Office Hours | Friday | October 30, 2026

0:00 Hey, everybody. It's Friday. It's 10 a.m. It's time to party. And I'm your excellent host, Wayne Campbell. With me, as always, is Garth. Party on, Wayne. Party on, Garth. No, just kidding. It's the day before Halloween. We're having some fun. Welcome to Office Hours. It's a wonderful Friday. It is actually Friday. It is actually 10 a.m. for me, at least, on the East Coast.

0:19 And we're here to answer your media and production questions. We've got a nice little panel assembled here, and we're ready to go. Alexander, what's the first question? First up this morning is coming in from Brian Taylor in Washington, D.C. Is there a way to tell QuickTime to use an external drive as the recording buffer when capturing video with an encoder like Magewell, or does it always use the internal drive?

0:41 I would think that it's going to use whatever the target drive is. So like if you are opening up a new movie recording in QuickTime, actually, you know what? But now that I say that, when you open up a new movie recording in QuickTime, it just opens up. It doesn't give you the option for where you're going to start, right? That's right.

1:04 So the question then becomes, is QuickTime the best thing to use for video capture? What's Courtney say? Go ahead, Chris. So, Brian, I'm going to say I think so. So, but I'm also going to say, I don't know. Here's what I know. My QuickTime, and I record my voice into QuickTime all the time. I probably made 20 VOs yesterday. And for some reason, my QuickTime is defaulting to creating an M4A file.

1:44 Now, I'm not Alexander Knight or Mickey McAteer, so I don't really care. It's audio. It sounds fine. so I just use that now it'd be nice I think Alexander probably will tell me how to make an AIFF file or a WAV file but I think that there's a way in the terminal if you go in and do some of this in the terminal

2:03 you could say hey make this the default thing and because I have vague memories of that I've forgotten more than I remember and I'm going to guess, hope that there's a way that in the terminal you can tell it where to record as well the other thing for you chris is when you're making that new audio recording and this goes for the screen recordings as and the um this goes for

2:32 the screen recordings and the movie recordings all other stuff as well when you're in the little box here and going to make a new recording and you hit this little chooser where you get your wow Wow, that's an OS 9 term, a chooser. If you go to maximum, it should record as an AIF. I think high records as an AACM 408 file.

2:52 You may be right about that. I may be crazy, and that's a Billy Joel reference. Next question. All right, this next question is coming in from Guy Cochran in Seattle, USA. Have you seen this new iOS switcher app? There's a link there. After five years working on Mix Effect, I wanted to build a switcher of my own. switch effect handles the video processing.

3:14 So that's an Adam Tao. Adam Tao, this is so cool. So we, a lot of us know Adam Tao for the absolute, he's like the ATEM ninja of reverse engineering all of the chatter that's coming in and out of an ATEM and then creating mix effect, which allows us to take the ATEM and make it really useful, actually make it nice to build super sources

3:36 and just have better control in general. this is something completely different so switch effect is actually using your iPhone or your iPad as the switcher and it's using the cameras on the device as well as a remote contribution camera if you have the switch effect camera app to get video sources in and as well as out so this is on the App Store it is free

4:04 Look at this already. I can run this on the Duo. I'm so excited. But I haven't got a chance to play with this yet, but this looks very exciting. It is on the App Store right now. And if you go to switcheffect.app, you can see the website where you can actually look at, even he's even got a public beta with getting some Zoom integration.

4:28 So this is pretty exciting. switcheffect.app if you haven't seen it. it, Courtney. Yeah, it looks great. I think, you know, maybe, I don't know if it's going to be available with all these days of vibe coding. I wonder why Adam hasn't had it, write it in Rust, so it'd be cross-platform. That would be a unique situation and you run it on, you know, some

4:52 powerful touchpad, touchpad Android things, and maybe even some Windows tablets, you know, be cool maybe maybe but i think there are some i think there are still some advantages if you're writing directly for the platform with their with their libraries as opposed to something that can work everywhere but might not might not be as efficient or as fast um i think that has a little

5:19 bit to of what he's able to get out of literally iphones and ipads is because of being of writing for them as opposed to something's going to go everywhere but maybe we can get a port I don't know I don't but we like our iPad and iPhone apps thanks Adam very nice I'm gonna be checking this out Chris completely unrelated last question

5:45 when you set the thing for audio recording I did an audio test at maximum It records in AIFC. Never heard of it, but 32-bit, big Indian, linear PC, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, that's what QuickTime does. I'm going to look into targeting where it records. Next question. This one is one of my questions. Thoughts on the new touchscreen OLED screen MacBook Pro?

6:14 Steve Jobs once said that it is ergonomically horrible, and if you put a touchscreen on it, you blew it. clearly the new regime thinks different. Ah, here in the land of the toaster fridge, Chris Sabato. So I don't have any opinions on the Mac itself, but I have my current laptop. I just got a new laptop a couple months ago and it came with a touchscreen. I didn't ask for a touchscreen.

6:39 It just happened. The model that I wanted came with one. And I have been surprised how often and I actually use it. I didn't think I would use it a ton, but I definitely find myself reaching and touching some things here and there, especially for scrolling. I use it a lot for scrolling. I use it a lot for things where, and I talked a little bit about this on Tuesday,

7:03 is that I built an RCP app for my cameras. And when I was building it, I was like, oh, I have a touch laptop. I can design it specifically for that instance. And so I can just reach up and slide faders up and down. So it's one of those things where like you may not think you like it, but once you have it, I'm guessing you will use it more than you thought you would.

