Office Hours | Saturday | October 24, 2026

0:00 The cooling comes from the river, which is on the right side of the picture, down in the valley kind of thing. So you're using a lot of water. There might be an upside. Yeah, and that water is going through our power plant before it hits the river and then becomes cooling. So they kind of use it for everything. The discussion now is what are they going to use the heat for?

0:28 so they are in the last planning stages how to reuse them the heath yeah i would think that would be you know if they built a data center near a city it'd be very good to pipe hot water for heating to all the buildings with uh to get rid of it that way and you'd be killing two birds with one nuclear power plant with one data center you'd be killing all the birds with the data center

0:57 we have questions two of them two two questions in one no no no no you're not going to be here during the show look at my favorite cat wow Wow. What's that kitty cat's name? Big dude. He's big. He's Linus. L-I-N-I-S. Nice. Linus, kind of like Linux only. Yep, Linus Torvalds. Linus Torvalds. The Esports World Cup in Paris. Oops.

1:44 Go away. Go to the deck. All right, Ronnie. I just put a question in directed to you. Who, me? Yes, you. oh was that for me uh i'm up from the pan that's what he was saying

3:12 well i don't know what sunday what may would make it a sunday question i mean as some of some people that's because nobody knows what alex lindy's lindsey's doing because you know he's working There's not much to answer there. Behind the pectin curtain, you know. That's the correct answer. Leave it up and say, you know, some of us have seen him and he's doing okay.

3:36 I mean, there's not much else to say. I don't see a reason to reject it and leave it for Sunday. We can guess what he's doing. We can guess what he's doing, you know. I don't know what's happening with the Vision Pro. He's well ensconced. Nobody else does either. He's well ensconced in the Cupertino spaceship. We can just say he was abducted by a spaceship.

4:01 All right, here we go. Spooky. Thanks for stepping in to read questions, Courtney. Good morning and welcome to Office Hours, the show where we answer your technical media

4:46 production questions every single week. If you've got any questions for the panel today, whether they be media and production production-related, general tech, AI, vibe coding, networking, whatever, even audio questions, we can answer that stuff. So make sure you get those questions in. We'll talk to you more a little bit about that later. Courtney, let's dive right in. What do we got? All right. First one

5:08 comes in from Austin, Texas. Paul Valhus asks, Panasonic's AW-UE200 and AW-UER200 are billed as the first global shutter PTZs with a 1.2-inch 5K sensor and pan and tilt up to 400 degrees per second. Shipping next year in 2027. Who needs that in a PTZ? And here's a link to that place. 1.2, they didn't quite go all the way to 1.5-inch. That's interesting.

5:37 Guy, or sorry, let's go to Courtney. Well, I'll tell you why they need a global shutter in a PTZ and that speed in a PTZ. how about covering the Olympics? Because the first letter in PTZ stands for pan. And one thing that's bad on a pan is a rolling shutter because it generates that jello effect. So if you're going to use these to cover sports, for example, and PTZs can now be programmed with intelligence to

6:05 follow a certain quarterback or the ball or the hockey puck or whatever in sports, it's going to to pan very quickly it's going to need that pan and i foresee that they could be using these in you know a lot of sports broadcast with that high quality sensor and good ptz and no rolling shutter effect all right and let's go to ronnie um i think it's a really cool camera uh the price is also uh

6:37 in the higher things. And I wonder if they are the only, maybe they are the only integrated full PTC, but of course you can have a global shutter camera mounted on a gimbal that is also giving you global shutter. But these are new cameras. I haven't had the time to kind of dive into them, but Panasonic as I know them, they are very, very good.

7:09 They are, as Courtney said, these are probably made for sports productions to be able to do really, really fast tracking without having the jello effect. So I really would like to take a look at those if you were into those types of categories. For normal stage use or event or conferences, I don't think that is too much of a problem. We tend to be using PDSets for adjusting and then go to still.

7:41 We don't move the cameras too much in conference settings. So different cameras with different specs for different cases. So choose wisely. If you need that camera for a specific case, I would like to know. And if we have comments in YouTube chat, leave a comment there, what you are going to be using it for. Guy? Yeah, I guess the question is who would need that in a PTZ?

8:10 There's a lot of folks that would. So at Tenacious Ventures, we have six UE150s, which is the predecessor. And we were looking at going to UE160s and Keycode Media was kind enough. They're the local, well, actually they're pretty spread across the US now with I think six offices. If you ring them up, they'll let you borrow cameras, so they let us borrow one.

8:30 And it was more for what Courtney was talking about. there's more a that we get in a little bit of shimmering it when we have you know a CEO or stage presenter and then they have an LED wall behind them and the 160 can cure that so we're like well we've already paid for these 150s we've done so many events with them so corporate these guys that are like local

8:52 medical we've done stuff for the usual big suspects the big names that you would hear in the technology sector in the Northwest so I would love to get my hands on these when i look at the competition the sony am7 so we were looking at going the sony route so this is kind of their answer to the am7 and then there's also the fr7 which doesn't have

9:11 as much range because you're limited by the weight of the lens so you could throw like a 200 uh one of the g masters on there and you could overweight that thing but as i look at uh this other company called um cinna uh live and the gigs that they're doing you're like go to their their instagram and And when you say who would use them, go look at some of the productions that they're working on.

9:35 And you kind of get a taste as to, you know, who's doing some of the bigger gigs. They just did the SpaceX coverage or the Tesla coverage with that flying car. So these were the guys behind that. Yeah, you could see some of that there. So if you want to get some ideas at the high end, go look at Cinebroadcast and some of the big box lenses.

9:55 I mean, we'll rent these big box lenses. And the picture quality, when you start to zoom in, because, you know, 5K, you've got extra room now that you could really push in. So if you're just going HD out, man, you've got mammoth sensor area that you can really get in there. So it's amazing. Even the Sony M7 is blowing people away by what it's capable of doing as far as reach because we're used to having to rent these big box lenses.

