Office Hours | Saturday | September 26, 2026 | Vertical

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 today, so make sure you, the producers, get your questions in. We'll talk to you more about that in just a minute, but we've got Bill Davis reading questions here. Bill, what do we got coming up? Our first question today comes from Paul Wallace in Austin, Texas.

0:20 Assistant Paul's wondering, the Insta360's Luma Ultra firmware adds a concert stage mode for dark strobing venues and 15 times Zoom that is AI-assisted crop past six times. Would you use a pocket gimbal to cover a concert? And he's got a link there to the Senity website. All right, go ahead, Courtney. You know, one of the things that a lot of the software for these little gimbals, like the Osbo Pocket Cinema and apparently the Insta360s Luna, is you can tap on an object in the frame and have it track it automatically.

0:59 So you can, you know, in a concert venue, you might want to tap that around the lead singer that is maybe prancing around the stage and swing that mic around over his head. And maybe it could follow him in a reasonably medium close up. So it could do things like that. You know, that might be a way to use something like the Insta360 Luna with their, you know, their built in firmware to track things might be a use.

1:27 also maybe if they're designed for strobing venues it can set the average exposure so it doesn't react constantly to massive lighting changes like strobe lights or a panning light flaring into the lens where it would suddenly stop down so you can set your exposure to be manual or lock it so that it doesn't react to a lot of the video screens of things in the back thing yeah it's interesting i haven't used these cameras but uh yeah there's

2:03 two parts to the question obviously i don't know how well and practical use to if this technology actually works well but shooting dark stages that's always a challenge i mean uh the other part of the question is would you would you use a pocket gimbal to cover a concert personally for me Now look, I'm fully guilty of this. I've shot footage of shows with my iPhone over the years.

2:27 It never looks great. I'm never going to look at this footage. You know, it depends what you're going to be doing with this stuff. If you're getting paid to do it, I don't think anybody would use a camera like this for paid professional use. You're probably going to use a much larger sensor camera. So it really depends. For personal use, I think you should just enjoy the show.

2:48 I don't think anybody should be using their cell phone to record footage at a concert. It's like, what are you going to do? Are you going to really look at that footage two years from now? Probably not. The audio is going to be bad, too. All right, let's go to the next question. Next one comes in from Guy Cochran in Seattle, Washington.

3:05 Guy wonders, what's new in vMix30? Ah, well, it appears to be a beta announced at IVC. Courtney, did you look at the changelog? Yeah, I did. I looked at some of the reports of what was seen at the IVC. I don't have a vMix license, so it is not shipping until late this year or early next year. They say that the new features in vMix 30 is NDI 6.4 integration and MKV support,

3:40 and it includes support for 6.4, and a standout feature is the preservation of the MKV file format. in multi-quarter, bundling the preview, main video, and metadata into a single file that can be brought right back into vMix. There's massive replay upgrades. The maximum number of cameras for instant replay has been increased to 16 channels from 10, 12, and now 16 replay multi-views.

4:10 Users can also designate unused camera channel to import clips off your hard drive directly into a replay channel so that you can open up slow motion capabilities to that particular clip. You have increased outputs. The total number of outputs has been increased to 8 and 30. It has SRT enhancements that have updated the latest secure reliable transport version, which officially supports SRT as a stream output.

4:38 They improve the audio quite a bit. New built-in audio effects, including RN noise and RTX audio effects for background noise removal. So active noise removal using the NVIDIA chipset if you have one. Graphic and overlay tools. Brand new overlay designer with shapes and borders support, along with enhancements to GT titles. inverted masking and eyedropper tool lets you sample the colors from a video screen.

5:14 And editing multiple text fields simultaneously. Built-in presentation support features dedicated built-in PowerPoint support and a slideshow input presenter mode. So you can open up a PowerPoint and probably have control over slide advancement and transitions and builds. And that's basically the end of the list that I have. There is a beta out for licensed users, but I think you have to sign up for it to get access to it for licensees.

5:49 Courtney, I know you're not an EVS operator. None of us are, but obviously we've seen this trend now with software-based. What was that? Robert Green is. I know, I know. It's too bad he's not on the show. He's behind the scenes tonight. whisper in our ears but so i've seen this trend obviously da vinci black magic with da vinci resolve they're trying to do the replay thing now v mixes of doing a lot of development work to

6:11 enhance the the replay capability but do you have any comments on that like obviously traditionally this was like a hardware software type of solution but now with a software-based solution is that something that you think is trustworthy to use for for this type of thing i can't speak to its trustworthiness because I haven't tried it, but, uh, you know, um, EVS is a specially designed

6:36 system for the ground up. It's designed with a rolling, uh, you know, 24 hour record capability on multiple cameras, all tied to time code. And it, uh, allows you to just set markers and then bounce back, uh, so that you can, while you're still recording, it's open recording while you're playing back. So, uh, some machines can handle that. Some machines can't. Um, that is the key

7:00 You know, some of this replay stuff means that you have to stop recording to play something back, and that's a problem. I don't know how vMix handles that, whether it handles rolling recording while it handles access to those recorded files while they're still recording. Because it depends on, you know, the operating system you're in and the file type that has been opened.

7:24 But so I can't speak to its capabilities, you know. So they added that replay capability in Resolve too. But I think that's a meager comparison to EVS. It's not near the same as EVS. Yeah, I mean, it's not, you know, when you have a bespoke solution, like you said, that's built specifically, and it's only designed to be an appliance effectively, it does that one thing.

7:53 I don't know, tacking on replay capability in already an app that is, I don't want to use the term bloated because that has a negative connotation. Obviously, DaVinci Resolve is a great app, for example, and I'm sure vMix is too. But yeah, you'd have to really make sure that you have the capable hardware. Make sure you're using qualified supported hardware and make sure it's tested and it's going to be stable.