7:27 Fenwick? I, on this thing, I completely agree with the late, great Steve Jobs. I think, I think optimum viewing distance, and maybe it's different for a laptop. I don't use a laptop usually. But one, my screens are too far away to touch. Two, fingerprints are a thing. I used to chew clients out when they'd come over and look over my shoulder and go, can we move this to here?

7:59 And I was like, ah, I don't touch the screen. And so – and I think that the – I will say there's a couple shots in the videos from the Apple where they're showing somebody with their wrists cocked up like this trying to play a piano, a software piano on the laptop. I mean has nobody there – I think they're getting ready for a class action lawsuit about carpal tunnel.

8:26 It's stupid. It's dumb. Well, if they made a laptop that folded flat like Lenovo and a million other manufacturers, you could play it like a piano. No, I think the Steve Jobs thing was they always gave this excuse, and these are laptops, so Chris, they're not going to have to be reaching out to their screen across the room. It's right there next to your fingers, okay, on the keyboard.

8:57 It's on the other side of the keyboard. is, when you think about it, you know, it's a lot more, a lot less problematic than using the touchpad. Because let's say you're on a web page and you see a link or you see an item you want to click to, you have to take your hands off the keyboard, go to the touchpad. Then you got to

9:19 find your mouse with your eyes on the screen. Where is that mouse cursor? Where did I leave it? I don't know. And then you got to move it. Oh, there it is. And then you got to move it. You You've got to move it up to the link and then you've got to tap it. With a touchscreen, you just go, ding, and you're gone to the link.

9:33 One move. No, your eyes don't have to look somewhere else to find the mouse. It's a lot less brain-intensive interaction than using a touchpad or, you know, if there's a hotkey for clicking that link, yeah, maybe. But how do you get to the link? And like he said, scrolling is cool too and pinch and zoom are, you know, you want to zoom in on a specific item on the screen.

9:58 You got to find the mouse, move it to the item, do the zoom thing on the touchpad. So it's a lot more thought and a lot more physical actions without a touchpad than with a touchpad. And it's right there next to your fingers. In fact, a lot of times it's closer to your fingers than the touchpad itself. sabato i just wanted to clarify for fenwick that like this laptop still has a keyboard and mouse

10:25 it's not just a touchpad and that's all you can use it for like it you can use it normally and that's kind of my point is like i'm gonna need a picture you use it like a normal laptop and you find yourself using the touch for various things it's not like oh i have a laptop and a touch touch screen. I don't need a keyboard and mouse anymore. So what do you use the touch screen for

10:48 out of curiosity? I like, I told you like, like in, in my normal day browsing it, like a lot of the times where I'll reach forward is if I'm on a webpage and I'm scrolling, like I can just reach up with my thumb and just like on the, on the right side of the screen, just scroll down. I find myself like, I find myself doing it. It is not intentional. It's not like I have a touch

11:09 screen i need to find ways to use it this is completely unintentional i just noticed myself doing it and the other thing i said was was things specifically that are better with touch and like the rcp interface that i made like that is like it's super useful it's not it does not replace my keyboard it does not replace my mouse i probably use it 10 of the time but that 10 of the time is

11:35 kind of nice Alexander yeah I mean I agree I'm you know you've got a lot it's still a laptop I agree with that I've just for me I've never personally felt the need that a laptop needs to have a touchscreen because if I want like and I get Chris if you if you find yourself just instinctively using your finger to scroll web page that's fine but I mean I've got a trackpad there

12:01 So the idea of me reaching out this way to touch the screen when my fingers are just resting here for me doesn't really make sense. But it's really interesting because I was watching Marques Brownlee's review of this laptop and he was giving his thoughts, his sort of unvarnished thoughts on it. And that video opens with that famous Steve Jobs, you know, quote where he's standing on the stage giving this presentation.

12:29 He's talking about touchscreens, how they did all these user tests, you know, and they just found out that ergonomically it didn't work, that your arm would just get tired and you have the keyboard there and a trackpad, a nice trackpad anyways. And they just found in all the testing that they did that it just didn't work. So it's very interesting. Now, I'm not saying Apple and the current regime that's working there should always be thinking what would Steve Jobs do because I think that's just going down the wrong path.

13:00 I think they need to do what they think is best for Apple currently and try to make the best possible products that they can. And I think overall Apple still does a very good job. They still occasionally have hits and misses. What I find very interesting, though, is out of the gate, and I don't know if they're going to add it later, there's no Apple Pencil support.

13:22 And to me, I think this device, a high-end laptop with a touchscreen, would be way more interesting if it had support for the Apple Pencil. Because being able to use a stylus, I think for things like drawing and making notes, I think that would make it even more appealing. I would also remind this group that when this was the iPod, everybody got, Steve got up on stage and said, nobody wants video on an iPod.

