Office Hours | Saturday | October 31, 2026

0:01 Alexander, as an answer to your, or a question to your question, we can probably demo multiple things. I don't know if people still are eager to hear about the new website or if I should show other stuff. I've been making a booking system. Well, we're going to tease the website. I mean, we've been talking about it for a while. We're going to...

0:34 I don't want to give away too much because we're going to be... We can tease it. It might be good to do it on a show that's recorded and stays on YouTube as opposed to the Sunday show, which isn't. I can show you something. Well, yeah, if you want to show something, just... Yeah, I know. No, it would be good to keep it where it hangs out on YouTube as opposed to the Sunday show, which doesn't hang out on YouTube.

1:01 I have this kind of site. After it's streamed live. Sorry, go ahead. Alexander, if you take a look at my screen. screen. So I have this website simulator, which is interactive, and I can see which parts of the website that affects members, member kits and gear, community and join, sign in, or and Google Analytics. I can click on Show Hub and we can see that it's

1:34 touching into insight on health, home and watch, et cetera. So it kind of has these interactive simulations. And that is kind of giving a top-down overview of how the new website is working and all the moving parts. Okay, interesting. A lot of data there. Oh, yeah, definitely. Definitely. And dependencies. And user journeys, how the flows are for each of these journeys. Ronny, I just heard a Discord notification come through. Does someone have an open speaker

2:21 with Discord? No, it's my microphone and my phone is giving me... I'm going to mute it. iPhone 18 is actually difficult to learn using the photo button and the... Copy. So if this is something that is fitting, we can probably do that. I have not prepared for that. But I could easily use 20 minutes of this. and Craig could pitch in and talk about the APIs and all the cool stuff

3:50 I lost my panel chair. I saw something. Thank you. Welcome to Office Hours, the show where we answer your technical media production questions every single week.

4:47 We've got a great crew today. We're going to answer those questions, so make sure you plop those in. We'll talk about that more on how you can do that in just a bit. Courtney, what do we got? Well, starting us off here from Minneapolis, Minnesota, T.J. Asher. asked the question, Apple released a white paper on their new display for the new OLED laptops.

5:10 What do we think about the display? Is it the most accurate consumer display ever? And he has a link there. Well, that's what Apple says. What do you think, Courtney? Well, I imagine it depends on how you calibrate with your software. So it is a closed system, so maybe they have a good handle on that. I just took a brief look at the white paper,

5:33 and it's fairly informative. A couple of unique things that they're doing, they have this dual layer. They have, rather than most LED displays, OLEDs that have a single red, green, and, I mean, two greens, one red, one blue pixel. This one has two LED panels, OLED panels kind of superimposed, and they have this very strange arrangement of the pixels with some bigger pixels and some smaller pixels.

6:01 and lots of pixels. And they do this, they double up that display to give you more brightness, to achieve more brightness because they say they can get to a thousand nits. And off an OLED panel, usually that's pretty hard to obtain without frying the smaller, you know, frying the individual pixels and shortening their lives. It also has what the equivalent of IPS is in an LCD

6:26 in plane switching where there's an individual transistor for each of the OLED pixels. rather than a matrix drive or something where it's driven off a row and column addressing. So there's an individual transistor at each pixel. So that's cool. They also talk about their anti-reflective coating on the inside of the glass. So there's a fluoride coating on the inside of the glass to eliminate inside reflections between the OLED pixels in the front glass.

6:57 so although they have a multi-layered glass now for that touchscreen they may have a lot little more diffusion and a little less sharpness may be coming out since they are putting an additional capacitive coating on the outside of the glass so i haven't read that part yet but that's what i'm assuming a cover glass is pro led xtr has reflectance of 1.0 percent

7:21 Lower than traditional OLED displays due to coasts. I was talking about the anti-reflective coating on the inside and the outside, plus they put that little texture coating on the outside to have a good feel for those touchscreens, you know. So it remains to be seen how good it is as far as accuracy when we test it. We'll know. Yeah, I mean, typically their displays are incredibly accurate.

7:49 Like even the iPhone is, you know, widely known that the iPhone displays, they're all color calibrated from the factory and they're supposed to be very, very good as a reference display. And this one, Apple says it's their most accurate display they've ever made. And I would probably believe it. I mean, the fact that they've released, the fact that they're so loud and proud about it, that they felt that they needed to release a technical document to really explain what they're doing with it.

8:14 It clearly shows that the engineering team is really proud of what they've been able to accomplish. So, Ronnie, what do you think of this? Obviously, this is a long document that we just had a link to, so I'm sure you probably haven't read the document. But what do you think of the fact that Apple has actually made public all the technical details of how this display is designed

8:33 and how it's color calibrated and how you can even customize the color profiles? That was the other thing that I saw. I think it looks like they have a new utility, and it's aimed at people working in video production that can create their own profiles for this thing. It's definitely a new thing from Apple. Not that it's new that they create good stuff.

