Office Hours | Saturday | October 17, 2026

0:01 Good morning and welcome to Office Hours, the show where we answer your technical media production questions every single day. And Mark Giuliani is going to be reading questions this morning. And if you have questions, we've got a great panel today, cozy panel. We'll talk more about that in a bit. Mark, why don't we get right to it? Hey, Alex. Good morning, everyone.

0:21 Has anyone seen an ATEM on boot up successfully acquire an IP via DHCP, but Mix Effect Pro can't find it? Rebooting it again solves it. I noticed this morning in ATEM setup when this happens, the PTP time clock from time.cloudflare.com had a warning. I have a screenshot. So, Alex, show us your screenshot. Interesting. There's no rhyme or reason and it seems like just every once in a while I will turn the ATEM on

0:56 it's like every couple of weeks and It gets an IP no problem, but mix effect Pro can't connect it and IP hasn't changed I have reserved IPS in my router. So that's not gonna change one thing I didn't notice though before until I started looking at stuff is I noticed this and I'm gonna show you my screenshot so it seems to be really I

1:20 have to assume it has something to do with this because you'll see here in under date and time network time protocol time dot cloud flare calm I'm not sure I'm assuming that's the default because I don't remember changing this but it had this red exclamation mark doesn't give you any reason why I can't connect to it and the only solution is to turn the ATEM off again restart it

1:42 and the moment I do that it is able to connect to this time server and mix effect pro is able to connect so it's really strange Mickey McAteer actually in the chat oh he's got a comment there he has seen this before welcome to the world of black magic design also PTP from CloudFlare do you mean NTP oh sorry I did I say PTP that is something

2:05 entirely different NTP network time protocol totally unrelated anyways that Yes, so he has seen this before, and I guess there is no solution. It just seems random, and it's incredibly frustrating. I'm pretty certain I have the latest firmware, but I just thought I would put that out there to see if there was a solution. Although I don't have the latest ATEM Switcher software.

2:29 I might be one or two versions behind, so it seems to be a regular thing. So I guess there's no solution, and I'm just going to have to live with it. I just thought I would share that. All right, Marco, let's go to the next question. Hey, are you going to look at the raised hands? Oh, sorry. Oh, sorry. I wasn't even looking.

2:47 I wasn't even looking. We have a panel here that might be able to help you out. Hold on. I'm on the wrong screen. I can't see anything. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, so there's an ATEM Facebook group where there's this lady in Russia, Boryshka, I think is her name. And she's done a bunch of research on this. And I haven't confirmed this, but she's said it multiple times.

3:06 So I'm pulling up mine real quick. In here, so I've got an ATEM Extreme. Let's connect to it real quick. Actually, before we connect to it, let's go to where you were. That was connection and then ATEM setup. Because there was something about getting the IP address, and then there was a slash that she said that manually. manually, oops, ATEM setup, go here.

3:38 And then, so mine's the same, time.cloudflare.com. So the NTP is the same. But then instead of DHCP, once you get the IP address, manually type it in. And there's something about the slash or something that she was saying, but just do that to go ahead and get DHCP, but then type it in static IP and see if that works. Because she's said it like four times to people on that Facebook group.

4:08 So I would give that a roll. Interesting. And so I noticed when you, I am part of that Facebook group actually. Oh, okay. Yeah. Search it up. I should have actually gone there. It looks like a great resource too, because I see all sorts of people commenting. There's like 74,000 people in there. Yeah. I should probably take advantage of that. It's interesting.

4:26 So when you set the static IP, So the NTP option, does that just disappear? No, it's up above. Oh, it's still there? Yeah. So you scroll down. So get DHCP and then take a screenshot and then manually type in those numbers and lock it down. Got it. Okay. I will try that and I will see if that is more reliable. Go ahead, Mark.

4:51 Guy covered it all. So I think we're good. All right. Let me just see if there's any other comments in the chat. Andre Dole is saying, I had a Cloudflare DNS issue today. Had to change my primary DNS to Google to be able to connect to Nice DCV. Maybe there is a Cloudflare issue today. All right. Let's go to the next question.

5:15 Okay. The next question is from me. And it says, we produce a three-hour live show with remote guests on Zoom. The host and panelists need program return, clocks, audio meters, guest video, and producer info. We currently use multiple Zoom feeds. Is there another way to feed all of this into Zoom without having Zoom instance for each screen? Go ahead, Mark. You wanted to provide some more information.

5:46 I was just going to provide more information in that when I started thinking about all the bandwidth we're using, trying to have all of these Zoom instances for each show we're producing. I'm just wondering if we get to a remote site and we don't have the same capacity, are we going to end up shooting ourselves in the foot and have to dump clocks and program return and all that?

6:09 Okay, and Guy? Yeah, typically we've used vMix. It's pretty heavy iron to do this. The nice thing is that you could even customize it with your own logo in there. So you're using vMix layers and you could make that return look like whatever you want. You could make, you know, if you have a prompt or something or run a show, you could make it bigger.

6:32 But it is spinning up something. It does require some engineering. It's funny because just this morning I was playing with my little app here that I had made for MXL. and I was asking it, what's the big deal about MXL versus NDI and having a switcher where it's like vMix, just you're paying $1,200 for that software. And it was like, well, MXL is when you're pretty self-contained on the same computer

7:01 because what it's found, and this is over the last couple of days I've had it doing these tests over and over again, is it actually has some numbers. Let me see if I can zoom in a little bit on this screen. so you guys can see it. Oh, yeah, it's going to be super tiny. Yeah, I don't think you guys are going to be able to see this.

7:18 But it basically proved that because you're not doing that decode cycle and, let's see, where is it? That decode cycle and encode cycle, you're saving a bunch of bandwidth. So that's one thing to think about is if you do the vMix thing, you have to have a vMix computer or you have to run it in the cloud. So when I've done shows with Jonas and Tucker and these guys, that's what they do is they have a separate instance that takes all those Zoom feeds and then puts it into a nice, pretty presenter view.