13:55 And a couple years later, these were the iPods, and they did it. The technology changed. You're just now catching on that Steve Jobs was, you know, selling marketing stuff rather than research? search. This was also, I think, peak iPod, just saying. Classic. But, uh, 09. The, uh, the thing is, people who are learning how to use computers today do learn on touchscreens first. And I even

14:23 see people who have used computers for a long time will pick up a laptop and then without thinking about it they'll start to do this and they'll go oh look and then when it just works it's kind of magical nobody's thinking that that's gonna be my primary use but when they do this by accident and it just works it's kind of nice so

14:46 my theory is that this just comes with the screen that they're making and they're trying to figure out a way to market it but the reality is it's just accidental but if i wanted to see if i was just reading casually and i want to zoom in and see myself zooming in on myself here at the office hours.global new website that you should check

15:06 out if you're in the discord it's very cool um might be something there fenwick so um back to the quick time thing here we go if you're doing a screen recording we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna nail this thing if you're doing a screen recording you get this little toolbar check this this out. Options. Hello. Up here. Zoom out a wee bit. Save to other locations. Pick whatever you

15:34 want. Pick whatever folder you want. And I haven't even started the recording. So I'm assuming it's also buffering to there. Now, I apologize. I can't remember what the question was. Was he doing a screen recording? It was a movie. It was a video input from a maid. Oh, yeah. That's going to be It's going to be different. All right, so sorry about that.

15:53 Yeah, don't use the QuickTime for that. And if you've never used the advanced screen recording that Chris just brought up because it's never occurred to you, Command-Shift-5 will bring it up anywhere on your computer. But don't use it. Use ScreenFlow instead. Yeah, use a real one. But if you need it in a pinch. Alexander? Yeah, and I just want to keep this on the production angle too because I was curious what people thought specifically for a touchscreen in that area.

16:19 And JJ McKenna brought up a good point. He said, companion web buttons, REM me use is immediate. And he also said, I've built remote interfaces for several shows where a remote contributor pulls out a touch interface to click on web buttons. And I think that's a perfect example. That's very true. So, for example, like I use Mimble Live to produce my shows.

16:37 And Mimble Live has a web-based interface. And you can reconfigure that interface to be anything you want. You can change the size of the buttons. and that's an interface where I can cut a show with my fingers on the touchscreen. In fact, I have a 22-inch ViewSonic touchscreen in front of me that's connected to a Windows PC so I can do that.

16:59 So that definitely is a very valid use case where I would find it very, very useful to have a touchscreen. There's a huge price premium for that touchscreen, Matt, and I'm sure that screen looks incredible. But the logo lights up. The logo lights up again, and that's what we're really here for. I'm glad they brought that back. Ten years of dark logo.

17:16 We're back to light-up logo. One more use case that I think we sometimes overlook is that because Apple has so many different aspect ratio devices now, the ability to run an iPhone or an iPad simulator in Xcode on your Mac while you're making a Mac app and be able to interact with it as you would on the device is pretty powerful since now you're having to develop for two different sizes of iPhone, then a couple different poses of the iPhone Duo, plus different sizes of iPads.

17:46 It's like, as a developer, I think that would be really handy. And just so everybody knows, I'm not only, this is a Surface. That's what we were on today. It just looks exactly like a MacBook because why, if you've got good design, why try to reinvent it? Just steal it. Great artists steal. Something else Steve Jobs said. Next question. All right, coming up next is from Paul Valhus in Austin, Texas.

18:10 Do you have any suggestions for a round table podcast set up using an ATEM Mini and a RODECaster video, cameras, lighting, audio, table, backdrop, etc.? Alexander. Not sure why you want to use an ATEM Mini and a RODECaster video. It sounds to me like you've run out of inputs and you're trying to cobble together a setup where you have two different camera switchers, which I don't suggest.

18:35 But can you do that, I guess? I would look for inspiration I would look at that podcast I forget his name that does a diary of a CEO he does things with in a round table type of interview and I think his show is probably one of the better ones out there that I've seen and in fact if you go to his YouTube channel there is

18:55 search around for it but there is a behind the scenes video that he did showing the whole studio space and the lighting and all the cameras they have and they have pretty high-end cameras they're I'm not saying you need to go out and buy Sony cinema cameras for your setup, Paul. But one of the things that drives me crazy when people do these style of things is they tend to use huge mic arms that tend to be in the way.

19:17 In the way, you always have sight lines to worry about with camera stuff. So get yourself low-profile camera arms. Elgato makes some pretty good ones. I've got one here that's made. Yeah, yeah, mic arms. I've got one made by Neewer, N-E-E-W-E-R. are they make a low profile one that's that's really high quality and it's not very much money it's about a hundred bucks so that's what I would suggest and

19:41 then you know large light sources the largest possible light sources that you can afford and again there's some good examples of the lighting that not behind-the-scenes video for diary of a CEO I would look at for where is it where else did he say audio I mean if you're looking are you if you're looking for suggestion for microphones i mean paul you have so many microphones now you've got i think

20:05 some mv7 uh mv7 microphones so you already have some decent dynamic microphones look at acoustic treatment so the first thing that i do when i'm doing any kind of studio space is treating the room acoustically that's always you're always dealing with that you know you got hard surfaces parallel walls which are not friendly to that uh type of thing that you're going to be doing there

20:27 So I would look at investing in some acoustic treatment. There's so many companies that offer those types of products out there, and I'm not going to specify one single one, but I would seriously invest in some acoustic absorption panels that just cut down on those reflections that are in the room there. Backdrop, I mean, that's, I don't know if I can really easily give you guidance there

20:50 because a lot of that is taste, but obviously the lighting designer hat has to be worn there because there's some things you have to think about in terms of like how you're gonna light the background like do you want a really dark background do you want to have some accent lights there's the things that you can think about and I'm not saying mine's the best in the world I don't think it is but I I'm a

21:09 big fan of lamps in like a lot of practical lighting so I do like those style of like sort of vintage looking lights that kind of and now this what this light here above me is from Ikea so this is a really inexpensive LED light that kind of looks like a vintage incandescent light. I actually have some ND film wrapping around it

21:32 to just cut down on the brightness. And it's blooming a little, but the highlights are blooming a little bit here just because I have a very subtle black pro mist on my camera lens that kind of blooms the lights a little bit. So those are things you can think about. Like a lot of my stuff is from Ikea. This other, you can sort of see this little red lamp here.

