The case for NEVER giving discounts. EP #122 - Darren Mostyn

Hey guys, it's Dan Lenny here, host of the how to Scale a video Business podcast. And this week we've got Darren Moston, who's an old friend of mine from Online Creative in Brighton, England. Darren runs a post production facility and is a colorist and online editor. And Darren actually worked with us back in 2014 on the Alpha 7S launch film. And I've worked alongside Darren at many shows over the years. IBC nab. But what's interesting is Darren's been running an online post production facility for 21 since the infancy of tapeless production, you know, non linear editing. And so what I wanted to do on this show was ask Darren what was it like to build that business, how did he evolve the business and what are some of the challenges he faces. But also what's really interesting is, you know, how much of his work is 4K 8K and HD and I think the answers will surprise you, so make sure you listen out for that. The other thing I think is interesting is how he is very clear about his pricing strategy. So if you're interested in understanding how a top pro in the UK is billing out post production and I think you're gonna get an awful lot of value from this episode. He's also got an amazing YouTube channel where he teaches really high end grading tips. So we'll link to that below this episode as well. And please, as always, I would mean a great deal to me if you could leave a review or a comment for us on your podcast app of choice. It'd be great if you could share this episode as well. And I'll leave you with this week's show.

Good morning, Darren. How are you mate?

Yeah, morning Dan. Very well, thank you for inviting me.

Oh, thanks for being here. For those people who don't know the backstory here, Darren actually graded the Alpha 7s launch film for us way back in 2014. It was actually during that week that we got the call from Japan, I think it was a Wednesday, saying you need to come to Japan tomorrow because the 4K films, we need to re reshoot it. That's pretty crazy. But Darren, you've been running a post production facility in Brighton in England for 21 years and that is, that is no mean feat because post is a very, very cutthroat and challenging space to be in. Very competitive. Do you want to tell us a bit of your backstory is how you got set up in online creative?

Yeah, sure.

I started out linear editing, so very much tape to tape editing and then got an opportunity to work for a company called FAST who were very leading edge in non linear editing. So this is when, this is in the days when I would play a clip back from a hard drive and spend most of the session explaining to people that it's really coming off a hard drive and not a tape hidden somewhere. People just couldn't believe that you could play video on a hard drive. That company was amazing. They really, I didn't know anything about computers and that sort of stuff so they really trained me up on all that side of it. But I got really in with the R&D department in bringing my editing skills to their development skills. So they, they, they were brilliant at making software. I was reasonably good at editing. So the two married really well and that, that company was a really great company to work for. And they ended up being bought by Avid after I got bought by Pinnacle. So, you know, you can, you can attribute some of Avid success to some of that company success, I think. But that was a great opportunity for me and I met a lot of really good people in the industry who are all, you know, pretty much still friends now. You know, these people are still around. They're all at different companies now. Especially as FAST doesn't exist anymore. But that was a real good stepping stone for me in starting my business. So I knew people at Sony. I then got in touch with people at Mercedes Benz World because they had Sony installations going on. So I'd started building up some good clients and just thought, you know, I'm going to go out and do this on my own and set up online creative in 1999.

Started doing quite a bit of training as well. I've always enjoyed training and teaching people and sort of demoing and that sort of stuff. But I picked up clients really quickly and it sort of, you know, took off. So I was starting to produce videos. We started doing a bit of early animation stuff. I was getting, I was very, I've always been very technical, so I've always loved the tech.

I'm a creative geek really. You know, I just, I, I can, you know, I can browse technology forever as I'm sure you can. So I keep, I keep ahead of my game, which is really, you know, that's something I really sort of pride myself on that, you know, I'm always open to new technologies. You know, when, when people would stop filming on video and it was going to disc, you know, I was very embracing of that.

But I think one of my big breaks came in 2000. I got invited to be the editor on the ATP Tour. And this was the first ever Avid Unity outside broadcast that was ever done in the world. I spent a year on the road literally hoping this Avid Unity thing would stay.

