CoreVideo Pro Zoom App Uses GPU-Native Encoding

0:01 Good morning. Welcome to Office Hours, the show where we answer your technical production questions and you, the producers, that's what we call you, put those questions in. Let's go to the first one, Courtney. All right. The first one from some stranger named Alexander Knight in Port Coquitland, British Columbia, Canada. says john i hear you've been working on some production related tools do you have anything

0:27 you can share with the class this morning what do you got john i hear i hear some rumors yeah i got a couple apps um that are out on github if you want to play along um so i got a core video pro which i can show now um just a simple uh zoom production app uh so the core video the obs

0:48 plugin that kind of everybody knows I um OBS kind of sucks um as far as like managing audio um across scenes and um it can be very complicated to kind of get set up so I wanted like an easier way to do it um so I built out Core Video Pro which has the zoom integration and basic source management and then ability to build out different scenes with some like

1:17 automatic sort of design looks so you can make it very easy you don't have to build all these different mortises and you can choose whatever sources go in these extra boxes if they're not made up a little picture-in-picture one and then if you want just kind of a different look there you can see it pops into preview automatically which is nice um ability to do some lower thirds um so you can

1:42 see this is my display 25 um whatever that means on this computer uh but whatever the source is actually called will just show up in the lower third i'm going to add a spot so you can add like a company logo whatever and you have the ability to do some branding within that overlay so you can kind of choose what it looks like what are your core um colors uh for an organization how fast

2:05 you want it to build in build out i'm going to add ability for captions as well um yeah so it's a nice little application and then you get an actual audio meter you can see myself in the zoom meeting you can see if they're zoom muted or not i mean this is the actual local audio coming from my pc and you got a simple gate compression eq and i'm working on sort of like a easy mastering

2:30 kind of sweet. So you can just kind of apply some sweetness and get some consistency out of the meetings that you're producing. So it's still working through what this looks like long term. But it has OSC controls. It's got an API. Trying to make some sort of smart automation. And I'm working on like bringing in all the different features from the Isadora file

2:53 into this so you could easily run like an office hour show like turnkey with you know one or two people have an ability to actually bring in sources from mxl so you could do a cloud deploy and then kind of go from there wow that is amazing so this first of all you're being extremely humble calling this simple uh it's like it's amazing what you've built here you even i noticed you

3:20 had a loudness meter there on one of the one of the pages which is fantastic so is this app is this living inside of obs is this accessible within it or is it outside this is completely standalone okay yep uh so it is a um its own compositor uh its own audio engine it's all written uh from the ground up um so this is my take on you know like the windows version of ecamm memo live sort of

3:51 thing and obviously you can see this preview program so you know i'm going to listen to the feedback of our community and make sure those things are important and and shown so i'm curious if so if someone's an obs user like obviously this is a standalone app but how do you get So you joined the meeting from this app, but where does OBS come into play?

4:13 For this app, OBS isn't a part of it at all. So it's just totally unrelated. So Core Video, what I originally started with was just like, it would be cool if I could get Zoom sources into OBS. That was my only idea. And then after working with OBS, I thought, this is really complicated. I don't know that my friends who I'm trying to build this for would actually have success doing a larger panel within OBS and trying to manage that.

4:40 And that's what led me to like, let me see what I can do and see what I can kind of frame out and then start making actual function underneath the UI I designed. It's amazing. I'm having a hard time seeing the text that's in the buttons in the lower, the bottom there in the toolbar. But is that like a performance meter of some kind?

5:00 Yeah, you can see like how long the app's been up. So this has been running for 88 minutes. Actually, this is running within this meeting, so I joined it an hour and a half ago. You can see if there's any frame drops, there's been 54 this entire time it's been up for 88 minutes. You can see what the format and bit rate is for the stream, the record,

5:22 and then what your program, like my canvas size is set to 1080p60. and do you have individual telemetry for the participants that are joining like can you see their frame rate that they and the resolution that they've that they're sending you when they've joined yeah so um on the sources screen um there is um looks like it's not working right now so

5:46 it's broken but you should be able to see the frame rate uh will auto retry to do the maximum that's allowed in the meeting. So someone drops down, it'll retry and try to pull them back up once it's available. But I will have a diagnostic panel, which is right now, it's mostly this. So it's able to pull and I can use this with AI

6:08 to kind of troubleshoot it. And what if you've got someone that's joined the meeting, let's say that is their audio is fluctuating a lot. If you as the engineer want to remotely turn their audio up or down is there any way to do that on a on a per user basis i can't control their machine audio but you know i can go into the actual zoom mix here and i can turn it up

6:36 turn it down okay i can apply compression uh so you can see there's a little meter here um or you can if i really dig into this uh you're going to see compression kind of go and then whatever ratio so you have the ability to make some in-app changes to the audio that's coming over zoom that's great i think this is this is a fantastic example of a person that clearly has video

7:00 production experience but also has the audio background because i know you've mixed live shows before so it's great you've got the best of both worlds you've got that knowledge because i often find with a lot of production tools without calling any specific tools out that you can very much tell when when when the people that have made an app are more video than audio

7:20 centric and it just seems that there are a lot of production tools where the audio part is not as fully fleshed out or fully thought out uh which is always frustrating but so this is incredibly cool to see and this is this looks like a very i can see a lot of people that are just starting out maybe that don't have the budget for a lot of expensive expensive subscription-based tools which

7:42 A lot of them that are out there are fantastic, don't get me wrong. But I think for a lot of people that are maybe just starting out that want to start a podcast, for example, or maybe they're running sound and video at a small church and they don't have a huge budget. And sometimes, you know, all these subscription tools can get really expensive.