21:52 Again, I really like red lamps. I don't know for some reason I just like that color so those are things that you can think about but start looking out of the people shows for inspiration you know who also has a great channel is I think it's called filmmakers Academy it is a program designed by Shane Hurlbut the cinematographer he's he's done so

22:13 many motion pictures he's got this this school you can take these courses but a lot of content they kind of chop up some of the classes and release a lot of free content on their YouTube channel. I would look at that because he does, and he has actually, some of his videos are done in what looks like a home studio, but because he's a cinematographer, like he knows what

22:35 he's doing. So his stuff looks really good. So, and he has a lot of tube lights in the background. So those can look really cool on camera. So I would have a look at that. Courtney. Yeah. Yeah, don't take the term round table, you know, literally. Because I think you're best off in a semicircle, not a circle. Because, you know, if you put things in a circle, then you're going to have to treat the entire studio because you're going to be looking 360 degrees if you're going to see people's faces that are looking the opposite direction.

23:05 So half a circle max. So a semicircle so that the people can see each other fairly easily. And put your host in the middle. if you have up to five people. You can have two on each side. That way you can arrange your cameras on one side of the room getting shots, and you don't have to worry about dressing the entire room,

23:27 and you can have something other than a black backdrop surrounding them all like Charlie Rose used to do. The other thing is ATEM switcher and the Rodecaster video. I would use just the Rodecaster video and attach an audio input like the RODECaster Pro 2, which now can interface with their automatically stitched together software so that the RODECaster can provide all the audio

23:55 inputs, high quality audio inputs to the RODECaster video, plus give you all those podcaster tools like, you know, audio playback and sound effects and, you know, all those great sound modifiers that comes with the Rodecaster Pro 2 can be interfaced and it also has the feature where it can do you won't have to have a technical director although it probably helped if you have video follows audio

24:24 so you can set it up to switch your video based on whoever has priority whoever's gain is highest in the incoming audio in the Rodecaster Pro 2 The other thing that does that is OC Go. And OC Go, you know, their Omni 12, you know, this new switcher that is supposedly the ATEM killer, is a 12-input ISO recorder with a preview and a bus and a T-bar and a lot of that.

24:53 Yeah, this one has a T-bar. All that good stuff that, you know, is missing from the ATEMs and the RODECaster. And this also has a unique feature now. Now, it has a 4K region of interest so that you can input on this particular switcher in input number eight. You can input an HDMI 4K image. And then you can select a region of interest up to three regions of interest from that 4K image and have them all show up as additional inputs coming out of the switcher.

25:27 So it's cool. you could have one 4K camera sitting at one side of the semicircle and get a two-shot here and a two-shot there and a host single and a wide shot all out of a single 4K camera that's positioned in front of them. You're getting 1080p regions of interest cut out of that 4K image. So that's a good way to add different shots into a, by just using a single 4K camera that has a 4K HDMI output into one of those Ocego Stream Omni 12s.

26:02 And also the Omni 12 does also have the audio follows, I mean video follows audio, so it can switch automatically for you. I'm not sure how you'd set up the region of interest. I guess you can set up the region of interest feeds as well because you assign those regions of interest to audio inputs on the switch – I mean video inputs on the switcher.

26:21 Fenwick? Can't hear you, Fenwick. Sorry. Yeah, a couple things I wanted to show you here. You know, Alexander mentioned Diary of a CEO. And Courtney actually pointed this out to us several months ago. And it was fascinating. So when on Stephen Bartlett's show, when they go to the wide shot, there's this beautiful chandelier up above the table. But in reality, if you look at it, it's got a big old giant soft light and some microphone things.

27:04 Or 16s, yeah. Yeah, thank you. I couldn't remember the model number, so I wasn't going to try and get it wrong. I just figured I'd sound stupid. So anyway, but that's a fascinating solve for the thing that they composited in. And I will say this about Stephen's show. It feels very casual and easygoing and simple. It's very high production value, as Alexander pointed out.

27:29 Also, I wanted to point out here another thing. So years ago, I actually got to do one of these. Our friend, Mr. Lindsey, he used to do this thing called the Virtual User Group. He had no idea we were gonna have COVID. But in terms of like a true in the round, this was quite an elaborate production for a bunch of people sitting in a black limbo.

27:55 You know, if you think about it, like here's an earlier one with less people and you had these people sitting on stools. And then here they started hiding the cameras. The problem with shooting in the round is you really, you either have to say to yourself, yes, we're going to shoot the cameras or no, we're not. And if you're not going to shoot the cameras, you really get boxed into a very, a very

28:21 claustrophobic look. You need a wide shot. But yeah, I'm sorry. We've talked about this in a round for way too long. Nevermind. Next question. This is also where Alex just talked about how nice it is to have an odd number of people on your roundtable because it makes it really nice to shoot the gaps. If you need another piece of inspiration, Paul, I would take a look at the Conan Needs a Friend podcast.

