Extra Hours | Episode 113 | October 19, 2026

0:00 Welcome to Office Hours, where we answer your AV and tech-related questions 365 days a year. You are joining us on a very special occasion. This is a big round number of an episode, episode 2400. And of course, because it is the PM in North America, this would be Extra Hours. It's not the only after-hours show, but it's definitely the only one that I host.

0:26 So there we have it. But joining me is this illustrious panel of peoples. Let's start with Courtney. Courtney, where are you joining us from? I'm still here, stuck in Hollywood. You know, I'm the last person to leave because I'm retired. So everybody else has gone to Georgia, you know, to join Tony Mobley. All the production that's run away to Europe. But, no, it's lovely here.

0:51 It's a nice sunny day out in the low 80s. Only half the town is on fire. So, hey, it's a good day. I was going to ask, this is going to be my next question, is like, you know, can you see the air when you walk outside? Luckily for me, the fires all happen up in the hills, so the smoke always blows to the north and west.

1:13 Blows over Occidental and out to sea, huh? Yeah, it goes the other way. It goes out to the desert lands and out there in, you know, Palm Springs. They love it out there. Yeah, well, you know, whatever. whatever it's not the city it's the suburbs whatever that means when it comes to la uh guy is also joining us from seattle washington the pacific northwest hey guy

1:36 yeah just a few minutes ago you were asking if i had the outdoor camps i had to go and and grab it real quick because it is looking pretty nice nice fall day outside right now it's uh seasons the colors were changing across the uh the cow field out there i don't know where the cows are right now and cows are cows are enjoying the sunset and probably getting some dinner there

1:56 there's some cows yes and magic hour yeah we've done this go tell the cows come home the cows are home they're home wonderful well and speaking of atlanta you i see those film credits more and more it's that giant georgia peach right at the end of every film crawl joining us from georgia mr tony mobley host of what's the name of that show again tony conversations with conversations

2:27 i know i know i just want to let you plug your show uh how are you tony i'm fine i'm glad to be here tonight uh normally i am watching from youtube but i wanted to see if uh there was a spot open and there was there is indeed sir there's always a spot for you and uh speaking of our regular panelists we're going to go all the way around prior to the international date line

2:56 all the way to australia uh mr asmussen carl how are you good morning everyone from the future uh the weather here is quite nice we're in spring at the moment so there you go i know you guys are in fall we're in full full full how you say that um so we're in spring so it's that's quite nice day it's got it's about 70 degrees so it's a normal spring day and we have had some warm weather but

3:17 it's it's nice today so shouldn't get too hot very good and of course last but not least he's usually not on camera but he just you know came out of the woodwork because you know he hates sleep john wallace how are you i'm doing good coming here from uh just north of detroit Detroit and beautiful Michigan the leaves are just starting to turn so it's starting to get

3:42 a real fun time of the year it's not too hot uh but nice nice to drive you can go up north and have a nice couple days and really enjoy the scenery excellent very good well we do have a few questions but I'm trying to decide if I want to start just yet I don't know guy oh you know know what i in fact i wanted to ask you guy um you were showing us those tiktoks like you know

4:09 the short videos that that you were going through yeah any progress on that have we published any of those or is this yeah actually baseball it was kind of funny uh because grokka let me know that it made a little error uh this morning so on sunday's show somebody had asked um if we had had gotten an invite from YouTube for consistently posting shorts, they give you something. I don't

4:35 remember what it was, but I was like, oh, we need to do that. We need to develop a way of making sure they go out every day. And so there's something called Buffer, which is a mechanism that you can use with all the other socials and large organizations use it. And we applied as a nonprofit to be able to get it at a discounted or free rate. But during the show,

4:55 I said, well, let me just ask Rockbot if it could just make a calendar. And so the question came in at the beginning, but then more towards the end of the show, I said, Hey, it actually made a calendar. And so I showed the calendar and if you give me a little more time, if you put it up as a question, I can pull it up and show you what it looks like, but it was pretty neat.

5:12 But this morning it sent me a message saying, oops, I made a boo-boo and I let three shorts fly out when I was only supposed to drip out one. And I was like, oh, how'd you let that happen? But so obviously, uh, all this, uh, agent stuff is, is still, it's still a little, you know, iffy, you could, you could let something, I mean, it could have dripped out 50 of them, you know, what's the difference between the 30?

5:34 Yeah. He's better than 30. So it could have been like a Gatling gun and just sprayed, but yeah, it was pretty neat to see it, um, push it out and I can pull up the, uh, the, um, what do you call it? The, you know what? The nice diagram too. I put a question in the, so if you want to get it exactly right, then feel free.

5:53 Yeah, let's circle back to it here. Give me five. Just got a notification from Robert Green. Looks like we're also being pushed into after hours and there will be an announcement just, you know, maybe in 40 minutes or so about how to join the community if you like what you're seeing. Because, you know, the channel is the very surface with which to scratch the itch that is office hours.

6:14 It is truly a grassroots community. Let's start with questions. Why not? Hey, all right. Let's go to the first question, who happens to be from Mr. Jason Bache. I believe it is from Albuquerque, New Mexico guy. Show us your YouTube shorts calendar. And we'll get to the top, Jason. Look at that. How did I get first? I said, give me five minutes.

6:40 Oh, my gosh. Can we push that down? Let's circle that one back. Yeah. Let's come to the next question. All right. Let's go to the one that was number one until half a second ago. It's from Tony Mobley, who is also here on the panel in New England, Georgia. It says, any panelists using Apple's release candidate? Any brave Apple-holics out there? So, yeah.

