iPhone 18 Pro's Variable Aperture & Real-Time Depth Control

0:00 Hi, good morning, everyone. Welcome to Office Hours Friday. It's our media and production Q and A show. And we're going to pepper the beginning with a little bit of iPhone, uh, with the announcement this week, but, um, before we start, we're just going to pause for a moment today marks 25 years since September 11th, 2001. And for some of us, that's a pretty clear memory for others.

0:23 Maybe you learned about it or shoot, maybe you weren't even born yet, but, um, In this community, we've got people all over the world, dozens of countries, tons of time zones. But that morning, we were watching the same thing. You're in New York, you're in London, Sydney, Singapore, South Africa. It was a unifying singular event. And grief crossed a lot of borders that day.

0:50 But so did our instinct to help. So, I just want to take a breath right now and think about the thousands of people lost their lives that day, first responders who helped that day, the families who are even today carrying on the burden. I think 25 years later, we can honor them by continuing to help each other, choosing to show up for one another, and just focusing on making today better than yesterday.

1:23 Thank you. Let's get into the first question. First question this morning is coming in from Oliver Breidenbach from Memo Live headquarters. What use cases would you like to see for the iPhone duo? What is the killer app? Go ahead, Jason. So I think the killer app at this point would be anything that's teleconferencing. The FaceTime, the flexibility, being able to finally see people on a mobile device that, you know,

1:49 doesn't seem compromised like it has always for me on the iPad is definitely the way to go. Courtney? You know, one killer app that they did announce for it that I do appreciate, even though it's on an iPhone, is the fact that it can take portrait or landscape without turning the phone. You don't have to turn the phone to go to landscape mode.

2:13 So the 17 Pros have been able to do that. You know, how many years did it take for that innovation to make its way into a phone? with the current sensors and cameras. So that, I look forward to not seeing people do everything in vertical mode and use more horizontal mode video when they're out there, capturing that irretrievable muse footage that nobody else has

2:34 instead of holding their phone. Yes. Guy? Yeah, I'm looking at this and it's IBC today and I had to throw on my NAB badge just to feel like I was at a trade show for some reason. But this is where I would see this product be a boon for us. Could you imagine like four or five of us running around at NAB with these phones and

2:53 being able to do interviews and show where we're at? And I think it's a killer device. So looking at it, two grand though, that's quite the jump. So we'll see. I don't know. When it starts shipping, I just need to go to the Apple store, get my hands on it, see how good that picture quality is and see how robust it actually feels for something like

3:11 that. I think it's incredible to think about the really skeleton crew journalists who are out there with a phone and a monopod and a one by one. And they're out there kind of on their own. You've got to, in some regards, you've got a built-in confidence monitor if you can take advantage of that front screen and actually see your framing, see a return.

3:38 if somebody built some sort of app that you could almost put two up where you can see your frame but also see program, I think there would be some potential there. And I have one more idea, but I'm going to hear from Courtney first. The other nice thing that they did say about it for use is in that situation where you're shooting interviews or you're doing a man on the street

4:00 is it allows you to use both the front and the back display at the same time when it's opened up so that the person on the camera side can see an image of themselves or see what the camera is seeing, as well as you on the open wide side where you could have a Zoom call up or other apps up or your notes up

4:18 and a streaming feed so that you could see what the camera is seeing. And they can see either what the camera is seeing. I think you may even be allowed to, I don't know, this hasn't been sussed out yet since nobody has one in their hoppable hands, whether or not you can drag something to the other screen on the other side. That's going to be also helpful for any reporters in the field, let's say.

4:43 Yeah, if you look at this frame here that's up, you can see that example where she's showing the gentleman that she's shooting at the same time. So this is part of the iPhone Duo FaceTime portion of the slider. If you go jump to the Apple iPhone Duo page on their site, I'll put a link in the chat if you haven't seen it.

5:04 And I dig that because I find the most frequent time I'm doing a FaceTime or a Zoom call with friends and family, my favorite mode has been get an iPad Pro, put it on a monopod and stand it up to about that person's height. And I stick them in the room. whether we're sitting around a table or standing in the kitchen and talking back and forth.

5:29 It becomes very natural when your eyeline is looking instead of kind of at a computer screen with a nose shut. You're looking at them in a very natural way. And I feel like this is one of those things that has the potential with the right implementation to be one of those things that makes the technology disappear and lets us focus on the communication.

5:49 Alexander? So you mentioned com for saying that or it just occurred to me too. I think that's one of the cool Possibilities of something with multiple displays like this that's relatively portable and small is I just thought you know It'd be cool if you were in a zoom meeting and you could have the zoom gallery on one side of the display And then on the other side that they did okay, so that's it's already supported Wow

6:14 the other thing that I think about is if I rewind to 2024, and I think back to our time at NAB, we had built this rig that this was like an earlier Gen 1 version of it that quickly turned into a Gen 2 on the floor where we had our zoom panel in the little monitor here. Here we got, we, let me see. That was so much fun. Yeah, here's Edwin

6:42 with it. And what was amazing was you can kind of, you can see it all happen right here. So you've got this guy is not talking to some host off to the side of the screen. He is looking at the, at the panel and he is communicating with them directly, communicating to an audience online. So his view looks like this. Uh, so he sees we had the multi-speaker view on at the time.