8:55 They also have a pretty high price on these things. I'm not sure if it's the absolute best consumer, probably, up there with all the best ones. And as Courtney said, we have have to test that. But them publishing these technical details is kind of a thing that they are, as you said, Alexander, they are proud of what they've done. And I have no

9:27 doubt. I think it's really good. The only thing I'm thinking of is if my clients or my friends or people gathering around my display to enjoy the really, really pro-LED experience start touching it with their fingers, I would get really, really annoyed. And I'm not sure I would be using it as a touch display either way. So I don't know. I'm eagerly awaiting reviews and maybe I'll hit the purchase button.

9:56 Yeah, and I definitely want to go into the Apple Store to check these things out. You know, it's really interesting and obviously we will never know. But a part of me feels like because we're now in a new era with a new CEO and we have a CEO that came from the engineering team, which is Ternus. I feel like this wouldn't have happened under Tim Cook.

10:18 I feel like this is like an engineering nerds thing that clearly he's really proud of what they've done. And I feel like, I don't know, that's just a guess. What do you think? Either of you can chime in, but I really feel like this wouldn't have happened under Steve Jobs. This wouldn't have happened under Tim Cook. This is because they now have an engineer running the company.

10:43 No comments on that? We'll just move on, I guess, then. I was just thinking we could talk openly about that, but we can circle back. All right. Craig McFarlane. I'm in question reader mode. Go ahead, Courtney. What do we got next? Well, Mr. Glad you pointed it out. Mr. Craig McFarlane, who's here on the panel this morning from Boston, Massachusetts. She says, I heard there is a countdown to a big launch today.

11:09 Are you excited? Sounds like a Cochran. Go ahead, Craig. I'm certainly excited. I'm not wondering all the heavy lifting. Ronnie Hofstra here can speak to more of the details, but I'm excited to finally get to the final countdown. And we're going to do a workshop right after the show today, or 30 minutes after the show. where everybody can jump in and notice things.

11:38 And with any launch like this, we need a whole bunch of set of eyes, diversity of how people look at things or interact with something to say, hey, that word you used there doesn't make me think I could click on it or whatever it is. We all see things slightly differently. So having a whole bunch of eyes on it would be really helpful.

12:01 So Ronnie, I think you can probably explain sort of the final machinations of pulling the trigger, as it were? Yeah, so we're finalizing all the latest changes and we made some tools to make sure that we kind of catch every thing from the previous website and have that modified and and kind of verified and approved by community members that are going to be doing that during the workshop.

12:35 And the goal is to have as much as possible finished later today. So we start 30 minutes after this show ends. And we just want as many as possible to get in there. And if you are going in there, you will also see one of the features on the new website, which is badges. badges and we have put some gamification into this to make it a little bit more interesting.

13:02 And all that shows up for the workshop later today on after hours is getting that badge. And we're also planning to have more of these badges being put into work later on. And the big thing is that we've made a tool using AI to make sure that we manage all these these vast amount of URLs, content pieces that are going to be transformed into the

13:33 new website. Some of them have their own URLs. We're also taking care of all the transitions. So we're depending on good documentation, for instance, for Google Search Console so that we have all the site maps in place and can control every part of the new site. We can even if there is an emergency, we can like the big rocket companies, we can shut

13:59 it down for a minute or two and we can disable and enable stuff just like you do on a real big website. I think we have the recent count up is like we have around 8,000 elements that are going to be managed. Most of that is automatically handled. Some of them are thrown away, like the old kind of cards that came from the old site.

14:26 So there's a lot of stuff coming from the old website. And one of the things I did was actually to create a plugin for the old site to export every possible URL that Search Engine could have been or was open to the public. public, and that is then being put into some manual lists and some do's and don'ts and merged together to a tool that we're going to use later today to manage all these changes.

14:58 So definitely it's a really, really cool thing, and we're all looking forward to launch the new website. But I guess we have a hold at minus 40 seconds now, so we'll see how it turns out. Ronny, I know we're going to have that presentation where we're going to be going through it. Is there anything that you want to tease us? Anything at all that you want to show us

15:24 without totally giving it away? Or should we? Yeah, I can kind of give a small overview, not to give away all the details, but I have kind of a, So I haven't prepared this, but we talked about it in the pre-show. I have a tool which is basically just showing the interactions and how the site is working. It's kind of a dynamic site map or presentation.

15:56 So we have all these elements that is in the site. It's organized by map. We have engagement. We have user journeys. is we have the crew and CRM system that is behind the scenes and we have how the search and AI system is working and most of these is things we're going to look a little bit closer on later tonight or later today. So we have let's say for visitors when a visitor is interacting

16:23 with the site what is the part of the public site that triggers and we also have We have for members that are logged in, we have member kits. That's an option where you can build your own kit and share it with the world. And there is also some tools inside there that makes it possible for you to overlay that on, for instance, office hours meeting, or if we have these great reviews sessions

16:51 that we have. And we also have, of course, sign-in systems that makes it easy to have new sign-ups from volunteers. We see that in the engine room, there are some elements that are depending on how the system works. We have APIs connections that go both to ShowHub, it goes to Mukana, it connects to YouTube, It connects to different services out there in the world.

