NDI Mixing (HX-HX2-HX3) and SDI Reliability

0:00 Hey everyone, good morning. Welcome to Office Hours Global, where we answer your media and production questions. We've got a nice big stacked panel today. So if you have questions, throw them into askofficehours.global. That's askofficehours.global and we'll start to see those filter in. Also, if you're in a Mucana backend, you can throw them in there as well. But we've got a big panel, so let's get to some answers.

0:21 Alexander, what's the first question? First up this morning is coming in from Harold Williams in Portsmouth. I want to take portraits and upload them to a watch folder. so ProPresenter will display them on the television monitor. Landscape format images work fine. How do I make portrait formatted images show upright automatically? All right, we'll go first to a man named Brady. That's a name you can trust.

0:43 Yes. How are you, Harold? I've done something similar at work using FFmpeg. There are a bunch of filters you can throw that'll give it that look like you'll see on the news where they put a vertical video on. the input can be changed to JPEG versus mp4 I'll put a link to us what was it where was it a sub stack or something video stack exchange has a good link that instructs

1:12 you on that whole thing and it's it can be set up to a watch folder so you just drop things in it process it and spits it out on the other side and makes it all ready for you Chris Sabato so it It sounds like from the question, what he's actually having trouble with is that he's taking portrait photos, and when he pulls them in, they're coming out landscape.

1:33 And if that's what's happening, I think we need to know more information about the process because that shouldn't happen, right? That metadata should be embedded in the camera when you take it, and it should persist throughout the process. So any modern camera, any modern Mac and Windows that should just work. And so I think we would need to know more to kind of figure out where the hole is in your process.

2:02 I'm doing a quick search on some forums about this particular issue. You're not alone here. It looks like ProPresenter ignores the EXIF tag that actually rotates, that tells the camera to rotate it. And so what you need to do is rotate it with something else before it gets into that hot folder. But Fenwick might know something about this. No, I'm just going to totally agree with you.

2:24 That's clearly what's happening is that ProPresenter is designed to fill screens. And somewhere along the way, either A, programmers didn't understand XF tags, or B, they decided to ignore them. But I would think that there would be some sort of way to make a, actually I know there is, to make like a watch folder where instead of just throwing them straight into ProPresenter,

2:51 you could probably throw them into a subfolder that would go, oh, I need to rotate this image. But also, come on, it's not that hard. Just rotate it. Yeah, I think the other, you might be able to use some AI coding assistant to help you with, okay, if the camera has the rotate exif tag, rotate the image and then resave it out as already rotated before it gets in there as part of the pipeline.

3:22 So you could, in theory, throw all of your pictures into that preliminary folder and then have it come over. Bill? This is just an aesthetic thing for me. But every time I'm watching television, I see somebody who took a vertical video when they did the old traditional. We're going to blow it up and map the vertical over a horizontal, slightly out of focus or majorly out of focus version of it.

3:47 I just think that looks old now. And it really bothers me. And it says you didn't, for some reason, you didn't know you were going to have to use both vertical and horizontal. You didn't prepare for it. And I don't know why, but I was thinking about that in terms of 70 millimeter IMAX and the fact that it's really more a square kind of format than it is wide now.

4:09 So there's contemporary things where people are not necessarily shooting the way they shot before. Instead of 100% horizontal or 100% vertical, more and more people, I think, are cheating and shooting almost like a red cross symbol and trying to keep all their major content in the center of it. And I just wonder whether anybody else was having the same reaction I do to that look and thinking it really dates a piece of content badly if it looks like you didn't think anything through before you shot.

4:39 Now, having said that, some days I understand you're given footage, you can only do what you can do. But does anybody else feel the same way I do that? It just looks weird when you see that again. Fenwick? Yeah, I think it looks crap. I think a couple things I will tell you that it is very easy to rotate an image. I believe, and I'm sorry, Harold, I don't know if you are using a Mac or a PC,

5:03 but in preview on a Mac, I believe once you open the image, you just hit Command-R and it'll go boop, boop, boop, boop. Four positions for that. And you can do the same thing in your iPhone, by the way. You see people that do this all the time. They take a picture and for whatever reason, it's like, you know, it's not quite straight enough.

5:21 And they're sitting there trying to look at it like this, like, oh, I've turned it too much. Hit the edit button. Hit the crop button at the bottom. Up in the upper left-hand corner, you can go boop, boop, boop. And it just goes blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, four positions. And when you're done, hit save. The XF data is forever changed. Super easy to fix.

5:41 Yeah, fun fact, you can actually, you don't even need to open it in preview. If you have the image open in Quick Look, like you just hit the space bar and it comes up to the preview on the Mac, you can hit Command R and it'll do it, which is pretty handy. Are you kidding me? Nope. In the chat, John Wallace says for ProPresenter, if you go Media Bin Inspector and then Properties tab, you can set the rotation to 90 or 270, which can be automated.

6:03 And you can also set the scaling to scale and blur and it'll keep the image upright. Next question. All right. This one's coming in from Jackson Shafir in Tamil Nadu, Indiana. What are your opinions on the... India? Oh, okay. I wasn't sure if that was India or... Hey, Jackson. What are your opinions on the EBU's Ograph for broadcast graphics, and what's the current state of its usage in the industry?

6:30 Courtney. Well, I wouldn't know about its current state of usage. I just saw this and had never heard of Ograph before, And the EBU operates, those of us in America don't necessarily see the EBU that much. This is a look at their white paper. There's a white paper on that website. And it's a proposal for formatting, using a format for web-based graphics for overlays and things like that.

