Live-coded AI-powered race-tracking system

0:01 Good morning and welcome to Office Hours, the show where we answer your technical media production questions every single week. If you want to get questions in, you got to use our Q&A system, Makana, and I'm going to mention how you can do that right now because we are a little light on questions. We rely on you, the producers. That's what we call you, the people that show up to the show.

0:19 You make it happen and you let us know the priority that you want the panelists to answer these questions. So you can go to officehours.global slash join to do that right now. Put your name and email. If you're already in there right now and chatting with us live, that's fantastic. We are going to go to our first question. And who do we have?

0:37 Do we have a question? It's me. It's me. Oh, it is you. Okay. Yeah, somebody did an update. Oh, that's okay. Courtney, why don't you go ahead? All right. Thank you. Rajan Chandil in Los Angeles, California, right here where I am, says, how does the spatial audio feature work on iPhone and how well does it edit in a Pro Tools or Logic?

1:01 That's a good question. I don't know anyone that would do a mix just by using AirPods in spatial audio. Now that's something you certainly would check your mix to see how it folds down into binaural and spatial. But typically when you're mixing for immersive formats, you're mixing in a actual multi-channel audio setup. So, you know, some kind of Dolby Atmos setup. And there are a lot of different flavors of Atmos,

1:31 7.1, 9.1, you know, so on and so forth. So depending on how many speakers. But yeah, I don't know anyone that's just doing it inside of, you know, AirPods and that's it handing their mix off to someone. That's not really how it's done. But certainly checking your reference on the AirPods is certainly something that you do after you've done it in a proper multi-channel setup with

1:53 discrete speakers. Go ahead, Courtney. Well, he was talking about iPhone, and I think iPhone just added in the latest iOS, they added the ability to capture spatial sound because they want to be able to capture for the Vision Pro, I guess, in spatial audio. So I don't know how that differs because I don't own an iPhone, but any of you that have the iPhone,

2:16 it has its two microphones so that they normally are more than two microphones and I think it has three microphones. So maybe it utilizes all three to somehow record a multi-track spatial audio track, but I don't know how it encodes it and whether it uses any type of the Dolby Atmos or other type of matrix for encoding. So I think we'd have to do an AI deep dive on Apple's published information to see how it is handled, if it is handled in Pro Tools or Logic.

2:52 Yeah, and Mickey McIntyre in the chat is saying that Dolby Amos is by definition not channel-based. It is primarily object-based. He said I mentioned 7.1 and 9.1. I was just talking about speaker formats. Obviously, you're mixing on discrete speakers, but yes, Mickey, I know what you mean. All right, let's go to Ronnie. Yeah, so I also think it's depending, the process and how good it works is depending on what type of media you're playing.

3:21 Is it a film? Is it an interview on a stage? Is it music or whatever? So I kind of get used to all these cool wordings. And I actually just, the part of spatial audio for iOS I'm using is when I have my earpods in my ears and I turn my head, the audio is still coming from the direction of the TV.

3:46 That's how advanced I am when I'm using that. And let's go to the next question. Next one comes in from someone here on the panel, Mr. Mark Giuliani in Washington, D.C. How do you use AI in your workflow? Go ahead, Mark. How are you using it these days? Well, in the architecture and engineering world, we're using it to take giant models, Revit models, which Revit's a product of Autodesk, where we have buildings in 3D,

4:18 and we assign it clash detection routines. So as the building is designed, how many systems are running into each other? Conduit, mechanical systems like ductwork, structural systems. And we get these reports back from the modeling software, and there'll be thousands and thousands of clashes for the size of the buildings we're working on. and you feed that to AI, it'll give you what to resolve first

4:47 in order to get rid of a lot of the clashes that are down below. In the radio world, we're using it for different types of branding. So we will bring new clients in, feed information into AI and develop branding routines for them so that we can help them come up with a plan, a marketing plan for, let's say, a year and then basically determine how their business has gone

5:15 since we've implemented the branding plan. Have they improved their number of people coming into their business, that their sales go up, things like that? And then on the production side, we will take recordings of the week and we will then take those recordings, we'll transcribe them, we'll feed them to AI and it'll tell us the quality of the radio show. and it'll say, well, your host said, uh, 23,000 times last week.

5:45 So you might want to work on that. So those are some of the ways we're using it. All right, let's go to Ronnie. Okay, so we use it for a lot of different stuff, both live and pre-production and developing internal systems to kind of replace existing business applications and features. But one of the things that we've done the last month, so to speak, is we are doing a yearly event in Norway called Staffet for Live, which is the cancer association in Norway, based on the Relay for Life model that many of you know from the States and elsewhere in the world.

6:29 It's kind of a global thing where they have all these runners or walkers or barely moving around the track. Do that for many different teams and they do that for 24 hours. So they start at Saturday at 12 o'clock in the afternoon and then they continue through the night and the next morning until 12 o'clock in the afternoon. So it's 24 hours of walking.

6:58 And the point is, in Norway, they kind of have a social, very, very good social thing about that event. And that is something that goes on in many cities in Norway. And chances have it that in Tromsø, where I live, they have one of the biggest one with a lot of people signing up each year. and we took it upon us to to kind of replace the you know the clickers that flight attendants

7:29 used to use when they're walking through the cabin and counting all the passengers in the seats and they have a lot of these clickers mounted on a table and every time one of the runner or the participant are running around around they just click one round to add it and And it's a lot of manual labor doing this. And we were really thinking about using RFID.

7:54 So every runner has a bib, like you do for marathons, et cetera. But in this case, we didn't want to have kind of the race aspect of it. It's more like a counter and being a social network. So this is what we came up with. And this is actually live. The last part of this thing was actually live coded using Claude on site while the runners were out.