17:23 All transactional emails are being handled by a separate system. So you can have alerts coming into you if you have a favorite show. And there is so much to look at in this kind of interactive thing. This is for the competence or the achievements you have on the site. You can have an on-camera route into KnowItAll. You can have content on social, which is mostly not live,

18:03 and you can have the different options on what to do in this aspect. We also have the planning, so helping and pre-prod people or roles. So this is kind of just showing a little bit of all the things that we are doing. And there's also a quick ring description here. A watcher is just a person that arrives at the site either from watching other episodes

18:34 on YouTube and clicking on the link in that YouTube episode, going into the website and then start watching other stuff in the archive. So there's a lot of stuff, too much to be going through in detail today. But we also have defined a lot of different user journeys, which is really important to understand what the users arriving at the site is going to be doing.

18:58 doing. Some of them are, of course, just watching search ask. We land on the front page, you watch an episode or go into the search and archive and do some more deep dives in here. And then you possibly end up asking a question related to that show or episode. So it's all kind of it's connected to everything so everything is connected to everything

19:28 and the website is kind of the hub where where all these things are taking place and yeah it's a lot of new stuff and we'll see maybe we launch everything or maybe we just launch a few things later this weekend or we'll see if you're there you will learn and and I have one question for you and then we'll move on The data that we're pulling, we're obviously pulling data too from the YouTube channel,

19:56 but when Office Hours Global started, we were originally doing all the streaming, I think it was on Alex Lindsay's channel. Is it grabbing any of their early stuff from the beginning? Yeah, the idea is to have everything in place and Guy has also created this great tool that transcribes all these texts based on the old information. So it's basically doing a transcription using Whisper, which is a community effort that everyone that has been a part of knows.

20:31 You run a small Whisper transcription agent and that transcription is then pulled into the website and being processed by AI to create richer content around that specific episode. And based on that, we also check names, etc. And we have a register inside here, which is working as a dictionary, so that all these automatic transcriptions and auto-processing done by AI can have kind of a source of truth on how your name is spelled,

21:03 how a given product is spelled, and so on. So we kind of starting to make the original or the corrected version of any of these and attach them to the aliases and contexts so that we know how something is written. And then we produce content based on that. And yeah, it's an almost limitless featured website. And it's one of the most advanced sites I've ever built.

21:35 it's I say I didn't make a comma in this code and that is a big thing everything is made by AI wow I'm looking forward to that so yeah if you're interested in that tune in at 8 30 pacific standard time that's half an hour after this show ends where we're going to be doing that with Ronnie in after hours Courtney what do you think of all this I think it looks great I can't wait for the

22:00 launch, are you going to take a bottle of champagne and crack it over your monitors when you launch it? And hopefully, unlike SpaceX, let's hope it doesn't have an RUD, a rapid unplanned disassembly, you know, because the code could just fall apart at the last minute. It could blow up bad, but hopefully you've done all your homework and it has a successful launch. I look forward to that.

22:26 that. Cracking a bottle, breaking a bottle of champagne like that just seems like a waste of really good champagne. Go ahead, Craig. I was gonna say one of the best features is, is just the speed and flexibility of changes. You know, the website that we've got now has served its purpose, but it was built at a time where people thought of, you know, content management systems and using WordPress and

22:54 and all that. And it was very stayed and so coming up with some new design or new feature and working it into all pages was really clunky to do when with what Ronnie and his team of AI minions have done is have a site that is now we can push out changes. As we come up with great ideas without having to worry, oh, well, we'd like to launch this, but it's going to

23:20 take a while to get it out now we can get it out as soon as we're comfortable with and running yeah and also what we can do with the site these days we're probably going to demo it later tonight but we can actually have real interactions with everything that goes on so if we have another other question coming up we can pop that up on the website beside the player so we're kind of trying

23:50 to enrich the user experience not just watching it on YouTube and this is also available for anyone visiting the website you don't have to be logged in to have a lot of these features of course if you log in to the website you can favorite a show or ask questions specific to one episode Etc so So that is features that is given if you're logged in.

24:12 So we're trying to kind of enrich the experience by having a replay function, for instance. So you're watching the show and you just missed a moment or you want to or you made made yourself a sandwich or something. You're coming back to the webpage. You just hit the button of the last question you remember and then it starts from there. So there's a lot of extra kind of add-ons to the experience, which we think, and I emphasize the word think, that the user would really love to have on the website.

24:45 And also, moving forward, we're not transcribing old episodes anymore. We're getting the real content directly from Zoom. It's the future. future. And so we have everything coming in correctly from Zoom and those are also presenting the questions live. So if you go to the new website and watch stuff, you will experience the whole experience will be on another level. Nice. Looking forward to that. All right.