7:05 and this gives you the method and it'll handle all the different flavors of JSON, etc. And so for you programmers that want to generate graphics in the cloud using web browsers for overlay, they have the manifest model. You have to have a manifest that is a file loaded and everything has to be in a certain folder. So it's fairly strict. And this is basically the list of the JSON file

7:34 that is the manifest. So you've got to adhere to all those rules and put all those little lists of things in there. And it can then render all your on-screen graphics either animated or not animated for you in the cloud in a browser. So something to look at. And EBU, of course, is good at creating standards. They created the broadcast wave standard.

8:01 Fools that they are. and I've had a beef with them about that for 30 years now. But yeah, because they don't know about NTSC. But anyway, broadcast graphics, that's their proposal. So go to lograph.eb.io if you want to learn about it and maybe vibe code something that will take your online broadcast graphics and put them in a browser. Bill, most people here will already know what EBU is,

8:31 the European Broadcast Union. It's one of many. We've got all sorts of standard bodies out there. And my fingers are crossed that eventually, now that we're in digital video and rasters are just pretty simple. There's a lot of standards. And I think it's time to kind of coalesce on some digital things that everybody can get along with. This is nuts after all these years.

8:52 But that's me being grumpy old guy. And they're listing on the site that Chiron, Blackmagic, and Matrox are on there as supporters. Now, I don't know what that means in practice on their individual switchers, but then, you know, but you don't see somebody like Ross on there. So emerging, it also says that, or apparently the Nordic countries in the UK are listed as the, some of the, some of the featured countries that are adopting it.

9:20 So I wonder if we got, if only we had somebody in Norway, we're going to have to, we're going to have to reel in Ronnie Hofsoy. Get him in here. Next question. Next question is one of mine. Anyone see the Blackmagic announcement for Generation 6 Color Science? It's in the 10.3 camera update. What impact will that have on production? Jason Bache. Well, yeah, I did.

9:45 And it looks to be all about skin tone. And anytime Blackmagic does something neat like this, it's going to have to do with the real nitty gritty. Generation 5 was a huge step forward. and Generation 6 looks like a refinement therein and it just looks great. They've also played a lot with red, which is, you can imagine, plays back to skin tone

10:10 and the way that everything looks. And of course, in true Blackmagic fashion, their actual guy looks extremely non-contrasty and very low saturation. Hell. Yeah, and if you start shooting something or you get footage that is Gen 6, you're going to just bake into your production timeline that you're going to have to tweak some of your LUTs. If there's a change in color science, that means that your LUTs are going to be different, so you're going to have to make sure that it still looks good and it's not just going to be automatic.

10:47 if you don't have the time or bandwidth to go ahead and reformulate all your stuff, then have that communication with the production up front if you can and ask them to not go to the new thing until you've actually built it. Next question. All right, this one's from Paul Vahus in Austin, Texas. Supertone clear and accentize DX revive claim to rebuild speech.

11:11 Not just denoise is regenerated dialogue ethical for a documentary interview. Alex Knight. Well, I can't make a statement that says that it is or it isn't because, you know, I can only comment what I would or would not do. DaVinci Resolve has had this feature for a while now, and it's surprisingly good. It's not a while. It's a fairly new feature in DaVinci Resolve Studio.

11:39 I think you've got to pay for it. But it seems to work decently well, and this technology is evolving rapidly, and it keeps getting better and better. I was it's able to take audio from something that I've done and just relatively convincingly recreate that person's voice. I'm struggling to think of a scenario where I would need this. If there's bad dialogue, that's what ADR is. You get the actor or get someone to come back in and

12:06 redo it. If it's a voiceover, redo the voiceover. If there's a problem, you know, if it's location sound based, you would just redo it. There are tools inside the software programs that we use to match the ambience. There are techniques you can use to, you know, when you do ADR so that it doesn't sound like it was just done in some ISO booth and it doesn't match the environment that

12:28 the actor was actually in on set. So would I use it? No. Is it ethical? That's for other people to decide. Bill? I'm going to talk about the ethical part of this because this has been a problem. Well, not just the problem. It's kind of been a universal worldwide difficulty since generative speech became so easy to do and the chips became so sophisticated. It is now very hard to tell the

12:50 difference between something that was generative, at least in short spurts. Usually if I'm listening to something for five minutes, I'll find a telltale clue that what I'm listening to was never touched a human vocal cord. But so much of it is so easy to produce. And the economics of using generative speech in all of its forms, whether it's a benign little thing like,

13:16 this should have been plural, and it was singular, and the actor misspoke, and I just want to stick an S on the end of that so I don't have to reshoot it. Almost everybody would say, yeah, that's probably fine. But we're now getting these things where we're starting to creep into the world of forced emotion in generative speech and things like that. So I think the ethics

13:39 discussion needs to continue to move as fast as possible because, boy, it's getting hard when you're just watching content to figure out whether something is real or 100% manufactured for a purpose of fooling you. And that's not good for society, in my opinion. Yeah. And the thoughts about, or the debate, rather, on AI versus human-generated speech aside, it should note that neither of those plugins are actually doing AI speech. If I look

14:13 in the chat, we've got a lot of comments that are, Mickey and others are mentioning that these don't actually use AI to generate the speech. So the question about these plugins is a little separate from the actual debate on how do we feel about the use of it. Courtney? Yeah, I don't really like the sound that it generates. It is not generative AI.

14:40 It's basically, it separates the actual speech that was recorded from the background sounds, kind of like the filter that I'm using right now on Zoom, So they have a version of this called personalized audio. And I use it for removing the sound of the garbage trucks outside of the phone ringing or the air conditioner behind me. And it manages to find my voice and send it through in real time.

