That’s the point of the grant lol
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I went back and read through it again. The quality of this grant application is amazing. I am sure serious time went putting this together.
I agree with your point that the videos produced can definitely convince investors to pour in millions of dollars to purchase ZEC. That is a strong point to show the return of investment for this grant.
Personally, I am much more interested in getting today’s youth excited about this great tech. By doing so, we will be able to attract individuals to the ecosystem not just by holding ZEC but also contributing. And, that can be exponentially more powerful. That means educating them on the math or getting them excited about the potential of this technology.
For example when Neil Degrasse Tyson lectures about anything science related I want to dig deep and understand it further. Or, a lecture from 3Blue1Brown who has amazing math videos who encourage me to also go further. A great example is this video by Wired (Zero Knowledge Proofs: 5 levels) :
It has 4.7 million views! With your production we can definitely do something like this for ZEC. Very powerful. I would love to see the grant approved to go in this direction. The Zcash ecosystem has access to the brightest minds of our day, to reproduce something like Wired is definitely possible.
Now, in terms of cost. While I do feel it’s very high, I am ignorant to costs related to video production. But, I do know that Sal Khan from Khan academy made many videos that provide immense value and will continue to do so with very limited resources. So, I do not believe that high production cost correlates to higher impact.
I believe this grant has exponential value, but strategy for video content is crucial. And, with a grant this large, I would love to focus on more on strategy. Happy to jump on a call David.
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This is an amazing point.
I wonder if, over time, when Zcash Media builds their YouTube presence they could reach out to people like 3Blue1Brown and meet the youth where they are 
.
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To your cost concerns, and many others in this thread have raised the same concerns.
@David_Heisenberg Can your team put together a proposal that would create similar content only via voice overs, and animation?
There is an extreme amount of cost involved with pulling people together in physical locations for in-person scenes, re-takes, gaffes, cats on the couch, etc forever
The Zcash Community is not in a position of luxury to be spending our precious ZEC for efforts like that - particularly if we’re liquidating our coins at $50 a piece to do so, rather than $500 a piece
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I love that you posted this video by Wired (Zero Knowledge Proof: 5 Levels). In fact, I sent it to the Mathematics Director at my son’s school (K-8) and the school is now going to integrate a discussion of Zero Knowledge Proofs into their curriculum. We need more content like this and sponsored and produced by Zcash!
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Yep exactly, imagine real educational crypto content for schools
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Like Algebra, right?
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Hello all,
37L and ZCG met last Friday to discuss both past Zcash Media grants and this current grant. We recorded the conversation and posted it here: (Auto-Subtitled, Backup Recording) Zcash Media 2022-2023 Grant Discussion with 37 LAINES and ZCG - YouTube.
We are hoping to continue the discussion in subsequent meetings, and can report back here as things develop.
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“Decentralized Media In web3 Is Not What You Think It Is” - Steph Alinsug
I just came across this blog post today and wanted to share some quotes that I am pondering on in regards to this grant proposal, ZCG RFPs(podcast,etc…), and other media style contributions to the ecosystem, as well as the direction of Zcash related media creation in general going forward.
“Media in web3 is the meta-container for everything related to the DAO or Tokenized Community’s narrative network effect. This means Media is responsible for ensuring the narrative and POV (vision), brand (strategy), and marketing (execution) are aligned across the entire community ecosystem.”
“Progressive decentralization of media starts at the bottom of the stack — distribution. The community supports the narrative network effect through peer-to-peer sharing. This looks like someone Tweeting about a piece of media, or even about the community itself. Decentralizing distribution is one way to engage the community in storytelling.”
“I argue that DAOs and Tokenized Communities should stand up media verticals in the way that we stand up working groups, guilds, or teams to facilitate other critical outputs such as Product, Community, Operations, etc.”
“Layering this line of thinking on top of DAOs and Tokenized Communities, we understand the need for media within all decentralized communities. All DAOs and Tokenized Communities are engaged in decision-making processes; governance is the catchall word for how decisions are made. Narratives — facilitated by our media — is how we shape governance, the culture of our individual organizations, and the culture of the web3 space at large.”
