This is Part Two of the Tech Head Stories interview with multimedia developer Taz Goldstein.

THS: In your web statement, you made an interesting comment that made me kind of think about digital video. You were saying "The quality of the supplied footage was questionable but because we work in a digital environment we can turn weaknesses into strengths." And then you go on to talk about how you tweak the colors later and finessed the look into something that was completely original and exciting. So in effect digital allows you to turn a sow's ear into a silk purse.

TG: Absolutely, there are ways in the analog world to do that but the idea of polishing a pile of junk is not a new concept, but doing it in the digital world is a tremendous difference from doing it in the analog world. The fact of the matter is that inside story behind that commercial - not very many people know this - is originally we had shot about six hours of gorgeous footage that we were going to incorporate into this commercial and we were going in a different direction with it and we brought the camera masters to get dubs made of them for protection and the post house who shall remain nameless destroyed all our footage. We only had four days left to make the spot and so we had to put this spot together using nothing but stock footage and material that was supplied to us by Nissan which is usually very taboo because usually this stuff stinks that the company supplies you like that and in fact it did - it was terrible - the COLOR was awful, the grain was terrible, and it looked like 16 mm that had been dragged through the mud and had been transferred with one light. It was just god awful.

But in the digital environment, we were able to experiment with a lot of different filters: Photoshop filters, Premiere effects, Adobe after effects layers, and just really have time to tweak and play and we didn't necessarily do the spot quicker than it would normally take in an analog environment, but in the same time we were able to try a lot more things. I am glad we did because it won the contest. And it is amazing to think that extreme panic and frustration - we lost our camera originals - led to us just fooling around with stuff that was available off the shelf and coming up with an award winning piece. It's pretty much a statement as to where technology is at.

THS: It seems that from listening to you that when you talk about a project it is moving through a lot of media - that you were originating in film, there might have been some video in there, there was certainly some digital in there, and then the release on video again.

TG: Not only video, but we also had a version on the web, on our website, there is another version that went to in-house that was distributed on CD-ROM. All the media came together well on the computer because it is resolution independent. What that means is when you work in a digital environment, especially on a Mac computer, video and film come in to digital by two separate ways if you want resolutions intact. When we take video in, we do it with just a Radius video card or whatever card is flavor of the month.

And for film we have to have a frame by frame transfer through a film scanner. But once its on the Mac, we can play with it using the same programs and incorporate the two. Combining mediums is rather a breeze. The tools are exactly the same, it just depends on how you spit it back out. In fact, this spot could easily printed back to film and shown in a theater with only a minimal amount of degradation because of we kept so much of the film resolution.

THS: What attracted you to moving images to begin with? Why are you here today?

TG: That's a hell of a question. Wow. Let's see - my history is kind of long and weird.

THS: What I was thinking about was when I was 5 my parents took me to the drive in and apparently we saw Captain Horatio Hornblower with Gregory Peck and Virginia Mayo and my mother said everything changed after seeing that. I don't know what that meant - it has always been ambiguous. But I remember sometime in my twenties, I saw that it was going to be on television and I had these scenes in my head, I didn't know if they were manufactured over the years because I had read C.S. Forester or what, so I kind of visualized them in my mind, like a couple of fragments and things, and I watched the thing and they were there. So, I think they were rolling around in my head, you know...

TG: I definitely think that anything you see - visual impressions stay much longer than any other - especially when you interact with them. Even in a drive in you are sort of interacting.

But the impact - the first thing that I can honestly remember got me intrigued by animation or digital video or just moving images in general was my grandmother when I was four years old gave my an old super eight camera and I really had no idea what it was for a while and it was just propping up a few books on my shelf and when I was five I actually decided to take it off the shelf and try doing something with it and I took out my little toys and little army men and actually started recording some stuff and just filming some silly little mini-movies. It was really simple stuff and although I probably somehow inherently knew a few techniques - like I put the camera on the shag carpet floor and was able to slide the camera along the floor - tracking the little army men and little things like this. It was just exploration. There was no bang pow you're introduced, it was more just picking up things as I grew up I started playing with them.

When I was in high school, I was in a social science class and frankly I was doing remarkably poorly, and there was no way to get myself out of it, so the teacher asked if I would like to do a extra curricular project and he asked me if I would want to do a video, cause you know I had a video camera and fooled around with it. So I went out - once again out of desperation because I did not want to fail the class - I went out and shot a documentary on death and dying and how it was perceived by people of different age groups. A pretty heavy topic for a high schooler, but what the hell, and wound up winning the New York Festival of the Arts competition. The following year I went ahead and did a documentary on life in high school and that won the same festival the following year which was the first time that had ever happened. So it was really just a matter of picking up a camera or picking up a copystand camera or just picking up anything and starting to play and it just sort of fell into place.

THS: I've heard you speak of these digital technologies as tools of self-empowerment. Could you talk about that just a little bit?

TG: The fact that digital tools are in expensive by comparison, the fact that they can bring everything into house, if you run a facility you can bring all the elements in-house, it gives you control - you become the person in control - freedom of control is now yours.