8:02 You know, these costs start to add up over time. And you're not charging right now for these apps? uh no this this app that you're seeing isn't like alpha so it's really early there's a lot of um functionality that's not that's still missing the core video obs plugin is free it's uh there's there's a full release of that it's um we got some people trying it out in the community getting some

8:27 feedback from folks online it was kind of cool to see there's like 50 people using it in one day um so just from the zoom stat so you know it's it's great um i think that the obus plugin is like the gateway drug and then hopefully it'll drive people towards this platform and yeah eventually i'd love to be able to charge some sort of subscription and offer support but right

8:47 now i'm just trying to figure out like how do i do this how do i maintain it um so as i'm growing i want to give people access to it and the ability to get feedback from actual people who are trying to use this in productions is invaluable absolutely so i'm looking at the website so it looks like it's i thought it was windows only but you now also have a mac version of this app what can you speak

9:08 to the differences in terms of the video performance the engine uh the graphic subsystems like on a on a windows pc versus mac are you running say open gl on a gpu is is it gpu driven on the Mac as well? How does that work? Yeah, so it's GPU driven in both. It's Nvidia optimized on the PC and then it's optimized for the M1 chips on the Mac, which make it fairly simple.

9:35 But the UI on the Mac for this app is Swift native, so it's not just a direct port. It's not like it's just a C++ app that has just been ported over. So I want to make it native experience and make sure the GPU is optimized and it can do what it needs to do. But mostly like the Mac side, I feel like is well covered with several different applications, but on the Windows side,

9:58 that lower tier, just like basic production needs, you know, like most people don't need vMix and VizRT. Those are awesome platforms, but it's overkill and I think complicated for many people to kind of try to step into that. And so my focus is on like, how do I make simple meetings um easy that's something you can stand behind and produce a a good show with and you don't need all

10:21 these bells and whistles that you know all these other major competitors have so you've covered the the zoom like the ingest part with zoom and stuff like that and some of the compositing with the the different graphics and layouts and stuff like that now how do you like can you live stream from this what about recording like where where does it go from from there yeah so you can stream uh it

10:44 has a built-in encoder. You can do NVIDIA's NVEC. You can do AV1, H.264, H.265. Those are all available within the app. You can record. I've had up to eight plus program records that are able to happen. I automatically, once you're tapped out of your GPU, it will move over to CPU for rendering. So you're able to take advantage because like an NVIDIA chip that I have, it can only do eight

11:13 records um so like once you're streaming right and then your recording program now you're dealing with blending cpu and gpu uh for encoding and trying to manage the buffers for that so you don't end up like losing frame stuff like that it's been a it's been a fun experience trying to figure out but uh fairly simple to do and i can uh i can show my screen again um so within the

11:35 routing you're able to actually choose like which feeds you would want to ISO recording of um and it does just the normal you know what everyone expects as far as routing goes if you're familiar with Dante or any sort of professional app you're able to quickly do that also to the multi-view and then aux output if you're using like a Blackmagic or AJA card you

11:57 can actually output locally uh what you want from that which is great um and then you just go in You can set your record, what you prefer. I don't know if that actually shows up. It looks like, no, it doesn't. Oh, maybe it's there. Yeah, you can see this here. Your rendering size, the format you want, the quality standards, and then what bit rate you want per camera,

12:23 and they're able to leverage that. So it's fairly simple, again, to use. There's some nice stuff where you can pop out program and preview. so if you want it larger on another screen you're able to do that you can pop out the entire interface and so you could move that to a different screen if you wanted to um yeah so just trying to

12:44 make it flexible for people and then build in those remote tools so it can fit into like a production that is like us produced around the world so eventually there'll be an ipad app a website um where people can easily go through uh you would be able to join like a control surface and you can pull the same Zoom feeds like in this virtual production app.

13:07 It will set up and lay out exactly like the main actual machine that's doing your encodes, but you'll be able to cut it and see those live feeds within it. So it's pretty lightweight, but it just joins the meeting like everything else and then can send the commands remotely via reverse proxy. So no Cloudflare tunnels and everything else that kind of has to happen today.

13:27 That's awesome. And I know that the Zoom API has been getting a lot of updates lately. And I noticed that they, some time ago, not that long ago, they added some new talkback feature. Do you know, have you heard anything about this new talkback feature in the API that allows you to, is it supposed to be like a comms solution? Is that something that you're working on with Core Video?

13:48 I think it is a comms solution, but it's more like a last mile type of thing. I do have a standalone app that can do it. It's called Zcoms. That's also on the Core Video website. you can download. It's fairly simple. Just joins a room and then you're able to do the communication back to up to four people simultaneously or individually in the room.

14:11 It will be built into Core Video Pro eventually. And there's like a version of it, a simplified version of it that's in the OBS app already. That's fantastic. Well, I appreciate the quick demo. That is amazing. I'm sure we've barely scratched the surface of it. I mean, there's zero reason now. I hope we spread the gospel when people find out about this app because, I mean,

14:33 there's zero reason now for anybody to just screen scrape a Zoom meeting because this is going to look so much better. I'm sure the color quality and the frame rate and everything, your whole production is going to look a lot better when you start doing the ISO feeds and stuff like that. So, yeah, I hope everyone checks it out. The video, I just want to make sure I get the domain name right.

14:55 It's corevideo.io. Is that correct? That's correct. All right, everyone go download it now and check it out. Mac OS and Windows. All right, Courtney, let's go to the next question. All right, very cool. All right, this one comes in from Paul Valhus in Austin, Texas. Paul says, what's a low-budget underwater video and audio setup and high-budget? Are you taking your podcast to the bottom of the pool, Paul?

15:23 I'm not sure what you want here. Go ahead, Courtney, and take a crack at this. Nobody else raised their hand, so I did a little bit of research. For underwater, it depends on whether you're talking about just recording something and pulling it out of the underwater environment and then playing it back later, or if you're trying to do live streaming. That would be much more difficult because then you've got to get wires out of the camera and audio.