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Thanks for sharing the video. Really insightful. I appreciate everything everyone on the call does wether it’s paid or volunteer.
TLDW
It appears @ZcashGrants is invested in trying to find some kind of middle ground with @37L. As it stands @37L have outlined 2 options. So it appears, for now, the ball is in @ZcashGrants court and they will need to decide between one of those two options (or propose a new option).
Options
Option A - The grant as it was originally proposed (or close to it). It’s my understanding that this is essentially the model most large YouTube channels are now using (or moving too) where they build duplicate teams and work on videos in parallel and it’s becoming increasingly popular to have seperate teams dedicated to shorter form content. Nothing in this proposal stands out to me as out of the ordinary for YouTube content creation and marketing for the goals proposed. The only problem is that doing so comes with a hefty price tag ($1.8m).
Option B - Drastically reduce the cost of this grant by reducing the number of teams and team sizes in some form. This would almost certain reduce the viewership/subscriber growth rate and the effectiveness of @37L in building Zcash Media as a premier source (on YouTube) of not only Zcash information but also broader cryptocurrencies information. Unfortunately this option would also likely reduce @37L’s ability to quickly react to the need for new/specific content or changes in market/priorities.
Don’t let the bear market scary you @ZcashGrants
Fear is what will prevent other projects from going all in and committing to their vision. I implore the members of @ZcashGrants to consider what the cryptographic landscape might look like in 3, 5, 10years and consider the massive advantage we, and Zcash, gain by committing to making a difference to that future NOW. That future is going to include big companies with massive marketing budgets, teams of bots, fud campaigns, honest misconceptions, and biased AI influencing and steering the messaging and landscape in ways we can’t even imagine today.
We are going to need a team that has been battle tested on the harsh realities of building content, followers, subscribers and fans. A team that can engage with users outside the Zcash bubble we often communicate in. A team that can not only produce content but also learn from that process and the outcomes. A team that can produce calls to action so effective that each piece of media nudges 1000s of viewers to proceed to make their first shielded Zcash transaction. Unfortunately building that team doesn’t come for free, and doesn’t happen in an instant.
So, my suggestion to @ZcashGrants would be to sell 36,000ZEC of the 130,000ZEC you currently hold giving @ZcashGrants $1.8m USD (at the current price of $50USD). Then everyone needs to take a deep breath and remember that in about 4months (November?) @ZcashGrants will have received that amount of ZEC back from the Dev fund. I hope after sitting on that for a bit everyone can be more comfortable with the idea that 36,000ZEC isn’t so scary in the grant (
) scheme of things. Then I want every single @ZcashGrants member to close their eyes and take a long pause to imagine what amazing things @ZcashGrants and @37L can achieve together if you approved this grant.
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Is anyone in the thread able to give a response to this question?
$1,800,000 is a proposal that is heavily balanced toward spending a lot of money on assembling in person content (think make-up, cameras, sets, travel, travel stipend, equipment, discretionary add-ons). Those traits for production are to my assertion “wants” not “must haves”
That direction economically feels irresponsible when considering the fact that the community would be made to liquidate a huge Zcash coin position during a bear market for “wants”
The animations that Zcash Media included with their primary productions were awesome and I really want to call attention to the reality that we could invest for a reduced budget that delivers audio with animation and stock footage only. Bypassing the heavy lifting (cost) for in-person film should be an option for this community to vote Y/N about!
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Hi @noamchom, thanks for taking the time to consider the proposal deeply and I am very glad to hear you liked the animation. However just for clarity, animation is actually the most expensive and time consuming element (hence why we limit it when we can). Also in this grant (as well as in the updated grant option we will be posting shortly), we have removed almost all production because we are relying on previously captured footage and new Zoom interviews (utilizing the hologram effect we created to maintain quality).