15:06 This Supertone also does the same thing. They do have a real-time version of it. It can either process or do it real time. So it's doing a similar thing. I think they use something like this. If you watch the Apple keynote for the iPhone Duo intro, all of those people sounded exactly the same. Regardless of their environment, whether they were in that curved glass parabolic mirror hallway or on a green screen stage, we don't know, or outside, they all sounded close mic'd with an open condenser microphone.

15:42 that nice clean, no lavalier noise, you know, that sound that a lavalier generates. But it was so clean and so pristine and so sterile, it kind of took you out of what you're looking at. I kind of like camera perspective so that you hear a little more echo on a wider shot and it sounds a little more intimate on a close-up and a two-shot, you know, you hear other things,

16:10 you hear the other act of breathing, things like that. these plugins that uses neural networks to basically sterilize the audio, it sounds like somebody ADR'd a movie, and that sticks out to me. And unless ADR is done properly with the proper mic distances and adding in the proper amount of reverb, et cetera, to match the surrounding sound and dialogue, it sticks out like a sore thumb.

16:36 So ethical or not, I don't think there's ethics involved. You're not really changing the person's voice. You're not putting different words in their mouth. So ethics, I don't think, becomes involved. It's more taste than anything else. Yeah, I actually thought this Apple event was a little weird. When they went to voiceover, there was a distinct change in the quality of the voice versus the actual presenting when they were on camera, which I thought was really weird.

17:08 It stuck out to me more than it did. And at first I watched it with a group here in After Hours, and I thought, oh, that's just something with the way that it's being compressed and then retransmitted. And then later that night I watched the event a second time because my wife makes snide comments and rolls her eyes at all the superlatives, which helps keep me centered, I think.

17:30 And so, but then I listened to it like on the TV with the good sound system, and it was even more apparent then. So, yeah, I don't know. There was something a little odd there. Bill? Well, I'm just fascinated with Courtney. What you said really kind of sparked something in me because the variability of sound, which you're attuned to having been on sets and listening to people for your entire career,

17:58 I'm hearing less and less of that. And I'm hearing more and more heavily processed because we need to get the voice out front sound. And I'm just wondering if in doing that kind of processing, and this may be for the people who work in sound who are watching this show and are thinking about how much compression, how much limiting, how much messing with the sound's original character in order to make sure that it stays way out front and the information is delivered, how much that's taking away from the nuance of people paying attention to sound.

18:34 Any thoughts, Courtney? Courtney? yeah and as a member of the um side after a screen actors guild federation uh i will let you know that uh union members are going to hate this uh because uh they almost all have built into their contracts days for adr uh where they would have to go in you know because they're when you're shooting on location there's a variety of things that can interrupt shooting and you know if a

19:00 plane flies over and makes a cut impossible they'll adr the scene or if you know you can't control the surroundings and there's a group of people fans across the street shouting the name of the lead actor uh during the take uh you know there's nothing you can do about that with from a production sound standpoint other than re-record it later and they just throw the you know they'll

19:22 try and get it quiet you try and get it as quiet and as clean and and capture as clean a tracks as you can on set but occasionally there's a cricket or something uh that will come on and they can't find it and it's going to contaminate you know broadband on the soundtrack. Now they have this tool that they can use in post-production

19:43 without calling the actor back in and having to redo his dialogue and there are some actors that just Marlon Brando for one who would just you know recite numbers or something or move his lips on the set because he knew he was going to go in and loop everything and work on his performance because he could never memorize his lines. So there's that too. Those kind of performances exist in films today where, you know, the whole

20:12 performance was ADR'd, but I think it sticks out. It looks bad. It's better if you can capture it on set, but I think they're going to miss that extra payday of coming in to do those ADR lines. And coming in from the chat, Mickey mentions that he's got clear in DX Revive, but despite the demos on DX Revive's site maybe not being the best examples, he's found that you can really

20:38 do wonders with it. So worth checking out if you want to play with it. Next question. All right, this one's from Harold Williams in Portsmouth. I have two Sony PTZ cameras. One is an NDI-HX2, the other is an NDI-HX3. Is it okay to use NDI output from both cameras together as inputs to vMix, or should I capture them with SDI? Chris Abato.

21:04 So setting aside any mail configured network, yeah, sure, it's fine. There's no issues. I have productions with NDI, full NDI, NDI HX, NDI HX2, and NDI HX3. They all play together as long as your network is configured appropriately. that being said if SDI is an option I find SDI more reliable if you can do it but yeah go for it David? The only thing I'd add too is use the HX3 camera as primary

21:41 and the HX2 is kind of like the cutaway camera only because of quality differences between them but other than that give NDI a try and then also coming in the chat sdi will be better but if you have to in a pinch using both formats you can get away with it next question all right this is one of my questions does anyone

22:02 know who the cinematographer was for the apple keynote last week shot an iphone 18 pro but this year it looked noticeably better much better color and contrast lighting thoughts on the production Bill Davis. Well, I don't know who shot it. I know that Apple has an entire team that has been working on these for a long time. And they're just continuing to improve.

22:24 I think this is iteration. It's the same thing that we did here at Office Hours. You know, you start out and you're a little shaky. And the first time you do it, you don't know everything you need to know. Second time you get better. The third time you get even better. And I think they're iterating their keynotes using Apple technology to really push it to the limits.

22:43 And certainly they have access to every engineering mind possible who understands the devices perfectly. And they have access to any expertise they need to make sure that the lighting and everything else. So they got top-notch gaffers and grips and everybody. And they plot this also in terms of what's going to look best on this sensor. And plus, on top of all of that, they have absolute control over their location because the Apple headquarters is something that they know perfectly.