7:07 So the most recent two active speakers were here and then we had this whole zoom panel underneath and that allowed us to connect anybody who couldn't be at the show right there in person. And then you can, I mean, I've got a ton of examples here of just where booth after booth, after booth, people are communicating directly with our panel. And, uh, on that day at that show, uh, it felt like we unlocked something there,

7:38 but the trouble with it was it's a big rig. I mean, if I look at this camera, the camera rig, it's not the biggest rig in the world, obviously, but when you're hoofing it all day with this thing, it starts to get tiring. And I had an idea of, okay, if we got an iPad mini or an iPad pro and we stuck it on the

8:00 monopod like I like to do with FaceTime, and then everybody can just look at that and nobody asked to hold it and you know slap an Insta360 or something on the top of it then you're not you're not walking around with this massive thing that's not fun to walk around with. Now the only trouble with that is my little iPad experiment looked like an art project. It was a

8:29 lot to it was a little fragile and it didn't it didn't look all slick. Now I'm thinking about okay if you can put the Zoom gallery on the front display that has the good cameras pointed at the talent, and then the operator can still see framing and what they're looking at as well as the return, or could even see something in comms.

8:53 Like if you had, you know, a text-based comms or something on the show there, in my mind, you could have the camera view that's looking out at the talent, and then you've got comms up here in the corner where you can get notes from the panel and then over here you can see the other gallery coming back. There's some pretty exciting, your brain

9:15 can kind of start with that seat and go from there. There's a lot of exciting ways that we could, I think, do event coverage with something like this. It would be so cool to send out four or five of these with the, you know, private 5G millimeter wave with dedicated bandwidth that's not crowded and all of a sudden we're able to bring the show to you know what Alex always did

9:39 the 99.999% of people who never ever could afford to get there couldn't get the visas couldn't get the travel time the time off of work but the audience that we're able to bring is so much larger that there's not only a lot of value for our audience but also a lot of value for the people who are on the floor there because it's like Guy has rolled up with an IV before and I'll let him

10:02 talk on that. But, you know, he's like, hey, I've got 200 of my friends in Zoom here. They're interested in your product. Do you have a minute? Everybody's going to say yes to that. Guy? Yeah, I was going to say that fatigue experience is very real for trade shows where you want to, you know, get high quality. And I get it. Are we doing conversations where no one's left out? Or

10:20 are we like, hey, I can only go an hour with this thing and I'm going to be I'm going to be done. And that's what happens when you have, to us, when you have an operator that's carrying something that large, they could maybe go two hours and you fried them. And if you're trying to go two or three days of coverage, it's pretty brutal.

10:37 So yesterday I was playing around with a little app that I made that basically would take an SRT feed. So from the field, we were running Lyrics Broadcaster. You guys could try this out. It's a little MXL thing that I've been working on. But basically, a guest would scan this QR code and then with that duo, you could have not only your feed, but you'd be able to see what was going on on the return.

11:01 So I see some fantastic use cases for this in that space where you want to see two screens essentially at once and have that camera. So I'm excited. I want to get one. But two grand, man, that's still a lot of money. But relative to the, I think back to the Sony DSR 500, that was 20 grand plus the $10,000 lens that I started with.

11:22 And it's like 30 grand versus, you know, two grand. What are you really saying? You know, with transmission. And if you were, and here's the calculation that I make. If you were planning to go out and shoot an event with an iPhone, you get an iPhone 18 Pro at, you know, one terabyte, two terabyte, 512, whatever it is, you've already spent the cost of

11:45 the iPhone 18 Pro to get it there. So the question that you have to ask yourself is not, is it worth two grand or three grand or whatever, if you really beef the storage up, I think it tops out at 3,200 US. The question is, is the second screen and the two-way communication and whatever app that you've built to take advantage of having monitors on both sides worth $800. If an 18 Pro Max to

12:12 this duo is an $800 Delta at every single storage level. So the question that I'm asking is, is that $800 worth not having to lug around this? Perhaps. I'm really excited to see what people are going to build for it and in the age of code being cheap with the help of our AI assistants, this could be the time where people are a little more free to play because they

12:42 don't have to, it's not as much of a gamble of their time and energy resources to get there in the first place. Next question. All right, this one's coming in from Oliver Breidenbach and Oliver asks, new Apple products now available as a lease with upgrade. Just convenient, or is there more to it? Courtney. Well, I think this is Apple's answer to the fact that because of the memory shortage,

13:08 everything's going to become $200 to $300 more expensive if you're going to put any kind of RAM in it. As far as the phones go, of course, carriers have been offering these kind of deals, where you're paying for the phone over a two-year contract period for decades now since the iPhone was introduced, the first one with AT&T. You were paying for that phone in installments.

13:33 But now they're offering this lease-to-upgrade payment plan where in addition to your – you can pay a monthly fee. In addition to anything that has a cellular chip in it like the iPad or the iPhones, you're going to be paying that along with your contract for your monthly fees for connectivity. So it's not really that much new at the end of the term.

14:00 I wonder if, you know, the problem is, you know, what the carriers used to do is keep charging you that inflated monthly rate even after they've long paid for the phone, you know, paid back the cost of the phone. and they're reaping in much bigger profits if you just continue the lease and continue to hold on to it at a monthly rate.

14:22 At the end of the lease, I think there's a buyout period, a buyout offer where you offer to buy it out at whatever is left, although there should be nothing left, but I'm curious as to what that buyout covers and how much extra it's going to cost for you to own the phone at the end of the lease period. So be curious to see what that is.

14:43 Yeah, it's interesting. They're even extending this to things like the watch. So I was running the numbers and I'm when I was I've pretty much for the last 10 years done an every other year thing for the watch. Like I'll buy the watch and then two, sometimes three years, I'll think about upgrading it. And then I've got if I don't have somebody to give that watch to as a hand me down,

15:09 it just sits and doesn't do anything. So in a weird way, I don't know if this is Apple making sure that, is this Apple making sure that they're continuing to get new products out because people are on this upgrade train? Like if people are on the lease program, they're going to get the new thing. And so there's a built-in customer base there.

