Ep.15 - NDI, SRT & IP Video Workflows with BirdDog's Monte Bennett & Christian Frink

BirdDog VP of Sales Monte Bennett and Product Manager Christian Frink join us in-studio to break down the state of IP video in professional AV — covering every format integrators and production professionals encounter today.

We go deep on NDI High Bandwidth, HX2, and HX3 — what the differences actually mean in practice, why HX3 changed the game, and how network infrastructure choices either unlock or sabotage NDI deployments. We also get into SRT's rising adoption, the role of SDI in a world moving to IP, BirdDog's new X-series cameras, NDIKVM via Play Pro, Dante AVH integration, and the honest truth about Wi-Fi for production workflows.

Montr and Christian also answer rapid-fire questions: SDI or NDI, the most overrated AV buzzword, the one BirdDog project every integrator should try, and their prediction for what disappears from production workflows first.

Whether you're a systems integrator, broadcast engineer, or AV dealer — this is the IP video primer you didn't know you needed.

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introductions

Vince 0:00

Gentlemen, it's so good to have you guys here uh in our studio. So welcome.

Christian Frink 0:04

Thank you. Thank you.

Vince 0:05

Christian, uh, it's your first time in Montreal. So welcome to Montreal. That's really cool. And you picked the perfect time in the season to come because I feel bad for the people that come in January, and it's just like the worst uh anyways, you you're from Michigan anyways.

Christian Frink 0:18

So Yeah, we get uh we get our own frigid winters over in Detroit. So I understand the pain.

Vince 0:25

Yeah, there you go. So we have Monty with us, uh and we have Christian. Um before we get started, how about um we kick it off and Monty give us and we'll start with Monty, but kind of give us a background, a little bit of your background in terms of uh where you guys uh where you guys come from and what you guys do at Bird Dog.

Monty Bennett 0:44

Yeah, sure. Uh so Monty Bennett, I'm the VP of sales for the Americas channel. Cover I say I cover everything from Canada to Chile. Uh right. So of course North America is 95% of the revenue that we bring in for that for that market anyway. But uh yeah, uh I uh been with Bird Dog for about four years. Um come from you know the A V industry for the last going almost 30 years and so forth. Bird Dog was kind of a change of pace for me because we're just as heavy in the production and broadcast space as we are in the pro-AV kind of space. So that was kind of a little bit of a change. But I've worked distribution and you know reseller management for decades at this point.

Hugo 1:29

So always in the A V or sometimes in a different vertical.

Monty Bennett 1:34

Uh always in the A V type of space, um, except for very early on, you know, back in college working retail, you know, consumer electronics retail type stuff at that point. But yeah.

Vince 1:45

I feel like that's uh that's how it all starts.

Hugo 1:47

It always starts like that. It does. A lot of people started in the like a retail shop like I did. I did too.

Christian Frink 1:55

How about you, Christian? Yeah, so I'm Christian Frank. I'm a product manager over at Bird Dog. And yeah, I also got started in consumer retail sales. Uh that's really my background. Um, you know, everything from renting cars to, you know, selling headphones and TVs. So um, and then I really cut my teeth at Bird Dog, um,

From Retail To Pro AV

Christian Frink 2:15

starting in the support side of things and then helping the team out there and building up to uh the product management where I'm at now. And just like Monty, I think it's gonna be four years this summer, which is wow. I don't know what time is anymore.

Vince 2:34

Time flies when you're having fun, I guess. Exactly.

Hugo 2:36

Exactly, with such so so nice products. Um maybe uh a question for both, I could can chime in, but uh we we really see uh uh the IP um basically the IP formats, uh prevalence of all the IP formats. And we we always talk about this on on this show. Um maybe your take on what makes uh IP video or IP everything over IP so popular. Um your take on this?

Christian Frink 3:08

Yeah, I think it's really the the flexibility um that it that it gives because there's so many different flavors of like video over IP, but there's really a flavor for whatever you want to do or whatever your preference is. So you can do whatever you want. Um, no matter what your workflow is, there's a video over IP that can do it. True that, yeah, true that that makes sense.

Hugo 3:31

And you know, while we're at it talking about video over IP, um I there's different formats. Obviously, all the bird dog line uh is NDI and most of them are PoE, pretty much all of them. Uh can you just explain a little bit the difference between some of the formats we hear about um very often these days in the production in general? Something that comes to mind is SRT uh and obviously SDI, because still to this day, some of your projects have SDI on them. Um maybe you can just explain a little bit the difference between those different formats for the benefit of our listeners.

Christian Frink 4:10

Yeah. Um, to be frank, like I'm not super technical on the backside of like the SRT, and but I honestly it's the the format I see um trending like the most. I see more people using SRT and it comes up more, and I think a lot of it becomes uh the the security aspect of it and being able to encrypt the video. Um so no matter like if it's a corporate or if it's you just want to close house production, um, a lot of people are really valuing that that encryption and being able to you know lock the stream down is becoming a higher value in the world that we live in now. Okay, very cool. Okay.

Vince 4:47

Are you seeing like um were you seeing are you seeing a big push in uh, for instance, NDI in specific verticals more than others than you usually I mean on my side I would say systems. I'm I I'm more of a systems guy and I'm and I'm hearing a little bit more about NDI now come bleeding in. I'm hearing it a lot about on the pro-AV side and the broadcast, but now I'm hearing it on the systems. But uh on your end, what do you guys is there a specific vertical?

Monty Bennett 5:13

I think that from from the discussions that I have and that my team has with uh the integrators in particular that are out there, right? Going back to what Christian said about flexibility, uh NDI is just it's you don't have to be an NDI expert the way you did, you know, five, six, seven, eight years ago. Right. There's a lot of the community of NDI now that really do work well together. You can buy different brands of a camera or converter, you can use different software packages, you know, to kind of put it all together, uh, different switch brands, whatever it might be. And everyone's kind of figured out that there's a certain level of compatibility that has to work there.

Speaker 7 5:53

Yeah.