8:21 And this is just a beta test. So what you see in the lower part on the left is one person called ML just recently passed through. So we get kind of a row that is added to all the totals, etc. So what we did is we have one reader tech running on some hardware with antennas to just read and get the pulse.

8:46 That is also coded using Cloud. Then we have the server, which is just storing the data and kind of making all the totals. And the thing we did on site was actually having another machine just live coded to connect this to the server. So we just used AI to discuss the interface between the server where all the data was collected and the presentation layer, which I was developing that you saw just the last screenshot I had.

9:19 And we actually live coded that on site and let the AI talk to each other and decide what interface they decided to use. And then suddenly I just saw the live data appear on the display. That was kind of funny. And we showed this to the managers and they were really amazed at how cool it could look and how kind of gamification things we are putting into this.

9:43 Next phase of this is also to have a 24-7 DJ running this. I probably have to talk to Mark or other people in the community to have this DJ voice digitized and synthesized. And go, Emma, you just finished halfway to some known place in Norway or whatever and have that kind of positive input and have them perform better throughout the 24 hours.

10:17 And we actually, this specific race, we had several people that actually was out on the track for 24 hours just having bathroom breaks and some food breaks. That is so amazing. So that's how we do with AI these days. We live code on site. Wow, that's amazing. Courtney? Well, seeing as I'm retired and I retired about 10 years ago, I don't use AI much in my workflow anymore.

10:47 These days, when you get to be my age and you're retired, mostly use AI for analyzing what your doctor has told you and taking those clinical reports and putting them in layman's language and letting you know exactly what you're in for. So for health analysis, I did try some experiments using AI. I was trying to explain, you know, I used to be a lamp operator when I first started this business,

11:13 but mole riches and carbon arcs, which were the big guy carbon arc lights we used to use in the set that burned positive and negative carbons. And you had a positive that goes in. I used to be a lamp operator, so I know those lamps pretty well and how they work. So I thought, let me just ask AI to create a diagram, an image of a Mull Richardson carbon arc lamp labeled with all the parts labeled and how you would control it for someone who's new and has never run a carbon arc lamp.

11:46 And so don't trust it. This is what Copilot just came up with. But if we look at some of the labels here, they have the tilt lock on the bottom of the yoke. No, I don't think that's where that is. It says the negative carbon rod is pointing to basically where you'd put a scrim or a screen in. The negative carbon rod actually comes in at about a 45-degree angle to the positive, which goes in the back here.

12:13 At least they got the positive carbon rod right. this thing that they have yeah you wouldn't have the negative directly in line with the positive because you'd be blocking the light coming out of it uh you know it it has an amp meter and they're pointing to something that's looks like a microphone i don't know what that is the power switch is inside no the power switch is down here right next to where the power comes in

12:39 and it has these high voltage leads going to the yoke. No, that's not right. The focus control is not on the front of the light. It's on the back of the light. The striking lever is back here in the light. They don't even have, you know, any call out for that. There's no amp meter. I don't know what the hell that is.

13:00 And the switch is a big lever switch is on the back normally. and they're pointing to this knob on the side and it says cooling fan. So yeah, don't trust those AI-drawn diagrams of anything. Even, you know, there are videos out there of how to load and, you know, your Mo Richardson carbon art that are still out there that they made 20 years ago.

13:26 So if it had access to those, I don't know how it could get this all that well. Don't trust it. How much do you figure I can get one of those lights now, working like a vintage, that exact light now? Well, that exact light nobody can get. Well, because that one doesn't exist. It's not real. No. Well, let's see. Mole Richardson went bankrupt,

13:48 and they sold off all of their inventory last year. And you could have picked one of those up for about $100 with the grid, the resistor grid that drops the voltage, which is a big thing that heats up to be about 150 degrees and they run off uh you know 330 volts dc so uh and if you unless you don't have a rectifier to run them through so right they're pretty

14:17 expensive to run and you have to you know the amount of diesel that you'd burn on your generator to power them is pretty great uh so they sold off all of their inventory for mo richardson in one big auction. They auctioned it all off. So you miss the auction. They sure look cool. There are some DPs that were still liking the light out of them that used them.

14:40 But because of OSHA regulations and the air quality management problems of the coal dust that they generate, it's hard to get the ability to use them in a closed stage. You can't really use them. We used to have DPs that would use them in a closed stage. It was torture. Right, right. All right, just a reminder, if you want to ask questions on this show,

15:00 I mentioned it at the top of the hour. I'm going to mention it once again because we got more time. If you want to ask this fine panel here, questions about any kind of production, technical questions at all, you can go to officehours.global.com. That is officehours.global.com. Put in your name and email. You've got to be part of the community to use the Q&A system called Makana.

15:23 And you can post those questions. You can vote on them up and down, which is very, very important. that tells us what order that you think we should answer those questions, kind of like Reddit there. And then the other component is the live chat. You're missing half the fun if you're not there now. We appreciate all your input and feedback there. And let's go to the next question, Courtney.

15:42 What's up next? Next one comes in from Berlin, and Andre Dali says, any news from IBC you are excited about? I don't know because I'm not going to IBC, but Guy might have some information. Yeah, I've been standing by just from this side of the pond and eagerly watching for news as it comes out. I did create, per the previous question, a couple little news aggregators that go out and scan.