15:30 Oddly, I did the watch with, I wanted the ceramic one. and it would have been like a thousand dollars for the watch new and then I did the 24 month lease thing because that's how long I was going to have the watch anyway and then it was like $30 a month I did the math and it's like okay so the lease over two years was $250 cheaper than

15:57 just buying the thing outright are they trying to make me are they trying to make me lease it And then at the end of the two years, if I wanted to keep it at that point, does that mean it's like, okay, you're either going to upgrade to the new one or spend $250 if you want to keep it? I'll be very curious in, I guess, 2028 to see what is it like at the end of that because I've never tried that before.

16:23 So, you know, I didn't need to lease it, but I probably didn't even need a new watch. But at this point, it's a small enough thing that I'm like, okay, why not? Like, let's just try it. Courtney? Yeah, one thing I forgot to mention too is the prestige factor because there are those in the Apple cult that always want to show everybody that, hey, I have money to burn.

16:49 I have the latest folding phone in the burgundy color because that color is not available on any other. So it signals the fact, you know, it's virtue signaling. It's signaling that you're wealthy and have money to burn. So, you know, my watch does everything those $300, $800, $1,000 iWatches do. And it cost me $11. And that's the... I have three of them sitting on the shelf.

17:16 So when this battery, which, by the way, lasts a week instead of a day and a half, starts to not hold as much of a charge, I just pull another one off the shelf and slap it on my wrist. $11. So that lets you know how much you're paying for that beautiful ceramic case that gives you the bragging rights of, look, I've got the iWatch.

17:41 No cheap Chinese knockoff here. And when back when they used to do staggered releases, I remember the iPhone was so much of a status symbol in China that I was at one of the Apple retail stores at the time. It's a long time ago. And we would have the same 20 people in line every morning. You could buy a max of two phones per day, but they would come for two weeks and buy two phones a day, buy two phones a day, buy two phones a day and then take them back.

18:12 because if you had the new i i that's the the whole uh conspicuous consumption status symbol thing was crazy to me because like you're gonna spend two three x on the phone so that you can have it for what three months before everybody else like you had to let them know i don't know that was weird next question this question is coming in from oliver breidenbach airpods 5 with

18:37 wireless charging case have an hour more battery life than without two different iPods? Yes, it is two different AirPods. So when they did the AirPods 4, so this is the one that doesn't have the in-ear little soft tip. This is just, it just sits like the regular pair of AirPods. Last time with AirPods 4, they did active noise cancellation and a wireless charging case came

19:03 with the one that was, you know, $30 more. And now it's active noise canceling on everything. And then if you spend the little extra money, you get the wireless charging case and an hour longer battery. So functionally, in terms of what they're actually doing, the two different AirPods are in your ears. The experience is the same. The difference is you're getting it for a little

19:27 longer and then you can smack it on an Apple Watch charger to charge it back up, which is actually super handy because if you get one of those, if you have a little charger stand that has the MagSafe on one side and the Apple Watch on the other, you can just smack the AirPods and it kind of floats there on your nightstand, which is quite nice. Especially if you're in a hotel

19:51 and you're trying not to have a million cords everywhere when you plug in just that little one thing on the bedside that has a watch charger on one side and a phone charger on the other, I found myself just throwing the AirPods on it as opposed to the watch a lot of the time. Next question. Paul Valhus in Austin, Texas asks, The foldable iPhone Duo is real for creators.

20:15 Is a fold-out screen a monitor, a teleprompter, or a gimmick? What would the panel actually do with it on set? That's interesting. We didn't talk about it from a teleprompter point of view before, but that's actually a pretty neat idea. Jason? It's not a bad idea. You'd have to get it high enough for your eyeline to make sense. I mean, honestly, what I think it really is because the camera is hobbled compared to the 18 Pro is the ultimate consumption device and the insanely cool iPad in your pocket.

20:51 Courtney? Yeah, I watched Marcus Brownlee's review of the Duo, and I can't remember which the selfie cam is under the screen, so it doesn't have a cutout for it. And it degrades the quality of the camera quite a bit. So bear that in mind because it's got those pixels in front of it, which is going to soften the image quite a bit.

21:18 So if you're using it as a teleprompter, if the inside camera, I don't know if it's the inside camera or the one when it's closed as the selfie camera. I'm not sure. It's the inside camera. The inside camera is underneath the screen. So it's got pixels in front of it. So bear that in mind. So it's not going to be near as sharp as the cameras on the back are.

21:40 So if you're using it as a teleprompter, you're going to degrade your quality. You could put that, but if you had it unfolded, you could have the teleprompter on the outside screen. And then your eyeline's a little messed up, but it's not in front of the camera anymore. But if it was just notes or just for messaging to on-air talent, I think there's potential there.

22:03 And again, this is not, it's a cell phone. I don't want to oversell it. It's a cell phone, but if you look at how many, if you take a look at the footage that shows up on cable news and on weather channels, it is not the top, top, top quality of what shows up on television. It is whatever we can get out with the lowest friction kit we can get.

22:34 And that's where I think there's an opportunity to raise the level up and to give people who are creating in that little slice of broadcast an ability to have a pretty innovative tool. And right now, because it's so new, it's all just possibility of, okay, well, what sort of production-focused app could you build so that you have the return feed and you have the ability to have either a teleprompter or text instructions if you're in a situation where you don't have comms?