7:06 I mean, I am. But keep in mind, I don't use it on production machines. In fact, I don't even usually use it on machines that are connected to the internet. I've used it on virtual machines. There is a way to do that that's way more steps than is necessary. But yeah, generally, just after Golden Gate comes out, those are the safest release candidates

7:32 you're going to get for the remainder of the season because they're not taking any risk. They're really just patching holes for the most part. part they will be playing around with functionality and features but if it's a feature for example that has to do with um you know in other people who are not on the RC like messages you know um it's not going to work because they're not they would also need to be on the release candidate so

7:55 you know it's safe but I wouldn't I I wouldn't I wouldn't bet on it is that yeah more or less Carl. So me, what used to be called like the golden beta back in the day, which was going to be the release, which is a release candidate. I used to use these quite a lot for third party software that I need for my

8:22 business. So the first party stuff from Apple is going to be fine, of course. So like Final Cut and all that. So I have some third party proprietary apps that have to work for me for what I do. So they're the ones I play with on my non-production machine. My production machine will get, it does come over, but only when I find out that the third party apps are working at 100%.

8:46 And I also go check the, like essentially the forums for these apps because a lot of people, you know, their business runs on these apps. So I always check the forums to see if there's any gremlins in there that will affect me as well that I haven't discovered yet. So that is one thing I do use if I ever have like to use a,

9:01 like a release candidate or like a golden beta. But recently I haven't had to do that so much, mainly because I don't mind being like maybe two or three weeks behind. You know, I'll wait for that, you know, 1.01. They're iterating so fast now. It's just, you know, it's not nearly as much of a thing. It used to be, you know, monthly or every other monthly.

9:23 And now I feel like I don't go a week without something. So now I'm curious, Carl, what are your make or break apps? Like what apps are you actually checking for because they're business critical? So CPP is probably the biggest one for me. So this is Canon's proprietary software for the raw format. I have never used that. Like I install it every time and I never use it except for remote camera.

9:47 But again, like the iOS version works. So remote shooting, which you can do with other third-party remote shooting has the most features, but has to do with the raw. So this is very similar to DaVinci Resolve for Blackmagic Raw. So if you understand how DaVinci Resolve and Blackmagic RAW link up, it's identical between CPP and Canon's RAW formats. So that's number one.

10:08 I do use After Shoot to cull the images. So essentially to fabricate images, which one am I going to throw into CPP? CPP works. You know, there is no JPEG kind of. It does have a JPEG preview in a way, but it doesn't show you the JPEG preview. You can't select that. It's always going to show you the raw bitmap. Yeah, but its render engine is so fast.

10:26 it's yeah it's it's quite fast like it's much faster than like uh photos or anything from adobe so if you put a raw into adobe then it's going to show you like the actual bitmap of the raw um that always takes longer than canons um and this is true for sony sony has their own version nikon has their own version too which have come out as well but that's that's usually number one

10:46 is going to be that because without without that i can't do i can't do hardly anything i can't use dual pixel so dual pixels is a pretty big deal for me um all my photography is dual pixel so and that only works in cpp that's that's another big one as well dual pixel so this is these are canon technologies that aren't found in other cameras um i always have sworn by um um by photo

11:07 mechanic i just i love it i know every inch of it and it's just the easiest thing on earth and the other thing is um with rf cameras especially with the newer breed of cameras is they have lens correction so distortion correction um peripheral illumination so all these kind of lens corrections um because the lenses are designed to they're designed mechanically and optically to work with these corrections turned on um especially you know if

11:33 if you're not doing any photogrammetry kind of stuff um and so with the cpp i can turn them on and off so i can so essentially it's like i can turn settings on and off in the camera um now sony has a little bit different system they have well everyone has the same kind of system but you do need the one that goes with your camera so for me it's cpp um so i can switch all

11:53 these things on and off after the fact or i can have them on on the camera and turn them on after the fact that's part of my important light room is it different than than the light room no so the way it works with third party this is why whenever canon releases or anyone you're using your camera it takes like maybe a week or two for um apple or adobe to support that raw format

12:12 because they have to profile it themselves they're not given the keys so they have to reverse reverse engineer the raw and then profile themselves in their own software. I mean, I used to make my own lens correction profiles way back when. Yeah. And there is software. I have the software that can actually, I have the software that can reverse engineer as well,

12:28 which I'd never use because that's like going, that's really going to like, um, to paint in the bud. Yeah. It's, it's real, that's real deep into, you know, raw file. But, um, the thing is with Canon, well, well, with each proprietary one, as I said, Sony, Nikon, they will have them. Um, it knows which camera you have. It knows which sensor you have.

12:44 so therefore it gives a proprietary curve for every sensor not just for every format and so this is something that is profiling the sensor and so you can do way more things and I have like photos I have this photo that's underexposed by like four stops and I use this photo constantly in any new software I want to use pixelmate is probably the best third party so which is Apple so pixelmate

13:07 does probably the best processing I've seen on Canon raw anyway from Canon Canon other than Canon's own proprietary software. So what I do is I have this really underexposed photograph and I say, oh, I need this photograph to actually be for the client, even though it's way underexposed like the flash didn't go off or whatever. And I use this photograph and all the software to see,

13:22 can I save it? And only pretty much only the Canon software can save this photograph at the moment, even Pixmator goes posterization. So that's why we don't make a test shot that I use to say, okay, is the software better than Canon? You know, it can happen one day, but at the moment, no. So Canon still is number one when it comes to processing.

13:43 Got it. That makes sense for new cameras and new lenses and new profiles. It kind of blows my mind that they are doing per-sensor optimization. That's insane. Tony, you had your hand up. I'm curious, what would you be using release candidates for? Well, I had my hand up, and a lot of what I was going to say was answered. So that's why I put my hand down.