8:18 But yeah, I don't know if that's going to replace a dedicated EVS system. All right, before we go on to the next question, If you have any questions for this panel, any technical questions, problems that you need answers to, we've got a great panel today so you can put those questions in Makana or Q&A system. If you've never done that before, you just need to be part of our community and you can go to officehours.global.com.

8:44 That's officehours.global.com. Just put in your name and email. We'll send you all the links that you need to get into that system where you can post the questions. Vote on them up and down. That's critical. that basically informs the team what priority you want the answers of those questions. And then, of course, you can chat with us. That's the final component of that.

9:05 You're missing half the fun. We always get lots of people posting questions in the live chat and providing additional feedback and suggestions and stuff like that. So it's almost like a secondary panel that we have in live chat, which is really, really fantastic. Adds a lot of value to the show. All right, Courtney, what's up next? Or Bill. Sorry, Bill's reading questions.

9:28 Oh, Bill, you're muted. Testing. There we go. Somehow my mute got stuck there for a second. I apologize. From Paul Wallace in Austin, Texas, how could you add a viewfinder to a ZVE-10.2 Sony and other similar Sonys which lack viewfinders and only have a screen? And he's got a link there to a DP review article about vlogging. Right back to you, Bill. What do you think? So, yeah, companies make these. I

10:02 wouldn't go with just trying to rig something up. There are companies that make these things. In fact, let me show you one. A lot of people talk well of the Zacuto. That's what it looks like. You can see that it's a standard eye cup style direct monitor that clamps on to the back of your camera over the screen and it gives you a much better acuity much better view of that because

10:28 it's the lens in there that lets you see the pixels up closer um there that one's i think a 150 200 bucks something like that if i remember right it's been a long time hoodman makes a less expensive one called the hoodman loop that does the same basic functions and there are units like this that strap to the back of your camera all the way up to beyond a thousand dollars i don't

10:50 remember who it was that made them, but I remember seeing a very expensive version, the kind of thing you would expect to see Apple using when they're shooting their keynotes on an iPhone that has extraordinary optics and the rest of that. So there are solutions for finding something to put on there, Paul, that allows you to use it more like a regular iCup loop rather than the screen

11:13 on the back of the camera. It's hard to tell its size by looking at an image, Bill. That thing looks as big as that sony camera it looks massive it you know because of the optics involved and because of the way things work and they want to pull it off the camera towards your eye so your nose doesn't run into the back of the camera the same thing so all of those things you can see let me

11:34 pull it back up again uh it's got a little focus wheel in there so it's got some optics in there and it's got some support it's set up for uh standard i can't remember how many millimeter the rods are that most of these rigs use nowadays, but it's got mounting points and most of them are in the same kind of form factor, some sort of a pull away from the back plane of that screen

11:57 and put some optics in there so that you can actually see pixels more clearly. And more importantly, probably if you're in bright sunlight, it's going to put your eye into a closed system where you can truly see that without splash from a sun behind your shoulder or something like that making it hard to see corny what do you think well i mean there's two different types of

12:20 viewfinders there's like the thing that bill was talking about where you have your eyes magnifier in front of a little lcd screen or you can go with a high brightness monitor that you mount there's a viltrox which are reasonably priced and has its own battery on the back for power it has hdmi input and throughput on the bottom there so you patch your hdmi output if

12:45 your camera has it in through a cable in and then take it out to a feed elsewhere these are 1200 nits so they can be viewed in sunlight one reason you might want a viewfinder is if you want to see your image in bright sunlight these with the lens shade the lens shade is built in here which is really cool. You can just fold it down. It also forms a protection for the screen

13:07 when it's in its storage case. These are pretty nice because they have built-in scopes in them and everything so that you can put your, you know, if your camera's outputting its menu system, it's also a touch screen. So that if it's outputting a menu system, you can use this big touch screen to make changes on it, which you can't do with the viewfinder. It also has a button.

13:28 If you can't use the touchscreen, let's say you're in cold weather and you don't want to take your glove off to use the touchscreen, you can use the little scroll wheel and the active little click button on the side. And it's 1200 nits, has a hot shoe adapter, has a quarter inch, quarter 20, so you can put it on an arm so you can face it in any direction.

13:48 And a hot shoe adapter, or a cold shoe adapter actually, just to mount on top of the viewfinder of the camera if it has a shoe on the top of it. So that's another way to go. and these are relatively inexpensive this is a dc 550 i don't know what they're selling for these days because electronics have gone through the rules let's see yeah those little five inch

14:09 screens that was going to be my suggestion to atomos is another company that makes stuff like this they're obviously going to be more money than the viltrox which is meant to be a budget one but if you just need something with scopes and check false color and all that you can get those little those little monitors and they come in five and seven inch sizes typically. Go ahead, Bill.

14:28 Yeah, I just wanted to make one last note. This depends on your personal desire to how you want to work in the field. If you're truly solo, I would think the stick my eye up against those little extensions is the way I would prefer to work because it does provide a kind of a closed environment. You can see the pixels easily. There's no light bleeding, things like that.

14:49 However, if you go with an external monitor, you have a lot more flexibility, particularly if you want to grab your camera and put it on a boom arm or something else. That external monitor with a longer cable can make it really easy to see your shots if your camera is not against your face. So they're both excellent tools, and you just have to decide how you mostly shoot

15:10 and what you want to rig and take advantage of. All right, let's move to the next question, Bill. can hear you bill he's having some issues with his mute switch it's mute there it is it's back on it looks like it's the the apollo solo knocked out for some reason i wonder if i have a bad connection my apologies again we can hear you zach sal smith

15:37 in chautauqua new york i am hosting a zoom meeting next month with a few different speakers the entire meeting will live in zoom no live stream component i'd like to talk to the talent without the rest of the meeting hearing me. Can I do this with VB audio or loopback? Go ahead, Bill. This is one of those circumstances where you really want a comms system if you can.