23:13 so they know exactly what lighting is installed. And if they need to rip it out and put something else in for the shot, they can do that. So I think most times you see something on screen and it looks great. It is because people who understand the nuances of capturing that took the time to understand everything and make those incremental little decisions that keep moving it from better,

23:36 better, better to as close to exactly right as we can. And then whatever image sensor you put at that moment after you've done all that, it's going to look amazingly good. David Brady. The quick Google foo search that I did shows that Apple keeps that stuff tight to vest. The only thing that I found was a reference to the 2023 keynote and a guy named Brian Oaks served as cinematographer on an iPhone 15.

24:05 Courtney. Yeah, they keep all that. And it's also multiple teams because they're shooting and they shot in a variety of 26 different locations and they shot in London and New York and San Francisco, of course, for all the stand-ups. But all the location shots as well, the pieces that tie everything together, they supposedly use the iPhone 18 and that's what they want you to focus on.

24:28 That's why they have a tight list. They never publish the list of people who were the cinematographers or the crew at all on any of those things because they want you to focus on the hardware itself and its capabilities rather than, you know, well, you know, I got my iPhone 18 and it doesn't look like Zygmunt shot it, you know. So it's like they want you to think that, hey, the phone's doing all the work, not the talent of a very skilled lighting cinematographer.

24:57 So they keep that closely held. And they also have in-house media people that produce a lot of that stuff, too. So we don't know which people the in-house stuff people did and which outside people lit and produced those wonderful images. And a Mac Observer article from earlier this week cites a social post that Apple made saying that filming took 38 days over 20 locations to get all of the individual pieces,

25:27 including all of those uh that two minute bit at the open where they did all of all of the fake movie intros the james stuff it's it's one of those things where apple wants you to think of what's possible is everybody going to get a whole crew with gaffers and lighting and multiple locations and do production at that level on an iphone no but the message is to

25:53 everybody who's a creator, they're saying you have something in your pocket that could get to that level. It's an aspirational message, but yeah, it is impressive to see how things look. The other thing is they've had more time to play with, okay, when we shoot ProRes RAW out of an iPhone, how do we grade it? How do we cut it together? What are the places where things are going to

26:20 break up. They've just had more time to iterate internally. So of course, you know, with time, with the same level of tool, because really the 17 to the 18 camera, other than that aperture, there's not a huge departure in terms of that image sensor. They've just had more time with it. So it's going to look better. Next question. Okay. This question is coming in from Paul

26:40 Vahus in Austin, Texas. Google meets Gemini note-taking defaults to on for business plans from September 21st for meetings of three or more should also announce AI note-taking the way they announce recording. Alexander? I don't use Google Meet, but I suspect they do something similar to what Zoom does. So when you have an AI note-taking enabled in a Zoom meeting, it's going to warn you.

27:06 It's going to let everyone know in the meeting that it is turned on just like it would if it was recording. They have to. I know some people are very sensitive about it. And look, I understand why some people would really benefit from AI note taking. And it's really just the ability to recall stuff, to be able to summarize, keep notes of what happened in that meeting.

27:26 But some people are extremely sensitive about this. And I know there are certain people that will not even get into a meeting. If you have note taking turned on, they do not want, like some people just don't want anything captured, recorded, anything at all. So it depends on the individual, but I don't think this will be an issue at least in the fact that it will

27:45 Probably tell you when you join the meeting that it is turned on So and you can make the choice whether or not you have a problem with that or not And the only tricky thing is if you're using a note taker that's not They if you're using a note taker that's not the one from the meeting provider So if you're in a google meet and you're using some third-party tool to take the notes

28:07 they have tools now that are capturing the system audio and using some sort of AI powered speaker detection to try and break up the different streams. If there's multiple speakers coming on the far end, obviously can separate you because your microphone's input is not going to be the system audio. But those don't, those explicitly do not say anything to the other person on the

28:30 line. So for a lot of us that are in a lot of virtual meetings all the time, you just don't know. And before there was all this AI stuff, people were putting their calls on speakerphone and then, you know, hitting record on a phone next to them and which is not right. But, you know, people were doing it. It's up to you to be a responsible person and, you know, let everybody

28:53 know what you're up to. Courtney? Yeah, physical recording and taking notes are two different things in the law, the eye of the law. So I think they probably are not required to announce it because prior to this, you know, a lot of meetings, a lot of corporate meetings, almost all corporate meetings, there was a stenographer there with a steno machine, like a court reporter, recording everything manually

29:16 was said by who and later generating a transcript of that meeting. You have to, you know, when you join these corporate meetings or business plans or business meetings, you have to assume that somebody's taking notes. Otherwise, anything, you know, you could come up with a great idea during a business meeting, and later you go, you know that thing I brought up at the business meeting?

29:37 They go, oh, I don't remember. What was that? And you go, oh, nobody wrote it down? No? Gee, good idea. Gone forever. So, no, they almost always have someone there. Either it used to be done with a secretary taking shorthand. Remember those days before AI? And then it went to court stenographer where they had the little steno machines. and now it's AI that is substituted and the court stenographers are out of a job.

30:06 Bill? Yeah, this is fascinating to me right now because after the Apple keynote, I paid a lot of attention. I got down a rabbit hole on a white paper and I got there through the fact that they had announced that they're putting ID. Yeah. Yeah, well, Siri Recap is a piece of it, but I started on the trail because of how they're now putting ownership data in every pixel on the new iPhone cameras.