10:17 And they're not cheap and they're heavy, you know, because not only do you need the big lens, you need the support. So now you've got big Vinton or Sockler sticks and you've got a big rig set up and bigger. Everything gets bigger and more expensive. But there's nice that you got focus on demands and things like that. So I'm excited to look at Panasonic's new tracking as well.

10:38 I know that they have a 30-day license on their $800 software, but it does require. If it's like what I remember testing, it does require a GPU. So you're going to have to have a separate computer. So I got to read more into this one and see if it's on board like the Sony because the Sony's auto tracking is just insane. And Courtney?

11:01 Yeah, I was reading the specs and that is the thing that stuck out to me. It has built-in auto tracking, built-in auto framing for automatically recreates your intended composition. Plus, it has in one model here, the AW, the UE2100W, it has built-in SMPTE 2110 and Dante support. So you can integrate it, especially in all these sports trucks that are switching over to 2110 for hooking up all their cameras and interconnects.

11:31 It's going to move smoothly into something like that. All right, let's move on to the next question. Next question comes from Alexander Knight in a place called Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. And who's today? Ronnie, you've been vibe coding your production tools for a while now. Are you concerned about the security of these apps and services and how are they being audited? You almost got Coquitlam.

12:05 It's an M at the end, not an N, Courtney. Go ahead, Ronnie. Yes, of course. Of course, we've seen what can happen even last week. We've seen what can happen when big organizations are creating security holes in something that we expect to be solid software. I'm talking on the PHP. So most of the production tools we are using and developing is for internal use only.

12:34 So they are sitting behind firewalls. And if someone comes through that firewall and starts playing with those tools, we have much bigger problems. So it's kind of seen as internal tools. And there is two camps here. One thinks that production tools should really be run in kind of air-gapped systems, which means that they are not connected to the Internet at all. all, so only be run internally and don't even have passwords to log into them.

13:12 Whereas other tools are being deliberately made for being controlled through internet, for instance, or in larger installations where, for instance, bit focus buttons or bit focus companion are examples of those type of things. And they, of course, need to have some more security around them. Then you have, of course, direct tools that are planned and being run in the cloud. And in those cases, you really need to be thinking on security.

13:47 And one thing we've stopped using as kind of a main rule, rule of thumb, is to never store username and password and instead have other means of logging into software. So instead of storing a password that can be hacked and used, we tend to go directly to either Magic Links, which then just send something to an email address and then creates a kind of two-way control instead of storing passwords.

14:18 And then when you eventually are being logged in using, for instance, Magic Link, you can use passcode instead. So there are ways to kind of control the login part of that. And then you have, of course, the code penetration tests. I usually have some AI that actually do some penetration tests from the outside and try to hammer into the applications. And normally it's good and just feed that information back into the AI and then make it take care of that.

14:51 But that also has something to do with the complexity of the application. So easy applications, easy to control, everything is good. And if it's internal, there's basically no problem. Makes sense. Courtney, what do you think? I was going to ask Karani, what do you do with these applications that have biometric passwords, where you had to use a fingerprint or a face unlock?

15:14 How do you deal with applications like that? or what is the new service, the key, the new encryption replacing password key? What is it called? Key link? It's called PassKey. So let's say if we have a few applications where we are using this, we use, when we are vibe coding this, of course I do manual coding as well, but normally I use a service called BetterAuth, which is then making it

15:44 it easier for me to apply different ways of authentication. For instance, Google login, like we have on the new website that you can find on devsite.officehours.global, a shameless plug for the new site. I'll leave a link in the chat as well. There we have different options to log in, for instance, using your Google account, which is then being just matched to your

16:10 your email. So then we have Magic Link. And after you have logged in with either of those two methods, you can then activate the passcode functionality, which doesn't even do any lookup through Google or you don't need the Magic Link functionality at all. It's basically stored in your browser environment is this way to explain it. and you just click accept and then it goes on into your local kind of security key storage,

16:41 which in Max is passwords applications. And those can be easily shared between your devices. So it makes it much easier to log in, though you have to activate this passcode for each device and actually each of the browser types you are using. So it makes things easier and more frictionless and also more secure, definitely. But security is also something in the application.

17:12 If you leave ports open, et cetera, so it's not just about authentication and the way you authenticate, telling the application that you are basically you. It's also a lot of other things. and leaving a database port open, for instance, is kind of a thing you wouldn't like to do. So you also need to test, penetration test everything and have big tests run through that.

17:37 And of course, see what happens when the application starts to crash because of high volume of traffic, etc. And see if it then starts to fall apart in some way that makes intrusion possible. So there's a lot of aspects. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Wow. Yeah, I mean, it seems like we're getting close to, I don't know anyone that's able to use agentic AI agents in this way.

18:05 But for even managing security, I was just thinking for internal audits for companies, it'd be kind of cool if you could just deploy an agent and say, Hey, just scan all these machines on the network. Give me a report. Tell me, like make an inventory of all the software that's installed and all the services that are running. and let me know what things I need to plug, right?

18:24 And then it just tells you. And then you could even just, you can review it and do it yourself, or you could just tell, okay, now go in and just close all these ports, fix all these, turn these services off. I'm sure we're very close to that if we're not already there. Guy, what do you think? What's your opinion on all this security audit stuff?

18:41 Yeah, there's been some pretty major stuff that's been going on over the last week, and it's getting exposed because there's people that should, when they discover this, let people have a fighting chance to go and patch it and fix it. And that's been the standard in the past. But some of these folks that have these tools are discovering things and then putting it out there on the public internet saying,

19:01 hey, look what I found. And for whatever little bit of glory they get, they just kind of hosed a bunch of people that now have to scramble and get out of bed at three in the morning to this thing that they now have to deal with. So we're going to see more of it, unfortunately, where where people are just using these powerful tools

19:18 because you get these fable level and mythos level capabilities that just can go through millions of lines of code in the middle of the night while we're sleeping. And these guys find holes in the game and they're there. They're definitely there. It's just a matter of what backdoor somebody's gonna get in. So like when I was giving Ronnie some access to our API,

19:38 I was like, okay, do I just ask him for his IP address, where he's gonna be coming from? And then I just whitelist his IP address. And then for everybody else, I rate limit them to like 10 pools or whatever. So some of this is just nuances of learning what's possible because I didn't even know about like Cloudflare access. And there's bot things that you could do in there.