Monty Bennett 5:54

Right. So once you kind of get past that initial hurdle of understanding, you know, the network side of things and how to set it up and really kind of what the best practices are, yeah, it's not really that difficult. Right. And then it's just expandable, right? The flexibility is

Why Video Over IP Took Off

Monty Bennett 6:10

there. Um, we still do, and to your point, uh, Hugo, we we we still do, we still see a lot of like SDI workflows, HDMI workflows, stuff of that nature, especially for smaller, kind of closed loop type of productions, podcasting, you know, small corporate production type stuff where you know just a few people are gonna be sitting around table chatting and stuff like that. Because of other brands of product that still have HDMI switching or SDI switching and so forth. Yeah. We're not we're not alienating any of that. Like we still belong there the same way. But the flexibility allows you to take that same product from Bird Dog and move it into that case, move it out into a flexible room, you know, the next day or the next week. That's right. Put it somewhere else if you want to, put it up in a box, take it off site, do anything you want to with it like that too.

Christian Frink 6:54

Yeah. And I'll even raise you like I think I'm also seeing a lot of energy in NDI around small environments too, especially in like House of Worship, where you know, you only have you know one to three cameras, but just the how simple it is to set up, just being able to have one cable and the that it's simple enough that you can have you know a random group of volunteers come in and be able to produce it for you is uh extremely valuable. And you know, it's cost effective. Yeah, it's the barrier to entry is so much lower than it has been from an education, from a dollar standpoint, um, and even usability that just the access to be able to raise the level of your production is so much higher.

Vince 7:42

Yeah, it's funny because the the software we use to record not the the like not every podcast, but most of them is called Ecamm Live. Shout out to Ecamm Live. Yep. And um one thing that uh I was always a big fan, I introduced it to Hugo, he became a huge fan. And um when we were discussing workflows, obviously you had mentioned you know smaller workflows, HDMI, that was great, but because we have a variety of cameras and we have about four cameras, having four capture cards even on a big Mac doesn't always make sense. And that that software um does NDI workflows, so for us, that is a no-brainer, you know what I mean? So that even on the podcast side, we're starting to see a lot more NDI um compatibility or acceptability, which I find very interesting.

Hugo 8:37

And we we have some bird dog uh products that we put in the back of our cameras when we want to do NDI. Uh today we're doing HDMI, but when when we do a podcast with someone remote, uh it makes much more sense to go software. So we use eCamm and we use NDI at that at that point in time.

Christian Frink 8:54

There's so many different softwares now that are doing NDI, and I think that's part of like what drives it in the market between like vMix is almost like a household name, and yeah, NOBS is huge. And like we're even trying to like we're working on a tool in the background to be able to integrate and make it even easier to use NDI there. So that's a little teaser for the future.

Vince 9:16

But on that, because I know um Monty brought it up um saying that NDI was a little bit more troublesome or cumbersome five years ago. Um what was the barrier of uh entry? Yeah, like what was what was difficult? Was it because of a lack of a standard, you would say?

Christian Frink 9:36

Um I think that's a big that's a that's a great way to put it. It's like NDI was building the airplane in the in the air, like with the community. Yeah. And so everyone was trying to figure out like, okay, how do we get this to work? And NDI was doing it their way um as well. And I think we've gotten to a point where, like with NDI HX3, where it's so uh accessible, and they've written a standard in such a way where you know exactly what you need to do to make it work. You know, NDI gives like us the manufacturer, like this is the spec that you need to hit to be able to have expected performance. You can go above and beyond that if you want to, but like this is the floor of how it needs to perform. And then as a consumer, you know, that gives confidence. And then it gives us confidence as a manufacturer, like, okay, if we integrate it with you know a different manufacturer, you know, it's going to work. And you know, we don't have to stand on our own laurels to be able to like, no, our product works.

Speaker 7 10:36

Yeah.

Christian Frink 10:37

Um, so the standards that work and they give

Where NDI Fits In Real Workflows

Christian Frink 10:40

confidence.

Hugo 10:41

Because you open the door, I know that's a question you like. Can you can you explain uh the difference between the three flavors of NDI, um actually what they are for everybody who's new to NDI or what HX3 is and uh HX2 and NDI full bandwidth?

Christian Frink 10:56

Yeah, so there's NDI high bandwidth, which is you know the the flagship that they have, which is um really um high bandwidth. It's not that high bandwidth, but you know, if we can talk a little technical, and so if you're working with like a 1080p 60 stream, you know, that's gonna be average around 160 megabytes of stream. Um so it can be get cumbersome pretty quickly on your network. And so NDI introduced um their HX, their high efficiency, where it can lower that bandwidth. And at first it was HX2, which is um using like H.264 or H265 to be able to make that happen. And you can kind of build it like with your GOP settings and you can adjust your bitrate and and all of that to kind of build your stream, but the for most end users there would really wasn't a way to um like I just want it to work and like look good, and you really had to have more of a technical brain of like how to build your stream for like what your environment was. So they built NDI HX3, which is the same exact compression and math in the background happening as HX2, but they just defined like what you need to do to get the expected performance. So with HX3, you have to have a latency that's under 100 milliseconds. They you have to fix your GOP or your group of pictures at 20. And then depending on what your resolution is, and depending on if you're using H265 or H264, um, they list out a constant bandwidth or a uh bitrate that they want you to configure it to.

Vince 12:38

Okay.

Christian Frink 12:38

So, you know, if you're running 1080p 60 at H264, your bitrate is 62. And so it's less than half of what it was with with high bandwidth. Yeah. So it gives you a lot more flexibility. Predictability.

Speaker 7 12:53

Yeah, yeah.

Christian Frink 12:53

And like we've even found like on our own testing, when we like have tested our HX3 on our um new cameras, our X series cameras, and compared it to like the high bandwidth on our P series cameras, uh, we find that the X series cameras with HX3 actually have a lower latency. Even though there's less bandwidth, it's a more high efficiency. But you would think that it's you know more cumbersome, that it's gonna take longer, that you're gonna lose an image quality, but it's actually the opposite. You know, it's it's truly become more efficient.

Monty Bennett 13:30

And of course the reliability side of that. Yeah, just having having things on the network of lower bandwidth means your networks are more reliable. Yeah. The little hiccups shouldn't be.

Vince 13:43

That's what that's what you're saying. It's it's more uh predictability.

Hugo 13:46

Yeah, yeah. And you know, one thing I think uh you were back to the previous topic, uh the the the barrier to entry five, six years ago might have been uh the networking chops. Yeah, because back five, six years ago, people I mean, there was network geeks, but the AV was had a team of AV people at one network guy, and he was basically the mastermind between all the designs. But now most of the AV people know a little bit more about uh about networking and the manufacturers like uh the Luxol of this world or or the Netgear. I know you you you partner with Netgear a lot, uh, make it much more easy to design NDI specific uh VLANs or group of of ports on a switch that makes it super easy, you know. Yeah you don't need to to command line anymore in a switch to design a VLAN.