14:09 But the reason that I asked the question was because in the past, I was probably the first person to use a release candidate as soon as they were available. And I had a bad experience with my Blackmagic camera app. and so after I uninstalled the release candidate it started working properly so I haven't done it since and that was about it about a year ago so I I just

14:43 observe when people are looking at release candidates makes perfect sense let's go on to the next question all right the next one comes in from Francis Francis Fry in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And Francis wants to know, the Acquired podcast is now available as a video on Netflix. I love the quality. If you had to guess, which brands and settings are they using for cameras and lenses?

15:12 All right. Right back to you, Hortney. It would only be a guess. You know, Netflix has its own specs for dramatic videos that are produced for the streaming company. But this particular episode that they have signed a deal with is coinciding with, it's called Seinfeld, The Deep Dive. And it's 230 minutes long, four hours long. So, you know, you have to have a little stamina.

15:41 The regular podcast is hosted by these two guys, which you see that some of their people that they've interviewed, some of the companies that they've talked to on acquisitions. You know, it's about acquisitions of corporations. And I think they do it. They're located on different coasts, I believe, the two people that are on it. And I think they do them from their home studios, although they occasionally apparently do get together in a remote location or go to the location of one of the companies that are the persons, you know, like Jensen Lang that they're interviewing.

16:16 But the Netflix thing is basically because Netflix has, I think, licensed the rights to all the Seinfeld episodes. So that's why this particular episode is now airing on. I see. It's kind of an in-house promo deal going on. But thank you, Francis, for that question. If we find out, they don't really publish the specs on that particular podcast, and I'm sure they probably vary.

16:46 And that question, by the way, came in from the QR code, didn't it, Jason? It sure did. John? John? Yeah, I was going to say, I wasn't able to find out which cameras they're using, but it looks like they're used Shep films. So if you want to look at other productions that they're doing, you can dive deep into that and figure out if you can figure out which camera they're using.

17:08 It sounds like they typically use cinema type. So it's going to be like Ari Alexa's and that's probably why. I was about to say, like, I can tell Ari color, even when it's been, you know, run through like a good colorist. Like it's just, it's so it's the midterm contrast. Like every time you do look at their sponsors, there's a lot of deep pockets there and the, you know,

17:29 and throw out the NFL. Yeah. They don't have any money. Yeah. So, you know, they can afford those area Lexus to shoot the podcast with, you know, it's nice. I wish I had one in my home studio. Me too. Next question. Next one comes in from Mark Britain in three rivers, Michigan, again i guess that is uh has anyone got their hands on the new oc omni 12 switcher

17:56 i haven't actually got my hands on it but a fellow panelist anthony barocas had it and uh i watched a couple of his lives and there was actually a discussion this morning on the video engineering engineering reddit group which was pretty fascinating uh i'll touch on what what what was said here in a second, but I first want to show the ins and outs as to why this one at

18:18 1975 bucks is something to look at. I mean, it's one of those things where you go, okay, it has HDMI and SDI inputs, which, you know, we haven't seen this in a Blackmagic since the ATEM television studio HD way back in the day where they mixed them up like this so that we could could have a variety with XLR ins and outs.

18:41 And it does NDI, which we know Blackmagic has said that they'll never do. So, but- Yep, never heard of it. Uh-huh. Mark, keep in mind that it is NDI HX. So like the Roadline, it's not full NDI. So let's jump over to this morning's Reddit discussion. Which video switcher would you get for under 2000 bucks? And a lot of it is the Blackmagic ATEM Extreme.

19:09 But the person who has one said, well, actually, there was a lot of discussion on the Roland at twice the price. You're looking at the V160 is more mature. And this one down here. The Roland is 4K? Yeah, for the 160. So one of the things is the ISO part of this. And so that's the part that's still a little premature. So this person, Alpha Fatty, says it's not a mainstream option.

19:40 It's still new. So reliability is in question. But I've been running an OC Omni 12 for the past month or so. The software is still a little flaky. That's the part that I've heard from multiple people now. So that's the thing is you get into Blackmagic. And if you just need it to do the thing, not only does it work, but it works with companions.

19:59 So there's a million units out there. So some of the flexibility that you get from having companion and being able to just program things with, with a, with a stream deck and then know that your ISOs, even though they're not super high bit rate, but they work. So I have one of the ATEM extreme ISOs and it's pretty bulletproof. I haven't had, I haven't lost any records.

20:18 So that's knock on, knock on wood, but they're low. They are low data rate, but for the money, I mean, under two grand, I don't know if I'd get an Omni versus just buying some decimators and converting to what I needed. unless it was going iMag, and then that's a different story. And so that was part of this Reddit discussion as well as like,

20:35 oh, I just get vMix, and I would just use a capture card, and then I've got all kinds of things like replay, but some people are saying, well, do you need iMag? So right tool for the job. Can you get away with a software switcher? I mean, you might be able to get Mimo Live and a Mac Mini. I mean, who knows what exactly you're –

20:54 actually, I do know what you're doing, Mark. You do those CrossFit-style outdoor events. that's a that's a tough one i mean i'd probably still go with an atem extreme i mean i don't know if or i'd say you don't have runs that are too long right or maybe the sdi version he does though he does have long runs but he's been using wireless uh hollylands as well so it's kind of

21:16 like where's where's your budget gonna go where where do you would you rather rent have money to rent a better wireless for the show and then have a less expensive switcher keep using what you're using so that's a tough one maybe courtney has something here he's going to recommend the road caster yeah mr gooden i have the road caster i have the eight temps and now i have a uh a the

21:37 baby brother to the big the big 12. so cute which this is only 279 dollars now they make one uh that does have sdi inputs along the side that's the same uh you know it's the same four banger which which is this four inputs, actually five inputs, because the AUX input counts as the fifth input, which can be either NDI, supposedly, or anything that qualifies as AUX coming in over the network,

