All you need is three iPhones

Amos Wenger: I'm hoping to finally fucking do a short one. I'm apologetic in advance. I know people who use content blockers to prevent them from visiting certain websites, like social media or whatever. I'm the owner of my computer, that does not work on me. I know how to disable it. I need to grow a spine or a will, I don't know.

James Munns: I sent a link to what my homepage is and yeah, I can tell you that doesn't work for me.

Amos Wenger: Exactly, all the "get back to work" things don't work.

Amanda Majorowicz: Oh yeah, that one.

James Munns: So James, what do I have for you today? What do you have for me?

Amanda Majorowicz: You have to explain the original title of this because now it doesn't quite make sense.

Amos Wenger: No, I do not. The original title for this episode was "Shooting Yourself: but not in the foot." Oh yeah, the title is still here.

Amanda Majorowicz: That's what I mean. This doesn't make sense but it did before.

Amos Wenger: No, I think it's great. I think we should leave in with no explanations whatsoever. "All you need is three iPhones: but not in the foot."

James Munns: I thought it was like that, just give it 50 amps. You certainly will not regret giving it 50 amps. Exactly. All at once, no circuit breaker.

Amos Wenger: Exactly, I think even just one iPhone in the foot is probably too much, if I'm being honest.

Amanda Majorowicz: Anyways, I'm leaving now, bye.

Amos Wenger: Bye Amanda. So James, I don't know if you recall, I don't know if you were conscious when you said that, but you said you would be interested in walking through my shooting setup, my studio, home studio, camera setup for my videos. Does that ring a bell?

James Munns: I'm intrigued about how you do everything. I think I was asking about your editing workflow, which I saw some shorts on, which looks super cool. But I would also love to know how you do filming as well.

Amos Wenger: Well, okay, yeah, because if you don't remember, if you're not interested, then I just spent three hours making slides for naught. So I hope you're actually interested in this.

Amanda Majorowicz: I am interested.

Amos Wenger: Thank you, Amanda.

Amanda Majorowicz: There we go.

Amos Wenger: Thank you for your support and for talking me out of the original title for this presentation. This presentation is now named "All You Need is Three iPhones, but not in the foot." I started doing videos as a bit in 2019 because someone said, "Wouldn't it be- can you imagine Amos being a YouTuber?" and I was like, "Ha ha, yeah... can you?" And then I made "The thing inside the thing." I don't know if you saw that one.

James Munns: Is there a name for the process of doing something ironically and then it becomes just like an endemic part of yourself? Because I feel like everyone who does things like say 'bro' ironically, it just becomes who they are.

Amos Wenger: I don't love the comparison there, James. I'm not going to lie. But yeah, I see what you mean. Bro, please. My first video that I made seriously on YouTube other than like-- because, okay, because I had my gamedev phase where I was like, look at my game prototype that nobody's going to download or buy. Some people bought games that I made. I owe them money because I was like, "Yeah, yeah, there's going to be updates." There never were updates. There was a Christmas update. It's pretty bad. If you bought Lestac, just hit me up. I'll refund the seven dollars. I know it's been eight years. That's okay. So I made a first video called "The Thing Inside the Thing" because I really like the idea of when you boot up a computer, it shows something on the screen, even though it's not booted into an operating system yet, right. It always broke my brain that on Windows you have to install drivers for Nvidia, but it can already show some things even before you install the drivers and even before Windows boot up. So there's already a computer inside your computer. So that was very fun. And I was shooting that with webcams because I had a Logitech C920, which you can see on the slides. If you go to sdr-podcast/ episodes, you can get that.

James Munns: You can't see me, but that is, I believe, the exact camera. I think I might have a different revision because mine doesn't look exactly like that, but I'm pretty sure it's a C920.

Amos Wenger: You have the C922, but... Very common cameras. Logitech is headquartered in Lausanne, I think, next to where I studied at EPFL. And they make stuff that's sometimes good and sometimes not. My naive line of thought was it's 1080p, so it's going to be good. It was-- chat: It was not good. It is decent for video calls, but it's not really suited for YouTube.

James Munns: Given enough lighting and given enough constraint.

Amos Wenger: I discovered so late that you need light. Anyway, at some point I wanted to upgrade. I was like, oh, I'm going to get a Logitech Brio, which this one does 4K 30fps, but it still has this tiny, tiny little lens. And it says 4K, but like if you plug it in wrong, it'll silently downgrade the quality to some heavily compressed stuff. And it's just not great. And back then I was using OBS, which is which is what I don't know everybody streaming on Twitch does. They use OBS Studio or a fork thereof. There's... I forget the name, but there's like the green logo thingy where they have integration with their own marketplace. It's just all forks of OBS and OBS itself is I hear a pretty dirty code base when it comes to audio and stuff. They recently had an article that was like, "Oh, whoops, for those two codecs, there has been a hundred millisecond delay for 15 years. We just never found out about it." And it's fun. It's a project that needs more contributors that know actually what they're doing. No shade. It's a very useful tool. It's foundational.

