Luke Johnson

In late 2015, I joined Oakstone’s CMEinfo brand as a video editor. A long-standing publisher in the medical educational industry, CMEinfo delivers quality medical educational content from world-renowned educators such as Harvard Medical School, NYU Langone, UCSF Imaging, UCLA, Cleveland Clinic, and many more. CMEinfo began in the early home-video days and has since evolved into a medical education streaming platform with one of the largest content catalogs in the industry. For my first six months at CMEinfo, I carefully learned the procedures of editing educational content and quickly began to incorporate my technical know-how into their workflow. Before the end of 2016, I initiated a transition to a network-based editing workflow which minimized ingestion downtime as well as implemented a seven workstation large render farm. During this time I transitioned to managing all of our department’s IT needs since our needs were vastly different from the other parts of the company. As our editing workload increased each year after, we managed to keep up by improvements in workflow and equipment updates. In 2018, we were faced with a pool of aging IT equipment and I took on the task of writing a new comprehensive IT proposal for our needs complete with 10gb networking and a dedicated media storage NAS. In 2020, with the start of our virtual conference business, I would again write another comprehensive IT proposal for the unique needs of streaming a live virtual conference. Now I manage a total of 16 video workstations, six laptops, a mac workstation, a dedicated FTP for remote work, and both online and offline media archives.

In 2017, I transitioned to handling not only post-production, but actual production as well. This involves frequent travel to capture medical lectures and content on-site at the major medical schools across the country. My production team managed to slim down our production requirements to only needing one crew member with a fly-pack, so the majority of my productions were and still are completed solo with occasional on-site temporary support for equipment setup. Traveling to the top medical schools in the US and working with field-experts became a common occurrence for my job, allowing me to build solid relationships with our providers. In 2017, I trained a crew member to do these on-location productions and in 2019, I trained another new crew member to do the same.

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On March 13th, 2020, I was flying back from Boston when the US went into its first lock-down. The morale at that conference steadily declined over the week as news spread within the medical community and after my return I was seriously concerned for the long-term success of our business. After a troubling two months of decline in work, we were approached by several of our providers for “live-streaming” services. Within a month, we had developed a complete live virtual-conference platform and those providers were able to continue their long-held conferences, albeit virtually. By chance, my team and I created an entirely new business of live virtual-conferencing for medical education. After our initial success we were approached by many other medical schools for our virtual conferencing services.

Our sudden increase in demand meant our existing production crew and production equipment needed to double in size to accommodate the added production needs. In late 2020, I drafted and proposed a virtual-conference studio and in 2021 I rebuilt our formerly cobbled-together virtual production studio. Today we have capabilities of streaming up to four simultaneous virtual-conferences with redundant internet and backup power, just as a television studio would implement. In early 2021, I trained three new production staff who, like me, started with video editing. The majority of training took place virtually, because our company became remote in 2020. My training involved the creation of pre-recorded lectures and live Zoom lectures where I taught software best-practices and answered all trainee's questions. Our new staff began editing immediately and I filled in their knowledge gaps regarding the technical workings of our production process. I had the opportunity to train one of our new staff on location at a production in Orlando (my first return to an in-person conference since early 2020). In 2022, we largely returned to in-person conferences and transitioned our virtual-conference studio to be road-ready allowing us to now capture and stream conferences for a worldwide audience from any location.

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While I have significant examples of my work for Oakstone’s CMEinfo and its other brands, none are legally allowed to be posted here. Please contact me for more information and examples which I would be happy to demo virtually.