Office Hours | Saturday | October 10, 2026

0:01 Good morning. Welcome to Office Hours, the show where we answer your technical media production questions every single week. We've got a great panel lined up here, and we look forward to you, the producers, putting in those questions. More on that in a bit. Courtney, let's get right to it. First one comes in from lovely San Francisco, Ed. I guess he's one of those people with just one name.

0:21 Ed says, using Zoom ISO V3 with a DeckLink Quad plus a Mac Mini successfully, looking to build a second rig, would an UltraStudio 4K Extreme 3 also work? What do you think, Guy? Yes. Wow, man, a few words. Okay. All right, let's go to Courtney. Well, what you might think of is it depends on how many people you want to bring in.

0:53 But you might look at the RODECaster video, either the big one or the little one, because they now have a mode that you can put them in where they stream up to 4K, the four of the HDMI inputs on the big one, three on the smaller ones, the core which is a lot cheaper than the 4k extreme 3 to give you four ndi streams that

1:20 should probably work using zoom iso i haven't tried this so maybe you zoom iso users can speak as to if it can ingest four ndi streams at 4k at least with in with one with with at least it gives you some choice in OBS and other software as well. So that's a possibility. All right, Guy, you want to come back? Sure. Here's the 4K DeckLink Extreme, and I just pulled it off my Mac,

1:55 and I have a quad card with the same kind of Sonnet box, actually the newer one that's Thunderbolt 3, and I can guarantee you that it does work. You do want to make sure that your drivers are up to date, though, and that if the car needs flash, that you flash it. Because sometimes when you go into the desktop videos version 16, it'll ask you to flash it.

2:16 So just get that stuff taken care of before any kind of show so that it's all ironed out and then burn it in. We have a Zoom test meeting that we run 24-7. I highly suggest sending your bots into that. If you Google Office Hours Zoom test, you'll hit that page and you can bring in eight bots. For you, it depends on what you're trying to do with the quad.

2:34 actually let's see using with the quad yeah so I have a quad and the Mac mini and then for a second rig if you're just trying to bring in one because all this has is left two cards in this box but you're gonna see that the extreme it's just one even though it has four SDIs this is just one in or out and then I

2:56 have a second who makes that enclosure this is an old sonnet one this is okay Okay. Ancient. It's Thunderbolt 2, but I mean, it works. Yeah. Yeah. And have you experienced any issues with stability with the DeckLink drivers lately? I've heard mixed reports. I know a few people that have had problems with them. It's been good. In Rockstar? Yeah. 3.06 is good with version 16 of the DeckLink drivers.

3:24 And I'm even running it on this test machine, which is GoldenGate. So I just let it burn in and it's been fine. All right. Chris Sabato. Guy, that's not the Ultra Studio you have there. That's just the DeckLink, right? This is Ultra Studio 4K, the exact extreme, the exact one he's talking about. Is it? And so it just has a... That doesn't look like the picture.

3:50 No, no, no, no. Ultra Studio 4K Extreme. Yeah. When I... Oh, sorry. You're right. You're right. This is the DeckLink 4K Extreme. The Ultra Studio is the rack mount unit. So same technology. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Except it's $4,000, right? I read it fast. Yeah. That doesn't look like what I Googled. Gotcha, gotcha. But they all... Yeah, we have those at the shop.

4:15 And no, actually, we do use a quad and a sonnet for our rig at Tenacious. And then we use the Ultra Studios for other processes. I'm trying to think of where those live. That would be my question. The Ultra Studio is like four times as expensive. So what are you doing that would require, maybe you have one on the shelf and that's why you would want to use it. But like if you're building a new thing and it's just for this, I feel like the Declan Quad is more bang for your buck.

4:50 Yeah, for sure. I mean, especially since you get more IO. The Ultra Studios, it's kind of a one-trick pony. It's meant to live on your desk. And I think if it's the one that I'm thinking of, it's got XLR in and out. This one's a breakout cable, so it doesn't look like it, but I could take XLR audio in here with my breakout cable. So even still, it's like, what are you trying to do? Are you trying to put it in a rack and be portable with it? Or are you trying to put it in a computer and use it directly?

5:18 And it also has Composite, which to me says it's old. There's a new one, though, isn't there, that's got Thunderbolt and does some kind of... It said, when I googled UltraStudio 4K Extreme 3, and it pulled up one that had Thunderbolt, but it was Thunderbolt 3, and it had Composite.io. And anything with Composite.io to me says old. Hey, so sometimes you're sitting in a control room and you need that old beta tape and that's what that device is for.

5:50 I'm serious. That's what people have them for. That could be true, too. You're paying more for that backwards compatibility. Yeah, for sure. And the ability to control that deck. I'm sure it's got RS-422, so you can actually bring up ancient. Sorry, I shouldn't use that word. It's only ancient. I'm trying to be respectful of people hey your format you're U-matic you're ancient

6:17 hey that was my format I was born in the black and white era but it goes back to the question what are you trying to do and do you need that particular device well if this is just laying around and it's already in a rack or something like that then yeah it's there to use like I wouldn't want to take this on the road

6:36 it's a fragile thing and that thunderbolt connection it could get disconnected. So things that are stable in a rack, you know, it's one of those things, what are you building? You know, where are you taking it? All right, let's move on to the next question. All right, next question comes from Craig McFarlane in Boston, Massachusetts, and you're on the panel this morning. Have you changed how you look at software builds or buy decisions

7:04 now that some things can be spun up with AI? When buying, are you more appreciative of all that goes into those products. Well, I certainly know I am. One of my much beloved BB Edit apps, those guys have been handcrafting amazing Mac apps for many decades. So as much as AI is incredible and it solves so many different problems with bespoke issues,

7:29 I still appreciate handcrafted stuff made by actual human beings. Go ahead, Greg. Yeah, this question came about because I realized that over the past year, my sort of equation of how I look at things has changed about decisions I make. And as probably a lot of people have with AI disrupting everything and saying, oh, you know what? I could probably just vibe code this. And stepping back,

7:59 it's like, well, do I really want to? And I've noticed that I, so there's the sort of buy versus versus build approach that has been around forever. But the opportunity for build is huge now. And, you know, as you just said, Alexander, that the build has a lot of strings attached to it. So it's not as simple as you'd expect. But still, I tend to look at commercial software a lot more skeptical.

