Loren Mally and the Jellyfish from OWC

Welcome to OWC RADiO, where we take a close look into the minds of innovators who are shaping the world of tech and creativity. Our host, Cirina Catania, goes behind the scenes today with Loren Mally, Director of Sales for the Jellyfish product line, a collaborative storage solution that's become a go-to for filmmakers, editors, studios, and creatives around the world. Please subscribe, hit that "like" button, and listen in to another great interview with two big brains. They talked about Loren's journey, OWC's vision, the power behind Jellyfish, the power of collaborative editing, and how the sales landscape is evolving — including whether AI is playing a role. Whether you're editing the next blockbuster, running a content studio, or simply love geeking out on tech, this one's for you. And, if you are at the NAB show in Vegas, stop by the OWC booth and say "hi" to Loren and the whole team. They'll be waiting for you in the upper South Hall #SLU2. ABOUT OWC: Other World Computing, under the leadership of Larry O’Connor since he was 15 years old, has expanded to all corners of the world and works every day to create hardware and software that make the lives of creatives and business-oriented companies faster, more efficient, and more stable.  Go to MacSales.com for more information and to discover an ecosystem tailored for you. As Larry says, “Our dedication to excellence and sustainable innovation extends beyond our day-to-day business and into the community. We strive for zero waste, both environmentally and strategically. Our outlook is towards the long term, and, in everything we do, we look for simplicity in action and sustainability in practice. For us, it’s as much about building exceptional relationships, as it is about building exceptional products.” ABOUT CIRINA CATANIA: Cirina Catania, is a successful filmmaker, former Sr Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at MGM-UA and United Artists, and one of the co-founders and former director of the Sundance Film Festival. Cirina is Founder/Lead Creative at the Catania Group Global, Showrunner and Host of OWC RADiO and partner, Lumberjack System, as well as Tech Ambassador for companies such as Blackmagic Design.  She is a long-time member of the Producers Guild, Writers Guild, Cinematographers Guild, the National Press Club, National Press Photographer’s Association, and more. She has worked as a writer, director, supervising producer, cinematographer, post-producer, or marketing exec on over 150 film, television and new media projects for the big screen as well as for networks such as National Geographic and Discovery. Cirina is based in San Diego, D.C. and Berlin when she is not on the road filming in the Amazon or other exotic locations. She is very proud of the fact that she has not yet contracted Malaria and that after all these years, she still loves her job!

Episode Transcript

(00:06):
Welcome
to OWC
Radio, where we dive into the minds of
innovators
who are shaping the world of tech and
creativity.
I'm your host, Serena Catania.
Today,
we're going behind the scenes at Otherworld Computing,
also known as OWC,
a company you all know for pushing the
limits of performance, storage,

(00:28):
and creative workflows,
and they also sponsor this podcast. And for
that, I'm very grateful.
Our guest today is Lauren Malley, director of
sales for the Jellyfish product line, a collaborative
storage solution
That's become a go to for filmmakers, editors,
studios,
and creatives around the world.

(00:49):
We'll talk about Lauren's journey, OWC's
vision,
the power behind Jellyfish and how the sales
landscape
might be evolving.
Stick with us. Whether you're editing the next
blockbuster,
running a content studio,
photographing some amazing
event, or simply love geeking out on tech,
this one is for you.

(01:11):
It's time for OWC Radio,
tech talk with creatives,
conversations with host Serena Catania.
Lauren,
welcome. Welcome to OWC Radio. I'm bringing in
one of the inside
inside people. So you guys listen up. He
knows what's going on. How are you today?
Very well. Thank you for so much for
having me, Serena. I appreciate it. You've got
some some great things going over there. And,

(01:33):
you know, let's start with a question that
may seem really obvious. So can you tell
us what OWC is,
what they do, and who they do it
for? Yeah. Absolutely. OWC is an amazing technology
company that supports the creative community, mainly focusing
on media. It could not necessarily be media
and entertainment, but we have a lot of
folks out there that span through,

(01:54):
you know, universities, religious institutions, you know, churches
and whatnot, or as, corporate branded content or
could be, you're a YouTuber or a video
podcaster.
And then you have, more specialized, you know,
your VFX, your colorist, creative houses, your finishing
houses, so on and so forth. And
all of which, when they're working with media,
that's where we help. You know? We're continuing

(02:16):
to support that community as much as we
possibly can.
And as they continue to accumulate and capture
for audio and stills and video, OWC is
there there to help. So we know who
OWC helps. Can you be a little bit
more specific about what kind of products they
have,
like the hard drives and the software and
that kind of thing?

(02:36):
Well, the interesting narrative in my eyes from
everyone has a different perspective. Right? So this
is my perspective as far as how I
see OWC. And I really look at it
from where does the content or where does
the media start? Start at the beginning from
capturing audio,
stills and video. And so if we look
at cameras, right, we look at audio recorders,
and the cameras can be still cameras or
video cameras. But looking at from just the

(02:59):
capture aspect on a memory card, right, whether
it be an SD, CFexpress,
you know, card, so on and so forth.
That's where it starts. That's the journey, if
you will, from OWC
on a technological
perspective. And
making sure that from hitting the record button
or hitting the capture button from the very,
very beginning, it is paramount to make sure

(03:20):
that we're not going, gosh. You know what?
It kinda glitched into that spot, and we
can't get that moment back. And that's scary.
That could be, you know, a big deal.
And so making sure that we have the
reliability and speed to keep up with the
recorders, making sure that all the stills in
the video and the audio are accounted for.
And then we start on the transfer process,
and we start on the on the storage

(03:40):
process, capturing and and storing it on the
memory cards, and we're transferring it to a
card reader or a dock that moves it
to somewhere else. Right? We're offloading that camera
card to somewhere else. That could be an
external hard drive. Right? A little thing that
we're familiar with. Everyone has one. And, we
have, some of the fastest and most reliable
on the market. Same thing goes to, well,