19:58 So a lot of it's just education as you start to get into vibe coding. Some of this may sound like, you know, foreign, but it starts to get important. And I'm thankful for Jackson. He started to point out some things. He was just like, you know, you might want to put a gate in front of this. And so when you get security expert, he actually knows a lot.

20:17 So thanks to people in the community that do know more and then want to school you and just be like, hey, I'm looking out for you. Because things that we learn in this community, we can then take on to other professional gigs. Like I have one next week with SRT pool, and I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to whitelist just the IP of the venue.

20:34 And that way, nobody else can hop on and interrupt that. And news networks do this all the time as well. They just whitelist that IP. and that way nobody could come in and hijack that broadcast all right let's go to ronnie yeah and one one other thing for those that are sitting in their homes uh or home offices and vibe code stuff

20:55 make sure that you always keep all the api secrets hidden from the application so you don't accidentally share that for instance to github and where you easily in github can just start start reading all these, all these, oh, what's happening? It's my picture flipping. Okay. So you don't share any secrets to GitHub. That is really a dangerous thing to do. So make sure that you tell your AI to check for those basic things so that nothing that

21:25 should be kept a secret is shared through GitHub. So just remember, if you delete it afterwards, it's still in GitHub. So you have to basically delete the entire repo and create a new one if you want to get rid of those old information that you accidentally shared last week but now you found out and you're deleting it it is not helping you uh so that is one thing to be be be yeah looking at when you're

21:49 changing and this this is something that sick people that are developers are are always looking out for so just all these new vibe code possibilities make sure that you are telling telling Claude that you have no idea what you're doing regarding security. I need your help Claude or whatever. Help me get this security in these applications a little bit more secure and tell me

22:15 if I'm doing something stupid. That is a good entry into your first chat message. I know AIs are not self-aware but I just a part of me thinks like should I admit that I don't know what I'm doing with security to the AI. I just feel like it might, maybe is it going to take advantage of me? I don't know. Probably not. At least not in the foreseeable future. All right.

22:39 If you want to ask questions for this panel, we got lots of time on this show. You can use Makana. That's our Q&A system. You got to be part of the community. I'm going to tell you how to sign up to learn more about that. You can go to officehours.global.com. That's officehours.global.com. You got to put your name and email in there. We'll send you the links.

22:58 And once you get access to Makana and log in, you can post the questions. You can vote on them up and down. That's very critical. And I always recommend if you can during the show, vote on them up and down. Just quickly do a scan. Just see whatever you're interested in. It doesn't take much time at all. And that's important because that tells the crew what priority we should be answering these questions for you.

23:18 And also the last component would be the live chat. So you're missing half the show if you're not in there. We really recommend you go in there because, you know, there's all sorts of different people in the community that add a lot of value to the show. Sometimes, you know, we don't get everything right here on the show. Sometimes people are providing additional feedback and suggestions and recommendations and links to things that we're talking about.

23:38 So that's a great place to be. All right. Let's move on. Courtney, what do we got next? From Paul Valhus in Austin, Texas. He says, a hum shows up mid-show. Ground lift? Cable swap? Switch over to battery? What's the panel's 30-second triage order when you're on the air? Oh, that's a tough one. Never something you want to have to deal with in the middle of a show.

24:05 Courtney, what do you think? Obviously, this could be a lot of different things. Hum shows up mid-show. The singer has forgotten the lyrics, and you need to turn the teleprompter back on. No. You do have a problem at a live show because a hum, AC hum especially, 60 hertz hum or 120 hertz hum, usually is coming in over your AC power line.

24:27 And you don't want to unplug your AC power line to anything that is carrying something like a live signal over the air to lift the power, lift the ground, unless you have ground lift, special ground lift switches in line already. So I would say the only way to deal with that is one, isolate this. See if you can isolate the source if it's coming in over an external audio source, like over one of the inputs to your mixer suddenly plugged something in and now it's coming in over a specific channel in your mixer.

24:59 try and do a notch filter at 60 hertz on that particular input. If it's in general, in your PA in general, you've got a problem, you would have to take the power down to lift the ground. The other thing you can do is, if you're running off of a laptop, I find a lot of times laptop power supplies are the source of the hum. And if you've got a good battery in your laptop

25:22 and you can unplug it to see if the hum goes away when you unplug the power supply to your laptop, And if it does, then try and lift the ground, put in a ground lifter, you know, one of those three to two adapters, AC adapters that we have in the United States. And if you're somewhere else, well, you're in Texas, that's kind of in the United States.

25:43 Then you can put one of those in line and see if that solves the problem. A lot of times switching power supplies can generate noise and get leaky after a while. So a lot of times I've found that ground hum is coming from my laptop's power supply and I run off the batteries. And Ronny? I thought ground hum came from the ground, but it probably doesn't. So most of

26:08 these situations that we experience is the bass guitarist has used his cable for something else that it should be used for, or the lead guitarist is using or leaving his cables with their kids using as a jump rope. So there are different ways, but eventually everything that we mostly experience is based on the stage floor right in front of the guitarist. They have these amazing

26:37 pedal boards that do all this amazing stuff that only a scientific degree person is able to understand. And sometimes they have that linked to another pedal board with another set of pedals pedals that do all more amazing stuff. And all these pedal boards have a connection between them because there is a thing going through everything. And the easy check to check if that's the cable coming from the guitar or the guitar

27:03 itself into the first pedal board is to just mute the first box on the pedal board and see if the hum is still there. If it's still there, well, then it's not the guitar cable. and then we have to of course find the faults in the pedalboard and a couple of weeks back we just asked the guitarist to change the cable and go directly into the amp and just jump over all the

27:30 pedal boards and the hum were disappearing magically. So these are things that of course are really difficult to find out during the show. You should be able to have good sound checks before that and do really good line checks, not just seeing that there is a signal coming in, but actually listening to that and listening to what the signal is actually giving.