7:51 And then they push it over and that comes back and they say, pin this one tile and you'll have all your stuff right there. And so it's really cool. But again, it's engineering and that you have an engineer on standby to handle just your routing. Because over comms, they'll say, hey, could you make that whatever the talent wants? so you can make this bigger or smaller.

8:11 So would that remove the issue where the more panelists you have and the more administrative tools you're using, the gallery just starts to get, everybody in the gallery gets smaller and smaller. Yeah, because you just tell the talent. You can't even read the clocks anymore. Yeah, because sometimes, like for this one show we were doing, the talent had a bigger screen, and it was right below the camera.

8:31 So it wasn't a teleprompter. It was just a below-the-lens monitor, and they would say, pin this tile, make it full screen. and we had to do it every show because Talon always forgot how to do it. But then we could customize it. And after 50 shows, you get into a rhythm and you know what should be on there and what works. But yeah, that's pretty common.

8:51 I mean, there's ways of doing it in hardware. We've done it on-prem with an MV4, so just the Blackmagic multi-viewer in hardware. So then somebody from afar could program whatever they want. but then it's a basic you know four up quad split display so it's basically sdi in and then you you put whatever you want each of those so but what that does is offers that the host uh a screen to

9:20 read but it doesn't bring that back into the panel so that the panelists can also see the clocks it would it would be in there yeah we've we've left it in i mean you could build something and that's part of what i'm building here with this this mxl thing is uh yeah you could build it however however you want and low latency so mine goes in zoom iso cloud in linux and then it goes to this

9:45 little lightweight compositor we'll call it or switcher and it can take whatever sources you want and put them in whatever arrangement and then push it back out in low latency web rtc and it looks so gorgeous i mean so zoom you know when it comes back out it's like like maximum 12 megabit and more like, excuse me, five or six, if you're not on enhanced media.

10:05 So like when we were doing the show with Jonas, he could send back in a very high quality web RTC feed that looks again, gorgeous. And the reason why is he could crank up the bit rate to whatever he wants. So that return feed, you don't want a whole bunch of them because they cost, you know, there's egress costs and we're doing a weekend show that it's on for 10 hours. So you got 20

10:28 hours of just you know this 20 megabit stream or whatever was at but it was it was fast you know like less less than so srt you know you could you could get uh under a second but web rtc is even lighter weight and it doesn't have any it's just over the web but there's no there's no kind of uh firewall issues for it to traverse or any of that so it's just super fast and super high quality

10:51 but it's super expensive to to push out but that makes a lot more sense you should talk to jonas You should talk to him for sure, because he could do this with CloudFlex. I'm pretty sure if he can't, he should use my new build that I just finished spinning up in Google Cloud and testing this morning. But it's fascinating where we're going with this whole MXL thing, because if you're doing stuff that you want lightweight and compact, and this RAM apocalypse keeps going on, and the ability to get GPUs, I'm trying to figure out how you could do more stuff in one machine.

11:24 so you're basically mxl lets you grab on to these video feeds and do other things with them without this encode decode cycle because once it's mxl it's just spinning around in this ring and you could just grab whatever you want out of that frame and it's super high quality so okay and guy can you can you quickly explain what mxl is because i've heard it mentioned on the show and

11:46 i'm sure you've you've mentioned what it is i just don't remember what it is it's not syncing in The media exchange layer and the EBU and the dynamic media facility, so the lab of the future, the broadcasting facility of the future, is really looking at this because, well, one, NVIDIA is interested because of the ability to grab onto frames. Well, they call them grains in MXL.

12:08 So it's not an actual frame. It's these grains where it's living in memory so it can pull out this feed. And it doesn't cost like it used to cost with other things like NDI. Because with NDI, the more you grab onto, the more it has to encode that back out. Unless you're doing something with Viz and TriCaster. I think they've adopted some of this similar technology where it doesn't cost as much.

12:35 But in vMix, the more you grab on... In fact, they limit you on NDI outs. I think you only get four in this version 29. So MXL is this exciting thing that runs in Linux, and Zoom ISO Cloud just came out, and that's what I've been playing with over and over and over again. I keep spinning this stuff up. But basically, you could think of it as a way to have processes

13:04 go on with video like a record, a graphics layer, It's just grabbing the same frames but not having it cost. It's kind of like a router if you think of it that way without having to do all the frame sync and having this big piece of heavy iron that costs you a bunch of money because routers get expensive. But compute can get expensive too.

13:23 So I've been running my little toy MXL thing on a $400 Proxmox Ubuntu old server rack PC that I just bought off Facebook Marketplace last week. And it's pretty fascinating to just be able to build this stuff, but it does require more compute than my little server could handle. So it's interesting to see where the future is going, because this was the winner of some awards at IBC in the talk of the town, not only this year, but last year.

13:52 So it's, you're going to hear more about it. I'm just super cutting edge and trying to learn about it. And Jonas wrote a app called EZMXL that if you play with it, it's basically, we'll take a lightweight graphic and a, and a player and let you cut between the two. And so you could see on your own machine what it looks like, but it's a Linux only.

14:11 It's not windows. It's not Mac. It's Linux. All right. Very cool. If you want to ask questions on this show, we've got a panel here to answer those questions for you. you can use Makana. That's our Q&A system. And once you post those questions, you can vote on them up and down. I always recommend you do that. If you're going to be here for the live show,

14:30 just take a moment and just vote everything up and down. Let us know the priority that you want us to answer these questions. And of course, if you're not in the live chat, you're missing half the show. It's a fun place to be. And if you want to know more about that, just go to office hours dot global slash join. That's office hours dot global slash join. Put in your name and email

14:50 email address and we'll send you all the links that you need to be part of the community for that. All right, Mark, let's move on to the next question. Our next question is from, I know this guy, Alexander Knight from Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. What does a Norwegian Memo Live and a question management system have to do with each other? Yeah, this is a bit of a cryptic, not so

15:12 much a question, but just like a cryptic tease for tomorrow. So we're going to have Ronnie Hofsoy over from Norway joining the show who many of you know and he's going to demo a little tool that he built that he vibe coded that will help anyone that is using memo live to produce a show that uses a question management system like the one that we're using to get questions in to build graphics I am

15:40 using I have been using a version of his Chrome plugin that has offered that kind kind of functionality. This new one is, well, I don't want to spoil it. You got to be here. But this new one is much improved, does not require Chrome, and it's like instantaneous. It uses the MIMO Live API HTTP requests to post that data into MIMO Live

16:01 so you can build things, and it's instant, and it's awesome. So make sure to be here tomorrow for the live show as we don't record it. Highly recommend you stay for that. All right, Mark, what is up next? Up next, we have Paul Walhus of Austin, Texas. Petapixel says the iPhone 18 Pro's new controls skip ISO, which hurts Apple log shooters. Do you shoot in Apple's app or only in Blackmagic camera?