22:05 a USB cam, for example, UVC camera, NDI camera, or the one that they call the Duet, I think that's called, has the SDI inputs on the side so that your inputs can be either HDMI or SDI or mix and match between the two like you have on the newer, the LB12. I haven't had a chance to play completely with this, but the things I like about it are the T-bar,

22:32 which the lower end ATEMs don't have, and the ability to set something, which if you're on set and you're trying to match stuff up, this is essential. So you can go like a split screen between two different cameras and check the color balance between the two or crossfade to line something up, a previous shot with a current shot. it has unlike the ATEMs it has an SD card slot which you can record to H.264 this one is not

22:58 an ISO it does record the program out in H.264 and it also is used as a media pool to do playbacks with so you can play back anything that's on the SD card either stills or videos and impact fours at the same time as you're recording to the same SD card so it has to be a fast SD card so and it has eight macro buttons and it does have a companion app.

23:23 They just updated the firmware and they now have an app that runs on a PC and a Mac, I believe, that interfaces with it. And it also has the hooks in to have a companion app. I don't know if it does MCP so it can be operated with your agents from your Claude coders. It's okay. Claude will figure out a way. It'll find a way in and take it over before you know it.

23:47 Yes, it'll be having its own podcast. Those Cylons are really good at taking stuff over. I don't know why. Next question. Next one comes in from some guy named Jason Bache from Albuquerque, New Mexico. I got this terrible feeling of deja vu about this question. Guy, show us your YouTube shorts calendar. Show us your shorts. You've had your fun, Guy. Show us what you got.

24:13 All right. So this came about because we're not using Opus at the moment for short. So I threw this at some of the LLMs and it came up with this little short studio thing. And over the weekend, this calendar was made, which is pretty neat. So this morning was when it was supposed to just drop this one call on the 19th called

24:36 vibe coding stuck at 90%, stop reprompting the same agent. And this is where it dropped three. So look at the apologetic kind of the first auto schedule run went wrong. And it's my bug. I checked that runs right before upload. Mistook the shorted and just uploaded for a duplicate and swapped in another one. That happened twice. So three shorts went public at 630 a.m.

24:58 I'm turning on. So it skips a short. You can leave all three public, blah, blah, blah. But what I really want to show you is the dynamics as to how this thing actually works. It's pretty crazy that these are what we'd call swim lanes. So this is Grokbot. This is his lane. This is my home server. This is a Mac Mini. And so it's actually this Mac Mini M2 that does this right here.

25:23 This is called the daily render.py. And this is what actually edits and creates. So back about a month ago, I had asked Resolve to create these shorts. And so I was blown away when Grokbot said, oh, I don't need Resolve. I'm just going to make it myself. And so it does it inside of an old Mac mini that's probably worth like $400.

25:47 And it's able to go through that calendar, which is here. This is the Short Studio web app. It's an app.py. And so that's running on my little Linux, my B-Link. So this little guy right here that's called Home Server Always On Host, that's the B-Link by Courtney for five, I think I got that thing for $399 for that. So that $399 computer is what's

26:13 running this thing. So the crew, the shorts crew comes in here and they can review the shorts and they can go in here and they can watch it and they could say approve or no, it needs a fix. And if they tell the editor what to fix, Grokbot will pick it up. So back over there, his name's Newcastle Newcastle will go over here and pick it up so like over here

26:37 he said what did he say today uh so6 and so1 are now marked as posted on October 19th let me see if there's something in here where Jason or one of the other crew members Somebody will say something in that and it'll say, and it'll actually just go in there and do the fix. So like Jason, Jason still needs to name the speakers and clips two and four.

27:06 So Jason sent five requests today. These are the requests. All five are fixed and waiting for a recheck. So it does the fixes and then it shoots them back to them. So it's pretty crazy that, you know, they're just here on the web. I haven't seen it all week. Yeah. They're just here on the web. you know, talking to my little B-link as the Shorts crew in Discord,

27:26 and then they interact with this thing that Grokbot's made, and then it pushes the finished pieces, once they're approved, over to the calendar, and then off they go. And you can see that we're now set all the way into the next month. So I think we have enough. Let's see, that's October. We got enough to go all the way to November 2nd.

27:49 So pretty cool that RockBot's built that. So thanks for the question. Pretty cool. Tony, you had something to add? Yeah, I just wanted to ask Guy, besides the innovation of the community, is there any other reason why you switched from Opus Clips? Yeah. So Opus, their person who was our main contact moved on. And so when we went to get more credits, he was no longer when we went knock, knock, knock, knock.

28:19 Do you know somebody over there? Because didn't you get some opus stuff going on too? Well, the house of worship that I'm working with is paying for opus clips. And we are not maximizing the use of it right now. We just have a small team and it's just overwhelming for us right now. now. So, um, they, maybe I could make a deal for you, my friend, I was about to say, how

28:47 about a little cash donation for some, uh, some access. We might, yeah, we might be able to work something out where some of our crew goes and uses some of your, your, uh, your account and then helps you out with your stuff. Maybe we could do a little mano mano there. Yeah. Because I still love those guys. It's, it's one of the

29:05 the things that this thing doesn't do very well yet is Opus has something like, I saw an ad, I got hit by an ad because I kept going to their site so much. And it said something like over a million customers. I mean, they're big time. They're really big time. And so it understands when you upload a video, it understands things that mine hasn't gotten to yet, like sentiment,

29:28 tone and rate of speech um it it's super smart it's using an an llm or it's using compute that is hardcore it's like it's not a little haiku yeah because i tried to use haiku and it was dumb like it just could not pick out good stuff and in fact it picked out a bunch of junk and we had to tell it like go to sonnet and clean this up even though it's going to cost us like 45 cents an episode to

29:54 to go through. But with Opus, I think the minimum plan is like 50 bucks or something like that. So, I mean, it's good for what it is, but you can burn through credits pretty quick because it's like a credit a minute, I think is what we added. Yeah. So we are, we have over 3,000 and I know that's not a lot, you know, for office hours standard, but for us it's, it's, it's quite a bit and we

30:19 We have not used it probably in about three months. We had someone that was working with us and they went away. And then the pastor passed away. And so we're sort of in this sort of limbo state. And I asked the team if they wanted to see if we could get a refund because we're not using it. Because we got a year in advance of credits.