Christian Frink 14:44

So that makes makes it that's a huge aspect too, like that goes underspoken is like having like doing the spending the little bit of time to like pick your switch and like to have intentional thought about like what you're putting on that and how it you know fixes with the rest of your network, it really pays off dividends, like later and ease of use and how much you want to beat your head against the wall when you're setting everything up.

Speaker 2 15:08

Yep, yeah.

Vince 15:10

Um on that, uh Monty, are you having more conversations about camera specs or network specs with your integration customers? Or is it both? I mean,

NDI High Bandwidth Vs HX

Vince 15:21

like are people like you know, asking more about the uh the the specifications of the camera or the network uh at this point it it really is more about the about the specs of the camera itself.

Monty Bennett 15:32

Um like Christian was saying, with with HX3, you know, kind of taking away a little bit of that you know, surface cloud type thing that kind of wonders, well, is this gonna work for me or not? Right? People back off and say, yeah, I'm gonna make that work. That's that'll be fine. Um so yeah, it it really is more or less around you know the specifications of the camera itself. And then and then just you know, the the applications that the cameras fit into. You know, we you know we recently back in November released the new XL Ultra and the new O4, the new outdoor camera. They'll start shipping in December. Um and they're out there in the market now, you know, they're available, um, still kind of finishing up with some some pre-order stuff and everything else, but the quantities of from production are coming up very, you know, very dramatically. Uh and those cameras alone are that's really our like go-to stuff at the moment. Uh sure, it's always great to talk about the newest things. That's the easiest thing to talk about. But those two cameras and the price points and the performance that we're getting out of those are bringing us into conversations where folks are actually implementing, you know, these higher grade cameras into sl into into spots that they're like, okay, the price point alone, I can bring three, four, five of these cameras in instead of a competitor that is double the price.

Speaker 7 16:51

Got it.

Monty Bennett 16:52

Uh and all the all they were going to do is one.

Speaker 7 16:54

Yeah.

Monty Bennett 16:55

You know, so yeah, the the it's been interesting over the last couple of years with kind of what we internally refer to as bird dog 2.0. You know, coming out with our new, with the new the new X Series cameras, um, kind of reinventing ourselves over the last two years. You know, the molds are ours, the specifications of what goes into the camera is ours. They don't they don't look like something else in the market. Of course, a PTZ camera is going to look like a PTZ camera for the best part, right? But you won't find another camera on the market that looks exactly like ours or with the same specs, you know, all the way top to bottom with just someone else's name on it. Like they're they're our cameras, they're burnout cameras through and through. And and we've done a lot of work at maintaining uh consistency among the lineup for certain features and certain aspects of them. True. Of course, there's going to be some differences between, you know, the the you know the the the budget conscious X, you know, X series, uh, X1 series type stuff, all the way up to the X4s and X5s and XLs. Yeah. So but uh yeah. Very cool. Great stuff.

Hugo 17:58

Yeah, you're right these days, uh, because I'm I'm very active with those cameras. I bring them to customers and show them. And I had a conversation recently with a film uh producer that owns his a small um indie theater on St. Laurent Street in Montreal, and he wanted cameras for his um when you do a premiere and uh the director is there and they're asking questions. Uh people in the audience ask questions, but also he streams, uh actually want to stream. So I brought him an X4 and an X5. And this guy's a camera guy. You know, he's he he live and die by by optics. And and I had him, I explained him the camera. I had a conversation and I prepped my my my speech because uh I I pulled out all the specs because I knew he would ask me about those questions about the optics. And uh I you know what I don't even remember, but uh the um the field of view. Yeah, yeah. So uh this guy knows what I'm talking about, and and he really liked them. Uh I let I did let it there for two weeks, uh both cameras, and and I think he's gonna pick on X5, but uh yeah, he was he was very uh amazed by the quality. So awesome. You guys are designing great products, that's for sure.

Vince 19:10

Yeah, I I think I think we in other podcasts with when we were with Franco were discussing a lot of um A V trends. I think it was on the podcast we were talking about A V trends for 2026, and even him on the lighting side, because uh Franco is more on the pro A V side, yeah, but even on the lighting side, um, they're starting to see e-ink displays. Yeah, um, and we had mentioned that Bird Dog um had EA uh e uh e-ink displays, and just that is such a huge thing uh for anything IP in the because that's the number one thing. Uh Hugo has a lot of uh demo gear, and it's funny because he's got to label everything with the IP address because everybody messes up, or he he sets it up and then everybody has to reset it, and then it just messes everything up. So having the uh e-ink display is just one thing um uh I that I really appreciate from the bird dogs that when we've done tests, it's right then and there and uh very cool stuff. It's built up for our own paints.

Hugo 20:15

Nothing worse than receiving a demo camera back from a customer who did put a fixed IP on it, and now you have to go through different pieces of software to find the IP address and change it to D HTTP and now with this, it's just okay, that's that's the IP address. Yeah, you were about to say something.

Monty Bennett 20:31

I was gonna say we had we had kind of a an evolution or a progression through that process too, right? Some of our our previous products had like the the the P110s and 120s and the 240s, had the little screen, the little L screen on it. Yeah, um, you know, that that told you, but you had to power it up to get there, right? That's right. With the e-ink at least, you it off, it's not pulling any power, and it's just there on the side of the camera and it's right there for you. And as of as of recent, we've also introduced the ability to customize the e-ink. So you can put your own company name, your logo, whatever you kind of want on the side of it. You could cool, you could update your own QR code. Someone could scan with their phone and take you back to like a service request or something of that nature, right? Like it's not it, it's there, it's there as it says bird dog to begin with, but as an integrator, if you wish to upgrade that and kind of give your installation a personal flair, it's there for you too. That's very cool. Choose your own adventure.

Speaker 7 21:28

Yeah.

Hugo 21:31

And uh talking about bird dog, because uh, I mean, you guys have such an iconic logo. Um what who came up with that logo and name and what does it represent exactly? Because that that's you know, that's super cool, by the way. Uh I I don't wear my my my my sweatshirt today, but I have it there for later. Uh, you know, I love the logo. Everybody, everybody in the company. The branding, yeah, the branding is like. Kidding, everybody here in this building loves your branding. If if you gotta send t-shirts and swag, I mean they go very fast.