(04:00):
I need more storage than just this one
external hard drive. Well, we have those as
well. So I'll put a bunch of them
together.
And in that one enclosure, you have now
built in speed, more storage, and you now
have redundancy. Right? So I have that mitigating
that aspect of risk if a drive goes
down. I know I have the camera for
the cards. I I'm I'm using the card
readers, and I'm using my dock so that

(04:20):
way I can put it into my external
hard drive. But there's six of us.
We all need access at the same time.
So what do we do then? It's like,
well, that's where Jellyfish steps up. And so
that natural evolution from capture to completion, if
you will, from us capturing all that media
on an OWC memory card to putting that
through a dock or a reader to making

(04:41):
sure that we have it on a a
backed up shuttle type of device, right, an
external hard drive, and then we all need
to access that in the same fashion, in
the same ease of use, in the same
performance as that external hard drive. We just
happen to be all connected to a Jellyfish
at the same time. And so when we're
putting it together in Pro Tools or if
we're
in Photoshop or Capture One or what have

(05:01):
you or if we're in Premiere or Resolve
or Final Cut, the idea is specifically with,
Jellyfish for video. If I'm in my timeline
and I hit space bar and I got
an a cam and a b cam and
a b roll and I have multiple layers
and it's all four k and I got
a four k timeline,
it's gotta play smooth. It can't be dropping
any frames. And at the end of the
day, all of these things are efficiency tools.

(05:24):
Right? We're we're saving time. You know? And
we're giving that back to the creators. On
the Jellyfish side, we're
looking at it from a production side and
a postproduction side, and it has the ability
to cut through the IT aspect of it.
Right? And so that's the beauty of Jellyfish.
In reverse engineering back from a team perspective
down to, again, back to the camera and
capturing. Right? Stills, video, or the audio recorder,

(05:47):
it's all there, and it's all protected. It
all has the performance, the reliability.
And even better, in my opinion, it's backed
by a team of creatives. Right? Everyone at
OWC has sat in that seat at some
point or another.
And coming from that background, we can empathetically
look at the challenges when it comes to
inefficiencies

(06:07):
of doing a certain job and how OWC
steps up and helps those inefficiencies
and gives that time back to the creator
so they can do what they're hired to
do, not be an IT person, but be
to be a creative. Right? And to tell
their story
and get that done whether that be for
themselves or for their clients or whether it
be a film or for the marketing team.
It it all holds very similar challenges that

(06:29):
OWC continues to alleviate those pain points, if
you will. Yeah. I think a company like
OWC is almost as much about the people
as it is the products.
I mean, when I was testing out the
jellyfish,
you were there for me. You helped me
set it up. You helped me with every
aspect of setting it up. And then when
we brought the other editors in, we took

(06:49):
it from there, and it was plug and
play from there. When you talk about six
editors working at the same time, describe for
us what that looks like in the room.
Where is everybody?
How does the jellyfish do that? That's a
really, really good question.
So if we were to visualize and and
if anyone has been in an edit suite,
and that doesn't have to be a video

(07:09):
edit suite. It could be any kind of
computer. Right? That you have your memory card,
you have your external hard drive, or you
have your computer, and you're diligently working and
making sure that that you know, you're doing
your job the best you possibly can.
And then let's pan out on that table.
Right? Just pan out a little bit. And
now on the peripheral, we don't have just
one person. We have two people, three people,

(07:32):
five people. Right? Sometimes 10 people or more,
and they're all in the same room.
And that's where we can say, okay. Well,
we've heard of servers before. I know I
worked at some place in the past, and,
you know, I had an IT person come
in, and they had all kinds of wires
and cables going all over the place. And
it took a week or two weeks to
set up. Right? And then if anything changed,

(07:53):
we need to get in there.
But it also was in this room, and
it sounded like a jet engine when I
walked in there. So
you're saying that Jellyfish can be sitting right
next to us? And it's like, yeah. It's
it's whisper quiet. It can be right next
to you, and you could have a 200,
four hundred, seven hundred terabytes

(08:15):
in the same room with you, and you
can have 12 people or 16 people all
connected to the same device. Now all those
people are at the in the in that
room,
and they all have something that doesn't sound
like a jet engine. They all never needed
to talk to, you know,
the IT person to do x, y, and
z so that way they can just get

(08:36):
their job done. And they all then feel
like they're just connected to one big external
hard drive.
And and that's the beauty of it. So
taking that image, right, as far as the
edit suite, I got my computer, my hard
drive, my card, and then panning out. Everyone
has a, you know, computer
and a hard drive and a card and
a card reader. They all happen to be
putting all that media into one central spot.

(08:59):
That's a jellyfish without the complexity.
I'm sharing the media, which is great. You
can see immediately
on the screen what media has been put
into the jellyfish,
and everybody can see that. By the way,
when you say it's quiet, it is quiet.
One of the things I think I suggested
to you when I sent back my notes
is, can we please put a light on

(09:20):
the front? Because it was literally
right next to me. And in order to
know if it was running or not, I
have to look and see the light on
behind the box in the back. That's wonderful
because I do also have a server, which
I love, but it has to be in
a separate room and it has to be
kept cold, and it is much louder than
the Jellyfish.

(09:40):
So tell people how the Jellyfish works on
location,
whether or not you have Ethernet, you know,
if you have Internet connection, is it its
own
network? Does it have to have an external
network running on Internet? How does all that
work? It could be a completely
off network device. Imagine if you were to
have a big external hard drive that, you

(10:01):
know, eight people are connected to at the
same time. You don't need the Internet for
that. Same thing with the Jellyfish.
And so we're all connected out of the
back of the unit with these Ethernet cables.
And say, for instance, I had a Mac
Studio. Well, Mac Studio has a 10 gig
10 gigabit Ethernet connection in the back of
it, so I don't need an adapter.
Now everyone's used to the normal Ethernet dongles.