30:41 And so, yeah, I just wanted to try to, you know, maximize this opportunity. I think there's a deal to be made for sure. For sure. We'll chat. Okay. Let's go on to the next question. Next one comes in from Orange County, California. Omar Gadon says, what's the best way to estimate live video audio sync delays without recording a clip and dropping it into an NLE and counting the frames of offset?

31:16 Well, I'll go first. You don't need an NLE. You can do this in quick time, just so we're clear. But let me, so there are all sorts of videos out there that are kind of like follow the bouncing balls, and then they have a frame calculator. That QR code will bring you to this video that explains precisely how to do it. The funny thing is, though, as I'm scrubbing through it, I'm like, wait a minute, this guy's using an NLE and then a frame calculator.

31:42 later so i i don't know i'm i'm sure there are plenty of ways and i am positive that mr wallace will uh will cover one that's better than that youtube video so what i would do is take the concept of chicken sexting which is the art of separating chickens by gender and it's taught by one person who has no idea what they're doing essentially guessing and then the person

32:10 person who actually knows what they're doing correcting it and over time that person learns the difference they don't even understand why they're but they can see and feel a difference and they become very accurate and then can train the next person so if you have ai creates you essentially this program and you guess 10 videos a day of what the offset should be i think you

32:35 could get really close to just being able to eyeball this and it's just another skill that you use it's true mickey mickey can nail this like like half asleep it's kind of amazing uh carl i think carl could too carl what you got so the one um that i've seen i remember seeing it years ago in a online so this is f1 tv back at their online they they used to just run their

32:58 live cameras so the race would be over and then you just follow the camera and the camera would keep walking down the pits one of the things i saw before a race started was actually them using Matchbox. So Matchbox is essentially software it's a two-piece you need two pieces so one is the analyzer and the other one is essentially a generator in which they have an iPad version

33:20 and so this is what I'm showing here is the analyzer so if we go over here to the glass so the glass is essentially going to be this is a one of the generators which can be on an iOS device be an iPad or an iPhone and then the original generator which is generally on a PC based and then you can put it through that way so but yeah so Matchbox by Hitomi this is one of the

33:43 solutions you can use for live which I've seen for very expensive but boy does it work it is and that's what I mean I saw it in Formula One broadcast years ago when I first saw this they usually had all the NABs and trade shows so they usually do set up their stands and they talk about what they do they do have videos on how technology works but if you don't want to do

34:00 what Jason said, or you don't want to do the chicken sexting, then this is one of the ways you can actually go about getting that. It was simply the, well, what I should say is the analyzer, this particular product is the one that will tell you what to offset in which direction for either video or audio. Very good. Well, Courtney's done a little bit of AV sync in his day.

34:22 Please tell me you're going to just say, use a clapper. Well, it depends. You know, I found that That video that you're talking about on YouTube with the bouncing ball. There it is, yeah. It looks like this. And it goes around and ticks once a second. And so you can freeze it and look at the – The trick is you've got to download the ProRes, right?

34:47 I don't know if you can hear it. But the problem with audio-video sync in a live broadcast like this is the fact that, I don't know if you can still hear it, but I'll stop it because it's ticking in my ear, is that every pathway that the video and the audio takes that is not, you know, combined together into a single interleaved file, the audio can get out of sync again.

35:14 It can get out of sync in your monitors. If you have a big screen TV that has it playing to a crowd, for example, and you're pulling audio out of the feed to that TV, the TV could have a delay because it may be in, unless you're in game mode, it may be, you know, cleaning up the video and adding four frames

35:31 of sync delay to the video. And if you're feeding the audio through the PA system that is not following the same path as coming out of the TV, hey, it's going to be out of sync again. So on a live show, it's a bit of a toss-up. It could be in sync and it could not be in sync. It depends on the pathway that the people that are watching it are using.

35:51 It could be out of sync on their TVs at home too. So let me suggest, because of course, if it is the camera and the microphone you're in front of, you can just take an iPad or something that's large enough, play that bouncing ball, make sure the microphone hears it, make sure it's visible. um you know on a on an ios device and then you're as close to dialed in as you could possibly be but

36:17 again this is a lot of work to not launch quick time or any video capture um and then just you know learn the keystrokes it's not terribly hard like it's right and left arrow i think pretty much everywhere and you know just count the frame offset uh we've got both guy and then tony guy I, uh, year first, go ahead. Yeah. Another grok bot story, but I had started to make an app that did this because I was

36:43 having an issue with our PA system at our house of worship with an outdoor event where, you know, depending on how far you are from the PA system, and this was an outdoor event, there is a millisecond, uh, just because the physics, 727 miles per hour. I want to say that what it is. 1100 feet per second. So I kind of eyeballed it and I, I got it as best I could.

37:08 The bummer about this one was that there was a lot of, um, percussion, uh, moments. And so if you didn't have it right, it was very noticeable. And so I bought an app called catch and sink is the name of it. And it is a record, but you can do it quickly on your phone. So I think it was $20, but then I went into grok bots and I was trying to make my own.

