Have you thought about, like, I think you can just tweak this thing or... And so a bunch of people watch it, give us notes. We go, okay, let's go back and...

The nice thing about working in storyboards and scratch dialogue or reference dialogue is that you can just redraw storyboards. And they can bring me down to the recording studio again and go, hey, John, can you say it like this instead? Or can you record this new line? Or one of the things that I kind of had to wrap my head around moving from live action to animation was...

You can, you know, in live action, they just give you the footage and then you're the editor. And maybe if you're lucky, you get some reshoots here. If we go, Hey, in the last screening, this whole scene took place on the softball field. We think it might be better to take place in the school.

It is a decent amount of work. Like, there's a storyboard artist that has to redraw all the backgrounds, but it is not nearly as crazy as going, okay, great, we're going to get all the actors back together, get the sound guy, get the camera department, and go to the set and, you know, have catering. And, no, it's much, much easier than that. So...

Let me just interrupt there for a minute. So when you have that, that version you show to like the, in the old days, Walt Disney had what they call the nine old men, like the people who he had, his advisors would watch, but you have that version at Pixar where you have people off the project that watch the project. Now is how well rendered is it at that point?

It varies like at that, like the first, you know, brain trust screening is all storyboards. In fact, sometimes we'll be like, you know what, actually there's a part in here where we just drew, you know, like there's going to be a chase scene here. So we drew like five, like really nice storyboards, like, and have a narrator explaining during this part of the movie, you know, um,

whatever. Woody and Jesse will run down the street. Yeah. Okay. So yeah, it's really, really rough. You know, sometimes we even have like, you know, if, if I'm not available to record for my character, they might do what we call reference for reference, which is, Hey, we'll just pull somebody else in to record those two lines since John's not available. And yeah, the voice changes a little bit, but you know what? It's all, it's all temporary, you know? So how many people attend that? It's like everybody on the team is there to see this together. It,

totally varies. Sometimes, you know, we do screen it in the theater, so there's a good amount of people, but it really varies. Different screenings and different projects will be like, hey, you know what, we really want to, at this point, we're getting close to being done in storyboards, so we'd really like Layout to attend this screening so that they can see and give us their notes for

what they think will be, you know, helpful to know as we're going to lay out or, Hey, you know what? Edit hasn't even seen the movie yet. And it's already the fourth brain trust screening. We really should get edit in here. It can totally vary. All right. So one more question. I like, I'm thinking about this practically, right? I'm working on this movie or this TV show, and now there's a meeting and there's like 30 people in there and they're all taking notes and

I don't know what they're doing on paper or digitally or whatever. And then somebody has to figure out how to make sense of all that feedback. I mean, like, how do you even do that? That is the job of the poor director. Okay. I mean, they do consult, you know, like the writer, director, the editor, like kind of the department, the producer also is involved. But yeah, they kind of get together after that big brain trust meeting where

And that's one of the really, really difficult things about being a direct, like being really high up in the, you know, on the project is you,

You've got to make sense of two people in that note session might give you completely different answers and you've got to decide what do I want to do? And sometimes, you know, everyone's talking about, hey, I just something about your main character isn't working, something about your main character isn't working. And it turns out that actually it's their sidekick is the problem. There's something that the sidekick is doing that's not quite meshing with the main character. And if you fix that, you didn't even have to change anything with your main character.

So, yeah, it's a really tricky and difficult thing. And you've got a lot of voices. That's why sometimes, you know, you don't want to invite the entire studio to your brain trust, because as much as, you know, we love all our coworkers and we all have great ideas. There's a point at which the amount of notes is just overwhelming. And, you know, people have completely different ideas of what the movie can be and everything.

It can just be a little overwhelming, honestly. So we do like, you know, limit somewhat the amount of people that are watching it at any given time. And the director wants to hold on to their vision, but obviously they don't want to make any unforced errors. I don't. But that's why, you know, that's why we do lots and lots of these brain trust screenings is that that way, you know what, if you messed up on one, it's okay. You've got another one. Like,

Uh, you kind of just have to look at it like, yep. The next one will be better. We'll fix that. You know, sometimes we go into a screening going, you know what? Jesse's just not working in this, but we've tried a bunch of stuff and you know what? We'll just see. We'll see what the brain trust says. Maybe there'll be like, actually, I don't think you have a problem there. But most of the time the brain trust goes, yeah, yeah. You've got a problem with Jesse, but here's some ideas. What have you thought about this? Have you thought about that?

And then at some point it lands on John Solomon's desk in the editing department. And, and what is it, you know, what, what are your main apps and tools you use to get your edits done? Yeah. So an assistant editor is kind of the in and out of like the input and the export of edit. You know, the editor, the edit kind of keeps the kind of canonical version of the movie we have.

The whether it's storyboards or shots or dialogue, you know, if an animator as they're working goes, hey, can I slide some dialogue a little bit like, you know, a few seconds or like a few frames later so that I can have their face, you know, they can make a face and then deliver their line.

They'll send it back to us and we'll make sure that it gets changed because eventually our sound gets sent to Skywalker Sound and they're going to do their thing. So we have to make sure that our sound matches the picture that animation is sending to us and everything. So tools wise, you know, Avid is still the kind of the king here. Yeah, basically everything goes in and out of Avid. We've got a couple of, you know, kind of proprietary tools that help us.

That help deliver things to edit and that once we export things from edit, we can send them to the storyboard artists in a way that they can actually, you know, if they need to just change a character's hair color, for instance, that they don't have to redraw the whole thing from scratch and then send us a new copy. They can go, oh, I can just open the old one in Photoshop and paint in the hair and then send it back to edit.

Day to day. Other than that, it's a Slack and Gmail and Google docs. You know, communications. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of communication as an assistant editor. The first assistant editor is, I usually say they're kind of like an air traffic controller. They've got to be talking to all the different parts, different departments and, you know,

If we decide to change something in edit that layout has to know, hey, actually, there's a new version of this scene where we added a line of dialogue. So everything's going to shift over. And also we're going to need a shot for that line of dialogue. So, you know, that first assistant editor will be communicating with them. They'll come to me as the regular assistant editor and say, hey, can you send that to layout? Layout will send, you know, a new take of whatever they're working on and I will bring it into the Avid so that the editor can work with it.