Alive because we were literally broadcasting live. And it was brilliant. It was. It was successful. We had avid engineers on site with their fingers crossed all the time. But it was a really good opportunity for me. And that actually opened up a whole world of getting into sport editing, which I didn't realize was a thing.

Until five years later when I realized I've just been editing snooker, golf. I did two World Cups, which was fantastic. I went out to Japan for six weeks and then did the German one for six weeks. And still looking after my other clients, so. Still looking after Sony and other people like that. And my corporate clients as well. Because we do corporate stuff.

Yeah.

And it kind of went from there. And then I realized I was doing a lot of sport and I was on the road a lot and I wanted to be a bit more grounded. Yeah. We were starting a family and. Well, my family was getting very established by then.

And I got picked up by Did. Oh, so sorry. Before that. So with the sport, what we started to find in those days was we were sort of chopping it out, but people wanted to start getting a better production value. We were moving on to the symphonies. We started doing the onlineing and color grading was really just starting. Now. The tools were getting a bit quicker enough. We're getting quick enough on the NLEs to actually start doing a bit of touching up. Because bear in mind, this is still infancy of nonlinear. The stuff wasn't very fast and quite compressed. We've now got to a point where we could do color grading in the time allocated before we're knocking out these highlights. What broadcast deadlines are like. You've got two minutes.

So we just started polishing and then we started playing with, you know, you throw a few Sapphire plugins and things start to look a little bit glossy. And I got really into the. The onlineing and the, the color and the, you know, the finessing. And I was chatting with some guys at Digital Vision who had Filmmaster and they said, you want to come and do some work with us? This is back in 2007, so it's even 13 years ago. And they trained me up on their whole film master suite and which was just fascinating for me. That was my first real. You know, I'm just color grading now. This is fab. I'm still editing, obviously, but I was getting into real world color grading with big Advanced panels and stuff. And they, and they sent me off to train people. So I started meeting these amazing colorists and I'm training them how to use this bit of kit and I'm picking up all these, all these tips from them. You know, it's like I was fine with training you. You still always get something back. Doesn't matter what level you're training. Even today when I'm training students, I, I always find I get something back that someone will come up with a little technique or a little something that you didn't know, you know. So that's, that's part of the thing I love about training is you're giving but you're always getting back, you know. And so I was meeting these fantastic colorists. So I went out to India. We were looking at where they do all the Bollywood films and it was just a amazing time. Yeah, it was really good fun. And then I realized I really wanted to get into the color side of things more and more. And this is about time when Apple Color started rearing its head for the brief period that it did. And so I invested in some more technology. So by that point I'd moved to Brighton. We set up a setup. This still in the same facility now. So we've expanded from the one room. We've now got two suites and a production officer. So we're not huge. We keep it small but it's all top notch gear. You know, we, I like to think we're a SoHo star facility.

So yeah, so we bought the Apple color. I bought a Sony BVM 32 inch CRT which is a beast of a thing. They were in every expensive. Yeah, everyone secondhand but.

But it was a. Yeah, that was great. When I got that thing in, it's like, right, I've got a nice beautiful calibrated monitor. I've still got it downstairs. In fact, I used it.

Was that SD or HD?

It's HD.

It's HD.

Yeah.

So like way before 4K.

Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. We're not even thinking about 4K yet. So no, it's HD. And yeah, I've still got it. And I used it on a job recently for itv. We had a lot of archive footage and all obviously interlaced and some bit not interlaced. And that monitor is still great for looking at that stuff, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

But it is for sale if anyone wants it. It's taken up a lot of room downstairs.

Getting that bvm, getting Apple Color on. And I bought a tangent. What was it? A tangent wave. So it's just, you know, so I've just had a little control surface. I just started, started doing some grading and I think my sort of broadcast. So I'd already done broadcast editing and my broadcast break in grading came from. I edited a documentary for BBC. So it's a seven week edit and I've done a sort of first grade on it. Just a, just a, you know, first look just to get it balanced for preview and whatnot. And I remember going to Soho with the director to go to the grade buy a well known colorist who I won't name.

