NDI on a Budget - Apple TVs as Networked Multi-Screen Displays

0:00 Hi, good morning, everyone. Welcome to Office Hours. It's Friday Q&A time, so it's time to answer your questions. If you've got questions, you can go to askofficehours.global. That's askofficehours.global or right here on the QR code, and we will get them live and do our very best to get an answer. We've got a great panel here to answer those questions for you today.

0:19 Appreciate everyone coming in. Alexander, let's get into the first one. All right. First question this morning is coming in from Andre Doley in Berlin. Lynn, recommendations for a not-too-expensive two-channel audio recorder as backup program recorder for events. Doesn't have to be battery-powered, but kind of small, like a 19-inch device. All the way from Hollywood, California, Mr. Courtney Gooden, what do you think?

0:42 Well, no 19-inch devices. You know, I'd say I'm kind of partial for a two, you know, the people that have done this right, compared to some of the others that are based in, designed in Germany, already built in China, is the Zoom. The Zoom F3. I think this is an F3. Yeah. It's a two-channel input. It's a good recorder. It has onboard batteries.

1:09 It can be powered off of five volts external, so you can power it off one of those phone recharger banks for backup. And its internal batteries work as backup as well. They have good power handling. It's got decent preamps. The F-Series has decent preamps. And I'm not sure if this one supports, but it could support timecode too, if you're synchronizing to timecode synchronized cameras.

1:31 You might be able to do that with this one. If not, the F6 does everything, including metadata storage in the broadcast WAV files. And this one will record up to 192 kilohertz sample rate in PCM. So it's good high quality. You see the waveforms there as you're recording. recording so uh it gives you a good indication of your signal levels and uh and the fact that

1:54 you are actually capturing audio when you're recording so that's my suggestion for now samples since midnight broadcast wave for me since midnight we were having some fun talking time code in the pre-show so uh you can only get that live so you can get here a couple minutes it's early you can get all those good stories chris i would like to take this opportunity to

2:18 say andre there's a jillion recorders i'm sure you'll find a good one but i would like to say my heartfelt apologies and thankful and thank you to all the back-end crew because when you get all these guys in this room together we can act like children and in the pre-show it was kind of crazy crazy. So I just want to say thank you so much for working so hard to make the rest of us look good.

2:46 I'm done. Bill Davis. I'm going to double down on Courtney's Zoom handy quarter things. I think you could probably get away with the H2 even, and they're pretty inexpensive. The H2n is a simple little recorder. The only thing I would do, I can't remember whether that has XLRs, if that's important to you. If you're just doing a backup of something, thing, maybe you can get by with a little RCA to mini pin in adapter. I won't buy one of those

3:13 machines unless they've got XLRs in them, but that's depending on what you need to do. But yeah, Zoom's little recorders work well. Then in the chat, Mickey suggests the MixPre 6. That might be a little outside of the, I don't know if that qualifies as inexpensive, but it is going to get It's inexpensive in Mickey land. It's inexpensive in Mickey land. That's right.

3:33 And if you're wondering why we sound so good, that's Mickey land. So maybe we should listen to him on the audio stuff. Next question. Next up is coming in from Dan in Mountain View, California, submitted through the QR code. Are control rooms and equipment rooms use TV logic reference monitors? What do you recommend in studio for color-accurate monitoring of Sony DHC series cameras for a DLP, not individual monitoring, 1080p60 workflow?

4:05 He's a mace. Dan, I think if you're using TV logic, then look no farther than the LVM241S 24-inch high-end LCD monitor monitor because it's got true 10 bit and decent contrast ratio and you know all the standard recs and you know good things and as an added bonus if you've standardized around a brand then more people happen to know how to calibrate it so if you are running with either not your normal crew

4:38 crew, or you've got less people than you would otherwise expect. More people that have familiarity with the equipment makes this less of a special thing and more something. If you have a trained room of people, they should be able to calibrate just about anything that you bring in there, but needing to figure it out when you're under stress and under the gun isn't something that

5:00 every crew is great at. Bill Davis. The other name that always comes to my mind, and I don't know where they are right now because it's been some years since I've had to play in this arena, but Flanders Scientific was always ... If somebody said, you need to calibrate something and you really want accuracy and you're doing this not for fun or for a client to look at in a studio thing,

5:21 but if you really want the engineering solution, that's the land that Flanders Scientific was always at the top of. They may have been sold to somebody else or something like that, because I said it's been a few years since I've dealt with that, but that's a name that I would always take a look at. Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Courtney Gooden. How much money you got?

5:38 If you got a lot of money. The Sony PBM 2400 4K, I think it's about $10,000, is good. But if you don't have that kind of money, I agree the Flanders are great. I see a lot of them on the set. Next question. All right. This one comes in from Craig McFarlane in Boston, Massachusetts. You said Zoom's My Notes is a recent feature which will allow you to transcribe, summarize meetings outside of Zoom, such as Teams.

6:10 Have you tried using it for non-Zoom meetings? Jason Baish, haven't, but I'm very much looking forward to it. So this actually works pretty well. In the same vein as a granola or a whisper notes, it's capturing system audio. So if Zoom My Notes is in your team's meeting, you need to tell the other people in your meeting that you're taking the notes.

6:36 It's not going to do it for you. It's not going to say so-and-so is transcribing. It's not going to do any sort of disclosure that note takers pre-system audio capture as a method were doing. That said, it does a stupendous job at meeting summarization. And there's also a lot of cool little templates that you can use. So I recently was in a meeting and I did a My Notes thing.