Yeah, it's a lot of fun, but it's definitely a lot of it is communication and organization, you know, keeping the Avid organized, keeping track of, you know, we have tons of spreadsheets of just keeping track of what is the actual have the directors seen this? Have they they've seen it, but they haven't made a decision and approved it yet. You know, layout needs an extra day to work on this sequence before they send it to us.

You actually touched on something I want to ask about because I had a friend, you know, Daisy, I have a lot of friends that work for Disney because we're associated with the company and she is, she works for them. But one of our friends worked at Disney Animation down here in Burbank and like one of his jobs was like shot tracking and like they have this massive notebook thing.

and tons of highlighters and they like, they track every individual shot and where it is and whether it's done or not. And, you know, all these things, the, the idea of it to me is fascinating. Like that's the kind of thing that like, to me is red meat. It's like, yeah, okay. We have a thousand shots we need to track for this movie or more. Right. And it's like, do we use an analog tool? Do we get a big board on the wall and like, you know, have somebody up on a ladder, you know, marking it off. I,

I love the idea of trying to figure out how to do that. Do you guys do that digitally or analog? And like, are you involved with that at all? Interesting you ask. So we do, I think we've been switching more towards digital, but there are literally still whiteboards around the studio where you can see they've taped off a grid for here's each sequence. Here's the sequence number. Here's its status. And there are columns for, oh, we need to record dialogue for this or the dialogue has been cut in or it's in layouts hands or whatever.

Um, so there used to be, you know, literal whiteboards, but we also have kind of a database that, uh, an internal tool that keeps track of everything. Um, and more and more, we've been switching from kind of manual whiteboards to basically digital whiteboards, um, where, you know, we'll take a, there's, you know, usually there's a flat screen TV and every kind of edit pod, and we'll just mirror to that screen, um,

that's got, you know, our database of all the sequences and tracking. And then, you know, when an assistant editor, like if I finish, you know, processing the dialogue, I will go into that database and mark it as here. All the processing is done. And, you know, that digital whiteboard will update on the TV. So if anybody's walking, like any editor is walking by and go or just wants to stick their head out of the edit bay or they can even check it on their laptop. But yeah, so we've been moving more and more towards digital. Yeah. Yeah.

Especially, you know, when the editor is, you know, for whatever reason, they're working from home on Tuesday, then, hey, they can look at the digital whiteboard. They don't have to go, hey, can somebody go out into the pod and take a picture of it and text it to me? Yeah, exactly. That makes sense. And like, to me, it seems like that would be a natural for like a Kanban board, but I'm sure you guys have done something more specific to your work, but.

That's a flow that I'm, I don't know, I find myself kind of interested in like how you do that just because the amount of people, the amount of change, like that would be a pretty tough, you know, tiger to grab the tail of. No, and it is a lot. And we also have, they're called coordinators here. People that like their job is partially like taking notes in meetings, but also helping keep that, you know, database up to date and, you

you know, it's a really cool thing though, to just walk by the board every once in a while you go, Oh, it is kind of cool to see like the status of the movie and you can see it changing in real time as we're making changes. I think I need one of those for my life. I just need to see, like see something turn green once in a while. Like, Oh, okay. A little progress. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

No, and I would imagine that over the years, technology has made that easier, right? Like talk just the manual whiteboard to one that's digital and like ties in with software. I mean, the wrong person walks by and erases part of it. Like, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Or you erased something and went, OK, I'm just going to erase this and rewrite it so that it looks nicer. And then you go.

Oh, shoot. What did it say again? Yeah, no, it's really, really nice. And yeah, over time, you know, on win or lose, we did less of the digital whiteboard and more of just a Google Doc spreadsheet that we were tracking things in. And then, you know, kind of over the past couple of years, as we were making the show, more and more shows started using the...

digital whiteboard and like you know once again the the fact that everyone at pixar is rowing in the same direction so one team goes oh hey we came up with this clever way to you know organize the board or we added one column to it that you know we found ourselves often going hey is all the dialogue recorded so we added a column being like hey is the dialogue recorded and

Um, it's one of those really cool things. And, you know, uh, the assistant editors all like we have, because we're the one, one of the ones that keep that, uh, all together. We've, you know, one of the assistant editors wrote an Apple script thing that can help, you know, update, you know, you brought in all, sorry, you imported all these shots. So there's a quick way to, uh, produce the text file that you can just copy and paste into the tracking thing and be like, here are all the shots that I just brought in.

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I'll give you an example. I pretended to have a job interview coming up and it asked me to help prep for the interview. It immediately started suggesting common questions I could get asked. And then I started talking through my answers out loud and it would give me feedback. And this is all happening in real time, like I'm talking to a career coach. And that's just what I tried first, but you can talk to it about anything. And that's the magic of it.

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All right, John. So it's not just updating the board though. I mean, you, you're working with so many people. I mean, how do you collaborate? Is it all email or, or I guess you said Slack too. Yeah. It's a mix of email and Slack. Slack tends to be kind of the quicker, like, you know, like the, just letting someone asking a quick question or letting somebody know that, Oh, Hey, those boards are online. But email is really, you know, the, the,

any kind of longer term information tends to live in emails and, you know,

on like right now I'm not working on a particular project today. So, uh, I might get, you know, 25 emails, which is not bad, but on, you know, a day when right before a screening, when there's a lot going on and there are exports happening and there's prep for the screening and things I might get, you know, 200 to 500 emails. So a big thing that I just learned very quickly is you've got to set up some filters in Gmail. Otherwise, uh,

A, you will be just buried in email and also your phone and watch and everything will constantly be pinging. Wait, I'm stuck. Did you say two to 500 emails? Yeah. You know, for a, so like, let's say there's 25 sequences in the movie for each of those sequences. When someone updates the database and goes, Hey, we'd like an export of every single sequence in the movie for the screening that generates 25 emails. So that's,

That alone, you know, you just do a few exports during the day and suddenly, yep, you're up to 200 emails. Wow. Ooh.