8:30 Like, is this just a container? Do they only exist because of the proprietary format or installed base and they're just riding on that? And if they were starting out now, would they actually get a lot of users? And so I tend to look at longstanding things more skeptically. And anyway, it's just more of a, it's still all up in the air, like a lot of things with AI with me.

9:02 And so I think things are more in the middle. I even look at a lot of open source projects. If it's not currently being updated like every month or two, I'm not even interested. Because if it hasn't been updated in over a year, unless it's like a foundation kind of thing that is super small and simple, chances are it's got all sorts of security issues.

9:31 choose. And AI could do a number on it, as far as improving it, performance wise or security. So I'm not even interested in anything that hasn't been updated. And so anyway, it's still evolving, I guess. And let's go to Courtney. Yeah, when, you know, I retired before AI came about, but in my my old life, before retirement, I used to have to generate a lot of stuff like this,

10:07 without the, without the meat in the corner, you know, which GAC screens, we call them, you know, if you'd have a show, which showed a room full of people sitting at consoles, you know, you had to have something that looked alive and on their screens, and we used to have to create, you know, You'd go into a set, and our department had set up, gee, there's 40 monitors on desks, and we've got to put something on all 40 monitors, and it can't be the same image.

10:32 And we would have to generate these GAC screens by the dozens, and we'd have a whole team of artists, graphic artists that were working in Macromedia Director, building things and creating things in Illustrator and Photoshop and After Effects that would do animations and things. and it would take a month or so to create those screens. So I thought, gee, I'll be really clever.

10:57 And I wrote a program to create these screens. This was, you know, 15, 20 years ago. And so I created my screen so I could create those GAC screens, you know, because each one of those little panels that you saw here in this scene here are adjustable in size, the content. I could change the, you know, just with a click, I could change the weather scan, what's on there, size of it, the position of it.

11:23 All the boxes were alive. I could slide them around, and I could just bring up that program and create 20 or 30 screens in a matter of about an hour and a half. And I put a lot of guys out of work. So I now realize this is now, in today's world, you wouldn't even have to have me because you could just say to AI, generate 30 screens that look like consoles in a launch control facility.

11:51 And, you know, they might pump out 30 animated screens that look like that or even better in a matter of seconds or minutes at least. uh so i have a lot of appreciation for the people that used to do that uh and uh and now i wouldn't want to get into the business of doing it again because uh there'd be no job left for

12:16 and let's go to chris sabato yes on multiple levels and one of the things that i that i and I actually just saw this last night is that I see an app. We've talked about the, the stadium sound app that I, that I've been working, that I've been vibe coding, that I have no illusions. That is a like high end product, right?

12:40 It's a tool that does something that I need. And I think it's useful. And other people might find it useful too. But I saw an app like that. It basically, it looked very similar, but they're charging for it. And it's just like, like this looks like someone did the exact same thing I did and they're charging 20 bucks a month for it. And so now I have this like, I don't know, this thing when I see stuff, it's like,

13:06 is this vibe coded? Because if it is and you're charging for it, I'm just going to do it myself, right? Like I can just, I can do that. If you did it, I can do it. It's, it's not where, you know, two, three, four years ago, if I saw something, it's like, oh, I probably couldn't do that. Or I don't have the time to do it. Or I don't have the knowledge base to do it. Now,

13:29 that level has come way down. And on the other side, there is the bigger high-end things where it's... And Mickey mentioned it in the chat. It's like, I want someone to yell at, right? I want... When something goes wrong, I need to be able to hold someone accountable. and a lot of that kind of depends on where you are in the industry or like like whether or not

13:56 like your your risk of failure like how important that is right and for me a lot of things i do it's like real low risk stuff and and i for i don't know the last five six years we've paid 500 bucks a year for a piece of software that translates scoreboard data into an XML. I finally, I used AI and built my own. And so that saves me $500 a year. And I was paying $500 a year for one unit.

14:28 Now I have, I can have as many units as I want for free because I built it. And my risk is low, where if it fails, it's kind of okay. Now, to be fair, the one we paid 500 bucks for failed a lot too. So it's, you know, whatever. But yeah, it does. I mean, to answer the question, yeah. Like there's so many more ways I'm thinking about,

14:52 can I do this myself? Is it worth doing myself? Is it a concern that someone else is doing this themselves through AI, right? There's lots of more questions that come up when when you're when you're looking at software solutions now and let's go to guy yeah there was an interesting discussion yesterday in the ai water cooler and craig showed off one of his

15:15 little cool apps that uh took all of his ideas in his brain and laid them all out and then ranked him and he had some like devil's advocate little uh you know it's like the good guy bad guy devil and angel on your shoulder saying you could build that but really should you and is there something something else out on the market because as somebody was saying yesterday in the Cisco

