THE OMNI SHOW

Chris Conti: For us, the Omni really changed how we started supporting a lot of our customers. What you're looking at here is a picture of the halftime show from Miami with JLo and Shakira. And what's really interesting about this show was anywhere between a hundred to 200 cable connections that we have to actually plug in to control all the equipment on the field. This particular show, we ran 17,000 feet of fiber optic cable around the stadium. That's where OmniGraffle for me, it was just like, "Oh my God, I can show people a custom drawing of how their specific show is going to get... all the bits are going to get plugged together."

Andrew J. Mason: You're listening to the Omni Show where we connect with the amazing community surrounding the Omni Group's award-winning products. My name's Andrew J. Mason, and today we learn how Chris Conti uses OmniGraffle. Welcome everybody to this episode of the Omni Show. My name is Andrew J. Mason, and today we're excited to welcome Chris Conti, chief innovation officer at the Production Resource Group. For nearly 20 years, Chris has turned to OmniGraffle to help shape some of the biggest productions on the planet, from network diagrams to the Super Bowl, to Emmy-winning entertainment technology. He brings a unique blend of creativity and technical insight, and we can't wait to dive into his story. Chris, thank you so much for joining us.

Chris Conti: Awesome. Thanks for having me.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah, this is fantastic, I'm really excited to dive in. And just as we started to begin, even before we hit record, you started to set up some screen share stuff, so I'm excited to get into some show and tell. But before we even hit anything to do with OmniGraffle, talk to me about your role, chief innovation officer. How does somebody end up with a career track like that? I love to ask the question, did you just wake up one morning and say, "I think I'm ready to innovate"?

Chris Conti: So I actually got my start in detention. I got caught in high school supergluing someone's locker shut, and I had to serve a Friday detention, and as luck would have it, the teacher was the theater teacher, and like "Oh, we have an upcoming show," I think it was like an eighth grade player or something, and so as my punishment, they made me hang lights in the theater. And I loved it so much that I went to college for it, I have a degree in theater, and after I graduated, I went to work for the company I work for now, and I got to tour around the world with a bunch of different bands and do a lot of live shows with TV shows and things of that nature. So it was a little bit of a nefarious start there, but yeah. And then like I said, I toured for about almost 10 years, and touring can be really hard, so an opportunity came up for us to come off the road and do product development and help design equipment for touring large special events, and that's what I've been doing ever since.

Andrew J. Mason: Very cool. Yeah, and it is demanding. I've got one or two buddies that that's their gig is they hang lights, and I mean you get to see some cool stuff.

Chris Conti: For sure, it's pretty awesome. I mean it's a lot of hard work for sure. In PRG, the company I work for, we do everything, we supply lighting equipment, audio equipment, video equipment, LED screens, scenery, cameras, for everything from the Super Bowl halftime show to American Idol, to Hamilton on Broadway and everything in between, and a lot of big rock tours like Beyonce and things of that nature. That's what we do and we use OmniGraffle as one of the tools that we to help us do all those shows.

Andrew J. Mason: So cool. I mean, it's a great spot to start to cross over in that direction. When did you first come across OmniGraffle? And if there was some space in between when you first saw it, when did you start to think, "Okay, this is probably a tool that I should be using or could be using"?

Chris Conti: When I came off the road, I started doing product development work, and we had a fairly complex networking product. It was a power and data distribution system that we use for touring and for TV work and in theater actually as well. And we were struggling with people not setting it up correctly, and so I was looking for a tool to way to just diagram how to set it up properly. And I had a colleague that had in said, "Oh, I use this program called OmniGraffle to do some drawings and stuff," and I was like, "OmniGraffle?" I immediately jumped in, looked at it, and I'm like, well, it's a diagramming program. Originally my thought was for org charts and stuff, not for network drawings. But the thing that blew me away out of the gate is that I could take a screenshot of a piece of equipment, import it into my drawing, and I immediately had a picture of what I needed to show how people to connect it up. I mean, it literally took my breath away like, "Oh my God, this is exactly what we were looking for." Literally in the first 30 minutes of using the program, I'm like, "Oh, this is it," and I mean we jumped right into it immediately, the group that I was working with, to use it to start doing drawings. I want to say one of the first shows we did was a Jay-Z show I think we were working on at the time, something along those lines. So we were drawing how all the control system, all the ethernet and all the lighting data moves around the venue or around the show and stuff. So we're in a visual industry, and I'm a firm believer that a picture is worth a thousand words.