28:46 I think they do a pretty good job. I pulled some shots during the preceding answers to show you how they handle the wide as well as the singles. And then they have a little background shot. It's not overdone, but it is nice. They have the low profile mic arms and the one thing that I would recommend most people don't do that They are getting away with is that they've

29:07 got a matte finish TV, and they're very thoughtful about how to Make sure that the lights not falling on it so that you're not getting a bad glare because they're actually using that for more Than just a logo in the show and I think they do a good job I just pulled some from the episode with Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, and it was

29:24 Because like I said, for a roundtable, I thought that without being overdone, it looked really nice. Appreciate the question, sir. If you've got questions at Office Hours, we got answers. Sometimes it's I don't know, but most of the time we've got something for you. But here's the thing. We've got a new way to ask questions. We have showhub.officehours.global, which is a new way for people who are in the Office Hours community to hang out and to say if they want to be on a show or to see what opportunities there are.

29:56 But the one new thing there is questions. Showhub.officehours.global slash questions allows you to not only type in a question, but also you can pin it to a certain show. So if you have a burning audio question that you know is going to be best answered by our stellar audio panel on Wednesday, you can actually choose the Wednesday audio panel, and then it'll make sure it gets to them.

30:22 I think this is pretty cool. So this is yet another way to get questions into Office Hours. You can still ask questions during the show. If you are at officehours.global.com is where you would go for that. If you want to actually get into Discord, get into Makana to ask questions live and operate with the community there. And then we have askofficehours.global, which is open 24-7.

30:44 This is yet another way at showhub.officehours.global slash questions, showhub.officehours.global slash questions. And you can pick your questions you want to answer. Chris, what do you think? You know, I think it's crazy. So many different ways to ask questions. I don't know how they all get organized. It's amazing. Thank you so much to our question management team for doing a great job. We have a great volunteer community here at Office Hours and one of those groups.

31:11 Just make sure that the questions that show up to the panel are thoughtful and are formatted in a nice way. And if something's sometimes that ask office hours like global, we get some fun ones because it's open to anybody. They do a great job. So special, special hollows, Eve, Eve, shout out to our QM team. We appreciate it. Next question. This one's coming in from Andre Dole in Berlin.

31:37 Can you remind me again what causes the ATEM UBC outputs to crush the blacks? What could you do about it? ATEM, remind me. Alexander. We have talked about this, I feel like, thousands of times over the last six years. I feel like, you know, this is probably a comment for the web team with that new website that we're developing. this should be a button at the top right hand corner, ATEM Black Crush, get your answers here.

32:05 That should be right on the front page. Basically, Andre, it is just the encoder chip inside that product that is using MJPEG compression, which is basically compressing. I think it's every single frame is a compressed JPEG image. So it's not great. You cannot change that. That That is a hardware design. They chose to do that. Other USB to HDMI encoders, for example,

32:31 like one of the reasons why I don't use the USB output on my ATEM is because of this. So I take the HDMI out of my ATEM and I go into a separate encoder. I have a Roland UVC encoder, and that basically uses YUV2, I think. Yeah, that's in the YUV color space, which separates chrominance from luminance. YUY. Yeah, YUY2 or YUV2.

32:57 And while it is still compressed, it is far less compressed. And the way it handles colors are much, much better. In fact, I remember a guy, Cochran, I think it was like a year or two ago, he ran the Roland encoder under some scopes and found that that was incredibly accurate, far more so than the ATEM. Now, I know the Zoom team has done some adjustments, let's say, some fancy adjustments to kind of color correct on their end.

33:32 When you connect an ATEM to a Zoom meeting, it does some things to make it look better. And they made that change in the Zoom workspace client quite a while ago. So when an ATEM is plugged into your Mac as the UVC, the USB webcam input, and Zoom recognizes that, it makes the adjustment. And other applications know about this as well, because even if you go into Nob Omniscope, for instance, and choose the ATEM UVC output as what you're trying to monitor, it says, hey, wait, hold on, hold on, hold on.

34:06 Just so you know, we don't recommend using this output for color-critical workflows for just that. people are acknowledging it, but we think it's hardware. Fenway? It's obviously hardware and it's stupid. It's stupid that it's been so wrong for so long. This really gets back to one of my core things that I tell people all the time. You're better off solving a problem than fixing a problem. Okay. So fixing the problem is there's a

34:36 drip in my ceiling, water is dripping through my ceiling. So I fixed the problem by putting a pan underneath it to collect the water so now there's not water all over the kitchen floor. Solving the problem is fixing the roof. And now we never get any, we're not collecting the rainwater, we're shedding the rainwater. And it's kind of atrocious that Blackmagic can't fix this.

34:58 I don't get it. They designed something wrong or it's bad code or whatever it is. It's just dumb. And Blackmagic should just solve the problem so that we don't have to fix the problem. them it's also the reason we all do this here every day is that we like to share knowledge we like to share and uh if you're like me and you bought an a10 before you realized about the crushed blacks but

35:27 you don't care about color quality you're gonna have to uh i have mine running through a capture capture card, which creates its own little set of interesting quirks. I'm using a Magewell 4K Plus, I think, and it does a pretty good job. Although every now and again, I make sure to get some compressed air and dust, undust the fans. Courtney. You know, I was just thinking, you know, when the UVC standard was originally written,

35:54 incorporating video into computers was a problem because you had to maintain your 16 color palette for use for the user interface so you couldn't use any of the colors there in the video image otherwise you would have some posterization you would have some weird things like if you used it for chroma key things would show up in your interface things would change color in your

36:17 your interface if you change the palettes. So they reserved like 16 colors out of the 224, 16 million or whatever it is with 8-bit color for the interface. Maybe this has to do with the black being preserved for the computer user interface. So they had to take gray and crush it to black because the actual black couldn't be used because that palette color was being used for the computer user's interface.