30:32 I mean, there's literally embedded data that they can trace back to know if something's been altered, which I think is a really good thing. My wife works in news, so they're all talking about that because they want to know that things are authentic the way they were shot. But in this audio piece on the AirPod Pros that are coming out, this idea of recording everything all the time and yet trying to convince, and I think they're going to do a pretty good job of this, everybody that the secure enclave that lives inside the chips that Apple is all making.

31:04 and their strong argument that this stuff is going to go into a digital stream, but one that is not breachable and that you are going to be able to get AI notes of the things, even if you didn't want to make a note of it, because it's recording all the time. And yet it's holding it in a private cloud compute area that is unassailable,

31:29 according to what they're saying, that this is going to change people's behavior. And if you can really go back and recover things that you didn't think you would remember correctly, I think people are going to want to do it as long as they can be assured that it's going to be secure and safe. So that's going to be the question. So Gemini note taking may or may not follow the same path and make it secure.

31:55 I do think this will get a lot of pushback in general for the public if they think that your ear things are recording every meeting or every conversation you have, unless they can convince the entire world that it's truly secure. David. I think this is confused with opt-on, opt-in versus opt-out. The fact that it's defaulted on for business account doesn't mean it can't be overridden by an administrator of that account, whether it's business, enterprise,

32:21 or nonprofit, in my opinion. Yeah, and I would administer a few different organizations. That's one of the things that I'm careful to go through all of those settings and make sure that the defaults that the provider, whether it's a Teams or a Google Meet or a Zoom or whomever, are really appropriate for the organization and aren't just what that company decided they wanted to throw in there.

32:45 Right, and sometimes legal will get in there and help you out with those things. him. Jason? All I'll add to that is that one of the main reasons that I chose the iPhone 18 instead of the Duo is that the Duo doesn't have that secure picture-taking part. And then the other thing I'll mention is that the company that I think does this the best out of anybody is if

33:12 you look at Zoom's zero data retention feature that can be enabled on your account, yes, it does the transcription, but as soon as that meeting's over, the transcription, once it's been summarized or tokenized or whatever, the transcription is gone, which takes away the discoverability piece. Everybody's worried. They don't, you don't want every single meeting transcribed forever because sometimes people are playing devil's advocate in a meeting and taken out of context.

33:37 That can look really bad, but you can produce really good results out of it. Debate is a great way to get people thinking and a great way to making someone defend their ideas is important, but sometimes to do that, you've got to push them. So I'm, I'm a big fan of the way that Zoom's approaching it. Now the way that Apple's approaching it, it's just like, yes,

33:55 we're going to make a transcription, but once we take the high level notes, we're going to burn that transcription. So it's not around forever. If you're watching this on YouTube and you're live, you are missing half the show. So go to officehours.global slash join, where you can see our backend chat that we have here. You can ask questions, vote on questions and join, join, join,

34:15 You also get on our mailing list so you can see who's going to be on the show every day, but also you get links to get into our Discord, get into our After Hours. It runs 24-7. There's a lot more to Office Hours than just the show, so go to officehours.global.com and join. Next question. All right. This one's from Brody Hefner in New York City, New York.

34:34 Are there categories or specific items of AV gear that you consider okay, at least less risky to buy used, either to save a little or because they offer something not found in the newer versions? Picks 240. Alexander? Yeah, well, that's one piece of hardware example that always comes up on this show. And other people have mentioned other products like certain vintage sound device mic preamps slash field recorders, that kind of thing.

35:02 it depends on the device I have no problem using vintage gear as long as I preferably have two of that item and I know they've been serviced for example you commonly see people you will see engineers front of house engineers for example that's just one example that have a hybrid digital analog mixing setup so they'll have a digital console but they might send some of the audio

35:29 to outboard analog gear for processing. You know, I still see, you know, classic Lexicon PCAM 70s or 90s, those old reverb units, but, you know, those things are 30 years old now. So, you know, you probably want two of them. You probably want to make sure that they've been, you know, for something that's 30 years old, the caps and the capacitor and the caps in the power supply and any other capacitors

35:57 that are in the signal path should have been replaced. The unit should be serviced. It should have a service tag on it so you know the date that it was last service. Have a backup because if you're relying on it, you know, if something goes down, you need a way to have some kind of redundancy. A lot of people will have some way of bypassing the signal path if it's going through some

36:20 piece of gear. For example, like if I had audio going through a piece of vintage gear, I'd probably want to set up some kind of routing bypass on my console so that if something happened in an instant I could just press a macro and reroute audio so that I didn't have no audio for a show. So that's one specific example just for audio. I don't know about other people. You know, I've

36:43 bought older consoles. As long as it's bought from a reputable dealer, I don't like to buy too much privately. But if it's from someone who is going to give me a warranty that's going to be there to back it up and I know they've tested it thoroughly, I'm more inclined to trust that over something I just found on Facebook Marketplace, which I probably won't use, you know, unless there's like

37:06 virtually zero budget. And I've, you know, have a conversation with a client and say, look, you know what you're getting into. Like I'm shooting a podcast and you don't have budget for nice cameras. I'm going to buy used cameras, but just know I'm buying used cameras. So if this goes down, it's on you. Like you're going to have to fork out the dough for a better camera

37:25 to immediately replace it. So, you know, just know what you're getting into. For Fenwick. Yeah. So Brody's talking about saving money. I think there's a little difference between buying old and used and buying vintage. You're buying vintage because that great old mic has a great sound. I'll tell you the one thing, grip gear, quite often grip gear. When I was designing the tallmakers. I wanted to confirm that they matched Apple boxes. And I went to a friend's

37:56 house who's a lighting company. And this is like a 40-year-old Apple box. And after I made the tallmakers, I checked them against vintage Apple boxes. Identical size. It was awesome. They're exactly the same. Also, if people don't know this, Justine Zarek loves a tallmaker. I just need to say that. Courtney. Okay. Yeah, I usually don't buy used gear unless I'm looking for a challenge.