(10:21):
So, like, say, for instance, I'm getting the
Internet from the wall. Right? And I take
that Ethernet cable, and I have that little
white adapter. Basically, it takes it from Ethernet
and goes into Thunderbolt or USB c, and
then I can connect my Internet to my
computer if I'm not connected to the Wi
Fi. Well, that would take a single gigabit
connection, which would be like I'm just reviewing

(10:41):
information. Right? I'm an HD video editor or
I'm just kind of looking at images from
time to time. If I want a 10
gigabit connection, which would be my four k,
my six k, my eight k media, or
a multilayered
edit timeline,
I'm going to need more than a single
gig connection. And so
there are adapters that look like a little,
you know, four inch by four inch box,

(11:03):
basically, and with little computer chips and whatnot.
And it converts that Ethernet connection that I
come out of the back of a jellyfish,
and then it would convert that to my
Thunderbolt or USB C connection
and give me that high performance required
when I have that type of four, six,
or eight k type of media. And that's
the typical connection from a Jellyfish. And OWC

(11:24):
sells those boxes, and they're not very expensive.
No. No. They they range anywhere from $2,300,
and they're actually really great devices. So the,
bus powered adapters, which gets the power from
the Thunderbolt connection,
those are great units. Right? And those are
going to provide all the throughput you need,
and they also don't need an external power
source like the pro docs do. So there

(11:46):
is an OWC
dock that has multiple connections, so multiple Thunderbolt
connections, USB connections, as well as CFexpress or
SD card reader on the dock itself. And
then that would take my Ethernet connection and
directly connect it into that adapter, and then
that adapter would then provide that connection to
my MacBook Pro, for instance. And, you know,

(12:08):
those are both really great devices that continue
to create that ease of use aspect and
that connectivity aspect from a jellyfish to your,
say, general MacBook Pro. So when we were
using it, we had three editors
all sitting around the same
table,
all on laptops, all with the adapters, and
we were all just sharing all that information.
I was amazed at how instantaneous

(12:30):
it is. And the other thing I noticed,
we were actually using the same piece of
media at the same time. How in the
heck does that work? Well, the Jellyfish is
built with a three tiered caching system. So
we have RAM, and then we have Flash
as far as a second tiered caching, and
then we have the primary pool of storage.
The primary pool of storage depends on the

(12:51):
model that you would choose, and it can
range anywhere from NVMe flash to SATA
flash
or spinning drives, if you will, or HDDs.
And so that would be the main makeup
of the primary storage pool. And so it
depends on the device that you would need.
Say, for instance, well, we're taking this up
on events all the time. We're doing event,

(13:12):
you know, videography
or maybe it's a film or
maybe I'm a marketing and advertising agency, and
we are literally going out, and we need
to be able to have two or three
computers connected to it. One would be just
to take all the cards and then pop
it into the Jellyfish and just all that
media into the Jellyfish. Have a couple other
folks that are gonna be putting together dailies
or they're gonna be just generally putting assembly

(13:32):
together and maybe categorizing the media, tagging it
if that's the case. And that would be
a really great scenario for the Jellyfish Nomad
to help in that scenario. So it's 14
pounds. It's portable as a case,
and it's all NVMe. So, like, the fastest
flash you can you can get out there.
And that can be set up in five
minutes. So you have all your your users

(13:54):
and your groups and all that set up.
And so when you're out there, all all
you're doing is you're connecting it with that
little adapter thing we talked about, and then
that's going into your MacBook Pro. And at
that point, you're up and ready and ready
to ingest your media into the Jellyfish and
continue to work. So that would be a
scenario in which the portable or the travel
jellyfish, if you will, the jellyfish nomads, it's
named, would come into play and and really

(14:15):
be a big benefit. Virtually, the same scenario
that the Academy Awards, the Oscars, they've actually
been using the jellyfish for the past three
years, and that's exactly their scenario. They have
five or six FX six cameras, Sony cameras,
and then they're taking those, those cards out
of the cameras. They have one designated MacBook
Pro to ingest the media into the Jellyfish,
and they have three other MacBook Pros that

(14:36):
are all in a premier software, premier timeline,
and they're using premier production. So that way,
they could not just access the media at
the same time, but they could be in
the same project working at the same time.
So taking, efficiency, if you will, up to
another level by utilizing or leveraging premier productions.
But by doing so on shared storage like
Jellyfish,

(14:56):
it's, you know, unbridled type of performance that
they don't need to worry about as far
as ingesting the media and playing it back
and then being able to turn around,
especially for for that particular event. If they
have an an award recipient come off stage,
they do their videography, and then they have
five of the cameras going on, and they
are able to work with the talent for

(15:17):
maybe a few minutes if they're at best
before they have to move on. Yeah. I
was behind that for five years, and you
don't have that much time. It's literally a
few seconds, and you gotta get that media
out immediately.
The beauty of that workflow that they had
going on with the Jellyfish Nomad was they
were able to take all of that, all
the media, put it into the Jellyfish, work

(15:39):
with three other people simultaneously in the same
project, and turn around that project in thirty
minutes
ready to be published on social
for the Oscars social campaign.
And they were able to do that real
time because of the performance, the ease of
use, and the fact that they were able
to take the media and just to turn
it around with their team, and it's ready
to go. And that's the workflow that all

(16:00):
of the Jellyfish is actually it doesn't matter
if it's the Nomad or if it's the
XT or everything in between. That narrative, if
you will, that storyline is is exactly what
a Jellyfish is designed to do. Just in
terms of career pathways for people who are
trying to get into the business or who
are looking for a new way of pivoting
because things are changing.
If you can learn how to handle one

(16:21):
part of the jellyfish style of workflow, you're
gonna get work.
You're gonna get hired. You're gonna be an
integral part of the team, and you're gonna
have a specific thing that you can do
that's gonna add to the results. One of
the things that we were discussing with my
team is you still have to have one
editor who really is in charge of the
final cut.
And then can you give us some advice

(16:43):
about how to manage the workflow? If somebody
goes into the timeline and make some changes,
how do we
name that? How do we manage that timeline
so that we can keep the integrity of
the master
flow of the of the project? Do you
have any advice for us? I think that's
gonna be different team to team, truly. Yeah.