15:51 Of course, there's been the GoPro, the perennial underwater housing on the GoPro, and they just saved themselves from bankruptcy by selling 90% of their stock to some holding company. So they're still around. So that's the lower end. If you have a Micro Four Thirds camera, there's solutions like several underwater housings that are available for various MFTs. Here's some for the Panasonic Lumix.

16:19 and you generally have to get one of these underwater housings designed for your specific camera because it has to interface to the controls in a method that lets you operate the controls without violating the integrity of the waterproof housing. Here's one from Neymar. These are around $300 a piece, which is pretty cheap. Underwater housings used to be close to $1,000. Here's one that's really cheap.

16:45 It's more of a glorified Ziploc bag with a piece of hard glass in the front. I would not want to use that anything deeper than about three feet. And it depends on the depth rating that you're looking at. As far as sound goes, sound off the GoPros, underwater sound really sucks. So you need you a hydrophone of some sort. Here's some lower-priced hydrophones I've found.

17:10 this is designed for pool people to detect underwater pool leaks but there are others here with the supposedly professional hydrophote i haven't tried any one of these for you know under 200 and here's one for 97 this ets makes one uh here it is down here that's a pre-amplifier that's built in it's a phantom powered hydrophone output um so you've got things like that that are

17:37 under $100. Then you got the more expensive ones. Here's the ambience for $417. So depending upon what your budget is, how deep you're going to go and whether you need to just record or if you need to get a live image out. Getting a live image out is more difficult because then the wires that go in and out of the housing have to be waterproofed and sealed up really good. And, you know, it

17:59 depends on, that's an obvious form of leakage. So you want to test everything, make sure it's leak proof before you stick your camera in there that is very very good advice i'm sure some people that were just getting into this the first time have probably been bitten by that and bought uh bought cheap uh enclosures that did not work properly uh just mentioned a couple of things

18:21 in the chat here jason robertshaw is recommending you check out cview.com it looks like they have a bunch of products they have something called the explorer adventure kit and also uh there was Someone else, Mickey McChore in the chat saying, low budget, a camera in an acrylic fish tank, cinema, Alexa 35 and gates underwater housing, broadcast barless or deep vision camera systems

18:47 and sound ambient ASF1 hydrophones. And there's a bunch of links in there. So Paul, if you are in the live chat, I would recommend grabbing some of those links and checking out those resources that Mickey pointed you to. also Ike Potter in Hanover Germany suggested not a cam.com has some stuff to look at as well I just a reminder if you want to ask questions on this show if you are tuning in live or just

19:14 coming in the door now we call you the producers so you are the ones that dictate the direction of the show and you can use our Q&A system it's called Makana if you don't know how to do that you got to be part of our community and you need to sign up for that so I'm going to tell you how to do that. Just go to officehours.global slash join. That's officehours.global slash join. Just

19:35 put in your name and email address. We'll send you the link to Makana. We'll send you the link to Discord and all the other community links that you'll want to be a part of. I'd recommend bookmarking them, putting them somewhere safe. You can vote on those questions up and down. It's kind of like Reddit. And that basically tells us what questions are most important to answer first

19:54 on the show for the panelists. And of course, you can also chat with us live, which many of you are doing right now. It's always great seeing all the different people come into the chat and post links and resources and comment. And we get all these different perspectives. It's amazing. So you're missing half the fun if you're not doing that. All right, Courtney, what's up next?

20:15 Andre DeLay in Berlin, Germany asked, what's your AI project of the week? Anything to share? All right, Craig, you have some experience with this. I do. And I don't have anything to share at the moment. I was on vacation for a week and then this week has been really swamped with work. I've got a lot of work things going on, but I'm going to be

20:43 digging in this weekend on Show Hub. There's a whole bunch of backed up features for question enabling all the question pieces, doing checklists for the show management team, and a bunch of other enhancements. I'm also working on this. A lot of people vibe code and they don't know what's next. They're not professional product managers. And so if you have the nugget of, oh, I saw this app that I use, it's a SaaS app, whatever, and I'd like to

21:17 replace it? Well, if you're just doing it for yourself and you're not going to share anybody, you can just vibe code it and start using it. If you're going to share it with others, if you're going to use it in a productive manner, if you're going to expose it to the internet, there's a bunch of things that you need to do. And some of that can be more than what people are

21:39 expecting. And so there's a graphic or might end up being a calculator just to say, hey, here's what I've done. How much is left? Because it can be quite a bit, you know, adding or adding multi-user support. Well, you got to change around the app because you didn't plan from that from the beginning or, you know, the way it's set up, it's not really set up to scale

22:04 to the number of people you're expecting or doesn't have the support, you know, role-based security or there's a whole bunch of things that I'd love to be able to make sure people have the right expectation or ability to say, oh yeah, I got to add that in and not just rely on AI to tell you, oh, don't forget to do this. Right. And so when you, I don't know how you

22:32 start your projects but obviously conceptually you have an idea for a product you kind of know what it what you want it to be but I like for me and I've only done like a couple of I mean extremely rudimentary basic apps and I always started with like a simple a simple prompt but how do you start like a big project like show hub obviously many people in the community that watch

22:56 this show know what it is but there there are many that don't so like when When you're going to develop a web-based application, do you write like a spec doc, a product requirements doc outside of the AI tool and then just upload and say, this is the product spec sheet? Or like, how are you doing that? You know, I use AI to do it.

23:22 And one of the easiest ways is to say, hey, I want to build an app to do. And then it's a two or three sentence thing. and then you tell it, interview me for what you need to know to build the spec. Not to go ahead and do it, but to build the spec. Because often the spec can be huge, you know, 20 or more pages with lots of detail.