16:33 That's a good question. Well, I use the Apple app. I've tried third-party camera apps, and there are some good ones like Halide and a few others. But the problem that I find is that I often end up having to reach for the one that's built in because it launches the fastest. Now, things have gotten a little bit better over the last couple of years with iOS 18 because now you have the, like, if you have a newer phone with the action button, you can assign different things to launch from the physical action button on the side of the iPhone.

17:02 So you could have that launch a third-party app, but they still don't quite launch as quick as the Apple app. and things have gotten better now with iOS 27 the controls have gotten more expanded in the in the camera app so they are now exposing more pro controls now it's interesting that they that they're saying that ISO I haven't actually looked at that iOS 27 this that's weird that there's no ISO

17:29 controls on the camera mark have you played around with this no but what I I was going to ask is how easy is it to use this and choose a camera when you're on your iPhone and you're just grabbing news stories or covering a parade or something you want to you pull out your phone and you just want to go to Facebook live real quick do you then have to choose

17:52 the black magic camera is the source from Facebook well that's the thing if you're using the Facebook native app you can't just use an external third-party app that's not that's what That's not supported. Yeah, it's going to use whatever the built-in iOS camera is. I mean, for me, for stills, I'll still use the default camera app. But for anything that matters, like if I had to record something that mattered,

18:21 I would probably use the Blackmagic camera app, which I do have on my phone. Because with a class-compliant audio interface, I can just plug that into my phone. I can plug in a professional microphone over XLR into that and record good quality audio. because the Blackmagic camera app obviously exposes all the pro controls where you can manually lock things down but it does a lot more than that too it can help it's got you know

18:43 framing guides in there and it's got the audio meters and you can apply LUTs you can shoot and log as well plus it has if you have an account with Blackmagic cloud that integrates well with that if you're paying for that service and you can have it automatically have those proxies go to the cloud and then you can have an editor on the other end that's automatically seeing that footage in

19:03 real time as it's coming in. So there are a lot of advantages of certainly using that for a video production workflow, if that's what you're trying to do. But if I'm just trying to capture, I don't know, a picture of my cat or something, I'm just going to use the, I'm going to use the Apple camera app. All right, let's move on to the next question. Oh, you're muted, Mark. Can't hear you.

19:25 Sorry. Our next question is from Alexander Knight Guy. Do you have any opinions on how Now, brick and mortar retail stores in 2026 must compete aggressively to try and keep up with online orders when Amazon sets the bar so high. How does one do that when you don't have Amazon's logistics and money? I've been thinking about this a lot lately, Guy, because I know you have some experience in this area.

19:51 It's always a challenge, you know, like even like the company that I work for and we're doing really well financially right now, but we're not at the level of Amazon. like who else is right that's always a challenge because you know from a customer service perspective people that buy from amazon they they have a certain experience for example like when you buy

20:10 something from amazon the tracking information is incredibly granular and detailed and you know they have their own fleet of trucks and you can see exactly where that driver is and you know we're at the mercy of pure later and fedex and hopefully not ups because i hate ups they seem seem to be one of the, the couriers never deliver stuff properly. They never read the instructions,

20:32 but that's a rant for another show. So yeah, it's just something I've been thinking about a lot. It's always a challenge. We're always trying to get better, but you know, we're probably never gonna be Amazon. What do you think about this? Yeah, I wouldn't try to beat Amazon at that game. You can't out Amazon, Amazon. I mean, they've definitely come up with this model

20:49 that's just super sophisticated, but they built it over time. And so that's the thing is even if I said, hey, you should do this and this and this and this, the logistics required to do it. Because I did it. I had a 19,000 square foot building that I built to go to 50 million a year. And I tried to chase that. I tried to get NetSuite

21:06 and I tried to get all these sophisticated things to automate and just try to leverage the fact that you could buy things, have them in stock and ship them very fast. In fact, on Amazon, we were what you would call fulfillment by Amazon where we could self-fulfill. So basically, you would see that it said seller fulfilled prime, and we were able to ship that fast.

21:31 But everybody started doing it. And so what was a deep trench, so we thought over the years, they just kept taking more and more of our margin. And they started charging pickpack fees and long-term storage fees because we'd get a case of something and ship it down to some of their fulfillment facilities. And then we would keep some on hand. So for you, I would recommend looking at what our local camera store here in Seattle is doing.

21:52 It's called Kenmore Camera. camera, they do a lot of in-person workshops. And I see, I go in there, they made this really nice training room. And so they have a lot of photographers that come in and they get to see all the new gear. So you can't be just that, go into a store, take a cut with a memory card, or they'll let you use one. You could try out different lenses. And so these guys are winning,

22:11 like they're still around. And part of it is also that they've got a deep, what I would call war chest of cash. It's so nice when you're able to buy in quantity and have that quantity in stock of the hot thing. And a lot of the big brands will respect that and allocate you preferred allocation over some of the players like Amazon or B&H. I've had times where I got that relationship

22:37 to where I would get the same amount as B&H. So something would come out and they would say, hey, there's only 100 coming into the country. We're going to give you 10 and we're going to give bnh 10 and we're going to give out a ram of 10 so it depends on what level you want to play at too because if you try to ramp up i mean there's that employee labor cost i mean and then

