This month for Tech Edge, we are going to have a conversation with Jacob Wen. Jacob is the IT manager and File Asset Manager for Powderhouse Productions. Jacob is very talented and climbed up the ranks of Powderhouse incredibly fast and he is truly a person to keep an eye on in the New England post industry.
Jacob, tell Imagine readers who Powderhouse is.
We’re a television production company in Somerville, MA who focuses on mainly reality content. Some of the shows we’ve done in the past include Build it Bigger, Dogs 101, and Making Stuff for NOVA. More recently, we’ve had a few series in production such as Extreme Houseboats on the Travel Channel, Spontaneous Construction on HGTV, as well as Southie Rules on A&E.
How did you get your job at Powderhouse?
I first heard about Powderhouse in the Boston Globe, which drove me to hunt them down at an Emerson College internship fair. From there, I was lucky enough to be selected for a post-production internship where I received a lot of really great hands-on workflow experience with Avid and Apple workstations. After the internship ended, I was called back to work on a few small projects as an Assistant Editor, and worked very closely with my co-worker Steve Barker on Avid ISIS media management. That blossomed into a working knowledge of the IT components at Powderhouse, so I wound up finding my way into the more permanent position of IT Assistant. I worked very closely with the IT Manager at the time, who designed most of the tech infrastructure at Powderhouse. He took me under his wing and gave me the training I needed to succeed at this job, which I still really appreciate. After he moved on in 2011, I took up the role of IT Manager and have been keeping things running ever since.
So walk us through the day to day responsibilities of the IT Manager/File Asset Manager of arguably the largest post production facility in Massachusetts.
Two of my larger responsibilities include the stability of our shared storage systems and also our network uptime. Since our internal network handles everything from phones and internet, all the way to sharing HD media for entire seasons of shows at a time, maintaining that uptime is absolutely critical. With my co-worker Kenny Johnson, the IT department handles projects like company-wide Avid hardware and software upgrades, all the way to basic end-user support like printing. We have an interesting mix of a standard office IT outfit, which deals with things like email, security, anti-virus, etc. ± but we also have our Avid and post-production equipment on an almost separate and dedicated network with it’s own nuanced requirements and support structure. Keeping both afloat is truly a balancing act, and trying to prioritize maintenance for both can sometimes be a daunting task, but it’s also really rewarding.
What do you feel is the most rewarding part of working in the post production industry? Conversely, what is the most challenging?
It’s really cool getting to work with big names like Travel Channel, A+E, and Discovery on a regular basis, and being able to occasionally see my name in the credits of our shows is really awesome. Also, I personally enjoy being able to help people with complicated technical problems. It’s sort of weird, but it’s strangely satisfying when you finally clean up an issue that’s been bugging people for a while. I think the most challenging is when people are having a problem, having to ask them if they’ve tried turning their computer off and on again. That line of inquiry is usually met with sighs and eye rolls.
Walk readers through the process of camera acquisition all the way to on air broadcast
Traditionally, everything was tape-based, which made the process relatively simple. The field teams would mail their shoot tapes back for ingest, which would be captured in a low-resolution for the offline edit, and by the online stage, everything would be conformed to HD for final output and then delivered to the network (e.g. Discovery Channel). Now with the explosion of tapeless cameras, we have to contend with a multitude of file types, formats, compressions, and codecs, which can be a challenge. Typically, content will be shot to either optical disk or to solid state media like P2 cards, at which point it’s transferred to a hard drive and mailed back to our office. Then, after being backed up on our SAN, it will be ingested onto our Avid ISIS at a low-resolution for our offline edit. We will occasionally have multiple assistant editors working with multiple editors simultaneously to organize and finish a cut in as little as a week or two. When it’s time to conform the sequences for HD, we will re-link the file-based camera originals from our SAN to our ISIS. Once the remainder of the online process is completed, the final sequence will be laid off to tape, and then mailed to the appropriate network to get final approval and ultimately aired.
Do you feel that the industry is constantly evolving and changing? What do you think the biggest changes in past few years have been?
Without a doubt, I feel like the biggest strain for us has been the move from a tape-based workflow to a tapeless one. When Avid helped us to expand our post-production hardware and workflow, it was built from the ground up with tape in mind. Now with tapeless, we’re struggling to find a home for the countless Terabytes of raw and transcoded video files that come in from the field. Not only that, but all of these files need to be stored securely, redundantly, and accessed quickly ± and unfortunately most of that storage isn’t cheap. The solution for backup and archival storage seems to lie in the world of LTO tape media, but as we’ve found out, that’s not without it’s own set of problems. The irony of moving all of these digital files back to magnetic tape, however, is not lost on us.
Any advice for someone trying to break through in the post industry?
I would highly recommend trying to obtain as much exposure and experience from an internship as possible. I’m sure there are a number of other methods, such as apprenticeships and shadowing, but I found that through internships, you’re able to get a healthy amount of experience and also make some important connections that can lead to other work in the future. Since an internship is a learning experience, asking questions and going above and beyond to engage with co-workers really goes a long way to understanding how the industry works, and allows you to build your networking skills. This, for me, has been extremely beneficial and I’d encourage anyone trying to break into the industry to be as engaged and enthusiastic as you can during an internship.