I think what is important to clarify is that the most challenging element and thus the greatest expense here is the storytelling (writing/editing). Cumulatively it’s the most expensive aspect of the grant because of the fact that it takes such an incredible amount of effort to learn the topic deeply and communicate it clearly. As Einstein said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough” - we are trying to hold ourselves to this belief and put in the deep work necessary to explain complex topics and technology concisely.
Our feeling is that the community will benefit the most from quality technology (provided by all the wonderful people, organizations, and grantees working on that), as well as clear vision building and value proposition communication. Thus it takes an incredible amount of thought to explain ZEC in context, and imagine what the future of ZEC could look like and how to welcome new thinkers into that future. This is why the per episode cost is what it is - the community is paying for the team of people taking the time to build a clear vision. I hope this helps clarify why we broke the budget down as we did.
Sincerely,
Natasha
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Hi Everyone,
As you know we met with ZCG last Friday (meeting video posted above). For those who didn’t have time to watch the video, the summary is that the committee provided reflections, support, critiques and suggestions based on our previous work and the proposal submitted. Following a group discussion of these points, we all agreed that 37L would submit an updated bid which heeded their feedback.
This new proposal reduces the overall grant request from roughly $1.8M to $1M. The details of this change can be found in the following bullets and budget.
Updated Budget:
Updated Budget Notes
- Relying On Core Team: The original budget was geared toward building a YouTube channel and a team to create and distribute consistent content. This new budget is built around the idea of relying on our core team and focusing on creating the 6 high quality videos that Zcash needs the most (e.g. Crime and Crypto).
- More Core Team Hours: Core team members Natasha, David and Jeff were originally contributing an estimated 315 hours collectively per episode (including pre-production hours / 12) in the original 12 episode budget, but on this new 6 episode budget we now estimate to work around 1.5 to 2.5 months per person which collectively is around 960 hours (2 months) per episode. About 3 times as many hours. This is the result of taking on more responsibilities from the removed crew and also being more realistic about the time we think we actually need to do each episode justice. (Though we will likely work more hours than this.)
- Estimated Timeline: We estimate that it should take between 1.2 and 1.5 years to complete this proposal.
- Increased Editor Time: We moved our now single video editor to a flat rate and increased the amount of estimated editing time from 1 month to a 1.5 to 2.5 month mark. Which will give us the additional time we believe we need. However, we did so at a 23% discount off the original budget rate. (About $8000 vs $10,400 per month).
- VFX Artist: Added 2 days for a VFX artist, which was originally covered by a different editor on the project.
- Video Distribution: In this budget David and Jeff are handling distribution on Twitter and YouTube. Which means we would still be creating and posting social cut downs (which can also be utilized by other marketing partners in the ecosystem), optimizing SEO and thumbnails on episodes, and creating multiple language subtitles for episodes. Jeff will distribute the episodes on other social platforms if the value is there and time permits (these duties were originally done by the marketing team).
- Twitter Postings: David will be taking over the responsibility of writing and posting on Twitter and is the most ideal person for the job with his knowledge of Zcash and crypto (Note that all recent posts on Twitter were created by him).
- Hourly To Flat Rate, Performance & Simplicity: Core members have switched from an hourly estimate to a flat project rate per episode. As said above we estimate it will take somewhere between 1.5 to 2.5 months of effort to manage, research, write, produce, create, and distribute each episode per member. The switch was made to simplify our rates into a short series format and to incentivize performance rather than a long term ongoing hourly service rate.
- 12 Episodes To 6: Episodes have been reduced from 12 to 6 in order to reduce the overall budget and focus mainly on the most important video topics.
- Dubbed Videos: Jeff will look into creating dubbed versions of the already released episodes (with translated text), as well as new episodes, into different languages. In order to execute them more budget and time will be needed, but we may be able to execute a single language on one episode with the current budget as a sample. There are multiple routes that can be taken and the cost can range dramatically, but we don’t want to sacrifice quality.