(17:05):
It really depends on and what you're gonna
be doing. Oftentimes, what what I've experienced is
the lead editor will have the projects laid
out ready to go, and it depends how
how fast it is and then what they're
also trying to do. For instance, if if
you have an ongoing project to work with
a marketing team, it's a, you know, corporate
branded company. Right? So they they run with
their own brand, and they have their own

(17:25):
media, and they're capturing their own content. It's
gonna be a longer process, and they may
be putting more emphasis on creating a library
of assets as they're going. Right? So, for
instance, they'll be ingesting media, and and then
they wanna make sure to tag all that
media so they can reference it later on.
In that, it plays a part as far
as whether it be a a church or
a school. Like, school's a good example as

(17:46):
they're continuing to do different events
throughout the year for different faculty members or
different sports events. They're gonna wanna continue to
go back at the end of the year
and create a a year over year or,
you know, a highlights reel, and they're gonna
wanna be able to final that efficiently or
somewhat quickly. And with the Jellyfish, as they've
been ingesting this media, as they've been adding
to the Jellyfish

(18:07):
and creating those projects real time as they
need to be done throughout the year,
they can always go back and search for
that media provided they've gone through and tagged
it, which we provide that that ability with
Jellyfish itself. You can go through and tag
your media and star rate it. So if
you ever go back and find it, you
can do so. We're working on Final Cut.
So I had the main XML
and the timeline on my computer, but

(18:30):
we had somebody working on importing
some b roll. We had somebody working on
music. We had somebody working on titles, and
I was doing the main cut. So I
told anybody that got the XML from me
to save a snapshot
of their project
and and then rename it either with time

(18:50):
of day, date and time of day, or
version number. Would that is that something that
you think
a lot of teams could use? I'm just
being very careful about not overriding
anything.
Yeah. Definitely. For instance, if in a Jellyfish
circumstance, you and a handful of other folks
would have access for
multiple folders with all the media in there,

(19:12):
and you would add project files to that
area in which all the media would be
listed. I would absolutely recommend having a, you
know, a source file, and then you want
you don't wanna necessarily duplicate your work and,
you know, create a bunch of additional files
and redundancy. I would a % agree with
what you did. I was really impressed by
the fact that we could all be working
with the same media at the same time.

(19:34):
And I just love that. I mean, my
last experience with a big team of editors
was a while back, and that was in
the basement of national geographic where we were
working on Nat Geo Wild. And there was
a room
Everybody was sitting at separate computers,
and they were logging into the main server
and then downloading what they needed and working

(19:55):
with it and then bringing it back. And
I think Jellyfish solves that problem. And it's
one of the reasons why when I first
saw it years ago, I I walked into
the offices
in was it West Hollywood or Hollywood?
You had that big thing there, and you
were just developing
the Jellyfish. And I remember
about a year or two later calling Larry

(20:17):
O'Connor who owns OWC, and I said, you
gotta take a look at this. This is
the future, and here we are. I'm so
excited about it. I think that this is
something that a lot of teams, either if
you work in the field or if you're
in one location with several of you in
the same place, but, also,
there is a remote
aspect to this too. Right? Can you talk

(20:37):
about that? Absolutely. Yeah. So if I have
a handful of folks that are gonna be
in the office, majority of the time, Jellyfish
really shines because it gives us the ability,
that ease of use, that performance that oftentimes,
like, your typical four k video editor absolutely
needs,
especially when they have either a multi cam
type of video edit or if they have

(20:57):
multiple layers in that timeline. They will need
that type of speed. There are several different
remote solutions out there. Right? There's the high
speed data considerations to where you can actually
send all that footage, terabyte, 500 gigabytes,
four terabytes, even in a different Internet protocol
and send it as fast as possible on
over, but you'll pay for that. You'll pay

(21:18):
for the x amount of, you know, gigabytes
or terabytes as far as the transfer.
There are cloud services to where they'll host
all of the media,
and they'll use smart caching to where you're
essentially feeling like you're connected to a big
external hard drive in the cloud, and we
can work off of this. But if there's
no Internet connectivity, if their Internet connectivity is

(21:38):
on and off, that was also a consideration
as far as it may not be the
best workflow for that individual, but you're also
paying for the amount of terabytes
in the cloud. Right? So and then there's
also a remote desktop solution. Right? Meaning, I
have a jellyfish in the shop, and I
have four or five people that are pretty
much always working away from the shop. But

(21:59):
the caveat is I need a a workstation
at the shop per person, essentially. Right? There
are other options and the different variations of
that. But, essentially, you'll need a workstation per
person,
and then they are essentially controlling that device
with that super fast connection to the Jellyfish.
And so they're not necessarily
transferring
the media,
you know, over a connection

(22:20):
real time to access it and edit, But,
nonetheless, there's inherent latency
with that. And the caveat is I need
to buy another workstation per person. So they're
working off their MacBook Pro at home, and
they're controlling, say, for instance, the Mac Studio
that's connected to the shared storage device, in
this case, a Jellyfish.
So that way you can get their work
done. The other option that, we inherently include

(22:40):
with the Jellyfish is a peer to peer
encrypted VPN.
So it's a very secure connection. And when
you're connected with Jellyfish over remote access, as
we've referred, there's essentially three layers of,
security. Right? So, one, we need to set
up that basic remote connection, which is a
very easy process. We've made it easy. The
little connect app that is included, you just

(23:01):
download on your workstation.
It hosts
that peer to peer encrypted VPN. So when
somebody thinks VPN, they're going, I don't know
the first thing. I don't know how to
set this up. And it's like, that's okay.
No problem. So you go in just like
you create a Yahoo or a Gmail or
something like that as far as an email
account. You go and do the same thing
for zero tier. Put in my user,
create a password. I click the network ID.

(23:23):
Alright. Now what? You give that to remote
editor. They give you their host ID. You
see a pop up, authorize. Now what? Now
you go to work. Right? You can access
the jellyfish at home. The second layer would
be
only if that person has been created as
a user,
they will be able to log in. And
so you go in a manager, and I
type in Serena, give you a password. Alright.