23:11 again if people are doing stand-ups or a remote hit not even a remote hit if they're doing a pre-recorded stand-up there's not there's not necessarily comms in that situation but again if you I was at the was if it was a few years ago I think this was actually it was a couple it was 2019 so it was seven years ago there was something going on that was of note in the Vatican and I was

23:40 there not for that. But I went into St. Peter's Basilica and there were like seven people right in a row all doing a little stand-up with a one or two person crew with just, again, it was at the time, a phone and a one by one and a wireless microphone. So all of those people just now got a tool that puts them in a completely different space than they were before. And that's the cool

24:06 thing to me next question paul faul who's snows in texas has iphone 18 pro adds a variable aperture on the 48 megapixel main camera plus pro controls in the camera app real depth of field control on a phone does that change how you shoot b-roll alex knight absolutely this is a huge huge deal if you like taking photos on your phone um you know there's this there's been this trend where everyone

24:35 wants you know that typical blurry bokeh background but I'm actually against it in there's so many situations where I would have loved to have control where I want to be able to dictate how much depth of field I have and this is really going to change that because contrary to popular belief no I do not want a super blurry background for every damn photo that I take sometimes I want the background

25:04 in focus. Okay. Okay. I'm done. Jason. Yeah, I think it'll make a huge difference. And I'm, as a vision pro owner, I can say like, you know, I'm not afraid of spending the money, but I think I might sit out the duo purely because I'm a photographer first. Courtney. And one of the thing, you know, you've had computational photography for years where it

25:32 and, you know, fake the bokeh. So they've been able to do that for several years now on most phones, including the Apple's. But one thing this gives you with a real multi-leaf shutter is when you're shooting at night, you know, specular reflections and specular highlights can have those little star-like effects. And it's going to change the shape of all the lens flares that you see when you're shooting at night.

25:59 So that's going to be an interesting new addition photographically. Other than that, that stuff is very hard. You know, the inner lens reflections can be faked. You know, just ask JJ Abrams. But, you know, it's harder to do on a phone realistically, you know, without a lot of creative panache. and they're definitely leaning in hard to the aspirational aspects of what could be done with

26:29 the camera. I mean, you saw it in the way that the show opened. They had all of those different scenes where there's a huge dynamic range shift within the same frame with the, you know, a really, really dimly lit face and then fire in the background. They had an explosion in the background. there were a lot of shots where they're leaning into, okay, if you put an appropriate amount of

26:55 kit around it, like you can get some really cool images off the device. And in reality, are major, major productions going to do that? No. But they're trying to lean into that creator space and say, okay, but look at what's possible with this if you put the amount of work into it. And that's, for me, always exciting when you think about somebody who's just getting started.

27:16 Somebody that has this phone as a hand-me-down in a year or two and is just starting to make something or just starting to understand the grammar of video and editing and everything like that. they've got a pretty cool tool that as a young person they have the time piece they have an abundance of time that as you get into a higher level production people are putting dollars for

27:40 real tools because the dollars for those tools is less than all the extra time that they would have had to put into it um i think the other thing the other thing that i see with the with the camera on the 18 Pro is actually the digital negative where they're trying to encode the fact that this was the raw original unaltered image into the photo at capture so that when

28:11 somebody is trying to make sense of the world in the age of AI generated slop, they can actually see, okay, this is really what was there. I hope more people kind of glom onto that concept and that it is really as rock solid as Apple claims it to be because I think that's actually going to be more and more important as you go forward from a journalistic point of view.

28:34 Well, the Duo doesn't have that. That's the other thing. Right, and the Duo doesn't, specifically on the 18 Pro. The other thing that I always think about from a news gathering perspective is the higher quality and the more control that we can put into the hands of someone who's out in the field into something like a phone changes the game because an iPhone does not draw attention.

29:07 in the way that a big camera rig does. You don't have to be a journalist with a big budget and a media corporation behind you to afford an iPhone. A lot of people afford an iPhone. Apple's quite good at selling them, as a matter of fact. So when you pull that out into a situation at a live event where you're trying to, or at some sort of newsworthy event

29:32 that you're trying to capture from, you're not getting the eyeballs of security. You're not getting the eyeballs of authority. You're able to be incognito. But when you go to the kind of shots that Apple put out in the beginning of their event video, when you are doing an interview and the iPhone is still your only camera, you have the infrastructure to build enough kit around it so that when the person comes in,

30:02 they feel like it's been taken seriously and it's not amateur hour. So in a lot of ways the advancements in the more advancements that could put into a camera that's in the level of a phone that you can put in your pocket allows the journalist or whoever is capturing footage to be more of a chameleon and stand out as much or as little as they'd like and that's a pretty powerful

30:23 idea as well. Next question. All right, next up is from Andy Kokendorfer in Vieira, Florida. Andy asks, has anyone on the panel tried ChatCut, a ChatGPT video editing plugin? Thoughts? ChatCut. Courtney? I have not tried it. I guess I could try it if I weren't in the middle of the show here. I think it's browser-based here, and I don't know. Is it a way of, look, adding

30:52 AI slop to your to all your videos? Yes. It has a lot of editorial features so that it can make decisions for editing. It can create motion graphics. So if you're generating you want to generate charts or motion graphics to display whatever to emphasize whatever you're speaking about. It can do all of those annoying type of motion graphics that you've seen in all those

31:19 keynote and PowerPoint presentations. It does offer text-based editing. So if you go to this website that he put in the link there, you can just try it. This is a, I think this is a way, if this is actually paid for by ChadGPT, I guess it's a way of them adding a new revenue stream. You know, one thing I hate more than anything is these types of subtitles

31:40 that I've seen more and more on TikTok, you know, on videos that are on YouTube where it's like, you know, a karaoke screen for just the subtitle captions, and you can't turn them off, and they're highlighting each word, and your eye is going down there constantly. It's so annoying. Gosh. It does AI image generation built in, so, you know, you can create AI slop just like everybody else

32:08 and put it right in as you're editing. So it has all those great features. If you want to take – it is like expensive. This is a way – the costs are like $25 a month for the minimum up to about $160 a month. And you have different arrays of features. Here's the price cost if you're paying monthly. So it's going to be kind of pricey if you're – unless you're an influencer or somebody, you know, a major TikTok famous person.