Monty Bennett 22:06

So yeah. From and and keep in mind, like I said, I've been here for four years. Um company, we just actually celebrated our 10-year anniversary. Uh NAB was our our our 10th NAB to be you know displaying at and showcasing at and everything else. Whenever Bird Dog first came around, um our founders originally ran uh a distribution company out of Australia, and they distributed the the new tech stuff at that point, heard about NDI coming and everything else, and said, okay, this sounds like a great technology to be able to share, you know, uh video and and and I and uh control and everything else through the network, but how are we getting other things into that? How are we how are we getting a camera stream or a video stream into that network and so forth? And the first thing they developed was was the Bird Dog Studio converter, right? Which allowed SDI or HDMI to be converted to NDI or decoded the other way around. And the idea then kind of came about as far as like it was it was it was your best companion. It was this little box was your was your best companion, right? And it's like, oh, that's like your bird dog, right? So the idea of bird dog just came from that's your that's your companion. Yeah, that's that that's the thing you lean on to get you through the day, you know.

Christian Frink 23:20

And there's the whole like technical aspect of like the the send and receive. There you go too. Yeah, yeah. So that makes sense. We uh yeah, we've named it. So it's Bindi, the little the little bird, you know, it's you know, shorthand for bidirectional NDI. It's kind of the uh shorthand for it. That's very directional and that's pretty cool, okay? Yeah, that is because it's the the best friend of the the the hunting with your dog, you know, you take a duck out of the sky and you send out the dog and there you go. Retrieves the duck and brings it back to you. Yeah, pretty cool.

Monty Bennett 23:56

That is very cool. It was just in the the actual logo itself was just kind of a melding of those two things. It just couldn't just be a dog. So it's like, oh, it's a bird dog. Well, this should be a bird and a dog. Yeah.

Hugo 24:06

So well, thanks for the explanation. And and maybe for the benefit of our of our uh listener, you mentioned the word new tech just before they were distributing in New Tech. So New Tech is actually the founder of the inventor of NDI, if I'm not mistaken. Uh and uh so they invented the the the format about 12 years ago. So I just wanted to say that. Uh now they're a part of Vizarte. Yes, yep.

Monty Bennett 24:31

Yep, very cool. Now NDI is a completely separate company on its own too. So yeah.

Christian Frink 24:36

Still owned by Vizarte? Yeah, they're under the uh umbrella.

Hugo 24:39

Okay. Yeah. Okay. And is it uh I mean, I suspect you can answer that question, but a little bit like Dante, do you guys need to give uh money to Vizarte every time you put NDI in a camera?

Christian Frink 24:52

Just like it's yeah, there's there's licensing with licensing. And that's been a that's been another big part of like the evolution of NDI and the accessibility of it. It's like we were one of the first ones to like not charge uh a license to the user, but that's what a lot of the market did for a while is you had to pay for licenses. And it's we've seen like rallying of other manufacturers to just kind of bake it in, and it becomes a lot more accessible to consumers and even to integrators for for quoting that you don't have like, well, we also have to you know buy this license fee.

Monty Bennett 25:26

Some of your activate it once you're on site, yeah. And you're not necessarily on a network that's you know friendly to you and everything else, you're trying to figure out how to activate a license, just bake it in. Yeah, we've been baking it in for 10 years.

Hugo 25:39

Some of your competitor are still charging for the license at in 2026. So yeah, yeah, that's a that's yeah.

Vince 25:47

One thing I really appreciate about your cameras, and I think you guys mentioned it before, is the fact that um it's flexible. So you can still do some cameras you can still do SDI, most of them do HD uh HDMI, and uh obviously the the network um side of it with uh with um NDI. But for anybody who's um right on the edge of getting into NDI, um saving them a little bit of anything it could be, what would be one thing that you tell uh uh somebody getting into NDI uh that you're still seeing first timers uh by a managed switch. Yeah. So you we're still seeing that all the time, every day. Yep. Interesting. So managed switch. So 100%. So are you do you think it's it's a question more of an ed education more than um yeah, more than just hardware? I guess education will fall all into the hardware.

Christian Frink 26:45

Yeah, so it's an education because it's almost like a prerequisite, you know, to be able to use like really, in my opinion, like any video over IP, because when you start using just like you know the the unmanaged switches or the even smart switches for that matter, um, there's just so much like packet loss that starts to happen when you're dealing with you know hundreds of megabytes of video data that you

Managed Switches PoE And Reliability

Christian Frink 27:10

don't want to, you know, you start introducing frame drops and skips, and then all of a sudden you're like, well, the source was here a minute ago and now it's gone. Like, what's going on? Like, well, let's have a managed switch that's designed to kind of route that kind of traffic and we can eliminate a lot of that stuff immediately.

Vince 27:27

Yeah. Or else it's your fault. And I think and I think that's where AV, uh I um AV over IP gets a lot of bad rap, is they'll they'll a lot of people typically get maybe a a bad taste in their mouth because of the product, and it's not the product, it's it's the the infrastructure that's not built correctly.

Christian Frink 27:46

Yeah, it's the foundation of your house.

Vince 27:48

Yeah, yeah.

Monty Bennett 27:49

Yeah. Yeah. Part of that, you know, part of that managed switch conversation as well goes back to goes back to PoE at the same time, right? There you go, PoE has came up leaps and bounds in the last decade as well. And while there are switches out there that might have you know mediocre levels of PoE power, there's others nowadays that have you know PoE plus plus on dozens of ports at a time. So actually understanding what the component's going to pull, how many of them you're gonna have to have, and looking at that whole PoE budget and really kind of doing the doing a little bit of math to understand what you're doing and be able to make sure things are powered right.

Christian Frink 28:33

And how your managed switch deals with that PoE power because like different manufacturers like handle that power differently. Like you have like Cisco switches that get like really smart and they're like, oh, you average you know 13 watts of power, so we're only gonna give you 13 watts of power. And then you can sometimes get into a really tricky situation where like you go to move the camera and then it'll kill power because it's requesting more than the switch expects. Um and then you just gotta change like some power profiles and things like that. But like there's other switches that we find a lot with like um like Luxel switches and like neck gear switches. Um they don't try to get smarter menu um with the power, and they're just gonna send out what the camera's asking for because it's variable, like especially with the PTZ, is like, yeah, it might average around like their two watts, but you know, if you want to do a pan shot, it's gonna spike up to 18 or 19.