And we did the grade and the director actually preferred my grade so we kept mine, which was, which was great. So I've now got my first colorist credit in broadcast and that just carried on. I've built up a sort of nice rapport with the BBC. So this was BBC Scotland. So all the rna, I'm actually in Brighton, they're in Scotland. So it was a. That was my biggest client at the time was actually what, 700 miles away, which is the beauty of being in Brighton. It doesn't matter where we are. And we know that now after lockdown, of course, it doesn't matter where you are in the world, you know, so we've kind of always worked a little bit remote.

And that. Yeah, so that was it. So then, you know, I really wanted to sort of move on. And then blackmagic, blackmagic Design, I know those guys really well from my early days at fast. So this is showing how it sort of comes around full circle. You know, contacts is everything in, in my mind. You know, building up contacts and keeping them and staying in touch is really important. And Blackmagic invited me up because they just bought DaVinci Systems and created Resolve. So this is very exciting because this resolve was what, $300,000 at the time. Then Resolve bought it and it was going out for $30,000. So, you know, overnight the system became more affordable and they invited me up to have a look at it. I've got to be honest, it wasn't amazing. I wasn't that blown away by it, to be honest. It was. It the.

How can I put it? The potential was there for sure, but I wasn't quite ready to bite with it yet. So I waited about six months and they released version seven and I thought, let's have a go on it. And I had a BBC documentary coming up again to grade. And I thought, do I, do I stick with what I know? I'm on Apple Color. But I also like to embrace this new technology. So I wanted to be, you know, good for my word. And I spoke with the director and he said we can, they can give us an extra couple of days on the grade, which I won't charge for but because I'm just going to be a little bit slower on this system. And we actually locked before the weekend. So I thought, right, sort of I'm going to go in at the weekend and just work, work on Resolve and just check everything's happy. And what Resolve did what they. Sorry. The team at blackmagic, they offered me tech support over the weekend. So if anything goes wrong, because I actually then found out that I'm the first person to have done a long form program on Resolve. So this is effectively the world's first long form program going out. So it was a one hour doc. So we were looking at about 8, 900 shots.

I can't remember exact how many shots we have. Something like that. And it worked. I was on the phone a couple of times, but it worked and I was really pleased and I've been absolutely in love with Resolve ever since.

So you talked about contacts and I guess what we're talking about here is relationships, isn't it? I mean, yeah. How have you built this business from a commercial standpoint? Because I understand you've done a lot of connections and a lot of contacts and a lot of kind of tech stuff. But, but what about the day to day? What about kind of like keeping the lights on? You know, there's a lot of money that goes into investing in a post production facility. I mean you've got high end monitors and high end computer suites. And although people like Blackmagic have democratized the cost down from 300,000 to 30,000, you've still got the $30,000 panels, right? It's like.

How do you balance all of the tech geek array, if you like with the business? You know, you've got, you've got a decent, a decent sized space, you've got rent, you've got. Yeah, how that side of the business.

Yeah, I mean, I mean networking is for me is everything. I keep in, I keep in touch with everyone. I'm always, I don't wait for the phone to ring. So I'll keep in touch with people. How you doing? Hey, by the way, we're doing animation now. I'll send them an animation reel. I've got my mailchimp. So we keep a, we can melch. So every now and again I'll just drop.

Just hey, here's what we've done recently. It's just a, just a few little things. I don't like to make it long, keep it nice and short so someone can just open it, go. Hey, yeah, Darren. Yeah, that looks nice. They don't want to read tons of stuff. Just a little something light like. So every year I do our year in 12 months and it just be January so there's only 12 things we did. Obviously we might have done 150 jobs but here's 12 highlights and I make sure that they're all different. So one will be an animation. Whether that was the best thing in February or not. I'll make sure one's an animation, one's a training session, one's an event. I did because I sort of speak at events and things like that as well. We've got to see how we do. Yeah, it's training, it's animation. So we're quite diverse as well in what we do and I think is.

That one of the secrets to your success that you've, you can't afford to just do one thing because you are for anyone who does not understand the UK. So Brighton's what, 60, 50, 60 miles south of London.

Yeah.