And you know, a lot of them are just kind of letting you know, Hey, the export is like, that's the other thing is you can have an email that says, Hey, an export has been requested. It's not ready yet, but it's requested. And then you'll get a second email a few hours later. Once the editor is done going, yep, now you can export it. So you're going to email filter pro is what you're telling us. You have to be, I don't know if I'm a pro, but you certainly have to spend a lot of time in, in the Gmail filter interface and kind of tweaking. Cause the,

On the one hand, yeah, it'd be great if I can just mark these all as red so they don't all make my, you know, Apple Watch explode. But at the same time, you really don't want to accidentally filter something that is marked as red that, oh, I really need to know the second that email came in because I've been waiting for it and I missed it. And now, oh, no, things are late because of me.

But yeah, it's a lot of just combining. One of the great things about it is you can combine emails from this person that mention this in the subject or don't. The real secret is, much like in Google Search, you can do minus. If you search Mac Power Users minus Pixar, you get all the episodes that don't mention Pixar. Doing the same thing in Gmail of, yeah, emails that are from this person but not

this person is not CC on them or, you know, using asterisks. Like if you want to filter whatever every email that comes from that we get at Disney or at Pixar from Disney, you could do from asterisk at disney.com. And that will filter every single, like if you want them all tagged as Disney, great. Now every single person that's gotten at disney.com email will be filtered in one place.

Yeah. And that's the advantage of Google. I've always felt Gmail is like so good for online rule filtering. Like you can do good filtering on Apple Mail with an email account, but it has to be on your device and your device has to be running with Mail Active, whereas Google does it all in the cloud before it even gets to you. And in a lot of ways, that's superior.

Yeah, it's, it's super nice. The one thing I wish is that they would just let you label a filter. Like, so that I remember, like, you know, you're looking at this long list now of, and some of these filters, you know, end up, you know, a thousand characters long of like, okay, it's from these six people, but it mentions win or lose, but it doesn't mention an export. And it'd be great if I could just label it as, Hey, this is the filter that, uh, you know, marks all exports is urgent or whatever. Um, you know,

You know, someday I hope they'll do that. But the real trick is to also not go overboard. You know, a thing I at first I was like, OK, I will I will label this is a storyboard. Like I even created labels. These are storyboard exports. These are layout exports. These are dialogue exports. And it just got to be too much. And I realized I'm never looking for a specific storyboard export. I will just tag everything as an export and.

Then use the handy search in Gmail and be like anything is labeled export and has the word storyboard in it. You know, I think Merlin has used the phrase like organizing your recycling. Yeah. So I you know, you have to be careful of that. And, you know, just coming up with like clever workarounds for tags so that when I am manually, you know, labeling something.

something like reference and referrals in both of those I'm typing like what to get through that I have to type R E F E R before I can even get to oh these are two different tags you know what I mean like when you're typing out a tag to add to something you want it to be the quickest way to add something so rather than reference I might write information or something that like quickly I can tag it and separate it from referrals because those look the same when you're looking at a long list of emails

It's so important to figure this stuff out. And depending on what system you use, there's a lot of good options these days, I think. I use Fastmail. And like you, I've got just a...

I've probably got about 150 rules that I apply at the Fastmail cloud level. So all the Mac Sparky stuff gets filtered way before I see it. And it's the same thing. You can do a lot. I will add, though, with Fastmail, you can label them. So there you go. Oh, yeah.

I'm sure, you know, I haven't really convinced the whole company to switch email providers, but I don't think that's going to happen. I don't think that's going to happen, but, but I actually, I feel like for people who don't want to use Gmail, fast mail is probably the best alternative. You're looking for doing something like that, but you know, we've had a sponsor in the past, the same box, uh,

They do that for any account, really. They've got a lot of cloud-based stuff you can do. But if anybody's struggling with email, I feel like this is a real help. One of the things I've done over time is I've created subfolders for the different things I make, like field guides, the labs, the podcasts.

And FastMail does a pretty darn good job of getting everything in the right bucket. So I can just go and say, okay, I'm going to take a half hour and go through all the field guide email. And then it's all there waiting for me. I don't have to figure it out. And that's something that anybody in the sound of my voice can do. You just got to choose which technology you want.

and just kind of build it out. I wouldn't say you build it out in one day. Like I'm sure, John, you didn't make this system in one afternoon. Oh, certainly not. And you know what? You're much like, you know, I realized I need fewer tags. You're going to don't try and perfect your system before you've implemented it. Just sometimes it's just about, okay, implement some of the system. And as you go, you will realize, oh, hey, you know what?

I thought I needed all these emails marked as urgent, but I never actually look at that urgent folder or whatever it is like tweak it as you go rather than trying to feel the pressure of like I've got to come up with a perfect system to organize every single email that I will ever possibly get. Stephen, what do you do for email rules? I've got a handful mostly to sort feedback from various shows into folders because if you email us like from the website that attaches a subject line, as long as you don't change it, it gets filtered.

But not a ton. I used to do a lot more. I used to have a lot more mail subfolders. And I kind of got to a point where I was like, you know what? I can just archive it all and search. And still have a handful of important folders, but a lot less than I used to.

And I will say that's one area when writing emails that I try and be really, really cognizant of is, you know, much like you were saying, Stephen, of like, you don't if they change the subject line, then, you know, your filter kind of breaks. So when I'm sending, you know, emails about like here, this dialogue is available. I have a format for the subject line that I try and make sure is consistent that like it's whatever dialogue online colon text.

Here's the sequence number and sequence name that's available. That way, if somebody has set up an automation based on my emails that I'm keeping it consistent rather than, you know, changing my subject line every time or making it just a little bit different, that makes it really hard for somebody who is relying on those filters to actually have something that works every time. Yeah. Where does automation come in for you? You know, you're dealing with a lot of different documents, a lot of email, things kind of coming in all over the place.