23:45 And one of the things you want to be able to do, especially these days, is be able to break that up into phases. because once you start playing with it, you may have different ideas about the, you know, future or enhanced features. And so have it interview you and then have it create it and tell it. And I'm going to have this other AI bot build it out.

24:12 And that piece is actually surprisingly interesting because it'll say, oh, if you're going to have ChatGPT build this, here's some things that, And it will disclose things that it thinks are deficiencies or extra things that it needs to know about. And that's really fascinating to see. But then so then I'll I'll have this doc, whether it's two or 10 pages, and then I'll give it to the bot that's going to be building it and say, look at this and tell me what's missing or confusing and give me how are you going to approach it?

24:50 and then it goes ahead and does that. And I say, go ahead and whatnot. And it builds it. And usually I want the smallest, like show me enough so I can see that it's real, play with it because I'm human just like everybody else. My expectations of the future are going to be changed once I put my hands on it. So I want to see that MVP prototype,

25:18 whatever, as quick as possible. And then I'll do a phase two or three that builds it out and adds all these things. And typically in that interview process in the beginning, I'll ask, have it make sure it talks about, so what's the end goal? Is this like a app that you're going to put in the app store? Is it something you're going to be in production with thousands of people using? Is it

25:43 just for you and your friends, like make sure it covers some of those sort of things as well. Yeah. You know, I got to admit, I don't think I would have thought the fact that you asked it to interview you to, uh, provide what it needs to develop it. I probably would have wasted hours writing a document. I don't think I would have thought about that. That's, that's super clever.

26:07 I'm going to, I'm writing this down right now. I'm going to remember this, uh, go ahead guy. Yeah, so I'm probably going to get some grief in the chat for this one, but this was in service to the community, so I came at it with a good heart. So whoever's going to give me grief, yeah, I'll deal with you later. But basically, I had a couple people message me over the last year or so asking, where's this episode? Where's that episode?

26:33 So I said, go to Philmont, which is this website here, which basically they took about a petabyte of information from YouTube. and they housed it and it's very expensive to do. So this website, if you go to it and you put in office hours and Paul's question about underwater, if you type in underwater and you go to automatic subtitles, it generates this, which is really cool.

26:59 So that was about nine clips that it came up with from what they call the auto, see how it says automatic subtitles? And then there's also manual subtitles. So this is a great service, but unfortunately, they only run their run about every six months. So it's not fresh, it's old, like it's stale data. And so what I asked the community to do to see if this would work, so this kind of started as a,

27:25 let me just see if it'll work and it kind of exploded off. So I'm staging this right now. If the board approves this part of the website, then it'll be in there. But But an example is we had Opus, who's a sponsor for our shorts. And they're like, well, how many times did you actually say our name on your show? I could just go in here and type in Opus.

27:47 And I'm like, hey, 40 times. And here's the exact time that we talked about it. So are they getting value? Absolutely. So there's reasons to have things like this. And so I'm trying to solve a problem. And I know some people are like, what privacy concerns? And I'm like, it's all on Philmont. It's all over there already. So I don't know if I'm going to ditch this project or what,

28:06 but I'm trying to do this in service of the community. I don't gain nothing for doing this. This is just trying to take six years of information, 35 million words, throw it up there so that people can search and find stuff. I know Zach in Spokane has reached out to me a couple times like, hey, where's that SRT episode? Can you help me find it?

28:25 And I'm like, go to Philmont. And he's like, no, it was a few weeks ago. And I was like, no, good luck. Then you're going to have to go through all the episodes by hand. He's like, I got to show my boss that part that what's important. We're on a gig. And it's like, well, sorry. So this should help speed things up.

28:38 So that's been the one that I've been working on. Whether it'll see the light of day, we'll see. Right. Well, I think that's super cool. I mean, the ability to, I've wanted that for years because there have been a few times where I thought I'm like, I remember so-and-so, like I could have sworn they said that one thing or they recommended that one thing.

28:57 but you know it's years ago and you can't remember and nothing nothing's indexed so i think that's uh i think that's pretty cool looking forward to seeing how that turns out all right just a reminder if you want to ask this show you can also go to ask office hours dot global that's another way it's another portal into our community that doesn't require

29:16 logins very fast you can do that right now by going to office ask office hours dot global and it looks like we've got a QR code right there. Boop! If you just scan that, that will also take you to the right place and you can ask questions to these fine panelists. We've got a great team of people here today to be here and answer those technical production questions,

29:39 anything related to audio and video and streaming and all that sort of stuff. All right, Courtney, what do we got next? Another one from Paul Valhus in Austin, Texas. He says, How much does a talker's distance to the wall behind them matter compared to the wall behind the mic? Which side would you treat first? Go ahead, Courtney. Well, it depends on whether you're at the bottom of the pool or in a room.

30:03 So if you're in a room, sound travels much faster through water than it does through air. Remember, sound travels is about 1,100 feet per second. So the furthest away wall, I would say treat first, which is the one behind you. Because for two reasons. One is it's further away and it's going to have more delay bouncing back into the microphone. And since it's facing the pattern of the microphone where you are, it's facing the same direction you are,

30:31 it's going to have its echo is going to be louder than the sound reflecting off the wall behind the microphone, assuming you have a directional microphone like a cardioid, something that rejects sound from behind it. And the main thing you want to do is break up at least one of the walls. if you don't want to put sound-absorbing material on the wall behind you

30:51 because it's in the shot, for example, at least cover up any parallel walls to that wall to kill the standing waves because standing waves will accentuate or elongate the delay time over a much longer period of time as the sound bounces back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. So you want to break up at least one of those walls to kill the standing waves.