37:27 And I was like, man, you could just pay the 19 bucks. I spent like two, two days trying to make an app. And it was, it's cool. It's a cool app. but it didn't, it still needed a bunch of work. And I'm like, just buy the app. So either get a Hitomi match box or the cheap way is catch and sync, but it is again, a record.

37:46 And then you play back the record into the app itself. So you store it onto your, your photos library, and then you call it back up. And then it tells you exactly, well, within reason, I mean, it's pretty darn close, but if you just don't have that, that ability because sometimes i just get confused like i'm like is that that way or is that that way

38:05 it just gets unless you do it all the time like mickey it's a tough one to um to nail down and get right fast i it's funny i i would i'm like boy you know i bet there's a great way and what i got was back was chicken sexting but now i understand like why why that was by the way courtney had it

38:25 closest 767 miles per hour, 1,125 feet per second. Or, um, for those of us in metric land, 1,235 kilometers per hour. Next question. No, Tony, what you got? No, I, I, I'm just throwing this out because this has worked, been working for, for me so long, thanks to the office hours community. community and I hope this might help um audio hijacking loopback I'm just throwing it out

38:54 because it's it has it has saved uh me participating in office hours and my house of worship and and of course CWTM so audio hijacking loopback only works on Apple and that only affects Courtney but you know who's counting Yeah, only 80% of the world, but hey, you know. 80% of the world, 10% of our audience. No, I'm kidding. That's not even close to true.

39:23 If you're watching this show on YouTube, you're missing half the show. Go to officehours.global join and it'll get you into Mechana and Discord where you can chat and interact with other producers. That's officehours.global join. Again, officehours.global join. Next question. question comes in from uh uh Jackson uh Shafir or Shafir in Tamil Nadu India anyone using bit focus buttons on Productions since the 1.8 update I've been having so much issues with it it crashed

39:58 for me in a show I ran yesterday oh guy what you got I'd have to say that and I hate to say it might it might be user error because this they've got so much money now in the bit focus buttons uh it's insane how much um they've put into the videos that if you go onto their youtube channel and see who's using it i mean it's a who who's who of the industry so $700 stream deck like

40:27 well it's not about that because i'm using it with not in a production but i'm using it for the nmos capabilities on this little app that i'm building so i've been running it in the cloud and it's been solid so i'm wondering if the machine that he's running it on is uh a clean machine because it could also be a network switch error like that could do it yeah and this brings up

40:45 something that we learned about um last week so we use an encoder from a company called videon and videon now has the ability to put a docker uh contain it has containerized apps that you could run and so you could run something like bit focus buttons on a solid piece of hardware where it's just doing its thing it doesn't have windows updates or any weird things to you know knock

41:11 it offline so something to take a look at is uh you know what else is running on that machine look at your task manager look at the logs and see what's going on because again go look at their the latest updates uh on their youtube channel and see who who they had interviewed at ibc it is a who's who of the industry and they have big money now corsair like they're no joke it is this isn't some

41:33 little thing anymore. It's big time. Well, and check your firewall too. Check your firewall, check your Windows security settings. If you have any third-party antivirus, I hope you don't, but yeah, that's one place to look. Courtney? Yeah. If it crashed the computer, I'd worry about your video drivers. So check frequently, this is the case in both Windows and Mac, is make sure you got the latest version

42:03 of the operating system, the latest version of the drivers, because sometimes things that will hang the computer or hang, you know, if you're running buttons inside a computer, a lot of times it's some quirky incompatibility with the current version of video drivers that you're using. That's a really good point. Check your BIOS. Like everything is failing right now. Like Windows updates have never,

42:26 ever been more important. Mr. Wallace, bring us home. Yeah, I was just surprised. I didn't know that the focus buttons provided a Kubernetes image. Is that something that's new with this release? Guy? I didn't know either, but I did find that page that I was talking about. So we got Brompton, we got Telestream, AnalogWay, Panasonic. We've got Audinate, Amazon, ClearCom, Tag, Sony, Mark Roberts, Utah Scientific,

42:59 Tific, Densitron, Luminex, Panasonic, Bolin, Sennheiser. I mean, it's a pretty who's who of the industry. So I would say check your machine. That's awesome. Yeah, that's great. Let's go on to the next question. Coming in from down in Austin, Texas, Paul Valhus says, what do you want to learn on the AI water coolers next meetup and long-term on how are your AI projects coming along?

43:31 I'll report from the field. So the one thing I like to see now, I personally don't vibe code myself, but the one thing, but there are people out there who love doing it, is something like Aftershoot. So I spoke about this a little bit earlier. So Aftershoot is essentially, it's a photo app that you throw your photos in and it just analyzes your photos.

43:51 It goes, I think these are the best ones and these are the worst ones. People are blinking in these. These ones are blurry. so that kind of stuff depending on how much you pay depending on how much and you can actually go in and fix stuff so you can actually there's lots of stuff you can do in that app I'm interested to see people doing add-ons or plugins for

44:07 these kind of apps that will do very bespoke stuff so people who can vibe code or people who are developers themselves doing rapid development using some form of vibe coding and that's kind of where I'm hoping to see some of this AI because this is one it's an AI app but also using AI and vibe coding to add plugins to do very particular features to particular photographs you know those

44:29 kind of things so I'm hoping that's kind of where we we get to I don't know I know it will because there are people out there who will want these tools they go well this tool doesn't exist I can vibe code it and developers who are already creating these kind of apps they can rather than take three weeks of vibe code something they can take three hours or maybe just three days to get something

44:46 that's product ready so which is a really cool place we're at now here in in 2026 uh john yeah so i've really enjoyed uh what i've seen other people kind of showing off i haven't been able to make it for the uh formal session uh but the end like little demos that you can kind of see in the different ideas that are coming out of the community are really interesting