7:02 And at the end of the meeting, instead of saying like the generic summarize my meeting template, I put it into like a sales mode. And it identified me as the person being sold to. Therefore, it wrote the notes from the perspective of the vendor who was trying to sell me something. thing. And whoa, was that crazy? Because it's like, it's clear based on CJ's comments that he

7:29 buys from this person, this person and this person. And these are the things that he cares about. And he said, and I was like, wow, okay, that was actually pretty accurate. But also now I'm going to be listening for it sounds like you prepared for this meeting with, you know, the AI transcript of our prior call. And I'm going to now judge you based on did you put a lot of thought into it?

7:48 or are you just reading the notes? Because I did have a sales rep who was pitching me on something that literally was reading from AI notes and trying to make it sound like it was off the cuff. He was doing a terrible job. Don't do that. Be thoughtful, be intentional. Also, it's really great if you're just rambling. Like I like to, especially in the car,

8:09 I like to think out loud and try to work through ideas that way. And I will use a WhisperFlow or a MyNotes or a chat GPT, a Zoom My Notes or a chat GPT voice conversation to try and work through an idea. And then after it gets through that stream of consciousness, of rambling of me, which some of them have a 20-minute limit,

8:33 ask me how I know, it actually is pretty good at cutting the wheat from the chaff. Craig, thank you for putting that message in, or that question through Showhub, and thank you for helping us make the Showhub thing. It's pretty cool. Next question. All right, this one's from Paul Valhus in Austin, Texas. EBU R128 says negative 23 less for broadcast. Does anyone on the panel deliver to that anymore,

9:00 or has streaming made negative 14 the new normal even for TV clients? Alex Knight. No, it's not true at all. So the negative 14 thing is not a standard. It is a recommendation by some streaming platforms. Streaming, and I'm not talking about broadcast. I am talking about YouTube and I'm talking about Spotify, which suggests targeting loudness to negative 14. And then, you know, streaming music platforms like Spotify do optionally have their own audio processing you can apply.

9:36 You know, Apple has their own thing. I think they call it sound check, which will reprocess audio to negative 16 to try to make it consistent. But these are not broadcast TV standards. So there are standards in the broadcast television world which are still absolutely applicable. And you pointed to a document there that is an actual standard. And, of course, there are other standards for platforms that are streaming television like Netflix, for example.

10:04 And they will have their own targets. So they have, you can find the documentation on Netflix's website. It's very, very clear that they recommend negative 27. It's actually not recommend. If you distribute stuff that doesn't hit that target, they're going to send it back to you and tell you to fix it. So they do have very, very strict requirements. Bill Davis. The great thing about standards is there are so many of them.

10:28 This used to drive me crazy. I used to have to do at least four separate exports of everything I sent out to broadcast. Some at negative 16, some at negative 24, some at negative 23. It's just nuts out there. So particularly in old line broadcast stations, one of the biggest problems that I went through in my entire career is when they distributed the distribution away from the individual stations.

10:57 And they often, in many TV stations, even large like kind of high-level Los Angeles or San Diego or New York or Chicago type operations, they closed down master control and they out-exported it to someplace else. I'll never forget. I was sending a spot from Phoenix to San Diego, and I had to distribute it first to Chicago. And then that's where they wanted it hubbed before they sent it out to everybody.

11:24 And along the way, you're going to have transcoding and all these processes happening. It's just nuts. So all you can do is ask if the media buyer who's helping you place this stuff on the station can get you a media guide that tells you what they want. And then 50% of the time after you get that media guide, if you call back to anybody who

11:48 knows what they're doing at the station, they'll tell you, ignore that, we don't do it anymore. more. So it's just a nightmare trying to figure out these quote standards. I think you're pretty safe at negative 15, negative 16, somewhere in there for a web distribution and negative 24-ish for a broadcast thing. If they push back and don't want to take the file, I try to make some phone

12:12 calls and see who in their network actually has some engineering chops and can tell you what they they do inside. I've had to do that at least half a dozen times. Call an engineer somewhere on site and say, what do you really need? Next question. All right, next up is from Tommy Shantz in St. Paul, Minnesota. How do you implement NDI into your workflow? Jason Baish.

12:35 It's been a while since I've done this, but using virtual outputs, I would output not just every screen, but every desktop in a tiny little grid and would put it up on a large screen. And it was It was the easiest way to not get lost between which desktop is it on and which computer is it on. And it turned out to be pretty handy.

12:55 All you need is a capable switch and a little grid so you don't lose your place. Yeah, I like it when I'm doing presentations and I need to have – I'm doing presentations in a space that isn't set up for – like there's no video router there's no distribution um in a in a traditional sense like i don't have copper but i know that if i can get like a hotel to bring like a conference room

13:26 or a meeting room to bring me two or three tvs i can then literally slap an apple tv on the back of each of them and I bring up the Ciena NDI monitor and then I just have my presentation go out with scan converter and then rather than trying to do like when it's one TV and I have an Apple TV I just do an airplay I know that it's

13:49 not as rock-solid but most of the time it just works and in an office with a lot of Mac people it is handy that anybody can just take their take their computer or their phone and go boop boop boop and then have their stuff up on the TV. If I'm trying to go to multiple monitors, then, and I know that there are more broadcast

14:11 professional type applications for this, but if I have a couple of, you know, Apple, three Apple TVs sitting around for the last three years, wire them all up with ethernet into a switch so that they can, can receive the NDI with that Sienna monitor app. And then boom, it's really good. I've even, even one time I did it, uh, we had a special guest that was coming in, uh, to a tour,