31:17 But I'd say if you're not worried about how it looks, put heavy dampening on the wall furthest behind you and then dampen the wall that is behind the microphone or in front of you, especially if it's much closer to you. It'll have a much shorter decay tone. And Guy? Or sorry, Guy, John. Yeah, I'm opposite of that school's thought. I think your body is typically between you and the wall behind you.

31:46 so you have some natural absorption going on and killing those early reflections, I think probably has some additional benefit of just not letting it disperse around the room and maybe have some diffusion behind you so you can make sure those waves are not hitting your microphone. But I think either way, you should be treating both sides of the room and doing your best to control the space that you live in

32:08 that you want to produce media shows from. Thanks. All right, let's move to the next question, Courtney. Next one comes in from Jerry Hoyle in Wesley Chapel, North Carolina. What's everyone paying for AI plans? Yes, I stole this question from Guy. Guy. Yeah, so this one didn't get answered yesterday. I was just curious because I was about to give up grokbots, but then Craig showed some cool stuff with MCP yesterday in the AI water cooler,

32:41 and it's got me scratching my head because I used to have a payroll of about $80,000. a month. So I'm used to paying people some pretty big money because they deserved it. And then I look at what these bots could do and I'm like, you deserve it too. But I don't have the flow coming in that I used to from running an online store for 18 years. But I'll show you

32:57 my actual figures. So here's what I'm up against. Supergrok Plus is $100 a month. So I'm about ready to figure out if it says you'll keep your access until September 22. Just in the last 24 hours, I've been beating on them pretty good. And I'm pretty confident I'm going to keep that one. My expensive one is Claude. You can see here I just dropped $158 on September 9.

33:17 Usually I'm running about $100 a month. There's been some back in March where I was at $200. I did upgrade. So this was, what do they call that, when you do a partial billing. This is the max plan. So I shifted mid-month because I was working on that MXL project. Oh, wait, I probably shouldn't show that cut. Okay, yeah, just wanted to make sure when I showed that,

33:39 that it didn't show my address. But here is the next one, which is ChatGPT, $21 a month. I did have to buy some API credits, so that one's $8.75. You can see back in July, I paid $105. So there's my actuals. I mean, there is some nonprofit stuff that we could do. I just didn't want to get into it because it's kind of complicated.

34:02 But through that TechSoup and GoodStack, we've been approved to get 50% off. So for ChatGPT, it would be like $10 a month. They don't let you go to the $100 a month plan, unfortunately. But we could do something. I just figured the accounting of it all would probably cost us more than the $10 savings because we'd have to be like, hey, Bob, you didn't pay last month.

34:28 We're going to have to take out your office hours, ChatGPT account. But I would love to be able to have the organization help out in some ways. But because we do have some discounts on the Claude side too, but it just takes somebody to manhandle it. And I'm just not prepared to deal with all the rigmarole of it all. So I'm just putting it all on my personal and not opening it up yet.

34:51 And John? Yeah, so I have a chat GBT $100 and the Claude $100. I mean, I have whatever the Super X account one is, so I get some Grok access from that. I'm heavily considering switching to Cursor. We're using Cursor at the office, and it really is a really great way to kind of get access to most of the models. You kind of miss access for, you know, a couple weeks while a new model gets released,

35:24 and they build out an API and capacity to be able to share that across. But I'm really impressed with Cursor. If you haven't checked it out, definitely. The Grok 4.6 models that they have out there are really powerful, and you can get access to GrokBot as well. So I can put you in contact. I've heard of Cursor. What's the relationship between? So is Cursor run by X?

35:47 Yeah, Cursor was stood up as like a IDE that was AI first. So it had a bunch of ways to integrate all the different AIs directly into the IDE experience. Recently, it was purchased by SpaceX or XAI, whatever, all the different brands that Elon keeps changing the names of. So they recently took it over and moved it into more of a, like a chat experience and then a terminal.

36:18 So there's still an IDE that you can access if you want to, but most people, especially vibe coders, are just kind of living in that CLI world or just directly into that chat experience that they have. So honestly, really, really powerful. And you get access to all the cloud models, the chat GPT models, codex models, even like some of the Chinese models are there too,

36:45 like Kimmy's. It's a really great way to kind of see what is what. And I think the most powerful thing is it has a logic router. So you don't really have to define which model it's going to use. You can just put a question in there and then it's going to analyze that question and you're able to kind of tilt the scale of build,

37:06 say like, you know, I really want intelligence focus or I want cost savings focus. And it's going to route that request to the best possible model and get you an answer quickly. And so if you're, you know, if you don't want to manage like, oh, I'm going to do this one like this and this one like this and all the kind of manual steps

37:20 if you're pinching pennies on your AI costs. You don't have to worry about that with Cursor. It can automatically handle that for you. Yeah, that sounds cool. I'm going to definitely check it out. By the way, does Cursor have level five self-driving yet? No, I'm just kidding. Don't answer. Maybe, you know, once the Tesla cabs are out there, we'll see. Go ahead, Craig.

37:44 Oh, you're muted. There we go. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, a little tiny mute button. So the my my screen just went blank. I'm not sure what happened. I think my browser just crashed. Anyway, I for AI, I've got work and I've got personal and for work. We need to integrate all sorts of AI platforms. So we've got we're spending thousands on cloud on chat GPT and a bunch of others.

38:19 But for personal, I have a $20 account with Anthropic for Cloud, $20 or so for ChatGPT. And more recently, I did the $100 deal for GrokBot. And I might switch to Cursor as well. I don't need the IDE, but I can't really justify $100. I'm splitting that with work, but I really want to explore more of this bot thing. I'm also using tools for like Granola to do meeting notes and whatnot, although I'm looking at switching out to use shadow and a bunch of other sort of AI monitoring type things.