16:12 And I run a Facebook group for SRT, so I saw that there was an update for Teams where you can push SRT into Teams Town Hall. So I made this little AI-generated image and put it up. And there was some people saying, hey, I've been doing it for a while with RTMP. And the reason why something like this is important to me is because I work with this

16:35 company called Tenacious Ventures here locally. And sometimes we have like what we're doing here, where we'll have the presenters on the stage in Zoom, but then we push to the audience that's in this corporate environment inside of Teams Town Hall. So there's 300 people over there, but there's only maybe five or six here, just the exact same thing. But I would like a reliable

16:56 way to push in. And so using like I have high vision Makito here, which is like a $4,000 bulletproof, you know, just it's going to work every time. So it'd be nice to have something. So I'm excited about that, as weird as that sounds. But shortly after I put that up, I noticed in the Discord last night that there's now Andy Carliccio saying Zoom webinars now

17:20 supports SRT inputs and webinars. So fresh off the presses, we see as of 9-10, we got hosting a webinar with SRT live stream. So I'm now excited to go play with that and see how that works. I've done RTMP inputs into Zoom events, and I know that that works. But sometimes there's just something about using the highest quality bulletproof machines, even an Epiphan Pearl. Some of these

17:45 are just standardized in corporate environments or lecture management systems like in schools and colleges. So I'm excited about that. The other big theme that I'm seeing from this side is thanks to Jonas. So Jonas put up a post. This one, it says, just in time for IBC, he introduced this easy MXL for DMF. So DMF and MXL is a huge theme that I'm seeing.

18:12 I just went to his Easy MXL page for CloudFlex Broadcast. I threw my AI at this and I just went down a deep, deep, deep rabbit hole. I'll show it here in a second. But just to show you my watch history from this morning, IBC News, there's lots of information on DMF and DMF. So this one here, like look at IBC 2026 SVG's channel

18:40 and look at, like, behind his head, this is Dynamic Media Facility, Grass Valley. You know, they call it AMP. They've been doing this for years. But what I was able to build just throwing clod at this. So this is what I built off of Jonas's. So this is a foray that I went. We're not seeing that, by the way. Oh, oh, oh, so you missed, dang it.

19:06 You have to push the button. Yeah, I forgot to cut, sorry. I didn't want to interrupt you. This is Grass Valley. No, no, no. Yeah, please do. So this is Grass Valley's booth. And you can see behind them, Dynamic Media Facility. And let me jump back over to Jonas's post real quick because you guys missed all that. So this is where it was talking about EZMXL.

19:24 And I'll put this link to in the chat. So back to here this morning, I get this email with what's going on on the floor. And there's lots of information on this page, SVG Europe. But again, the big theme, Dynamic Media Facility. And then here is what I built off of what Jonas... Oh, we're getting feedback because we're on that channel. So this is a switcher that I built using Dynamic Media Facility.

19:51 And I can go in here and I can switch now between feeds. So basically what this is, it's a way of... Somebody else might be in here switching. It's a way of bringing inputs up into the cloud and having other people be able to grab onto these feeds. Yeah, somebody else is switching. It's not me. So the cool thing about what I learned

20:16 from watching all these videos is there's also something the BBC is using called TAMs. So you'll notice here, fast turnaround workflows using TAMs. So I was watching this video on AWS from a previous, I think it was IBC last year. And so I figured, what if I could have people controlling a switcher, but then recording it to where you can go back in time?

20:41 So this is like 12 hours of stuff. And I built all this just using Cloud. So this is an end-to-end switcher recorder. People can operate the PTZ camera, but this is all MXL in the cloud. So that's a big theme that I'm seeing from the show floor. Like not just one booth, it's everywhere. So that's something to be excited about. That's awesome.

21:07 All right, let's go to Ronnie. Yeah, so first and foremost, I have to regretably say that I didn't join IBC. And I feel kind of an empty thing in my upper torso here. I really miss being at IBC, meeting all the people and looking at all the booths and all the cool stuff and talking with peers. But one thing that I saw is something coming from OWC,

21:40 and that is the new Thunderbolt 5 dock with dual HDMI outputs. They already have multiple, at least two or three, other Thunderbolt 5 docks. And I've always missed one that also takes care of the HDMI. So I guess this is probably going to end up on my desk, at least for anything I do in my home office and just have my computer connected through one of the Thunderbolt ports.

22:10 So that is kind of a cool thing that has been tried by a lot of people. I trust OWC to actually get this to work very good and that is something I look forward to. And of course, I would also say that the new FX5 camera from Sony would be something I would be looking really hard at. There are rumors, there are a little bit delays in deliveries of the FX5.

22:38 I think personally it has to do with the factory. The image sensor factory got hit by the earthquake earlier this fall. and I'm not sure if I'm going to believe the official statement why there are delays in delivery pipelines, but Sony will get the FX5 out and I'll really look forward to try and get my hands on one of those cameras as well just to be testing.

23:03 And there is a lot of other stuff going on. And one other thing, IBC is always giving out this really, really thick magazine every morning when you are joining the IBC. Can someone that are listening to this broadcast actually just go and get those and post them to me. I miss them. Yeah, that dock looks great. It's pretty chunky looking, though. I've never seen an OWC dock that tall before.

23:28 There must be a lot of electronics. I don't know if it has active cooling in there or not. But yeah, OWC makes great stuff. Looking forward to seeing that. All right, let's go to the next question, Courtney. Next one comes in from here in Los Angeles. Rajan Chandil says, Does anyone get a proper Zoom working from a Tesla? Anyone have a Tesla?

23:48 And the Zoom app on Tesla? A little big screen. Well, Rajan, I don't think anybody on the panel has a Tesla because nobody's raised their hands. So we would need someone that actually owns a Tesla to be able to give you a proper answer to this. I'm sorry we don't have an answer for you today, but we can push that question back to you.