15:58 And there are so many options now that we never had before. Here on the show, we use one called Unity Client. It goes on your laptops or your phones or whatever you're using to do production, whatever your team has in the field. And it's an entirely separate pathway. So you're not trying to add on to audio lines that are still running. We also use Spacecoms.

16:22 Our friend Jonas Dottle and his friends have developed that. So there's a couple of these things that we use that kind of perform a back channel thing. And it is much more convenient than trying to multiplex some sort of chat thing on top of an existing audio signal. It seems to me that that always gives you trouble. So I kind of like those inexpensive, simple.

16:44 If you have internet connectivity and you can get your phone or anything else like that onto the internet, they work pretty well. And let's go to Tony. I would recommend that since you have a month, you're a month out, that you check out after hours. Check out after hours. And also, I would encourage you to take a look at Zoom Test Kitchen.

17:13 Between those two places, you would have an opportunity to play with your actual setup. And so that's my suggestion. And I recommend a comms package to, I believe, Space Comms, which is done by Jonas Dottel. I believe there is some kind of integration now with Zoom so it can show up in a Zoom meeting so you can talk back to people. That's probably what you're looking for.

17:40 All right, Bill, what do we got next? Next coming up is Paul Wallace in Austin, Texas, is back with us when Sony and other manufacturers offer their cameras in black or white. Why white? He's got a link there. One of the questions for the ages. Oh, fashionable colors. I always find products that are white never seem to sell. As a dealer who sells many products, like Pioneer, for example, they make, sometimes

18:04 they'll do special editions of their DJ controllers, and the white version just does not sell. Anyways, go ahead, Bill. Okay, I'm going to talk philosophy. I have two philosophies. Number one, if this thing is designed to go on set, black rules. If for no other reason than if you have any shiny objects in what you're shooting, anything white or bright or highly colored has a chance to reflect off of those mirror surfaces

18:34 into the camera so you can see them. And sometimes you have to run around flagging things that people have brought on the sets. If you buy everything in matte black, nothing's going to reflect back to the camera and it takes away one step of something I have to think about. Now, that is in favor of always buying your equipment in a dark color.

18:52 The other side of it is something I'm finding into more and more as I get older, which is that if I drop some small thing like a phone on the floor of my car, it might take me a week to find the thing. So I'm starting to order things in white and bright colors just so that it forms some sort of a distinction from the environment.

19:13 The same thing with your camera bag. I can't tell you the number of times I've had an all-black connector and I've been looking for it in a dark camera bag. And it's just frustration on top of frustration. In fact, so much that I changed the brand of bags that I was using to a bright yellow interior. so at least all those small things would be visually distinctive.

19:33 So that's, you know, I'm just going to say, what am I going to do with this, and am I going to have trouble finding it? If so, I don't want it to be black. But if it's going to be on a set somewhere, whether it's small, medium, or large, I want it to be black so it doesn't risk reflecting back and causing me a little wasted time.

19:50 And Courtney? Yeah, traditionally cameras have been offered in, you know, back when I was buying Nikon cameras, They come in a silver body, you know, with a silver top and all black, a blackout version. And typically, you know, journalists who want to shoot and not be obvious and not be seen, not draw attention to themselves and like to shoot candid photographs. So if you want to shoot candid photographs, the less visible you are, the better.

20:21 White is more of a fashion statement, you know. And if you want to make a fashion statement, look at Pentax. They have their new robot edition. It's a Lego camera. Now this, and it has even a little robot head on the top of it. This is the KR1 or something from Pentax. Now, if you're shooting small children, this might be handy to get them to look at the camera.

20:46 Babies or, you know, toddlers, they might be interested in looking at the camera if it looks like a little robot to them. They may want to take it away from you and keep it forever and ever. but that's a problem. So, you know, there are fashion colors. And these days, a lot of the point and shoot cameras came in pink and fashion colors for women who wanted to carry them as an

21:09 accessory in their little handbag. So, you know, some people look at them as a fashion statement, but most, like Bill said, black is the go-to because it makes you less conspicuous. And a lot of people even take black tape and cover up the name of the camera's logo over the lens. so that people aren't more concerned with, oh, what type of camera are you shooting with?

21:31 And just know that you may fade into the background so you attract a lot less attention with a blacked-out camera. Yeah, for cameras, I mean, I would only buy a camera that's black. I just realized I'm a hypocrite. As we're talking about this and I'm talking about how things don't sell that are white. What did you order and why wasn't it black?

21:54 I completely forgot I have a pair of white Adam monitors on my desk right now. I'm just a hypocrite. I apologize. Take everything back. Let's just rewind and delete all that. And all you people with the AirPods, the little white boogers. Little white lips. That's true. Marketing. Yeah. I wanted to see if your new iPhone coming, Alexander, was ordered in white. No, I haven't.

22:16 Yeah. You know, I have owned white iPhones. And I remember the iPhone 4 when it came out in white. I thought it looked really sharp. That was the only phone that I ever owned that was white. All right, let's go to the next question, Bill. Next question comes in from Craig McFarlane in Boston, Massachusetts. With Mac OS 27, did Apple improve the behavior for managing audio source priority and audio selection?