39:12 because some of these costs can go crazy if you're not watching out for it, especially on the work side because you pay for everything you use. But that's about what I use. That's cool. And Guy, you want to come back in? Yeah, yesterday I had maxed out the max plan. And so I was sitting there like, okay, I got a little bit to wait until it resets.

39:32 And I was like, oh, there's no reset. So in ChatGPT, you get two resets so you could actually flip it. And so I was throwing a ton of data at it. when you're throwing 35 million words at something. And it was like, hey, we could do this in waves. Why don't you do it while you're sleeping so you don't max out your plan?

39:48 And it's like, or you could pay $80 to $300 and we could just get this done with the API. And I was like, man, this is crazy. And it goes, or if you had your own machine, we could just with your own model on it, you could just do it for free locally. And it just gets me thinking because we're going to see this as a problem more and more

40:05 because I'm pretty sure all these plans are subsidized heavily right now. and they're so fast. These machines just tear it through stuff. I'm like, wow, when I run something on a local model, it just feels like molasses. I mean, it's so incredibly slow. And so when I do a prompt like in GrokBots and it just takes off, and you could actually, in GrokBots,

40:24 all the bots have their own computer, so you could pull up the screen of the bot. It's pretty wild. So you could see what it's doing. And to watch these things just take off and go, especially if you send five things. And yesterday when I asked Claude to do this thing, it sent 216 agents off at once. So, I mean, that's the level of stuff that you can see when you have a lot of data in a big project.

40:49 But yeah, I'm anxious to see what happens with this new release of Apple and all this on-device stuff because it's going to get exciting when every home has its own Mac Mini or whatever, and it has its own model on it. That's going to be cool because then ideally that cost is zero. You know, like we just download it and we just ask it stuff and it's all on-prem.

41:09 So that would be cool. Something to look forward to. So I've only been using ChatGPT. I'm only paying 20 bucks a month. I feel weird saying that now, seeing you guys spend like $100, $200 a month. I just can't imagine spending that much on an AI. I'm sorry. Well, one thing, try doing this, Alexander. or try downloading the ChatGPT app on your Mac

41:31 and then go into where it says Codex and then actually have it build something or do something agentic where it takes over your computer and you'll watch your tokens just burn. I haven't done that yet. Well, a lot of people don't realize that you could do it, but when you ask it to actually go through something and do something pretty hardcore, it's crazy.

41:52 To see the agentic stuff where it just takes over your computer, like when I was working on a Resolve project earlier this week, asking it to create a moments, the best moment. It doesn't know what the best moments of office hours were for the last week, but it made its best. They just added MCP support in the new result. Yeah, so I was doing some really cool stuff with that.

42:11 And you would be amazed. I could probably pull it up if there's another question, but basically I had it building the week in office hours. So to see it take off and like build stuff in Resolve faster than a human could, it was like a Gatling gun of clips because it actually put all the subtitles too. And I was just sitting there watching it just with my jaw just down because it sucked down all of the YouTubes, all the shows.

42:37 And then it did all the analyzation of the words. So it's going by words. Unlike Opus where it knows the rate and tone of speech, so it uses that as an indicator. Mine's kind of dumb right now. It doesn't know, like, is Chris smiling? Is he laughing? So that's the next thing is how do we – Well, actually, one idea that Claude came up with is in Mukana, if people said highlight or clip, we could then take the or hearted the question.

43:05 So three different ways that we could actually get a highlight reel for the week. So if you were on a shoot or I know Craig was on vacation this last week and you missed a week of office hours, what were some of the things to get you caught up fast? And I know that Leo Mindell and those guys used to do this in after hours.

43:22 It was kind of fun. But I'm like, with AI, this was completely hands-off. Like, I didn't touch a dang thing. And it just took off and built last week, the week before, and the week before. And it just made all these awesome videos with like a cool blue background with the title of the episode, the date, the question. I mean, it's amazing what you could do with Resolve and a nice Claude Max account.

43:51 but you could do some really fun stuff. I am definitely going to, I've tried Codex a little bit, but I haven't used the app on the computer and I definitely am interested in trying the whole MCP thing inside of, I've actually never worked with any, like honestly, I just like recently discovered what an MCP server is and conceptually I understand it, but I've actually never used one.

44:13 So I definitely will have to play with that with Resolve Studio, which I do have a copy of. Go ahead, Craig. Yeah, I was just going to say, just from a cost standpoint, you know, paying more than $20 when you think about an app, $20 a month or a hundred, that's crazy. If you think about the value, you know, as I was talking

44:34 about, what is this time? What is your time worth? If it saves you 10% of your time, what's that worth? And if it creates apps for you that wouldn't have been possible before, what are those worth? And not that I want to give a lot of money to the AI companies, but really think about the value you're getting out of it and not sort of historically what what are services worth?

45:03 And where does that put this? This is a whole new category. And so just value your time, value the the things you're using it for. And, yeah, some people are definitely overspending because they're experimenting. thing. But I also, I don't want to have somebody hold back from 20 to 60 or something, just because they, it seems like a lot of money. It, it may be, but if you lean on it and do some really cool

45:33 things with it, that's worth a lot more than, you know, and you don't have to necessarily stay at the high level. You can look at it each month and say, yeah, I'm good for a little bit. Or I'm going on vacation for three weeks. Let me bump it down. Guy? Yeah, just to come back in, because I see we're lying on questions,

45:51 I wanted to expand on one that gave me what I'd call superpowers. Because I would have never been able to understand what Jonas was talking about with MXL and DMF and this whole EBU thing with what was going on in IBC. So all these acronyms, soups, and I just threw it at Cloud. I said, what could you do with this? And it was like, here, I'll build out what he put up on GitHub.