15:37 one throat to choke because yesterday Chris also showed his SRT encoder and I had a couple questions in the water cooler about his projects I'm like you know it's cool but he had mentioned that uh gran and apps already has something but he wanted particular things and that's the cool thing about uh vibe coding something is that you could customize it and make it have features at

15:58 the other guys. Maybe it's free or maybe it's $10 a month. And I suggested Colaba because it's something that I had. But then what's rolling around the back of my head is what's the price of failure. So this is about $8,000 right here. And it does the same thing as his free vibe-coded app. So this is a Makito X4 with SDI in, and that's what his app is doing. And is this thing

16:21 better than his? At the end of the day, the visual result to his audience, they probably don't care. they would never notice a difference but this thing is bulletproof you know it's what the military uses to transmit so does it do hevc does it do um what do they call it segmenting where it can send what's the name of it there's a certain thing that this box slicing so this thing will do

16:43 hardware slicing and customized decoders at the other side can take advantage of this slicing and get you even lower bandwidth or or more reliable frames so there are certain things But they got engineers over there that are, you know, when you pay $6,000, $8,000, $10,000 for a Makito, you got that throat to choke. So we only have 2,080 hours in a working year.

17:05 Do you really want to vibe code a $10 thing? Like, because when somebody wants to choke your throat and now you got to stop doing $120 an hour work to go do your $10 thing, like, hallelujah. Like, look what you built. You're now responsible for it. What is it called? Makito? Is that what it's called? Yeah, Makito. Yeah. It looks like the now discontinued slot-loading Apple external DVD drive.

17:33 This is the top of the line. Look how thin that is. It's amazing that they can pack that in there. Well, it's a blade, so you could fit 20 of these in a 19-inch rack across. I've seen them in installs where… Yeah, so this is just a housing for a single rack unit. This one's not a rack. It's just an appliance that you could set down.

17:52 But yeah, this is what you'll find everywhere. This is an industry standard. Very cool. All right. Let's go to Craig. Craig's got something to say here. Just one last thing. So I used to do buy versus build. And as an outsider, I would look at open source as well. Nowadays, as Guy was just mentioning, we're sharing each other's apps and whatnot on the AI Watercooler yesterday.

18:20 today. And I realized there's a, there's another option now, which is I'll build something for myself. And then now it's like, oh, should I give this away? Should I sell it? I don't want to run yet another business. I already have that job. But I hadn't really thought of that sort of as a, as an option before, but now it's like, and I appreciate all the stuff that Chris Abato has

18:45 done. It's like, look, I'm not supporting this. I'm not offering it as a business, but I've done it and if you can build on it great go for it so that's that's a whole nother uh option that didn't used to be there very much uh just a reminder if you want to ask questions on this show i'm a little bit late with i'm not not looking at the time uh you can ask questions

19:08 to this illustrious panel by using mcconaugher q a system and it's a great place to put those questions in you can vote on them up and down which tells the back end crew how important it It is in terms of the priority of the answering of those questions. And you can also chat with us live. You're missing half the fun if you're not doing that.

19:26 If you don't know how to do that, go to officehours.global slash join. That's officehours.global slash join. Just put your name and email there. I'll send you all the links with the stuff that you need to get in there, including Discord. It's a great place to be. Guy, let's go to you. We'll get you put in here before we move on. So just one last thing to think about too, when you look at the change logs of some of these apps that people have built over the years with a team of real engineers, you start to scratch your head and go, oh, I see a customer had a little boo-boo and they fixed it.

20:04 And so the other day, like when CJ asked, hey, I want to play out. He did it here. He played out that little jingle and it was too loud. And I was like, well, you should just use Stadium Sound. So I went and got it. But he could have used, you know, QLab, which is the industry standard. But it's only $1,399. Like that.

20:21 That's all. All right. Off the soapbox. Is there a payment plan for that? I'm just kidding. There is actually. You can just rent it. I guess you can rent it. You can rent it. Yeah. Well, actually, honestly, that's kind of a, that's not very common, is it, to see a rental thing for a software, but that could actually make the difference between having something that's useful and not having the right tool at all for a job, like especially for schools.

20:49 Let's say you're doing, you know, only a couple of productions a year to have to spend $1,400 US on a software license might not be viable, but to just rent it for one or two shows a year is pretty reasonable, actually. I think more people should offer that as an option. All right, let's move on to the next question, Courtney. Coming in from down in Texas way, Austin, Texas,

21:13 Paul Valhus says the St. Louis Blues will produce their road games from a control room at home. Would you rather direct from base or be in the building? He has a link to a story about that. I don't know. Does that matter, Chris, to you, where you are physically? So I don't produce NHL hockey games, So like, I can't like speak to personal experience, like in my experience, like if I don't have to go somewhere, that's fantastic. Right. Like, great. On the other hand, like for a lot of this stuff I do, like where I'm also the engineer, like I kind of need to be on site.

21:50 um this is this is an interesting thing and it's like when you click on the link and actually read the story it's it's really not about where they're directing from it's it's about the blues uh taking over from their the failed rsns and that's a whole thing in the industry where where regional sports networks are are collapsing and the seattle kraken um got out of their rsn before it collapsed and

22:20 and said, all right, they saw the writing on the wall. They said, the RSNs are going to collapse. We're going to bring our whole thing into house. And so they have their own production. They're producing their own games and doing their own distribution. The Blues were with Ballet Sports, who was bought by somebody. And then they collapsed anyways, right? And so they lost their RSN.

22:41 So they lost the regional sports network that was covering their games. And so they kind of had to scramble and say, all right, well, we just need to do it ourselves. And that's kind of what this article is about. And when you have to do something yourself, when you go from someone else doing it to bringing it in-house to having it to do yourself, a lot of times you're probably looking at doing it cheaper.