27:54 If there is some hum, you address that immediately during the sound checks and try to prevent them from appearing in the show. And if you have a temporary thing that goes on during the sound check, you really should be aware because that can jump into and bite you during the show. And then of course you have what Courtney was talking about. Going from a laptop,

28:17 for instance, to a soundboard is never a good idea unless you have some DI in between them. The DI also can be isolating so that electrical hum coming from the power systems to the laptop, which is then easy to just unplug and run it on battery to see if that fixes the problem. them. But use some form of a DI on all these types of equipment that can generate hum and

28:45 make sure that you use the correct power. So if you have microphones that do not support 48 volts, for instance, that can cause hum in some instances. So make sure you have tested everything beforehand. And if things are going high wire, have a plan to be bypassing those things that are actually creating problems for you. Yeah, that's all good advice. And I agree with James Haldane in the chat, though, this kind of stuff rarely happens

29:15 in the middle of shows, which is why it's important to always make sure you test and check and know exactly what it is that you got and not have someone just walk in and randomly plug in. I mean, in my experience, typically, you know, and wires can break down, that can happen too. But, you know, I've seen it where some, you know, someone comes in, they plug something

29:34 in with an unbalanced cable and they don't have a DI box they're using some consumer grade thing and it you know somehow it ends up going out to program maybe it was unintentional that kind of stuff sometimes sometimes you have a bad ground inside a cable that can happen to and like Ronnie is saying with specifically with guitar players obviously Paul you didn't mention

29:53 specifically this was a band or anything but you know a lot of musicians work with unbalanced gear and that's why you can have those those types of issues issues, yeah, especially with keyboards, a lot of keyboards, unless it's a high-end workstation keyboard, a lot of them have unbalanced quarter-inch TS outputs, which is why we always use as short as possible quarter-inch cable going straight into a nice radial DI box to immediately

30:18 balance that, transform or isolate that into XLR, which we would go to front of house. So those are all things you gotta check ahead of time, for sure. But definitely stressful, obviously, when you do hear that problem. It's like, where is that coming from? All right, let's move on. What have we got next, Courtney? Coming in all the way from Madrid in Spain, Ignacio says,

30:39 I haven't seen Alex Lindsay in ages here. How's he doing? Any plans for him to show up in Office Hours Global again in the future? And that was submitted through the QR code. All right, Guy, you've talked to Alex. I mean, he's obviously in Scots and Cupertino. Yeah. So for those of you that don't know, he did take a position that's pretty non-public facing. So he's kind of dipped behind the scenes for now. So he's the partnership manager for Creative Pro 3 ecosystem at Apple. And so it's not really a role where he's going to be out in the limelight like he used to be.

31:18 so will he come back? that's a good question, you can catch him in the Swell sessions in the Office Hours Discord we have a studio that we partner up with and you'll see some of the community members operating cameras and I've seen Alex behind the scenes so if you go into our Discord it is this one right here called airship-studio and you'll see

31:46 John Nichols usually, Rocket it, we'll post a, and this is coming up, so subscribe to this channel if you want to catch up with him. He'll be in there, and what he does is he usually is the guy either running a camera, or you'll see him helping direct with Marcia via comms, and we'll pipe those comms into this meeting, and you can hear what's going on, and you can hear the, not only hear the calls, but you can

32:10 can pull the feeds from each camera down. And if you have Zoom ISO or MIMA Live or vMix or any of the other tools you can that can grab onto those feeds, I'd love for him to come back. I'm kind of holding this space here. It's been amazing to see since January how the community has just stepped up and kept this thing going.

32:32 So I'm like, let's just make it a beautiful thing. And if he comes back, he comes back. If he doesn't, then we just carry on and we keep doing our shows and learning new things. I mean, I'm proud of like what Ronnie's done with the website and things are just still moving forward and we're holding that space and we wish him the best. But I've talked to him on the phone

32:50 and he is doing well. So if you're concerned about his health or any of that stuff, he seems to be in high spirits. There we go. Got my mic on. All right, Courtney. Courtney? Yeah. And as someone who has previously worked under nondisclosure agreements for the big Apple company, and it's passed the statute of limitations, so now I can speak about it.

33:17 But this was back in the 80s, the 90s, and slightly into the 2000s. I know having to sign those 12 and 22-page nondisclosure agreements on every project I worked on for them. So I know that you cannot speak publicly. You can't even tell people you're working on something from that company. So you have to be very mysterious. So I understand his absence, and especially if he's in a position that is non-public facing.

33:46 He's not allowed to go in any public, you know, distributed media and speak anything about what he's doing, where he is, how he's doing, etc., etc., etc., or why he's doing it. So I understand, but we hope someday he'll return. But he's been abducted by the big spaceship in Cupertino. Yeah, we wish him the best. All right, let's move on, Courtney. What do we got?

34:13 Rajan Chandil in Los Angeles says, is anyone else having issues with VIMO billing or extra charges? And he has a link to a story there. Ronnie? Yeah, so Vimeo has been Vimeo for ages and some of us have been using those services for ages. A couple of years back, we kind of reduced our amount of services with Vimeo because we hit those limits, which are kind of pretty hard. And they are lower than you would expect if

34:52 you're running a big live conference for instance with uh with global reach uh you you you will find yourself uh quickly hitting the limits of extra charges so that is something they are open about if you're going to be using vimeo be sure that you don't have um you don't have a situation where you can be incurring overcharges because they will cost out of your pocket and make sure at least

35:21 that you have that agreement with the client that are kind of owing the the project so that you are able to uh invoice them for those extra charges this is the way the the business model for vimeo is built up these days and it's their way of doing it and just remember vimeo is uh is uh purchased or in a one one single deal last year on this time i think almost a year ago they were uh

35:47 purchased by a company called Bending Spoon. So they definitely have made some changes and probably had some cool plans about what Vimeo is going to be. And in this day and time, make sure that you follow all the changes in all the pricing. We see this from other companies. And as an example, Adobe has been really, really bad at treating their long-staying customers in a bad way

36:16 by incurring very, very high charges for all the subscriptions that you are trying to end. So make sure that you are reading the small text and doesn't just click apply or accept the newest additions to any terms of service. Make sure you read them in case they are kind of trying to capture you and keep you as a customer forever. That would be a bad idea, but some companies are doing that these days.