36:44 So maybe that's why. I don't know. And maybe they've just carried forward that UVC standard forward, and that's why they had to do it, maybe. That's why they haven't fixed it to maintain compatibility, backwards compatibility with the old standard. Courtney, did you ever use super black as a production technique? No. In NTSC days? So black was 7.5 IRE. Oh, yeah. Some devices could output zero so that you could do a luminance key off something.

37:16 And you still have that on scopes. You can have it come in at seven or zero at black so you can set them. Next question. All right, this one's coming in from Jeff Cohen in Miami Beach, Florida. Any experience, good or bad, selling used gear through avgear.com? Courtney? I have not seen this site. It looks interesting. I'm getting ready to put my bid down on some ingenue lenses here for only $229,000.

37:46 So let me see if I've got that much credit on my credit card. No. You know, I have not used this and they may be perfectly vetting everyone that posts on this site. I can tell you my bad experience with another offer up, which is another gear for sale site that I put a printer on. And immediately, I had never been on that site before.

38:14 And immediately, I put something up and immediately I got two posts. Oh, we want to buy your printer for the price you're offering it at. We've already purchased it, etc. Just click on this link. and that came in a message from the site itself. I clicked on the link and it said, okay, you know, this sale has gone, and I said, well, after range payment,

38:40 oh, we've already paid it through the site, came back the message, and here's the link. Just enter your credit card. It will be credited to your site, and it looked like the actual site. It smelled, it came from a URL that had the actual site's name in it with a little prefix in front of it. But it was totally bogus. And they don't – and I got three offers like this from different users.

39:08 And the problem is because you're dealing with people that operate under aliases, they can – anybody can create an account and put a phony – and a link in any one of their messages that takes you to a phony website website that looks like the real website, behaves like the real website, even has a pop-up chat like the real website and will steal your credit card information.

39:31 So be careful, especially when you're dealing with products that could be $229,000. So be very, very careful in something like this and make sure that they're vetted carefully and that you don't do click on any links and any communications you get from these guys. So the moral of the story is buy your Ingenue lenses from a reputable dealer. That's right. A guy out of a white van on the street that says,

39:58 I've got some overstock from Ingenue and I just got to get rid of them before I go to my next job. Yeah. If you're dropping big bucks, you've got to consider the source. That said, AV Gear does have a physical location. So if any of our lovely producers who are in the Las Vegas area want to drop by and ask some more pointed questions, I'd love to know.

40:23 Like, what is their situation like? As a matter of fact, it could be fun to hear about how that business works on a Tuesday evening sometime. So you never know. Next question. This one is from Paul Valhus in Austin, Texas. Sony's $399 ECM W5 wireless kit records 32-bit float into the camera through the MyShu with 64 gig of backup per transmitter for Sony shooters.

40:50 Does that beat Rode and DJI? So this is super interesting to see something that was brought about by the newer players to the game with DJI and Rode to get adopted by somebody like Sony. because if you look at what this product is, it looks very much like the same thing. I've got two little microphones that go into a transmitter. Sony has some that it's actually interfacing directly to the camera through the shoe.

41:20 But remember that the microphone still is going to record directly onto the microphone. That's the important part. You don't want to depend on the audio that's recording directly to the camera as your production audio because the wireless that it's using to get between those two is not going to hold up in any sort of contested environment. However, syncing those sources is going to be a heck of a lot easier if you have a scratch track on the camera that is recorded from the same source.

41:52 So they're a little bit more expensive than what's coming out of Rode and DJI. but taking a look at these I'll be interested after they're off the pre-order to see that if any any of the Sony shooters that are in the community here can pick up one of these kits and tell us what is it like to actually I use them I'm curious to see what does a what does

42:15 a more established legacy brand do with this kind of a newer concept from the creators and thank you Thank you, thank you, thank you for having a – I know that the Rhodes and the DJIs do this as well, but thank you for having an input so that you don't have to hold up the little lav to someone or to Alexander Night Sugar and hold up one of these paint sticks and really make them upset.

42:42 Next question. I'm sorry, Courtney. Yeah, I just wonder. I haven't looked at the specs on this yet, but I'm just wondering if it incorporates timecode because what is handy to have, and some wirelesses do this, is have timecode from the camera that's transmitted on the back channel to the transmitters so that they can record the timecode of the camera on each of the audio tracks that are recorded in the wireless transmitters.

43:08 That makes syncing them up or finding a clip out of something that's recording continuously for six hours, and you want that one take that happened somewhere in there, and you've got to find it. You don't want to scroll through six hours' worth of audio to find it. So timecode helps, and common timecode between the camera and the recordings done in the wireless mics is a handy thing to have.

43:31 But look for that in the specs and see if it uses any kind of timecode synchronization for the locally recorded. audio track so interesting it does it says if the receivers time setting is changed while using the timecode function the new time is not immediately reflected in a timecode so there is there is some sort of back channel time code feature on the device you would think that that makes it sync directly

44:01 from the camera but okay when the receivers using the phone chases time Time code signal is not output. The receiver is connected to the multi-channel. It doesn't support a digital audio. So it looks like, yes, it can get it from the camera. Output synchronized by time code can be directly connected to the receiver. So, yes, that is a thing. But I don't know if I'd want to use this for six hours.