22:42 And he has noticed that alone would get me to switch. yeah you could you know you'd have to get me at gunpoint to be able to switch to a new operating system that is untested and unproven go ahead craig yeah so like a lot of people there's things i love about apple and there's things that just drive me crazy and the whole

23:02 nonsense of and i appreciate somebody plugs in a mic and it auto switches to that you know for for probably 60 or 70 percent of the population that that's a handy cool thing it's like oh great it now it's selected for those of us that have multiple inputs and multiple outputs i would love to just be able to rank them i've got a bunch of monitors and randomly zoom or teams or some

23:34 other thing. We'll just start piping it because it randomly picked out of the list. And if I can't prioritize, it's just, it makes, it grinds me on a daily basis. So I see there's a audio priority bar that is an open source tool that covers that. So I'm actually going to give that a try but i was hoping it was fixed in the os looking up through google where it doesn't seem

24:06 like they made a change so what what kind of what kind of problems have you had because i don't i mean i've i don't recall having very many problems with you're talking about setting the default input and output for the audio interface that or or whatever you're using in that computer is that what you're talking about correct okay yeah so i don't i don't like ever leaving things on any kind

24:29 of automatic setting so for me the first thing i do on mac os or and windows the first thing i do is just immediately select the interface that i want now i've had for me even disconnecting and reconnecting usb interfaces like that i've never had an issue with it just go back to the internal uh the internal interface on the computer so for me that's worked really well but yeah i don't i

24:55 I don't trust things to try to make decisions for me typically. So I like manually setting that stuff, and that's worked pretty well. Even inside of Zoom, I just always go manually select that interface, and it always seems to remember it. Go ahead, Bill. Yeah, that's one of the things that Apple tends to do, and I think for a lot of their customers, the fact that you've plugged in a mic,

25:16 you know, there is a huge number of people, because you plugged it in now, you probably want to use it now. So they default to that. I got to tell you, it's been annoying me lately because after the last OS update I did, suddenly it's telling me when I'm sitting here, you have different Bluetooth devices. Do you want to hook up this one? Do you want to hook up that one?

25:36 And it's like trying to get ahead of the decision that he thinks I want to make, but I don't really want to make it. So one of the things I have noticed, though, is that after two or three times when I say no, suddenly it will give me a, okay, you really don't want to do this because let's shut it off. And I just think they're continually trying to put a certain amount of intelligence.

25:56 And until I figure out how they're implementing that, it drives me nuts. And then it usually goes away. I'm not saying it's not an annoyance when they first pull one of these things. But a few of those, to me, have been persistent enough to bother me for a long time. Your mileage may vary. Yeah. I know Apple intelligence is integrated into macOS in a much deeper way in macOS 27.

26:20 So obviously now they have Gemini or a customized version of Gemini as a model. But I don't think what we need is like the last thing I would want is Apple intelligence, like making suggestions, like kind of like Clippy in Microsoft Office. Like, hey, I noticed you're trying to connect this interface. Would you like me to help you? No, I don't need that.

26:39 Thank you. All right. Next up. Henry Ramos in Yonkers, New York comes up next. So many folks making apps with AI now for production. anyone seen anything truly useful go ahead tony so i made a quick list uh chris sabato ken jordan john wallace rabbi david paskin uh lord zoom uh john drinkwater and And beta, I want to say alpha tester Tony Mobley is working on something.

27:17 So we'll see. But I would say stay tuned to office hours because there are always people in the community who are always working on things. And I would say that there are probably people that are doing things that they are just not sharing yet. And Courtney? Yeah, look to our own office hours collection of people from right here on the panel, Craig McFarland's Show Hub that he has done a little AI construction with.

27:56 It's amazing. Every time I log into Show Hub, which we use here on the back end of office hours to sign up for things, and it keeps statistics and information about all the panelists and the people and the shows and everything it's been on, all the stuff that used to be done, tracked on a manual basis in the past, is now handled by the Show Hub app that Craig has done, and he can talk a little more about it.

28:24 Another app that one of our panelists and back end people that operated in office hours has come up with is Core Video from John Wallace. He's made this as a couple of corevideo.io. And this allows you to bring Zoom participants into OBS as native sources. So you can look, you can see all of our smiling faces right there. uh so that's uh go to core video.io it's uh it's coming to obs and there's a mac version and a pc

28:59 version in the works and a zoom i think a zoom plugin as well so uh there are a number and as tony mentioned you know there's four or five other people that are also cranking out things that are useful for sports uh for signage for uh you know doing graphics on shows things like that the list is almost endless. All right, let's go to Bill. Which is to me part of the problem. If I

29:25 know somebody and trust that they're a good thinker, and I think our panelist here, Craig McFarlane, and his work on the show stuff, the show hub, is a perfect example of that. Here's somebody who understands systems and signal flows and what needs to be done. He has the specialized knowledge of having been in the environment he's programming for and has seen what is necessary and

29:52 what's fluff and can make great programming decisions to be really useful and really targeted. Now, for every Craig, I think there may be a thousand people out there now who thinks, I have this great idea for a new fill in the blank, whatever it is, a new notepad that'll be exactly what I want in the world. We'll love that and they'll all want some. I'll make it a

30:15 commercial product. And in point of fact, no one's ever going to hear about it. Nobody's going to ever want to use it, but you're going to go to some app store at some point and there's going to be 150,000 note apps because everybody's vibe coding their own. So I just want to, I want to find strategies as I get older to make sense out of what should I look for,

30:35 whom should I look for it from. And the other thing I see is that it seems like I see more and more stuff on the web from big companies that appear like it's vibe coded and it's not very good. And it seems to have some of the, the, the AI slop involved in it, even though it's from some huge conglomerate global operation, it seems like they have lowered their standards at the same

31:04 time. A million people on the bottom are trying to raise their standards. And what I still want is unique expertise, people who are able to curate solutions that are better than the average by far. And the last thing I'll mention is that we'll stick with them and continue to update it as systems and operations change. It's nothing worse than finding a program you love,