25:22 Before we move on to the next question, I just want to remind you if you have questions for this panel you can do that you got to be in our community to do that which is mcconaughey our q a system where you post those questions vote on them up and down that's really critical and i recommend you try to do that as early as possible because that gives the back end crew a

25:38 signal that you have certain questions that you think are more important you want those answered first and of course you can chat with us you're missing half the fun if you're not in the live chat there's always lots of people with different experience that are adding feedback and suggestions suggestions and really adding a lot of value to this show. Those people that are in the chat,

25:56 we call you the producers because you basically dictate the run of show, the content that we're going to be talking about and how long the show is. So go to officehours.global.com. If you haven't already done that, that's officehours.global.com. Put in your name and email. We'll send you all the links to how to post questions and of course, Discord. We've got a Discord community. Hundreds

26:19 Hundreds and hundreds of awesome people in there. All right. And also one other announcement. I have been told that a brand new product has launched on our store. You can now buy the Office Hours Coffee Tumbler, a very, very high quality tumbler that will keep your beverage hot for many, many hours. It looks like it is 12 ounces. It is a vacuum-sealed tumbler, and it is tapered near the bottom, so that should fit into pretty much any mug holder in any vehicle that you have.

26:50 100% of the proceeds support Office Hours Global. And thank you to whoever designed this webpage. Thank you for making it a black background so my retinas are not fried as I'm staring at the screen here in my dark studio. It is available for purchase right now, $50. and you can go to officehours.global, sorry, it's ohgshop.com slash product slash office dash hours dash Tumblr.

27:17 I've put a link in the chat. If you are in there, that's another example why you want to be in the chat. We post really useful links. So ohgshop.com, you will find a link there to buy the Tumblr and that will support the show. All right, Courtney, what do we got next? next. All right. Next one comes in from you, Mr. Alexander Knight in Port Coquitlam,

27:39 British Columbia. Have you seen other production pros build their own bespoke apps with AI tools to solve unique problems? I wonder what the general consensus is in the industry outside of our community. I'm very curious about this because, you know, this show is so focused on what people are doing here. But, you know, it seems like people are really divided and, you know,

28:05 there's half of the people that absolutely are opposed to anything AI and then the other half are absolutely all in on it. So what do you think, Courtney, is going on? Yeah, I see a lot of YouTubers and one in particular I follow is Dave Plummer, who was one of the original programmers of Windows. He wrote the Task Manager. and he now has a new program that he wrote using AI

28:31 called Task Manager OG or TMOG. If you go to tmog.org, you'll find it. And this is cool because, of course, Task Manager is part of Windows and the old one hasn't been updated since I think Windows 3.1 was written or at least Windows XP. But now Task Manager is now available on Unix, the Mac OS, Linux, Linux and it's quite cool. For those of you that are used to looking at the old one, this is what

29:02 the new one looks like. And it monitors in real time all the aspects of your computer. He makes a professional version. This is the free version. And over here, the features are aligned and here's the free things over here on the left. And then the paid version, you get these additional features. But in the free version, you get to see all the processes running this great little graph that changes resolution as it goes from right to the left.

29:30 So it shows you over time, you know, something that is transitory. You know, like, why did my CPU go to 100% there for about five minutes? And then you can track it down using the list of programs and utilization of the CPU or the GPU. So you have these real-time graphs of CPU, GPU, memory usage, and temperatures so that you can see what is causing my computer to slow down.

29:58 So that's kind of cool. And, of course, you have all these other charts. You can map the usage on all the cores on your computers, on all your processors. And, of course, it works across all of the Intel and the M-series chips on the Apple. and, of course, across Windows and Linux as well, which is quite cool. He also has his last video.

30:23 He has a bunch of PDP-11s, and he was trying to figure out how to add RAM boards to them, which are heinously expensive these days, even for like a 2-meg board or a 5-meg board, because on a PDP-11, those boards haven't been produced in many years. So he set Claude Code out to design a new memory board, which he did, and he has one, the prototype's in now.

30:51 So it designed the board for him, the layout, and for a memory board, which he can produce and manufacture cheaper than buying one. So I have seen a lot of people that are doing vibe coding for their own personal use and for vertical market applications and so on. In the 3D printing world as well, a lot of people are writing a lot of code to do 3D conversion of objects to 3D objects, etc.

31:24 Yeah, I did see his task manager app and it looks really cool on Mac OS and Windows. Windows, and I have to say, it looks and seems more functional and better in every way than the built-in, you know, activity modern or Mac OS, and it's certainly better. The one in Windows 11 is not bad. I wouldn't call it bad, but his provides a lot more information, and it just looks cooler.

31:49 You do have to, I think it's GPU-driven in terms of the acceleration, how it's doing, all that, so you've got to make sure that he has specific information about system requirements for how you want to run that thing. So just be careful about that. I don't know if you really want to run that on an integrated graphics processor. He wrote it to be very low profile

32:08 as far as system utility goes because he knows that to monitor your systems, you know, the utility of your system, you don't want to have the application itself eating up a lot of the CPU cycles. So it's designed and written and tuned tuned to use as low an overhead as possible between the CPU usage and handing off what it can to GPU usage.