46:11 And I was like, oh, it's just a clip player and color bars. I'm like, that's no fun. And so I was like, can I take my PTZ camera and integrate that? And it's like, sure, hold on. Let me go into the API here and give me the admin for your camera and send up the feed. And pretty soon it was like, pop.

46:29 And I just see the video playing in the cloud. And I'm like, what the heck? Okay, let's go to the next level. So the next level, next level. Next thing you know, I'm like, hey, what's going on with NMOS and BitFocus buttons? What could you do with that? And the next thing you know, I've got my stream deck with the network controlling a cloud instance, MXL with NMOS support.

46:49 I'm like, this is bananas. And it goes, hey, you're the first person in the world to do this. It was like, this was just released a few days ago. You just downloaded it and you hooked all this stuff together, NMOS, MXL. I was like, okay, this is superpowers. So when you say $200 a month, it's like, yeah, but what could you do with it?

47:08 And how am I going to monetize this? I'm not sure. I mean, I'm like, hey, could I build something that competes with Grass Valley that, you know, cost a quarter million bucks? You know, is it a Cayenne switcher, you know, built out of my spare bedroom? You know, it's just, but again, it's superpowers. When I had Grockbots build me an app for the app store and it actually put it up there, I was like, okay,

47:29 again, superpowers. So to me, it's like, I see in the chat that, was it Tim McCullough's like, I'm here to support authentic intelligence. Me too. Yeah. This teacher was joking. He calls it AI, actual intelligence. But I'm like, I have no clue. Somebody asked the other day, what did you use to write this in? I'm like, hold on, let me check GitHub.

47:50 Because I didn't know if it was Python or HTML or JavaScript or what language. All I did was just type to cloud and say, hey, I want video over here. And I want a button and I want my stream deck to control this thing. And it works. So AI can be helpful to make you realize your dreams or even float above them because there's some stuff that it's come up with that I was like, I didn't do that.

48:13 So yeah, it's amazing. I'm trying to wrap my brain around the fact that we've gone from zero to 100 in like three seconds, like just a few years ago. None of this stuff existed. I'm just trying to understand how we got to this point. I've never seen this kind of rapid acceleration with this, like just technology that's completely unprecedented. It's just changing the way we work. It's changing the way we think. It's changing everything. Some for the better, some for the worse too. Certainly, you know, that's always the concern. Low level jobs, repeated task type jobs are going away. Yes, that's going to happen. It is happening now.

48:56 But I think it's making a lot of people more productive in many, many ways, too. So I find these tools incredibly valuable. What I love about what John built is when we have our mantra here of a global conversation where no one's left out, it's like together we're sitting here building stuff because we're in these different atmospheres of seeing what Zoom ISO does and what the true need is in the marketplace.

49:19 So to me, it's crazy to just think that, yeah, John was able to come up with something because he saw the need. Like he saw how these tools are being integrated in vMix, how they're being used in VizRT. And now he's got kind of a behind the scenes perch and goes, why couldn't my Twitch friends use this for free? Why do they have to pay, you know, $12,000 a year for VizVector or something when they don't need everything?

49:38 They just need, they don't need the craziness of what a broadcaster can do. They just need the basic tool. So it's cool to see the community stepping up. Absolutely. And before AI existed, before these AI vibe coding tools existed, for someone like John, let's just assume you're an experienced programmer. But like even for a small team, before AI existed, that probably would have taken one or two people, maybe what, six months of development of coding and coming up with some kind of alpha or beta that you could actually like use that would be somewhat workable too.

50:14 So it's insane that you can do this in such little time. It's amazing. All right. Just wanted to thank everybody that is watching the show live. If you're tuning in now, thanks for watching Office Hours. This is the show where we answer your technical production questions. And if you find any of these answers useful, if you like what you're watching on this show, you can contribute in various ways. I'm going to explain how you can

50:40 support the show. One of the ways you can do that is just becoming a volunteer. So all the people that you see today on the show, these are all volunteer panelists that show up. We never know who's going to show up every morning and we always get different people coming in so there's different perspectives and a lot of people that come onto the show have different experience in

50:57 in the industry some are video centric some are audio centric some have more networking production related skills so there's so many different people that join the show so you can join us by going to officehours.global slash volunteer that's officehours.global slash volunteer just put in your name and email and then check the boxes on the roles that you're interested in and if you don't want to be on camera that's perfectly fine we have a lot of

51:26 great opportunities if you're looking to gain new skills in an area where perhaps it would be traditionally very very difficult to learn a new skill like how do you become a technical director well you can't just walk in the door and say can you let me cut your show for you with no experience This is the only place that I know of without going to school, post-secondary, without paying a lot of money.

51:49 This is the only place that I know of where you can actually do this and get some training and work with these incredible high-end production tools. So if you're interested in that, I would highly recommend it. Of course, there's other roles available too. We have people that manage the Q&A system. we've got our pre-show coordinator that greets people at the door that checks camera audio

52:10 lighting networking all that sort of stuff to make sure that they're going to look and sound right when they go on to the show there's there's so many different volunteer roles available so i'd recommend you check that out and of course you can show your support by donating to the show by going to officehours.global slash donate that's officehours.global slash donate all right we're

52:30 almost done for today but Courtney let's go to the next question yeah for uh for I read the next question I just want to let guy know that Vladimir Putin enjoys watching the cows out in your pasture in the morning he eats his breakfast you didn't know that Claude was doing that for you but hey those cameras are going out next up is Paul Wall who's in Austin Texas he says iPhone 18 Pro

52:54 has a variable aperture what can't the iPhone still do that Apple needs to add next well there's always something to add go ahead Courtney well you know it's all about the camera now with Apple I think they need to take the next step and make a very optical 5x zoom on their cameras or just do bite the bullet and make it a point and shoot camera with the phone on the back