31:29 learning how to use it, investing your time in it, and then that developer gets tired, gets hired away for something else or does something and it just ends up crashing in a year or two not being supported after that and so all of your sunk time in learning how the thing works goes away because it's not kept up with when the next os changes so there's some thoughts from me

31:52 greg yeah you know the the one of the things that uh is super important thinking about new products the first thing is empathy having empathy for the user whether you are you know you're aiming it just for yourself or you're part of a community like we are with office hours and knowing the needs of that community being very aware and in touch with that is going to let you build a better

32:23 app if you're just building it for somebody that you don't really know very well or you're just trying to throw some slop up there to get some money, that's not going to be a very good app because you don't have any empathy for those users. So that's, you know, and Bill brought that up, that's 100% the most important. And then having, you know, if you're using AI to

32:48 vibe code around it, just being able to use that in a way that doesn't let you be stupid. You know, I've got a product and engineering background, so I know the pitfalls and all the issues that can go wrong. But a lot of folks, they might know the given application need or the community, but they don't know, oh, what could go wrong or what do I need to worry about?

33:14 And so being able to give them a framework to be able to talk to AI and say, hey, I love the idea of I want to do this. Here's my goal. Interview me to pull out all that you need to be able to plan and build this thing for me because I'm not an expert. And so just interview me. And it's really great to see it ask questions like how many users?

33:44 you know what how important is security how important is privacy you know all these other kinds of things I actually built a web page to go over just that because I found that a lot of people you know they they build an app not to go on and on but if you build a cool vibe coded app it's like oh well this feels like 70 or 80 percent and it's actually probably about 25 or 30 percent

34:11 of if you were going to roll that out to multiple people because you have to worry about security and all these other things that you're probably not aware of. And once you do that, then you can roll it out. And with AI, it's not the same amount of work that it used to be, but you can't skip those if you're rolling it out to a larger audience.

34:36 Tony? Yeah, I just wondered, there was a question that was asked, was I actually working on an app? And yes, I am working on an app for my house of worship. And I'm looking to pair it with Zoom. I'm hoping that it will be extremely easy for the house of worshipers that I am working with. And it's going to be kind of, you know, simple.

35:04 I just want to be able to provide lower thirds and be able to share some scriptures and that kind of thing. So, yeah, I am working on something. Yeah, I've seen some very useful apps. You know, we've talked about this. We've had people demo these apps in the past. Obviously, Craig's Show Hub, which is a web-based application. And we've got John Wallace last week on last Saturday's show, which I encourage you to check out.

35:28 He demoed Core Video, which is a way to bring in Zoom ISO feeds and manage all of that stuff. And in Stadium Sound, Guy Cochran in the chat mentioned Stadium Sound by Chris Sabato, of course, as well. One thing that I've noticed, though, is it just seems that a lot of these apps that are generated, as useful as they can be, there is kind of this homogenous sort of like obvious vibe coded done by AI look where they

36:00 seem to like the user interface elements and design they all seem to have the same kind of dark mode the same kind of fonts are used this like similar colors are used and I think a little bit more work would be needed by the individual that's you know prompting the AI if you want to make something a little more unique you're going to have to have to obviously put a little more

36:21 work into it um because that's that's the one thing that i'm seeing it's like you know i encounter an app and i just go oh yeah that obviously that was wide-coded because it's just got that look right go ahead greg yeah just the one other thing that i was adding in a lot of the apps that i'm building now i'll build it with a ai interface first because you might want you know you're

36:42 working with your ai tool clogged whatever and and uh you want it to connect like to show hub or something else. Well, if I make a bad interface for humans, it doesn't really matter. If you're using AI to connect to it and to pull data or to make changes or check on status, that's all you really care about. In the future, I think all apps will have two interfaces, one aimed at humans and

37:11 one aimed at AI. And so any new app, you really should be thinking about both. And having that interface to ai is actually in a lot of ways it's easier because it's super structured and it's singular you don't have to worry about 100 browsers and all this other stuff and and it can get get around people complaining that oh you don't have a special function to do this well you've got an

37:37 ai interface just have it do what you want yeah absolutely if you want to ask questions on this show, we have another method to ask questions, which doesn't require a login. You can just go in your browser right now to askofficehours.global. That's askofficehours.global. Just put in your name and question. We'll get it into the show. And don't worry if we run out of time. If we don't

38:00 answer it today, it's going to go into a queue and we'll get that brought into another show to make sure we answer that for you. All right, Bill, what do we got next? Tony Mobley here on the panels up next from Newman, Georgia. Noonan, excuse me, I mispronounced that. What advice do you have for new office hours viewers and or panel members? Okay, this is a great question,

38:23 but normally we, like inside baseball stuff, we spend more time on Sunday. So I would encourage everyone to come back and we can discuss it further. So we're not going to really spend too much time on this. But I would say generally for me, I think the biggest recommendation I have is generally people put questions in, make sure you put your questions in early,

38:43 especially if you're asking the panelists to comment on, say, a video, for example. Like if we have to click on a video for YouTube, that takes time. So that is generally what I recommend. And for panelists, you know, just reading ahead and looking at those questions early as possible also helps the flow of the show. But we'll talk about that more on another day.

39:02 Let's go to the next question, Bill. Craig McFarland, Boston, Massachusetts, back on there, another panelist. With advances in AI and photo video enhancements, have you revisited low resolution in poor quality family photos or videos to bring them back to life? Oh, man, there's only so many hours in the day. Go ahead, Courtney. Yeah, I have. And, you know, there's this website that's been around, History Brought to Life.

39:27 They started this several years ago. I think they're up to volume 12. They do things like they take these historical photographs like, you know, the laughing Einstein here. and they will take it and colorize it and bring it back to life using AI. You wonder what he was laughing about. He's clapping his hands. You know, AI has done all this with a historical photo.

