Sacramento, California
contact@jbertuch.net
I build apps for people who work in live production.
Most of them started with my dad. He's a video programmer, and every so often he'd go looking for an app that did some specific thing he needed on a show, not find one, and ask me if I could build it. That's where these apps came from, and it's also how I ended up anywhere near live production in the first place.
My own background is mobile development, and the show work came through him. From 2011 to 2018 the two of us did a run of jobs for Control Freak, starting with a set of synchronized iPads that dancers carried on stage for will.i.am at the American Music Awards. After that I spent a long stretch working in IT and kept building the apps on the side. This year I went back and rebuilt the video wall software from scratch.
Apps
Published under Upload Studio Ltd. iPhone, iPad, Android, and Mac.
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A Stream Deck surface for Bitfocus Companion, on the phone or tablet you already have. It registers with Companion as a virtual surface, mirrors your buttons over the local network, and sends presses back. There's no account, and nothing goes through a cloud.
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Marks cue points on a track and replays any section on demand, so you can time lighting and video to the music. It generates SMPTE timecode and speaks OSC and MIDI, so a media server can follow the iPad.
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A pocket LTC timecode reader. Plug into the line and it tells you whether it has lock, the frame rate and drop frame, which direction the code is running, and how hot the level is. It generates code over the same connection too.
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The operator side of CyberDeck. A tech lead publishes a role with only the buttons and variables that job needs. The operator scans a code, runs the show, and cannot wander into anything else.
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SnapDeck for Companion
Keeps a versioned history of every Companion config on your Mac, shows what changed between versions, and puts a known-good one back from the menu bar.
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The Total Venue
Loading docks, bus parking, power, rooms, and local crew numbers for the venues a tour actually plays, written by the people who work them, and it works offline. This is the one I'm building for my dad.
The wireless video wall
Shows from 2011 to 2018, and available again as of this year.
Identical iPads or phones playing as one timecode-locked display over Wi-Fi, carried by performers or set up in a grid. My dad and I ran the first version of it on shows from 2011 to 2018. The software is new as of this year, and I'm available to run it. The production or a rental house supplies the devices.
Credits, how it works, and what a production needs to provide