36:44 Yes. And let's go to Guy Cochran. Yeah, this is a tough one. I mean, as Ronnie was saying, the bending spoons playbook is acquire, trim back some of the headcount, roll up accounting and some of these features that they think are R&D. all these things that they used to spend a lot of money on. So it's kind of like slash and burn.

37:12 And unfortunately, if you go through LinkedIn, you'll see a lot of people are pretty pissed off. And there's even some of the former folks that used to work for Vimeo that started a new company called Livid. So if you are livid with billing, which it seems to be across LinkedIn, a lot of people are not happy with seeing bills that used to be like $50 a month go into four or 500. So

37:34 So like, you know, 9 to 10x what we were paying. So I haven't been burned by this, but I would recommend looking at Livid. And the other one that we use is Wistia. The reason why I like Wistia is you could actually see, they call it the heat map. You could see where people have rewatched certain sections or where they fell off.

37:54 You could also put in what they call turnstiles where you can gather an email address after a certain amount of time if that's one of the things that you want to do. But there's a lot of intelligence too if you want. You could even see the IP addresses of where people are coming from and you could see the organization name. So we used Wistia a lot when we're using what we still do with the One Button Studio.

38:19 Jason Jenkins is carrying that One Button Studio on and what he does is he's able to see if an organization rewatches a certain section of the One Button Studio videos, they're getting a phone call. all because you could tell that the email is going around or they're in the middle of a bidding process or something like that. So I would really look at Wistia. It's a little more money, but it's

38:37 worth it. It's so good. As far as like Vimeo live streaming, I would also be looking at alternatives. I mean, the 1080p with Zoom, it's pretty decent. Like Vimeo, some people used it for live streaming for years. Alternatives are out there now. The one thing that they had was higher quality quality streams back in the day and YouTube alone is eating their lunch.

39:04 I mean, if you could handle the ads and the copyright stuff, then yeah, there's just alternatives. One thing that I also would share is that if you have those videos that are embedded across, this is the nice thing about AI is that you could easily go back and find and replace all those. Whereas before, like if you had a thousand videos and you're like, oh no, I'm stuck with

39:23 vimeo because our our entire archive is everywhere you can you can go across and have uh find and replace so if you get the new url you can just go across a website and pretty much make sure that none of those videos uh get a 404 error so uh i i feel you though that's a tough one tough pill to swallow and there's going to be worse stuff too bending spoons is on a spree so it's the same

39:48 in playbook over and over again. Yeah, absolutely. All right, Courtney, what do we got next? Next comes in from Craig McFarlane in Boston, Massachusetts. Craig wants to know, while helping someone with their audio-video setup is best done live with experts like we used to do here, not everyone is comfortable with a ruthless review. With AI and other tools, what aspects could be done as an automated service?

40:16 Go ahead, Courtney, right back to you. Well, I would think I'm not. You're the AI expert here on the panel, Greg, when you're here. So you might be able to know. I would think, however, with all the AIs that do like Nano Banana 2.5 or whatever, 5, whatever they're up to by now, it's able to actually change your video and make you into something else.

40:42 I know I've had it make me into something else constantly, and maintain certain portions of your background and change just one thing. I would think it'd be really good at making those changes, so it must be able to recognize what's in your particular frame line and compare it to other, you know, if you give it samples of good examples of a correctly framed, correctly focused, and good background, etc.

41:07 et cetera, examples like that to use as part of its AI visual selection of data, then it should be able to give you a verbal criticism or a text criticism of what it thinks you could do to improve your background without actually doing it for you, which sometimes isn't really easily done live. And Ronnie? Yeah, so we basically do some of this stuff already in After Hours. We have this

41:42 meter that has been made by community members and is sitting in the 24-7 Zoom meeting all the time, and where you can actually remote control that. And I guess some of that is at least AI-vibe coded, I think. And those meters are giving visual feedback on the levels that your microphone is at the moment. And we also have some other tools that we are using internally that can basically

42:16 gather all the speakers in a meeting and create individual information for each speaker's situation regarding audio. Look at the levels, look at noise levels. We can identify if microphone is is open, if it's muted in Zoom, if it's muted elsewhere externally in a mixer, or even sense if we suspect the 48-volt phantom power to be missing in a microphone. So we have a lot of diagnostic tools that we are vibe coding and have been for a couple

42:56 of years, one year, so that we can have assistance. distance. And some of those things are then being fed back to the user in the meeting, so they can kind of have some feedback to be able to assist them in doing the right things. But you know, there are some gaps between an engineer that are sitting and evaluating all these qualities and the competence to a person that is just joining a meeting, for

43:30 instance if that is the the use scenario here so there are there are of course uh things that you need to be carefully telling the the user or client and um yeah it's never never easy uh but of course there's a lot of tools that you can can vibe code and i think the biggest problem is not to get it vibe coded the biggest problem is to actually come up with the idea of what to create

44:00 And let's go to Guy. Yeah, it's funny that you bring this up because at Tenacious, we have a link that's on Vimeo. We just bashed. But we host a video over there that walks you through a lot of this. And this was created during the pandemic of audio, lighting, all these. And they're really good. I wish I could share them with you, but they're private.

44:20 One of the things that I've thought about after watching their videos is creating breakout rooms here in after hours where you could go in and have certain tools like the framer or meters or certain things with AI that would see what you're doing and then gently coach you. And one other quick thing, I just want to show you how gorgeous the sunrise is right now.

44:43 This is live outside. You guys periodically see this cow cam. It was even more stunning just a few seconds ago, but man, I'm like, that's a whopper. Oh, come on, that's AI. You can't film such AI. No, it's not. Like, which cow do you want to see, Courtney? You want to see that one over there? like let me see that's not an ai cow let's see the one that's laughing at you yes

45:03 the one i ran by this morning yeah those are real real cows and real cars that they're driving i just saw a car drive by somewhere out there but yeah until the cows come home but beautiful morning here in the pacific northwest in washington state very cool uh yeah and i actually Actually, while we were talking, I uploaded an image, a still image that I took with my ATEM to chat GPT.