Monty Bennett 29:28

Yeah, for big difference. Yeah, if you're activating all three motors in it at one time doing a movement, it's gonna pull more current. Yeah, yeah.

Christian Frink 29:35

And that's why we have you know maximum power values. Right.

Vince 29:39

We had a whole podcast just on that.

Hugo 29:41

But you know, something we forget about your products and in general PTZ and EI cameras is is a single wire that drives the control, the actual image, and the power. That's a huge going back to the side if we decide to have a signal. Right. That's a huge time saver for any AV uh uh uh AV integrator. I mean, one camera, one cable. Yeah, yep, yeah.

Monty Bennett 30:09

And you look at you look at the X1 family or the X5 that also have the built-in decoder. True. That's a return feed of NDI that we're then decoding at the camera and then can output over HDMI to a local monitor or something.

Speaker 2 30:22

Confidence monitor. Absolutely.

Monty Bennett 30:23

Yeah for teleprompter or stuff like that. Yeah. So that's a lot of stuff happening over that one over that one cable. Exactly. And you know, and what once again, we're not, you know, we're not asking people to you most most hands-on people can terminate a cat five, a cat six cable on their own nowadays, right? Yeah. Uh but HDMI or SDI and stuff like that, you don't turn terminate those in the field for the most part. Molded cables. Yeah, exactly. You've got to buy the right length and it's just kind of that one-time shot versus rolling out a rolling out a couple of things.

Hugo 30:56

Uh, you guys are still not completely close to HDMI because recently, uh, and and now we're gonna dive a little bit in the in the weeds of the technical stuff, but recently you released uh firmware that makes your camera compatible with the Blackmagic HDMI workflow with the the atoms, right? So uh if I'm not mistaken, uh the atom can turn on the the the tally light on your camera or something like that.

Christian Frink 31:21

Yeah, that's nearly exactly there. So you know you're still doing HDMI, but inherently there's still a network connection. You know, you still have you know the camera is still on the same network as the the ATEM is, and then in the web interface of the camera, you just put in the IP address of your ATEM, and then you assign the ME number that you have, and then the input number, and then tally works. Okay. You have your green preview and you have your red program. Nice. Nice. It works. I and then it works all in the background using you know Visca and the fun magic stuff that gets to happen.

Hugo 31:58

Pretty cool. I I thought it was an end shake within the HDMI string. So it's it's a network. Yeah, basically it's your camera talking to the the API or the black magic. Oh, that's pretty cool. Wow, that is very cool. I did not know that.

Monty Bennett 32:10

Yeah, yeah. The network cable is still there because you're you're you're gonna need some type of control. True. True. So even with an HDMI catching the video output, you still have the the control side of it. So nice.

Vince 32:22

Are you seeing a lot of adoption um into the broadcast film stuff with NDI or we're not there yet?

Monty Bennett 32:29

Uh to me, I mean, the uh the the the film world is just a little different. Yeah. Right? The broadcast side, especially in in whether it's television

Camera Design E Ink And Licensing

Monty Bennett 32:40

station or higher-end YouTube type uh applications and so forth, um, things, especially with the the new XL Ultra, that camera with the four-thirds sensor in it, it's got an amazing cinema, you know, like a cinema depth of field to it that just really looks great. And at the price point, you know, now we've got users out there able to put in, like I said, they can put in that camera in, you know, either either as their main cameras if they wish to, and one person sitting at a table somewhere else can do switching between multiple cameras, can PTZ around, whatever it looks like. And you're not worried about you know paying camera operators to do it. You've just got the one person sitting at the table with the with the the KBD uh controller.

Christian Frink 33:24

Replacing your studio camera that costs twenty thousand dollars with a camera that's seven thousand dollars is you know a lot more digestible for a lot of environments. Absolutely. Or even just your startup cost. Right.

Monty Bennett 33:35

Right.

Christian Frink 33:35

Yeah.

Monty Bennett 33:35

And and we've also introduced in the in the XL Ultra, once you get into the web user interface, the the bird UI, there is a function in there to kind of do a preliminary color match with the XL to a Panasonic, a Sony, or a Black Magic uh studio cam. So it gives you that starting point to be able to, you know, okay, we're gonna get you 90% there. Yeah. And then you can kind of tweak it from there because we've got a full color matrix, and you can tweak it to match your other cameras. So if you've got those expensive studio cams as your primary shots, yeah, but you want, you know, you want some PTZs on on nice tripods sitting out of the way or whatever else it was for the auxiliary shot, we can make it look exactly like your other cameras in your system.

Vince 34:19

Yeah, that must feel much better for anybody who wants to be able to do it.

Christian Frink 34:23

One of the biggest trends that we're seeing is um LED walls. Yes. Coming in, is everyone wants to be in front of an LED wall. And like that's one of the flexes that that XL camera has that Monty's talking about, is being able to have an optical low pass filter just integrated into the camera so you don't have to add additional hardware. What does that mean? So the optical low pass filter it eliminates that moray effect that you get when you're shooting at an LED wall. So you don't have like the weird lines, it just looks like what your eyes see. Gotcha. So you don't have to do you don't have to fix anything in post.

Vince 34:56

Gotcha. So I I'm assuming that would be the better camera to have when you're doing, let's say, a concert and you're doing uh iMag. Yeah.

Christian Frink 35:05

Yeah.

Vince 35:05

Yeah.

Christian Frink 35:06

100%, or you're in a newsroom, you're even shooting in front of a green screen.

Speaker 7 35:12

Yeah.

Christian Frink 35:13

Um we've gotten to do a lot of really cool, like Monty did one down in Dallas where we took the camera to an absent showroom and just set up a demo where we had we're shooting at an absent wall, and then you have like new blue graphics coming in that are um going up on the screen and being able to pull out. So it's a really cool, like full like IP workflow that you can do from screen to camera to graphics. Um that's really exciting like workflow. What they call virtual production.

Monty Bennett 35:42

Yeah. Pretty cool. Yeah. And we're seeing more and more, you know, that where of course that still has a place in in the in the broadcast environment, right? For the anything from the sports scores to the weather forecaster to everything else behind, you know, for the up on up on screen behind them. Yeah. But we're seeing it more and more in the the corporate broadcast type space, right? The C-level executives talking about, you know, doing an investor meeting, doing their quarterly earning meetings, right? Trainers, training teams on doing whatever they're doing, right? Whether that's uh how to use a CRM or how to present new products or whatever it might be. I think I think that the world, you know, we've been we've been seeing high-end product releases from Apple, for example. You know, like everyone, millions among billions of people tune in for the next Apple release.