(23:45):
Now you're a user. And so you're like,
okay. Now I signed in, but I don't
see the Jellyfish folder where all my media
is. What's going on? Well, I'm gonna go
to that folder. I'm gonna see your name.
I'm gonna give you read and write access.
Okay. Now do you see it? Oh, it
popped up. Now what do I do? Oh,
oh, just go ahead and
toggle that little button over. And then you
see how that jellyfish is up on your

(24:06):
desktop just like an external hard drive? Yeah.
Now what? Access it like an external hard
drive. The only caveat is if I'm connected
via the Internet, the Internet's the Internet. Right?
So if I have a congested Internet at
the at the shop, at the office, and
the upload speeds are congested because everybody in
the world is, you know, needing something, well,
that's one consideration.

(24:27):
The other one
is if, you know, all joking aside, but
if I'm connected at home and I have
a fast Internet connection, but then my my
dog bowl is connected to the Wi Fi
and the iPads and the iPhones and the
game systems and the refrigerator and all the
stuff is updating at the same time, that
pulls from that available
download speed, right, that Internet speed that I

(24:47):
have. So there's the consideration in that an
inherent limitation to the general Internet connectivity and
speeds.
But, nonetheless,
having the ability of going to the shop
this is the fun thought process, right, as
far as a workflow goes.
Imagine if I'm leaving the shop, but I
know my team is coming to ingest media
into the jellyfish. They just got finished with

(25:07):
with filming. So they take all their cards
and they put it into the Jellyfish, and
they say, okay. Great. I'm gonna go home.
Right? And then on, say, Friday night or
Saturday morning, I can access the Jellyfish from
my home, and then I see all the
four k, six k, eight k media on
there. Well, gosh. It's it's gonna take me
just a a really long time to pull
all that media
to my apartment, to my external hard drive,

(25:28):
to my house, whatever it might be. Well,
I can actually tap into the Jellyfish with
that remote connection, and I can tell the
Jellyfish
to transcode the media to smaller files, to
compressed files or proxies.
And then now that they're smaller, like a
ProRes proxy is a really good editable proxy
that I can still work off of, but
it's a whole lot smaller than my original
camera media, I can pull that on over

(25:50):
to my external hard drive at home,
make my edit, and then I just connect
the project file, which is super tiny, right,
on over to the Jellyfish, and we can
make our high res exports. But that workflow
is all included
in the Jellyfish. And not only that, but
we help folks set that up on the
initial setup process. Awesome. We didn't do that

(26:11):
with the one I was testing, but we
do have zero tier here. We use it.
It's very efficient. It works very well, and
it's also very secure.
So So you don't have to worry about
somebody that's unauthorized
getting into your
media or your network at all. So that's
really good. I'm really curious. The Nomad.
I love the Nomad. It is light. It
can go anywhere. Where are some of the

(26:31):
places you've been with it? I mean, I've
traveled internationally with a Nomad, fortunately. And, through
that process, I'm able to put it in
the overhead bin. But we've also had clients
do the same thing. We actually have a
really great partner slash client, Butcherbird Studios, who's
actually pretty close to the Burbank office.
And, they were able to take their Nomad,
and they went a little step further than

(26:51):
than we did. And they filmed themselves
putting the jellyfish Nomad
in an overhead bin in a regional flight.
So we get to see
them put the jellyfish
in the overhead bin. And, I mean, as
if anyone's ever traveled with, you know, hard
drives before in the past, it can be
a precarious situation
and worrying about whether

(27:12):
individuals will be taking as good of care
as their shared storage or hard drives as
well as they would, right, let alone cameras.
Having that ability with the Jellyfish Nomad, being
able to
be nimble, if you will, as you're traveling
and really just have it in your hands,
and it's a carry on at that point
is really, really nice. Tell us about Lauren
Malley. Well, I got started in acting, and

(27:34):
I was in Meisner, Stanislavski,
and then I moved to LA and back
up to the Central Coast area. And I
got involved in a short feature film and
as one of the principal actors.
And after the film was finished,
I went back to my graphic design company,
and so I was doing that. And so
in Illustrator and Dreamweaver and Photoshop doing the

(27:54):
whole thing, building brands, building logos, websites, and
stuff like that for local companies. So it
was a lot of fun, and, I mean,
acting definitely was the passion. And then the
director writer came to me, and he goes,
hey. You know what? Do you wanna try
to put this together? And I said, well,
what do you mean? He's like, well, I
need a video editor, and I'm looking for
one. And, well, I'd never done anything like
that. This is back in 02/2009, somewhere around

(28:14):
there, 02/2008, '2 thousand '9. He said, well,
you wanna just kinda take a crack at
it? And he's like, you know, do you
know your way around Final Cut? And I'm
like, what's Final Cut?
That was my intro. And so he had
Final Cut Express, and I learned the short
keys and, you know, put my software brain
into it, trying to understand the workflow, if
you will. And then after putting a terrible
assembly together, which

(28:36):
also heart goes to the writer, director, and
whatnot and the producer, but, unfortunately,
with a nine person ensemble
independent micro budget independent film, there was let's
say, the continuity was not in the vocabulary.
Might have been challenging. Yes. It was. Absolutely.
But it was a really, really good way
to cut my teeth on editing itself and

(28:57):
going through and creating all the logs. There
weren't any logs or anything. So I'm listening
to every single audio track and putting everything
together and labeling everything. And then
it's like, okay. Well, now what? It's like
page one.
Get into it and start putting an assembly
together. And through that process, I was actually
handed over a handful of different books. And,

(29:17):
so I read those,
put a second pass, a third pass, and
we submitted to film festivals and went through
the whole basic route. And then after that,
it was commercial producing and directing and editing
for little small businesses in the Central Coast
area, which was a lot of fun. And
then through that process, it forced me to
get into Premiere and After Effects. And then