14:33 of our building and we didn't have any kind of uh we didn't have anything for digital signage and so uh we did the same trick where i just threw apple tvs on a tv in the lobby and then the tv you know further into the building and then had uh one of the roadcaster video s's sending out what i wanted broadcast on those screens and then like so i could remotely control it over on

15:02 the network and it was kind of magical when all was like it just it was a little extra something that really really made the difference but besides that i have uh i have a tail two yeah ob spot tail two that i'll most of the time not have any trouble just it's not a very complex network but i haven't said i haven't had to set up any special vlans for yet when i just want to

15:28 put it somewhere in the building that we need a live video from because the other thing that we'll do is a virtual building tour where I'll have my uh I literally built like a little cart with uh with the computer and the with the computer one tail two and this was going over wi-fi because we had that it was like a 200,000 square foot building so I

15:55 I couldn't do cables the whole way. And that actually held up pretty well the whole time. But did the virtual plant tour mobile. And then when I wanted to cut to a wide, I had another camera in the building over NDI that I was able to cut to. And it did a really nice job. Next question. All right. This is from Paul Valhus in Austin, Texas.

16:15 Comment on the design of the Lewitt Connect 6. You're a Lewitt guy, Alex Knight. What do you think? We've talked about this. I've kind of made jokes about the design before. I don't know what they were going for. I'm going to show it to you here. So this is the Kinect 6. I look at this, and it looks like something from 2001 A Space Odyssey.

16:38 It could be the black monolith. Some people have joked, oh, it looks like a transformer. It's a very strange design. I've never seen this before on an interface. I suspect they didn't have – I mean, look, they could have just made a rectangular box. I guess they just got bored and they figured well, you know, we make microphones. We've never made an audio interface

17:00 There's a bazillion manufacturers that make these types of products. Let's let's try to do something a little bit different Be good to actually ask this to the Luit people I know we had someone on from Luit last week to talk about the new their new wireless studio headphones This would have been a good question to send to their design team So I don't know what they were going for but it's a it's different. I'll give them that

17:23 Courtney Gooden. Yeah, and because of that, I thought he didn't say, he just says Lewitt 6. And they make a lot of products that have 6, like the headphones that we had on with Bill's show from Lewitt, the LW6. So was he meaning the LW6 or was the L-Connect 6? So if you're talking about the LW6, which are the new wireless headphones, their design, you know, first of all, I'll comment on that because we don't know what he was looking for.

17:52 But the LW6, I don't know if I would use wireless. These are low latency headphones, supposedly around 5.8 milliseconds in their custom transmitter. They have this little puck that you connect to that you can plug analog audio into or plug it in USB-C into a computer interface. And it transmits wirelessly to the headphones. The headphones are battery powered and have their own DSP in them.

18:19 I have not listened to these. I don't think I would ever use wireless headphones in any professional situation because you don't know the state of the charge. And you may have left them plugged in overnight, but somebody came in and turned off power to the studio overnight, and you thought they were charging for 12 hours, but hey, they only got 20 minutes charge.

18:43 So this is why I wouldn't use wireless. They do have the ability to plug them in and use the USB wired connection, which if you like the sound of them, these are like $600, I think. They're kind of pricey for headphones when you can get a good pair of Sony VR6s or the standard. Yeah, not anymore. I have a pair right here for under $100.

19:07 I don't know if I would go with something like a wireless where there's any delay at all and you have to depend on Bluetooth quality for the transmission. Bill? So I was lucky enough on the Tuesday Focus this week to chat with Brian Fisher of Lewitt about these headphones that we were just talking about. Yes, they're not incredibly inexpensive. It's $600 or so.

19:32 We don't know what the street price is going to be. At least I didn't ask Brian about that. I probably should have. I think that's a convenience thing. They're designed for somebody working in a studio who wants to be cord-free. And there are some circumstances. I remember how many times I had to take my headphones off because even the curly cords on them wouldn't reach to the thing that I needed on the back wall.

19:53 And it's just – if you want to get rid of those kind of annoyances, I think this and the direction they're going in, which is to try to keep fidelity and latency both in as green a green zone as they possibly can with today's technology, is a worthy endeavor for the people who rely on these every day. I haven't heard them either and that's always going to be your final determinant.

20:16 I'm stuck on Sony 7506s just because I've used them for 40 years now and I know exactly how to figure out because of their kind of presence peak and the fact that they're really good on human speech. It's really easy for me to tell whether somebody's got splashy Ss or sibilants or their mouth is a little moist or something like that and that's what I use them for all day long.

20:37 So I'm used to that sound. I think you'll get used to any kind of tool you have. But this seems like they put a lot of time and effort into these, and I'm hoping that they have success with them. So if you want more information, look at Tuesday's show just a couple of days ago. Fenwick. 35 years, Bill. 35. 7506 came out in 1991.

20:56 If you're talking about the audio interface, I think the answer is it's designed to encourage you not to put a cup of coffee on top of it. That's excellent. Reverse ergonomics. This is not a flat surface. You are not going to mess it up with your diet soda. Intentional design. Next question. All right. Next up is from Paul Valhus in Austin, Texas. DJI's Osmo 360 Mark II launched worldwide from IFA at 589 euros with no U.S. release again.