James Munns: I would say I use OBS. Anything that I've ever done on YouTube or Twitch has been through OBS.

Amos Wenger: So I stopped using OBS when I started using CleanShot.

James Munns: This is going to be a series of things where you say, "This is what I used to do and it's bad." And I go, "That's cool. That's what I used to do."

Amos Wenger: But you still do. Yeah, I know. No, no, no. OBS is great. I just got tired of setting up-- It's bad for me to capture just a little bit of one interaction when I show like this button. You drag that over here. CleanShot is so good at that because it's good for screenshots, but also for screencast. So you just drag around the area you want to record, it-- This is not an ad for CleanShot, but God damn it. They should sponsor me! I already emailed them like, "Let me pick the codec."

James Munns: Are CleanShot and Cleanfeed related in any way, or do you just have an affinity for tools that start with 'clean'?

Amos Wenger: I do. I-- it's a complete coincidence. Cleanfeed is done by audio nerds and CleanShot is done by, I don't know, one of the many people who-- we've talked about before, have that product sensibility because they use macOS and just like neatly packaged things. Just like making you pay 15 bucks a month for some open source code. That's what the Mac apps are.

People use real cameras

Amos Wenger: So I was using OBS and after that I discovered, hey, people use real cameras. Let's buy a real camera. I already had a Canon something, but it didn't have clean HDMI out. So I bought a Panasonic Lumix DC-GH5. Why do things have two brand names and three model names? I don't know. Welcome to AV and a capture card that goes with it. There's a bunch of cheap HDMI to USB little USB dongles. You can find those on AliExpress for, I don't know, 10 bucks. Most of them are completely crap. They only do 1080p something and they're going to drop out and the call is going to be terrible. Blah, blah, blah, blah. That thing on the screen is on the opposite end. It's probably too expensive for it. I didn't need that. Nobody needed that. I just got obsessed with the idea of 4K 60 FPS. I made a whole video about it. It got 12 views and then I don't know. I moved on.

James Munns: So wait, what this on the screen that you're talking about is a PCI express card. I'm guessing that's an Elgato 4K

Amos Wenger: 60 Pro MK.2 and you cannot use it with OBS. Well, you can, but if you use it with OBS you're limited resolution and frame rate, you have to use the Elgato 4K Capture Utility, which I hate with a passion because it sometimes silently fails. I have somewhere a list of all the reasons why I lost footage and ummm... It's definitely on that list. By the way, the screenshot I found randomly on the Internet of that tool is a bunch of memory corruption.

James Munns: Yeah, just terrible visual artifacts. Like you said that you kept a list and all I'm thinking is like Game of Thrones, like Arya Stark, like listing the people that have caused her pain. And that's you with like dropped frames and lost shots.

Amos Wenger: Yeah, but it's not people. It's just like forgot to turn on the-- because like when you record sound and image separately, you're bound to forget to turn on one of them. I don't know. There's always something. Moving on to mics. What did I use? I never used the mic from the webcam because it was always in a room that's untreated and has rough, well, not rough, but like solid walls. There's a lot of refractions. So just going to talk about a bunch of mics for a bit. And the first thing you need to know about mics is they have polar patterns, which define which direction they're capturing sound from. And all the mics we're going to see today, well, most of the mics we're going to see today have a cardioid polar pattern. And for those of you who are not looking at the slide right now, how can we describe that? They mostly pick up sound from the front and try to reject sound from the back.

James Munns: It's an upside down figure eight where the bottom of the eight is, or in this case, the top of the eight is much bigger.

Amos Wenger: I see a butt, but...

James Munns: Yeah, it's fair. It's a very lumpy butt. Well, no, I guess the cardioid pattern. Yeah, it's a butt. I was looking at the super cardioid and the hyper cardioid.

Amos Wenger: Yeah, the first mic I used is a mic I bought to record music. It's the RØDE NT1-A. Do NOT buy this mic. First of all, because that's not what it is anymore. But second of all, because they released the RØDE NT1 without the A. I don't know how it works at RØDE. Fun fact, you don't say Röde. I just watched a short by some French guy, the Audiofanzine channel, and they say the founder of RØDE. Like because RØDE is like Rode with the O stricken. So you think it's from some Nordic language or whatever. No, you say it 'Röde' instead of Rode-- They just did the slash for stylistic reasons.

James Munns: This isn't like when we put cool umlauts on every vowel just for comedic effect.