38:31 Because I repair a lot of electronics and have for years. So I'm not afraid of buying used gear because I may know that, hey, I might find out. Somebody will say, parts only. And I'll get it like, oh, there's one 12-cent part that is, you know, you'll buy something for 10 cents on a dollar and there's a 12 cent part that's bad in it that's

38:52 caused the person to sell it. So you can make some pretty, you know, good purchases if you're into fixing things up. So if you're into repair and you like to replace capacitors, there's lots of websites available for people that do this that cover, you know, recovery and and restoration of classic AV gear. But yeah, I would stay away from anything that has a lot of moving parts in it,

39:20 like DAT recorders. I think I had about five DAT recorders, and I don't think I have a single one that will now load a DAT tape. And they haven't made the transports for about 15 to 20 years now. So yeah, getting parts for those or fixing them. their microscopic little moving idlers and wheels and belts. Just don't do it. Things rot. So all electronic stuff like boards, you know,

39:47 that Alexander was saying earlier, you know, you got to make sure the pots are not actual analog pots that get dirty or wear out and have to be still available. And the capacitors, because there was a period of time during the 70s where they made a bunch of bad capacitors. and they went into everything. And all power supplies and audio boards and everything

40:12 may have to be recapped because they dry out and fail or short. So keep that in mind. And if it works and if you're not, you know, if you're not, even if it doesn't work, if you're not pretty good with electronics, just buy the new stuff. And to distill some of the sentiment in the chat, You can get some really great high-quality audio gear that's vintage or used and still make it work, but you've got to consider the source.

40:39 If it's coming from someone who was taking it out and doing it on DJ gigs every weekend, that's going to be different than a piece that was used just as a field recorder. Maybe that's not a good example, but the point is if you have a feeling that the prior owner may have been a little hard on it, then maybe you don't, you know, I would never look at buying a used rental car either.

41:06 It's just, I know somebody was driving that way harder than it should have because they're not living with the long-term consequences. The other thing to think of is if you're thinking about it from a dollars and cents perspective, what's the price of failure? You know, if your production goes down because you were trying to save money on this particular part, was it worth it, Alexander?

41:30 Okay, so the company that I work for, we do trades. We take in stuff, flip it, and sell it. One of the things that I'm so hesitant to take in on trade is DJ equipment. It gets trashed. And I can tell visually when I inspect things and I look at a DJ controller that a lot of these things have motorized platters. It probably has thousands of hours.

41:54 People are taking them to clubs. Sometimes you can't tell until you really open things up. I found liquid damage from either, usually from beverages, and it's usually, if somebody gets beer inside the faders and it goes all over the circuit board, then all of a sudden things get gummed up, buttons don't work, they start to seize. And I actually had somebody that tried to pass off a thing as like a manufacturer's defect, and I sent it to the distributor, the official Pioneer technicians.

42:25 They opened it up and they found that there was liquid damage from beer. It had gummed up all the components. And they're like, yeah, we're not going to cover that under warranty. So beware of used DJ gear. Next question. All right. Paul Valhusanas in Texas asks, does the panel run Whisper locally for transcripts or is it worth paying Descript for or Riverside for the cleanup and speaker labels?

42:49 Alexander? Well, I've had some experience with Mac. So I use Mac Whisper and I have used it, although I haven't used it in probably about a year or so, but I own a license for it. It works really well. It runs locally. And it does a really good job of separating the different, identifying the speakers and the audio file. However, I find that I'm now,

43:09 because I'm mainly working with video production stuff now, I'm using that feature built into DaVinci Resolve Studio. So you do have to pay for Resolve Studio to get this. But it does have speaker detection and speech-to-text translation. And it works exceedingly well. It saves me a lot of time. and I can actually after you know it processes the hour and it might take

43:33 like for say 60 to 90 minutes on my m3 max MacBook Pro it might take I don't know five or six minutes to process all the audio but it does a really good job and then it's all searchable of course so it works really well for me to you know if my client says hey did did so-and-so say that one thing at some

43:53 point in the episode and I can just type in a few keywords and boom it It instantly jumps to the point in the timeline where that person has said that. And then I can easily grab the in and out points and grab, if it's a good segment, I can grab that as a clip for social media. So that works really well. And that's what I'm primarily using.

44:10 David? Yeah, I'm a big Whisper user. I do a lot of translations via it, translations into subtitles, et cetera. But I find running it local is fine if you have, especially with this community, with all the Mac minis that everybody has just laying around. Just set up one as a Whisper machine, send everything to it, and call it a day. Fenwick. You guys are wicked smart.

44:37 So just yesterday I had to do a quick transcript, and I don't use the Resolve, and I don't even know what this Whisper thing is. But I figured out, I found out that you can upload a finished video to Riverside and Riverside will do a transcript of something more than just the stuff that it records for you. I thought that was pretty cool.

44:59 Yeah, I also dig the, I dig the one that's built into Final Cut as well for the transcripts just because being able to search through your timeline with text was, is, is just pretty darn powerful. I know that all the editors are doing it and it's table stakes now. But if you haven't tried it because you're like, oh, I don't need that, you should really try it.

45:20 I was getting ready when we were doing one of the anniversary episodes for Office Hours. I had pulled the original, like the first episode of Office Hours to try to get a piece of it. And I knew something was mentioned and a story was told. And then I was like, found it. Amazing. Hey, I got a question for you. Did we make you smile today?