21:32 How is the panel buying DJI gear now? And is the band pushing you to Insta360 or GoPro? Chris Fenwick. Here's how you get DJI gear. And I know this almost certainly for a fact. And Alexander will correct me if I'm wrong. If you want any DJI gear, contact Alexander. Tell him what you want. Buy yourself an iPhone 18 Pro Max Black, 256, 512 gigawatts of whatever,

22:00 and drive it up to Alexander's house and do a little swapy swap that's how you do it phrase I know a guy comes to mind yeah I when the DJI when the drone when the foreign made drone band and DJI larger DJI band came into effect was announced earlier this year I actually ordered an Osmo 4 before they were not okay to buy

22:26 because I knew it would be it would be tough stuff. A little tricky to get replacement parts for it now, but we can figure that out. There is a larger ban on any newly released DJI products. So if you notice whether it's this Osmo 362 or there was, I think the Pocket 4 was one that we talked about the other week, those new products

22:53 are not getting cleared to operate in the United States. And so they're just not getting marketed here. Not a whole lot we can do about it. But how we're getting them is creatively. But also you should be thoughtful about if you are going to get a product that's not officially sold and supported in the United States, you've got to figure out not only how are you going to get it,

23:18 but how are you going to maintain it. So if you have expendable parts like propellers or you're going to need to make a repair to the gimbal motor or something like that, how is that going to work? Because you can't send it – are you going to be able to send it to DJI Care if it's coming from the U.S.? That starts to get hairy in a hurry.

23:37 Fenwick? For the record, I am not officially endorsing smuggling contraband across borders. Next question. Okay, Andrew, God, I can't speak this morning. Andre DeLay in Berlin is asking, what's the latest tech product that you are very excited about? Jason? I'll give you an app that I think is pretty neat. This is Pixel Platter. Now, we've talked about MIDI for really professional playback,

24:10 and, you know, I love that. This is more impromptu, and it can load a spectacular number of videos. we're talking you know it will load an entire folder of videos and then you know just replay it perfectly and then we'll give you you know okay well there's four there's eight there's 16. any one of them you could expand into you can mess with playback and then you can come back

24:34 out of and it just always plays so just even for perfect background of awesome um it's just it's just neat and it's seven bucks and it's really fun Courtney yeah I haven't gotten one yet but they're I think they're just now out they've been announced and there's a couple of influencer videos out on it the OC new 12 channel hardware based switcher it's called the ghost dream omni well like

25:10 something like this. This is designed to go after the ATEM. But the nice thing, it has both HDMI and SDI inputs, so you don't have to pick and choose. You can pick and choose on a per-channel basis. It's one or the other on each of its eight input channels. It has a T-bar. It has pertinent buttons for switching. It has analog, look at that, XLR inputs. It has lots of USB-C interfaces,

25:42 so you can plug webcams in. For webcam in and out, it has recording on an SD card there, so you can ISO record. And it has, of course, internet capability. It does NDI, something that you don't find on the Blackmagic. So it looks pretty exciting for, you know, under $2,000. So that would be the most exciting piece of tech in our world that I've seen come out lately.

26:12 I just want to throw in real quick, PhotoJoseph just did a whole review on that thing, if you're interested, friend of the show. Tom? I'm trying to get excited about something. However, there was a rumor back in August that they were going to ship new Macs sometimes this year. So I put in an order for a Mac Studio Ultra M5. And, you know, again, sometime this year, who knows, maybe October, maybe December.

26:44 I'd really love to know more about it. But when have they shipped a Mac lately? We got one. M5 Studio. Got it done. I've got an M5 Pro Mini that's supposed to show up in two weeks. We were on the pre-order for it, but we didn't get into the early. It was still delayed a little bit. The new Claude Opus 5.5 is out this week.

27:16 And surprisingly good at little web-based animations. And I'm always trying to find ways to explain multi-step or abstract concepts to people. and I was trying to explain how a piece of machinery worked and I was like the the pictures don't really illustrate what I'm trying to get it to so I literally took a 2d like drawing of a piece of equipment that was annotated I

27:51 uploaded it to Claude Opus and I was like hey can you help me make an animation of this and what it came back with after I mean I want to say maybe five ten minutes of work on my part and about half an hour of it cooking itself it returned a website that had was like okay here's all the different parts of this machine and then if I wanted to click on an

28:19 individual piece of the machine it would go down to be like okay here's the picture that you uploaded and here's what it's doing at that point and if you have something that you're trying to explain to somebody and you have the ability to say opus 5 5 on you know extra effort or max effort it's pretty magical to just to will into

28:43 existence an interactive animation site about I'm just thinking the next time I go to train somebody new I'm gonna think about okay what are the things that are are always a little bit too abstract for somebody to get. And can I have an idea for how I would show it, but I don't have the skill to animate it. And I'm going to say, hey, can you help me put this together?

29:05 I'm super excited to see where this turns. Next question. All right. This one's from Robert Green in Los Angeles, California. Jason, how's that shiny new iPhone? Was the Duo tempting? Jason. Yes. Yes, the Duo was tempting until I looked at the camera specs. And I remembered that I'm a photographer first. And that's the reason that I buy a new iPhone, or at least that's what I tell myself.

29:33 I'll give you a sense of this. I have not had a chance to really play with this. But the speed of it is markedly different. Also, the charge is like they weren't kidding. For once, they weren't kidding. The charge is actually notably faster. Here we are 4K at 30 with dual recording and like it's not missing a beat. And keep in mind, this is over AirPlay.

30:04 They've really done something cool here. And I admit I have not played with the aperture much, but I look forward to doing it. I've done exactly one polycam 3D thing. I think the app needs to be updated so that it actually can be set for manual input. Don't fact check me on that because I don't think so. Oh, there's CJ playing around.

30:28 I'm trying to see if you can see the aperture. I don't think you can. Oh, no. No way. I mean, I can see it with my eyes. Well, yeah, but no. I mean, your lens is still trying to figure out whether or not you're a three-eyed monster. to set up a better shot for that because it's cool to see. It is very cool.