22:58 there's the r d cost to build all this stuff up so just be careful what you're getting into and who you want to compete with i think if you're local you should just stay in that well i know you your chain has a couple different facility locations but i would again look at more than that we have over a hundred across oh wow we're the biggest biggest music retail company in the country

23:16 Wow. So Music Trades is a great resource magazine. I don't know how familiar you are with Music Trades, but it's basically PDFs and Excel docs that you can buy that have tons of data as to what keyboards, drums, whatever's coming into the country. It's super detailed. And then I would take AI and I would actually use your customer database, see who's buying things and try to pair

23:37 things with similar customers. So that was one thing that I did after I shut down my stores. I took the NetSuite database and I said, take a look at this and tell me any trends that you you could spot because we had data analysts on staff, but we didn't have AI back then. And so at the level we have now, it's so crazy. It's like, hey, did you know that people that bought

23:55 an ATEM need an SDI cable or that people that bought a Rode mic typically wanted a boom pole this amount of time later? You should just pair those together or send them a friendly email, or I can do that for you. So you set all these triggers up that start to look at what history, historically, what customers with similar patterns have done, lighting, audio. For us,

24:15 it was a lot of switchers. So you start to say, oh, do you need a router? Do you know what a router does? What happens if you fail? And so you write an article, you put that up. And I also did a lot of YouTube videos. So that attracted a lot of attention because the phone would ring because of the YouTube videos. So I don't know if you have any hosts or personalities on site that could do

24:34 that. So training on site is one thing. We don't, unfortunately. I've pushed for that for years. They still, we don't have a team that does it. It's, yeah, it's one of those things where if you can get somebody that can do it i mean why not you yeah you know what this is me talking to your boss alexander uh if i was alexander's boss i would start doing videos start small and especially

24:55 on the popular items because the youtube algorithm will give those lift pretty quick in fact if you use a tool like vid iq you could go in there and you could see what uh keywords are are they're getting searched for but there's low competition so vid iq is a sophisticated tool for like 49 bucks a month that'll tell you, give you intelligence as to what people are searching

25:14 for and not finding. So I would look at vidIQ as well. Yeah, that's, that's great advice. Absolutely. I mean, there's always opportunities to, to carve out a, you know, it's interesting because I work with a lot of people that have, you know, carved, they've done the, they've gone above and beyond and they've actually carved new positions that didn't exist and were promoting,

25:35 like those jobs didn't exist. And they, they were able to show that, you know, Hey, there's something actually really interesting there's something here but yeah it's one of the things that we're always fighting because you know um because we have retail stores but we also have online orders like for example like we get orders a lot of local orders people will order

25:54 for whatever reason i don't know if it's just laziness or whatever but they'll order online to pick it up locally at the store right the problem is like unless it's actually it says it's in stock uh it says we'll give you an eta of the order somebody will fall human being will follow up with you within you know 24 to 48 hours and the problem is when the when those orders get

26:16 directed to the stores the staff don't always follow up so i'm co it's always like it's hard to get buy-in sometimes because like i'm always chasing people we're always chasing people to like hey how could we how come a week has gone by and you haven't actually contacted the supplier a week a week will go by two weeks ago i've had i've had people i've had orders go go like they've

26:39 ghosted people for a month i'm like that's unacceptable like we're come you realize we're competing with amazon like you we need to follow up but it's really yeah you have no business even making videos and doing all that if you can't even cure that that basic 101 block and tackling stuff yeah this is where you need something you know you need a person who will listen to somebody

26:59 like you and say hey here's the challenge and let's go ahead and look at what other big players are using like we use netsuite so there was all kinds of automations that you could do and now with ai i'd imagine you could do the same things where it would immediately email them and then put a flag or some kind of dashboard up to tell the employees like hey today you got to do this

27:17 reach back out to this person and ideally you do it fast and with with bots and out of automation i'm surprised with the retail chain of 100 i'd be you know focusing man what's their number let me Let me talk to them. Just give me their name. Well, yeah, there's certain things I can't say because I'm not the owner of the company.

27:35 But our POS system is custom made. It looks like DOS, basically. It's just a virtual console you log into. So it's all custom made. And so stuff moves very slowly is what I'm trying to say. But anyways, before I go to Mark, I'm just going to bring in one comment, which I 100% agree with you, Mickey. He's saying provide good service and build relationships with customers.

27:56 Amazon does not do that. That's a really good point. That's definitely an area I think where we excel. And in fact, that's one of the challenges with buying. For example, just to be specific, buying pro audio gear from Amazon is not always reliable. There's a lot of counterfeit Shure products being sold by third party nefarious people that are not, you know, they're not authorized dealers.

28:19 They're Chinese clones of Shure products. and they look really convincing. The packaging looks pretty convincing. And then they get a mic that's not real. And then sometimes they have an issue being able to return it if it's not fulfilled directly by Amazon. And it becomes a mess. So you're right, customer service, I mean, building relationships, long-term relationships, that is super important. Mark, what do you think about this whole thing?

28:43 Well, it's hard to follow Guy on this, and everyone knows that Amazon's built quite the logistical system. But I have to say, we're on the East Coast, and if I need something, B&H, it's always there the next day. And I don't know if that's true if you're on the West Coast. I don't know if they have a distribution system over there. But to get things, I mean, nine times out of ten, the price is the same as Amazon's, and we get it the next day, and I'm not paying for the shipping.

29:13 It's free shipping. shipping. So Amazon's, I mean, B&H is really kind of building their customer relations, even if you don't have the same person you go to all the time. I mean, I just order online all the time and get the stuff the next day. Yeah. And yeah, James has mentioned, yeah, it's one of the challenges sometimes of buying online. You don't know when a product, you know,

29:35 unless it's Amazon, you don't know when a product is going to arrive. And sometimes you need the item in two weeks. That's always a challenge. Like, yeah, our systems aren't always hooked up. We have certain hooks in our system to certain databases with some suppliers, but the challenge is working with all those suppliers to make some kind of, like if our database was hooked up with every single supplier,

29:55 so we had real-time access to the data, that would solve that problem. I'm not sure why that wasn't done a long time ago. Anyways, let's go to, before we go to the next question, Guy wanted to come back in. I just want to say it's a super big investment, but the tool that we use called NetSuite, it was purchased by Oracle. And getting a person in that could run NetSuite with a sophisticated background.