Speaker 7 36:32

Yeah, yeah.

Monty Bennett 36:33

You know, we've been we've been looking at TED Talks for 20 years.

Speaker 7 36:36

Yeah.

Monty Bennett 36:36

Right. And everyone wants that level of production feel for more and more, right? Yeah. We we see it in House of Worship, we see it in education, we see it. So that kind of stuff. And like I said, with the XL, you bring that, you bring that technology in to make a remotely operable camera able, easy to set up, put it anywhere in the room you kind of want to, and and get a great shot out of it. Yeah, that's really cool.

Hugo 37:03

Talking about remote, uh, there is a solution from Bird Dog, which I love. And I I think it's a little bit it's not popular enough for the power of that solution. It's Connect. Uh, can you talk a little bit about Connect and maybe talk about the roadmap of Connect? Because I think there's stuff uh that will be coming to your cameras uh that has been announced, so I'm not sure. I there we're not under NDA, I think. Yeah. Uh maybe you can talk a little bit, explain what is Connect. In my opinion, that's uh amazing solution.

Christian Frink 37:36

Yeah, so Connect is a software, it's essentially like cloud production that we can do um, you know, anywhere in the world. So if we're here in Montreal, you know, we could put one of our cameras um into Connect and then you know, back at Monty's house in New Mexico, we could set up another one and we could produce that all back in Melbourne, Australia if we wanted to, and be able to operate those cameras like we were in the room with them and merge them together and route sources across the world. Uh, but what's really cool with um on the camera side is we're introducing an update where the cameras themselves can be an endpoint. So that way you don't have to have a computer on both ends of that handshake, but that the camera can be one on its own. Uh which makes it a lot easier to deploy. So if you're doing remote productions, you can have all of your cameras, you know, you set them all up, you configure them, and then you can just send a camera out to talent. They just plug it into a switch that's also in you know the fly pack that you sent them. They plug it into internet. You already have the feed, you can color match and everything from your house, and you're live. Yep, that is very cool.

Hugo 38:46

This is pretty cool. And and just to uh elaborate a little bit more is to this date, you'd still need a server running on your network. The server could be a Mac or a PC. Uh obviously, the the the the more powerful the server, the more streams you can encode. But to this point, you needed a computer running on the network that was encoding the camera feeds. Yeah. Or actually any NDI feed. This is not a bird dog specific solution, right? Yep. Uh but you will be coming up with a firmware that will basically bake those features directly in the cameras. 100%. Yeah. Okay. Any uh ETA on this firmware? Imminently. Imminently. Okay, good. Good. Something that amazed me about that is you can have uh, I believe you have, I think I've seen a uh uh an app for uh for Apple TV, right? So you can remotely control cameras, PTZ cameras from your Apple TV in your uh uh living room with the remote you can control PTZ cameras that are uh somewhere else.

Christian Frink 39:53

Or even if you don't want to use you know your Apple TV, you can just have the phone on your iPhone. True. And you can do it all from the Connect app on your phone. Yeah, or the or the Bird Dog Play. Yep. Probably the Play Pro 2.

Vince 40:06

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So you're saying that um a large company who's got multiple podcast shows at different locations can send out just a bunch of bird dog cameras. I'm just saying. Yeah, when the firm firmware goes, bunch of podcast cameras, that's it. Plug them into the switch, and then you can have a remote producer produce the shows.

Christian Frink 40:30

Yep. That's amazing. You can route everything so it has a full like matrix grid. Yeah, and then there's also some like hidden um gems that are in there. So like in the matrix grid, you can actually create um like QR codes uh for different routes. So if you have like a regular like route where like if you want to decode a particular chemistry into like a play um to be able to output onto like a TV, you can print off a little QR code and then you can just tape it on the desk and just be like do this when, and you can just have somebody scan it with their phone and it'll trigger the action with just a scan. So you can kind of eliminate a lot of uh wow training and stuff and just be like this QR code does X, this QR code does Y. Huh? This one I didn't know.

Hugo 41:14

Pretty cool. Pretty nice. That is very cool. And you know what's very and again, I'm completely amazed because those feeds, when you and and there's different uh uh there are different options to encode, but uh some of them the if you encode the cameras remote and you have your server here in that's in Norval and the cameras are in Chicago, is it that uh in Detroit. The cameras are in Detroit. I'm in Montreal, and the producer. The NDI fees are gonna show up on my network, yeah, yeah, just like they're local.

Vince 41:48

Yeah, so there's no VPN. It's uh I guess it's point. I don't know how you guys, I don't know how you guys are routing that, but it's I don't think the point, right?

Hugo 41:56

Yeah, yeah. Wow. So there's and am I wrong if I say that nothing goes to cloud, it's it's really point.

Speaker 2 42:02

Yep.

unknown 42:03

Wow.

Christian Frink 42:03

And like what's cool is like we've kind of engineered our own flavor of like SRT for it. So like it all happens SRT, so it's all secure, but we've also baked in all of the really cool like metadata from NDI along the way. So you can still get you know NDI, um, tally, all of like your video data and everything. So any of the controls that you can do via NDI on our camera, um like through the web interface, you can do through Connect.

Speaker 2 42:31

Yep.

Christian Frink 42:32

So it's fully like you have everything with that camera except for physically touching it.

Vince 42:39

Yeah, anybody who's got a big, big company with a lot of different podcasts, and anybody who wants to start a podcast, that is like, especially with a remote producer, it's like just

LED Walls Color Matching Virtual Production

Vince 42:50

take care of the angles, the lighting, and then we'll take care of the rest. There's like it's just clutter-free production.

Hugo 42:56

That is just credible. One visit, you put the cameras, you find the angles. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Christian Frink 43:00

Because you can build all your multi-views and everything in it too. So if you want to do picture in picture, you can do that, and then you can create an output like broadcast stream out. Wow.

Hugo 43:09

And you can be granular uh with the encoding you're doing. So depending on your bandwidth, you can say, Okay, I want 20 mega megabytes, or you can be oh yeah, okay.

Vince 43:18

So you can even uh manage the the bandwidth per camera. Yes.