Andrew J. Mason: Yes.

Chris Conti: And so that's where OmniGraffle for me, it was just like, oh my God, I can actually show people a custom drawing of how their specific show, all the bits are going to get plugged together. It's not abstract, it's not arbitrary, it's not an Excel spreadsheet, and I they can take the picture and actually look at the physical equipment and everything would match up. For us, the Omni really changed how we started supporting a lot of our customers as far as introducing them to some of this more sophisticated technology. And then it was just avalanche from there.

Andrew J. Mason: This is really cool because I so appreciate getting to hear what somebody's data visualization story is, because some people are very comfortable with many layers of abstraction. And for you, it sounds like the scale with which you're working right now, I mean, being able to show the actual piece of rack mounted equipment or the actual light or the actual cord is probably going to be really, really helpful in order to get somebody initiated, especially if they're not like, "Where's the model number on it?" It just removes all of that from the conversation. "It's this light." "Okay, that's helpful."

Chris Conti: Yeah. The other thing that I found interesting about it was it made people who were new to this type of technology, our equipment, it made the learning curve significantly more shallow and easier for everyone. Because, "Oh, it's a picture. I just have to plug it up like this? Oh my goodness." Yeah, there's more nuances than that, but I mean a picture truly is worth a thousand words for sure.

Andrew J. Mason: Talk to me about when you start off with, okay, you have this kind of big pile of stuff and you're now tasked with the idea of, how do we start to create an organized visual out of this? There's different layers of meaning, there's different layers of data. Do you start sketching stuff together, do you start grouping related items? What's your first steps that you start to take before you see some orders start to emerge from there?

Chris Conti: So yeah, I mean that's a great question. For us, I work backwards. So specifically what we're drawing is a lighting control system. It's an ethernet based system, we're using ethernet equipment. Some of it's highly specialized for our industry, it's what we would term entertainment grad. It's equipment designed to go tour on the road and things of that nature. So we have all these symbols already pre-built and everything, that we've built in OmniGraffle that we can use. And what we do is I start at the end, so the goal of the drawings that we do is to show how our lighting console, our control console that controls all the lighting, how it connects to the various areas around the venue, and how those areas connect to the lights and stuff, and what type of data we're moving across our networks, and where does it need to go. So that's where we start, is we start with... You know? We're working with our customer or the crew chief or the production electrician. Some of them work for us and sometimes it's an external customer as well. And where we start is like, "Okay, what kind data do you need and where do you need it?" And it literally starts as just Xs and Os and squares and triangles. "Okay, I need this data here, I need this data here," and then we back our way into it. And so okay, if I have 10 devices that need to plug into an ethernet switch, that means I'm going to need one switch here that these 10 devices are going to connect to the switch, and that switch will connect over to the switch all the way on the other side of the building or something along those lines. So that's how we do it, is we start at the end result, like I need to move a bunch of data someplace, and so I start at the end and then work my way back up the river so to speak.

Andrew J. Mason: A little bit of a rabbit hole left turn here, but just out of curiosity, and also for clarifying for some folks, when you say data, do you mean stuff like, hey, they need sound information to copy with the lights, and so that actually happens over on this side of the stage, versus... Like it's-

Chris Conti: So we're building fairly complex lighting control systems. It's all ethernet-based, we use ethernet, we use fiber optic, we use a lot of the stuff that you would see in any building with computers or an office building where you're networking computers and stuff. The difference here is that not only are we networking computers, but we have to... Imagine if you had a computer that had a hundred other mice and keyboard connected to it, and the mice and keyboard in our world would be like the lights that we're actually trying to control. So that's the data that we have to move, is the actual lighting control data. To get a little more technical, it's something called DMX512 and we use ethernet to transmit that information over it. We do also sometimes have to move audio data. The specific protocol that we use there is Dante. On the lighting side we have DMX512, another protocol called Streaming ACN, and then if it's a video data, sometimes we're sending actual video images, like moving video images from our cameras to a video truck, or I'm sending it to a video screen, or sometimes it's just ethernet data, pixel information, like, okay, I have to control an LED screen. So it's different types of data, and it's by department, so lighting, audio, video, scenery, and within each department there's subsets of data that we have to move around. And we don't always move that stuff on a single network. We're in the entertainment business, the show is 8:00 PM. No matter what happens, the show must go on. So we have a lot of redundancy, we have a lot of separate networks and stuff like that. So oftentimes you'll have duplicate systems, like I'll have a control system for lighting, there'll be a separate network/control system for audio, and a separate one for video as well.