32:33 And so it doesn't, you know, time slices it so it doesn't take up a lot of your cycles. Very cool. All right, Craig. Yeah, you know, so less about the people that are using it or the apps they're doing in in production, there was a little bit of stigma around AI. And I think it's appropriate to say, hey, don't just build something and throw it into production. And so I think there's quite a bit of

33:04 number of people that are building something just for themselves, which is fine, as long as you don't put it into production without understanding, you know, does it scale? What's the risk? Does everybody know how it's going to fail over and all that kind of stuff? So I think there's probably a lot of, certainly people have shown me things that they haven't published or they're just using by themselves.

33:32 And that sort of stuff is awesome because it just gives somebody an extra tool, an extra muscle that they can play with, better understand audio details. AI is one of the great things about it is the ability to be a great tutor, to bounce wants the ideas back and forth and fill in your knowledge about different subjects. So I think it's really helpful from a, let's build an app.

33:59 Oh, and maybe it takes you an hour back and forth and then use it. Well, if you throw it away a week later, you lost maybe an hour while you're doing other things. So it's fine. And just obviously be careful if you're going to do something like that and use it in production anywhere. Yeah, absolutely. That's a good point. And Chad Lafarge in the chat saying, note that Andre Doley built the graphics tool we're using in vMix workflow for QA code bugs. Very nice job. And our credits for vMix format are generated using data from panel view tools, show hub and compiled into slides using credits app I asked AI to build. Very cool. Ronnie, what do you think is going on in the industry in terms of people's adoption of this technology?

34:46 Yeah, so I don't know, but people should really pay attention these days. And the train has left the station a long time ago. But obviously, we made numerous professional applications that we're using, you know, daily on in our day jobs. And that is, that is a lot of help doing that. Of course, it also helps being a developer, at least in this time and day.

35:16 But I would like to show something that I made on a hunch. And this goes directly to Craig's suggestion that there is a new category of software appearing and it's throwaway software. So you create it for a one-time use and then you just don't care anymore. more. And what I'm going to show you now is based on an ID. So me and my family is going to London,

35:42 the big family. So we like 10, 12 people going and we're going to enjoy everything. And we are old ones. We have younger ones. They have their boyfriends and girlfriends, et cetera. Everyone is joining in and getting all those on the same kind of page is really difficult. So So everyone can, of course, have their own preference in concerts. They want to go look at maybe IMAX in London, et cetera.

36:07 So there's a lot of stuff that is possible to do, and we needed a way to kind of organize this. And this is what I actually did. And I have to tell, I did this on my phone late at night, in my bed, watching TV at the same time. And this is basically a full organizer of everything everything or almost everything that goes on in London. I've connected it to many different

36:33 APIs. It is organizing stuff for us. We are able to choose our own favorites. We can do sorting. We can look at what happens on Saturday the 21st. And I can quick link to ticket orders. I can attach my comments. All the different categories are also here, so I can look up theater things that goes on in London. And this is kind of aggregating data from a lot of different sources, including web

37:11 scraping, the more kind of special websites that are a little bit narrower in their target group and doesn't have APIs or other ones. ones, we can have experiences. I'm sorry, this is in Norwegian because everyone is Norwegian. So this is kind of a planning website and all the family members can choose their own kind of thing. And of course we support different view modes, can have a compact mode.

37:41 There's also a weekly setup, so we can look at all these things in a weekly thing. And we can go to the, I'm not going to click on that one, but we have a lot of activities and most of them are something that we've never been able to agree upon before. We started using AI to create our custom Christmas trip to London for the entire family thingy using cloud.

38:13 Just a couple of hours of work on my phone watching TV. Wow, that's awesome. All right. Just before we move on, if you want to ask questions to this panel, you can do that. We've got another way that doesn't require a login. So we always offer alternatives for different people. You can go to askofficehours.global. That's askofficehours.global. Nothing to sign up for or log in. Very quick, rapid fire, put in your name and question. We'll get it in on the show.

38:41 And for some reason if we if we get really busy and we're unable to answer it. Don't worry about it It's not gonna disappear It'll go into a queue and it'll get brought in on another day Which is why you should always be here, especially for tomorrow because tomorrow is Sunday our Introspection show which we tend to go a little bit longer than the typical one hour runtime and that is not recorded

39:02 You got to be here live. So recommend that's one of my personal favorite days Alright, Courtney. What do we have next? Well, it comes in from St. Paul, Minnesota. Tommy Shantz says, my AV CAN's PTZ is lagging about two frames from my other two cameras, all going via SDI into AJA converters. One feed is going into OBS from the ATEM Mini Pro.

39:30 How can I fix this? I don't know. Now, I have to assume, Tommy, that you're using the same cameras for all these. uh courtney that's a bit unusual he's using the same camera as the whole thing the pipeline's unified what do you think uh what do you think's going on here you know the akansco is uh does do have an ndi out i believe as well as an sdi out maybe and maybe it's still encoding for that

40:00 ndi even if you're not using it so if your other cameras are sdi only and don't aren't uh you know network-based cameras that send signals over Ethernet. Maybe you ought to check into the setup on that AVCANs. I don't know because I don't use them, but look into the setup and see if you can turn off any encoding that it may be doing that you're not using to encode NDI over the Ethernet.