23:07 cheaper and in this particular case you know one of the reasons the rsn's collapse is because it's expensive to do this and a lot of the rsn's and um you know i'm everyone knows i'm a huge buffalo fan and so like the sabers have msg as their rsn and i was just kind of looking this up and and so they travel so their director goes to all the games there's a truck they rent a truck at

23:30 each away game and that's all that's all money and and the blues are probably looking at that and saying, do we need to really send a truck somewhere else? Can we just do all this remotely? And it looks like they can. And I mean, NBC does the Olympics via Remy. So sure, why not? I think it's just a real interesting time in sports

23:57 for when you're looking at all these, like not lower level, but these professional sports that aren't the NFL. basically, that have to deal with RSNs and how are their games getting out and how are people viewing their games and where historically it's been other people coming in to do their games and more and more it's becoming, well, we're just going to do it ourselves. And it's an interesting

24:23 time. Go ahead, Courtney. Yeah, yeah. Chris mentioned it. You know, NBC has moved a lot of their sports headquarters, broadcast headquarters to Stanford, Connecticut, that big broadcast facility they have there, and everything is done remotely. I think there's more and more of this. Of course, they do employ a lot of times some people at the game itself to do color or coverage of the crowd, et cetera, interviews on the field,

24:50 things like that, that feed the main. But the director and all the switchers and the sound mixers and everybody else is sort of being cooped up in a truck. So, you know, you have more standard creature comforts if you're in a facility like the NBC facility, a streaming facility. Because, you know, hey, the coffee pops in the same place and the snacks are the same and they bring in catering and it won't be different.

25:16 You're not subject to trying to send a gopher down to the snack bar that's on the fourth level of the stadium. And it's going to take them a half hour to go down, stand in line and come back and bring your food to you. So, yeah, a lot of people would rather be in a nice, comfy facility where it's quiet and you don't have the distractions of having to watch the cheerleaders for the opposing team and the other distractions that you run into when you're in the stadium.

25:42 And I think the article was really about the streaming network and how competition for regional sports and many other types of things that used to stand in a competitive marketplace with the major three networks have changed. And now they're competing with Netflix and Hulu and Fox and Paramount Streaming and all the other streaming networks that are out there for these big game licenses.

26:09 licenses. So there's a lot more competition. There's a lot more bidding for what's going on. And there's more of an opportunity for regional sports and smaller sports, college sports, less popular sports than football or basketball or baseball to stream to a larger regional crowd. And so that's a good thing. Guy? Yeah, depending on your infrastructure at your home. So I've done this,

26:39 from here, but I have redundancy and there's a certain calm that you get. And there's also a certain freak out that you get when one of those things goes out and you're down to your, when you think of pace, when you think of primary alternative contingency and emergency, uh, it gets pretty scary, pretty fast. So there was one day, so I have two internet connections here and there was

26:58 one day when one of them went out and it was my backup, but I immediately, because there was people out in the field that if I did not have connectivity, they were we're going to be left stranded essentially at 13 different locations. So they would be like, what do we do next? Because they needed me on Unity to route some things. So basically, it was going to hold up a whole production day, 13 times, you know, a thousand bucks ahead.

27:23 You start talking about real money. So I immediately had my son who was on his way to work. I said, hey, go get me a Starlink from Home Depot right now. And it was five in the morning and he went ahead and got me a Starlink. And I had it sit and stand by, you know, even though it was my, My third thing, I still felt the need.

27:39 So there's a certain comfort that comes from being on location and somebody else's job is to take care of all the engineering and all the gear. One thing that Tucker would say when we did this other cloud production is he loved being able to go play with his kids during the breaks. So we would have, you know, there would be a time

27:57 where the breakout rooms, all the attendees, there was like 400 people would go into these breakout rooms and we had an hour. We had a whole hour to just go kill. and he would come back and he'd be all refreshed and he'd be like oh that was great that's why i love cloud production i could go visit with my family and then boom i'm back in my seat you know

28:12 it's just like it's amazing the downside of course is you don't get that lovely catering and you don't get that camaraderie with your friends you don't go out for drinks or whatever in the evening and and socialize so i miss that but the wear and tear on your body of traveling so i did a i did a production where i had to go to every major city across the united states twice it's not fun being

28:31 being on the road for that long when you have a family and you know grab a lawn you know it's like you come back the last thing you want is a lawn that's you know overgrown and the neighbor's going where you been all right let's move the net to the next question from right here in los angeles california gordon lake asks is there is the dji sdr transmission to a good low-cost alternative to the teradek systems

28:59 for a wireless camera to switcher. And he has a link to something there. Chris, Sabato, go ahead. Yes, it is. I've not used this one, but I've heard really good things about it. It is, it's low cost. And there's, anytime you're doing something wireless, there's, you know, things that can go wrong. Personally, I have the Hollyland Cosmos C2, and I've been happy with that.

29:26 But I've heard very good things about the DJI, if you can get it. I know I have some colleagues in higher education where they are not allowed to purchase anything DJI. Courtney? Yeah, that's what I was going to ask about. Is the DJI embargo still in effect? Does it affect something like this? Especially since this is covered, you know, transmission stuff is covered by the FCC in the United States.

29:55 So this could become a political football used against DJI. So I'm wondering if that is even still available in the United States. You people in Canada can ship us one. But I've been really surprised in my drones that are DJI that the quality of their transmission is superior to anything else I've seen used on the set on the ground. But that may just be because the drone is 100 feet in the air in line of sight, usually to the receiver.

