Jason Bache founded Nerds Limited back in 2009. In March, 2020, he joined Office Hours Global. which is an online community.
Jason continues: “It’s 100% volunteer, and the whole point is sharing what we’ve learned for the betterment of everyone, so titles sit strangely around the Office Hours culture. The closest I can offer is that I’m a day-one panelist, occasional host, and member of various Office Hours administrative councils. Six years and 2,300 consecutive daily broadcasts later, we’re still solving production and technology problems live, every day.”
Recently, Jason challenged himself to answer a simple question: “Can you build a broadcast-quality studio that fits into two Pelican cases and delivers the same experience as a permanent studio?” I was intrigued enough to interview him to learn more.
Larry: Why was answering this important to you?
Jason: To answer your question, you’ll need a little bit of context. I’d booked two months in San Francisco. That left me two choices: take the summer off from Office Hours, or build a studio that fit in checked luggage.
The show is built entirely on remote contribution and hasn’t missed a day since March 2020. We do take guests whose only options are a webcam and AirPods, when what they bring is worth the tradeoff to the show — and even then, they’ve spent considerable time with our back-end crew tuning everything that can be tuned so they look and sound their best. A panelist answering questions on air is a different bar. The crew wouldn’t clear it, and they’d be right not to. You don’t take a lighting answer from someone who can’t light themselves. This had to work to Office Hours standards or it wasn’t going to happen.
So the challenge arose naturally from there. I had to figure out how to take the entire standard with me.
Underneath that sits something larger. For years, “working remotely” meant accepting soft video, thin audio, and a Wi-Fi uplink — and we accepted it because physics and economics demanded it. During the COVID pandemic, nearly everyone had to endure their version of working remotely. Given the circumstances, constraints like bad audio, bad video, and WiFi drops were the best we could do. Those constraints have since lapsed. What’s left is a packing problem, and packing problems yield to Tetris and patience.
There’s a story the Disney Institute tells about the Enchanted Tiki Room. Walt asked why the animatronic birds didn’t breathe. His Imagineers explained that the mechanism was difficult and no one in the audience would ever notice. He said, “People can feel perfection.” That’s the whole argument in four words. Your audience might not be able to articulate why one presentation held them and another put them to sleep — but they feel the difference every time, and it accumulates.
Larry: What is your production background, in other words, what experiences have qualified you to answer this question?
Jason: Since 2009, I’ve built systems for clients where reliability isn’t negotiable — work where the question is never whether it runs on a good day, but what happens on the worst one. That’s Nerds Limited.
Being part of Office Hours from day one is the other half of the answer. Together, we’ve aired 2,300 daily episodes. That’s a lot of opportunities to make something better. Every day, we learn something that works a little better, or something we never want to do again, and six years of those small improvements have taught me how to approach a lot more than just the show.
Larry: What did you discover about the future of professional production?
Jason: Two things, and they sit right next to each other.
The first is that the old maxim holds. Content is either easy to make or easy to watch, never both. Office Hours takes real back-end production every single day — the work didn’t disappear, it moved onto the internet. Zoom is a large part of why that’s possible. It’s easy to think of it as a meeting tool, but it became the transport that made distributed live production workable, and it has kept evolving in that direction.
The second is that the on-air position came loose from the room. I can bring the same picture and the same sound I have in my permanent studio, from anywhere, and the audience receives an identical show. For the person on camera, a studio has stopped being a place and become a repeatable signal chain. Creators, broadcasters, educators, and enterprises get real freedom, and they sacrifice nothing in quality.
What interests me is that those two findings don’t contradict each other. The production burden stayed exactly where it was. What lifted was the requirement that the person in front of the camera be in a particular building.
Where it goes from here, I think, is that the default flips. Today a remote contribution has to justify itself. Before long the permanence of the studio will need to justify itself.
Larry: How do you define “broadcast-quality?”
Jason: Broadcast quality means there’s no difference in cognitive load to your audience between content made in a purpose-built studio and content made elsewhere.
Cognitive load is the right measure because it’s the one the audience actually experiences. Nobody grades your bit rate. They just get tired or bored.
Larry: You wrote that “the era of ‘good enough’ remote work technology is ending.” What does that mean?
Jason: During the pandemic we collectively accepted lower standards because we had little choice. Grainy webcams, laptop microphones, unstable connections — all of it understandable under the circumstances.
Working remotely is fine. A laptop and AirPods are fine — right up until you need to be understood on a video call. The cognitive load I’m describing doesn’t care how large the audience is. It should matter as much to an executive that they’re impossible to misunderstand as it matters to a broadcaster that their voice has clarity and timbre. Never make the people who need to hear you work for it. The only way you’ll ever learn they can’t understand you is when one of them interrupts you to say so, and that’s an unforced error.
Today, that’s also an avoidable one. Cameras are better, audio gear is smaller, computers are dramatically more capable, and network infrastructure has improved. A remote contribution can be made virtually indistinguishable from being in the studio, and the technology to do it exists right now.
Larry: What did you learn designing a zero-compromise broadcast studio that travels as checked luggage?