24:05 You can always post it on another day and maybe you'll get lucky with someone that actually has one that can report back. All right. Let's move on, Courtney. All right. Next one comes in from Jerry Hoyle in Wesley Chapel, North Carolina. What computers are you using on the show today and what are their functions? Ronnie, you probably have more than one computer, right?

24:30 I have many computers, but in this home office, I've tried to force myself into using just one. So I have an Apple TV, I have an audio mixer, a physical audio mixer from Allen & Heath. I have all the supported things. But fair to say I'm using all the ports on my M4 Mac Mini. It is connected to a display on my right side where I have the LG Quad display

24:59 where I have both camera feeds coming in, the multi-views coming in from the Constellation ATEM I have in front of me. it's two of the displays from the m4 mac mini and the third display is a vertical one where i have all the chats etc on my left side so and it's also controlling my um my prompter view running on an ipad as the as the fourth display actually this this small box uh is is amazing at that type of

25:30 work and sometimes I also run Meme Live and I recently started to get into the thing of NDI and I'm trying to see if that is also feasible using this machine and it seems to be working and chewing through it. At the same time I'm using my computer for Claude, sometimes I'm running Docker and in the case that you remember when I'm having problem here it's because of everything is

26:00 chewing up my small memory. This is a 16 gig only, so that's the memory, not the compute of that machine. So I just regret getting too few gigabytes in that machine. If I had 32, it would probably be breeding a lot easier. Cool. All right, let's go to Courtney. Well, let's see. I'm using an old Dell Inspiron, Inspiron, however they pronounce it,

26:29 i5 multi i5 intel with 12 I don't remember how many cores it has, more than 4 it has 8 cores I think with 4 power cores and 4 efficiency cores and no Apple cores I'm also using a tablet Windows tablet PC that's an 8 inch tablet over here on my left that I use for comms. So I'm using the touch version of Unity comms over there

27:04 so that I can be in touch with those behind the scenes back there and they can yell at me all the time. And so just with those two computers, the only two computers, I do have one of the, I don't know if I can hold it up and I have a rope to hang myself with. I do have one of these little GMK Tech R5s over here

27:24 that I was going to use for graphics. I do have it fed in, but it's not coming up right now. And I use the RODECaster Video S for switching and doing all the magic compositing and things that I'm showing you. And I just use the extra screens. I have the screen, three video outputs out of a Dell go into the Rodecaster and to an external ATEM mini to provide inputs that I can switch between here.

27:58 But I try and keep things compact because it's in my living room. And I have a central workstation that's all glommed together in the space of about four square feet. Right. And I know, Courtney, you've reviewed and you've purchased many of those little mini PCs, the little fanless ones over the years. Do you keep those? Do they have active duty doing something or do you sell them?

28:22 Like, what do you do with all that? I used to use them for work, for providing, you know, for feeds for, you know, in a set where you'll have, you know, 20 displays or something like that. You have to have something animated going on on the screens, and you have to be able to remotely control them. So I would use them for that kind of stuff, and I wrote custom software to do that.

28:46 So those little mini PCs were great for that because they have networking, they have Wi-Fi. I can run 12 of them off of a tablet, control 12 of them off a tablet, and each one of those little mini PCs is stuck behind a monitor somewhere. So use them kind of like a signage, digital signage you'd use in digital signage, but on TV shows and so on where you have to have, you know, you have the big control room with a launch control or something.

29:16 And you have to have animated screens that people are sitting in front of. And you have to reset them all for continuity's sake. You'd have to be able to control them so that they're not just playing loops. so that if you are playing a loop, that the loop is at the same point in the dialogue roughly that it was on the previous take.

29:35 So you have to reset them all to the beginning of the loop, and when they call action, start them all at the same time so that then when they shoot the close-up and the wide shot, it'll all cut together, and the background screens will be at approximately the same thing, so you won't see continuity jumps between them. But nowadays, I just buy them and test them for their capabilities in doing such a thing.

29:58 And since I just have them, they're built up here. They were at such a good price, you know. And I have given them to my friends whose big desktop PCs have gone south. And I give them one of those little PCs, and they get along just happily fine because it runs. it runs browsers and Microsoft Office and just about anything else you'd use in the normal

30:22 office situation just fine because they're not editing videos. They're not YouTube producers or anything like that. So for average everyday office work, no moving parts, no fans. It can last a long time without service. It's amazing because, you know, when I used to work in these these tech companies like you know in cubicles and stuff like that this was like 20 almost 25

30:46 years ago now and uh you know you'd see all the computers at these workstations and they weren't particularly powerful they would just buy the cheapest little dell workstation uh but you know they're these little tower pc taking up a lot of space generating heat with spinning discs that make clicking noises and all the stuff and it's amazing that you know the size of a puck you can

31:08 get this incredibly powerful computer, much more, even graphically too, much more capable than anything that we had even say 10 years ago. It's really amazing that you could have a company and just have these tiny little things with VESA mounts that you just bolt right to the back of the monitor and you don't even see it, just keyboard and mouse, nice clean setup. It's pretty

31:26 cool. Yeah, those little GMK techs, they don't make them anymore. These can power three displays. They have two HDMI ports on them, and you could power a third out of the USB-C port occasionally if you tried. But, yeah, so you could power three 4K monitors off of this one little box. So for use like that where you're not, you know, overloading it with a lot of tasks, the graphics, onboard graphics processor can actually handle it.