40:28 I know you still have the PTZ control over the Ethernet, so it's talking to your control software. so just make sure it's not also encoding a 4k signal out of that camera because that could take up a lot of latency and maybe latency that encode latency is also dealing with the output to the sdi as well so take a look at that maybe that's just an off-the-cuff analysis of looking

40:52 at the camera for about 30 seconds mickey mackajor in the chat is saying in a typical production frame synchronizers are used to time align various video paths and obs you can delay video too but be warned that this can be very resource intensive then he follows up with a couple of comments also gen lock the cameras if they are capable also make sure all cameras are spitting out the same

41:12 frame rate so the atom does not do any frame rate conversion all right there we go hopefully that helps you out tommy and let us know how things are progressing all right uh what's up next corny Mr. Chad Lafarge in Columbus, Missouri, working tediously on our back end every day, says RAM prices are ridiculous. AI is consuming all the GPUs and Christmas is coming.

41:40 I need your help desperately as I have two young programmers who need new machines this year and I'm not made of money. What can I do to max my purchasing power? Purchasing, maxing, that's the new thing all the kids are doing. I feel you, Chad. We're all feeling the pinch. I mean, no one likes it when these prices are going up. And I agree with you.

42:05 Like, I would love to get a new Mac Studio. It's so expensive. I mean, it was never cheap in the first place. But it's just, it feels like things keep getting further and further and further out of reach. you know I like I need I need new backup drives and now they're 50% more than they were last year and I've just basically done like a complete spending

42:27 freeze I'm just trying to make do with what I have and offload stuff to back blaze when I run out of local storage and have as much cloud backup as possible because it's just so expensive right now Ronnie what's going on what How do you feel about this? How is this impacting you? Yeah, so if prices were to rise a bit, like a few percent, that would be easy to overcome.

42:54 The thing is, and most people are not aware of this, of course, people in the industry knows this, but prices have gone insane. We talk about three times, maybe four times up. up. And this goes for especially memory, and also CPUs and GPUs, of course. So buying a new gaming machine these days, if that is something that people are, and specifically the young ones, are looking for, the effect on the price is mindless. It's not possible

43:31 to purchase that. So my best suggestion would be to go to where companies are selling new but used stuff. Sometimes you can even get it perfectly new because most of those used sites doesn't even care about the new pricing. So they don't mark up their prices at least not to the same amount that the new prices for new products are and you can really get a bargain uh looking through those

44:05 i'm not specifically mentioning anything because this is an international broadcast and we we have different sites around the globe but there are a few ones in the chat that are mentioned as good alternatives in in the us and of course you have ebay etc and i would i would just look at that buying new stuff now for youths, especially if it's PC-based systems and even Apple's,

44:28 it's like you need a bank loan with 15 years write-on. So it's mindless. Go ahead, Courtney. Yeah, I concur with Ronnie. Look at the used market because, you know, if they're kids and they like gaming, get them into retro games, you know, the games that you played as a child. You know, if they get them into retro games, They will run on anything pretty much, even in emulation from those old 8-bit software from Atari and Commodore and all of those great machines from the 80s and 90s.

45:06 And it doesn't take much hardware to run them. And like Ronnie was saying, you can pick up a used machine that has 164, 32 or 64 gigabytes of DDR4. You can still pick them up pretty cheap, load them up with enough RAM. And as an interface to the web, they work just fine. A good browser will run really good on those, especially if you put Linux on them.

45:32 It's fairly lightweight. And they can connect to the internet and vibe code all they want. just take the money you saved off of buying expensive DDR5 RAM and put it into tokens for your vibe coding kids because that's what they're going to need to learn how to use anyway they're going to have to learn how to use AI to do programming instead of learning it from the ground up

45:57 so put your money into subscriptions for AI and get them some basic machines that are loaded up with enough RAM to handle coding over the internet. Yeah, absolutely. And I agree. And looking at used prices, everyone's gouging, even on the used market, but you're still going to save some money doing that as well. I know with Apple computers generally, I'm not too worried about buying used Apple computers

46:29 because they're pretty resilient and they're kind of a pain to open anyway. ways. So it's, they're, they're hard to really mess around. I would look at also, if you are looking at buying a Mac, always look at Apple's certified refurbished program. They're not going to be huge savings, but you know what, if you're saving a couple hundred dollars, that's kind of a

46:48 big deal, especially if you have to buy more than one computer. Lately I've looked and there's not a lot, like you're not going to find Mac minis used. You're just not going to find them on the refurbished plan, but you, you know, you can still find iMacs refurbished. You can find refurbished refurbished MacBook Pros, that sort of stuff. So always keep an eye out on the refurbished program

47:07 because you get full warranty too with anything that you buy from Apple. And you know they're virtually brand new at that point, coming directly from them. All right, what do we got next? Let's go to the next question. Next comes in from Madison, Indiana. Roscoe Jones asks, in the age of live streaming. Is there any gear other than cameras that should be hardware-based and not

47:33 software? This week, broadcasters are asking to be released from hardware EAS slash emergency gear. I guess the emergency alert system, I guess that's what EAS stands for. And he has a link to an article from TV Technology. Well, I feel like sometimes, you know, it's like talking about religion. People have different opinions about this. And I know there are scenarios where hardware absolutely will make sense.