32:42 it's going to cost you a lot of money to utilize that. So you better have a good business application or a business that's willing to fork over the $160 to have all the features turned on. So it's going to be kind of easy. From the things that I've seen, the latest Frontier models able to do, not necessarily in video, but just in general,

33:03 I think about where was I a year ago, two years ago, things have come so far that I'm actually willing to I would want to give this a look just to see what does the output look like, right? We're not that far away from Will Smith eating spaghetti. Things have gotten a lot better. But if you look at what ChatCut's claiming, it's okay.

33:26 We're going to be able to let you edit on the web or with an agent. We're going to allow you to create shorter versions, tighten up edits, turn talking head interview footage into a tighter cut. Like there's a way to interface with a video editing timeline in natural language. So if this ends up in front of anybody at ChatCut, I personally would love to talk to you.

33:52 I think it would be really cool to see what are you doing in the background that's enabling this, and what's your methodology and your logic for going through and actually making these cuts and making these decisions, and how much does the user have the ability to tune of, okay, this is how I like you to, I like L cuts and J cuts.

34:12 I don't like to do hard cuts here. Oh, well, if you're doing B-roll over a talking head, I want fades in between the B-roll, but I want it to be a hard cut when I go back to talent. And those, if I start to vocalize all those things and give the instructions in natural language, which is it going to make an instructions or a setup.md that's like, okay, this is how I like to edit video.

34:37 So that's a, I think we're at the point now where I want to give these sorts of tools another look to actually see what is the, what does the output look like? And really what I'd love is to see how do they work. And if you want to be part of that conversation, I would encourage you to go to officehours.global.com join because that lets you not only watch the video on YouTube, but also lets you know

35:02 when we're live. It lets you get into Makana to chat during the show, ask questions, vote on questions. And then also you get into our discord, you get into after hours. There's all this cool stuff that's around the show and this community is pretty cool. So check it out. OfficeHours.Global. Join. Next question. All right. This one's coming in from Joseph Walters in Cleveland.

35:21 What mics are you using today? I bought the tech zone and was curious. Alexander. Yeah, the TechZone X2 specifically I think is what you're asking about, Joseph, and I know a lot of people on the show used those. I did buy one and I have used it. Not using it now. It's a very good sounding microphone, don't get me wrong, for the money.

35:42 The one that I'm using right now, which you can just barely see at the bottom of the frame here, this is an AKG C414 BULS, which they do not make anymore. I like this microphone. it is pretty I would describe it as it is very pretty flat in terms of frequency spots like it's not super exciting like some of the other AKG that mics have honestly I feel like it could probably

36:08 be it could probably have a little more high-end it's kind of a boring sounding microphone so it certainly has its use cases a lot of people like using these older mics for taming harsh sounding sources. I may be switching out my mic. It depends. I'm going to be getting a mic put together from Vanguard Audio, my friend at Vanguard Audio Labs, Derek, he owns that company. He makes microphones.

36:34 And I asked him if he could build one of the FET microphones in a black casing. And he says that he's able to make it in a matte black finish. So it's going to be a lot larger of a microphone than this one, but I have actually never used a Vanguard audio microphone before, so I'm excited to try that out, and I will report back when I get it.

37:01 Courtney. Yes, I am using the old Stellar X2 from TechZone, and I even have a spare. Look, when they were last on sale. There it is. My backup Stellar X2, I now have stereo. So I like the sound of this microphone. It's cheap. That's the reason I bought it originally. And I listened to the sound of it in several comparisons to much more expensive dynamic,

37:27 I mean, much more expensive condenser microphones. It's not as versatile, although it is tailored. It's very well built. And I've torn it apart several times and looked at the internal construction of it. It separates the power supply board as separate from the audio preamp board. So it keeps those things isolated. It has a really good capsule with the diaphragm is sourced from Japan.

37:53 And the guys that build it here in California are very exacting. They pick their components, match their components in the transistors, etc. So they take a great deal of care in turning them out. You get a chart of its frequency response when it comes. So wait till they're on sale. You know, when they're not on sale, they're like 300. They're the price of most other good dynamics like the IOPR 40 and the Shure dynamics.

38:24 But wait for them to be on sale. You can get them on sale during Black Friday and during Prime Day. Usually is when they put them on sale. They were on sale for $84 this year when they were put on sale. Then they jump up the next day after those sales over to $340, something like that, or $390. So I'm using one now, but I'm using a lot of, I may not sound as good because my throat is a bit congested this morning.

38:53 And I've got personalized audio turned on because there's a huge air conditioner that's trying to get a jump on the heat dome that we're in. It's 85 degrees in here right now, and it's been on for five hours. guy yeah that that mic is a heck of a value that stellar x2 it surprises me because you know the popular mic right now is a sure sm7b and that thing goes for you know four times the price

39:21 versus that one on sale so um it does count though with your entire chain when you start to look at okay you got a mic that's 84 bucks can you throw more money downstream because right now I'm using noise removal so here's what it sounds like if I go original sound so I should have picked up a few dB it's not a little bit fuller now but maybe

39:42 you'll hear a little bit more noise this is me coming in from Seattle Washington with a little bit more fullness and noise assist is on my sound devices mix pre 6.2 which I'm probably gonna take out of the chain and just go direct into my role in UVC which has just okay preamps but are you guys hearing actually Actually, you sound a lot thinner and lower when you turn off the noise assist.