31:57 Yeah. All right. Let's move on to Guy. What do you got? Oh, boy. There's a lot cooking over here. So, the three computers that I just showed you in that Azure instance are costing a couple bucks an hour. One's got 128 gigs of RAM. so what's actually here that I'm using on the show is an older Alienware and you can see that

32:24 this machine right now it's CPU's 11th gen core i7 it's kind of a getting getting old 128 gigs of RAM you could see it's got a 3070 card in it and it seems to be humming along the cool thing though is I have splash top running on it so I have access to all these other computers so when you ask what can we do well this machine's running zoom iso so I have that Mac mini

32:51 m4 so that's running the beta build of gold gate 27 person testing so that's running that and then over here we have the administrators a Mac studio that actually runs the Mima live testing ground that I just joined that I show you that's a mac apple m2 ultra 64 gigs and then over here i've got my imac pro that's got 128 gigs

33:18 and this is my cloud code machine so this machine is a 3 gigahertz 10 core 128 gigs of ram with the vega 16 gig graphics card but this is like my daily driver in addition to this other one that's a PC, that's a gaming laptop that I use. So what are their functions? I mean, it just depends on what I'm doing that day.

33:46 But yeah, that's a little tour. All right, Mark, what do you got? Well, you know, as an architect, I'm going to think outside the box here. And I think that Jerry's question is really about the computers that we're using to run the show, to run office hours. Do you think that might be the question? because Mickey has, I think, listed those computers over in the chat.

34:10 He has, and actually he's got quite a few computers. Actually, all the ones that he listed here are for running office hours. So he says he's got two M1 Max Studios running Zoom ISO, one Dell Optiplex 3080 for Isadora and Universe, one M1 Max Max Studio for MixFX, two Dell Optiplex 3080s for SBX Graphics, one for custom running Casper CG, four Dell Optiplex 3080s for MV and return feeds,

34:40 one M1 Mac Studio for engineering, plus a lot of personal machines donated by JJ McKenna for office hours use. That is a lot of computers, probably a lot of heat. That's going to be a nice warm room. You never need to turn on the electric heaters in a room with that many computers, that's for sure. For me, I've got, what do I have?

34:58 I think I have seven. I've got two m2 mac minis one m4 mac mini I have a m3 max macbook pro and then I have some little mini pcs I've got two of the melee quieter threes and then I have a quieter four which I actually have bolted to the back of this view sonic touchscreen modern here they're all doing various different things but it's all production related a lot you know I treat computers like

35:27 many of us here treat them as appliances because I don't like to overload a computer with too many tasks that it needs to perform so a lot of these computers are only just doing one thing you know like one of them for example is just running a bit focus companion server that sort of stuff so I like to dedicate these machines for uh for one particular task and a lot of these little mini

35:49 PCs too are so inexpensive to buy maybe not as inexpensive as they were a year or two ago before the ram shortage not that i'm bitter or anything like that everything's gone up like 50 percent in cost and we're all feeling the pinch right now so uh you know i'd love to have an extra machine but i'm trying to see uh you know i'm honestly looking at buying refurbished stuff or buying

36:10 new stuff because um it you know you're gonna be able to save quite a bit of money doing that so and i actually found some some shops uh in the lower mainline here that actually do refurb stuff And you know, they give you a warranty. So even though it's used, they've tested, they checked it all over. And you know, why not? If you can save a couple hundred bucks, that's a couple hundred bucks you can use elsewhere,

36:31 considering how expensive everything is these days. All right. If you want to ask questions on this show, you can use the QR code system that we have, or even just go to askofficehours.global. That's askofficehours.global. Nothing to sign up for at all. It's a very quick system. just put in your name question we'll get it into the show if we don't get to your question today

36:54 you don't have to worry about it it's going to go into a queue we'll bring it back on another day so that's ask office hours dot global all right Courtney what's up next next question comes in from right here in Los Angeles California Gordon Lake asked anything new happening with space comms but he has a link to space comms dot io yeah I know there was Jonas announced in discord there

37:17 were a whole bunch of new features there. I don't have a list of all of them in front of me here. I know one of the features he added that a lot of people have been asking is basically the ability to have panning controls for stuff. A lot of us that have used other comm systems for communicating with team members are used to having the ability to pan stuff left right in the mix. So it's

37:39 apparently that it has now been added. I think there's some other stuff in there too which I should have probably looked ahead of time let me see if I don't know if he if it says anything on the front page hopefully it's got the now I looked at the desk he's got a desktop app for windows and mac and it still says version one so I don't know if you just get those features

38:01 automatically because it's mostly a web-based thin thing uh so I don't know that might be the case but I'd have to double check I don't see the new features listed here on the home page so So, but anyways, the padding controls, I know a lot of people have been asking for that. So that's the first thing that stood out to me. All right, let's go to the next question.

38:23 Next one comes in from our friend Paul Walhus in Austin, Texas. And he says, Red built a boxing ring at IBC with version 5 Raptors, two version 5 Raptors with dual fisheyes, 8K50 over fiber, live to Vision Pro, live immersive sports real format or a demo only that red can afford and he has a link there well i don't work in this industry but to me it seems like something that would be a demo that

38:56 only they can afford because first of all apple's not selling a ton of the vision pros and we all know that basically the vision pro although they tried to market it as a consumer product is a glorified beta kit that's really what it is let's not mince words it is a beta kit for people that want to be early adopters that want to see what that technology can do so that they can

39:17 actually build apps, build content for that particular platform. Unfortunately, I went to that link. I couldn't see. There was no photo of what this stuff looked like, so I couldn't even tell you what it looked like. Courtney, were you able to see what this setup looked like? Yeah, the problem is it's behind a paywall, you know, so they want you to sign in, and it's British