You mentioned mail rules, but is there anything else like on the Mac that's helping you out there? I mean, keyboard maestro, I cannot live without. You know, when I got the new Mac mini, I within about three minutes went, why is none of this work? Oh, that's right. I haven't installed keyboard maestro yet. You know, like you don't even think about some of the things of like, oh, I just use, you know, I can type at, at, and it'll fill auto fill my email, you know,

in the date format for a new file I created. There's so many little things that, and that's just personally, but also at work, you know, everything from, you know, we like to have consistent naming between, you know, files between, uh,

like recording sessions or exports or anything. And the best way I found to make sure that that is consistent is using automation because it's easy for you to make a quick typo. And now one of those hundred folders is mislabeled or one day you happen to forget that actually we write all these folders year, month, day, and you wrote day, month, year, and now everything is ruined.

Wait, wait, Pixar uses year, month, day for their following. It depends on who you are and where you are and what project you're on. And, you know, but yeah, it totally depends. And that's actually one of the things, you know, last time I was on, I had only ever worked on win or lose. And now I've,

helped out on other projects and learned that like some of the things I told you guys last time of like, this is exactly how we do it. Turns out not every director wants to use, you know, Google docs as their notes, like place for notes for the editors. Some of them want to use box notes. Some of them would rather write it all in an email. So it's one of those things where you do kind of have to adapt as you're going. And that's one of the ways that I use keyboard maestro is sometimes, you know, Oh, this is,

whatever note-taking app they want to use, Command B doesn't bold things for some reason. Well, I'm going to write a keyboard maestro thing to make sure that it does because that's what I need. Yeah, yeah, makes sense. This episode of the Mac Power Users is brought to you by Indeed. Go to indeed.com slash MPU and join more than 3.5 million businesses worldwide using Indeed to hire great talent fast.

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John, one thing we talked about before recording was your, it's understandable given your line of work, but your interest in video transcoding. And that's something we get questions from listeners every once in a while. Like, you know, I've got optical media that I'd like a copy of, or I have these files that are in a weird format. So tell us a little bit about video encoding kind of broadly, and then some of the use cases that you have come across.

Sure. Yeah, I love video transcoding. It's one of those things that seems really, really technical and to be truthful, it is. But once you know some of the basics and kind of understand the concepts, it becomes a lot easier to at least get something that, you know, works for you. And, you know, you can that like, you know, if you just need to convert a video for whatever to shrink it down a little bit, they understand enough to at least do it.

So, yeah, like I guess let me like start by like explaining some big terms, I guess, that like, you know, I think most people know that a movie is made up of individual frames. So like, you know, every in like a movie, it's one twenty fourth of a second is a new image or in videos. It's one thirty thirtieth of a second. You'll actually see this in your iPhone in the camera settings. You can change the frame rate in which you record.

So each of those frames, basically the computer's got to go, okay, I've got a certain amount of data called the bit rate to basically explain this picture. Think of it like a series of JPEGs. Like each one can be whatever you want. You can tell it, hey, I want every single picture to be less than one megabyte. And it'll go, great. I will figure out ways to try and reduce the amount of data there. That's why sometimes you look at a video and go, oh boy, that is super blurry.

it's not necessarily the camera was out of focus. Sometimes it is, you've lowered the bit rate so much that it's got to go. Okay. If you think of bit rate, almost like paint, it's, you've got a canvas and how much paint am I spreading on that canvas? If you're going to give the person like an eyedropper full of paint, they've got to kind of try and spread that paint as far as they can for people that have used, you know, um,

Digital cameras, when you use digital zoom and it's basically just kind of cropping your picture and making it bigger, that's essentially what, you know, lowering your bit rate or, you know, increasing the what we call the raster size, which is like, you know, people have heard of 720p, 1080p, 4K, etc.

that's basically your frame size. So, you know, if you have the same amount of data and you try and spread it out more, like with digital zoom, you're not actually creating like, you know, I guess this does slightly fall apart in the new iPhones do some computational photography to kind of figure out

to not just take every pixel and stretch it out. But, you know, traditionally, yeah, that's what you're doing is basically taking one pixel and making it now four pixels. So you're not actually adding any information. You're just making the picture bigger.

What other things can I tell you guys about? Codecs are, you know, in your iPhone, there's a setting under the camera app, or I think, or maybe photos where it says, hey, do you want to make files that are more efficient or files that are more compatible? The more efficient is this new, relatively new thing called H265 or HEVC, if you've ever seen that acronym. That

basically it's just kind of a smarter compression method that lets you, you know, for the same amount of, how can I explain it? It's almost like if you gave someone the same amount of paint, but you gave them a little trick to spread the paint a little more efficiently. Mm-hmm.

There's what other things there's hardware and software encoding. So hardware encoding your Mac has, you know, if you've ever watched any of the WWDC keynotes and they've said, oh, yeah, we've got some ProRes encoders right on the chip. That is hardware encoding. It's using something built into the hardware that is specifically designed just for video encoding and decoding. And it's much faster and.

There is a slight quality tradeoff. I think most people won't really notice the difference and will appreciate the difference because software encoding, you know, on my Mac studio making like an HEVC file, I can get like, you know, 60 frames per second. If I turn on the hardware encoding, it goes up to like 400 frames per second. So, you know, depending on what you're doing, that time savings may be a huge deal to you.

And then finally, I guess sound wise, you know, there's I think most people know the difference between stereo and surround sound like stereo is just two speakers in front of you or to your two headphones and then five one or seven one or at most is just more speakers and you're kind of spreading the sound around.

There are a lot of different like, you know, H two six four versus HEVC. There are different audio codecs. I think Apple's kind of preferred one that they like deliver movies in like from iTunes is AAC and it's pretty great and efficient at encoding. Um,

But I guess the biggest like thing before I really get into like kind of workflow stuff is just to remember that like just because you're making a bigger size file at the end of like a video conversion doesn't mean you've actually gotten better quality. You've just kind of maybe stretched out the image or, you know, you've created new pixels that aren't really there in the original video.