Andrew J. Mason: That's wild too, to think that. Just so that the can kind of grapple a little bit with the level of complexity that really needs to start to happen. Because when it's done, it's a show, it's just one chunk, show. That's a show, that was a great show. When you really start to pick this apart, there's layers upon layers upon layers of information that needs to go flawlessly in order for this to happen. So I'm actually really excited because you came at least semi-prepared. I'd love to hear, and any chance that we get for showcasing something that's primarily visual for everybody that's listening on audio, you can jump over to YouTube just to get a deeper idea as to what it is that's Chris talking about, but we'll try to describe what we're seeing as we're talking through this as well. So a couple of examples.

Chris Conti: All right, so one of the big shows that we do every year is the Super Bowl halftime show. I've been privileged to do halftime. I've worked on 15 halftime shows, seven or eight of which, as they all blend together at this point, I've actually been on the field forum. And the ones where I wasn't actually on the field, we were doing documentation and technical support for them. So what you're looking at here is a picture of the halftime show from Miami, with JLo and Shakira. And what's really interesting about this show was... I mean the scale of it was, I mean, it's as big as it can be, right?

Andrew J. Mason: As big as it gets. Yeah, yeah.

Chris Conti: What makes the Super Bowl really stressful and hard for us is, so we're in a stadium setting, we have all this lighting, audio, video, pyro, and senior equipment that we have to connect. And what's really especially stressful about all this, is all the equipment on the field gets set up in six and a half minutes.

Andrew J. Mason: Holy mackerel.

Chris Conti: In that six and a half minutes, depending upon the show, the type of show and the scale of it, we have anywhere between a hundred to 200 cable connections that we have to actually plug in to control all the equipment on the field. We also have equipment around or right around the stadium. So in this picture here, I'm standing at where our control position is. To give you a sense of what we have to deal with here, we have four control positions in the roof of the stadium, we have a control position in one of the voms on this side. We have two in the voms on the other side over here, two more in the middle voms. We have four control positions on the field, on the four corners of the field., And we have two that are temporary that roll in with the stage. And to interconnect all this, this particular show, we ran 17,000 feet of fiber optic cable around the stadium to connect it, all right? So we need a way to show how all this stuff is going to get connected together and work. OmniGraffle is the tool that we use to do that.

Andrew J. Mason: That is beautiful. Wow.

Chris Conti: So this is the network drawing that we do for it. It's technical, I'll get a little more detail here in a second. Here's our front of house position that has all our lighting control equipment. Each of these boxes represent a rack location where we have to get data to, and then we break out to the actual lights and stuff. And then the green and blue lines are all the fiber optic around the stadium. And so it's showing how the equipment's connected, the order it's connected in, but it's also geographically showing us where in the physical stadium that we're dealing with. So when you start looking a little closer, I do a lot of drawings, so sometimes you see little Easter eggs about front of house from the block here. This is our lighting/video control. This set of control control consoles was driving all the lights in the stadium that we hung in the stadium, this control was driving all the LED wristbands that the audience had, this control is driving all the video screens, this control is driving all the pyro like flames, smoke, fireworks, lasers was all being driven here. And then this lighting control was driving all the lights that were actually on the field. And what that actually looks like in real life is that's what it looks like in real life.

Andrew J. Mason: Yo, that's cool. Wow.

Chris Conti: So, yeah. And then you can see we have all these ethernet switches and network processors and things of that nature. And all that translates into this rack here. And in the drawing, things are color coded like red for pyro obviously, blue, purple, and all that translates into the real world with the equipment as well. Red for pyro, green was I think, stadium. Another example is we have this Northeast position down on the field, and this is where we would break out to get to the temporary stuff. And this is actually where I was during the show. And looking at a little deeper here, we've got some ethernet switches, we've got some data boxes out with data, a computer for us to monitor. And what all that looks like again in real life is this.

Andrew J. Mason: Wow.

Chris Conti: Fun little fact, in case you didn't know that, apparently it rains in Miami, and actually the drain for the field is right underneath my data rack here.

Andrew J. Mason: Oh my gosh. Chris, oh my goodness.

Chris Conti: Yeah, and the water, one day it rained, and you can see here's the fiber optic lines that are going out out to-

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah, you don't want to see any sparks that aren't a part of that pyro show. That's right.