39:39 Cinematographer Magazine, I guess, their website. So maybe you can get there if you want to sign up. You can go take a look at it, but there's kind of an image there that you can see over the paywall. You peek over the paywall. So I guess I can't quite tell from this image whether they're going into a beam splitter, if they're just side by side with the red, using the red raptors. I guess

40:06 they're side by side. I don't know if they have a right angle. It's hard to tell from that image there. But like you said, Vision Pro, I was in one of the flagship Apple stores in Beverly Hills where they have a lot of money. And I did notice last time I was there, just last week, that they didn't have any Vision Pros even on display anymore. You used to see them on display and

40:30 nobody was looking at them anymore. They don't even bring them out anymore. I guess they're too much of a theft target or something. But I guess you'd have to request a demonstration even in an Apple store. So I'm not sure how well they're selling. And I think as immersive... Honestly, I don't even know if thieves want them because they don't know what to do with them.

40:51 Resale on them is not that good, probably. They are one of the most expensive things you can buy in the Apple store, unless you get a fully loaded Mac Pro. But they don't even sell those anymore. one uh yeah so they um the market is pretty limited for live sports over that you know you may have you know i think alexander you have one don't you would you watch live sports i don't own

41:16 one oh sorry it wasn't you no um i i'm not a sports guy i think the concept so i think to to the question specifically live sports in an immersive like in a format like that i think conceptually it sounds cool um but i'm not sure who obviously this is red so this is a company that makes high-end cinema cameras but i guess the question is who is this for like this setup with

41:44 like it obviously this is production related so we're talking about high-end 8k cameras fiber going live so who is actually is somebody on the crew just using the vision are they are they using it to preview what it will look like before it goes out like who is this really for i'm not entirely certain i i can't i guess somebody there at the event like looking at it through the helmet

42:09 to see what it looks like before it goes out to broadcast i guess that's why they need it but well immersive is not going to be broadcast because there's no format that is approved by the fcc for broadcasting immersive yet so uh it's going to be a closed loop system uh if you are able to watch it. So, you know, maybe if you had plugins, fiber plugins available in the stands

42:33 at the venue, if you brought along extra batteries in your Vision Pro, you could plug them in in the stands. I don't know how you would distribute this over fiber, you know, special, you know, 10 gig fiber hookup. You'd have a fairly limited audience that could carry that live. And of course, immersive audio is a solitary experience you know you've only uh only one person can look at that

42:58 immersive audio at a time so and sports is something you kind of want to sit around and share with your friends going hey did you see that play you know no i was looking over here at the concession stand you know i still have mercy so the the i think immersive formats like i think it's very interesting this is still very very early technology obviously from the consumer

43:19 perspective we're not there yet with i think the form factor of these devices but i'm optimistic that at some point and i don't know what that timeline is i don't even think it's five years maybe it's 10 years out i think at some point we're going to have some kind of form factor for augmented reality where it's going to be so miniaturized so small and at a more attainable

43:45 price that I think it will eventually make it into the hands of consumers that will be popular enough to warrant people buying them that there will be enough adoption and there will be more development but the thing is I think what we need is we is we need companies that have enough cash flow that can spend the money on R&D and do all this crazy stuff that us as consumers now we're

44:14 looking at this and go, well, who is this for? This is entirely ridiculous. Nobody can afford this. But I think we need those people to just figure out a way to make that technology work. And eventually, I think at some point down the road, we'll get it into a more affordable format, but they need to go through those growing pains to get there. So I don't think this is not,

44:34 it's not meant, this product is not meant for people like me. It's not meant for my mom and dad yet. But at some point in the future, I do see society moving towards augmented reality, for a lot of experiences, but it's going to take a while to get there because we've got to figure out the battery technology. That's not there yet. How do we get all the cameras, everything down

44:53 into these small packages? Nobody wants a big helmet with a big, long cable coming out, going to a battery pack that is in their back pocket that's warming up. That's not a great experience, but I think everyone knows that that's not what we want. That's not ideal, right? But that's just a stepping stone to the next thing and what is that next thing going to look like so we just need

45:16 to keep making it smaller and smaller and smaller uh go ahead courtney yeah i just want to point out uh augmented reality is kind of different from immersive video it can be immersive video can be viewed in augmented reality but i have the opposing point of view i don't think augmented reality is going anywhere it only has a few vertical market applications that have been found for it in the 15

45:39 years that it's more than 20 years that it's been out since HoloLens was introduced 15 years ago. And they've even abandoned it. They've sold it to the military for military use, perhaps. Even the military canceled its orders on them, so that's why they stopped manufacturing them. Apple is walking away from them for right now. And the lighter weight goggles that you see on your screen are not

46:05 augmented reality. They are just heads-up displays. which there is some use for that kind of stuff, but tying it to your head position and tracking your eye position, because that's what you have to do to have augmented reality, because you have to superimpose that video image over your real world environment in your current point of view. You've got to track where your eyes are looking.

46:27 You've got to track where your head is turned. And all that takes a great deal of computing power to do for very little return, very few applications where it even becomes valuable. If you have a technician that wants to learn about a device or something, it's much better just to have a 3D display that they can rotate it around in front of them,

46:52 the image around in front of them, rather than having to walk around the image to look at the backside of it. That doesn't make any sense. It's easier to see it on a flat screen represented in 3D on a 2D screen where you can rotate it with your mouse and look at it from any angle without having to get out of your chair.

47:13 Or rotate your head or feel like this. Or, oh, let me look down under the top of that. Can I see down inside that device? So it doesn't make any sense to me. And so I don't think augmented reality is going to go anywhere. And immersive video, I don't see that going much places either because they tried it. And I worked for several companies that shot volumetric video for entertainment purposes that they tried to do.