And London treat it like, you know, another, another lifetime away. So there's, there's a perception, isn't there, that you know, if you're not in London that you can't be sustainable?

Absolutely, absolutely. And there's still obviously part of the company. I don't just sit in this seat all the time. And so I'm, I. They go up to Soho and work in Soho as well. But most of the time I'm here, I want the work to be here. A they're then paying for me and they're paying for my suite as opposed to just paying for me. So I am keeping my fingers in London. It is tricky to get them to come down Even though it's 50 minutes on a train, you know, they don't, they don't want to. But as I said, one of my biggest clients a few years ago is BBC Scotland. It didn't actually matter. I hope my reputation is enough, you know, to get people down. I always, you know, I, I deliver what I promise. I am ahead of a game. I do keep on top of the technology. If I was still here on Apple Color, you know, I wouldn't. Well, it doesn't exist anymore. Bad example. But you know, I embraced non linear straightaway. I embraced, you know, cameras going to, not to tape, you know, to digital. We're There with that technology ready, and I shout about it, you know.

And do you find that from a pricing perspective, you have to adjust your pricing and be more competitive because you're not in London? Is that something that's, that's been in this. It's impacted you over the last 21 years?

It's a very interesting point. So I, in the last, the, the best thing I did, particularly with post production, so, you know, people come for a color grade, they want to, they want a fixed price, they want it cheap, you know, all that sort of stuff. And I don't do that. What, what I changed to about five years ago was an hourly rate instead of a day rate. I do an hourly rate. So. And send me, just send me an outline of your job and I'll guess how many hours that's going to take. And I'm normally, you know, plus or minus an hour. I know how fast I am. I've graded enough programs to know at what sort of level it needs grading. And so I give him a quote on that. And if I finish earlier, happy days for the client. If we finish later than that, I guarantee you that's generally not my fault. It will be many more changes. Doing the job's a bit more complicated than they first said. And so everyone's happy. I'm still, you know, I'm not working an extra 10 hours. When I've not quoted for that 10 hours, I give them a guide price. And what, what I think is important is I, I don't drop my rates. Yeah. You know, I, I wouldn't say never. Depending on the job, I've done a few sort of charitable things and, you know, projects of passion. I can then, if I have time, but I don't drop my rate. What I'll do is I'll maybe give them a couple of hours free. And I think the important thing there is if you, if you keep your rate, clients are very, they're very quick to forget that you've discounted. And then the next time you come back and you decide, oh, hang on, last time it was £95 an hour, what's going on? And if you keep your rates but give away a few extra hours, they notice that you've put a few extra hours in. So when I go sleep, building value.

Rather than discounting, which is something that I always recommend people do, and the other thing I want to just touch on there, which is something you mentioned, which I think is really worth holding on and going back to, is that when you're doing graphics or grading. Oftentimes the challenges in time are. Are very rarely because you're not fast enough. Because when it comes to graphics and it comes to motion graphics and comes to grading, people can't make their mind up about, do they want it warmer, do they want it cooler, do they want it more red, they want it more blue. And I've had situations where we did something a few years ago for a client, and they literally went full circle. They went, can we take that green out of there? And can we take that orange out of there? Can we put it in here? And then 24 hours later, they've gone around all the stakeholders, and we ended up regrading it exactly the way we'd first done it.

Yeah.

Which. Which happens a lot. It's part of the creative process. But it sounds like that's something you're very big on, which is like, great and good graphics by the hour, because then they're paying for every hour and you're not. You're not in your profit.

Exactly. And also, you know, we'll sit down at the beginning and if the client's here, I mean, appreciate. After lockdown, things have changed a little bit. We've got. This is the back of my studio, so I've got the panel in front of me. So it's. It's definitely bigger than 2 meters. But I've noticed our last few jobs are remote. People aren't coming in. But normally I would sit down with the client at the beginning of a session, explain exactly what's going on. And after half an hour of grading, it's like, yeah, they might not have said too much. I'm like, are we. Are we going the right direction? Are you. Are you happy? You know, and please don't be afraid to say if you don't. If I even say some. If you don't like it, but you don't know why, just say, I don't like it. I've been doing it 21 years. I can take it. It's not, you know, I don't take it.