Christian Frink 43:22

And if you're not going live, you can also record it as well. Very cool. And that's it's a huge there's so many things that it can do. So um it's really easy to say, like, well, whatever you want to do, it can do, but like it's basically it.

Vince 43:37

Yeah. On that, I mean there's um especially on the integrations. Oh, I actually I can't shouldn't say that. Even on the the the the pro V side, that's where it started on the audio side, Dante. And now Dante is doing a lot of video too. Um NDI, Dante, not being best friends, not being Crazy, crazy compatible. Is that still an outdated statement?

Christian Frink 44:03

Or I think a little bit, yeah. Yeah. We're doing so like uh we have Dante AVH coming to uh most of our PTZ cameras. Oh yeah. And so it's still like in its emergent phase. I think that the Dante, at least the AVH end of it. Um but as far as like Dante audio and NDI, um I have most of the workflows I see are done through like Netgear switches, but they play phenomenally, yeah on the same thing. And that that's back to giving a pat on the back to like the the networking side of the business and the work that they've done to like merge all of that is for the most part, like I really don't see that many issues when merging like Dante and NDI. Yeah, when they're it almost becomes more troublesome when it's over-engineered. It's like, oh, I have a Dante VLAN over here, and I have my NDI VLAN over here, and then you know we produce everything out of a third one. I'm like, why did we make it so hard?

Hugo 45:02

There are profiles in the in the Netgear with uh NDI5 and Dante or NDI6 and Dante or NDI6 and AV over IP.

Christian Frink 45:10

So they they play uh Yeah, and I think the Luxo switches are the same way, if I remember.

Hugo 45:15

Yeah.

Christian Frink 45:15

Yeah.

Hugo 45:16

That's very cool. Yep. Uh is it already time for some rapid fire questions?

Vince 45:22

Yeah, maybe let's let's do a little bit of uh you wanna you wanna kick it off with the rapid fire questions? Oh boy. It's uh whoever wants to answer first, or uh it'd be nice to hear both your answers.

Speaker 2 45:32

So I'll take the first one.

Hugo 45:34

Yeah, go for it. And those are basically one-word answers or fast answers. Okay. Um SDI or NDI? NDI.

Christian Frink 45:44

You depends.

Vince 45:45

Oh boy, I like that. I like that. Okay, you have to elaborate now.

Christian Frink 45:50

Well, it it it depends. So like if you're just doing um you know, pop-up productions, and like you have to bring everything with you, and you're it's all going on a table right in the back, and um you have your three cameras all on your little six-foot table. Why bring a switch? You're not streaming it out that day, it's all just happening local. It's one less thing to put in your bag, it's six hundred or a thousand dollars that you can save on your production and it's great. But you know, if you start getting into permanent installs or you are streaming your production out live, it's NDI works great. Yeah. So it really depends. Like I think I don't think NDI is like killing off you know SDI. I think there's still a place uh for it, absolutely. Very cool. Thanks for the honest answer. Yeah, yeah.

Vince 46:42

All right, most overrated AV buzzword right now.

Monty Bennett 46:52

Broadcast AV. Right. Like for me, I see I see that used by every manufacturer some way just because it's a buzzword. Right. And at the end of the day, yes, that you know, we we we have this melding of broadcast style installations happenings, dedicated rooms, stuff like that coming into the spaces and so forth. You know, uh an A V integrator at this point is audio and video and lighting at the end of the day. Like it we've we've been doing all of it for a long time. Yes. And then we tried to like separate things out, and now we're trying to meld it all back together into a smaller, into a smaller form factor again. It's like it's just just just keep going. Yeah, we're fine. I think you kind of nailed it on that one.

unknown 47:42

Thanks.

Hugo 47:44

Um one sorry, one bird dog project, every integrator should try. Every every integrator should try, sorry.

Speaker 2 48:02

Play pro. Bingo. That was my thought too. Good answer. Your latest and greatest project. It sits on the table right there. NDI KVM. Very cool.

Monty Bennett 48:12

Yeah. Yeah. With with with uh the KVM functionality in Play Pro, we have uh we've got a good a good industry friend of ours that uh has worked for iHeartMedia and Radio DNA and others of that nature for a long time. And he's he's a staunch supporter of of our of our of our PTZ cameras and stuff. Um and the previous play product he he lay he loved for the applications where it worked well. Play Pro came out with the KVM over NDI side of things. He went, hold on. Because in a in a in a podcast studio, in a radio studio, the room's gotta be silent, you know. The fan running over there is driving me crazy, by the way. Um for him, yeah, he needs to put that stuff in the room next door.

Speaker 7 48:54

Yeah.

Monty Bennett 48:55

And he can do it through, and he's like, and it works phenomenally well. Wow. And a play pro you know even with a little bit of a price increase recently due to memory and stuff like that. But 350 bucks, he's like, it it's uh it's a killer.

Vince 49:08

Yeah, it's an old. It's a killer, yeah. Biggest NDI mistake.

Speaker 2 49:16

I was gonna say in three words or less, but might need more than three words.

Vince 49:19

Yeah.

Speaker 2 49:20

Three words or less.

Christian Frink 49:28

I think it's four. Not buying managed switch. I was waiting.

Hugo 49:33

Yeah, two words because I could have been on managed switch. That's what I was saying. Quick prediction quick prediction. What disappears first?

BirdDog Connect Remote Production Roadmap

Hugo 49:50

Traditional matrix switching switching or standalone SDI workflows? What was the first part? Traditional matrix switching, like the big SDI. Like what what's changing about it?

Vince 50:05

Uh which one disappears first. In your opinion.

Christian Frink 50:12

I want traditional to disappear. But it's such like a a big boat. Uh I think it'll stay around for a long time. Um I look at like the big productions and I see all the cables and the drives and there's there's a better way. What do you think?

Monty Bennett 50:38

The thing is is that it they they both still they both still have a reason to exist. Right. There are there are lots of applications out there. You know, the old adage of the show must go on, you know is is absolutely true. And you know, the the the situations where the look and feel and experience of having something that's been done done the same way for the last 20 plus years, and people know it, people understand it, um, it's fail-proof in a lot of ways. So it's still gonna be around for a while. Um I think I think that the the IP world in particular is becoming smarter and smarter and and and more reliable. Um and it'll eventually get there. Um like I think about whenever I go to a concert, you know, and you think about the you know, the the roadies that have to break everything down and move it and put it all back together. And it's gonna be eventually it'll be a world where you know just nothing but fiber runs from the back to the front.