30:22 So we had a guy that worked for homegrocery.com and then I believe it was called Zulily or one of these big chains that handled diamonds. So he was able to come in and clean up our inventory when the previous person said it was impossible. possible. He came in and within a couple of weeks, we had it to where if somebody barcode scanned

30:44 a 10 unit, let's say Rode Video Mics came in, 10 units come in, it would allocate to eBay, Amazon, our web store, and then the salespeople amounts with safety. So it did this all automatically. And so it's just having this intelligence to be able to go in there and say, okay, problem, problem, solution, resources, and people. So right now you have a people problem that they don't know

31:08 how to do this stuff because it is Amazon level. And so having a tool like NetSuite, which is the number one ERP in the world now, it's a huge investment. I was paying eight grand a month for NetSuite. And for the amount of users you have, you'll probably be paying a lot more than eight grand. Yeah. But actually with AI now, I figured out how to grab a lot of the database stuff that

31:28 you wouldn't have to have as many seats unless you needed those real-time database things but it was so cool because it would pull amazon every uh couple seconds and it would say here's our here's our latest update so if we had 10 you would see 10 up in amazon within a couple seconds so that was how fast and sophisticated our stuff was all from a barcode scan so some guy could be out

31:48 there eating a donut yeah eating a donut and drinking a cup of coffee and scanning stuff and And it's making web pages and it's putting inventory accurate to 100% accurate. Like there was no mistakes. It was completely 100% accurate. You mentioned there was an acronym you mentioned, ERP. What does that mean? Yeah, Enterprise Resource Planner is what it is. Okay, okay. Yeah, and then Microsoft makes a tool as well.

32:11 There's a bunch of them out there, Sage. And we did a bunch of research before we went with NetSuite, but NetSuite's the number one now. Okay. Yeah, it's very interesting. Good discussion there. If you want to ask questions on the show, we still got time for the Saturday panel. And you can use askofficehours.global if you just type that in your browser. That's askofficehours.global.

32:33 Nothing to log into, nothing to sign up for. Very, very quick rapid fireware to get those questions in. And if for some reason we don't get to it today, you don't have to worry about resubmitting that because that's going to go into a queue and we will bring it back on another show. All right. Mark, what do we got next? next. Craig Kadoky from Toronto. Has anyone had a chance to look at Bitfocus training studio yet?

32:56 How did you find it for companion training? You know, this, this came up a couple of weeks ago and I didn't realize until recently that they did this. I don't, I don't think anyone, I may, I certainly haven't looked at it, but I think it's really cool that they're offering, offering a free training. So I will definitely have a look at that, Craig and a guy. What do you think about this

33:17 free training. Yeah, this is cool. I haven't looked at that one in particular, but a lot of people don't realize that you don't have to actually buy one of these units. There is web emulators. So the software is free. You could just go online and there are so many things that it could control. One of the things that I've always dreamed of in office hours and after hours in

33:34 particular is putting a little interface where you could go in there and you would push these buttons and it would do things. So you could control a PTZ camera. You could trigger a stream to YouTube, you could make a hyperdeck, play a rewind or fast forward or play a clip or control like Alexander's DM3, but you would just see a picture of a video feed of it. As you're

33:55 manipulating things, you could be anywhere in the world and just have access to this. It'd probably run in the cloud so that the IP was protected, but ideally it would also have a reset so people could go in there, play with this stuff, mess it up. But all they're doing is just pushing button, well, pushing virtual buttons or in a perfect world, we would also have some kind of

34:12 a pre-tunnel or some kind of tail scale or something where it's like, okay, now you're into our instance and you can play as much as you want, but you are connected to that device. So I think we could do a lot of training here. And there's so many people in the community that use Companion and that are sharp. It's just a matter of figuring out what could we do.

34:33 But I've watched some of their stuff on Bitfocus buttons, which I've been playing with as well. There's some sophistication. In fact, Jackson, one of the members in the community, And he showed on Tuesday Focus how he's controlling different things in OBS using Companion. And he built something that looks like buttons. Watch that episode if you get a chance. There's a lot under the hood there.

34:54 Very cool. Craig Kodokie also said in the chat, training studio has a virtual broadcast studio that you can make connections to from Companion and get real results. Okay, that is seriously cool. I do. That's next level. We got to see that. Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to have to mess around with that. All right. And Mark, what do we got next? All right.

35:13 Our next question is from Brody Hefner in New York City. Starting with Mac OS 27, the preview app allows viewing, editing, and rendering of .usd files. What are some use cases for this feature that might justify an early upgrade to the latest version of Mac OS? OS? For me, there's absolutely zero that I'll justify upgrading to a new OS because things are too fragile in the audio and video world sometimes with stuff like that. However,

35:44 if you are in that world where you were working with USD stuff and you're using LiDAR and you're scanning stuff and working with, you know, with 3D modeling, you know, a dedicated computer, there'd be nothing wrong with that. So I think for those that are in that world, I think it would would make sense to have a separate computer to do stuff. For me, it doesn't make sense just

36:03 because like all my stuff is locked down on Sequoia. I'm not moving from that operating system. I know Dante virtual sound card is stable on it right now. Like they haven't even, they haven't certified Mac OS 27. So for me, for my workflow, it doesn't make sense, but for others in me, go ahead, Guy, what do you think of this? Yeah. Alex had showed us some cool stuff

36:25 Stuff that you could do with Keynote where he had scanned some of these things like a black magic camera. And he had these different layers where he would do the magic move stuff where you would say, here's one frame and then make it go to this page two slide where it would be a different view. And then it would interpolate or tween all the in-between frames, but it did it very lightweight.