40:07 Yeah, that was surprising. That was odd. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. I'm going to have to run some more tests, but yeah, MixPre is going out. Yeah. Look at this back on YouTube after the show. Okay. Will do. Thanks. Take a listen. And I have a similar chain, I think. I'm also on the Stellar X2, and that's going into a MixPre 3 with noise assist before it

40:31 goes into the Mac Mini and now it's a zoom. And if I turn down my noise assist, now you're going to start to hear the air conditioner vents in the background because it's also quite warm here in, uh, in Southern Ohio. But, um, I am a fan of the Stellar X2. Also, I, uh, I tried the Stellar X3 for a while because I thought more numbers is better.

40:54 Um, and it turns out that I liked the sound of my voice on the X2 a lot more. And if you go on Amazon today that mic looks like it's about $300 or $320. But if you look at the price history, you can see that there's also a lot of deals on there. So if you look in here, that mic has dropped

41:17 down all the way as low. I think there was a period earlier in the year where it was under $100. So there definitely are times where you can have deals. But really with any microphone, you've got to make a qualitative choice about what mic sounds good with my voice, what's the money that I want to spend on it, and does my whole chain support not only the signal chain,

41:37 but also the room that I'm in support that specific type of microphone. Guy? Yes, I wanted to come back now with the original sound with the noise assist completely at zero. Now you should hear, I'm going to pause so you can hear the noise. Yeah, okay. And now I'm going to go back to noise removal in Zoom, and now this is me coming in with noise removal on regular zoom no more noise

41:59 assist and this should sound pretty decent. Guy Cochran pretty decent yeah I could go down a few if you if I bail tomorrow and that's if that's what they throw on my headstone pretty decent I think I'd be I'd be alright with that. Next question. Alright this one's coming in from Douglas Carmichael the latest DaVinci Resolve, that's 21, has built in MCP server.

42:28 Have any of you tried connecting Resolve to ALLM? Jason? I have, but just take my word for it. It's cool and I can't talk about it. Okay, Guy, I think you've dabbled in this as well. Yeah, I got excited when I first saw OpenClaw start to do a gentic thing. And then I saw the Behringer MCP that got put up where it was controlling the faders.

42:56 So seven months ago, I might be the first person to have ever made a DaVinci Resolve MCP. So I put this video up on YouTube that got 3,800 views six months ago. So it's titled, We Just Broke DaVinci Resolve Open With AI, Here's How. And this release, they basically show what I demo here, but they're missing some things. Mine actually can tell you what the video is because I'm using something called Moon Dream.

43:23 So if you go onto GitHub and you look at my Resolve MCP server from seven months ago, you'll see edit by talking. So theirs isn't that. So mine, you can talk into it. You can see what the timeline is with AI Vision through something called Moon Dream. And then here's the 53 different tools. so I haven't loaded theirs up yet but I was watching the video

43:49 that this person put up Team 2 Films and it's very similar to what I built theirs is cooler in a lot of ways it does rely on transcription so you can watch this video I'll put a link in the chat where you can see how she's using it with Claude so an MCP server is basically the link that allows you to plug in

44:07 your OpenAI, ChatGPT or Claude and then start to use you've got to connect the MCP to your DaVinci Resolve and you're running it locally and then you'll start to get cuts and whatever you want to do. Output, one of the things I always liked doing was as I was driving to be able to say, and go ahead and kick out that timeline

44:33 to my YouTube folder with these three different settings and it would do it with different color grades or different titles and different languages. So really cool stuff. It's the future. Next question. All right, next up is coming in from Paul Valhus in Austin, Texas. IBC opens today. Pick your top thing to see out of the Red Shark top 10 list. Courtney Gooden.

44:59 Of course, we haven't had a chance to look at this on the panel here because we've been stuck here. I took a brief look at it during the interim there. You know, one thing that they did announce is Adobe had a lot of announcements for Premiere. And one thing, one feature that they highlighted in the article here was the ability using AI to separate overlapping dialogue.

45:24 And this has been a bugaboo of production for years. Actors hate the fact that they have to keep their dialogue separate when you're shooting a close-up of one actor and you have a heated argument going on. The other actor has to make sure that they don't step on the lines of the actor that's on camera with their off-camera dialogue because it contaminates the on-camera dialogue.

45:44 So now using AI and with this tool that's built into Premiere, you can use AI to separate the off-camera dialogue and clean up the on-camera dialogue so that the actors can now overlap, which is what they love to do because it gives them the feeling and the spontaneity of the scene. where they're supposed to be having a heated argument, and it drives them nuts when they have to separate their dialogue

46:09 and deal with overlaps. Or things like when the director goes, and action, and the actor jumps the action cue and overlaps the director's action call. So the sound editors have to go in and try and cut that opening line, and they hear the overlap, hear the ch-t of the director's calling action overlapping. So you can now clean up that kind of stuff.

46:32 Also, Blackmagic Design introduced Resolve 21.1, and I haven't had a chance to look at that. I don't know if any of you have downloaded the latest version. It was announced just before the opening of IBC, so it's brand new, with a whole bunch of improvements there. So I haven't had a chance to take a look at that. But that's something that I want to take a look at, and Sony has introduced the Nikon new RED combo camera, cinema cameras.