Christian Frink 51:37

Uh fiber run, a fiber run, whatever it might be. And you have 128 channel like Dante mix and then you have three dongles that you unplug and it all goes in your backpack.

Monty Bennett 51:48

Right. Or or wireless, whatever it might be, you know, it'll eventually get there.

Hugo 51:52

Uh maybe a little uh uh twist on what you said. Uh do you feel that eventually maybe yes, those two workflows like the baseband slash SDI and the NDI or an IP protocol will live side by side together, but eventually maybe the SDI workflow will be the backup and the main one will be the IP. So you know, when critical, when you need dual recording or you know, eye availability, make sure you see that now even. Yeah. Yeah. So you already see some workflows where where they they they they plug the SDI spigot, but just as a backup?

Christian Frink 52:27

Yep. Huh? Like they prefer it or the even to go as far as like um like wireless NDI like being the preferred, um and setting that up as like your preferred Nick and then having a wired option or an SDI option also as a backup. Oh, okay.

Hugo 52:43

I mean I thought we were ending the the podcast, but you opened the door like because one of the questions I wanted to ask uh was about Wi-Fi. Yeah. Uh and I'll be totally honest, my experience with Wi-Fi, maybe I have bad Wi-Fi, but uh is not reliable for production. And I didn't want to touch that on the podcast, but while you open the door, of course. I know that some of your cameras have Wi-Fi, like including the X4 Ultra and the X1. Yeah. Uh do you in Canada we we don't see any Wi-Fi adoption for production. Do you see Wi-Fi and do you find it enough reliable?

Christian Frink 53:23

Um when you build it to suit, um, so like when you have a really good Wi-Fi router and you isolate it away from you know other traffic, it works well. But when you're using it on the same network as regular internet traffic or um like your cell phone, like it's not as great. If you're you're running it on like a um like a consumer grade Wi-Fi router, it's not as great. Um when we start really running it on you know Pro A V access point routers, um, they're great. Um and it works the same as wireless does or as a wired does, but it has the same like fallbacks that Wi-Fi does in general. Like the further you get away from you know your access point, the slower and the more inconsistent your performance is gonna be. Um the more stuff you add on to it, you know, the more stress it's going to be. The more Wi-Fi networks in general that are in the area are gonna be there. So it's about being aware of your environment. So if you're you know in a conference hall that has its own guest Wi-Fi, it has its own private Wi-Fi, and um somebody's throwing up hot spots in the audience, and um, just use a Wi-Fi channel, you know, scan the Wi-Fi's and see what channels they're running over, and then don't run on the same one.

Vince 54:47

Yeah.

Hugo 54:47

So a little bit like uh when you pre-prod a wireless microphone um venue, you can pre-prod your Wi-Fi, find the right channel, use Wi-Fi six or seven if you can, and have a dedicated um mesh network with multiple uh um access points. And yeah, you just gotta look at your channels and your channel widths and hundred percent.

Vince 55:11

Yeah, okay.

Christian Frink 55:12

I think I think just because we're we've all been so used to Wi-Fi just like kind of generally working for us as you know, regular everyday, and I think we kind of take it for granted when it comes to like the production of it and be like, oh, it'll just be I'll just use what's here because it's Wi-Fi. Like, well, not all Wi-Fi is pretty.

Vince 55:30

I don't, I don't, I don't agree, I don't agree with that, but I agree with what you said, but I don't take it for granted at all. I I have uh I have a um a prosumer system at home and I'm constant. And you know, we had this talk as well on the podcast where it's like everybody's like everybody's complaining about their Wi-Fi at home, and I feel like everybody's going out and get getting the biggest monster router they can. They get home, and and that's just default. But that's just making every other household worse, right? So everybody's yeah, they're just flooding the entire network. Yeah, they don't even scan, they're just exactly the box. And in my system, uh people tend to be like, you know, I can I can uh I put the the power on super high, and people normally would say, yeah, I want to and actually I'm putting mine on low power so that's yeah, so you're okay.

Monty Bennett 56:24

It's it's like listening to music though, right? I mean, you know, you do you want to listen to something at 130 dB with massive clipping, or do you want to dial it back a little bit, listen to it you know, at 90. Yeah, just sort of 80, yeah. Yep, right?

Hugo 56:39

Maybe I'm the sweet spot, but it's fun that you're in decibels from a video guy, so I'm yeah, I'm happy.

Vince 56:46

Yeah. That's super interesting.

Hugo 56:49

Well, thanks for that, for that uh Dora about Wi-Fi. Because I'm I mean, unless somebody probes me wrong and and we'll have conversation throughout the week, uh I I'm still uh a very, very uh uh wire person. Like uh I'm I'm uh big into IP, but I tend to not recommend Wi-Fi for any type of workflows because and and just maybe a last question. What's if if if your wireless networks configured properly, like dedicated Wi-Fi, three, four cameras maximum, um nothing else, like if you're in an ideal situation, is the latency comparable? Yes. Oh yeah, okay. Because the one of my big things was the latency. But again, I just like anybody, I I did create a I did bring an AP at home, but you know, I didn't basically I didn't do so much research, but yeah, you you are scratching.

Christian Frink 57:47

I've seen it in my in our office. We have a Netgear like um pro access point. And just running on one, I had like our X4 Ultra and I ran it on battery and I had it connected to the Wi-Fi, and I like just carried it around with me through the office, and I had the rest

Rapid Fire Dante And Wi Fi Reality

Christian Frink 58:05

of the team like watch it like live, and they're like, it's clean, and it didn't drop at all. Um, and I I went through the building until like we got to the edge of the frame and then it just it dropped off when you know after we got out of range. But yeah, I bring the camera back into range and it rediscovers it and it picks right back up where it's at. Okay, interesting. Thanks. Yeah, just instead of the handshake happening, you know, over a cable, it's invisible.

Vince 58:32

Yeah, that's very cool. That's very cool. Gentlemen, thank you so much for uh for stopping by and it's great that you guys uh managed to come into the studio. We've been starting to do more remote, uh remote uh podcasts with uh guests, but uh anytime uh we can have any any of you in the studio is always uh is always a pleasure. And uh we had a lot more questions, uh, but we'll have to save it for another time, and we'd love to have you guys on again uh at a later time if you guys are you guys are always welcome. So we'd love to thank you so much. Yeah, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.