45:31 And I'm going to show you my screen here. Because I told it to be ruthless. I said I need a ruthless review. And man, it did not hold back at all. It gave me an overall 6.8 out of 10 overall visual representation. Presentation says my immediate impression you have a competent deliberate studio setup But the image isn't working as hard as it should to make you look like the central personality

45:55 If you're of a successful YouTube show the picture has attractive depth of depth of field pleasing background Ambience and respectable technical quality. However, your lighting is not sufficiently flattering or controlled the composition includes several Distractionism and the enormous gray surface behind you undermines what could otherwise be an interesting set that. It gives me a breakdown by lighting, you know, just some examples. I'm not going to read

46:20 all this, but it says, you know, your eyes aren't getting enough attention. The brim of your cap creates shadow around your upper face. Your glasses add another dark visual element, given that eye contact is arguably the most important element for an on-camera presenter. This needs improvement. Your skin looks excessively warm. The orange amber influence in your skin is quite pronounced. It makes your face appear reddish, particularly around the cheeks and forehead.

46:41 A warm background is fine, but your skin should have more natural appearance. Then it goes on, talks about the competition. I got a lower score for my competition. Apparently it doesn't like those giant bass traps. And it goes on and on and talks about some distractions and stuff like that. And then it goes into camera framing. It's very, very, very interesting stuff.

47:02 So obviously proof that you can absolutely do this in privacy and upload a photo yourself to chat GPT and it'll give you a score. Guy, what do you think about this? Yeah, you should try it with Grok in unhinged mode. Oh no. So for those of you that don't know, there is a mode in Grok that you have to go in there

47:20 and turn it on, but it gets pretty crazy. So try Grok. All right. I'll try that next. If you want to submit questions on the show, we got another way to do that. No login required. You can go to askofficehours.global. That's askofficehours.global in your browser or scan the QR code that you were seeing on your screen right now and post your question if we don't get to it today you don't have to worry

47:44 about it we will automatically resort those questions on the following day and get those questions into the show so make sure you tune in of course tomorrow is sunday that's our introspection show you got to be there live to be part of the show so we hope to see you there all right courtney what's up next uh next up from rajan chandil in los angeles uh televisions that could

48:06 be used as a monitor. Any ones you prefer for the price over 40 inches. Corny, what do you think? Well, call me Rajan. I have a couple of 47-inch Noxa monitors that are 4K. So this is what you want to look for is a 4K monitor in something like a 47-inch, so smaller so that you can use it, you know, so it's not going to take up the

48:34 the whole room probably, 43 or 47 inch. Those are two sizes you can find. Be careful of the ones that are connected to the internet. Like the LG's TVs are now phoning home. If you do get one like that or the, you know, the ones that were Vizio that was bought by Walmart, they're phoning home or Target. Was it Target or Walmart? One of them bought up Vizio and it phones home all the time

49:02 to serve you advertising. So you want to make sure that the monitor is not connected to the internet unless you want to airplay to it or do something like that. But I find the 4K panels that are in a lot of those work quite well as a monitor because they have a pretty wide color gamut and they usually have very good off-axis, they're usually IPS panels, and they have good off-axis

49:31 viewing for wide, have wide sweet spots so that you're not looking at color shifting as you get off axis. I'd stay away from OLEDs because they're going to burn in if you have anything permanently on the screen like a computer interface, it's going to burn into those pixels. But you can get reasonably priced monitors, just don't connect them to the internet. They give

49:52 for computer monitors with an HDMI input, they work pretty good. However, you may have to deal with hdcp but usually in a monitor you don't have to deal with that at all unless there's some type of recording function in that monitor all right and guy yeah be careful of what you get because our house of worship bought a mishmash of a bunch of tvs and it has been an absolute

50:18 nightmare for how they uh ask for the input so they go searching for whatever and i feel so bad for these teachers that come in and they plug in their iPad and the next thing you know, they are on some weird screen and they can't get the input. And then I get singled out and I have to go walk all the way up and go try to fix it. And it happens all the time. It's unfortunate.

50:38 I like these Dells particularly because they don't have that. They don't have that whole boot up process, but these are also the quad splits. So you can put four things inside of them. They are pricier. So it depends on if they're going to get beat up and left on because we do have have some at Tenacious. I can't say what we call them because it's kind of vulgar. But when you

51:00 need these big, bigger, we call them DSMs for the downstage monitors, but sometimes a presenter will want a bigger monitor that will put kind of in their eyeline way down. So it has to be big. So it has to be like a 50 or 70 inch and they get beat up. I mean, they just don't last because because sometimes they get scratched in shipping.

51:22 And we try to put them back in the, well, the 70-inchers, we have one big, huge rolling case, but sometimes they just get bought for specific gigs, and then they get scratched, and then they just get given away or whatever. So be aware that in production, either you buy the big case and you deal with all the shipping and all of that stuff

51:37 and try to make it last. But a lot of these production-type monitors just get heavy use. And if they're not commercial monitors like the OCs, I mean, that's the other thing is, could you get away with a Megamon? So the OC line has them built into cases already. So those are pretty sweet. I suggest if you can, look at the OC Megamons if you're just trying to do like Video Village.

51:59 I mean, what are you trying to do with it and where is it going to transport to? Are you going to throw it in the back of an SUV or are you going to put it in a truck truck with a bunch of other anvil cases and whatnot? Because that's where people loading at three in the morning, sometimes they just want to get out of there.

52:16 Corny. Yeah, another thing, if you're going to be transporting them around, I was thinking in a home setup or a studio setup. But yeah, if you're going to be transporting them around, but sometimes TVs, you know, they're more disposable because they're under $200. And if you get a 42-inch professional computer display, you're going to be paying thousands of dollars. So you don't want that to be damaged.