- Production (aka filming) & Post-Production Expenses: Some rates were lowered or increased from the prior budget, but ultimately the price landed around the same amount. It is important to note that we do not know with 100% certainty how we will use all of the production budget (some of the items are hard costs). It depends on what’s best for each episode; it could be that we need it to rent a location, hire a crew member, film a demonstration of Zcash being used, fly somewhere to film an interview, build background for a set, or use it to buy us some more animation time.
- Discounted Production Gear: The quality of the episodes is very important to us and knowing that we need to keep the budget tight we’ve provided our cinema level film gear at an extreme discount. We shoot on RED cameras (used on Marvel movies) with professional lenses, wireless monitoring, lighting, grip truck and sound equipment. The gear we use can run up to $4000 per day depending on what and how much of it we are using, but we are providing access to all of our gear (which you could shoot a feature film on) for only $2,000 per episode.
- Post-Production Studio: We are not charging anything for our post studio in Santa Monica, CA which includes 2 editing rooms, viewing room and a vocal ADR room even though it will primarily be used to produce Zcash content. This space costs about $3700 a month to maintain.
- Per Episode Cost Increase: Primary reason for the increase is that the core team is now estimated to work around 3 times longer on each episode and the pre-production budget is now included in the per episode cost. In other words, it is a nominal increase in cost per episode that comes from combining different areas of the previous budget together and from giving the core team members enough time to complete episodes on their own.
- Formalize Workflow: We believe this alternate budget will be beneficial to give us more time to formalize a workflow with our core team that we can use for a scaled up team in the future when more budget is available.
- Writers & Animators: It should be known that we would actually prefer substantially more time with researchers, writers and animators (animation alone could take up our whole budget) on our team, but we will work with what we have. These are mainly advanced original topics that we are tackling and we could spend more money with ease.
- Contingency: There is a lot of uncertainty on film projects and that is why they frequently go over budget. Our line producers prefer to have contingency budgets at around 8-15%, we’ve set ours to 5% in order to reduce budget even more.
- Perspective: It is important to us that no one gets the wrong idea about the rates we are charging. It’s true that you could spend $10k per episode or you could spend $2 million per episode. In our world a 15 to 30 second commercial could cost $50k to $1 million. Point being there is a vast amount of ways you can budget a project depending on a lot of factors, and by the standards in our industry this project would be considered low budget. The advantage we have is that our core team consists of talented, efficient, passionate and knowledgeable people. It’s more important to have a team of people who can effectively use the money given to them, and know how to still make something they are proud of without going over budget.
Core Team Updated Responsibilities
Our core team is multi-skilled and can take on others’ responsibilities in a lot of situations beyond the ones listed below. [List below does not include the non-core (part-time) members/companies on our team.]
Natasha Mynhier
- Provides creative direction throughout the entire project with an emphasis on story and structure.
- Responsible for writing and structuring story elements.
- Communicates and interfaces with the Zcash ecosystem.
- Handles legal and primary production communications.
- Creates and conducts questions for interviews.
- Responsible for maintaining collaboration and morale between team members.
- Source crew when needed.
- Skilled in video editing and will provide assistance on the main episodes or social media cut downs when needed and within reason.
- Capable of cinematography, sound mixing and lighting when necessary.
- Provides voiceover (subject to change).
- Leads animatic creation.
David Boyer
- Lead crypto and Zcash expert.
- Main communicator with the Zcash ecosystem.
- Stays up to date with the Zcash ecosystem.
- Leads research and writing of topic essays.
- Leads episode topic selection.
- Manages writing and posting on Twitter.
- Handles communication about social cuts in regards to creation and asset delivery to ZF or other necessary entities.
- Reviews and approves topic essays for structure, information and accuracy.
- Reviews episodes for information and accuracy.
- Collaborates with Rekodi on community management.
- Creates questions and participates in the interviews.
Jeff Hammerton
- Supports creative direction throughout the entire project.
- Distributes and optimizes (SEO, Thumbnail, etc.) the main 6 videos on social media platforms and prior video releases. Which primarily includes YouTube, Odysee, and Twitter, but may also include Reddit and Facebook (or others) if time permits and deemed valuable enough.