30:51 From an industrial and manufacturing coolness, I'm excited that the automatic mode has another choice for how it can manipulate the light that's coming into the lens. How much am I going to actually get out of manually setting it myself? I don't know, but I cut you off. Sorry, Jason. All good. Good. Tlaloc and I actually met in person in a coffee shop and we were playing around with it.

31:18 And like, yeah, it took a little bit of doing because, again, like coffee shops are not extremely well lit. But, you know, we started playing around with it. And like, you know, there is absolutely bokeh that's not computational and it probably won't matter. Oh, another thing that is markedly better. CJ, if you've played with Focus Lock, it is shockingly good. a double tap to focus lock and there's a part of the demo where they're like you know even if it's

31:45 out of frame right like um i'm not kidding let me try this so let's go to video there it is we'll tap focus tracking right completely out of frame and boom it still goes right back to it and it works pretty much every time there's also a nice um there's also the nice thought that now Now, when you press and hold to lock exposure, you can now very easily double tap and make focus independent of that, which is nice.

32:14 They've done a nice they've done a good job of giving you access to a higher degree of granular control without making it easy to get into a mode that's like, ah, when am I taking pictures of? Bill? Bill? I just wanted to make a comment on Apple's kind of recent history of changing from the old glass master, we've got to get everything right before we ship, to get it good, ship it, and then

32:39 iterate based on customer feedback. I really think this is a better world. I'm really thinking that the Duo is a 1-0 first attempt that they thought this was the most important stuff to get right. You know, they knew everybody's going to look at the hinge, and they knew everybody's going to look at whether or not it's scratched and how convenient it was and this idea of a screen on the back of

33:00 something that people can watch. All these things are kind of obvious for a foldable multi-purpose phone. But now that they've got the first one out, I'm really interested in seeing what kind of actual field feedback they get. Do people like the vloggers really embrace this and use it as a kind of a mini confidence monitor in live shoots? Is that its sweet spot? How are people

33:29 going to actually use the split screens and things like that? And I think you can only get that by kind of asking the customer base, what are you guys going to do with it? Not what did our designers think you were going to do, but what are you actually doing? So I'm really going to be be interested in the Duo version, whether it's 1.2 or 1.4 or version two, or where will it be

33:53 in a couple of years at version three? It's kind of a new category and I think it's really fascinating. I'm going to be watching it pretty closely. Alexander? Yeah. So I'm definitely due this year for an upgrade. I've decided I want to upgrade because I'm still on a 15 Pro Max. I don't get that, you know, I used to get so excited about upgrading phones and now I just, I don't really care all that much anymore.

34:18 But I've had the 15 Pro long enough. It's fully paid off now and I think it's time to upgrade. I'm probably going to end up with the 18 Pro Max and for many of the reasons that also Jason mentioned. But I got to say, though, the Duo, I think not this year for some of the limitations, but I definitely think that phone is going to be in my future.

34:42 I'm really intrigued by the display. I think they've done such a wonderful job with the folding phone design. You can't even tell the creases there. I think it's the first really interesting product I've seen in a while that's just not as boring to me as a regular. just cell phones have become these rectangular bricks I just find them incredibly boring now but it you know it's different enough I think the animations the fact that when you're looking at

35:09 the front screen when you slowly open it that transition animation is just typical like Apple design flair it's it's amazing it's like as you're turning it it's like a peek into what's on the other side of it it is so cleverly done I gotta say though the photo examples they've posted of of the Duo, everyone is downplaying it. I just feel like everyone's making it seem like

35:31 the Duo is gonna be horrible, and yes, I agree on every level spec-wise. The 18 Pro has a much better camera, but from the examples that I saw, I think the photos look pretty good, and I think for most people, all but the most discerning people that want the absolute cutting edge, I think it's gonna be good enough for most people especially because the

35:59 trade-off really is if you want a device that is smaller smaller than an iPad that has that extra screen real estate where you can do a lot more work on it without necessarily having to take an iPad or even a bigger laptop that to me is super attractive there are many times where I've wished I've had more screen real estate and I didn't have another device with me so that to me is really

36:22 really appealing. I'm going to kind of just wait and see how this product evolves over the next couple of years. Maybe next year, if the camera has a significant bump next year or the year after, I may eventually find myself on a Duo, but not today. Jason? I respectfully disagree about like, you know, is it going to be good enough for most people

36:46 most of the time, sure. Is it going to be good enough for people who actually use the iPhone Pro cameras? Not if you're actually using them. Fenwick? I was curious, Jason, you said it was so much faster. What iPhone did you upgrade from? You know the answer, Fenwick, the 17 Pro. Okay, no, no, no. I didn't know that. I honestly didn't know that. So you're saying between the 17 and the 18, it's radically different and it's not just because I spent a bunch of money and I got something new.

37:25 You know, as a proud Vision Pro owner, I can tell you, no, it's not just because I spent a lot of money. Straight up, it is absolutely faster. The other thing is the charging is shockingly faster. Yeah, that's really interesting. I'm curious about that. I also went from a 17 to an 18, and I found that the – it does feel snappier, but I'm more moved by the – or I'm more impressed with the fact that it charges faster and the battery just happens to last longer.

37:58 Two nanometers. If you're in the Blackmagic camera app on the new phone, what it looks like is, so here is the screen. And when you've got iris control now, and so if I swipe up and down on the right, you can see how that bokeh is changing just a little bit. You notice it on these close-up shots a lot more than on something that's far away.