45:43 Did we make you laugh? Did we save you some money? If you're getting some value out of Office Hours, I encourage you to put some of that value back at officehours.global.com. We are a nonprofit. We are largely member supported and we really appreciate everybody who helps us keep this going every day. The folks that work on the show are 100% volunteer, but we do have bills to get this out to you.

46:04 So appreciate it at officehours.global.com. Sorry, I lost your audio there. Oh, next question. No, you're good. Okay. Tommy Shanson, St. Paul, Minnesota is asking, I'm looking into using Riverside. Are there any things to look out for that might make things more difficult than need be? I know Chris Fenwick's a big Riverside champion. I am not. But I'm going to throw it to him anyway, even though he didn't have his hand up.

46:36 I'll raise my hand. Hey, I'm looking into using Riverside. Yeah, that might make things more difficult than need be. No, Tommy, I'll tell you, I started using, I was using other methods to record my show, the Final Cut Grill, which I apologize. The other day at the end of the show, I said to everybody, thanks for watching the grill. We were not watching the grill.

47:01 That was just a slip. I think Riverside's pretty great. It gets better all the time. They are hardcore upgrading it. I will tell you one thing it has. And, you know, to your point, Alexander, earlier you said, I don't know why people have bad audio. I'll tell you why they have bad audio because they don't have you there to record their audio for them.

47:22 And quite often we get really bad audio out of Riverside, not because Riverside can't record good audio. I just did an episode with Doc Rock the other day, and, of course, you know, he's got good stuff, and it sounded great, and it recorded it fine. but people are sitting there on their laptop and they're looking at the ceiling and they're on the

47:39 laptop mic and it sounds crap but um riverside has a new feature called magic audio which looks at the audio makes it better it's a little heavy-handed they also have a little dry wet slider and i have found that you let it analyze and magic the audio and then you pull the dry wet slider down to about 60 and it sounds really good i gotta say it sounds really good uh so i've

48:04 been using that feature and you can, if you want, let it, you know, do a magic edit of your, of your thing. I think it's a little, um, the kids, uh, like to take out all of the filler words, all of the breaths, all of the pauses. I think those pauses are dramatic and good. I like to keep them in. So the magic edit overdoes all that stuff, but it's absolutely

48:34 worth looking into and the features get better like every six months. It's pretty good. Next question. Henry Ramos in Yonkers New York asks, I have a project that will require some not complicated graphics and light animation. I'll hire a graphics artist for a day, but would like to explore using AI, any suggested platforms? Courtney. You can try any one of them, any of

48:59 the LLMs that are multimodal will generate graphics. I just typed into Copilot, give me a lower third with John Doe, star panelists right here. And this is what it came up with in about 30 seconds. So, you know, no graphic artist involved. Now, I didn't say give me an alpha channel. So, you know, it could have done that. And I could have said, you know, make sure it's positioned in the lower third of the

49:27 frame. But, you know, this is a starting point. If you load it into any graphics editor, you can remove the white areas surrounding and make it generate an alpha channel for that particular lower third. So, you know, designing it as, you know, easy pickings for any AI these days that you subscribe to or any of the free ones even. That was a free one with Copilot.

49:50 Bill? Yeah, still graphics, I guess. I can see the utility there if you just don't want to take time to do anything. Although, like in Courtney's example, which I think is fine, but it looks like every graphic I've seen on TV for the last 30 years. So it's not distinguishing yourself, your brand, or anything else. That's, to me, the downside of AI-generated anything is that it ends up looking like AI-generated stuff.

50:15 I see tons of those little tiny short clips in my feeds and they all have this hyper realistic kind of fake just I Don't know it's kind of like a an odor to a visual odor to them and it drives me a little bit nuts Animation I think will be also a little more difficult because that implies that there is a beginning a middle and an end and

50:40 And animators spend a lot of time trying to figure out pace, timing, how to do that correctly so that it feels – so that it meets the requirements of the piece that you're trying to work on. And I'm not so sure that AI will be a great source of doing animation. But we'll see. David? I don't know. I've had some pretty good success.

51:03 I fed an LLM style guide, font set, and described everything that I wanted. I just needed a slate with some sort of motion to prevent burn-in. It generated something that was plausible, and I'm currently using it for a gig that I'm working on. Yeah, the thing that I would recommend, first of all, if you haven't tried, if you have Claude, they actually have like a design or a designer.

51:35 There's some sort of thing in your settings now where you can actually upload like your brand colors and your fonts and you can set like a style, which is pretty powerful. The thing that I'm hesitant towards if it's animation, even still animation, I get frustrated with this, it's that the output is always flat. So if it gets close, but you need to move things

51:56 a couple pixels one way or another, or you need to tweak something or something's not just quite right, your recourse is to start over and say, oh, can you move this? Can you move that? And different platforms are going to have different levels of how much are they going to be able to tweak, like let you select just this little tiny part and tweak it versus sometimes they fix the thing that you wanted,

52:18 but now something else is totally wrong. So the other question I would have for you is how important to this animation is precision? Next question. All right, this one's coming in from Jerry Hoyle in Wesley Chapel, North Carolina. During the pre-show, the panel were discussing a video series and show about an abandoned construction site. Series name, please, and its spinoff. Chris Sabato.

52:45 So the series is Ambition Strikes on YouTube, and I will post a link. And the spinoff is Expedition Rove. And if you've watched Ambition Strike, there's a series, there's a, they've always got some project that they're working on, right? And sometimes it's a quick project and sometimes it's a big, long project that takes multiple episodes. And one of those episodes was a house that they redid.