36:44 And that's one of the new things in Mac OS 27 is you can do exactly what Brody's saying is you can open up the preview app and you can not only see the USDZ, you could actually see the layers. So you could see how it was built. And I don't know, I'm not that sophisticated in the other Blender apps and things like that.

37:01 But if you just want something quick, you can see what those layers are. And then you would use another app to go in there and change the metallic sheen look. And it actually tells you that. With Mac OS 27, if you go in there and you look, you could see the different layers and click on them and see the free resources, Apple's website.

37:18 So if you go look at the MacBook Neo and you download that file, you could see the metallic layer. You could see the lighting on that layer. And it's interesting to just look at and see how these things were built and know that you could animate those things in Keynote. And so it makes for some powerful presentations because you can make it look like

37:36 you have like some crazy 3D rendering. In the olden days, we used to have, you know, like $2,000 Lightwave Studio software that was super sophisticated. Now you could just go Keynote, insert object, USDC, duplicate to the next page, rotate it, and then say magic move. and you've made a brilliant presentation that would have taken, and it renders in real time on Mac Silicon.

37:59 It's like nothing. It's just like, it just, it's super fluid. So that's one thing to keep an eye on is just building brilliant presentations and animations inside a keynote. Yeah, a keynote's amazing. All right, let's move on to the next question. Our next question is from Paul Valhus in Austin, Texas. PIXIS Blackmagic cut the PIXIS 6K to $1,995. Then two weeks later, it listed at $2,245, citing duties and taxes.

38:34 Did anyone buy it for $19.95? And how do you budget when prices move that fast? That's a tough one. I don't really have a need for this PIXIS camera. I mean, but I have to say that price point does look very attractive for the functionality So I'm sure if someone's is getting into like if you would just want to if you want to shoot your own films and stuff

38:56 Like that at that price point if you're just starting out that is a very attractive price But yeah, I hear you Paul that is it's tough when prices change But you know sometimes if you just need something you gotta buy it and it's it's the price that it is, you know I hate it when prices go up. It's nice when they go down, but they often these days seem to go up more

39:15 more often times than they actually get reduced. So, you know, I buy stuff when I need it. It's tough, you know, I used to dwell on this so often when I would be in the market for a new computer. And, you know, I'd always think, well, you know, this is good. But if I buy it three months from a launch, you know,

39:32 I'm probably going to regret it because there's always something better around the corner. Yeah, well, there's always something getting released. So sometimes you just need a product and you got to get it when you need it. All right, let's move on to the next question. Can't hear you, Mark. Sorry. Craig Kodoke from Toronto. Is anyone interested that the new Apple TV has AV1 built in?

39:57 And what would you want it for? I could not be the least interested. The problem, okay, here's the thing with the Apple TV. I love the Apple TV. I think it's the best media playback device on the market for a home theater. in terms of the responsiveness, in terms of the user experience. There's one issue. Well, there's several issues. I'm going to get to the price in just a second.

40:25 As someone who has built a home theater with discrete speakers that has an Atmos setup, I've got an AVR in my setup here. The Apple TV in 2026 still has no HDMI pass-through, which means that when stuff is getting through the Apple TV, it is reprocessing stuff, which I don't want it to do, which can affect sound quality. This is not something that requires a hardware update.

40:51 Apple absolutely could do it via software. And I don't understand. In fact, recently I just put tvOS 27.2 beta to see if they added it. Nope, still not there. So I don't understand that. The NVIDIA Shield has that. Lots of other devices, cheaper devices on the market have that. for some reason Apple hasn't done that now interestingly the Mac has HDMI pass-through so Mac OS has had that for a while now it's the Apple TV that needs

41:20 it so please Apple if you're watching this please add pass-through the other problem this price hike is absolutely ridiculous on this device they and it wouldn't be so bad if they had other flavors of the Apple TV but they decided it as usual. The device is over-engineered with a very expensive processor, has very expensive RAM. Why? Because they decided to put a six microphone array in this thing to have the latest Siri AI

41:51 functionality. So it can do onboard processing, stuff that I just do not care about. And that's fine. Maybe if you're interested in that and you want to be able to talk to your Apple TV, but they need another version of this Apple TV at a lower price point that doesn't have that kind of functionality because there are a lot of people that are just not going to be interested

42:12 in that and at $300 US by the way in Canada I looked it up yesterday $429 Canadian dollars for this Apple TV that is just I'm sorry I'm not buying it I'm not buying it I have the previous version it does everything it you know other than the new Siri AI stuff with the latest tvOS it does everything that this device has and it feels just as

42:37 fast as it did when I got it several years ago so for me I have no interest in upgrading it I don't know how what kind of impact AV one will have as a codec for playback on this on this device so that I really can't comment but I think that's the least interesting thing of it for me right now all right

42:55 All right, let's go to the next question. Next question's from Zach Stallsmith in Chautauqua, New York. I have quite a bit of gear I haul around in my car for gigs, and it's pretty safe when transporting it, but I'd like to have better cases that protect and are easier to move. Is Pelican the way to go? Stuff like an ATEM, 27-inch screens, by 32-rack cables, all that stuff.

43:24 What do you think, Guy? Yeah, when I went to Vegas to the Infocomm show, we were walking around and we had the IV on a cart and David Brady and a couple other people in the community said, hey, what's that over there? Let's go visit that booth. And it was Fiasco Cases. And this is what they look like. I would take a look at these because over Pelican, they're balsa wood.

43:51 So this part here that goes inside is lightweight balsa. Sorry. Bass wood. That's the one that starts with a B. Bass. Bass wood. Is that right? I'll see it over here in a second in the fly rack specs. But anyways, you get the idea that you could put that wooden rack case inside of the really thick case. And these guys know what they're doing.