47:00 So they've got some new products there to take a look at. When I get a chance, I'm going to take a look. Guy? Yeah, and there's a lot of stuff missing on here. I know Jonas is there showing some of his CloudFlex stuff. And on LinkedIn, he had put up something about MXL. And I'm super interested in MXL and DMF right now.

47:19 I think they're going to be showing ZoomISO Cloud because they showed it in the Grass Valley booth. I walked by the booth at NAB. See, badge, remember? I feel like I'm at the trade show. The laptop, I think it was Andy's laptop, was sitting there in the Grass Valley booth running Zoom ISO cloud. So I'm interested in seeing how this MXF format allows video to come into a system and then get shared around.

47:44 And in Jonas' LinkedIn post, he says that he has this demo where he's going to be tossing around MXF at the show. And I know they did that at NAB. So if you haven't done any research on MXF, start looking at it. I think it's the future of broadcast. So get interested in it. It is a lot of fun once you get some of the knowledge and figure out what it can do.

48:06 Also, hey, Jonas, we love Spacecoms. Check out Spacecoms at IBC. Thanks, Dave Trautman, for the nod on that. Premiere looks like Adobe's got a new color mode in Premiere that it would be interesting to see. They're saying it's color grading reinvented for video editors. I would be really curious to sit in on a technical demo of that and see somebody who actually has a couple of reps in,

48:28 go ahead and grade something. And then I think the other one that would be cool to see is the Sony booth is always massive at these shows, and they have some cool stuff to kind of... You mean the Sony wing. The Sony, exactly. Welcome to the Sony wing. It's nice to be able to actually get your hands on cameras and talk to people.

48:46 I remember when there was one camera that we thought would be a really cool alternative to an FX3 as a webcam. And then we found out that they were just trying to build a very small camera to shoot miniatures and things like that. And they're like, yeah, this would get so hot, it would not be good to be on for hours and hours a day.

49:06 So those are sorts of questions that you can ask people in person at a show that aren't going to make it to a press release. It's nice to actually talk to someone who has a little bit of engineering know-how, but I'd be curious to see the FX5. And they also have some new monitors. I think it was called the DP5 and the DP7.

49:26 It's a 5- and 7-inch color-accurate monitor that you would, I guess, tack onto one of their cinema cameras, but then not only have monitoring, but also have direct control so that if you couldn't actually physically touch the camera, that you'd have that control elsewhere. I know there's other ways to do that, but it's always curious to see something new that someone's trying to take an approach there.

49:50 Next question. All right, this one's coming in from Douglas Carmichael. Douglas asks, what does everyone think of the new Yamaha DM5 consoles? Mr. Knight. Haven't had a chance. I did see the press release the other day for this. I haven't really had a chance to look at all the spec changes. So they've announced two new consoles. There's the DM5. So everyone knows the much more expensive, larger, bigger brother, the DM7.

50:20 And everyone knows the giant chasm gap between the, you know, sub $3,000 little 16 channel Dante enabled DM3 and the DM7. And actually, they're not even close to being similar other than just the fact that the preamps shares the same preamp technology. It doesn't have the same processing power. The operating system looks and feels different. The busing structure is different. but so they've announced the dm5 and they've also announced a smaller dm5 compact and i haven't had

50:55 a chance to really look at them too much to be honest with you and uh i was talking to mickey about this and i think he said that the dm5 compact is 10 grand if that's the case and that's in u.s dollars assuming that that's accurate you're going from say a dm3 which is like a $2,000 console to $10,000, it's still going to be a very, very large gap. So make no mistake,

51:18 this is not just supposed to be a slightly beefed up DM3. This is really just a, you know, smaller DM7 that's supposed to be more affordable, but it's still pro level and you're going to pay pro level pricing for that. So I still feel, I'm still frustrated. It's got to see, it's got the Rupert Neve processing that the bigger DM7 has. So what I'm still frustrated about is that there

51:46 isn't something that's more capable that is a little more money than a DM3 but not 10,000 plus dollars. And so I still feel that there's space in the market in Yamaha's product lineup. And you know what? Maybe the solution is going to be that because they're a little long in the tooth now the TF series of digital mixers those are overdue for a refresh so perhaps maybe what

52:15 Yamaha will do is they they will make those the larger more affordable consoles that have the expansion slots because if you need more processing more channels more IO that kind of thing the TF series was the way to go without you know spending more than five thousand dollars so those are due for a refresh so I'm anticipating something I don't know when they're

52:36 going to refresh that if that's going to be announced later this year or if it's going to be announced next year but we're probably reasonably close to a refresh of that entire product climate don't get me wrong I love the DM3 I think for a small little mixer it is very capable it serves a certain segment of the market that is people that don't require a lot of IO or a lot of buses

52:59 but it is very good in a very small form factor. I love the large touchscreen on the DM3. I just wish it had a little more processing power. One of the things that frustrates me on the Yamaha operating systems, I just find that navigating menus, it's a little sluggish, and I don't know if that's just the processor. I've always found Yamaha consoles just a little bit sluggish,

53:24 so I don't know if it's just they're running really bad code, but they don't they're not as snappy as say an Allen and Heath console is like if you look at any of the Allen and Heath SQ consoles they they're just much more responsive and actually speaking of Allen they just refreshed that whole SQ lineup with the SQ plus so I don't know who's

53:45 going to buy this new DM5 and DM5 compact maybe churches will buy it but it's not at a price but like for me I don't have 10 grand or 12 grand for a console right now so it's kind of out of the budget of what I want to spend but certainly it will serve a certain segment of the market and making the chat mentions that he would take a look

54:04 at the at the sea the compact version of that which he said in chat was $8,000 a sweetwater has on their pre-order for 7,000 so it's it's starting to get closer to that that price territory hey if you're hanging out in office hours and we're making you laugh and made you think maybe we saved you money maybe you're just wanting to support what we do, bringing this all to the world every day,

54:29 check out officehours.global.com. We're a nonprofit, and our mission is to try and increase media education every single day and have thoughtful conversations, but we are largely member-supported, so if you go to officehours.global.com, you can chip in there, and we'd appreciate it. Next question. All right, next question's coming in from, as soon as this switches, there we go, Paul Vahus in Austin, Texas, is asking, Zoom AI Companion now takes notes inside Teams and Google Meet calls to AI note takers in every meeting helpful or the end of candid conversation.