Um, so yeah, there is a certain kind of, it's all a kind of balancing act. You know, if you've ever done photography, you know, that there's kind of this triangle of balancing that you're balancing your ISO, which is like the sensitivity, the aperture, which is how much light is let in. And then the shutter speed, which is how long that aperture is open. And you're kind of balancing those three. You're going, okay, I'm willing to trade off a little more noisy of an image for a little brighter of an image, or I'm willing to,

You know, I don't need I'm not taking a sports photo so I can leave the shutter open longer, whatever it is. It's all kind of a balance of like you don't want to make a 4K file that it has a tiny, tiny bit rate. But you also don't want to waste a bunch of bits on a tiny, tiny video that is only on, you know, a Web page that no one will ever view bigger than their phone.

You know, that's the part I needed to hear because I like to me, I've always thought, well, it's bigger. That's probably the render I want, the one that makes the biggest file. Right. If I, you know, but that I'm really glad you shared that bit. Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, if you took a one megapixel image, you know, on like way back in the day on an old digital camera. And today you could export it as, you know, a PNG that is, you know,

whatever, 10 times the file size, but you're not actually creating any, like you're not actually getting anything more out of that picture. So for, let's talk about transcoding for humans then, right? You know, folks not at Pixar, right? I mean, but there's a lot of people listening that, that bump into transcoding once in a while, they get a video of their kids or they've, you know, for whatever reason they need to transcode. What's a good tool set and some settings people should be looking for. So,

So I think the thing most people probably immediately turn to is Handbrake, which is great. And I love Handbrake and I use it at work all the time. A lot of those things I just talked about, there are a ton of knobs and buttons and dials in there. And some of them are things like, you really don't need to mess with that. And some of them are like, yep, you should adjust the frame rate to be either the existing frame rate, like you can do same as source, or you can be like, hey, I want this to...

this has to be at 30 frames per second for whatever reason. I need to make sure it's 30 frames per second and it will do the math to figure that out.

But one thing that if you're doing a lot more transcoding or, you know, you're more comfortable with the command line, Lisa Melton, I think she used to work at Apple. I think she worked on the Safari team way back in the day, spent a ton of time writing a bunch of video transcoding scripts that you can use in the terminal. And she was even nice enough to set up here. If you want to create a folder and, you know, point the script at this folder, it will, you know, she wrote some shell scripts basically to automate here. I want to transcode 100 videos. Great. Just throw it all out there.

I would also encourage, I'm sure you'll put the link in the show notes, but reading her documentation is what taught me a lot about things, including, you know, things like forced subtitles, which is, you know, when you're watching a movie that has, you know, one scene that takes place in Germany and the one character says one line in German and you see just that subtitle on the screen, that's the sort of thing that is an easy mistake to make when you're, you know, early on, you know, maybe trying to rip a DVD and, you know, uh,

do something, whatever you need to do with it. If you're cutting a montage, whatever it is, um, Lisa's explanations, uh, are,

are great because she really understands clearly videos and video codecs and how does she is big on the kind of balance between, I don't need the world's biggest file. I don't want, I want something smaller than the original source file, but I don't want to lose too much where I'm watching this and going, yeah, that doesn't look right. You know, the, the sky is supposed to be all one color of blue and it's kind of like two shades and there's kind of a weird jagged line in the middle. Um, she has spent a ton of time on that.

For people who, you know, a handbrake is great for certain things, but there are certain things that it can't do, like rewrapping a video, which is basically like rather than I guess the way to explain a video file is there's kind of a wrapper outside, which is kind of the file type like .mp4 or .mkv. And then there's a thing inside that that is the codec that is like you can have an MKV that has.

Like I was talking about earlier, there's H.264 and HEVC. You can have two MKV files that both have different flavors inside them. And so what Shutter Encoder can do is rewrap that without converting anything. So you're not affecting the video quality at all. You're not changing the file size in any way. You are just getting a shiny new wrapper on the outside that, you know, something that maybe you got in MKV and you just want to play it in QuickTime, it can rewrap it as...

a quick time file that you can just play straight. Um, it's got a bunch of things for editors, like, you know, uh, converting things to pro res or bigger, you know, more editing friendly, um, codecs. It's just a great tool that somebody is writing for free. And I think it's on PC and Mac. And, um, I highly recommend it if anyone, you know, uh, it's a nice GUI to some of the, a lot of these are built off of a tool called FFM peg. That's a, you know, terminal tool. And, uh,

Shutter Encoder is a very nice front end for that.

Yeah, I think a lot of people, when they bump into this stuff, it's like, oh, I've got to do this in terminal? Like, no, thank you. And that's totally understandable. And I think that's where tools like Shutter Encoder or Handbrake can ease people into this. Oh, and sorry, one quick tip. If you're using something like Handbrake, in the top right, there's a thing where you can select, hey, I just want to encode chapter one through two or from 30 seconds to one minute in.

If you're testing out a bunch of, you know, like settings and you're like, I don't know what I'm doing here. Let me try like changing the bit rate from 10 megabits to 100 megabits. Just try it with like a one chapter of your movie rather than waiting the hour for the whole movie to re-encode. And then you can check the whole movie. You can save yourself a lot of headache by just transcoding a little test thing rather than the whole video.

What are some places that people should be doing this that they're not like, you know, for folks who are just shooting their own videos and maybe family videos or maybe, you know, they've got rips of their favorite movies. What are some some use examples people should use for for video encoding tools that they haven't thought of? Yeah, I mean, definitely. Like if you got I hesitate always with home videos just because you are technically anytime you transcode something, you are losing a tiny bit of it.

no matter how, what settings you use, you are in fact changing your original. But if you've got, you know, some, like if you've got some home video that's, you know what, I just, I, or some video that you've recorded for whatever reference, like you were like, I just need kind of the layout of this house. Like I, I'm, I don't need all the fine detail. I don't need the HDR quality of the video. I just need, I had to do a quick walkthrough of a house. I'm a real estate agent. I just need to reference. Oh yeah. So then you want,

Walk 10 feet and then you turn right and there's the bathroom. That's the sort of thing you could easily, you know, be like, yep, I can save a few gigs even by just transcoding this. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of those companies that...

One of the nice things about codecs, like going from H.264 to HEVC is they are more efficient. So you can get around the same quality with a smaller bitrate. So you can save on storage if you re-encode something, like you sent all your VHSs away to be converted, like your old home movies.