When we did the. The A7s, our bro Smokey's film, I'm pretty sure.

That I wasn't even at the grade, I think, because we actually. We did. Because we. We shot a 4K film.

Yeah.

And we shot that and I sent it to you, and you started having a go at grading that, I think, while we were up shooting the main film.

Yeah.

And. And that's when we discovered there's a bit of a problem, because what happened was the engineers had told us to expose the S log 2 at the time at 1600 ISO, but because it was pre release, pre, pre firmware version one.

What we should have done has been recording at 3200 ISO and they hadn't. I think it ultimately settled on 1600 but we should have been recording at 3200 and they hadn't told us where to set the middle gray and the white point. And so it all came back a bit underexposed. Not through any fault, wrong, because it was consistently underexposed. And so that's why the engineers got back in touch with and said, actually we've realized there was a problem with the S log file. You need to come to Japan. So we weren't even in the suite and then I think we came down to do something with you for a couple of days. But I think that was it. We had to fly to Japan.

It was that girl walking around Edinburgh. Wasn't it something.

Drew and I had to fly to Japan and we left you to Grant. So I think that the value of you might be, not be in London, but we didn't actually need to be in the suite because we're paying you because you know what you're doing.

Yeah, we get a lot of that now. You know, it's just, I mean, the downside is you're sending them files and they're looking at it on a laptop. You've got that old argument. But people trust me, you know, all my clients come back, you know, I look after them, you know, you get the job. Right. And if it's not right, I'll fix it at my expense. You know, but it's.

I've got good, loyal clients, you know, I just want.

To talk a bit about, you know, obviously, you know, for many years you were SD, then you upgraded to HD and then you go from HD to 4K.

Yeah.

And, and what is, you know, I mean, interestingly, going from tape to tape, this was probably cheaper because these HD dicks were like £80,000.

Yeah.

But in terms of like reinvesting because, you know, you've got, you've got the full resolve panels.

Yeah.

You've got, you know, probably high end monitoring and other, other, other things that you invest in, you know, Genelec speakers and the whole experience, how do you, how do you manage reinvestment in tech and, and what is it that drives you to reinvest? Because especially as a tech head. Yeah, I mean you literally, if, if NAB was happening this year and ibc, you could literally come back from every show and go. Actually, I now need this panel or I need this display. How do you balance that with.

With the needs of the business? Because if you keep reinvesting in technology and if you go out and buy a Mac Pro, you're 10 grand to the wind.

How do you, how do you.

Wow, there you go. How do you evaluate when to invest and upgrade and how do you justify. I mean, because you can't necessarily clients anymore. So I'm curious to know your thought process around reinvestment in technology and how that saves time or makes you more efficient.

Was buying the advanced panel, which is, you know, it's a 25, 000 pound bit of kit. It was a bold move, very bold move when you consider a lot of facilities don't have this big panel. Even some of the soho facilities don't have the advanced panel because they do smaller versions, although they didn't then. But the speed that I can grade with this thing, it makes me so much more efficient. That's making it more efficient for the client. I can turn out more work. The whole perception, when you walk in, you feel reassured that, you know, if I've got this sort of kit, you'd like to think, I know what I'm doing, I'm not going to buy it. It just sits here going rusty. The first big investment I ever did was, well, that BVM CRT wasn't so cheap, but the advanced panels was the first time I went and threw proper money at something and I didn't regret that. I mean, on my first job, I didn't regret that. And that paid for itself in, you know, not very long at all. I mean, in months in terms of time. And after doing that, I've never been worried about throwing money at stuff anymore. If I want, I'm a bit, I'm quite terrible that if I want a bit of kit, I'll just go out and buy it, to be honest. But it's always paid for itself. I've never had to worry.

So during lockdown, that's, that's the. Just to try to touch on this before. Sorry to interrupt there, but I think that's it. You know, when, when you look at any kind of investment in technology, if it speeds you up, it means you can increase your capacity. Therefore any investment that panel makes you, makes you faster. But it has the secondary benefit of giving the client confidence that they're, they're in a kind of a Class 1 suite. So you're going to see about lockdown. Yeah.