(29:37):
at that point, I've always loved movies. I've
always loved storytelling.
And, it was just beautiful happenstance to where
it was just, for me, a match made
in heaven. Looks like you've landed in the
perfect place. It's a little bit of everything.
You edit some of the social media that
OWC
releases. Right? That stuff looks really good. Roscoe
and John, they headed up mainly. You know,

(29:59):
most if not all the stuff that anyone
would see on YouTube and so on and
so forth. I've done a couple of things.
John's an amazing filmmaker, and Roscoe's a great
video editor. You are talking to a lot
of photographers
lately. That's about the CFexpress
cards. Right? Can you talk about that side
of the business a little bit? Because you're
involved in just about everything. It's not just

(30:20):
the jellyfish. It's out of just pure selfishness,
if you will, is why I like to
be involved. And my wife's a union photographer.
She's based out of LA. And so she's
been a photographer for as long as I
can remember. And so she's working with, you
know, various outfits and
names and this and that and the other
and doing either unit photography, gallery photography, key
art, and so on and so forth. And

(30:40):
through that osmosis, if you will, I know
how to use the camera just like any
other photographer and composition and lighting and so
on and so forth. And but through that
process,
I know about SD cards, CFExpress type a
and b and what makes the most amount
of sense on stills or video because I'm
using it. I'm doing it. And so my
main focus is on video. So if she

(31:00):
and I are doing a project together, I'll
take the video side, she'll take the still
side, and together, we get to have a
lot of fun with it through the stills
and I mean, musician as well, so getting
into the audio aspect. So we have a
little jellyfish studio at our house,
a little 96 terabyte, but we put it
through the paces as far as, you know,
four, six, and eight k media, as far
as, you know, 50 megapixel imagery going through

(31:22):
Capture One, going through a collaborative database within
Resolve or Premiere.
I edit in Logic. You know, I've been
doing that for years. So having all that
media live on Jellyfish and being able to
work off of that simultaneously regardless of the
type of work that we're doing speaks to
the versatility and ease of use and reliability
of a jellyfish in in really whatever realm.

(31:44):
And then taking that back to the cards
themselves as we're capturing on a Zoom recorder
STs, or as far as we're using a
CFexpress type b card on a Canon r
five camera or I own Blackmagic cameras, so
I'm recording directly to SSDs.
So I'm using the, Envoy Pro Electrons to
actually record my six k media directly onto.

(32:04):
So regardless of what the capture is, whether
it be in a memory card or external
hard drive, then it has to transfer through
a dock, a reader into either a shuttle
or directly into a shared storage device. So
that way we can be working simultaneously.
So when your teams are or the teams
that are using Jellyfish are finished with those
particular projects,

(32:25):
what do you recommend in terms of storage
for them, both NAS and long term? So
the Jellyfish can be used as a larger
device. So it depends on the individual and
what their interests are. If, for instance, they
have the budget and the space for a
backup device, a general second tiered storage, if
you will, or a nearline storage, but like

(32:45):
an LTO device, for instance, more of a
hands on. Right? More of a step by
step. If they wanna do that, there are
really great options. Jellyfish has the ability of
saying, okay. Well,
economically speaking, I can look at a 480
terabyte
device, right, a Jellyfish tower. They can live
in my apartment. I don't need special power
or anything like that, and it has 320

(33:07):
terabytes of available storage. I have more than
enough performance to do whatever I need to
do. Economics made sense to get a larger
device, and now I don't necessarily
need to put it on something else
if I don't want to.
Best practices are definitely to keep it in
three spots, two different forms. So that way,
you're not
just left with one system regardless of the

(33:27):
amount of redundancy.
So having that said, we also offer different
devices on the LTO side. So that's what
the archive pro that we offer as far
as the LTO device goes. On the Jellyfish
side, if I wanted to make it easy
for myself and I had a facility, I
could have the Jellyfish
main system, if you will, as far as
all my active medium. And if I wanted
to move that to a nearline storage device

(33:49):
or if I even wanted to put that
into another location,
I could do so. And, I can have
a one to one device, one being a
Jellyfish, super fast, super high performance. But as
far as one to one meaning capacity wise,
I want the same size capacity. Doesn't need
to be all the performance in the world,
but it could be somewhere else. That's how
we can also accommodate. I was worried about
the creatives during the fires in LA and

(34:12):
wondering how many people lost
their work. Larry O'Connor and I did just
a brief
interview about that and some advice about how
to get things ready if you have to
leave in a hurry, and I really do
believe in redundancy.
It doesn't have to be a fire. It
could be a flood. It could just be
theft, you know, whatever happens. But I do
think it's really important to have at least

(34:33):
three copies of your media. And as I
say that, I'm lying because I can't afford
to make three copies of 250
terabytes. I have some smaller thunder bays
that have projects on them that duplicate some
of the stuff that's on my Jupyter system.
Tell me about the short film that you're
working on. I watched the trailer. What's it

(34:53):
called? And can we see it? Or where
are you are you with it? It looks
really, really cute.
Yeah. We we just had fun with it.
So it was a colleague and I. We,
wrote it together based on an idea that
he came up with when we were in
theater training about ten years ago. And at
this point, we just kind of continue to
write about it. We wanted to just put

(35:14):
words on the page in a proper formatted
structure, if you will. And one thing led
to another, and we reached out to a
handful of friends, and they're all theater actors
as well. One thing led to another, and
everyone kinda came together. We shot it over
about a day and a half racing against
the
November light available. It turned out to be
fun. So it's a little twelve minute short.
It's just kind of a fun personal project

(35:35):
that we just had a lot of fun
making is all. Don't you think creatives need
that, though? We need to keep working. We
need to keep creating.
In the middle of everything else going on,
you know, I'm curious about something. Can you
give some advice to people because the industry
is pivoting? Things are changing. Hollywood is going
through some really rough times. I was

(35:56):
on a couple of calls this morning with
members of the producers guild, and we're we're
concerned about what's happening for the potential for
jobs at the studios right now. Do you
have any advice for young people who might
wanna get into the business about where you
would suggest
some of the career pathways might be for
the future.
Any thoughts on that? I mean, I I