48:04 I'm trying to move my whole... I would love to move to a software-based solution for production mainly because... And I'm already doing this on one of my shows. But the problem is I still have an ATEM switcher that does ISO recording for one of my clients. podcasts and I'll probably eventually move to MIMO Live for everything but I've got to now convert

48:25 my whole studio to SDI and then I gotta get an external of course because my Mac doesn't have the capability to put PCI cards in there I've got an external I gotta get a Thunderbolt enclosure with a deck link card and so there's some some cost involved there but for mission critical stuff you know I'll say I do really small potato stuff but like for for stuff in live sports for like

48:48 like big high stakes productions where you can't have failure. I know a lot of guys, they're all still using hardware. So hardware based switchers, hardware, everything, because, you know, when it's that much money, when millions of dollars are involved, like you can't really mess around. And I love MIMO Live, but you're probably not going to be using MIMO Live at the Olympics, right? So hardware has its place for certain things. And I'm sure Courtney

49:14 Courtney has an opinion about that. Go ahead, Courtney. Yeah, there are some things, you know, that you might want in an emergency situation. You know, if you've ever if the Internet has ever gone down for a long period of time where you are, you may realize just how much of your life depends on it these days. You know, I have probably 60 or 70 devices around my home that I can only control through the Internet by voice control.

49:38 You know, they don't have switches on them. I can't turn on some lights and some LED strips unless there's an Internet connection. A lot of them have to be a remote connection to a server in China somewhere just to turn on a light. So look at your IoT devices and see if they have a local LAN fallback so that if they lose an Internet connection, you can still control them with an app or something over your local area network.

50:07 work. So in case your internet connection goes down, you can still run things. I think in the emergency alert system, what they're trying to get out of the regulations, the way the emergency alert system used to work, is that they had certain clear channel radio stations that are AM radio stations in the United States. This is how it worked. And in an emergency, like a nuclear attack

50:29 or something like that, where everybody else may be knocked off the air, like FM stations, etc., the clear channel stations can up their transmitter power and cover the, like, 12 stations, I think, and cover the entire United States with 50,000 watts each. And they can even bump up their transmitters to more than that. They would turn their transmitters off and on, off and on, the carriers off and on,

50:54 which would trigger receivers in all the emergency alert other stations that are not clear channel so that they could then switch over to monitoring the emergency alert AM channels to rebroadcast what they're broadcasting. So you still have a nationwide broadcasting system that is not dependent on any phone lines or any interconnects or any internet lines and still just using broadcast transmitters, which have backup generators running on them,

51:25 which then can maintain an emergency alert and communications even the event of major power grid loss. And, of course, anytime we've seen, you know, Mae West or any of the major trunk lines go out on the Internet, you know, a whole area can lose Internet connection. So it still needs to meet some type of emergency lifeline in situations like that. If we become too dependent on that data connection between everybody,

51:53 bad things can happen, especially when the bad guys have learned how to use live coding. All right, let's move on to the next question. What do we got? Francis Fry in Cambridge, Massachusetts says, I have successfully used Zoom ISO for a while. Recently, the audio and video increasingly are out of sync. Nothing changed on my end. Any idea why? What might be going on?

52:20 That is interesting. And I wonder if this is, if Francis is in the chat, if you could tell us, is this something you're only seeing in the recording? I mean, if they're participant inside of the Zoom meeting, if you're looking at them, and I don't know how good you are at judging sync, if it looks like they're pretty close in terms of sync and it's just in the

52:42 recording, that would be really weird. I don't use Zoom ISO, so I can't really comment on this. And there was just a recent release, an update. So I don't know if you're also on the latest version or not let me have a look at the chat see if anyone else is commenting Oh Francis Fry says inside of zoom it's fine okay so it's only the recording at

53:07 John Wallace says I would assume the enhanced media is causing you some pain people can now have frame rates from 20 to 60 frame rates per second and Mickey also says exactly yes that could very well be a thing the variable frame rate thing that's that is always a challenge in zoom and i don't know if zoom iso i would check the

53:26 set dig into the record settings and see if there's any way that you can lock it down to a fixed frame rate because i say this i've run into this issue with with not with zoom iso but with memo live about a year ago i was doing iso records and um we did an interview with someone one and the record was really bad it was completely it was really bad with the sync

53:51 and it was really because their their their frame rate was fluctuating quite a bit it was going down you know from 30 all the way to 15 sometimes 12 frame rates per second and the people at boink software actually really released a update where you can now lock the recording to not rely on the frame rate that is incoming from the source but you can lock it to a fixed frame rate so for

54:17 example like if my if my project is set to 60 frame rates per second I can tell it to use that and lock it to 60 instead of relying on that variable frame rate and that really fixed all my reliability issues with the record so if if zoom ISO doesn't have that hopefully they add that feature because that that may actually fix the problem so I would have a look and see if

54:40 if they do have that setting. And if not, submit that as a feature. You can always, Francis, go to the Zoom ISO Discord channel. It is very responsive. There are people that work on that application that always respond there. So I would also post some feedback there and see what they have to say. Let's move. Actually, before we move on to the next question,

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56:35 You can go in and order that now. We appreciate your support, by the way. All right, Courtney, what do we got next? All right, next one in and maybe the last one for the day. This is the last one. It comes from Mr. Paul Valhus in Austin, Texas. Would you have use in your studio for the Streamer X video capture card audio interface and control surface, or is the ATEM Mini enough?