44:23 Fenwick? A couple of things. One, if an audio engineer ever gave me a six-hour audio file, and I just started recording at the beginning of the day, figured out, It'd be the last day he ever worked for me. It's just irresponsible. It's ridiculous. Also, yeah, I got nothing else to say. That just makes me angry. Audio should start and stop with the cameras, period.

44:48 Done. Next question. This question comes in from Jeff Cohen in Miami Beach, Florida. Recommendations for a client-friendly non-PTZ webcam that stores settings for Zoom, exposure, et cetera, on board to non-volatile memory? memory. Only found Elgato facecam 4K so far. So essentially if you have an Elgato, in this case the Elgato 4K camera, you plug it into a computer that has the Elgato software and you can change all the things. I can change

45:20 the exposure, I can change the crop and the framing within my, you know, to get that 4K down to a 1080 frame and then when it plugs into the next computer that doesn't have the Elgato software, it stays put, is what I understand the goal to be. Very similar to like how on an MV7 Plus, if you have the Motive Mix app, you noodle with all the settings on your machine,

45:40 and then when you give it to a client, it just shows up and does whatever it used to do. Not sure if there's any other models that do that, but I was hoping to at least restate the question that I understand it. I'm not seeing anything in the chat. I am, however, curious, what is the aversion to a PTZ? Because I used to think that that would be, that would make people

46:13 nervous, that weren't, that were non-technical people that had this little camera that started to move around. I've given a couple of PDZ cameras to other users who are non-tech, to other people who are non-technical users, and they really, really like them. The only thing that you really, really, really need to just not have be a default thing is the gesture control. I had an Insta360

46:36 link or an OBSBOT camera go rogue at a town hall and try to follow an executive as they were were walking out of their office to go to the bathroom, and I got a bad half hour about it. Fenwick? I agree. That would be a great feature, Jeff Cohen. I don't know about it, but I do know this. Remember that you can request camera control with many of the PTZs,

47:07 and I think you can with that one, where through Zoom you can pan and tilt the guy. Okay, so just remember that. The color and all that, that's another problem. Sabato? I don't have a good solution, at least I think in terms of what you're looking for. But if you want to spend a little bit more money, get a little bit higher quality,

47:34 get an old mirrorless camera, like a Sony 6000, set everything in, take some hot glue, glue all the settings so nobody can touch any buttons, and then get just an HDMI UBC adapter. And it's set, it's done, there's nothing they can do, and it will work and look great every time. Don't let them get new lights because it'll mess everything up. Courtney?

47:59 Yeah, and you know, you can store presets in the companion and you can store even some of the mixers like the new OC Go has this little PTZ control joystick on it here. And you can set up the macros when you choose your cameras up here that are controlled by this joystick. You can store the presets, the pan, tilt, zoom and focus in a preset and assign it to a macro button.

48:25 and so you can save that to a file so anytime you're using that PTZ camera and it hasn't moved then you can just hit the preset it'll go to it pan tilt zoom and focus as far as color now I don't think so but it does store the PTZ characteristics in a in a file The last thing that I would recommend that you try, besides setting up your Zoom meeting,

48:55 I don't know if you have to do this in an organization level or if it's at a meeting level, but have it be that when they join the meeting, they acknowledge that they're accepting foreign camera control. So that way you can do what Chris was suggesting for your reframing. But also, Also, if you are using the new Zoom ISO, it has exposure controls and color controls.

49:18 It's going to be affecting the image, not remote controlling the settings on the camera, but if you need to make some minor adjustments to a reframe or to color or to exposure to try and make things line up nicely, the per input controls on the new Zoom ISO is really handy. If you have the enhanced media license, check it out. next question all right this one comes from Ronnie Hoff so in Trump so Norway

49:43 if we start streaming to many social media channels how do we handle comments and questions that users write in on those channels how should panelists react to that and how I'm happy that you knew what so me was I was I was stumped on that you know Ronnie I just I just I just gave him gaffer like you know I think dude that's super weird I think you're the first person to just invent

50:07 that turn. Go ahead Alexander. Yeah we'll need it definitely a way to do that. Now there are services like Restream there's been some internal talk about what we're gonna do. Restream is a service that allows you to basically stream to multiple platforms all at once. The only thing is of course it gets expensive because often there's transcoding involved because different platforms have

50:32 of different requirements in terms of bit rate and all this sort of stuff. So if it has to be transcoded, then that's going to cost money because they have to pay for the processing on their end. They've got to pass those costs along to the user. But Restream does serve a purpose in that it will collate all the comments from these platforms into a unified chat interface, which is really cool.

50:56 I know there are people in the community that are not a fan of Restream. it's not the highest quality in terms of like stream quality so you might have to roll your own solution and considering that you know we have access to modern day vibe coding tools like Claude and stuff like that maybe that's something we can look into via API is maybe we can roll our own service that will just we

51:21 maybe we can just vibe code a interface that'll have all the chat comments from from YouTube and Facebook and X and LinkedIn and all that sort of stuff. Because, you know, all these platforms have APIs, right? So we might have to build something to do that. But I agree. That's a valid point. And you're definitely going to want a way to do that.

51:41 Otherwise, we might have to hire my 11-year-old nephews to manage all the comments. I want 11-year-old moderators. That sounds delightful. Fenwick? Yeah, I'm glad you finally brought in the comments, Alexander, because it sounded like you were fixated on the outgoing stream. I think that's the easy part. The thing that Ronnie's trying to get at there is the comments. So, you know, I'm kind of new to the – I'm not going to say that out loud.

