The person behind
IEW Solutions.

I’m Greg Meisel. My fascination with how things work began in childhood, with the mechanical and technological world. As I grew older, music became the center of my universe. My friends and my older brother were musicians, and I wanted to become one myself. I understood how profoundly music could affect our emotions, but I never developed the discipline needed to become a proficient player.

My mind naturally gravitates toward mechanics, science, and understanding things in a logical sequence. I feel the emotional power of a performance, while my instinct is to examine how it comes together. That combination eventually helped me find my place in live production: working with the technology that allows people to bring their performances to an audience.

I began working with bands as a roadie in 1979 and was mixing front-of-house sound by 1981. Those years involved loading trucks, running cables, maintaining equipment, and making shows work under whatever conditions we encountered. My responsibilities expanded into lighting, video, projection, technical direction, and managing crews. Working across those disciplines taught me to understand the whole production and the relationships between the people responsible for it.

My skills have been self-taught, developed through research, experimentation, experience, and learning alongside others. While working in rock and roll, I kept imagining what affordable home computers might eventually do for show production. When 386 computers and Windows 3.1 made those ideas practical, I began teaching myself to program and connect computers to the equipment I was operating.

During my years at Image Technical Services in the 1990s, that work became ShowDirect. I developed a graphical show-control system, networked interfaces, and a physical control surface to coordinate lighting, audio, video playback, routing, and effects. Having experienced the pressure of executing those cues myself, I wanted operators to have something they could understand and trust.

One of my proudest experiences was using ShowDirect for the Army Experiment 5 presentation at the AUSA Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, in October 1998. Audiences moved through three presentation stages. The main stage combined live simulation feeds from geographically separated locations, video conferencing, and prerecorded material over connections that were often unreliable. When a remote feed dropped, I could change the upcoming cue to use its prerecorded counterpart, keeping the presentation moving without exposing the interruption to the audience. In March 1999, I received a personal commendation from General John N. Abrams for my contributions.

At ITS, I also led development of DAART for the Army’s after-action training reviews. We needed to record activity from classified workstations whose internal data we could not access. Their analog VGA outputs were our route in. Capturing twelve separate feeds presented substantial challenges, including the expense of storage at the time. My solution interleaved the images into a single recorded stream that could later be reconstructed into a multiview for review.

In 2001, my relationship with ITS reached a turning point. I had expected the agreement surrounding public sales of ShowDirect to provide the financial return for my development work. When it became clear to me that ITS intended to keep the technology out of competitors’ hands, the future I had anticipated changed. I continued working freelance while considering where to go next.

The next chapter grew out of something my wife and I already shared.

My wife had been an accomplished Grand Prix jumper and a contender for the US Equestrian Team in the 1980s, before a severe riding accident ended her competitive career. Horses were familiar to me too: as a boy, I spent time working with my uncle’s horses on his farm in western Kansas. By the late 1990s, we had pleasure horses of our own and cared for them as members of our family.

As we spent more time riding, we brought out our old film cameras and began photographing each other riding and competing. Other riders saw the photographs and started asking us to photograph them. Eventually, we began to believe we could do this professionally.

My understanding of movement and mechanics proved especially useful in equestrian photography. I could anticipate the precise moment in a horse’s stride or jump that a rider wanted captured. Photography gave me another way to combine careful observation, technical understanding, and an appreciation of what mattered emotionally to the person receiving the work.

From 2001 through 2014, Flashpoint Media Services became a major part of my life. I was managing partner, photographer, and developer, with responsibilities spanning business operations, mobile production trailers, photography, and the systems supporting our work.

Our photographers could produce thousands of images in a day. Riders needed to find their photographs easily, while the experience was still fresh. I developed eView to support that process. It evolved from tools for cataloging images and presenting proofs into a connected system for viewing, sales, administration, and mobile access. Eventually, riders could receive notifications and browse new photographs on their phones shortly after competing.

The later years of Flashpoint were difficult. Changes in how people shared and valued photographs made the business increasingly hard to sustain. Closing a chapter that had occupied nearly fourteen years required another reinvention.

In 2015, I founded ifelseWare, now operating as IEW Solutions, and returned to live production while developing tools for the industry. Field work and development continue to inform each other. Operating equipment exposes practical needs; understanding the technology beneath it makes me a better operator. That relationship has shaped projects including xPrompter, AV-Presets, Dominion, the Legion media servers, and more recently Ascension and Aion. My work now extends through software, circuit boards, embedded programming, and precision timing.

I enjoy helping others develop their understanding, and I prefer mentoring to micromanaging. Preparation, honesty, and clear thinking under pressure matter to me. So does recognizing how much our work depends on trust between people.

Beyond the technical and creative work, I spend considerable time thinking about human behavior, empathy, and the systems we live within. I explore those subjects in my writing at Reasonable Objection. I have strong opinions and can be outspoken. A philosophical perspective has helped me step back, examine my own assumptions, and find a way through the harder transitions in my life.

My path has involved successes, disappointments, and several changes of direction. Throughout it, I’ve kept wanting to understand more, make useful things, and remain considerate of the people affected by what I do. I’m still learning, still building, and still discovering where that curiosity will take me.