(36:17):
have opinions and thoughts. I mean, I definitely
don't know the solution or if there is
a a single solution for something like that.
I would definitely say that leaning on your
network, not being shy to ask is, for
one, something that is extremely valuable. It's hard
though for people. Right? It really is. And
I mean, it's hard for for everybody to
not

(36:46):
instance, like,
a VFX or a colorist, there's a lot
of value that they have to offer. It
depends on
whether they want
to hang up their spurs, if you will.
Being the cowboys out there and the cowgirls
out there and a independent contractor basis, if
they see the value in building something, whether
it be a brand that they believe in
or would it be a team that they
wanna support. And I think when it comes

(37:07):
to, you know, a university or church or
corporate branded company, right, somebody who owns a
brand that they're creating content for themselves,
oftentimes, those folks need a lot of support.
They need a lot of help, and
there's a lot of value that an industry
professional can walk into provided they understand and
and and see how they can augment the
corporate structure from a creative perspective. You are

(37:31):
very, very creative. You're you're only kind of
like a renaissance, man. It's amazing all the
things that you do.
You're really good in sales too because you
understand
what people need. So I think sales is
a service business. It really is. It's not
just about trying to keep sales numbers up.
It's about figuring out what your clients need

(37:51):
and helping them get it. Sometimes a solution
isn't always what you might have in front
of you, but you're really good at that.
Does OWC or do you use any
AI supported
contact management systems or does AI enter into
your day at all in terms of the
sales? I'm just curious.
Yeah. It's a great question.
AI has yet to be something we lean

(38:14):
on, if you will, as an everyday tool.
Although
it's there in the peripheral, something that we're
keeping an eye on and how we can
potentially leverage that
to the benefit and betterment of our customer
experience.
We see everything from an OWC
perspective.
Brand and customer experience is is absolutely
paramount to us. We wanna make sure that

(38:36):
every one person understands,
for one,
what they're looking at. Two, I think this
is something that's every one person out there
starts to do their own type of research.
And if they can intellectually comprehend what's going
on, then they can emotionally
take their ownership. The easiest thing for me
is, like, if you look at a camera,
most folks already know what kind of camera
they want. But if they don't, they do

(38:56):
all kinds of different research. And then once
they finally make that decision and get that
camera, and then once they take the time
and investment to film that thing with that
camera, and once they take the time to
actually put all that together, their story, their
narrative, they did it with their branded camera.
It's theirs. They own it. It's not the
engineers. It's
not

(39:16):
the technologists and whatnot that put countless and
thousands of hours to create that one thing
that they can buy for x amount of
thousands of dollars that they now took the
time to understand it intellectually,
comprehend that fact, and then they took emotional
ownership into it. And that's what we try
to achieve on the enterprise storage group side
or the Jellyfish side, what have you, is
we're always

(39:37):
seeking for that intellectual comprehension and trying to
share that as much as possible in the
community that we love
and respect so much. So that way, they
can take the emotional ownership if they would
like. Right? So that way, they can own
the thing that does
what we say can do. Right? That they
can essentially
have that shared storage aspect to have the

(39:59):
technology get out of its way so they
can focus on the thing that brought them
to the table to begin with as far
as a creative to tell their story. Can
we talk about what some of this technology
might cost a company that wants to get
into it? If you have a two person
team and you're thinking about shared storage and
you like the idea of something that's easy
to use, something that's built with reliability, something
that has the performance, but you're going, gosh,

(40:20):
I only have two people. But I do
have, like, 30 or 40 terabytes hard drives
hanging around here and there, and what do
I do? You can start with a jellyfish
as as low as $6,000.
It depends on the size team that you
have. It can go up from there. I
mean, we have
systems that are desktop devices that go from
anywhere from, say, 48 terabytes to 480 terabytes
in one little box that sits on the

(40:41):
desk. And then we have more of your
traditional rack systems that are highly performant, have
a lot of redundancy, a lot of scalability.
So you can walk into a rack system
that has, say, 38 terabytes of all flash,
or you can scale that up to three
and a half petabytes
in one pool of storage. So that's still
that one external hard drive on my desktop.

(41:02):
All 30 of us just happen to be
connected to it, and all 30 of us
happen to be hitting that space bar on
our timeline, and all 30 of us are
seeing that smooth playback at the same exact
time, playing the same media if we want
to. So that's the, versatility as far as
Jellyfish is offered. But the range starts at
6, and it can go to 6 figures
depending. I have a flex eight sitting down
here next to me that's

(41:22):
that's like one of my workhorses.
I can say personally to everybody listening into
you that
my experience with OWC over the many, many
years I've used it, all of the drives
I've ever used, I've only ever had one
that was threatening to go down, and I
had soft raid. So it warned me ahead
of time.

(41:43):
And I took that drive out, shipped it
back to OWC, and they replaced it. And
I've never had a problem as opposed to
I won't name names, but, you know, other
companies where you get a drive, you put
it in, you start using it. And if
it's gonna fail, most of the time, it'll
fail right away because other companies don't test
them. OWC
tests their drives. You can just trust them.

(42:04):
So tell people where they can go to
get more information about all of this. 0wc.com
is the quick way to go to. And
then if you find the Jellyfish area, right,
the NAS solutions, if you will, that would
be how to get to the Jellyfish side.
Otherwise, to see all the solutions that we
have as far as, like, an SD card,
so you have express type card, like a
or b or a card reader to a

(42:25):
dock, external hard
drive to a RAID of NVMe, whether that
be external or internal, to a RAID enclosure
that holds four or eight external hard drives
to then getting to the one to many
connections. We think about all the other things
that I just mentioned. They're all one to
one. One camera card to one camera. I
got one external hard drive to one person
connected to it, one RAID to one person

(42:46):
connected to it, to the one in many
where I have one shared storage device with
all of our media connected to many of
us at the same time. And so all
of which you can find on the 0wc.com
website. What's the difference between 0wc.com
and maxsales.com?
Do they overlap, or are they different? I
would say they overlap in a sense. MaxSales
is where you can go and click to

(43:07):
buy, and it's I have a shopping cart,
and I can go and buy it right
then and there. It has a lot of
great information there as well. If you wanna
learn more about the systems, that's where OWC
would give you a plethora of information.
Ultimately, if you do want to purchase something,
you're going to be directed to maxsales.com.
So people can go to either place
and click a couple of buttons and learn

(43:28):
more about it, and then they'll get to
you
to ask her questions and hopefully get a
system. Yeah. If you think about the systems
in which I can just click and buy.
Right? So whereas it comes from,
like, Jellyfish, for instance, it has the, more
of a consultative approach, right, to learn more
about, you know, their particular setup, their workflow,
what system makes the most amount of sense.