57:02 So we're going to go to our regular Rode videocaster and Rode product expert, Courtney. Yes, a suitable sign-off question. Hit the road, Jack. Yes, this is what we're talking about is the Rodecaster Video X, Streamer X, which is a teeny tiny little version of their Rodecaster Pro. But it does have video capture as well, but it's $249. dollars. So it does, one nice thing it does have that similarly priced capture cards that are more

57:42 capable than this, has that they don't, is a good audio interface. It has an XLR input for a single and it has a single headphone output in two types of, maybe it supports two channels of headphones. I guess this one is just with a microphone built into it. And this one is just for headphones only and a quarter inch and then an eighth inch TRRS, RRRR.

58:09 And it does have an NB, what is this? I don't know what the second HDMI says. Maybe that's an output. It says through. Through. So I guess you can patch your camera or any HDMI source that you're feeding into capture in and you can feed it back out into a monitor. And it does have two USB inputs or outputs, I guess. So maybe one of them will serve as an input and one of them is an output only.

58:38 And then you have a third one here, which is power only. So that's curious. So it's handy to have, but, you know, for just $25 more, you could get the OC Video Go, OC Go Deck, which is $279. I bought one and I think it's sitting down here somewhere. But anyway, it gives you far more flexibility and far more inputs to deal with.

59:06 Four inputs and overlays and the ability to do things. And the bigger RODECaster video core does, like put myself in the corner up here. So things like that. So I don't know what all the capabilities of their Streamer X are, but it probably has built-in streaming over one of those USB ports. and I don't know how many services you can stream to.

59:28 But if you only got one camera and you don't want to do things like bring video in from other people online or from websites that you want to demonstrate, et cetera, in your stream, maybe it'll work for you. It's $249. I don't know if it has any capture capabilities, so we'd have to look at that. I haven't researched it enough. And Peter Belbin in the chat was saying,

59:53 how does it compare to the Roland equivalents, particularly regarding black levels and accuracy? Well, you know, that's a great question. We'd have to test it out with scopes. Maybe somebody can do that. I don't know. Nob Omni scope. That's a good product. We can maybe do some AB comparisons. All right, that will wrap the Saturday show. Thanks to all the panelists for coming in this morning

1:00:11 and bringing your A game and answering all these questions. And to you, the producers, yes, you, I'm looking at you now. You showed up. You came through. You put in these questions. We had a great show. Thank you very much. Just a reminder too, 30 minutes from now, roughly I guess about 35 minutes because we're ending a little bit early at 0830 Pacific, we are going to have a pre-launch party for the new website.

1:00:35 So if you want to see what's going on and all the cool stuff that the team has been working on, make sure you jump into After Hours. Of course, I'll mention it again, but After Hours is a Zoom meeting and that link is provided in the emails when you are part of the newsletter. newsletter. So if you haven't already done that and you're joining late, go to officehours.global

1:00:54 slash join to make sure you're in there. That's where a lot of the fun happens. And we do all sorts of labs and other cool stuff inside of After Hours. And of course, thanks to the back end crew for coming in and doing all the technical work behind the scenes. There's so many different roles, as I've mentioned before. We couldn't do the show without you. We value you a lot. And if we were to

1:01:16 who have traveled around the world to answer all these questions virtually. According to the Talalic traversal, that would have been 10,000 miles. That's 16,000 kilometers and 78 million bananas for scale. That's the banana, exact banana for scale there. That banana seems to be in very good shape. Thank you, Ronnie from Norway. And this was episode 2412. That is all the time we have.

1:01:39 We'll see you in after hours. Bye. get your bottles of champagne ready to crash across your monitor for that lunch yes where's the sound anyone have a sound board where's the champagne bottle crashing yes the sound of the horns of the green Mary as it launches hopefully there won't be a rapid unplanned disassembly. No, you can upgrade your hardware, Courtney. Huh? I can upgrade my

1:02:20 hardware? Oh boy. Am I going to have to to look at the website? That's the question. Who can afford an Apple product these days? Geez. If you maxed out that new Pro laptop, the OLED laptop with the touchscreen, I think you're talking like like $12,000 or something. It gets ridiculous. I would never pay $12,000 for a laptop. Never, never, never, ever. Somebody can just steal it.

1:02:51 That's a good point. Yeah. Even if I bought a $20,000 desktop, I'd bolt it to the wall or something. I priced out, So the new touchscreen MacBook Pro. What are the prices? If you max out the memory. I went to the custom configurator and I maxed out everything.