52:37 With TVs, a lot of times, you know, when you find one brand that is commonly available at Best Buy, let's say, that works for you, then you know that if you're traveling with it and it breaks in a remote location, you can go to your nearest Best Buy and pick up another one to replace it with and drop it in. The other thing you need to make sure of is that the resolutions on your computer that you're going to be working with are supported by the TV.

53:00 Because some TVs, TVs are pretty good and forgiving. Computer monitors sometimes are a little less forgiving with frame rates, aspect ratios, those kind of things. See what kind of frame rates the TV supports. The higher, the better. But sometimes you can find the publications, the service manual for that particular TV, that will show you the resolutions that are in its EDID table to show you what it will take as far as an input goes.

53:31 So if you've got a computer with a strange pixel count, horizontal and vertical, it may show up strangely. Usually it may show up stretched on your TV. If it's less than 16 by 9 aspect ratio, it may stretch it out to fill the screen, which may screw you up if you're looking at accurate representation of circles and things on your computer output.

53:53 So be aware of aspect ratios and make sure that you're operating in an aspect ratio on your computer that the TV likes. All right. Thank you for that, Courtney. Courtney. If you like Office Hours Global, the show that you're watching or listening to right now, we love having you here live on the show. It's always really fun seeing all the chat and

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55:20 Donate now. All right, Courtney, what's up next? Next one comes in from Henderson, Texas. Texas Jeff V Lee wants to know I've heard several concerns about the changes in ownership of Vimeo we were just talking about that would you turn to mux bunny stream or something else for hosting video curriculum on an LMS accessibility and affordability is the key mux and bunny stream

55:47 while you just threw out a bunch of words there Jeff that I have no idea what you're talking about Courtney, or Guy, what do you know about this stuff? Well, typically on some of these, you would see an S3 bucket. So S3 is AWS. And then there's a lot of permissions things that you got to be careful. I've seen some of these content creators where they got burned because they accidentally,

56:11 whoever was handling all that back end stuff, didn't set the permissions correctly. So you got to be really careful about where you put your videos if it's paid content like that that's high dollar webinars or something like that. I'm going to go back to the recommendation from earlier, which is Vimeo. And I'm just going to show you what it looks like to upload a clip in the back end, what

56:32 I was talking about these analytics. So when you go in here, you'd be able to see the traffic, the engagement, social audience, all this crazy stuff that... And here's that heat map thing that I was talking about where you could go back in and and you could see where somebody specifically was talking, or not talking, but re-watching. So played, replayed, replayed again, skipped.

56:52 So if people are leaving at a certain time, that's also a lot of great intelligence. So just for this analytics alone, I highly, highly, highly recommend Wistia, or at least getting, that's the free version right there, so you could at least go upload a clip real quick and just go see what it's like. And it also tells you where it's been embedded at,

57:11 everywhere that it's embedded. So unlike Vimeo, where it's not going to tell you that information, Wistia does. So again, I'm a big fan. I've given them tens of thousands of dollars over the years. So big, big fan. All right, Courtney, next question. Next one comes in from you, Mr. Alexander Knight in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, Canada. How does a parofocal lens work and why are these so much more expensive?

57:41 Nicely done. Courtney, right back to you. What do you know about these things? Well, par-focal lenses maintain their focus as you change focal length. They're typically used in video cameras because when you zoom in, you don't want it to go out of focus. You know, you zoom in, you set your focus, and then you zoom back out again, and it will maintain its focus throughout the range of that magnification or zoom.

58:04 And the way it does that is it has a separate set of elements that change as you change the focus as you change the magnification. So there's a separate set of optical elements inside the lens which are moving in proportion to your zoom. So that's why they're more expensive, and that's how you use them. Typically, you'll find non-parafocal lenses and still lenses

58:31 that are used for still cameras, so that if you zoom in on something, then you're going to have to focus, and you zoom back out, then you might have to refocus again. that's all I know about them. Well, yeah, they're obviously a lot more expensive to manufacture, but I've always wanted one, could never afford one, and I'm always jealous. Anytime I see a movie and you see a really fast zoom in,

58:55 it's like it's perfectly in focus. It's amazing. All right, next up, what do we got, Courtney? All right, next one comes in from Jackson Shafire in Tameel. They do. Anybody have any experience with Teradek wireless transmitters? They claim to be zero delay video. And here's a link to Teradek. Ronny? Yeah, so I've used Teradek products for a long time. So we have a lot of older equipments from the cubes, etc.

59:26 So they are not being used these days, but we still have them. And even back in the days, they were kind of quick and they have become quicker and quicker and quicker. quicker and the latest one I saw last year at IBC in Amsterdam was just mind-blowing I think they are as low as one milliseconds or maybe even less it also has something to do with uh with the

59:51 coverage so if you're having a longer distance it automatically adjusts so that you can have a have a buffer that is automatically managed but the last one I saw is amazing Amazing. And Guy? Yeah, so I've owned a lot of Teradek gear. I've also owned the cubes, and I was a reseller for Teradek. And they make great products, but the landscape has changed quite a bit over the years,

1:00:19 especially with DJI entering into the market space. It depends on how far you want to go and do you really need zero latency because all of these seem to add a little bit of latency. We have a production next week where I'm looking at what Omar Gadon, who he does MMA boxing style events, and he has the DJI product. And so we're going to rent this one.

1:00:45 And I know Jeff Keithley's rented these ones in the past. So with the monitor, it'd be $336. And this thing will go miles line of sight. So you're familiar with their drones. That's where that technology comes from. The one that Omar has side by side is this one that we're probably just going to buy this, the Axiom Cineview for $749 and rent, and then we'll

1:01:07 have two and we're going to have them running both at the same time. But the Teradek is also just a rental item, I would say. Unless you're doing a lot of this stuff, I wouldn't recommend buying them because the higher end ones, of course, you want the best because there's nothing worse than buying like a Hollyland or something and having it fail. Ask me how I know. So you

1:01:27 You cheap out on these things and you're going to get burned. So the big thing is they always test great when there's nobody there. But when the thousand people show up, then all of a sudden all those water bags start to soak up your transmission. And the next thing you know, you're getting dropouts. So if you can, run a cable as far as you can with the receiver closer to wherever the operator is going to be.