30:24 So as long as you have line of sight, it may be great for doing that kind of stuff. But I'd worry about it when in your if you're indoors and in a highly reflective situation, a lot of metal around whether it work is good. Guy. Sorry, I was pulling up a photo here of of the DJI in use. So we rented the bigger one for a production.

30:54 And I have to say, this is a rental item. If you think you're going to be using it all the time, then it might be worth buying the less expensive one. But I've been burned by wireless transmission where we were doing the Ittleson wedding. Actually, it was like a quarter million dollars. I probably shouldn't say how much it cost, but it was a very expensive wedding with a bunch of highbrow folks.

31:19 And the moment that everybody stood up, my feed went to pixelated garbled mess and we had to go to a different shot. And I was running camera wirelessly and it was transmitting fine. And then the reality hit. So what's the price of failure is my point. If you want to get the inexpensive stuff that's under a thousand bucks, beware. A cable is always your better choice.

31:46 or if you have to run a long cable and put it very close so now you're only transmitting like eight feet so now you're just in that range where and that's what we should have done and I had even flagged that as a as a something and we just we ran out of time we didn't get back to it and we paid the price you

32:02 know we had to go to the different shot which was even a blocked shot like my shot was the shot and I was I was right there you know I had it so that luckily we uh we iso'd and we were able to record and drop it back in but the live it broke apart yeah just because you can do something doesn't mean you should just like all the time people

32:24 ask me can i stick a wireless can i stick a plug-on sure transmitter receiver and to connect to two speakers at a great distance so i can have wireless speakers yeah you can do that but It doesn't mean you should go ahead, Chris. It, this comes down to, and we talked about a little bit in one of the previous questions, what's your tolerance for failure, right? If you,

32:47 if your tolerance for failure is real low, this might not be the solution for you. If, if something can go wrong and you can work around it, then yeah. You know, like I said, I used the, the Holly lands in for our football broadcast and through one and a half games they worked great I had zero issues with them and then in the previous game which was a

33:09 little later in the day the lights came on and then one of them just wouldn't work once the lights came on and it's I don't know why I have no idea why the lights were interfering with the wireless and actually it was the one that was closest was the one that it was was having trouble with with the light so what's your what's your tolerance for failure that's really the

33:30 question. The funny thing about that is when I ask that question to people, they will always, I've never heard someone say that they have a little bit of tolerance. It's like, it doesn't matter what event it is, if it's their kid's birthday or a CEO is coming to talk, when they ask me for wireless products, they always say their tolerance for failure is zero. I'm like,

33:52 okay, and you're asking me to buy a $200 wireless microphone. How does that make any sense? All right, Guy, go ahead. Yeah, so I found that image. And this thing worked to caveat. There's two different models. One's the higher end model. So here's the price of failure right here. Is it worth $52 to rent the smaller one for $52 for seven days?

34:16 This is the exact one that we rented. I'm about to show you a picture of 263 for seven days. So price of failure, over $200 and something. Are you really going to risk a production? Like we had, I'd say, 100,000 people watching what was coming out of this feed. So here's the DJI all done up, some other images of it. But it did fabulous.

34:40 Even they asked me to go get some shots outside of the venue, and I walked out, and they were banking them on the replay machine to play back. But it was a nice rig I set up, but there's a DJI back there. All right. All right. Just a reminder, if you want to ask questions on the show, we still got some time left on today's show.

34:59 You can use askofficehours.global. That's askofficehours.global. It's just a simple web page if you go there right now. Nothing to log into. Very, very quick way to put in those questions. If we don't get to your question today, don't worry about that. It goes into a queue and we will usually sort through those questions and bring it back on another day. All right. Courtney, what do we have next?

35:22 Next one comes in from Zach Jeffers in Spokane, Washington, Pacific Northwest there. Business question. After everybody is paid and expenses accounted for, how much margin do you consider standard for business profit when bidding standard projects without the friend of friends deals, etc.? Craig? Obviously, a lot depends on, I haven't said that very often these days. It depends. It depends on the type of service work you're doing.

35:56 If it's in the AV production versus IT, our company, we're more in the 50% margin, but other industries or segments, it's closer to 20 or 30. Also depends if you have variables in it or if you're fixed bidding and all of that. There's a lot of people that lowball things just so they can do change requests and eat back into their original desired margin.

36:27 But the one thing I would recommend is, so on Office Hours, we've done this sort of thing quite a few times. And so you can go, if I go, my bad. If you go to YouTube and look up on the Office Hours channel, just type in project management. You'll see at the February 26, 2024, we did a great show just on building bids and lots of rules of thumb and ideas about that.

36:58 The whole project management series on Mondays was really outstanding. And then if you're in Showhub as well, or the new website, if you evaluate the new dev website, you can search for terms like that and just get an amazing amount of great knowledge and wisdom. Yeah, I'd say if you wanted to, I just had to jump in there real quick. Sorry to raise my hand.

37:29 And the business is different for different types of entities. So depending on what scale you're playing at, it is a bottom line number, they call it. And if you're at under 5%, you're super thin, especially if you want to do something like give an affiliate type commission for somebody who gave you or referred you. So do you have 10% to give to that?

37:54 That might be your entire net or is it an ongoing thing? So I'd say more like 20 would be pretty healthy. When you start looking at like Apple and anything over double digit in the software world, but we're talking two different things because they have a high top line number. So what they bring in makes that net, it could be a 2% net, but 2% of a very, very large number is a different story than 10% of a much smaller number.