52:12 A friend of mine, a guy who's been on my show now, he's really into the Ecamm thing. And I know that none of us really use Ecamm, but I'm fairly certain that Ecamm allows you to pull comments in from multiple places. I know that he brings in comments from the chat in YouTube. And I could be wrong about it. It says connect with YouTube, FaceSpace, the Twitters, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

52:44 So I think it brings comments in from everything. I don't know if that translates to how you're getting your signal out, Ronnie, but it's one of those things where, and Alexander's right, I bet just one of us could, not me, could write a tool that sucks in comments from everything and outputs via HTML5, you know, a keyable thing, like just insert this key and then I'm going to update it.

53:12 that's the way to do this by the way uh but um i think sometimes choosing the right tool to alleviate headaches is a good is a good way to go ecamm may be uh the solution to this who's gonna write that is that sabato sabato gonna do that what are you doing this weekend chris no ecamm's mac thing i don't want anything to do with that no no no i'm not saying i'm i

53:39 I know who I'm talking to. I'm saying you could write a tool that says I'm logged into this account and this account and this account. Show me a stream of all of the comments that are coming in, regardless of where it's coming in, and just let me go tink and make that one live. And then output it via HTML5 that I can drop into my switcher through technology.

54:07 Cool. It's the same. And that is a little, and the way that it works with Restream and comments with Ecamm is that if you're connected to Restream, Restream aggregates the comments from all the places that you're streaming to. And then Ecamm services comments from whatever your primary stream source is. So like if I go into my Ecamm settings here and I've got all my destinations, like I'm picking one of these.

54:34 I don't have a place to like add in a bunch of accounts, but if Restream is the account, then that's what's going to show up there. I didn't know if this was an office hours question or if this was a question for you, Ronnie. If this was an office hours question, then what you all just got was a little tiny preview of perhaps an introspective question about office hours.

54:55 It normally we don't do during the week, but we're sliding here during the last 10 minutes. this. On Sundays, we do a non-DBR live only show. It's kind of like members only. So if you want to join us and get more involved with Office Hours, talk about things you'd like to see, things that you like, things that you don't. Sunday's the day to do that. And it's pretty cool. It's also a day

55:17 where we as a community talk about the future and talk about what we're trying to do as an organization, because we are a nonprofit. And if you'd like to chip into that, we'd appreciate it. I get a lot of value out of Office Hours, so I try to give as much as I can back at officehours.global.com. We appreciate everybody who gives their time, talent, and treasure to making this wonderful little program.

55:36 Next question. All right, next up is coming in from the QR code submission. David is asking, what are your thoughts on IPMX? Who's actually using it in the real world? Courtney Gooden. Well, I got a question for you, David. How old are you? because by the time this becomes utilized as a standard, you may be dead. Wow. Because as any standard goes, this is up for adoption.

56:07 This is a media standard, an IP media standard for packaging video and audio media over IP. And of course, you know, there are other competing standards. This one happens to be backed by SMPTE, VSF, and NMWA, whatever that is. You know, these three standards organizations. And here's a comparison of, you know, AES-67, the other standards that have been established so far. This is a proposed standard, which is still in the proposal stage.

56:41 So before it's widely adopted, it has to settle down and they have to agree on everything. That means you got to agree on all the manufacturers of equipment to agree on a standard and that usually takes 10 to 15 years sometimes. So here's the proposed standards, the differences between SMPTE 2110 and the IPMX proposed standard. The problem is it's going to – unlike the 2110 that has no copy protection or anything

57:08 anything like that, HGCP built in. It does have encryption built in, but these are all optional. And anything that's optional becomes a problem with the standard because it depends on what manufacturers support the optional issues and which ones don't. And that reduces your cross compatibility between hardware that is sending the data over IP and that is receiving the data. Does it support the full version?

57:36 Does it not support the full version? it's a mess. It's always a mess anytime it's extensible and manufacturers are allowed to, you know, add their own flavor of the standard. That means it's no longer a standard. So I wouldn't hold my breath, you know. That's why I asked how old are you. This always reminds me of the XKCD standards comic where it's like,

58:01 there are 14 competing standards. 14? Ridiculous. We need to develop one universal standard that the covers, everyone's use cases. Yeah, situation. There are 15 competing standards. And we go, and we go, and we go. Thank you, everyone, so much for joining us on this fine Friday afternoon. Morning. Where are we? Afternoon for some of you. We are global. Also, thank you to the panel for being here and answering your questions

58:25 and to the producers for asking those questions. And as always, what we do would be absolutely impossible without our marvelous back-end crew, who, despite putting up with my antics, still seem to keep supporting us and making sure that we get on stage in a timely fashion and keeping us organized. Move forward. You're the best. It's a lot like Traversal today. Had we gone around in person for episode 2411,

58:49 we would have went 28,000 kilometers. That's 28,000 miles, 45,000 kilometers, 220 million bananas for scale. See you in After Hours. excellent beyond Wayne Halloween so the answer is streamer bot streamer dot bot is that how you do the comments oh yeah streamer bot it's been around for about five years six years it's a multi-platform ingest so it's been around for quite a while

59:30 and check out Nutty Lamau his page he's been posting how to's for streamer.bot oh cool I'll check that out thanks JJ has it become a standard no clearly not can you touch the buttons entertaining whimsical yet yet relevant with an underlying revisionist conceit that belied the show's emotional attachment to the subject matter What? I said the stream has ended.