If you had to produce a show today using only gear available 25 years ago, what would be the hardest modern capability to give up?
ASKED BY · Josh Kaufman · PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA · 30 SEP 2026 · ▶ 00:54:15
Undo functionality is the hardest to give up; metadata management and frame-accurate marking throughout the editing process would be the second loss, as it enables massive time savings and precision assembly.
Real-time capture and ingestion would be the hardest loss; modern instant digital workflow is far superior to the tedious tape-based capture methods that required hours of deck scrubbing and pre-roll.
Modern mobile capture like iPhone-to-cloud workflows with instant turnaround and AI-assisted editing represent a quantum leap from the old 35-foot production trucks of the past.
Summarised by AI from what the panel said. Watch the moment for the full answer.
From the transcript.
Machine-transcribed, so it may contain errors. Every timestamp opens the episode at that second.
53:51for a lot of other things you do. Let's go to our next question. Oh, that's me. Josh Kaufman in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania says, If you had to produce a show today using only gear available 25 years ago, what would be the hardest modern capability to give up? Oh, my God. Everybody wants to get on this because it would be difficult. So, Guy punched first.
54:16So, Guy, you're up. Then Sky, then David. Guy, go. Well, I was looking for the video where I made one on the Firestore FS4, which was the first affordable way of digitally capturing DV. as a a stream so it was coming through the firewire port recording onto a file and that was pretty amazing so i'm going to say that these tapes which uh i have oh yeah here
54:44if you guys remember these tapes i do not miss real-time capture this one hour tape would take an hour to capture and i had the bigger ones that were 184 minute dv cam so if you shot a three hour show and especially if you had multiple cameras and you had to ingest all those you were you were camping for a while and then if you had to re uh in final cut if you wanted to bring just your
55:10online edits back on the deck would have to scrub and just go and find that spot and then it would start to capture and it would pre-roll and it was it would go all around hunting for those clips so i don't miss that stuff uh i don't miss doing it at all the other thing i had one more camera around here. Jeez, you know
55:32I got a lot of stuff around here, but I'm missing a big camera. Oh, here it is. Oh, man. There's an ancient one for you. Serious lens on your camera. So this one, this is a studio camera, so it did not, actually, here's the pairing to it. So it did not record. You needed a deck. I have a similar camera like that.
55:54So then this is how you would shade your camera and so you have your iris control and your white balance uh shutter speed all from here remotely so that's a uh something that uh today most people would be like what you how are you having to do all that stuff it's like uh well some of the some of the stuff i do miss
56:14because i could zoom in from this thing and with our a lot of our lenses we don't have the zoom servo capability uh from afar so some of the old stuff right par focal lenses are harder to find Yeah. Sky? I'm kind of going along the line with Guy, though, in the sense of what I wouldn't miss. And again, it's a lot of this stuff that we've been showing.
56:38And I did a show in Boise two weeks ago, and I shot it all on my iPhone because it gives me the quality, the turnaround time, the efficiency. It was up in the cloud. The editor had a hold of it instantaneously. We were turning on a dime. The AI was already set up for what the questions were going to be. So it pre-edited a lot of the rough edit for us that by the time I got done with the show,
57:08I had quality footage that was in full-on 4K that I could now turn into vertical or horizontal for the client. And so to do all of that in the past, I started with, it used to be a 35-foot production truck that you and I made our living on. And David, you supported that. And I got to work in that. And it was a great honor, but a huge challenge.
57:38So I'm kind of reversing it, Josh. Sorry. Thanks for letting me be here. David Brady. Okay, I'm going to answer it verbatim. What would be the hardest modern capability to give up would be undo. There you go. Oh, my God, yes. David for the win. David for the win. Yeah, that's a nice one. For me, the answer is also one word, but it's metadata.
58:04I was so fortunate to have friends like Greg and Philip who were really heavy thinkers in this. And I think I've saved more hours over the last 40 years because they schooled me early on the importance of setting camera metadata, setting metadata throughout the whole editing process. And I've literally done gigs and gotten paid for gigs where because my metadata markup, particularly using things like the keywords, the frame accurate system in Final Cut, when I got everything, when I schooled myself into putting an endpoint at the right frame because I knew where that scene started and putting an outpoint at the end of the right frame and with just enough pads so that I was pretty sure it could cut against the next scene correctly.