38:21 So we're playing with different margins for different businesses. Like if you look at, if you go to your local library, there's a book that you could get that tells the net margins of different industries. And it's pretty fascinating because I used to be in something called the CEO Roundtable and I would peer into restaurants and dry cleaners. We had different businesses. So it was always fascinating to see different occupancy costs, different legal.

38:44 So it depends on what level you're playing at, but I'd say to answer the question, uh, 25%, so that you have room to wiggle that in case you need to, uh, just give back or invest in, in future equipment. But if you, if you're riding anything below 10%, you know, you're, you're on thin ice, you know, it's, you might be able to survive, but you're not going to be able to grow and prosper. So I would shoot to have more than 10%.

39:11 All right. Courtney, did we get you? No, someone jumped in there. Oh, sorry. Can I just do one last thing? Markup is not the same as margin, so remember that. Go research markup versus margin. Go say it, Courtney. So that you know. Yeah, I used to work in the commercial business. And so I worked with a variety of different commercial production companies, and they all had different methods of budgeting and bidding.

39:43 And in a situation like that, I don't know where it if you're doing production, you know, a thing to consider is overruns. You run into things on production that you don't run into in other types of jobs where, you know, clouds could come in in the afternoon and extend your shooting because you don't have the sun or a rain shower comes through and you have to stop shooting, which is going to cost you an overtime for your crew.

40:08 And you have to build in contingencies like that when you're budgeting to cover stuff like that, as Guy was saying. So a lot of production companies would do a cost-plus type of budget where they turn in a budget and say cost-plus, it'll cost you like 20% over whatever the cost is. And that way you have a much built-in contingency fund because then the client then is going to have to cover any cost overruns, especially if the client comes in and says, you know, I didn't like those last three performances.

40:43 You know, let's do some more takes on that. But we're in overtime, you know, then they're going to have to eat the overtime. And you're going to get paid more money because you're doing cost plus. So the production company that bids at cost plus looks at overages as a money-making thing rather than a money-losing thing. So that's a consideration when you're deciding how to budget things.

41:05 And if the client will go for a cost plus type situation, I'd go for that because you're covered in contingency. And don't pad your cost when you're turning in your cost in a cost plus situation. Because once they catch you on that, you're burned and you'll probably never work for that client again. So you have to be careful there. But do it honestly.

41:28 and then if anything unforeseen comes up, you just get more money because the costs went up and your profit then went up. Next question. Paul Valhous in Austin, Texas says, what are the secrets to funny wildlife photography? And he has a link to something I hope is funny. If only we had TJ Asher here, who's a good photographer. Chris Sabato, what do you think?

41:55 well i'm i feel i feel offended now i'm not a good photographer i don't know are you a photographer i don't know yes yes okay um uh so here's the thing right the secret is luck and that's like now don't get me wrong like you need to be a good photographer to to execute the the image capture and you need to know what you're doing to put yourself in the place to be there but this is

42:25 not a case of like um i know this thing is happening i need to put myself in a place and kind of wait for it to happen like some of these photos like this is just goofy like it is just pure luck that you know that an elephant takes his trunk and is like you know whatever like Like there's there is a huge component of luck to photos like these.

42:48 You need to be a skilled photographer to capture the image when it happens, to be there, to have the right equipment, to have your cameras in the correct settings, to capture that image when it happens. But this is one of those things where it's where there is a there's a huge component of luck. And this is no different than, you know, I'm not a huge wildlife photographer.

43:07 It's mainly sports. And it's a similar thing. Like you need to have the skills and the framing and to do all the stuff to capture the image. But that thing that actually happens, that's luck. And Corny. Yeah, it's luck and lots of time invested. You know, there's wildlife photographers that will sleep out in a blind with a camera for days or weeks,

43:35 weeks capturing endless, endless rolls of footage of mundane stuff happening to get that one little funny or exciting piece of footage that happens. I know on Roar, and on Roar we had, we were shooting in Panavision film, we had five Panavision cameras that would roll on scenes with, you know, untrained animals doing stuff. And to get one scene where there was a cub pushing itself along

44:01 on a skateboard, you know, a lion cub, you know, that was just a fluke. And that happened because we had four cameras rolling 35 millimeter footage at a huge amount of cost through the camera. Every day, we had some days where we'd shoot 40,000 feet of film and maybe print, you know, a thousand. So at a 40 to one ratio, sometimes you'll get lucky. Now, unless you're Disney,

44:26 Now, Disney would stage a lot of their funny antics that happened in their wildlife photography. They had a whole series of wildlife shorts and things back in the 50s and 60s. And all those encounters of strange animals in the field, some of them happened to have been set up. Strange thing how that happens. Let's go to the next question. from uh chris uh zance in san antonio texas what's the best way to give multiple crew

45:03 members independently switchable vmix program multi-view camera and teleprompter feeds using sdi or ndi can nux and stream decks control each monitor independently without affecting other other outputs? Go ahead, Chris. It depends. How many of these do you want to do? Like this, in order to do this in vMix, you would need to use an output for each one of these. The current version of vMix has four outputs. The upcoming version, I think, bumps it to eight.

45:38 But currently with four outputs, one of them is your program output. So that gives you three three independently controllable selectable outputs that you could use. And you could do that. And so if you need more than that, you just can't do this within vMix. There are some other ways that you might be able to figure out to do this. But to do it 100% within vMix, in the current vMix program,

46:05 you could have three other than program. program, you have three selectable outputs that you could configure with Companion. You could do something if you wanted mix inputs, you could use mix inputs or you could just use Companion, Stream Deck and Companion to change what is routed to each of those outputs two through four. And then once it's in an output, it can go out via a deck link.