39:49 I've used similar tools with my own photographs. I had my sister had a photograph when she was, you know, 40 from 40 years ago, a bunch of her friends that she was at work with, and they had things painted on their faces, And it was the only picture they had of these four friends. They were celebrating some win from some team and they had numbers or something painted on their faces.

40:13 And so I took that photograph. I brought it into a to nano banana. And I said, you know, first of all, the color was all faded and you could hardly tell it was a color photograph. I said, recolor, you know, bring the color back to normal. Get rid of the numbers on their faces. And it did it in a matter of three seconds.

40:32 It generated a perfectly good high-resolution photo, removed the numbers from their faces, recolored their faces to be nice and healthy skin tones. And it was quite amazing. I sent one to my sister, and she couldn't believe it was the same photograph. So, yeah, I have used AI to bring these poor-quality family photos back to life. And you can increase the resolution and get rid of the grain and do a lot of things.

40:58 and even like I showed, you know, bring a historical photo back to life with realistic kind of animation. All right, and let's go to Craig. Yeah, I actually ask because we have some family birthday, typically once a month, some points in the calendar, and I've got a pretty good archive of things. And so I'll, whoever's birthday it is, pull out some gem.

41:30 But what I'm finding is just, I tend to these days look for the ones that people haven't seen before or they didn't pass around because it was slightly out of focus or just not a great shot and just enhancing that. And I might throw in a goofy video So as long as it really captures the facial movements and that kind of person, that clicks.

41:57 Because some of them, it's like, oh, that's not that person. But just enhancing some of the ones that people haven't seen is kind of a treat. And it's things that I wouldn't have just a few years ago been able to do a whole lot with. So it's been a lot of fun. All right. Let's go to the next question. Guy Cochran in Seattle, Washington weighed in with this.

42:23 What was shown in the AI water cooler? I don't know. Didn't watch it. If anyone else has any comments, they can raise their hands. But I don't know. So let's go to the next question, I guess. Francis Frey in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I use the RODECaster video for Zoom teaching. Depending on what I send in from an iPad, it can be blurry. Notability, handwriting is crisp and sometimes graphics are blurry from the same app.

42:55 What is going on? Hmm. I don't use a Rodecaster video, but Courtney does. What do you think is happening with the negotiation? I'm not sure. It depends on her setup and how she's bringing. Notably, handwriting is crisp and sometimes graphics are blurry. Maybe it's resizing it because it does, when you bring in a still graphic into the media player, it will resize it and rescale it to match 1080p.

43:28 So if that, if what you're bringing in is really a low resolution 480 or a video grab or a screen grab from old, you know, standard composite video, it may be scaling it up and not doing the best job of preserving sharpness. You may want to run it through some type of AI sharpening tool first and resize it outside of the RODECaster Video app that you load.

43:55 Because when you bring stuff into the media pool, it will rescale everything to match your resolution, which is usually 1080p. So try and rescale it to 1080p outside of the app before you bring it into RODECaster Video and sharpen it up there. You could bring it into Photoshop or bring it into any of the AI-enabled graphics programs that can take lower resolution stuff and sharpen it up.

44:23 And text, depending upon what type of graphic it was, whether it was a PNG or whether it was something with overlays or something on it, the fonts may be rendered separately. So it depends on the resolution you're at when you turn that into a still that you're going to bring in. Bill? Yeah, that was, I think Courtney might be on to the right thing.

44:48 We've noticed a lot in Zoom, depending on how many people are in the call, if this is a Zoom call, say you're using it for teaching, we don't know whether you have a 35-student classroom or you're just doing this privately and individually. But we've noticed for years on office hours, it's a lot better than it used to be. But if you had a number of people who were logged into a Zoom call and they went to a second screen or they pulled something up or they spoke, at first they would be pretty fuzzy because Zoom was trying to maximize the division of resolution from everybody.

45:20 And they would often get crisper as they spoke because all of a sudden the full bandwidth of the connection would fall into play. I can't tell you the number of times that I thought in a video that I was watching on my screen when I was editing. That's really pretty blurry image. But when I went to export it, it would do all the rendering.

45:42 And that same frame, instead of looking fuzzy, would look crystal clear. And it was just where it was in the processing pipeline. so what i'm saying essentially is investigate through exports or moving it out giving it time to process doing what courtney suggested which i think is really good if you get a low resolution contribution into the stream and it's you know 320 by 240 that's going to require a lot of

46:16 processing to fill a 640x480 or a 1920x1080 screen, it is better to let the computer do that task separately and then bring the higher resolution up-resed photo in from that point on. So there are a whole bunch of little catches and gotchas that can happen that can make things look like they're not working right, but behind the scenes, if you give your computer enough time,

46:40 it'll actually make them better. My two cents. Next question. We're going to Zach Stoller. again in Chautauqua, New York. Just for some quick recordings for PR and general announcements, I'd like to use this mic on my iPhone Pro Max 17 so the audio was nice and clear. Thoughts? Go ahead, Bill. Okay, so let's talk about good. How good is good? A lot of people record audio on their phones these

47:10 days and it can be very very good even with the default tools without going to an external mic chain external preamp and the rest of that people are used to listening to iphone quality or smartphone quality audio and doing okay with it now take that same thing and move into the professional realm and almost everybody i know who's truly a high quality audio person will say this is not good

47:37 enough. And it isn't good enough if you're going to be taking it into a big screen movie theater and you want control over the sound and you want it to be professionally good. But that's not what a lot of people are doing. So I know a lot of people who do a lot of recording onto their phones and use it and they they're just fine with the results. There's some DSP and some Apple

48:03 intelligence and other things in my iPhone that allows me to get a decent quality recording. It's perfect for note-taking. I can even use it occasionally if I need to for some kind of semi-professional use. But would I use that to record my voiceovers? No, I would not. I want the highest level possible because I don't know what the end user, the mixer, the person on the

48:28 other end is going to want to do with that. And my goal is to keep it at the quality as high as possible. And phone, the phones today have too many things going on for me to know that, that I can achieve that with a stock phone without doing some other things in the middle. So that's where I am at this point. All right, let's go to Courtney.