1:01:48 And then it's just a shorter hop. So cable close as you can. And actually on this production, we're even going to have a wireless cellular as well. So we're going to have it split. So you could go into, look at your signal chain and see if you can go out from the camera into the wireless transmitter and then loop back out and go to another transmitter. So then you have two at the same time, if the rig will support it, because these guys are going to have a backpack, so we can weigh them down a bit.

1:02:16 But if you're loading it all on top of a rig, be aware of your power, your cabling, and just the rig itself. How is it going to hold that transmitter? Because you may run into other issues with that as well. The worst is, you know, that thing dying or falling off in the middle of some heated battle, I call it. All right, next question.

1:02:35 Next question comes in from New York City. Brody Hefner says, NAB New York City reported that more than 60% of those registered were first-time attendees. Is it becoming the National Association of Streamers rather than broadcasters? Corny. In a short word, yes. You know, originally it was limited. National Association of Broadcasters was limited to people with broadcasting licenses or networks of broadcasters. So nowadays they accommodate the streamers, which are becoming a larger portion of the consuming audience that is distributed over the Internet.

1:03:10 So, yeah, it is. And they're finding out a lot of the local broadcasters are shutting down and going to streaming. All right. Last question. All right. Last question comes in from Jerry Hoyle in Wesley Chapel, North Carolina. Alex, how was Ronnie's app on your podcast last Sunday? Anything new to report? Yeah. So for those that don't know, we talked about it last Sunday, I believe, when Ronnie demoed.

1:03:41 is a little vibe-coded production tool that helps people like me bring in live Q&A into a show using Mimolive, which is the production tool that I use and Ronnie uses and many other people in the community use. It worked really well. It was flawless. It was so much better than the previous thing that we were doing, which was basically a Chrome plugin that would scrape a webpage

1:04:05 and bring those questions in. And there was a bit of a noticeable perceptible latency with that. But now because it runs as a node app, which I'm sure and Ronnie, I'll let Ronnie talk about this more, but it's much more lightweight I don't have to use Chrome. I've banished that now so every claimed quite a bit of CPU processor cycles With that and it's just instant the questions pop in and there's so much possibility now with automating

1:04:30 The the show in terms of the interaction when when people are talking on the show automatically going to certain certain layouts, two ups and whatever you want it to do. I mean, there's so many creative possibilities, but Ronny take it away and then we'll end the show. Yeah, I'll be quick. So the tool is basically making content in one system transported to another system by using a node server,

1:04:56 which is running on basically any machine in that network that Alexander or who else is needing needing to have questions moved from Mukana into Mimo Live. And it looks like this, not using too much time for this, but new features that have appeared last week is the ability to have multiple shows and you can have different profiles. So if you're using Mukana for many different shows,

1:05:26 you can just have those saved as templates. templates, it is automatically connected into the open running MimoLive instances that you have running in your network. And it also makes it possible to use any of these triggers and information sources and then just automatically put them into the correct layer into MimoLive. So those that are using MimoLive knows that all these these are a hassle to get the API codes from.

1:06:02 And this is just automatically showing this based on the amazing features that we have in MIMO Live to this. And here we can have triggers when a question goes live, put the host in the correct spot in the layer, and the reader is in the correct spot. You can recall this layer and you can go to a panel layout, layout, which is automatically managed by the people that are added to this meeting,

1:06:29 both in mapping the Zoom sources and also their specific layer thirds. Or you can choose to have the layer thirds automatically being written into that specific layer. And you can also put some algorithm to work here where you, based on how many people that are answering a specific question you choose which layer set and layer and which positions to put these raised hands in and yeah it's a lot of a lot of stuff going on here but uh it's amazing

1:07:01 it's really cool and and uh ronnie you didn't have any peer pressure at all to add any of these features right no one no one has tested you at all you just did this all on your yeah that's fun all But a message to the community is just to, if you're using Mukana and you're using MimoLive, hit us up. The code is free.

1:07:26 It's available on GitHub for free for everyone to start using. So if you know someone that are using Mukana and MimoLive, just start using this. It's really cool. Yeah, good stuff. We'll keep talking about that as that tool evolves. and make sure you're here Sunday because you know we talk about a lot more of that type of stuff on Sunday we got more

1:07:47 time to do it thanks to all the panelists for coming in today and answering all these questions and of course to you the producers yes you I'm looking at you right now you showed up live you came through because we wouldn't have a show without you without these questions this is really entirely driven by what you do and of course the back end crew thank you

1:08:03 to all the people involved that put the show together and all the various roles that you are in we could not do it without you sincerely appreciate you. And if we were to travel around the world virtually to answer all these questions, according to the Talalic traversal, that would have been 42,000 miles. That's 67,000 kilometers. And that's 329 million bananas for scale.

1:08:25 Yes, that banana for scale. This was episode 2405. If you've got a little time after the show, you can always have some fun in our after-hour Zoom meeting. All right, we'll see you then. Later. Later, Gator. Good night, Alex Lindsay, wherever you are. You're still alive. Yes, I know. Otherwise, he couldn't hear me. We miss Alex. Yes, indeed. I'm not hoping he loses his job, but some part of me hopes he loses his job.

1:09:06 Come on, man. That's mean. Well, he is in a challenged, he is supporting a challenged product. Let's just say. We just miss him. Heavily challenged product. All right. Well, there's more to 3D than just one piece of hardware. Just remember that. Yeah, it's come and gone four times now. Four times during my lifetime. Oh, the sun is gone. Come on the show tomorrow.

1:09:35 Let's talk about that. that you can you can rant about that for an hour. 3D. I might have to purchase an outside camera that I can use to compete with guys' co-cam. I can have a reindeer cam. I need a set camera that can track reindeers. I'm facing, I'm jealous of Guy's view. I could put a camera outside my apartment, but I'm facing a highway.

1:10:00 So unless you want to see concrete cars in a safe way across the street, I don't think that's going to be very exciting. well well we need some variation we can't be all watching on course mine you'd see the the hit