38:23 But this is also where if you're trying to get that starburst effect, that you'd have to go. If you're in the Apple camera app, those controls are there, but they're a little bit more obscured. You have to hit the little grid of buttons. When you mirror the new camera app to my Apple TV, it doesn't go into landscape mode. So I'm not going to crane everyone's necks for that.

38:45 Hey, if you're watching us live on YouTube, we're glad you're here, but I think you're missing more than half the show. We've got a great chat that goes on all along the side of the show, which is great. so you can talk to the other people in the community. We also have a great Discord, and we have this after-hours thing that we hang out in.

39:02 There's people there pretty much 24-7, and it's just a fun place to hang out. So check out officehours.global.com if you want to join us live and more. Next question. All right, this next question is from me. Thoughts on the rapid use of AI models like Mythos to repair massive code bases like Windows? Windows. Microsoft released an unprecedented nearly thousand critical fixes. This was the

39:26 latest patch Tuesday. Side effects, many versions of Office had broken copy and paste, follow-up patches to fix it. Courtney? Yeah, the problem with these new tools, the AI tools that can find faults in old, you know, ancient code, is that everybody has access to them and the bad guys and the good guys. So it has become a horse race to try and outrun the people that are trying to run find exploits

39:54 and the people that are trying to fix the holes that could be exploited for exploits. So this is just totally accelerated the cat and mouse game that has been going on for years with the bad guys trying to find holes in the code to gain control of your computer and use it for their own use. and it used to take a nation state, you know, a room full of little code monkeys

40:19 to try and hammer on software to find a hole in it to exploit, to pull their little espionage tricks on and take over tricks on. Now one guy in his grandmother's basement can run mythos and hammer on some old code and try and find a thousand holes. So it's become a race between the operating system and the code, you know, legacy code distributors that are trying to stay ahead of the bad people and it's just going to get worse.

40:52 So buckle your seatbelt. It's going to be a bumpy ride. A lot of things get broken. A lot of things get broken when you make a thousand patches and you want to get it out because these thousand patches are covering up a thousand holes that everybody else can find running the same software. so you want to get it out fast and when you get it out fast you don't have a time

41:18 time to test everything to see what it broke when you make the corrections to fix the holes i just have to point out that we went from uh the hacker in their parents basement to now there's a tragedy uh he's they're an orphan they're in their grandparents basement like courtney just escalated that to a whole nother level and i just i just want to point that out i appreciate the parents

41:39 My parents were all killed by AI. Yeah, I agree with what these guys have said. There are more bugs than ever. The ability to find them is a lot faster, and we're going to have companies trying to fix them rapidly. They're going to break stuff. So, yes, we are going to go through a period of tumult where things are going to be a little less reliable,

42:01 And we as professionals who are relying on the technology to be rock solid and dependable and repeatable need to understand that it's on us more than ever to when we're doing some sort of upgrade to take a look at every single step in our process and make sure that it's still behaving as expected. So build that into your jobs. Next question. All right.

42:26 Up next is coming in from Guy Cochran in Seattle, Washington. What's with the new Rode 4K capture mode? Courtney? Yeah, this came out just yesterday. I updated my Rodecaster video to 1.4, which is the latest firmware update. And if you update your Rodecaster Duo Pro Duo audio mixer, Duo Pro, it also involves a lot of changes. And one of the things they built into this new version is called 4K capture sync.

42:56 So it turns your 1080p switcher, which is the RODECaster Video S and the RODECaster Video and the RODECaster Video Core, the three switchers that they have out for doing switching video. It adds this new 4K capture mode. So it does take away a bunch of stuff. So let me just talk briefly about that. that when you put it into capture mode, it no longer becomes a switcher

43:21 that gives you overlays and switching and transitions and all that stuff like the little window that I'm in up here right now. You lose all that when you go into 4K capture mode. But what it does do is it allows you to take those HDMI inputs on the back of the Rodecaster videos and feed them 4K and capture them onto a connected SSD in H.264, H.265,

43:47 encoded, so it lets you record four 4K ISO streams onto that hard drive. They're clean streams, just the video. You'll lose all the ability to do overlays or switching or anything else, but it just turns it into a four stream 4K capture card. And you can also, it does give you SDI routing. So it can output SDI over its network for 4K SDI streams, and each one can give you

44:17 an isolated mixer. It keeps the audio engine alive. So the audio engine, you can do a custom mix for each NDI stream that you're outputting, 4K stream that you're outputting over your network. So it does allow you to feed four NDI ISO NDI streams out over the network. And each one has a custom mix that now has the availability to not only mix the audio inputs from the RODECaster video,

44:44 but also from the RODECaster Pro audio mixers as well. Because you plug a little cable, a little USB-C cable between the mixer and the Video S, and you now have linked all the audio and video between the video and the Rodecaster Pro so that you can run the video from the Rodecaster Pro and you have 12 inputs of audio now with XLR inputs into the Rodecaster video from your audio mixer.

45:13 So it adds a whole lot of functionality and it's free. So if you have one of these products, I urge you to update to 1.4. you don't have to use that capture mode and you can use it as a 1080p 60 mode uh now if you're just going to use it for switching and video overlays etc but it now supports 60 frames per

45:32 second and 1080p you know you made my heart flutter for a second there when it was sdi over the network i know you meant ndi but just for a split second like i opened up the brandy i opened up the press release i was like what they did what was only one letter off come on the other thing that I'm thinking that you could do with this is that if you have four independent 4K inputs

45:56 going out to the network over NDI, you have, I'm curious to see what the bit rate is, but if you were switching with an Ecamm or a vMix or something like that, you could then have the switcher happen in software and now the road is your capture card. That's kind of the way that I am envisioning a potential use of this too, but I definitely want to play with it.