(43:49):
For that reason, it's not listed on Mac
sales. It's all listed on 0wc.com.
And then through that, if for instance, you're
saying, you know, I wanna learn more about
Jellyfish.
I'm kinda curious as far as their take
on our setup and workflow.
I'm not really in the place to buy
anything for at least six months or a
year. Great. No problem. That's what we're here
for. We're here to help. We we like

(44:10):
to be a resource as much as possible,
and part of that process is understanding their
you know, your setup, your workflow,
what makes the most amount of sense. And
whenever timing happens, great. But we're here in
your corner, you know, supporting your efforts and
showing you what makes the most amount of
sense based on your parameters.
Lauren, this has been awesome. I really appreciate
it because I think it's important for people

(44:30):
to know a little bit more about all
of this and how it works and where
to go to ask questions. Is there anything
that maybe I should have asked you that
I didn't that you wanna talk about? What
did we miss? Oh, NAB.
Yeah. We're in the South Hall upstairs,
and, we'll have a nice little area in
which folks can come and see jellyfish if
they want in person, see a live demonstration.

(44:51):
And we're also gonna have our Atlas memory
card line there. We'll have our ThunderBlade line
there, our, ThunderBay line,
our Envoy line for as far as external
hard drives go. So we'll have a handful
of folks there to answer, any kind of
questions anyone would would be curious of as
well as live demonstrations if they're interested, but
we'll definitely be there. We're also announcing a

(45:11):
couple of different new Jellyfish products as well
as a couple of different external hard drive
devices at NAB. I think that yeah. One
of which I believe is the x 12
part of the ThunderBlade
family. So 12 sticks of NVMe
is quite a lot of flash in one
device that you can set up in whatever
type of RAID you'd like with soft RAID
software. So you get all the performance and

(45:32):
all the redundancy you'd need. And then as
far as on the Jellyfish line, we have
a couple of rack devices that,
have been available for some time but really
have not been officially announced. And that would
be the s 24 all flash based rack
device, and then we have the backup device.
To your point earlier, as far as how
you would wanna back up your active media

(45:53):
on a Jellyfish to a backup
separate appliance, and that would be the b
24 as we're introducing. And then all of
which, which is really kind of fun,
if, for instance, you go to the 0wc.com
and you find the jellyfish, there is an
area in which you can build your own
jellyfish.
So if you were to, you know, ever
put together your own thing online, whether it
be a car or whether it be a

(46:14):
an Apple MacBook Pro or something like that
and add the different components, imagine doing that
for your team
on a jellyfish.
Say, I want the travel.
I have five users,
and I want this case. How much does
it cost? But the end of it, it
actually is a very interesting thing.
Imagine if you were a lead video editor,
Serena, at a team. Right? And you know

(46:35):
that you're passing drives. Right? You know you're
taking turns on raids, and you are well
aware that this is not necessarily
the best way to spend you and your
team's time. There's the server stuff out there,
but it's hard to kinda wrap your head
around, well, how do we go and say
to our budget, it's a $20,000 thing, it's
a $40,000
thing, or a $10,000 thing?

(46:57):
If we go through the builder,
we can actually go say, I have four
video editors,
and I pay them
$30 an hour or $45 an hour, whatever
it might be. And we spend how much
time recabling stuff?
How much time do we spend relinking media?
How much time do we, you know, all
of these little different those six little different
questions, you can actually move the bar as

(47:18):
far as zero minutes to fifty nine minutes
a day.
And based on the amount of time that
you're gonna eliminate
as far as wasting time,
that then shows you, well, you're looking at
a $15,000
jellyfish or a $40,000 jellyfish or what have
you. Considering
eliminating these time of inefficiencies,
the general thought process is your jellyfish will

(47:40):
take you x amount of months to pay
itself off.
The time you're getting back, basically, far as
the labor goes in the in the individuals
that you pay them on an hourly versus
the amount of time they no longer have
to spend to do all those manual tasks
and how that jellyfish can act as an
efficiency tool for them. But going to the
CFO as a lead video editor or a

(48:00):
post super or what have you saying, hey.
You know what? I know we're wasting time
and we're wasting money, but I promise it's
not my fault.
It's tough to make that argument. So if
we can provide a narrative, right, open the
dialogue from their perspective, from a budgetary perspective,
and show them that there's a better way
and efficiency tool, that's how Jellyfish can step
up and, alleviate essentially those pain points. Those

(48:23):
would be some fun things to take a
look at if if you get a chance
to find them. Yeah. So go to 0wc.com.
Look for the NASS solutions, find Jellyfish, and
navigate around in there. And, I really do
highly recommend that Actually, any of the solutions
that OWC has, I don't think you can
go wrong. And I'm not just saying that
because they sponsor the show.

(48:44):
Although I'm very grateful
to Larry and all the people at OWC
for helping us get this show out and
interviewing wonderful people like you and helping technologists
and creative find answers to what they need.
I'm really, really grateful for that, and I
love highlighting
wonderful people. So appreciate you coming on. And

(49:04):
remember, everybody, what I tell you every show,
get up off your chairs and go do
something wonderful today. Try something new. Go research
what you need to make your life
less confusing if you're in the video business.
He's Lauren Malley. I'm Serena Catania, and you've
been listening
to
OWC Radio.