44:18 it. I mean, look at this video of them loading a truck. So they come from a background of loading these trucks. So they do like touring. So look at how sophisticated this is where everything fits. So, I mean, this is so beautiful compared to what I do with the local company I work with. We just throw everything in and we have to tie it all down and it doesn't fit like this. It's

44:40 not so elegant. So when you get to the bigger levels, you want to look at, you know, how you're going to transport it. In fact, James Haldane in the chat, when we visited, Alexander saw it as well. He's got a pretty nice van and he does something similar like this where even if it seems like a good idea to go buy cheap cases just because you're getting a good deal on them from

45:00 some old place that is blowing them out, it's not worth it. I mean, go look at Fiasco Case's website and figure out exactly what you need or give them a call and figure out how you're going going to transport it from A to B and get what you need. Get the right tool for the job. There's also JSON cases that make custom cases. So for like our PTZs, our UE150s, we have JSON cases

45:25 and they fit their laser cut. And there's another one, my case builder, but we use JSON cases for the cameras just because they fit. They're identical. I mean, it is the laser cut. They scan a bunch of cameras. So depending on what you need, Fiasco cases and my case builder or JSON cases mark so guy i just want you to know that in that video you showed they only filled equipment

45:50 in one of those series of cases the other cases were just so that one case wouldn't roll around anyway they they may like if you if you look at some of their videos that are like older like here look at this one right here i was just so that's their shorts but if you look at this one one called videos they this one's nine years ago uh look it's not showing oh

46:14 yes but see only one of those cases has anything in it they're just using the all the other cases to keep that one case from moving around anyway porter brace porter brace is another company that's a lot like pelican but um they're not as expensive as pelican usually something fascinating about that i don't know why i feel like i could stare at that time-lapsed

46:39 video of the people stacking those beautiful cases oh it looks it looks really nice like pressure washing videos on youtube where they're like cleaning something up and it's like hey stacking and organizing same with these guys i don't know if you've seen some of these videos where they clean up a uh a network control room where it's like all these crazy cables

46:57 like spaghetti madness everywhere and these guys come in and they're just like make it look so perfect and yeah i i'm enamored by those videos of before and afters now yeah when i used to uh when i used to build pcs i i would subscribe to maximum pc i don't know if anyone remembers that uh uh magazine but uh one of the uh they're no longer around they actually got acquired by hp

47:21 There's a Canadian company in Alberta called Voodoo PC, and they used to build the most beautiful looking. I'll say that the word beautiful as an adjective with PCs, but they really I mean, they custom manufactured these cases. They would I think they were like one of the first, if not the first companies to cut a hole in the side of the case and put a piece of glass in there.

47:43 And they would laser etch their logo into the metal. and they had this one guy, I think he was Japanese, and he would literally, like origami style, the way he would organize the cables, like the ribbon cables were so perfectly folded at right angles and everything was just unbelievable. It really is amazing to watch people organize cables and see that just so beautifully done like that.

48:09 Of course, in my setup, it never lasts because you start adding stuff to your studio and six months down the road, you start out organized And then everything gets completely messed up after a little while James holding in the chat you mentioned James's name guy. He's saying up. No pelican style takes too much room They have a lot of wasted space custom-made cases will take less room industrial totes for cables and smaller items

48:32 But you need to be careful when moving gear in totes alright, let's go to The next one did we get you mark? Mark? I just said the porter brace is an alternative to Pelican. All right. Craig McFarlane from Boston, Massachusetts. When buying gear online, new or used, are there simple checks to spot reproductions? This is really challenging. I have, or we as a company, we've had this challenge too.

49:04 It's for certain products. Right now, there's a lot of counterfeit. I mentioned this earlier. There's a lot of counterfeit Shure products on the market, but there's also a lot of counterfeit Neumann products. In particular, we've seen counterfeit SM58s, SM7Bs. We've seen counterfeit Shure wireless products like the SLXD wireless line, which is very popular. We've also seen counterfeit Neumann TLM103s, which is one of the most popular studio condenser microphones that they sell.

49:30 I've seen counterfeit a few other Neumann counterfeit mics as well. I think a Camus 105 and a few other ones that if unless you really know what to look for, you put them side by side. There are there are slight differences, like the color on the badge is slightly different. The screws that they use are different, but they've gotten visually very convincing.

49:55 And I would be hesitant to buy certain types of products just because I know there's so many counterfeits. I'd be very hesitant to try to buy them privately unless someone could produce a receipt saying that they actually bought it from an authorized dealer. Because these products have serial numbers, so we can look up serial number sales history and find out where did this product actually come from.

50:18 In fact, we take trade-ins. I won't even take a microphone from someone unless they actually bought it from us. We're not going to take a Shure or a Neumann microphone because it's too much risk. In fact, some people have gotten bit by this where they've actually purchased these products and then they find out later that they're actually counterfeit. And you kind of have to open up these products, sometimes get into them to really see some of the differences.

50:44 So I'd be cautioning you when you do that. Buying used stuff, by the way, through an actual dealer is a way better place to get that stuff. So, you know, find whatever your local shop is, whether, you know, if you're looking for cameras. I try to buy something used from Carisdale Cameras because I know that they've actually tested these things. They've cleaned them up.

51:03 They provide some kind of warranty even on a used item. So that's my recommendation. Go ahead. What do you think, Mark? So I think that we had, if I remember correctly, a shore rep on the show probably about a year, maybe two years ago. and she said that this was such an issue with them that they started putting serial numbers on the microphones.

51:27 They had never done that before. So it would seem to me that one of the first things you'd want to do is see if you can register the equipment just so it may show up when you register that this product's already been registered or you know that that serial number is completely fake. Yeah, absolutely. And if that person can't reproduce the receipt,

51:50 you know you can ask them where they bought it from and if they say they bought it from Sweetwater or they bought it from other dealers just call that company and give them the serial number and they'll be able to tell you right away just by looking up the data on that whether or not it was actually sold by them and then you'll be able to verify that it's a it's a real product

52:07 authentic product all right let's go to the next actually before we go to the next question I just want to remind you if you like office hours if you like what you're watching and listening to to right now and you want to support us, we would sincerely appreciate it. There's multiple ways you can support Office Hours Global. We're a not-for-profit organization. You can join us.