- Researches and contributes topics, notes and feedback based off of filmmaking experience and YouTube optimization.
- Supports question creation for interviews.
- Handles getting multi language subtitles on main videos and will be looking into options for getting the audio dub versions of the video made (if money/time allows).
- Maintains the server, edit bays, computers, footage, camera and sound equipment.
- Handles billing, payroll and accounting.
- Skilled in video editing and will provide assistance on the main episodes or social media cut downs when needed and within reason.
- Providing coloring on all 6 videos, replacing the previous colorist.
- Primary provider of cinematography, color edits, sound mixing and lighting on any shoots or productions.
Eli Wanket
- Eli leads everything post-production. Which involves a lot of post skills which include, but are not limited to, video editing, titles, asset consolidation, motion graphics, VFX, coloring, animation, media management, music selection and sound design. It should be noted that athough he is capable of a lot of the responsibilities for post-production, we will still need to outsource the majority of Animation, VFX and Sound to specialists.
- Responsible for improving the aesthetic, flow, and feeling of each episode.
- Capable of assisting cinematography, sound mixing and lighting when necessary.
- Creates animatics and supports animation creation.
- Interfaces with any external post collaborators
- His parents were hand drawn animators on the original Star Wars and Indiana Jones films (just sayin).
If still on the fence, the only other options to adjust the budget are reducing the time the core team works on the project, or reducing the amount of episodes that we do. However it should be noted that:
Less Time = Lower Quality, Less Output
More Time = Higher Quality, More Output
Important Final Note
Finally, we would like to note that while the budget is built around “episodes”, it is really built around people’s time. If it is decided that instead of a full-length episode, we think it is more valuable to spend an equivalent amount of time creating different formats such as news updates, long-form interviews, short clips, etc., this is an option. Flexibility to use our skills and time to experiment and determine what is best to effectively educate audiences on Zcash is the most important thing to us.
Thank you all for your ongoing consideration.
Sincerely,
Zcash Media Team
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Hello, and apologies in case I missed the answer to my question in your revised proposal. I’m seeing that it will cost $169,000 per Zcash episode and that there will be 6 episodes instead of the previously planned 12. How long will each of the 6 videos be?
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This is amazing news that @ZcashGrants is open to funding this new proposal. I think even in the new form this grant will net benefit Zcash and the community.
Option A vs Option B
While considering this new proposal I’d like to point out some of the differences, as I understand them, between the two proposals. Let’s call the new proposal “Option B”
Option A ($1.8m or ~32,000ZEC@$57) - Outcomes
- Produces 12 videos
- Produces shorts and social media content
- Produces short deep dives into specifics of the long form videos that wouldn’t fit into long form video
- More then doubles the number of people trained and skilled to produce Zcash Media content
- Allows @37L to scale up and produce content fast enough to feed the hungry social/YouTube machine/algorithms
- Creators of large channels often talk about the building a successful YouTube channel/following in years not months. This proposal is more conducive to that.
Option B ($1m or 18,000ZEC@$57) - Outcomes
- Produces 6 videos
- Produces shorts and social media content
- Possible production of short deep dives (time/priority permitting?)
Option A obviously produces way better outcomes. Option B saves @ZcashGrants 14,000ZEC. So all things considered if @ZcashGrants think that it’s very likely they will be able to commit to spending all ~215,000ZEC over the next year on proposals with a higher ROI then this grant then they should consider Option B. But if @ZcashGrants think they are not likely to find ~200,000ZEC worth of grants with a better ROI then over the next year then they should pick Option A.
My personal opinion has always been that @ZcashGrants is highly unlikely to find anywhere close to 200,000ZEC worth of high quality grants over the next year so it seems obvious they should fund the full 32,000ZEC ($1.8m) grant. Especially when this grant will contribute to solving the lack of high quality grant proposals.
As we go into another weekend of some much needed R&R on our side of things, I just wanted to say something more as a Zcash community member than as a Zcash Media team member.