Jason: That portability isn’t about buying smaller gear. It’s about designing a system where every piece is there with purpose.
Of course I had no idea where it would go when I began. So I came up with three rules:
The third constraint pushed me furthest past my own ideas. I was in the city taking meetings, attending conferences, and generally needing my MacBook Pro to be available without disturbing my studio rig. Once the laptop is disqualified, you can’t quietly lean on it as a safety net, and everything left has to earn its place.
Ironically, those constraints produced a cleaner design than a lot of permanent studios. Those rooms turn into archaeology — not for lack of anyone noticing, but because a permanent install has to be stopped to be altered, and stopping is expensive.
Larry: What gear are you using in this remote suite?
Jason: Any claim about production has to be backed by the gear that made it. The list is below. For the really detail-oriented, here’s how it’s wired. The important part is that I bought none of this. I rigged it from existing studio components.
You’ll notice there are no displays on my list. They’re the most fragile thing a traveling studio could carry, and cheaper to buy than to fly. They’re available in every city on Earth. I’d planned to buy a couple when I landed and never had to. There were already several at the Airbnb. A single display runs this entire rig. I lucked out and got three, purely for convenience.
My in-ear monitors bypass the Mac completely rather than routing through it. That’s deliberate, and there’s a real reason for it. (Larry adds, this removes any latency caused by the computer; though it also means you are not hearing final audio output.)
Larry: Does this mean that the traditional edit suite is dead? Is there no benefit to fixed-base facilities?
Jason: Not at all. It’s easy to lose our bearings and succumb to the hyperbolic. Production is about options, not ultimatums — nothing dies, it just stops being the only option. This requires some real-world examples.
Apple shoots exquisite productions on iPhones. The Odyssey was shot on IMAX film with a hundred digital alternatives sitting right there. Putting those two side by side is faintly ridiculous, which is exactly the point — they’re both options.
Production is all about creative choices. I doubt The Odyssey went to IMAX film for the pleasure of doing it the loud, expensive, analog way. But it doesn’t matter why they did it, and it doesn’t matter whether ticket sales covered the extra cost. None of that matters. What matters is that a creative had the option and chose it.
Same with Apple. It doesn’t matter whether they sell one more phone because they shot their own productions on one. What matters is that it’s possible, and that tomorrow’s creatives recognize what’s already in their hands.
When people need to collaborate in the same room, when a production requires specialized infrastructure, or when clients expect that environment, large facilities still make sense. None of that has changed.
What’s changed is that there’s now a practical option where there wasn’t one. Adding it took nothing away.
Larry: One of the gifts of both production and post is that, ideally, they enhance collaboration where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It seems to me this would get lost when everyone is working remotely.
Jason: Nobody wants to watch production without post, and there’s no post without production. The two only exceed the sum of their parts when one creative vision, informed by everyone who contributes to it, survives the entire process. That’s difficult, and the downside is significant. When a big visual composite doesn’t align with the vision as it was shot, you find out late, after the money is spent.
Vision travels through conversation. Poor remote technology creates friction, friction discourages the conversation, and the vision drifts.
Remove the friction and the opposite happens — if everyone can contribute with a clean image, clean sound, and conversation that doesn’t stumble over latency, geography stops limiting who’s present when the vision is set.
You can assemble the best people instead of the closest people. That’s the whole gain, and it’s not small.
Larry: What key takeaways do you want editors and other post professionals to learn from this?
Jason: Don’t optimize around old assumptions. Once you’ve seen a better way and choose to leave things as they are, you’ve taken on technical debt. That debt compounds.
There’s a line from The Dark Knight I can’t get out of my head, “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” That happens to workflows. Every one of them started as somebody’s clever answer to a real problem — proxies for machines that genuinely couldn’t handle the originals, overnight renders for hardware that genuinely needed the night, approval loops built for the era before anyone could see the same frame at the same time. Those were heroes of their day. Some still are. The rest stayed on after the problem went away.
Nobody made a mistake. We solved a real problem, the problem went away without sending a memo, and we kept running the solution until it became the thing slowing us down.
So periodically ask, “If I were designing this from scratch today, would I build it the same way?” Sometimes the answer is yes. Increasingly, it isn’t.
Larry: What question should I have asked, that I didn’t?
Jason: I might have asked what surprised me most about the whole project.
I expected to spend two months tolerating a travel setup. Instead, I kept forgetting I’m not in my home studio. The only tell is the blank white wall behind me. It’s true that a home studio has other, non-technical benefits. A space which can express your career, interests or achievements can’t fit in two Pelican cases. At home, my backdrop is full of old lenses colorfully lit and beautifully in bokeh behind me: a veritable wall of depreciation! The answer is that none of it felt like a compromise and that was a huge surprise!
We used to ask how much quality we could carry with us. Now the question is only where we’d like to be while we do the work.
One Response to Designing a Broadcast-Quality Production Studio That Fits in Two Pelican Cases
Great kit to Go!
Thanks for sharing & all your tips.
Mike M