So. So during Lockdown. I did exactly that. I thought, what am I going to do? So obviously business did stop. I mean full stop. It just. I had everything planned. August and September are my really busy periods for there's two big events that I do. So I edit all the TV Choice Awards every year and obviously it's ibc. Both those were canceled. I had a. I did pick up a bit of work during lockdown from clients that I. That hadn't worked with me before because where they used to go, Joe, nothing was. That just didn't work for some reason. So I actually picked up a few new clients. But we were very quiet and I thought, okay, this is time to get in the studio, rip out some of the old stuff. Let's get some new stuff in. I bought a new Mac Pro 2019, which is. That was a big investment. They are not cheap, but that is going to save me. Well, it gives me some longevity again because my main machine was still the Mac trash can. They call it the Cylinder one. In fact, I bought. That was just about when you were down in the studio.

Yeah. Because I bought one I. That. That just a quick interlude.

You got the one I couldn't get.

From Lewis at Jigsaw while I was at your place and he sent it to yours and I took it to Japan with me so I could cut the Sony film. Yeah, that's like six years ago.

Yeah. So mine's still working absolutely fine. But I'm not going to wait for it to break and then that's going to happen when a client's here that's going to ruin. That's. That client won't come back. So that needed upgrading anyway. But also we're getting a lot more 4k stuff in now and I just needed some more grunts. And you might have seen I did a little YouTube test of my Mac Pro 2013 versus the new one we've got and it's ridiculously faster. So that's going to increase my workflow. We're rendering out one hour docs or 90 minute docs. I'm doing them. They're going out in a quarter of the time. I can render out one hour, probably.

10 to the client because you can work more quickly, which means you can. Your throughput of work can increase. So that's a great business case study for investing significantly in a very powerful machine that will then make you more efficient.

That's what I need. I need a fast machine. I need a panel. And the other thing with the panel even, it's just my whole I'm 52. You know, I'm sat here all day doing this. This makes it so much nicer. You know, just ergonomically, you know, we always. We use, you know, we have decent furniture, good chairs. I've got AKA desks. This is all about making my 10 hours sat in here in the dark more enjoyable, you know.

What about video monitoring? Because, you know, in the past, the kind of. The CRT monitor, the grade one monitor, which cost stupid amounts of money.

Yeah.

Modern. Modern panels. I mean, you know, I've got. I've got an lg. I think it's an LG or a Samsung in the living room. And someone said to me, oh, that's. That's actually being used in colorist studios, because it's. It's like that good. But. But what's your perspective on. On. On monitoring in terms of video panels? Because.

Sure, sure.

Here. So, you know, I'd love to know. I think the listeners would be really curious to know what. What is a professional colorist using as a reference.

So we've got the. I'm sorry, I'm just looking at it. The Blackmagic Ultra Studio 4K for outputting. And I'm running a Flanders Scientific DM250, which, again, was a significant purchase. So we've got that maybe about two years ago. Obviously, the CRT was replaced quite a long time ago. So I had a Panasonic plasma, but that was definitely fading. I think I had it calibrated and I've got a guy who comes in and does the calibration. I don't. I don't do my own calibration. I've got enough stuff to deal with. And he came in and said, that's the last time that's getting calibrated. It just wasn't quite reaching the white point. And if my calibration's off, you know, I might as well be grading blind. There's, you know, I have to have a critical monitor that I can trust. So I bought the Flanders DM250, which came highly recommended. I think that. I think that was a good investment because I believe they're actually worth more than they were to start with now, because they're.

So Is that a 4K monitor? Is that an HD monitor?

It's HD. So for 4K monitoring, again, just another recent investment, I bought the Panasonic GZ 2000, which is fantastic. So that's up on the wall in front of me. I've got the Flanders here. So the client can see the Panasonic and if you want to go true 4k, I can switch the Flanders off work off the Panasonic and they match beautifully. So that was another good investment.