We are incredibly lucky to have Natasha, Jeff, and Eli willing to bring their immense skills, passion, and infrastructure to bear for Zcash. As the person on our team that brought them into Zcash land, I can say that without them, I would be able to accomplish pretty much nothing.
What they bring cannot be quantified into budget estimates and number of episodes. Years and years of training goes into making the types of work they can make. Countless hours of practice in a range of skills that could fill an encyclopedia. Jeff will work 16 hours a day meticulously testing every possible combination of whatever needs to be done, whether its thumbnail optimization, business infrastructure, cinematography, or building an entire production studio from scratch (which he actually did). Natasha will craft stories that emphasize the most human and relatable aspect of any issue, from autism to climate change to Zcash, all while uniting and bringing out the absolute best from every person she works with. Eli will sit at the editing bay for days on end finding the most attractive ways to make a bunch of cryptographers, academics, and all around nerds look like Marlon Brando, while simultaneously bringing obscure ideas like zero-knowledge proofs and trusted setups to life through beautiful animations.
Bringing them in for a year+ to distill the ideas and information surrounding Zcash into perhaps the most powerful form of mass communication that humanity has yet developed - motion pictures - is the number one reason I am bullish on Zcash. If I received nothing and worked no more on Zcash, yet I knew that they were working on it for the next year, I would sleep easy at night, with my ZEC resting in the shielded pool, having the complete faith that Zcash is being served by some of the best people in the world.
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Hi Everyone,
After many hours of conversation and another meeting with ZCG, we have decided to pause this application as it stands and reopen it when we have time to create a proposal that is broken down by packages. We will have more info on what this means when we reach back out, but the short of it is that we want the community to be able to partake in the process of deciding which elements of our work are priorities at different times without halting the overall effort. We believe the solution to this is the creation of a Zcash specific media ‘Menu.’ Yet, it will take some time to create this.
Please know that this decision is not an easy one, as many of our team members have put in multiple unpaid months now in an attempt to bring our next effort to life. But we believe this will be a better system long term (and we want to be involved long term), so we decided it is worth the investment to create this package plan even though it will take us another couple months to do so.
When we worked through this idea with ZCG, we brought up the fact that some bridge funding would allow key team members to continue working on Twitter, Interviews at Zcon, and Social Media Cuts. They agreed that this would help maintain some presence in the interim, so we agreed to submit a separate proposal for this bridge funding. That will be posted in a different thread sometime next week when we have time to draft it.
Per ZCG’s request, this thread about the long term grant will remain open during our time away, to maintain the history of this conversation. When we return, we will post our update here.
Lastly, we want to help Zcash continue to define collective value propositions for ZEC. So we will be hosting a Zcash Media Value Proposition Meeting at Zcon for anyone in the community who is interested in sharing their ideas. More info on this will be shared in a separate thread when we get closer to the event.
We look forward to seeing you all at Zcon.
Sincerely,
Natasha
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When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.
Don’t lose your passion and enthusiasm for Zcash. I applaud all the time, effort, and soul you’ve invested to date and truely hope we can welcome you back to bigger and better things soon!
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@ZcashGrants when appropriate I’d like to hear some insight into why ZCG couldn’t fund this grant. As far as I recall a grant this large requires unanimous approval. Is that correct? Did that contribute to the inability to fund this grant?
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Hi @GGuy. Thank you for your questions.
Unanimous approval was not required. The Zcash Community Grants Committee replaced the voting thresholds originally established by the former ZOMG committee with a 3 out of 5 majority vote requirement for all grants, with the stipulation that all committee members must vote. Please see below from the February 7, 2022 ZCG Meeting Minutes:
Regarding the following:
It’s not that we “couldn’t” fund this grant. However, the committee did bring up some concerns, which Natasha alluded to in her previous message. Our discussion with 37 Laines is public and available on YouTube at: (Auto-Subtitled, Backup Recording) Zcash Media 2022-2023 Grant Discussion with 37 LAINES and ZCG - YouTube.
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