53:21 of it you know so it has a fold-out screen on the back I'm gonna like the duo and it's basically a point and shoot, you know, a pocketable with a 5X or 10X optical zoom on it, optical image stabilization, you know, all those great things we had in micro four thirds cameras, just make it a camera and you can make phone calls on it if you want, but you know, just take the final step and

53:47 make it a camera. What are these phone calls that you speak of, Courtney? I don't know. Well, now we just have ai translate your text into a voice which it phone calls for you yeah so so the new i haven't i did watch the keynote they they do actually provide on the 18 uh pro there is an 8x optical zoom on it uh what's the sense does anyone know the sensor size i don't know if they disclose

54:17 the sensor size it shows the aperture i don't see the the other issue with the iphone that people don't always seem to talk about is they go, oh yes, it's got aperture blades now. So we can, but we're just remember a lot of, because the sensor size is so tiny on these things, they're still doing a lot. And I mean, a lot of computational photography. And I don't mean that

54:40 to diminish the incredible engineering work that Apple has done on these and continues to impress me year over year with the camera updates. And it's incredible that what they were able to do and put into that tiny package. And I'm definitely going to be due for a new phone this year. So I'd like to try this out. And I think it's cool that you can play with, you know,

55:02 more depth of focus, a shallow depth of focus or having, you know, things more in focus in the background. But there's still a lot of computational photography. And it's, the camera on these phones is not meant to replace a professional full frame camera. Like it is like, don't pretend like that's going to somehow be a full frame camera with an expensive lens.

55:28 It's not going to be that. It's not ever going to be that. But I think for a device that's in your pocket, it does take truly exceptional photos. And the examples that I've seen of the 18 Pro look pretty impressive. And I'm sure actual experienced photographers have probably tested it already, have some really good things to say about it. But Guy, what do you think?

55:50 I just wanted to reply to what Courtney's idea was because there was actually a phone camera. I don't know if anybody remembers it, but it looked like this. And I had one. I still have it. It's somewhere buried in a box. Samsung did it years ago. Yeah. And so I actually took this to NAB one year. And this is the result. You could actually edit on the thing.

56:10 So I had this in After Effects done and it was ready to go. And I shot this interview with Dan Chung. So I edited this while I was walking. I trimmed the clip, and then I shot it with that camera before the show opened. So this was like the first unveil. I had some heads up that this camera was going to get released.

56:35 This was, let me see how long ago this was, 13 years ago. But basically, I interviewed Dan Chung. Let's see, he comes up here in just a second. so it just so happened that my friend dan chung is a magazine reviewer he gave me like the first scoop of what was going on with that camera and this video got like 9 000 views pretty quick

56:58 because everybody wanted to see what was going on so by nine o'clock by the time the show opened i already had a video edited and that that camera has lte on it edited and uploaded while i was walking. So this little camera right here shot that, edited it and uploaded via its built-in 4G LT 13 years ago. So pretty crazy what the technology was even back then, but it was a

57:22 full-on like camera, like you were saying, Courtney, like, well, you know, if Samsung had it four years ago and about another two years, Apple will introduce it as their idea. So, hey, well to be fair to apple i don't think they've ever said that they that some of the stuff that they've done is their idea that they were the first i mean apple has historically never been

57:45 first but what they do is they kind of just wait things out to make sure that the technology like if they're going to do something they're going to wait until they have something that they think is considerably a better user experience than what is already out there. Like they're not gonna do something unless they have a contribution that they think is actually worth doing.

58:08 Go ahead, Guy. Yeah, one more thing on that note. So Samsung and Apple had some patent disputes back in the 90s. And David Brady just sent me a link to this video that he's like, is this Adam Tao in it? It's a Newton video. And one of the things that the guy says in this video, It's like an hour-long documentary. He said, Steve Jobs hated the Newton,

58:31 but it was the Newton that saved Apple because the patent disputes with Samsung, those patents were already for the Newton that became the iPhone. So the iPhone wouldn't exist without the Newton patents. And then the ARM technology, the actual chips in there, they sold those stock for 800 million bucks and that's what kept Apple afloat. So I'll put a link to that documentary in the chat.

58:53 it's it's fascinating to watch and and know about this story behind everything yeah and it looks like the sensor john walls posted uh that the iphone 18 pro and pro max feature a 48 megapixel main camera sensor measuring one over 1.28 inches which is 71.5 millimeters squared there we go uh all right i think that is it for today's show thanks to all

59:20 the panelists for coming in this morning and uh bringing your different perspectives and answering these questions very thoroughly we really appreciate it and of course to you yes you i'm looking at you right now you the producers you put in these questions we wouldn't have a show without you and you always come through for us thank you very much and of course to the back end crew that

59:39 puts the show on all the different roles that uh you know it takes to to put on a show of this kind of level of quality it it's a big undertaking a lot of people don't realize that and until you're behind the scenes you don't know so thank you we couldn't do the show without you and if we were to have travel around the world to answer all these questions virtually according to the famous

1:00:02 talalik traversal that would have been 16 000 miles that's 25 000 kilometers and 123 million bananas for scale this was episode 2370 if you got a little time after the show you can always jump into after hours so we'll see you there bye happy trails vladimir will be looking in good show everyone like he has nothing better to do he's probably in his garden garden i know i've heard he likes gardening he enjoys watching the

1:00:41 cows outside yeah you ever seen that photo have you ever seen that photo of steven seagal standing next to putin and he's like he's he's in his garden and he's like eating a carrot it's the weirdest photo what's up back yeah i gotta go look that up i think it's a i think it's a video putin just hands him the carrot and he's like

1:01:07 and your YouTube feed will be full of Steven Seagal movies from here on out yeah actually I better use a brave incognito like the first three Steven Seagal movies are fantastic come on above the law under siege oh man come on man those are great movies all right we'll see you guys Thank you.