46:22 Kudos to Guy for giving us breaking news. I feel like we need a stinger or something. Next question. Douglas Carmichael asks, with the ecosystem that Blackmagic Design has built around the ATEM, do you see a market for the OC products? Jason. I'm sure there is one, but they're too new and we all have Blackmagic. So, I mean, I don't think – I certainly don't have one.

46:46 Courtney? Yeah, I think for the individual creator or someone like us who are just, you know, sending stuff up to a Zoom meeting or a podcast with live podcasts with interaction or, you know, if you're producing stuff for, you know, videos, educational videos, et cetera. I think the OC addresses – what they've done is they've taken all the weaknesses of the ATEM line, which no analog – no decent analog audio inputs on the ATEM minis.

47:17 All those problems, SDI or HDMI but not both on the ATEM mini lines and even the extreme lines. So they've solved all of those problems. They have, you know, USB-C inputs, video inputs for webcam inputs as well. You know, so they've covered all the weaknesses in the ATEM switcher line, which an NDI output, which is another, not SDI. It does have SDI output with the OC-12, the one that I showed earlier.

47:50 But it has SDI and HDMI outputs and NDI outputs. So it covers all the bases, which ATEM will never do because, you know, they're at war with new tech. They don't want to support NDI. So, yeah, I don't think ATEM is going to be able to catch up. Maybe they will. Maybe they'll add good audio inputs. We'll see. Fenwick? I think Douglas is absolutely right, though.

48:18 I think that the ecosystem is important. And the way the ATEM talks to the Blackmagic cameras is really awesome. And I think that it's sort of a thing kind of like, you know, I know you hate this, Courtney, but it's sort of like the Apple ecosystem. I love the way my phone and my computers interact and that I don't have to, you know, have a PhD or download a bunch of additional, you know, utilities or whatever to be able to copy and paste between things.

48:50 And the ecosystem is not something that shows up well on a spreadsheet or a balance sheet. It's a feeling that you take away. And yes, I know that everything I do between my phone and my computer, you could do between an Android and a Windows machine. But I like the fact that it's all in one. And I think the ATEM ecosystem is really great.

49:19 And I look at companies like OC and I go, yeah, it's great. You know, it's great. But you don't have the rest of the ecosystem. And, you know, maybe they have an intention to build the OC camera, but that's a big, that's a big. Now, Chris, the Windows phone was amazing, okay? Was. That was a joke. It was terrible. It was the worst thing ever.

49:40 I look at the OC stuff and I think about much like some of the folks in the chat are saying, I think about somebody who's just getting started who doesn't have any ecosystem or tech debt that they have to like mold into. into. And if I were making a recommendation to somebody that was, like a local school or a local house of worship is starting a video program from scratch and they've got

50:11 kind of hand-me-down stuff that's a hodgepodge of different things, I would be more inclined to recommend a product that can do SDI and HDMI and have XLR in than something that they need to build a bunch of individual components around. Or if I wanted to have something that was fairly inexpensive that I knew I could get a dozen of and then either send them out with students or put one in a truck or put one

50:35 at each school, the ability to connect two more things and be a little bit more versatile, even if the software isn't as nice and even if it doesn't have as many things that can can go around it. I think there's something to be said for, okay, you're going to have to muddle through some of the harder to use parts of this product, but it's going to be able to be glue in

51:01 more places. So I definitely think there's a market, but if you have other black magic gear, it's going to be increasingly hard for that to find a place. Next question. Thomas Johnson, St. Paul, Minnesota asks, CJ had a program that he described for sorting and editing photo folders. What was it? I do not remember. The most recent photo project that I did where I was sorting folders and trying to identify pictures is that I had a, my grandfather

51:35 passed away last month and I was in charge of the, among other things, the memorial slideshow that was going to be at the visitation. And I had a thousand scans. I had a thousand prints and negatives combined that I had to scan to get up on the screen. But they weren't in any particular order. And what I had done is I took all 1,000 scans, just put them in a folder, and then I think

52:02 I sicked Claude Cowork on it. And I was with Fable, Fable 5-1. And I just said, hey, this is what I've got there's pictures from you know 60 or 70 years of time some of them are digital and have metadata some of them do not sometimes I had film negative sometimes I had prints help me group them chronologically group them because when you get like a literal like a basket of photos that have been picked

52:29 through a hundred times there are no particular order so like the stuff that was from you know the kids birthday party is right next to you know the picture of the grandparent as a child and it's like okay these were taken 40 years apart they this the the fact that they were scanned sequentially had nothing to do with it claude did a really nice job of analyzing the it got to know the people that were in the photos

52:53 once i started to tag them and then it would use logic uh if i had a picture of a document like a picture of a marriage certificate and it actually like was able it started to date the the other photos that were taken around it uh based on the date that was on the marriage certificate and then Then it would look at hairstyle and clothing and film grain and start to group the people.

53:13 It did a remarkably good job of putting everything together. And then I said, I want like a Ken Bernsie style slideshow where all the pictures grow and shrink. But I want it to be very high quality and I don't want to have to do a lot of work to do it. Right. OK, get in line. But what it did is it built an Apple script, put it into Keynote,

53:34 put all the pictures kind of chronologically based on the era made that put them small on one page big on the next page and then used a magic move transition in between with a six second duration on the transition and it was like magic and then I and there's like oh that's a great idea now what I'd like you to do is do object push in between the different sets of photos so the

53:54 photos fly in and out and like and it I think I went through this is the the embarrassing part. I went through 17 iterations before I got to the thing that I really wanted because I kept having more ideas, but I needed to do it across, you know, 200 slides and I didn't want to do it manually. And I totally blew through my Claude subscription for the two weeks that I

54:19 did that. But it was kind of like magic to do it. And if, if, when you have a weird problem that It seems like I don't know how I would do this with the time and resources that I have. Just asking the question like, well, what if I could is I think it's pretty darn useful. If you're finding Office Hours valuable, I encourage you to give some of that value back.