53:10 And one of the persons that helped them on the house is in the Expedition Row. So it's kind of, it's a spinoff, right? I thoroughly enjoy it. It's just interesting. It's just interesting. It's, I don't know. And the Chris's approve. Well, if your price is to prove. Yeah, I will tell you, there's something extremely satisfying about watching any person work on a thing that's really good at a thing.

53:39 And conversely, Mr. Ambition Strikes, I don't know his name, Zapata will tell you. He could figure out, he's not good at everything, but he can figure out everything. So watching the problem-solving aspect of that, it's insanely satisfying. It's kind of like on a totally other end of the spectrum, it's kind of like Matt Armstrong on YouTube. Matt Armstrong is this British dude, and he buys crash-damaged supercars, like cars that are worth $2 million.

54:14 He buys them for $450,000 because it's been totaled. He puts $300,000 into it, and now he's $750,000 into owning a $2 million car. And it is insanely exciting to watch him try and solve a problem, try and solve a problem, try and solve a problem, and you see the excitement in his face when he goes, ah, I figured it out. And I got to tell you, and I feel a little stupid for admitting this,

54:47 there have been times where I'm fist pumping my ceiling like oh he got it he got it and it's like holy crap I am so invested in this guy fixing the airbag on a car I will never be able to own and it's it's just really interesting watching humans solve problems is the best example of the joys in the journey because sometimes the way that they go about trying to solve the problem

55:11 helps you solve a problem in your life that's totally unrelated and yeah love watching Ambition Strikes is really good though. It's fun. Next question. All right. Tommy Shanson, St. Paul, Minnesota asks, is there a better AI for mechanical or architecture design? Gemini and ChatGPT were useless to me. Courtney. Yeah, I'd be careful about using AI for creative work. Now, there are plugins in Autodesk and, you know,

55:40 a lot of their programs have plugins that use AI for certain, you know, tasks for automating certain tasks like placement of electrical outlets and block design and so on. But for the original creative design, now you want to have an architect involved in that. Yeah, because if you leave it up to the creative aspects of any of your generative AIs out there,

56:05 they'll create things like a car with a fifth tire in the middle of the driver's seat. But, you know, you never know when something strange is going to pop up. You also never know when you don't need a tire in front of the driver's seat. Yeah. You'd have to be sitting on it, but it's pretty tough. It might be cool. Jason? Oh, Tommy, be exceedingly careful here.

56:28 You'd be surprised at what you can get planned out on Fiverr, F-I-V-E-R-R.com, for less than $100. Don't go there. Fenwick? Hey, so I have nothing to say about this, but I want to go back to the last question about the lower thirds. Are there any of the AIs where you can say, to your point, CJ, about you can't edit it, are there any of the AIs that you can say, hey, do me a favor, I want a lower third, here's my brand color, here's my font, can you make me an After Effects project where it slides in and does it, do any of the things have the ability to do that?

57:08 question to the panel? Yeah, well, mine mentioned when I asked it, it said it could generate, you know, After Effects for doing the animation. It said I can't create animation, but I can give you, write the programming for After Effects and I can provide you with that code to do the animation. So essentially the After Effects project file. Right. Yeah, even if I had to pick my keyframes and animate it myself, if all the layers are already there, that's pretty stinking cool.

57:44 Next question. There was a really good – hold on. Hold on now. I'm reigning this in for – I had it do a slideshow where I said I want – I have all these stills and I want you to do these Ken Burns-like effects where things are growing and shrinking. And its solution to that was it built an Apple script that then created a keynote file that put every image that I wanted on two slides sequentially at slightly different sizes, put a six-second long magic move transition between them, and then put a object push or object move or all the object-based transitions in between.

58:23 That's not the most efficient way to do that, but it does work. Not the most efficient way to do it until you watch a machine make 17 different iterations of it in 10 minutes. So like had I done it that way by hand it would have been horrendously slow, but the output is what mattered So the question is maybe because you could in theory have it build you that in Keynote and then output the

58:47 Output the lower third is 4444 To get back to the mechanical engineering If you plug in to MC if you plug in Claude for example into a SketchUp MCP it will draw things in 3D It's not always aware of the constraints of reality or the physical properties of material. So sometimes, like some real architects that I know, they'll design things that are a little impractical.

59:16 So just beware there. That's going to – okay. Teeny, tiny little bit. We're going to – because Chris is teasing me about total runtime accuracy. Actually, that's going to do it for today. Thank you very much for everyone for being here. Thank you to our awesome panel for coming in and giving your life experience. Everybody's smarter together. Thank you to our producers for asking such great questions and keeping the show moving.

59:41 And finally, thank you to the ladies and gentlemen, the fine ladies and gentlemen, who keep this show going, not only from a technical perspective while we're live, but also all around the show, keeping us moving forward. Tulalik Traversal today, had we done this in person, we would have gone 33,000 miles, 53,000 kilometers. That's 262 million bananas per scale. And I did not account for the credits.

1:00:01 See you in after hours. I would like to say that Wednesday's show was 13 seconds long. I think you guys changed the length of the credits because I nailed it. Or you just let it pad out. Whatever. No, I nailed it, dude. When I said bye, it ticked over to the dead roll time that I had calculated. There's no Fenwick standard time.

1:00:28 I've put ticking seconds on my stream deck now to really just harass me about it. Oh, that's nice. That's pretty cool. I will admit that's cool. That might be worth learning, Companion. Hey, so OS, whatever it is now, it broke. Wildingate. Golden Gate, yeah. It broke my ability for my streamdex, and I don't use the companion to talk to Unity.