They sent them back and they're all H264. You could potentially, if you're comfortable with it, convert them all to H265 or HEVC and, you know, save probably at least a third of your storage. You know...

you do have to consider like the trade-off that you are technically changing your original, but there is a degree to which even just, you know, converting from VHS to a digital file is already losing something. I've kind of come to terms with, you know, there is no, there is a technically canonical version of all our films, but,

But at the same time, every home video release is slightly different. It's been re-encoded. It's been color corrected slightly differently, maybe because the color space on a Blu-ray is different than the color space on a DVD. So there is a certain, you have to have a kind of Zen attitude of, you know what, if I'm okay with never having the quote unquote true version of this, then I'm okay with, yep, you know what, there's a tiny bit of change to the file, but it's not the end of the world.

Yeah. And I think something people at home need to know is that like movie companies really obsess over this stuff. Like getting the encode right is super important when that's your business. Oh yeah. Our mastering department spends a lot of time thinking about these things and testing these things. Honestly. Yeah. They are the, like, if you think I was too technical talking about this, you have no idea. Cause there are people in the mastering department who could run circles around me.

One last tool that I'll recommend is there is a terminal, uh, uh, uh, on GitHub. Somebody wrote a terminal command called video dash compare, and it is great. You just pointed at two video files and it opens up a new, uh, uh,

that is playing both videos side by... Or not side by side, with a kind of like a line down the middle. And you can just drag back and forth, you know, between the two videos and see, oh, you know, like here's my original home video and here's the converted one. Oh, you know, when I'm sliding back and forth, I can kind of see that, you know, we lost...

whatever, Uncle Jerry's tattoo is kind of blurry in this one, so maybe I'll redo this. Or you might go like, oh, I can slide this back and forth and this file is half the size, but I don't notice a difference. So it's a very handy thing because it'll play them at the exact same frame between both videos. So you can see truly side by side what the two look like. This episode of MPU is made possible by Incogni.

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So take your personal data back, go to incogni.com slash MacPowerUsers. And the code MacPowerUsers is in the show notes. And if you use it, you're going to get 60% off an annual plan. Our thanks to Incogni for their support of the show. John, we always like to wrap up the show talking about some of our guests' favorite apps and services. And you've got quite a list here. Tell us about some of the apps that bring you particular joy. All right. Yeah.

Let's start with, I guess, the thing I've been using on my Mac to take notes. Markdown is really, really cool and really, really great, and I love it. But I am kind of one of those people that needs to see. Like, I can't look at, you know, as easy as Markdown is, it's hard for me to look at something with asterisks around words and things. Your eyes don't see native Markdown. Exactly. I don't, you know, in the Matrix, I would be the person that, you know, just sees green things.

going down the screen. But I found this great app called Typeora that is a note app. You can set it up with Markdown files. You can create folders in it. And it kind of converts everything you write in Markdown into a pretty, you know, as you're looking at it, it, you know, takes two asterisks and makes it bold. It, you know, it's,

I can't remember. It's WYSIWYG. But the really nice thing is it's preserving all that markdown and you can, there's a quick toggle to be like, Hey, you want to see the markdown? Go ahead and look at the markdown. It's really, really nice. You know, I love using drafts, but the fact that I can't see something, or I still see if you use asterisks to make something bold, you still see the asterisks was

was a thing where sometimes I need to show notes to somebody else and they go, why do your notes look like this? Like, yeah, sure. What is going on here? So this is just a nice way to like, even if I need to take a screenshot of something, I don't have to worry about, oh, they're going to ask me about all the asterisks or the underscores or anything. Sure.

I hadn't looked at this app in a long time and it's really pretty. I mean, it gets a lot of updates. There are themes that people make for it. Yeah. It seems to be, I really like it. So maybe somebody else will like it too.

It's kind of in my head, like in the same category with an app like IA Writer. Exactly. It's very similar. Yeah. And that's, you know, one of the fun things about all these tools is like, A, if you have a folder of Markdown files, you can point both apps at it and be like, actually, I prefer using IA Writer for this. And I prefer using Typewra for this. Nice. What else? I've been using an app on iOS called Open Vibe. It's a client that connects Mastodon, Blue Sky, Threads.

a bunch of social networks all in one app. It reminds me of the good old days of tweet bot kind of, but,

But, yeah, it's, you know, I haven't really settled on whether I'm going to use Mastodon or Blue Sky long term. And just having both of them in one place is actually really, really nice. It makes it easy if you do want to post the same thing to both social networks, you can. But you can also just, you know, post a post on Blue Sky and be like, no, no, this one is only for my Blue Sky fans or whatever. Yeah.

So yeah, it's nice to just open one app and see everything rather than, you know, multiples. And I still have, you know, the separate blue sky app, a separate Mastodon app if I really want to use those. But yeah, it's really nice to have everything in one place. Oh boy. This next one, John, this next one is good. Okay. So if anyone's old enough, I never thought I'd be describing myself as old enough to remember something on the Mac, but there used to be a lovely app called candy bar that let you change icons on your Mac. Yeah. And yeah,

Let's say that maybe if I had focused more on school rather than using Candy Bar when I was in college, I would have done better because I love playing with icons. So there's a website called macosicons.com where people design icons and upload them. And, you know...