46:35 It can go out via NDI, lots of ways. But you're going to be limited to three outputs. Guy? Yeah, Chris handled it pretty well there as far as the NDI side. On the SDI side, depending on budget, you could get a VideoHub or an AJ Akumo and did like what we did here where you put a panel in front of the position and

47:02 this way like for our cameras we had a dirty feed which so if somebody was shading the camera we could push to on the bottom row and we could have the dirty feed and we could have clean on on the on the top one so it was really cool to have this OLED monitor in front of a director a producer shader position

47:23 where they could jump on comms and there was these were at a table side by side so they could just jump on and they could punch up whatever source that they wanted it was all all laid out on the sheet in front of them and it very fancy stuff I mean this is super high-end fiber so the fiber connections on the back of the camera allowed for one with the on-screen display OSD so that that

47:44 OSD feed I could see battery life I could see you know all everything that that's on the screen. And then a lot of it, we can actually control remotely as well. So the operators just point in the camera and I'm controlling white balance or any of the red plus green, whatever it is that you want, you can control from afar on certain operations.

48:04 So to answer the question, yeah, it just depends on how much you want to spend. But yeah, vMix 30 will give you additional outputs if you run out beyond the four that is program preview, or you could select whatever the heck you want. I mean, it's all addressable inside of NDI and then it's just a stream deck button. If you like the show that you're watching

48:23 or listening to right now, thank you for being here. If you want to support us, there are various ways that you can do that, which I'm going to explain to you. One of the ways that you can support us is by joining us and being part of the community. We've got a great community in Discord, in the live chat, and also all the people that participate on the show.

48:41 If you want to join as a panelist, we would more than welcome having some new faces here. You can share your experience and answer some of the questions on the show. Of course, if you don't want to necessarily be on camera, there's lots of other roles available on the back end crew. We could always use more people. There's so many different roles from the people that are the technical director cutting the show to the people managing audio and networking and the Zoom meetings and all that sort of stuff.

49:08 There's a lot of different opportunities. And it's a great place to learn, too. too. There's not a lot of places where you can go without actually paying money, where you can get those new skills. And this is a great place to be for that. You can go to officehours.global slash volunteer, officehours.global slash volunteer. To learn more about how to do that, you can just select the roles that you're interested in and submit your information

49:31 and somebody will reach out to you. Guy, did you have another comment on this? I found that picture and I thought it'd be fascinating for people just to see what it looks like at the high levels. This is a 25 to 1000 Fujinon, the Devo or Duvo lens on a Venice. And so that's how with the multi-dine back, silver back. So this is how we were able to

49:50 get those feeds across the one fiber cable that goes back to where we're producing the show. But yeah, very cool. And we had four of these, so big money event. And one other ways you can support the show too, I just wanted to mention that you can donate. We are a not-for-profit organization. We would sincerely appreciate any help that you can give as well.

50:13 And you can go to officehours.global slash donate. That's officehours.global slash donate. All right, Courtney, what's up next? Next up, a question from Douglas Carmichael. Douglas says, could cloud-based audio mixing be useful for streamed music events, or would there be latency issues? Chris, depends on what you're mixing for. If you are mixing for the stream, then latency doesn't matter because the audio comes in and you're mixing it and it leaves you.

50:46 If you are mixing for the venue, if you are mixing to send back monitors, then latency becomes an issue. But if you're strictly taking the audio feeds in to a mixer and mixing them to go back out to the public, then latency doesn't actually even matter. Corny. me. Yeah, Chris nailed it. Latency is your friend, actually, in remotely mixed and in venues. You

51:13 know, a lot of people don't realize this, but, you know, all live broadcasts over the last 15, 20 years have had a seven-second delay built into the audio automatically so they could censor out the bad words that may come fleetingly out of the lips of someone on stage. So, you know, latency has been around for a long time, up to seven seconds.

51:34 So a lot of times it gives you a jump on, you know what's coming. You have a little preview of it if you've got a non-delayed version of the video and a delayed version that you're using for mixing. So you can use it to your advantage, and it doesn't make any difference unless you're feeding that image back to someone at the live event

51:54 who is watching the performance live on the stage and has the feed of the mix at the same time, then it's an issue. But other than that, you know, like if the cameramen are their on-site announcers that had to take their cues off the broadcast rather than the local feed, then it might be an issue. But other than that, latency can be your friend.

52:19 Yeah, I agree with all that too. I mean, for me, like I couldn't do my job as a front-of-house engineer for a band if there was noticeable latency. Like someone's paying me to be there. Like I need to be able to react to the band and what's going on there. And, you know, music is a musical performance is a very dynamic thing and it requires hands on.

52:42 It requires focus. And I just I wouldn't be able to do that with like 20 or 40 or 50 or more milliseconds of latency. Just not not something I would want to do. All right. Let's go to the next question. From Chautauqua, New York, Zach Stahlsmith says, can QLab interface with Zoom OSC or Zoom ISO? Chris, I'm certainly not a QLab expert, but in my use, I don't, depending on what you're trying to do, sure, it can.

53:15 QLab's really flexible. It can take in video feeds and send out video feeds. It can, I've used AppleScript, I think is what I ended up using to, within QLab to run an AppleScript to do things. So I don't see why it couldn't, it just, I don't know what exactly you're trying to accomplish, but I think sure, it's pretty flexible. I think it can.

53:41 Next question. Courtney? Sorry, I lost my, I was doing a little research on the next question. From Paul Valgus from Austin, Texas. He says, space, the final frontier. From OpenAI, would this be useful for your production company and office hours collaboration on products, projects? And he has a link to something from ChatGPT called space. I've never heard of space from ChatGPT, Craig.