Chris Conti: Looking in the middle of the drawing here are our temporary positions, the equipment that has to roll that we have to set up in six and a half minutes. And again, showing more of our switches and color coding everything, all the numbers represent configuration settings that we have to set on the equipment. And again, what it looks like in the real world is it's all equipment ratchets strapped up underneath the temporary cart. You can see the power that comes in, some of the cables that we have to plug in, and the fiber optic line that comes out.

Andrew J. Mason: And so, a hundred of those cables, 1700-

Chris Conti: 17,000 feet of fiber optic. Yeah.

Andrew J. Mason: Talk to me about the lead time on this a little bit. So you are putting this drawing together. How long is it from, "Hey, we have an idea for a show, and let's start to map out some visuals," to, not when the carts are on the show, but to where you're looking at this diagram, you're saying, okay, I think this is fairly complete? I mean your head must be in this thing, one file, for months.

Chris Conti: No, actually.

Andrew J. Mason: Wow.

Chris Conti: We start thinking about it right before Christmas, just getting some general drawings. And it's really the first week back from Christmas, from the holiday break, is when we do it. I usually have about a week. To be honest here, we've become so fluid and so fast with OmniGraffle that this actual drawing that you see here, it took us about an hour to generate. It's all templated up for us, we can generate really fast. And-

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah. And have you been to the Super Bowl before? So it's like the venue, you know... Okay, okay.

Chris Conti: Yeah, this is revision six. So we go through a couple revisions based on equipment moving around and stuff like that. So it takes us about a week of back and forth. And then we have a week of prep where we build it in the shop, get this assembled in the shop, and then it's a three to four week load in, and then a week of rehearsals, and then we do the show, and then it's a couple days load out. So it's not a lot of time, it's really fast. And all our equipment's engineered to do all this, but make no mistake, we couldn't do this without OmniGraffle. You can see in the drawing here all the stuff that we have to connect, and it's clear, again, these are showing the four corners of the field, these are out in the building, these are up in the roof. So it really helps us do what we need to do. I will say that the other interesting thing here is, so we have six and a half minutes to do the show, the field component, the show's roughly about a 12 minute show, but when we're loading this thing in, six and a half minutes, it's in front of 80,000 people here in the stadium. And you've got another 100 million people watching this live on TV.

Andrew J. Mason: No pressure. No pressure, Chris.

Chris Conti: And there's no pressure, there's no-

Andrew J. Mason: It's fine.

Chris Conti: And the other thing is if you make a mistake or something goes wrong, you can't stop. It's happening, whether you're ready or not.

Andrew J. Mason: What a treat. And honestly, this wasn't... I mean this whole chunk wasn't the direction I was planning on taking this conversation, but I'm so glad we went here because it is such a cool visual. And I think for probably from the Omni side, sometimes you make software and you're like, "I wonder what people will use it for. I hope they go use it," and that's great. But the use cases we've heard over the last two years of just interviewing people, Dave Budge from Australia and John Motors, he's the CEO, he uses OmniGraffle to wire together, retrofitting land rivers for electric cars. I've heard of people doing data visualization for 23&Me, for like DNA code stuff. I was like just way smarter stuff than I'll ever be involved in, but it's just so cool to see. I love to ask this question. Let's just say for whatever reason somebody's stumbling around YouTube or listening on a podcast and they happen to hear this conversation, early 20s or maybe just starting in a fresh career path, and some light bulb comes off on them and they say, "My gosh, this is awesome, I'd love to do what Chris does." Do you have any advice at all for somebody that is just finding themselves, starting to look at this, look at the data visualization stuff, and look at kind of the career path that you've carved out for yourself and say, "You know what? I think I want to do something like this, if I could"?

Chris Conti: I mean, everyone says, "Oh, follow your passion and it's not work." Yeah, I mean that's an important thing, is you have to be passionate about it, passionate about wanting to learn. The reality is no matter whatever formal training that you may get, or informal training that you may do, you constantly are going to be learning. So you got to want to learn. The one thing I tell young people all the time is I, can teach anybody how to... I can teach someone how to do a big rock show or something like that. What I can't teach is work ethic. People who want to be there, want to do the work, and want to not only do the work, but do the work outside of the work hours, as far as, "You know what? I need to learn how to use OmniGraffle, I need to learn how to use a piece software piece of equipment.". Open up the user manual, take a look through it. And that's literally what, as far as Omni is concerned, that's what I do, is when I first started getting into it was like I remember taking it home that first day and looking at, I need to understand this better, and there's not enough time during my work day. So in the evening, I'd sit there and go through some of the online tutorial stuff to learn. So at the end of the day, that's why I tell people is you got to have the work ethic and be willing to put in the time and effort to learn the products that you need to learn to do the job that you want to do.

