Whether you’re new at producing video or an old hand, imagine a tech support site staffed by the leading lights of audio, video, and online production, where you could go and ask for help whenever you wanted. It actually exists: Office HoursOffice Hours is an ongoing series of remote Zoom sessions for media producers that run every day, seven days per week. It launched at the beginning of the pandemic and has been growing ever since.
Origin of a Great Idea
Office Hours is the brainchild of Alex Lindsay, a 51-year-old Northern California tech industry veteran whose career includes pit stops in gaming, movie special effects, and animation. Lindsay has also done pioneering work in the field of streaming video. Many of the tech pros in the Office Hours community have known of Lindsay for years because of his association with the MacBreak Weekly podcast on the TWiT network. His video streaming clients have included Adobe, Facebook, Google, Salesforce, and the Obama White House. Shortly before the pandemic was officially declared, he was hired as head of operations at 090 Media, a live events and video streaming company in La Jolla, CA.
“This organization wouldn’t exist if the pandemic hadn’t happened,” Lindsay said of Office Hours, which he didn’t think would last more than a few months. He initially assumed that he’d be answering all the tech queries himself “What I didn’t expect was the caliber of the people who were going to show up,” he said. “Within a couple of weeks, it became less about me giving advice and us having a discussion.”
Here’s an example. Tlaloc Lopez-Waterman, a professional lighting, projections, and scenic designer based in New York City, recently parked his Fifth Wheel camping trailer at a Walmart outside Minneapolis and went online to help shade some video cameras for a cooking show in South Africa. Shading involves adjusting a camera’s exposure, white balance, saturation, and contrast.
“I just thought, ‘Okay, we actually live in the future,’” Lopez-Waterman recalled with a chuckle.
Lopez-Waterman was in the Midwest for a freelance gig. But he did the camera shading pro bono because the cooking show’s host and her doctor husband were friends from Office Hours. Numbering several thousand technophiles from practically every continent on the planet, the community was born on March 25, 2020, as a response to the coronavirus pandemic. Lopez-Waterman, who has worked in theater and opera for 20 years, is one of the dozens of regulars who provide free advice on audio, video, and online production.
At the start of the pandemic, his company, Light Conversations, LLC, saw four months of work vanish in a few days. In a process he referred to as “trial by fire and a lot of quick learning,” Lopez-Waterman prepared for a job that involved 10 remote performers—university students in their homes and dorm rooms—with more than a thousand video cues. In subsequent gigs, Lopez-Waterman used proprietary software for Zoom developed by another regular on the Office Hours panel of professionals.
“This is less a testament to technology and more a testament to community,” Lopez-Waterman said.
How the Sessions Work
Office Hours runs for two hours on weekdays, beginning at 7:00 a.m. PT. The first hour consists of questions put to a panel of between 15 and 25 knowledgeable tech people. While the conversation is open to everyone no matter what level their degree of tech sophistication may be, the process of participating was described by one of the Office Hours regulars as akin to entering a speakeasy. Questions are answered after they’re posted in an external chat system called Mukana. The link to the Mukana web page is posted for a mere 10 minutes every morning at 6:40 a.m. PT in the Zoom session while panelists are doing mic checks. The audience in the Mukana chat room votes questions into a list in a way similar to how Reddit ranks posts from users.
At 8:00 a.m. PT the second hour begins with a focus on specific software, hardware, or individuals talking about their line of work. Guests have included the chief programming officer for SXSW, a representative of a company that makes backup software for filmmakers, and the co-creator of a multitrack video editor designed for mobile devices. Among the eclectic cast of characters who’ve shown up on Office Hours: Elmo Shropshire, half of the duo that recorded the 1979 hit song “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” and Courtney Goodin, who won a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award for his 1982 invention of Compu=Prompt, the first computerized teleprompter. Saturdays are known as “The Long Day” and sessions can go 10-12 hours. Between the end of each two-hour session and the beginning of the following morning’s session, After Hours takes place, where as many as 50 people chat among themselves.
In addition to Lopez-Waterman, the hive mind at Office Hours includes Hasmukh Gajjar, a doctor turned IT executive in Cape Town, South Africa; Kenn Jordan, a digital technologies consultant in Ashtead, England who designed the Office Hours website; Todd Reynolds, a violinist in Western MA; Jim Hankins, a cloud consultant in Chesterfield, MI; and more videographers than you can shake a stick at.
“We just have a lot of really smart people who are willing to support each other and work with each other from all over the world,” Lindsay said. “They’re starting to generate novel solutions for complex problems.”
New Tools for Old Problems
A case in point is new video editing software for producers working with Zoom, developed by 24-year-old Andy Carluccio. His Virginia company caters to those who do virtual events, meetings, and online productions.
Carluccio, who graduated from college with a double major in drama and computer science as the pandemic began to shut things down, started Liminal Entertainment Technologies, which makes the apps ZoomOSC and ZoomISO. ZoomOSC allows producers to integrate Zoom into many third-party software and hardware systems. ZoomISO retrieves individual video feeds from the Zoom ecosystem. Liminal’s Streamweaver software allows remote control of soundboards and lighting equipment for online video production. Carluccio said the pandemic has kickstarted the innovation of online video production technology in a major way.
“This has been a huge accelerator for understanding how to do production online,” he said. “People had been doing it before, but we’re doing it at a scale and a speed now that’s totally unprecedented.”
Liminal is based in Springfield, VA, and has less than a dozen employees. Carluccio first learned of Office Hours from customers who filled in a form that was part of the process of downloading Liminal software. Many said they originally heard about the company on Office Hours. In late November of 2020, Carluccio decided to check out Office Hours.