52:23 So we have an entire group of volunteers here, everyone from the panelists to the back-end crew, all the different roles that are involved in producing this show. It takes a lot of work to put these shows to make them look and sound as great as they are. So you can go to officehours.global slash volunteer. That's officehours.global slash volunteer. You can just put in your name and email,

52:44 select the check marks next to the roles that you're interested in. There's all sorts of different opportunities. It's a great place to be. I always say this, you know, unless you got to go to school and pay tuition, you know, it doesn't cost you anything. And if you want to learn some new skills and expand your knowledge, it's a great place to be. So I recommend you do

53:05 that. Another way that you can support the show is also by donating. So you can go to officehours.global slash donate. That's officehours.global slash donate. Thank you very much. Next question, Mark. Paul Wahoos from Austin, Texas. Sony Alpha 1 versus Nikon Z9, nearly the same price, but which flagship is right for you? The Sony Alpha 1 is listed at at $5,698, while the Nikon Z9 will cost you $5,296.95.

53:43 Ah, yes. Let's pit one camera company against the other. Let the flame wars begin, Mark. Well, you know, I think it has to do more with the collection of lenses you have, because that ends up costing a lot more, usually, than the camera body itself. So I think if you're already on Sony, you're going to stick with that lineup. And if you're already on Nikon or Nikon, you're going to stick with that lineup.

54:10 Yeah, that's very true. I guess it depends also whether, I mean, so I believe both of these cameras are mostly focused on stills, although they do have recording capabilities. The issue that I've seen, I know that they've gotten better over the last few years with Nikon, but Sony historically has been more reliable for video, in my experience, than Nikon. But I know Nikon's been making some strides.

54:35 I just haven't really kept up with some of the newer cameras. So maybe the Z9 is a really great camera for recording video. I just don't know that much about it. All right, let's go to the next question. next question is from zach stallsmith in chautauqua new york with the zoom osc bit lost your audio mark you lost my audio there you go i'm unmuted i'm hearing you okay all right

55:03 with zoom osc bit focus companion if a user has punctuation in their name companion doesn't seem to like that. Can I use their Zoom participant number to send OSC commands for that participant rather than their Zoom name? Go ahead, Guy. Yeah, I would defer this one to our friend Justin James, who runs the GitHub for the Companion Module system. You can see his little,

55:32 so he's Digital Drummer J, Justin James. I would take a look in here or throw some AI at this and and ask that question. One of the things that popped up is being able to do the participant selection instead of using the traditional way with the, if they have a punctuation in their name, you could use the participant selection system. So you would say like, oh, that's Alexander.

55:53 Hit Alexander. And then if you want to spot or mute or spotlight or mute or whatever action you want to take, you could do it by that mechanism instead. So I'm pretty sure that's what Justin James will say, but I don't see him. Let me see if he's responding in our chat. Usually he's watching the show. So, Mickey says, yep, with Zoom ID.

56:11 So, you can go by Zoom ID as well. So, that's another way. All right. Let's go to the next question. Our next question is from Paul Valhus of Austin, Texas. Does this accessory really turn your phone to a pro camera? And he gives a YouTube video. I haven't actually heard of this product before, but I did quickly. Let me just see if I can switch to that.

56:41 It doesn't look particularly great. I will say, here it is, here's the video. It looks like it's made by, is this Huawei? Huawei Mate 90 Pro Max Collector's Edition. Well it's a collector product so it must be great. I don't, I'm not really a fan of sticking stuff like this on a phone. I just feel like, you know, if you need a big lens, buy a real camera.

57:09 For me, the iPhone, a smartphone, is supposed to be something that is light, that I can just take anywhere. And obviously, on a year-to-year basis, companies like Apple, I mean, all companies that make smartphones, they're making big strides in the sensor design. Obviously, the new iPhone 18 Pro is the best camera they've ever done now. They've got the physical aperture blades now.

57:30 so you can control that if you want more shallow depth of field or greater depth of field, that kind of stuff. So this kind of stuff seems incredibly gimmicky to me. So I'm not a super fan of that stuff. All right, that's going to wrap the Saturday show. I want to thank all the panelists for being here this morning and answering these questions.

57:49 And, of course, to you, yes, I'm looking at you right now, the producers that show up every morning. We wouldn't have a show without you if you didn't put these questions in. Thank you very much, and thanks to all of you in the live chat who have been commenting and just, you know, I consider you sort of the panel adjacent because you put in all this feedback and you often provide solutions when sometimes we come up short,

58:10 you always come through for us. We really appreciate you. And of course, the back end crew that wakes up every single day to put these morning shows on and also all the evening shows that happen as well. We really appreciate the work that you do. If we were to have traveled around the world virtually to answer all of these questions, it would have been, according to the

58:27 The tele-electroversal would be 19,000 miles. That's 31,000 kilometers and 153 million bananas for scale. This was episode 2398. If you've got a little time, why not jump into after hours? We'll see you. Bye. All right. Yeah, I'm surprised, Alexander, that you didn't know about the music trades. I've never heard of these. We used to have these laying around in the lunchroom, you know, just so people could

59:01 go through the data because it was always so, a lot of times it's just the opposite of what you'd ever think that it was. There's just so much data. I mean, some of it's expensive, but the basic man, what do you call it? Magazine wasn't that expensive, but yeah, there'd be like the top 200. What? I missed that, Mickey. mickey uh your audio your audio just was that is that just me or guy guy's audio just dropped there

59:30 uh i'm sorry i was listening to comms uh yeah so there's like the global 225 report this two-part report the 225 uh music companies around the world ranked by the most recent full-year revenues plus employee count ceo base country web address for each basic sales and demographics so yeah it's It's just intelligence. And they're still around as a digital – like they don't do the print thing anymore?

59:54 Yeah, they still do the print thing. Oh, they do? The nice thing is that you get the print thing, and then if you find something that you want, one of these data reports, they're like – some of them are $10, some of them are $100. Actually, this one here, all data. Yeah, so here's the international package is $139. The supplier package is $200.

1:00:14 I was just going to ask if it's U.S. only or not, but they do have – Oh, no. No, this is world. Well, there's international stuff like this one. Yeah, I fell into this category. I was in the internet music retail.