47:41 They had Buzz. I worked with Buzz Aldrin. And I saw their demos. And the problem is you can't control. when you can't control the point of view of the viewer, it's hard to tell a story anymore. Yeah, and Roz McNulty mentioned that, where is it with a comment here? Last night's live baseball game was amazing. You are missing the future. And Roz also said,

48:07 my third time watching a live stream, and I don't like sports. The stats of everything they use is available online, how they do it, and the team and the equipment. That sounds really cool. I mean, I'd like to be able to experience it. I'm not a sports fan, but I think I'd like to at least experience a live stream like that in an immersive format, at least once just to see what it was like.

48:25 By the way, I don't know if anyone recorded me when we did that office hours meetup at that restaurant. And I was and anyone in after hours saw me wearing that helmet. I felt so dumb wearing the Apple Vision Pro. I just because I didn't get it. And I'm like trying to pinch stuff. I'm like, how does this work? Does this work like a mouse?

48:47 you know it's like it took a while to get used to it uh but anyway um let's uh just before we go to the next question i just wanted to remind people oh actually guy had a quick comment let's let's go to guy yeah that was funny seeing you put that on for the first time and seeing raz this is one of

49:05 the great things about this community is being able to share this technology and see people light up i wish i had the time i would have pulled up the i have some video or a picture at least of you putting that on for the first time. At NAB, there was a similar setup, Paul, which I got to try on. And actually, I think, Paul, you were there, I think, watching me through the live

49:25 stream that Omar was filming. So this is one of those quality things where you got to see it to believe it. So I know Alexander's like, ah, poo-poo this and poo-poo that. Meta sold over 20 million of these little headsets that you may have seen. I mean, I got two of them downstairs with my grandkids running around like maniacs playing these games, monkey something, gorilla something.

49:46 So there is a big company out there that has a lot of money that has proven that there's an audience for it. It's just going to get better. So this is just a taste. What we're seeing is the infancy of technology. The one that they had at NAB was that 100 gig. So they had dual thunderbolts going into a Mac and they were streaming from the immersive in real time ProRes.

50:06 I mean, it was bonkers. So the future, it's coming. Like, and the quality is just going to be stunning. When you watch a basketball game and that ball comes at you, it's going to be like, you know, you're there. And you can look around. So very cool stuff. Absolutely. All right. Just a reminder, if you like this show and you want to help out, you can help out in various ways.

50:28 I'm going to explain some of those. One of the ways you can do that is by volunteering. This is an entirely volunteer-driven show, and we have many people on the show, including the panelists, obviously, that donate their time to come here and answer these questions. It's always great seeing different people come on the show and bring their expertise and their unique perspectives to answer these questions for you.

50:50 And, of course, the volunteer back-end crew as well. We have so many different roles, everyone from, you know, that we've got someone that cuts the show live, someone that manages the live stream, someone that manages the questions. We've got the pre-show coordinator that greets you at the door that checks your audio camera and lighting and all that stuff. There's so many different jobs.

51:11 You've got people that are network specialists and audio and video specialists. So it's a great community to be a part of if you're interested in production. and even if you don't have experience in a particular area, if you want to learn more about it, there's no better place where you can actually just bang on a bunch of gear that you've never used,

51:30 that you'd never have access to without paying so much money for tuition to go to a school. It's been years of your life, hoping that you'll learn something and maybe get a job somewhere. And I had lots of people that have forged lasting relationships and friends with people here on the show that have gone off and done their own shows and they've had all sorts of opportunities

51:54 to collaborate and work together. So it's a great place to do that. And if you don't know how to do that, you can go to ask, or sorry, that's the wrong URL. It's officehours.global slash volunteer. That's officehours.global slash volunteer. Just put in your name and email address. Check the box on one of the roles that you're interested in. Somebody will reach out to you as well

52:16 and help you with the onboarding process. Another way that you can show your support is by donating. You can go to officehours.global.com. That's officehours.global.com. We would sincerely appreciate it. Can't do it without you. All right. Courtney, what's up next? Next question comes in from Taylor Sonderhaus in Cincinnati, Ohio. He says, are we playing with VisVector, I guess, after the show in After Hours?

52:44 All right. We're tossing the ball to Guy. Yeah, I'm really proud of this one. This is a culmination of a ton of work, and I'm super thankful for all that's been done on this one because it's fantastic. One of the things to think about is in office hours, we can allow people from around the world to play with tools that are inside of trucks, broadcast trucks.

53:05 It doesn't cost Rion in Trinidad anything to double-click nice DCV and pop into Vector. So I'm in Vector right now. This is the show running live in Vector, and I just downloaded a little DCV file. But it's amazing that we could be around the world learning these tools. And so Rheon's really interested in 3Play. So one of the other features of high-end trucks is the ability to roll replay.

53:32 And we will have that capability. Taylor's going to be in After Hours showing off this technology. This is amazing. It's running in the cloud. So this is what used to be a box. It used to be a TriCaster box. and you would plug your SDI in. We're running Zoom. So this is the show that we all jump into the stage. And what you're seeing here is basically all those inputs.