“The day I showed up, they were doing a demo of my software without realizing I was there,” he recalled.
Carluccio reports that a “good chunk” of the panel of Office Hours experts has purchased his company’s software. Participants are forbidden from promoting their businesses on Office Hours. At least one participant was escorted to the digital door after displaying an IR code that served as a link to his website after repeated requests not to do so. Discussion of religion and politics is also verboten. Carluccio said he uses the feedback on Office Hours to fine-tune his apps.
In the 18-plus months that Office Hours has been going, the community has cooked together over Zoom, started a band called The Remotes, and lost one member.
The ‘Belfast Method’
A couple of terms have been coined for their techniques and peculiarities, including the “Belfast Method,” which is when a far-flung crew takes over a video production by remotely controlling cameras, the video switcher, soundboard, lighting, and other gear. Someone in Israel might be operating cameras, someone in Australia might be switching the shots, someone in New York may be running the light board, and someone in Toronto might be doing the sound mixing. The crew communicates over an audio feed that is often controlled by a guy in the Detroit area with “mad cloud skills.” It came to be known as the Belfast Method because Office Hours members perfected the process at a small theater in Belfast.
“It’s musical chairs on a worldwide level,” said Richard Lavery, artistic director of The Accidental Theatre in Belfast. “It’s pretty magnificent as to how it all works and it’s pretty astounding what the possibilities are.”
Lavery said that prior to its Office Hours connection, the theatre’s video assets consisted of two cameras connected to a single computer. Now it has an entire broadcast control room and studio with six video cameras, three of which can be operated remotely.
The Belfast Method has also been deployed in Washington State, where a global crew helped shoot the first season of Mad in the Kitchen Live, a cooking series hosted by Madeline Smithberg, a former producer for David Letterman and a co-founder of The Daily Show. Mad in the Kitchen Live is produced by the Seattle-based reality TV vet Schy Gleason, an Office Hours regular.
Todd Reynolds, a North Adams, MA violinist whose home recording studio is used to record albums and soundtracks, has allowed it to be taken over via the Belfast Method. And he has served as director in a Belfast Method video production.
“It was an amazing rush,” Reynolds recalled of his brief time in the director’s chair. “I feel really grateful that this kind of society has been created.”
A router and a streaming bridge in Reynold’s studio are on loan from Jim Hankins, who runs Cloud Bedrock, a cloud consulting business in Chesterfield, MI. Hankins recently loaned several thousand dollars’ worth of audio and video gear to another person he met on Office Hours.
Another beneficiary of the Belfast Method is Tony Mobley, a retired high school teacher in Newnan, GA. Initially drawn to Office Hours to investigate how a church in Georgia could stream its services, Mobley was reluctant at first to speak up on the show.
“I didn’t have the cool camera or the best microphone, but at one point I was willing to risk coming on camera even though I knew I didn’t sound good, I didn’t look good,” Mobley said. “I was embraced. I was encouraged to continue.”
Kenn Jordan in the UK developed Mobley’s website. A company that was giving teachers free webcams sent one to Mobley. And Guy Cochran at the Digital Video Equipment Store in Everett, WA gave Mobley and nine others on Office Hours access to his company’s Zoom Enterprise account. Before he knew it, the YouTube show Conversations with Tony Mobley was up and running. The weekly show has been produced by a crew of Office Hours friends that has ranged in size from three to 10. Several of the major Office Hours figures have been guests.
“This idea that Alex Lindsay has that Office Hours is a global conversation where no one’s left behind is something that more of us need to be promoting,” said Mobley.
Lindsay considers inclusion a top priority, though visitors to the two-hour show may come away with the impression that most of the Office Hours’ panelists are older, white, and male.
New Faces, New Connections
One of the younger faces in the rows in the Zoom window is Mickey Macachor, a 31-year-old location sound recordist and post-production sound mixer based in metropolitan Manila. An Office Hours mainstay since day two of the website’s creation, Macachor likes the community’s commitment to education.
“I think it attracts people who are ever-curious, which immensely jives with my own sensibilities,” said Macachor. “I feel like I have found my tribe.”
Last summer, thanks to a connection he made on Office Hours, Macachor was hired to do audio work at the Tokyo Olympics, where he was stationed at the venue for rowing and canoeing events. He met two Office Hours regulars from Georgia and Oklahoma on the job.
In October, Chris Fenwick of Lower Fenwick fame drove more than 500 miles from his home base in Northern California to Sin City to meet John Pretto, who runs a Las Vegas company called Talent Pros Live, and a handful of other Office Hours regulars in the flesh. Fenwick is convinced that the Zoom conversations on Office Hours enable its audience to bond better with the learned panelists than they would if they were at some industry gathering in a convention center. Referring to how Zoom sessions on Office Hours bring onlookers into the middle of the conversation, Fenwick insisted, “That dynamic has no analog in the real world.”
An Office Hours 2.0 is in the works. New hardware will be installed at Alex Lindsay’s home for the new version, which will work in conjunction with a collection of software to make the two-hour Office Hours show “look like or look better than television,” according to Andy Carluccio. Office Hours 2.0 will help to further decentralize the production of the show but will do it via a centralized control interface. That interface will be made available for other productions.
“We’re creating a lot of plug-ins and tools that we could use for other purposes,” Carluccio explained. “People can take a lot of the same tools and resources that we’re building up for this project and [use them] in their own productions and passion projects.”
Carluccio said the goal is to eventually transition the hardware and software systems that comprise the centralized control interface in Office Hours 2.0 to the cloud and provide access to “all this infrastructure and all the tools we’ve been developing” via Amazon Web Services.
Manhattan-based radio journalist Jon Kalish has reported and recorded for NPR for 40 years.