48:51 Yeah, I haven't used this, so I can't speak to its quality. Uh, you know, it's what it is, is it's a stereo microphone there's one problem if you're just using it for recording voiceover announcements or announcements that are going to be put somewhere a stereo mic will probably get you in more trouble than necessary and this is sure who's you know they make quality microphones

49:12 you know a lot of people here on the show are using them a lot of the time this is the mv88 it's a c uh you know usb c plug-in so it it has uh i guess a to d converter inside of it and it It delivers a stereo signal over USB-C to your iPhone, so you plug it directly into the bottom of your phone.

49:32 And it has a pop filter. But I think it's designed, this particular microphone is designed more for recording ambient sounds for sound effects, you know, collectors that want to collect sound effects, stereo backgrounds in the field, you know, crickets or car drive-bys, things like that. It's not necessarily, I don't think it's mid-side. I haven't seen what the pattern is, but it is a stereo.

49:57 Whether it has two capsules in there, you know, a figure eight and a cardioid, or whether it has just two single cardioids, I'm not sure. I'd have to do a little more investigation. But a stereo mic is probably going to get you into more trouble when necessary. Go for a single pickup microphone that plugs in a USB mic and plug it into your iPhone and use it for announcements.

50:21 that's the probably better way to go and stay, you know, four to six inches away from it when you're recording. Yeah. And Bill, you have another comment? Yeah. Everything Courtney said, I will just say, it's also remember always the environment. It's whether or not you're in any kind of a treated space or whether it's noisy or things like that, all mics just record what hit the diaphragm.

50:44 So if you're in traffic in your car and the windows are opening and you're trying to record something to put on the air, it's not going to work very well. On the other hand, if you take a modest mic and take it into a vocal booth like I used to own, it sounds surprisingly good. And you can get decent recordings out of that.

51:02 So it's a combination of all these things. One of the problems with mics on your phones is that people tend to say, okay, it doesn't sound too noisy in here. So I'm just going to hold the phone a foot away from my voice and say it here in this room. And you go back and if you apply a compression to it and turn it up,

51:19 You find what's all that crud in the background. I can hear the fan and I can hear the AC and I can hear the traffic outside my window. And that's what kills you as many times as anything else. All right. If you are liking the show that you are watching right now and you'd like to support us, there are various ways that you can do that.

51:38 One of the ways that you can support Office Hours Global is by joining our community and become a volunteer. We've got an incredible crew of volunteers. There's a lot of different roles that it takes to put this show on. Also, the panelists as well that put their own time into coming and answer all these questions. And you can find out more about that by going to officehours.global.com.

52:04 That's officehours.global.com. And you can just click the roles that you're interested in and somebody will reach out to you. Also, another way you can support the show is by sharing it with a friend. and also donate by going to officehours.global slash donate. That's officehours.global slash donate. All right, Bill, what do we got next? Kenny Hamptons in from Greenville, Illinois. I have an older Asus gaming laptop originally recommended for vMix streaming.

52:34 It still runs Windows 10 Enterprise and works well, but it isn't Windows 11 compatible. What are my best options for continuing to use it safely with vMix? this is the challenge with windows and microsoft has decided that certain computers are not going to be allowed to upgrade to windows 11 because they must have certain hardware-based uh support for the new trusted computing platform or whatever it is cordy what are your thoughts on this

53:03 yeah there are tp workarounds out there that the trusted com or tcp or whatever they call it the the trusted computing platform requirement for Windows 11 that you can get around. So do some research there and see if you can run one of those bypass to get you to upgrade to Windows 11. Paul Therott, I think, did a couple of articles on this.

53:25 So go to therott.com, T-H-E-R-O-T-T dot com, and take a look there because I think he covers the ability to upgrade. And those Asus gaming laptops, I've had some, and they're great. They have a lot of times I'll have an NVIDIA separate GPU in there. So it'll work well with vMix that are written to support the NVIDIA drivers. So take a look at that.

53:54 You can still get by with Windows 10 Enterprise. It'll still run fine. It'll run almost all the, I think the vMix software will still run fine on it. You know, you don't have to worry about vulnerabilities. So just keep it patched with the latest security stuff. And, you know, they're not going to be releasing very much more security stuff for Windows 10 Enterprise.

54:16 But see if you can bypass that setup and go ahead and upgrade it to 11. All right. Next question. Tony Mobley is up next from Ninnan, Georgia. Has there been a conversation about Muse? not on this show that i'm aware of i think that's the new facebook ai right is it not correct yeah it's uh uh so meta came out with a uh agent called meta muse and uh so far it's been doing

54:49 uh pretty well i you know this is a new thing this is what all the ai want they want to be your agent, your interface to the world. And that is where the whole direction of where it's going. The issue is, what do you trust it with? Do you just give it access to read your email? If you say, all right, you can only read email, where's that limit coming from? Is it limiting

55:17 itself? And if it makes a mistake, can it accidentally send email? Or is there some other something else controlling it. I'd say, you know, download it. It's like the number one app on the app stores and give it a try. I'm using a few different agents and yeah, you really do need to be very careful about it right now. Going forward in the future,

55:44 it'll have clearer controls about all of that, about, you know, what you have it do, where the limits are. You know, you don't just give it your credit card and say, here go buy me something surprise me and then you have a boat in the driveway or something you know so you just need to be careful about that sort of stuff and try it out but

56:05 at the surface level some of the things that people have been using it for is hey look over my you know here's my credit card statement you can't access it but look at the output and find subscriptions that I'm no longer using and things like that a lot of people have found hundreds of dollars of savings there. So there are some use cases that are pretty benign

56:29 that you can give access to that aren't going to, you know, you're not going to be surprised with a huge bill or some new product in the driveway. But that is the direction a lot of this is going. You know, I wish I had enough room on my credit card that I could just easily have a A boat just show up in my driveway.