45:08 um yeah so i i look forward to it every friday and i will try to get in there actually on time so i can participate with the group and not just kind of do the show and tell afterwards words. Great guy. Yeah, I'd love to see how to hand off between a GitHub project where you can, if you're using up all your tokens on one frontier model, how to pass that work to another one

45:38 cleanly. Yeah, because it's one of those things where once you learn from other people's workflows, flows there's the hence the you know the community water cooler where it's just like what are you doing because i just put on this uh lm studio bionic and i have a 3090 card 3080 card in here and i was asking it like hey what what might a 5090 card cost and it's like uh as of now 2026

46:03 the nvidia has not officially released or launched the geforce rtx 1590 so you know this this is quen 3 vl 8b instruct so when you download these these local models they can be very old and so if you're asking it well the first question i asked is what's the uh uh how many people are what's the capital of spain and it said the capital of spain is madrid i'm like okay cool it's working because

46:30 you could see i had some errors and then how many people live there and you know so for a question like that it gets it right like population of madrid 6.7 million people gross domestic product output, blah, blah, blah. But then I ask it for something like what's the price of an Nvidia 5090. And it just doesn't even know that it is shipping.

46:47 So that's the other thing is just how do you maximize the use of using your own local LLM so you're not burning up tokens. Cause if you have one of these cards and you're just doing basic stuff, like some of the stuff that we're doing with the short studio, I'd love to just pass it onto my local machine while it's camping in the middle of the night, let it not

47:03 cost me anything except my electricity bill. well and if memory serves you've got some solar panels so um i'm guessing that's not the same as my power bill because i don't have any john what you got i was gonna say uh make sure guy that you're using the llms for what they're supposed to be used for if you need real-time information it has to be something that's online and then has some sort of rag model that's pulling in that

47:29 real-time information to go alongside the data set it's trained on um but yeah i i find it really really interesting what we can do now with the local models and uh starting to test some um at the workplace uh haven't gotten too far with the yeah but um it's really interesting because we have a partnership with uh cisco and so they're giving us some access to some gpus that we can

47:56 around on our UCS blades and we'll see what that kind of turns into once we get the all the things fired up um and recently started really experimenting with cursor and I don't know that that to me is I think the best and easiest way to get into the multi-model game when it comes to cost I've been getting really cheap access to the grok models kind of makes it a game changer yeah

48:20 I find that if you know if I wanted to go from I don't know Claude to Gemini I don't know why I I would ever would, but, you know, usually it's the other way around. But, you know, I would ask, I'll ask Gemini, you know, I want to start this as quickly as I can, you know, in Claude. Like, you know, please give me a Claude tune version.

48:42 And then I would go to Gemini and say, you know, here's the gist of it. And here's what, you know, here's what Claude gave me to give you. Is there anything else you need that I can ask? Now, of course, it's the least efficient way to do it, but I'm not letting him talk, at least not in any real way. Guy? What I found really effective is, like at work, we use Jira for our work tracking.

49:09 You can do that same concept for your AI agents. Yeah. And so you just build your backlog, have the agents be able to comment on it, and then assign work to the agents in that backlog. So whichever is the best model that you feel or you use AI to determine which is the best model from each competitor and assign that workout. And then you just have it go check in.

49:34 I built a little app. I called Coordinator 3000 because it's, you know, just stupid and extreme. And it first started off as an idea of like, oh, I have all these credits. I should make sure I'm using it right. I'll just, you know, I'd love to get just API access and just have the AI just kind of work together and coordinate. Then I figured out that my monthly credits don't actually apply to any sort of API access.

49:57 So then I built it essentially like a little JIRA backlog where I'm able to just go in, they can check in, and then allows it to coordinate that work. And then I have within my agents.md file, then like what happens on a commit, what happens before a PR is merged. And so all those actions run. run, and then you can have agents even talking to each other, uh, to coordinate like work

50:22 that needs to happen on my local machine. They'll check in with the other agent and make sure that like, okay, this is not running this type of test. So then if I'm doing a performance test against the app, then it can silence all the other ones until it's done. And then, and then move it on. Very good. Um, guy real quick. Yeah, that's, that's amazing.

50:40 We need to have you in the water cooler. Wallace, that'll be amazing help. I want to see that. that uh Courtney last word yeah guy you should have just used copilot and that little uh a PC that you have because here's the here's your answer that you could get from copilot and so tech uh 35.99 currently for the 1590 with a solid OC from new egg and typical air cooled modules are

51:04 49.50 to five thousand dollars for that card there's and it even told me that there's a a suspiciously low listing of the 5090 96 gig turbo for $108.99, which it says, which is not a real 5090, likely mislabeled or a scam. So it even caught the scam listings out there. So just ask Copilot. It's updated. It uses the latest information besides the large language model.

51:31 We're going to burn through this last question from Tony, and then it is on to the content recommendations. And I think this is going to be a, if only we had the Foley lightning round for the content recommendations. But yes, next question. All right. From Tony Mobley in Noonan, Georgia. Conversations with Tony Mobley needs a capture card. Can the panel members please make a recommendation and a new ATEM is not an option.