54:15 What is this? So this is the equivalent. And if I can share screen without sharing too much. There we go. So it's basically an environment where you can create documents and share them with other people on your team and all collaborate together. other. You can have scheduled updates. You can add comments. So similar to a lot of Google Doc type of things where you can just collaborate. And the features and tools are one thing,

54:48 but it's, you know, the biggest thing you have to take into account are the people. You know, how do they like to work? Are they more just, let's talk about it, use a piece of paper or whiteboard? Are they all on one platform or another? If nobody's on ChatGPT, then no, there's lots of other features similar to this on other tools. If most of your team is already

55:13 on ChatGPT and they're comfortable in that, then yeah, maybe it's worth looking at. All of these platforms, whether it's Google or Microsoft or anybody else, they're all starting They're starting to consolidate and collaborate and they want to be your go-to platform for everything. And so I'd say it really depends on where the people are because changing tools is one thing. Changing people's habits is a lot harder.

55:44 So make sure it's a tool that your team can readily jump into without having to change lots of personal habits. All right, Courtney, what's up next? Next up from St. Paul, Minnesota, Tommy Shantz says, anyone on the panel stack Blackmagic Design ATEMs to get more inputs? If so, what are the issues I might have to look out for? Courtney. Well, I'm doing that right now.

56:11 I have my old ATEM Mini stacked into one of the inputs on my Rodecaster Video S coming in over an HDMI input. And I can tell you right now I did have an issue with that because the ATEM, you know, which has a USB output and the RODECaster video has a USB video input, you know, like webcams. But the problem is the RODECaster isn't compatible with everything.

56:39 And one of the things that's not compatible with on the USB input happens to be the ATEMs. So I had to drop back and not use that spare USB input on the RODECaster to use up one of my three HDMI inputs on the RODECaster Video S. So I lost an HDMI input where I thought I was going to actually gain four from the ATEM

57:04 by using that USB video webcam input. So be cautious of that. And the other thing is you have to watch a multi-view all the time and to make sure that you have pre-switched the downstream ATEM to the correct thing with the correct overlays and the correct audio, etc., before you take it on the upstream or downstream, the last switcher in line. So you've got to be careful.

57:37 If you're not paying attention, you can have the wrong thing up on that ATEM, on the first ATEM going into your second ATEM. So you've got to make sure you switch the first one first and the second one second. And sometimes getting out of a situation like that can require double punching. Go ahead. Yeah, one of the things to be aware of is the reclocking.

57:58 So they call this subswitching. Sometimes for a video feed, you might have a glitch or a delay because you've now introduced another hop in between. So unnecessarily, if you don't have to do it, just buy the right unit. But if it's something like computer screens, sometimes we'll have multiple PowerPoints and the next deck's coming up. And so a sub switch is okay. But for that, I really like to have a stream deck. So that way, the stream deck has got that ATEM's IP address. And I could just hot punch really fast because the last thing you want is to be using ATEM software control. And you have to actually switch instances of the switcher in the app. And so that's dangerous.

58:37 So just be aware. It's easier to just buy the right tool for the job because you could run into, especially if it's an HDMI one and you're running into EDID handshake stuff. I mean, you just got to be really careful about what you're doing. So get the right tool for the job if you can. But if it's just one, you know, it's fine. Just be aware of reclocking.

58:58 yeah it looks like a bunch of people in the chat are also mentioning that too mickey mackator in the chat was saying uh no don't do that doing it is fighting a losing battle you will not be able to have access to all your sources on cures and mes and john wallace said there's also the issue of sync issues with adding at least a frame of latency between

59:15 the two devices all right that'll wrap our saturday show thanks to all the panelists for coming in this morning really appreciate you and of course to you the producers yes i'm looking at you right now you showed up because we wouldn't have a show without you if you didn't put these wonderful questions in so thanks for making that great also the back end crew that wakes up every

59:34 single day that puts these shows on in the morning and of course the evening shows we've got evening shows throughout the week it's incredible amount of work to put these shows together and everybody's donate donating their time so uh we really appreciate everything that you do uh all right uh if we were to travel around the world virtually to answer all these questions according to the

59:54 the Talag traversal that would have been 18,000 miles or 29,000 kilometers. That's 144 million bananas for scale. This was episode 2391. And after the show ends, if you want to jump into after hours, we'll see you there. Bye. Bye. Happy trains to you. Yeah, what happened to Roy Richards? I was going to come in as black and white there for a minute.

1:00:29 Yeah. Had it all queued up just to do that. Right, Cochran. Old scroll bag. Does my video look any crisper today? I found a setting that I think. Are you in 60 hertz? No, but I found out that I was actually only in 720p for a while. And when I was debugging my SRT app, I was like, Why does it keep telling me it's 720?

1:00:56 I have my camera set at 1080. And it turns out there is a different setting for recording and HDMI output on my camera. Oh, yeah. That is a thing. What camera is it? Coming in from the 60s. It's a Nikon D500. Oh, yeah. A lot of still cameras only up to 720 still. Definitely look sharp. Over HDMI. When I first started using this camera, I was like,

1:01:20 Like, why does my image just look a little bit softer than everyone else's? Like, I don't understand it. That happens a lot if you have the menus turned on on the HDMI output. It'll lower its resolution to match what's on the back of the camera, which a lot of times is 720p. Wait, say that again, Courtney. A lot of times if you have,

1:01:41 sometimes you can enable the menus on the external video out on a...