56:53 That would be pretty cool. How many do you want? Ten? But also it would be dangerous. That would be very dangerous. And ten roasts show up. Exactly. Next question. Next question comes to us from Tommy Shantz in St. Paul, Minnesota. My house of worship projector needs a new connection. No SDI input, but it has a 10 base T. Use that or put in an SDI converters on both ends.

57:17 A four-year-old 100-foot HDMI cable is connected now, and it's breaking up. Ooh, 100-foot HDMI. Courtney, go ahead. Yeah, 100-foot HDMI is a bad idea unless you get one that converts it to optical. HD-Base-T is a good choice for you. There's a company called ORI, O-R-E-I, that makes, and it depends on what resolution you're working with, they have a transmitter and receiver. Since you have a receiver HDBase-T built in to the projector, you could just get the transmitter, and it might be cheaper than this pair that they're offering here.

57:54 And it'll work. And the other neat thing about HDBase-T is it not only carries your, you know, an HDBase-T encode on one end, but it also carries your USB. So you could put a mouse and keyboard on the far end. And a lot of times network will be carried along with your HDMI signal. So it can carry Ethernet directly to the projector if you need that for connecting to upgrade its firmware and things like that remotely.

58:26 You know, that can be done as well. So look into Ori as an HD-based T. That may be the cheapest way to go. Then, well, SDI converters on both ends will do the job. But they won't be as versatile. And since you already have HD-based T built into the projector, you know, just an encoder might do best at the HDMI end. And that way, that HD-based T can run up to 100 meters or 300, let's say 300 feet without any problems.

58:52 So with over Cat6, although, you know, it's, and it's just a single line, a point-to-point communication doesn't go through, make sure it doesn't go through a router or anything else. Yeah, I've actually had good luck with that particular brand, Courtney, that you recommended. I did just that at a church, actually, that had a similar problem. It's been running well for a couple of years, and they're not very expensive solutions.

59:16 Actually, very inexpensive solutions. All right, let's go to the next question, Bill. Clalo Clopez-Waterman in Santa Fe, New Mexico. As we move into a more egalitarian programming environment that works with AI, will the software sales business die? there will be four companies chat gpt claude and a couple of more and that's it and we have craig here who can predict the future and tell us exactly what's going to happen in the next five

59:42 years go ahead craig i i just need a bot to take me off mute automatically uh the uh no that so the reality is that much like we were talking about earlier that if you have empathy for the the community, that's the most important thing. The other part is understanding what it takes to actually serve that functionality, that feature, whatever. And there's a lot to that. You can't

1:00:13 just sort of wave a magic wand and expect everything. There is a certain amount to it. And you see a lot of folks that do a vibe coding thing because they know, oh, this group of us users want this thing. And then they run into some technical difficulties. And then they just iterate on AI for a while. And then finally they get it, but it just takes that while. And then

1:00:39 somebody has a request for a change and building a software product for multi-users is a lot of work and running it and operating it is a whole bunch of work. So you could do that with AI, but is that what you want to do with your time? Even if it takes up 10% of your time to do that, is it worth that?

1:01:02 Don't you want to be doing, if you want to do that, great, make it your job. If you don't enjoy doing that work and you want to do photography or something else, do that and rely on these other tools that somebody else has spent all that time building, iterating, and creating. and you can certainly use AI to interface to it, but all the software is not going to be just created by AI.

1:01:30 There's too much, especially if it's AI to AI, yeah, that's commodity. It's not worth getting into. But if it's AI to humans, there's always going to be humans needed to be able to say, yeah, that's not going to work out well, or you need this thing. and that's work that somebody has to do and it's not AI. All right, that is going to wrap our Saturday show.

1:01:57 Thanks to all the panelists for coming in this morning, answering all these questions. And to you, the producers, you showed up putting these questions. As we always say, we wouldn't have a show without you. Thanks very much. If we didn't get to your question, don't worry. You can always post it on another day. We'll send those questions back to your notes section of Makana.

1:02:13 So make sure to please post them early for the next day. and thank you to the back end crew that shows up every single day to make these shows happen we've got morning shows we've got evening shows there's so much work involved with these uh programs and we really appreciate the work that you do if we were to travel around the world virtually to answer

1:02:32 all of these questions today according to the talala traversal that would have been 20 uh thousand miles that's 32 000 kilometers and 155 million bananas for scale in case you're wondering this was episode 2377. If you have a little time after the show, we'll see you in after hours. Goodbye. Bye-bye. Ta-da! Ta-da! And no AI was used to construct this program. That's right.

1:03:05 That makes sense. How do you know? Uh-oh. It was superintelligence we were using. bill's breaking down on us i don't think we're so we're certainly not uh contemplating it but i could see some point in the future having an ai agent type interface or or bot that joins a talk show or panel that only responds when you ask it to but it's like hey did we ever do a show about blah

1:03:42 and you could turn to you know the botan it then pipes and actually we did three and did it and okay great shut up thanks you know i think you know you could you could generate a an avatar of john pretto or something bring him back and have him do all the statistics for us which was what he was great at cataloging uh you know in the past so uh you know it's possible to bring back an

1:04:07 avatar. Yeah, it's pretty spooky. I've done a few projects where we've animated an avatar based on a whole bunch of photos and movies and whatnot, and there's times there were...