Andrew J. Mason: Chris, we don't always get the story arc, but sometimes when that arc shows up in an episode, I love to just kind of call it out for people. I love how you've kind of painted this picture from this kid who didn't know what he was doing, and as a punishment for detention, got caught hanging lights for theater, moving into this role that you find yourself in now. And I know it's not over, but it's a really cool chapter that you find yourself in. Last question, what would you say it is in you that drives you to be as productive as you possibly can be? It isn't always there, sometimes it activates for people, sometimes it's dormant, but for you to take this kind of a lifestyle and also to move your career in this direction, it doesn't happen by accident, at least at some level. What is it that you find in yourself that's like, "I want to follow that"?

Chris Conti: I think it's two things. I think one, it's the people I work with. Your colleagues, I mean, you spend a significant amount of your day with these people. And so it's an amazing group of people that I work with. And that's the first part of it. The second part of it is I'm in the entertainment industry. We do rock and roll, we do TV shows, and it touches people. It touches a lot of people. People are very emotional, they're very passionate about music. And so for me personally, there's nothing... I mean, I remember an incident when I was on tour, where I was on tour with Coldplay, and I remember playing, we were at Red Rocks and we were carrying this green laser with us, and the show was hit or miss and that, the weather was bad. It was rainy out, but the band wanted to play, the audience wanted them to play, and we're like, "All right, let's do it." And I remember being at the back of the venue... You know? As a crew person, we actually do stuff during the show while the band's on. It isn't just about loading in and loading out. And so yeah, so one of the things I was doing was I was acting as a laser safety officer, so I'm in the back with the headset on, we're about to shoot the laser up over the audience. We want to make sure that it's safe and that no one's going to be injured or anything like that. And the song starts, the particular song was a song called Clocks. The laser shoots out and spreads out over the audience. It's like 15,000 people there in the venue at Red Rocks, and 15,000 people looked up when they saw the laser come out, and 15,000 people collectively gasped. Because what had happened was, because of the rain, the laser shooting through the rain. So it looked like a million green sparkles over everybody's head.

Andrew J. Mason: Wow, yeah.

Chris Conti: And I mean, I still get chills.

Andrew J. Mason: Like the Matrix code effect. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Conti: Yeah, it was everyone just like... And so for me personally, being in this type of industry, that's the thing that drives me, is although I am not talented as the band is, being able to participate and being able to be a part of that and to deliver an experience for people that moves them, is pretty powerful. So at the end of the day, that's the other thing that drives me. It's not often that you can be a part of something and affect so many people in a positive way, especially in this environment today.

Andrew J. Mason: It's so obvious that you've connected the work you do with something that is greater than that work. It's the outcome of the work. And my gosh, yeah, people make real life decisions based on experiences that they've had, that is something that is emotional or storytelling or anything that shows up in a show for entertainment purposes. So it's like, absolutely, that would be something that you could connect to. I love this conversation, I can't wait to get it out there and share it with folks. If people are interested in connecting with you or with PRG, do you have any way for folks to stay in your orbit and find out what you're up to?

Chris Conti: Yeah, you can check out our website, www.prg.com, you can follow us on all the socials. We are always putting content up there and some of the shows that are working on. Check Us Out. We love to hear from people, and look for your next show. If you happen to go see a show, look in the shadows, see if you see our logo on the equipment that's around and stuff like that. So, yeah.

Andrew J. Mason: That's perfect. Chris, thank you so much for sharing your story and all the anecdotes. I think it's awesome to get to hear how this is happening in the world. I appreciate your time.

Chris Conti: Thanks for having us. And thanks for making... I mean the Omni Group and OmniGraffle, amazing product. I'm not being paid to be here or anything, but as you saw here, hopefully in this episode, it's a product that we live and die by. It really has made our jobs significantly easier, and it's just a rock solid product that we've been using, like I said, for almost two decades now. And we love it, and we were just fortunate to be asked to be here with you guys, so thanks for having us.

Andrew J. Mason: It's our honor. Thank you, Chris. This is perfect.

Chris Conti: You bet. Hey, and thank all of you for listening today too. You can find us on Mastodon, @theomnishow@omnigroup.com. You can also find out everything that's happening with the Omni Group at omnigroup.com/blog.