But probably the best example of empowerment that I can think of is about 8 months ago, my partner and I wanted to produce a television show. We couldn't do it because it is ridiculously expensive to make - about $50,000 in post-production alone, upwards of $700,000 to make a pilot. Which is obviously more than we had and felt like putting into a pet project. But once we got into all the digital video stuff and I opened up this company and we had all these resources available, we realized that the biggest - potentially the biggest chunk of the budget was production - would be already taken care of because we already had the equipment here, it was already paid off by the projects we were doing. So we went ahead and shot a pilot - we did an entire half hour pilot with all the promos, commercials, bumpers, and the whole deal. It was a travel show for kids and young adults called "The Wanderers." We shot the entire thing on Betacam, we cut the whole thing on the Mac with a Radius card, applied graphics, music, and the whole thing and spit it right back out to Beta tape, transferred it to D2 for our master, made dubs off of that and distributed it around.

That show has just been optioned about a week and a half ago it was optioned by the company that produces Northern Exposure. That again is something that has just happened very recently in fact we announced it at Mac World, we were speaking there at Mac World and we announced to the crowd there and we got a pretty good reaction. We were probably more excited than the audience obviously. It is a very cool thing that we basically took pocket money and, in fact, that show, the whole half hour - everything was produced for $1500. That is absurd, that is crazy. Obviously the equipment was paid for so that was not included and I am not billing out my own time because I did it after hours when the clients went home, we started putting a show together. So, the only thing I am including in that money is what we had to lay out of our pockets, and by the way included a $300 speeding ticket. The budget was considerably small and we produced the entire thing that includes dubs, that includes everything. And we are likely to become television producers within the next year because of $1500 out of pocket expense. And if that isn't empowerment, I don't know what is.

I expect there is going to be a lot of stories like that coming out into the open. People might not be rushing to admit that they did a show for a $1500 because - bad for business - but the fact is people are going to know that anyway. Pretty soon that is going to be out in the open, so that's empowerment

THS: Briefly, what kind of equipment are you using there? You had mentioned, a Radius card.

TG: I use exclusively a Mac platform. Within the office here - within our Santa Monica office - we have three Macs that are dedicated as graphics stations, two Quadra 840 AV's, one power Mac 8100/100 - they both have a decent amount of RAM, nothing huge, I think they are both around 50 MEG of RAM. We are running the Radius Videovision Studio boards. We are also running one Telecast board. So most of our stuff goes directly out from the Macintosh out to the BetaCam SP in real time. Rarely do we have to do frame by frame stuff, we are called on to do that from time to time but usually it is directly out from our Macs. We are running - what other kind of stuff - we pretty much have all the toys - the CD-ROMS and the scanners, DAT, Syquist...

We have got about eight machines we have an average of about 10 gigabyte drive space. But when we started, when we got our major breaks, we were running a Quadra 840 AV, only one, with 24 megabytes of RAM and a 1.7 gigabyte hard drive which is really small especially by today's standards.

Almost all of our big first clients were done with that one machine with that small memory that includes stuff for Mazda and American Gladiators, ABC, FOX, MTV, lot's of big stuff, all done with a very minimal investment. And because of the turnaround and because we were able to pocket so much of the profits, because we did not have to pay for the overhead of the huge post production facility we were able to buy more systems and now have that many more clients. So it is a very easy to expand sort of business. If things go well - I don't want to make it sound like anyone who gets into the business will suddenly be doing roses. But if in fact you do get some good clients up front, you can expand your business very, very quickly.

THS: Sure, that is another kind of empowerment.

TG: I went from being freelance to being post production supervisor to freelance as a graphics designer, broadcast designer, and now for about two years I've been doing graphics in one form or another. For about two years before that, I was handling a lot of post graphics elements and handling a lot of animation as well. But just graphics I've been doing for about two years. And in that two years, just six months ago we opened up this company Glyphics and it is already doing gangbusters. So talk about a turn around in just six months, going from a guy with a computer to a guy with a company is a very good situation. In addition now we also have a couple of AVIDs here that we use in off-line editing, and various other fun gear, we also have a MIDI studios to do jingles.

THS: Software?

TG: Software - we primarily use almost the entire Adobe product. It seems like anything worthwhile Adobe gets their grips on. There is a program called After Effects which Adobe purchased, now it's Adobe After Effects, and it is probably the single most incredible video tool available on the Mac market. It is phenomenal and also version 3 is about to come out and come down in price radically and it is going to have features of equipment which would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, literally, it has motion tracking on it, and all kinds of great stuff. It costs about a thousand bucks. It is a great piece of software. We also use Premier. We use Photoshop Illustrater, Screen Ready, another Adobe product, brand new. We use a lot of 3-D stuff and we use a lot of different 3-D programs. People ask why? It is because each has its strengths. We use Infini-D, Typestry, Strata Studio Pro, Video Pro, and occasionally Electric Image. And of course everything else under the sun. We are real software junkies here because even the even the smallest tool could have one incredible feature in it that just sets the project on its ears. We grab everything we can and software is so inexpensive that you can do it very easily. Every time you do a project you can find another piece of software.

THS: Is there anything you see exciting on the horizon?

TG: Probably the most exciting thing right now on the horizon is After Effects 3 and it is really just going to be a major, major re-release of an already incredible piece of software. It is going to - you want to talk about empowerment - After Effects 3 is a major source of empowerment. It is going to be able to do things that Flame could do which is easily hundreds of thousands of dollars. Of course you still have to do the rendering time, but which you do in Flame you do in Flint, but it is still an incredible toolbox. Also the Daystar system is going to be four microprocessors working in conjunction with each other, which is going to speed up things radically, that is going to push the envelope quite a bit. I think all the stuff we are seeing on the web is very exciting. We are starting to see real time video signals being sent over, web TV essentially. Which can therefore be a nearly unlimited number of channels and resources, availability of programming. Everything is about to explode once again.