There are so many apps that I use like Shutter Encoder is a great app, but the icon on the dock does not match the like rounded square style of all the other icons in my dock. So I just went to Mac OS icons, typed in Shutter. And sure enough, several people have come up with different Shutter icons that you can

use these are also great if you you know want an icon like you know if you're using keyboard maestro and you want custom icons for various macros or things people have designed tons and tons and sometimes i'll just skim through and you know sometimes i discover an app because i'm like oh what is this this icon looks pretty what is the app that this is supposed to go to and you discover oh there's an app that i didn't know about that would actually be really helpful in my day-to-day life

So let the record reflect that it is at this moment that John wrecked the rest of my day. I'm sorry. Oh, but it is just fun. You're not, you're not, you're not sorry. People need more Mac power users episodes, David. I can't deny them that. It's good. It's good though. This is great. Yeah. It's super nice. What else? I'm a bit of a,

data hoarder. Like, you know, I love to download things from the internet and save them or screenshots or whatever. So there are kind of three things here that I will kind of incorporate all together is I have a Synology NAS that has a bunch of drives in it. I think I've heard you guys talk about them tons. The ATP guys talk about them. I love my NAS. I'm probably not even using a fraction of all the functionality. I don't run Docker, but

It has my Plex library. It runs Plex. It's got all my photos, my partner's photos, my parents' photos are all living there. Basically, you know, it's just a giant bunch of hard drives that, you know, have a bunch of tools built in. You can have it back up to some external drives. You know, this is my moment to tell people that RAID is not a backup. That's right. Yeah.

please do not go, hey, there's multiple drives and there's redundancy. Just trust me. Just back it up an extra place. I promise you, you will be so happy if you have a good backup of something and you will not be devastated if you lose some photos that, oh no, like that's, you know, the wedding photos from 20 years ago that are gone forever. The price of a hard drive is so worth it.

To keep stuff in sync, like, you know, there are a couple of folders that I want to keep a copy on my desktop and a copy on my Synology. Or I truly use this at work all the time to copy stuff between, you know, drives or folders at work. rsync is this terminal command that is so powerful and so incredible and can do everything from preserving permissions to, you know, mirroring the exact file and folder structure of a different file.

of your like source, it can, you can tell it, Hey, I want you to copy the exact folder structure, but also remove all the files that are JPEG files. I just want you to copy all the MOV files. Great. It can do that.

Um, but if you should, you get in trouble with that and maybe you accidentally made six copies of the exact same thing to the same folder. Instead of going through a manually deleting them, there's a, an app called dupe guru. That's all one word that is for finding duplicate files. And it's got, it's actually great. Cause it's got a couple of different ways for finding duplicates. You can be like, Hey, anything with the same file name, Hey, anything with the exact same file size, the same modified date, um,

But it's also got a tab in there for photos. It will go through and do kind of a hash of each photo and go like, hey, and you set kind of a threshold. You can be like, hey, anything that is 75% similar, just show me all of them. And you can then decide, actually, these two are 75% similar because they were taken, you know, milliseconds apart, but I want to keep both of them. Or, hey, you know what? Actually, I have three copies of the exact same photo and you can tell it, make sure this one is the one that you keep.

It's really great. I highly recommend it. I think it's open source, but I know it's free. And I think it's multi-platform as well. Yeah, yeah. I'm looking at the website now. It's Windows, Ubuntu. Ubuntu? I always mispronounce that. macOS. And you can get the source code if you want. Yeah. What else do I have? I think one of those things that, you know,

I've been shocked at how many people, like I'm sure a lot of your listeners know, but maybe the people in your life don't know about regex.

Once you discover the magic of regex and the ability to go, hey, rename all these files, detect the first three numbers and move those to the end of the file name or whatever it is, the fact that it can kind of... You guys can describe regex probably better than me. It's like a text programming language. You can come up with a formula and it'll apply to text. It's great for file naming and text editing. But I'll add to that...

Yeah, I'm searching. But I mean, the knock against regex has always been that it's hard. Like when you look at a regex formula,

It is not user-friendly. It looks crazy. David, what if I told you that there was a user-friendly way to use regex? Okay, tell me. BBEdit has this really cool thing called regex playgrounds that are a super clever way. You give it a text file and you go, okay, hey, I'm trying to find a date in here. And it will show you some formulas for here's how you would find a date. And it will show you in real time in the window, hey, here, you formatted it as...

four digit year dash month dash day. And it will find all those in the document and highlight them. And you can then mess around with it and be like, okay, Hey, what if let's say I only have a two digit year. And so you delete two characters in there and go, Oh, okay. Now it's only finding those two digits of the year or whatever it is. It's so much easier. I mean, so many people use BB edit, I'm sure, but yeah,

I think it's definitely easy to like, I fell into the trap early on of being like, oh, BB edit. That's for programmers. I don't really know programming. There's so many tools in BB edit of just comparing two documents and you want to see, hey, what are the lines that are different? Or, hey, where did something get added? Being able to find and replace with regex to be like, hey, find any instance where, you know, there's three digits and like just finding and replacing all the years and being like, you know what? Replace all the years of 2025. Super easy.

Yeah. And like in the world of AI generated transcripts, this is very powerful. Like, you know, it always gets Mac Sparky wrong. It does M-A-X-B-A-R-K-E-Y. And so like you put a regex formula together and you throw it all in the BB edit and it fixes the entire transcript like with one button.

But I would add an addition to using BBEdit. If you want to get into regex, but you're intimidated, is artificial intelligence is very good at writing regex. You know, you can go into ChatGPT and say, I want a regex that does the following. And usually it gets pretty close. It at least gives you a starting point. You know, I think AI is still one of those like things that I think a lot of people are divided on. And I truly don't know how I feel about it. But there are certain things where, you know,

where there are things that are just hard to Google, you know, that like explain, like if you don't know what a pipe is in the terminal and you just go, hey, hey, chat GPT, what is this vertical line in this terminal command? It can at least try and explain it to you. And maybe it's not 100% accurate, but at least now you know the word pipe and you can go to, you know, somebody else maybe who on the internet has explained what exactly a pipe is. But

It's really hard to just Google a vertical line and be like, what is this? And they'll be like, yeah, it's a vertical line. What do you want? You know, one thing I just want to mention now that you bring up AI is you didn't say the word AI at all in your workflows for your show. I didn't. Disney's pretty particular about what is and isn't allowed. I think I can pretty confidently say that our show wasn't, I can certainly tell you our show wasn't written with AI. It wasn't, you know,

Uh, we didn't write any songs using AI or anything like that. Um, I think honestly, AI, by the time we were done with the show, AI was still kind of in its infancy in terms of like, you know, consumer uses. I'm sure there are people at the studio who have asked chat, JPT something. Uh, I think the most I've seen people using it right now, or like the most I saw it on and anytime I've been working here is people making something funny to put like a, using an image generator to make something funny for Slack. Yeah.