54:44 We are a nonprofit. We're largely member supported. We appreciate all the volunteer hours and time that is put in here, but we also appreciate donations. So if you want to chip in and help us keep the lights on and keep the show coming to you, Office Hours at global slash donate. We appreciate every little bit. it. Next question. Next up is coming in from Andy Kokendorf from VR Florida. I have a Sennheiser

55:05 416 that I want to rig on my standing desk for Zoom. Which shock mount do you recommend mounting hardware? Thanks. Bill? It's not a super critical thing because the 416 by itself does not have a particularly large problem with handling noise. It is internally created such that people People use these in the field a ton. So it's not like you're hanging a large diaphragm condenser that literally will pick up every single shake.

55:33 It's already starting out reasonably handling isolated. What I would stay away from are really lightweight clamps, lightweight arms, the things that pick up vibrations so that when you hit the desk, that's transmitted all the way through directly to the mic. So some kind of a suspension thing somewhere in the process would be useful. And I just go with heavier things whenever I'm mounting a microphone.

56:00 So the inertia of the C-stand or larger clamp, a Mafer clamp as opposed to a mini Mafer clamp, I'll tend to go in that direction because it just makes things better. Courtney? Yeah, if you're looking for shock mounts, I like the Rycotes. I've been using them for years. The latest ones are, you can get the true audio for about $189. It includes the super softy windscreen.

56:29 And this shock mount, which is their lyre type shock mount, looks a little bit like this. It dampens any kind of thumps and bumps that are going to be transmitted through your desk to that shock mount. It has an adapter in it, a hot shoe adapter. It goes 3-8 inch, 16-2 hot shoe. and you may need an adapter if you've got a quarter-inch magic arm

56:52 or something that you are going to clamp it using Bill's Mayfur. You're going to have to have a three-eighths inch to quarter-inch adapter. But other than that, I like the Rycote shock mounts. They hold up pretty well. After a while, sometimes the plastic clips, if they've been exposed to sunlight for a long period of time, decay and will break, but you can get them replaced.

57:13 All replacement parts are available. So I vote the Rycote for the shock mounts. Chris? Courtney says, Ryko. Andy, don't forget the actual stand. At the beginning of the office hours, I went through, I think, three different mic arms in like a month. I felt stupid. Don't buy anything that has an exposed spring because you touch the boom and it just goes gah, gah, gah, gah, gah.

57:46 It's awful. So think about that nothing with an exposed spring. They're cheap and horrible and then Mickey in the chat recommends the If you're gonna pair the the shock mount with the radius the rad 2 which looks a little something like this Next question All right. This one is coming in from Douglas Carmichael Where do you see the role of developer training courses like code with Chris in the age of vibe coding?

58:17 Jason. Easy. Training will include vibe coding. Just because you can write doesn't mean you're a writer. Just because you edit doesn't mean you're an editor. To that end, there will still need to be programmers out there, whether they are vibing or otherwise. You know, I also just want to say that if I had to code with Chris, I would code with Chris Sabato because he makes really cool stuff.

58:40 I'd code with Fenwick. We'd get nothing done, but it would be a lot of fun. I don't know anything. That's good. Good. You know, I think knowing nothing is powerful because you don't know, you're not trained to not think of things. Sometimes the best ideas come from places like that. From people. You don't know you're stupid if you're stupid. Hey, thanks everyone. Appreciate you coming in here on a Friday.

59:02 Thank you to our panelists for coming in and sharing your life experience. It was a fun show today. Also, thank you to the back-end crew who, as Chris alluded to at the beginning of the show, literally there's a village of a small village a small army of people that not only help us look and sound great during the show and keep us up to standards but

59:20 also all around the show keeping us organized moving forward figuring out what to do next pretty exciting stuff also thank you to our producers for asking such great questions we'll be back with Q&A tomorrow morning and introspection on Sunday if you'd like to come to that that is live only so you You'll have to go to officehours.global.com. Get yourself on the list.

59:39 It's a lot of traversal today. Had we gone around in person and asked all these questions for episode 2376, we would have gone 34,000 miles. That's 55,000 kilometers, 269 million bananas for scale. There it is. See you in after hours. Weird final shot. Banana on a scale. The apple. Banana on the apple scale. And I just want to say, the question got pulled away,

1:00:09 but there was one thing that sounded like an announcement about AI coding stuff this afternoon. Yeah, in After Hours today. I didn't catch the time. I was going to read it during the credits here. Announcements in the credits. Oh, there it is. Our weekly, it's in, yep, go ahead. All right, CJ's off, I'll do it. But our weekly After Hours of AI Watercolor Zoom meetup today at 4 p.m. Eastern.

1:00:38 That's 20. UST may offer a preview of exciting upgrades to the Office Hour website. How does one sign up for After Hours? Well, they just go to join, officehours.global slash join. That's the answer. And there's a water cooler meeting, not a water color meeting. You do not have to bring paints or brushes. You know what? I was picturing. It was happy trees, all right?

1:01:02 Just because I can read does not a reader make me. You Bob Rossified it. Nicely done.