How much work do you do in 4k as a professional colorist? Doing a lot. A lot of projects a year. Because that's another thing I think is very interesting is like the. The training enthusiast world is all about 4k and 6k and 8k and 12k. And my perspective, like, is, you know, I mean, not to bash anyone with 12k cameras, but just don't. I don't want to. I don't. Not interested in dealing with those files.

Yeah.

So what is your perspective? What are you generally grading in? Is it 4k? Is.

Most of the stuff coming here is 4k. So we're grading in 4k, but I'm outputting in HD. So TV broadcast deliverables are still HD. I'm not doing Netflix stuff. Yeah, I'm not claiming to be doing Netflix stuff. I'd love to do a Netflix series. But, you know, all the stuff we do that. The ITV one, the most recent one we did that was output in HD, that's the deliverable. But I generally want 4k rushes coming in. I don't want to really be grading off HD where possible. We do a lot of corporate stuff. We do a lot of branded content that. Some of that stuff's coming in as edited files that are delivered to me as a 1080 file, which we then just chop up and grade. But these are, you know, these could be their internal videos. We got some really nice branded content stuff. And that sort of stuff's great for business because I'm spitting out many more deliverables. We're not just spitting out a HD master, we're doing an Instagram master. We're doing all the social media formats. So this is. This is business of the last few years has been. The reformatting we do is. It's great money. You know, it's. We're not just grading once.

We'Re grading once and delivering many, you know, so it's fantastic. But yeah, we're mainly. We're mainly still delivering in hd. That's what the broadcasters want.

Now, I don't want to finish this chat before we talk about your new project, which is your YouTube channel. So why don't you tell us a bit about that and where people can find a bit more about that.

Yeah, I started this during lockdown, actually, so I. I don't had an app many years ago. Well, four years ago I wrote an app called killer tips for DaVinci Resolve. Killer tips, DaVinci Resolve. And I actually did really. I got over 50,000 downloads of that thing. But the running costs of it are just ridiculous. You've got to. It needed a reskin. It was developed on when Resolve was version 12.5. So there wasn't even Fusion or Cut Page or Fairlight. So the way it was laid out was all a bit bonkers in the end. And it was a bit of a beast. It was quite hard work to do. You have to pay developer fees for Google and Apple. You've got to pay. You know, just the running costs of it were expensive. So I can it and just sort of left it for a bit and it was a bit. It was a bit of fun. I enjoyed doing it. Again, it's just giving out free knowledge. It's good. And off the free knowledge I get, people ask me to do training. You know, it's the. They realize that you know your stuff. And I just thought, let's just have a go on the YouTube thing. Why not? So the first thing. So I put up my reel and then I put up the Mac Pro 2013 vs 2019 test and I thought, let's just. Let's just do what the app was. But it's just nice short little pieces and, and it's sort of, it's, it's biting. It's. It's been quite funny. I've had about two and a half thousand subscribers and it's been going for 10 weeks, which I believe is quite a lot. I'm very new to YouTube. Yeah, I use YouTube to like, how'd you do this? And I'll quickly watch it. I don't start following, you know, all these big channel guys, you know, Mr. Beast and all this sort of stuff. But it's quite interesting, you know, I'm just interested to see where it can go and I'm happy to give it a shot if it works great, you know.

Well, I mean, you did a great piece on the Timbirwa film we just did on the A7S3. And so we'll link to that in the blog post beneath this@denleny.com but mate, thanks so much for sharing your experience. I think it's so such a great perspective to have someone who's. Who's making a living and has been for 21 years in post production at Broadcast in the UK. And it's fascinating to hear that most of the stuff you're putting out is hd.

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting when that will change. We don't know if we'll. We keep in touch, but we're ready for it. I've got, you know, my machine can do 8k if it needs to. It's been ahead of that game. So, you know, if someone comes to me and says, can we deliver in 4k? Yeah, I'm ready to go. I don't need to rush out and try and buy some kit. It's here, ready to go, you know, and, yeah, I'll just keep doing the YouTube stuff. I'm just giving out free knowledge. What's not to love?

Thank you so much.

All right, good chat with you then. All right, take care.

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