I do know, like, and once again, like, AI is such a complicated thing because there's generative AI, there's, you know, all these different things that contribute to AI. So I do know that we do use machine learning. RenderMan is our publicly available software that, like, you know, various VFX houses and stuff use to render things. And

I can't, I don't fully understand the tech of it, but basically at some point somebody realized, hey, we can make a noisier image that's like mostly rendered in, in RenderMan. And then RenderMan uses some machine learning to denoise it a little bit and it ends up saving hours of render time. So, you know, we're certainly not like, you know, we're not, oh, never, ever, ever use AI, but I think we're trying to be cautious, you know.

I can't speak for the whole company. And, you know, Pixar is a lot of people there. I'm sure there's somebody at the studio who wants us to make an entire movie only using AI tools. And there's another person who says, if we ever use an AI tool, I'm quitting. So there's a whole bunch of variation, but yeah, we didn't really use, no, we didn't use AI to make win or lose. Yeah. What else? Oh, this one's for David. Okay. There's an app called log ride. All right. That is just, if you go to Disneyland a lot,

If you are any theme park, really, and you want to track, hey, these are the rides I went on in a particular order or here's how many times I've been on Pirates of the Caribbean. If you just like stats like that, it's kind of fun. It's silly. Some people would probably go, why on earth are you tracking that? But, you know, it's fun. You can even keep track of things like scores on rides that have a score like, you know, the Millennium Falcon or Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters. Yeah, it's fun.

The problem is I almost never go on rides. That's my dark secret. I go to Disneyland like once a week. And I go on rides when I'm bringing people. But when it's just me, I'll have a cup of tea, watch a crowd, get my steps in, maybe eat a churro, head home.

Totally fair. Sometimes call me music in the background. Yeah. Yeah. I know. Steven will call me and then hear the steamship in the back. Yeah. I know where you are. Where are you? Where are you? John, win or lose. We're so happy for you. A fellow Mac power user, uh, has, uh, has helped us show from beginning to end, uh,

You know, you and I text each other once in a while, and I knew you were working on it. I was very excited to see it when we went to D23. And then now I can watch it. I'm dutifully watching. It's very good. All of you Mac Power Users listeners, help John out and check out Win or Lose.

This is something you can certainly watch with kids, but it's also something you can enjoy on your own. In fact, John has something a little special for MPU listeners, at least a few of you, right? Yeah, you know what? I will do my best. I'm going to say this with some slight caveats, but...

I'm going to go to the studio store and this is from my own money. This is not affiliated with the studio. I'm just doing this on my own. But for anyone who watches win or lose, there'll be four episodes out by the time the you're listening to this. If you just, uh, I'll give my blue sky and mastodon handles out. If you message me and tell me what your favorite joke from the show was like, whatever made you laugh, I will within reason send out postcards from the Pixar studio store to you.

You know, if 10,000 of you suddenly send me tweets or blue sky posts, I can't promise 10,000. But within a certain amount of reason, I will absolutely send you a postcard from the studio store here. Well, so just let John know you heard it and you enjoyed the show and maybe you'll get something special. So how's that for an offer? Yeah.

I also wanted to take a quick opportunity. I know, you know, St. Jude is important to Mac Power users. So I work for, you know, Disney is the company that owns Pixar. Disney will match a bunch of donations to a bunch of organizations, including St. Jude. And I bet you a lot of other companies that people, the Mac Power users work for will also match. So please don't forget to set that up with your company because it's

I really love how much you guys do for St. Jude, and it's great that you can essentially double your donation by your company contributing to it. Yeah, that's real money every year in our campaign from company matching. And September is right around the corner, it feels like sometimes. Yeah.

I have this picture in my head because I hear from a bunch of people inside the Disney company every year because we talk about it in the show. And I mentioned this year that we're getting a double from Disney. And we have a lot of Disney employees in the audience. And I heard from a bunch of you saying, oh, I didn't even think of that. And in my head, I've got this mental picture of Mickey standing there with his wallet empty. Yeah.

And I love it. I love it. Mickey's like, oh, okay, I guess it all went to St. Jude this year. I'm sure Mickey is very happy. It's a worthy cause that I'm sure Mickey is very happy to contribute to. Yeah, I bet it is too. It's a great company. And I love that feature. And Disney's not the only company that does that, by the way.

You know? Yeah. That's why I'm reminding everyone, set it up right now. Like, yeah. Don't wait until September and go, Oh yeah, yeah. I'll remember. No, you won't. I'm telling you right now, you will not remember. So do it now. Yeah. And you know what? Mickey does have more money. He can afford it. I'm just going to say that.

All right, gang. John, the show is called Win or Lose on Disney Plus streaming right now. You get two new episodes every Wednesday. So then it wraps up. When does it wrap up again, John? When is it? March. Hang on. Looking at a calendar.

Cause it's two every week. I think it's March 12th. March will be the final two episodes. So we aren't far from the end when the show publishes, get in on it, enjoy it and know that a fellow Mac power user played a big role in that. John, where should people go if they want to send you a note at blue sky? Oh yes. I forgot to tell them my blue sky handle. It is, uh, my last name, S O L I M A N. And then you add D E R. So salamander kind of like a salamander. Uh,

Yeah. Send me that. And I'm both Blue Sky and Mastodon, right? Yes. If you see a frog icon, though, that is not me. There's a guy that has underscore salamander that is selling NFTs. That's not me. Oh, yeah. Important safety tip. You'll probably see a lot more posts about win or lose and...

theme park photos and things like that. If that's what you see, then that's probably me. But if you see a bunch of NFTs, not me, I promise. Okay. Well, we got links in the show notes to that, all that. Thank you. Yeah, we will definitely for sure. And we will not do the NFT guy. We are the Mac power users. You can find us at relayed out of him slash MPU for feedback and membership in the more power users. If you want to become a more power user, you get the ad for extended version of the show.

Thanks to our sponsors, Squarespace, Google Gemini, Indeed, and Incogni. And for those more power user subscribers, John's going to talk about his path to Pixar today. So we're looking forward to getting started. Otherwise, we'll see you next week.