53:54 So this is like Zoom ISO, but it's native. Vmix could do the same thing. But there's so much more power under the hood, especially things like Replay. And these are the tools that serious professionals use. So I'm excited for the community to get their hands on these tools and super thankful again for Viz for sponsoring, or is that the right word? I guess it's a sponsorship

54:17 because they're allowing us to use their tools and they're not charging us anything. They're getting exposure by letting people like Rayon and whoever wants to jump into this meeting right after this one and play. So I'd encourage everybody to at least get the intro as to how this is running and how it operates and the quality that it can output. And Guy, for the uninitiated,

54:39 You mentioned at the beginning there about downloading a DCV file. What is that? So nice DCV is like a splash top or a parsec. So it's Amazon's version. So this particular VizVector is VizVector in the cloud. So they have a way of allowing. Let me see if I could show that dashboard. And is that something you have to pay for? I'm assuming this is a service or something you have to pay for.

55:07 It's something that they built. Okay, let me make sure there's nothing. Okay, so this is what the back end looks like. And so when you hit download, I don't actually want to, well, okay, I'll hit it. When I hit download, it should show me, yeah, so it just downloaded the DCV file. And then when I double click that, which I don't want to do because I don't want to interrupt if they're doing the show.

55:29 I know he's shadow cutting the show right now. But basically, it gives you a file. And this is the file that I was saying Rayon would just open up. And all of a sudden, he's in. So that's all the credentials. It's everything like, well, basically we have to whitelist your IP because it's one of these danger things, you know, where somebody could attack that thing.

55:47 But basically once we whitelist an operator's IP address, they get that nice DCV file. They can pop it open and now they're connected. They're in. They're controlling. It's just Windows essentially. You know, it's a fancy Windows instance just like the Azure instance that I was showing you with the little thing that I built. It's just somebody else's computer. That's all the cloud is.

56:06 And so we're running their broadcast grade software on a bulletproof machine. So it's exciting stuff. I mean, definitely come into After Hours and play. Awesome. All right, let's go to the next one. Coming in from Ceilings Grove, Pennsylvania, John Foltz asked, when Guy shot the cooking show, Matt in the Kitchen, with Benji, they used the DJI Osmos. I have a few of those and a Mac Studio.

56:36 How far away can I get the Osmos from the computer? And what do I need to make that work? I would like to use the PTZ in Ecang. All right, Ronnie, what do you think? Yeah, so I've done something similar. We tested using Insta360, both at 4K and 108060 for the newest one. And we use USB cables from a really nice company called AngelBird.

57:06 These USB cables are 14.8 or almost 15 foot and 4.5 meters for the rest of the world that understands meters and centimeters. And those cables can go into a type OWC USB hub and then go into your machine using, for instance, a 1.8 meter Thunderbolt cable. just remember the number of cameras will quickly add up and probably will saturate your USB part of the hub so to speak

57:44 so just be sure to not add too many for each hub because it will eventually hit a limit where you cannot add more data to the throughput but the distance is, as I said, around 15 feet or 4.5, almost 5 meters. It worked perfectly. I've tested cables up to 7.5 meters, which is a little bit more than 15 feet. I can't do the math in my head these days.

58:15 And using good quality cables, these cables from AngelBird are really flexible and they are also available in line color. so you make sure that no one trips over them when you are in a pinch and you need to stretch them between two chairs to get it to reach. So that's my two cents. All right, very cool. Those look like great cables and definitely a good company.

58:41 Guy, go ahead. Yeah, if you just wanted to see the behind the scenes of what John is talking about, I shot this video. It's called just Google search Ecamm PTZ Benji, the simplest multicam live streaming setup. And he walks through that setup with how he plugs it in. And you can watch this at your leisure and you can see how we populated Ecamm with those.

59:07 In regards to the length, I haven't tried the USB-C version of these fiber cables, but like here's a... Wow, that was just 15 foot and it's 256 bucks. That is a wow. I don't know about that. Yeah, so I just quickly searched because I had used USB-A with fiber cables to go over 100 feet. So like maybe this one, Home Depot, what?

59:36 Guy, that's got to be a mistake because look at the photo. That looks like a 50-foot or 75-foot cable. Look at the bundle of wires on that. Yeah, maybe it is. It's got to be a mistake. it'd be interesting to buy them off some someplace like Amazon where you can return them because if they don't work like this one says 25 feet 200 200 reviews so maybe maybe you can go 25

59:59 feet you let us know yeah Corning Corning also makes really good ones they're very like three four hundred bucks for for something like that but they're top notch absolutely all right so that'll bring us to the end of the Saturday show thanks to all the panelists for coming in this morning and answering all these questions. And of course, to you, the producers, yes, I'm looking at you

1:00:19 guys watching on the show right now. That's awesome. Thank you. We wouldn't have a show without you. And of course, the back end crew that wakes up every single day to do this show. Actually, we have people in the morning and the afternoon because we have afternoon shows as well. Couldn't do it without you. Really appreciate you being here. If we were to have travel around the

1:00:37 world virtually to answers all these all of these questions, according to the Tlalala traversal, That would have been 23,000 miles or 37,000 kilometers. That's 181 million bananas for scale. This was episode 23. Got a little time. Bye. Yeah, if you want to see an interesting film about the future and AI, immersive video, see Gore Verbinski's Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die movie from last year.

1:01:06 if you haven't seen it, it's kind of a scary prophecy of what we're all in store for as AI takes over and kills us all in the next four years. That's what I'm predicting. I think we're far away from AI doing that. Entertaining film. All right. Good show, everyone. Have a good weekend. Yep. It is Saturday. It's supposed to cool off here in Los Angeles, supposedly.

1:01:34 Just a few degrees. yeah it's cooled off here quite a bit what's the current cool don't you dare say cool yeah yeah don't you dare say cool yes ronnie's throwing a log on the fire 11 degrees celsius here who even knows what that is in fair who knows what is that fahrenheit celsius Maybe I should kind of put down a pole out on my lawn.