Jim Tierney, CEO of Digital Anarchy - a podcast by Other World Computing

Jim Tierney, CEO of Digital Anarchy, and Host Cirina Catania talk about his long history with Burning Man and share information on his company’s plugins for motion graphics, After Effects, animation, and video editing.







In This Episode00:19 - Cirina introduces Jim Tierney, the founder and president of Digital Anarchy, who has the title Chief Executive Anarchist.03:37 - Jim talks about his company's most recent products, like Transcriptive and Flicker Free.08:12 - Cirina asks Jim about the rumor that he likes to go to Burning Man, a festival that focuses on community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance.14:30 - Jim shares why he chose Premiere Pro as a platform for transcripts.19:36 - Cirina and Jim encourage listeners to check out Digital Anarchy's software, namely Transcriptive, Flicker Free, Beauty Box, Samurai Sharpen, and many more.



Jump to Links and ResourcesTranscript



Hi, we're at NAB 2019. This is Cirina Catania with OWC Radio, the new creative club. And I'm with Jim Tierney. He's got a great title. You are the founder of Digital Anarchy and the president. And I love your title of Chief Executive Anarchist. That's kinda cool. We're creative. We like anarchy, right?



We get anarchy whether we like it or not, especially at NAB.Everybody's anarchist. Let's go back a little bit because I want people to know you as a person. How did you get started? Where were you raised, and how did you get started with technology?



Where did I start?  I want him to tell us all his secrets.



Secrets are good. I started off life as a graphic designer, and I got hired on as a QA person at MetaTools, which you might remember with Kai's Power Tools and Bryce and some of that stuff. And I started working on Final Effects way back in 1995, which is the After Effects plugin set. And did that for a couple of years, worked on a couple of other companies that used the After Effects plugins, and then came up to San Francisco for the whole “.com” craziness. And then that imploded, and I started Digital Anarchy after that.





When did you start Digital Anarchy?We started in 2001.



Oh, my goodness, it's been that long.



It's been a long time.



I actually remember that. So talk to us about some of the products that you have developed over the years, and then we'll move into what's new. So what are some of your legacy software?



The first product we ever released was Text Anarchy, which was a particle system for generating text. And it could do the matrix kind of text thing, but you can also do a lot of other like text effects with it. We started off doing motion graphic tools, very After Effects-centric. There was also Psunami, which was for generating realistic water. And this is all back 2001-2003. We did the first kind of script product, I think 3D assistance, which was as far as I knew the first script-based plugin because up to that point, they're all just c++ things. And this was using the keyframe assistant API and After Effects. Now there are scripts for everything, but back in 2003, there were not. And then, in 2008, I guess we sold most of the video stuff off to Red Giant, so a lot of those products still exist as Red Giant products. And then, we did Photoshop things for a while, and that didn't go so well. So we went back to doing video things. And that's going great. So here we are.



So tell us what you're working on now.



Yeah, so the most recent product is Transcriptive which is a panel that is integrated into Premiere and allows you to pull in AI transcripts. We've just added the ability to get human transcripts. Because it's integrated into Premiere, there's a lot of interoperability with other aspects of Premiere. Every word has time codes, or every word is clickable and can open up sequences. The clip is right within the source panel within Premiere. So it's just really nicely integrated. We just launched Transcriptive.com, which is a web-based version of it. So again,

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