55:06 Courtney. Yeah, I haven't had a chance to dive real deep into this just to look at it briefly here. But it's interesting that this Zoom AI companion works cross-platform so that it can listen to and take notes. This sounds like a security nightmare. In your Google Teams, I mean in your Microsoft Teams and Google Meet meetings, you can access it for free, but it does have limits.

55:37 and you can buy, you know, and it is available or will be available. They're rolling it out slowly for people that have subscriptions to Zoom. So this, like I say, I haven't seen how the security is going to work on it because a lot of times corporate meetings, they will have strict things where you cannot record that meeting. I know my union meetings, which we conduct over Zoom.

56:07 are not allowed to be recorded, and they have a lot of that stuff turned off, the ability to record locally. So I wonder how this interfaces with that. It also has this application, the AI Companion, and does basically, it takes the audio and transcribes it into text and then summarizes it and extracts things out of it and does summaries. It also can, in a meeting that has charts and graphs, it can analyze the charts and graphs and give you a text-based description of what's going on on screen.

56:43 So that sounds useful. But like I say, is this going to be a security nightmare? Is it going to have to announce it, that it's recording this meeting? or is it going to have to get permissions from Microsoft Teams and from Google Meet before you can enact its usability for you if you want it to take notes on the meeting itself. So it's interesting how that's going to be handled.

57:11 It also has a mobile phone application so that you can just, if you're having an in-person face-to-face meeting, you can turn it on. It'll record your conversations and extract a summary for you in text later. And that also sounds like a legal nightmare. And the way that I've seen it, because I participate in Zoom meetings, in some Google Meets, as well as some Microsoft Teams.

57:39 When I see a Zoom AI note taker show up as a, it shows up as another participant in a meeting. So that lets other people know that it's there. And then I've also seen they have a notes feature that you can take transcripts as well. You know, we've said it on the show before that, you know, word-for-word transcripts of meetings is something that is both incredibly useful

58:08 and something that is worth considering, like Courtney said, the security implications of it. And, you know, do you want every word of that meeting to get out there? One thing that Zoom does that I really like is, and it's something that I've enabled for my organization, is the zero data retention policy, which basically says that as soon as the meeting's over and the transcript is created, the recording is destroyed.

58:33 And then once the transcript of that meeting has been tokenized, the transcript goes away as well. So you can't go to a meeting that happened in the past and say, hey, regenerate a new summary of this meeting based on this other prompt because the transcript isn't there anymore. So what zero data retention allows you to do is if you have meetings that are sensitive, you can have those transcriptions happen, have those little summaries happen.

59:02 but kind of in the way that Apple is now kind of, I think, taking a page out of their book with their Siri recap feature, is just saying, okay, that recording doesn't exist. You cannot play back the recording. Zoom can't play back the recording. And as soon as the meeting's over and the transcript happens, that meeting is destroyed. And then as soon as that transcript has been processed and summarized,

59:27 that transcript is destroyed as well. So if you are in a security-conscious situation, take a look at potentially enabling zero data retention for your organization. That's going to wrap us for Friday. Thanks for joining us today. If you are around tomorrow, we actually have some pretty cool stuff happening around the show, or I should say just after the show. Taylor Sunderhouse is going to be in After Hours after tomorrow morning's show to be working in VizVector.

59:58 So if you're curious to see the way that we're using software switchers and utilizing VizVector and getting ready to use more of it in some of our production pipelines, check us out there in After Hours. Thank you so much to our panel for being here. I've said it almost every show, but no one of us is as smart as all of us, and we really appreciate the perspective, even if it's a couple hot takes as we're excited about the potential for the future.

1:00:23 Thank you to our back-end crew for helping keep us not only looking sound good, but also keeping us organized. There is a massive village of people that keeps this community going every single day, all volunteer, and we appreciate every one of you. Also, thank you to our producers for asking such great questions, not only about the new cameras and new tech that we're excited to maybe get our hands on,

1:00:46 but also every single day about media and production in general. Can't do it without you. The Tlaloc traversal today, had we gone around and asked these questions in person, we would have gone 23,000 miles, that's 37,000 kilometers, and 185 million bananas for scale. There it is, the Imperial Banana. See you in after hours. Imperial Banana. OfficeHours.com slash join if you're not in after hours and you want to see VizRT, or VizVector.

1:01:15 All right. I'm wondering if that AI summarizes, then destroys the transcripts. If it hallucinates, it covers its tracks by destroying the transcripts. You'll never know if it's hallucinating since it deleted the transcripts. I think it's AI's evil plot to kill us all, as we've heard about the last three days. To audit. I'm going to go actively lobby my wife to get a Fold instead of a Duo or get a Duo instead of a Pro so that I can have her be the guinea pig and play with it.

1:01:51 That's how I can get the tax write-off and play with the thing. Brilliant. Yeah, the one terabyte version is going to be like three grand though, I bet. $2,700. Yeah, they put up the pricing yet.