51:59 Carl. So Blackmagic just updated or released a new one, however you want to look at it. so they're all to studio express so there's a recorder and a monitor so the recorder is the capture monitor is the playback um so i'll just scroll down so you can see the price a little bit easier so um this is pretty much the best bang for the buck you're going to get at a 1080p

52:20 as far as price and features it will do uncompressed 444 so you know it goes right up there as far as you know quality if you want to get in high quality but it will do all the other the codex as well of course like 420 h264 h265 that kind of stuff um so this is probably your best bang for your buck and it's about half the price of you know an a10 mini um that can that

52:40 can use that you could also use as a capture card of course so this is about half the price um and it does have a lot of new features um that are not found on the a10 mini of course 100 percent um i'm gonna go with so one step up from that i think it's 149 us um is the the simplest possible

52:59 possible capture card is a I'm trying to remember this is the hyperdeck studio HD it's actually really nice and the clutch on the wheel it just feels really good you can operate it without having to look at it you can operate it manually it's got a plug-in for Ethernet it's got an SD card plug-in and it has an external disc plug-in that you can also use kind of as a as a as a video

53:26 input converter and then an HDMI loop through. So if you've got a way through, you know, whatever your output is from your ATEM, if you take one of your outputs from the ATEM and just loop it through there, if it's going to another broadcast machine, I have no complaints. This is, you know, it's not going to save the world, but it is absolutely worth what it costs. Yeah. They're

53:50 They're on special at the moment. Oh, there you go. Even better. Yes. All right. It is time for content recommendations. And if the panelists can put their hands up in the order that they would like to be called, I will call on them. Courtney, you're first. What is your content pick of the week? Well, I'm not going to recommend a video, which I usually do, but I'm going to recommend a website.

54:14 You know me. I do a lot of 3D printing. I print little boxes and things and just working on some little plug-in voltmeter that's this big. Anyway, I used Tinkercad for many years, but there's a new guy on the block called Layerling. So go to layerling.com and you'll see this, which is a browser-based 3D design program. It does everything Tinkercad does. So it's a very familiar interface.

54:43 Face, if you use Tinkercad from AutoCAD, is completely free, runs in a browser. You can download it onto your own computer, runs cross-platform, and it does fillets and chamfers automatically, even on round objects. So check out layerling.com, vibe-coded. It gets updated about every week. So take a look there. It's freebie. Next in line is Tony Mobley and then Guy. Go ahead. head um lanterns is my recommendation for content uh just it just ended and they are already working

55:21 on season two um very interesting show and i recommend it is it about the green lanterns like is that yes yes it's about the green lanterns well they're intentional in saying lanterns because Because there are different dimensions. Sure. Right. Yeah. I won't, I won't spoil it for anybody. I'll just say, okay, if you've picked up a Green Lantern comic in the last 30 years, like it's not a spoiler, but yes, you know, no, you're, you're absolutely correct to, to, to leave it be.

55:56 Guy, what do you got? Yeah, this one's going to be a little doomer, but it's still good. It's called how to survive the next two years of AI. And it does make a lot of sense. He starts talking about, hey, you know, a human needs X amount of calories a day, so you should have some food and some water. So here's how much water you're going to need.

56:18 But the really great thing, what made me think of this is at the end of it, he talks about how weird it's going to get and how weird it's already become. So in addition to having the resources, he talks about the job market going up and down and how you should invest in people because the people in the relationships as these jobs start

56:41 to go away, the network that you have, and we call it the dojo here, but showing up and having friends that know what you do and how you do it is going to be really important. So I think office hours has got a lot to gain with new people coming in and new connections being made and a tighter bond being made because as these jobs get taken over by smart compute, I mean,

57:00 it's just going to happen more and more. So watch this video and you'll see what I mean. Like he He lays it out pretty cleanly. So good one to watch. Well, it's true. And, you know, for those of you that don't know, Office Hours started pretty much because, you know, a whole bunch of people from Hollywood weren't working, you know, and Alex started

57:15 it along those lines. It's like, well, what else are you going to do? Let's answer some questions and meet each other. And careers were made and remade and, you know, resurfaced. And like, truly, for me, it was a renaissance. It was one of my best years was 2021, which, again, I thought I was doomed. good Carl so no surprise I've got a history documentary series this one can

57:38 be fun YouTube so nice and easy it's called old money documentaries and you can if you take a look down here at the bottom where we have all the names so this kind of tells you what we're talking about so Gilded Age Vanderbilt Siastas Rothschild so it essentially looks into these these families or titties dynasties more like it entities reaches and actually shows you

57:58 essentially where the old money was where it is now like the Vanderbilt's of course don't have any money left now um so and what happened to these dynasties but another one that's really important is how these dynasties got created and it's usually a single person um the kennedy of course would be joseph red baron so to speak yeah yeah right that's right

58:16 and well the asters is a kind of interesting one as well so it is quite interesting it also gives you a very good indication of what american history was like you know 150 years ago 200 years ago up to probably about 100 years ago which was you know around the depression was when a lot of these families collapsed into one. So the Astors are quite famous

58:37 because the Astors own the land that the Empire State Building is currently on. That used to be the Ward of Astoria Hotel, which is where the Empire State Building is now. So some families absorbed that money that was lost and they got very rich and they had essentially public works projects, which was like Rockefeller Center and the Empire State Building. But it's very fascinating.

58:58 So it's part American history, part dynasty history. and part how to waste your money. That's right. For those who are rich and the rich aspiring, yeah, great pick. Mr. Wallace finishes out. Yeah, I've recently been watching a YouTube series called The Fold. It's a bunch of comics. They get around, play poker, make fun of each other. Some of them don't even know the poker game,

59:29 So it's just kind of fun to, it's an interesting concept. They have some decent production. It's not, you know, not perfect by any means, but enjoyable, funny to watch. And I'll post the link in chat. Very good. That will do it for Office Hours. By the way, there are many ways to support us. I already read that one, and that's how the teleprompter works.

59:51 Thank you to our panel for sharing your expertise and life experience. To the back-end crew, this episode was Alan, Robert, Vic, Taylor, and Peter for keeping the show running smoothly and nice and organized. And to our producers, to your great questions, you know, for your great questions that drive the show every day. The Tlaloc traversal for episode 2400, that is 25,000 miles, 41,000 kilometers.

1:00:20 kilometers and you guessed it 200 we needed a reverb million bananas for scale you you

1:01:59 Thank you.