Amos Wenger: No, it's not an umlaut, it's the thing. If it was, then yeah, it would be a Röde! But it's just a slash and it's not even from Sweden or whatever.

Amanda Majorowicz: You know where they are from? This was a question on a pub quiz from last week and I got it correct.

Amos Wenger: I just looked it up earlier today. They're from Australia? New Zealand, I think. Pff same...

Amanda Majorowicz: Same!? Oh, God.

James Munns: Oh, you just upset like four people who are very far away from us.

Amos Wenger: I have seven more letters to write by hand. I'm so sorry.

Amanda Majorowicz: Anyway, it's fun fact from me. You're welcome.

Amos Wenger: Beautiful fact, beautiful factory. Beautiful landscapes, things trying to kill you. I don't know. Same thing. So don't buy the RØDE NT1-A because they came out with the RØDE NT1, which has a built-in USB audio interface and a floating point. Yeah, 32-bit floating point support. And it's just nicer. Anyway, this is a studio condenser mic. It has a cardioid polar pattern. And the acoustic principle is pressure gradient. James, do you want to see a nice little diagram of how that works?

James Munns: I would love to see a nice little diagram of how that works. Oh, wow.

Amos Wenger: Here we go. Can you describe it for me, please?

James Munns: I see some greens that are coming in. They're hitting a membrane and what looks like a... It says bias, I guess that... Well, it looks like either a cell or a capacitor pattern going into an operational amplifier. That is just marked gain and signal processing.

Amos Wenger: I know some of those words.

James Munns: So yeah, it looks like sound comes in, crushes the box, and then there's a little equalization vent that takes it out.

Amos Wenger: Okay, so there is a membrane. It's the important part, I think. And when sound indeed comes in, it makes the membrane vibrate. And that membrane is charged with an electrical voltage, which means you need phantom power. So I'm going to go to the next slide for a little bit. You know that 48 volts little button that you have on the Scarlett Solo that I made you buy? Yep.

James Munns: And I had to look up whether I needed it for my mic, and my mic does not need it.

Amos Wenger: And do you?

James Munns: No, I do not.

Amos Wenger: Because your mic is not a condenser mic. Your mic is a dynamic mic.

James Munns: Yes.

Amos Wenger: Like the SM7B and you have an SM57, I think?

James Munns: It's the... whatever the round one... I always get the 58 and the 57 confused, but it's the round one, not the flat one.

Amos Wenger: I don't know.

James Munns: It's the one for singing, not for miking up drums.

Amos Wenger: I see. I have an SM7B. They have... It's just more expensive than the one you have, but for no good reason, because you can EQ your way from one to the other, which I learned too late. I spent useless money. Oh, this whole presentation is like, I regret spending money on things, but at least I learned a lesson. Anyway, I started with the NT1-A, which is a condenser mic. The problem with condenser mics is that they tend to capture a lot of room tone, like a lot of ambient noise, which is great if you are in a studio that sounds great. Like, you're on a soundstage or whatever. The space you're in is designed to perform music, and then you bring one of those in. It's going to capture exactly what you hear. But if you're like me in a very large, weird-ass living room slash kitchen slash TV room, whatever, it's very bad and you want something a lot more focused, like the RØDE PodMic, which is completely acceptable to start with. I think I would recommend it. It's under a 100. Or the SM7B, which is what you see everywhere on every podcast, and it's too expensive for what it is. But I just got tired of messing around with sound. I was like, I'll just get what everyone has. You do need the rest of the things that go with it, like an external audio interface. Sometimes you need a FetHead or a Cloudlifter to add some gain. I used to use them, but actually the Scarlett Solo, if you just max out the gain, it's actually okay. It's just... They have the exact same pattern, but both the SM7B and the RØDE PodMic are designed to try to only let in sound from the front. There's physical designs inside of them and the principle that does it so that it's more focused on what's close to it directly.

James Munns: What's really fun is these gain pattern diagrams. The only other place that I've seen them is for radio stuff, including Wi-Fi access points. If you go to the Ubiquiti website and go and look at any of their Wi-Fi access points, they'll have emission pattern diagrams like this that show you what direction they have the strongest radio signal in. You can figure out whether you should mount it flat on the wall or on the ceiling, depending on where you are oriented to them. Because they're exactly that. They're the gain either on transmission or reception of some energy source, whether that's a pressure wave for sound or a radio wave for Wi-Fi or any of these. You'll see these polar emission pattern diagrams in a bunch of different places.

Amos Wenger: Yes, it's waved all the way down. I also have a nice little diagram for those dynamic microphones. The way they work is you also have what is also called a diaphragm. No, it's not a membrane this time. It's a diaphragm that is attached to a coil. When the diaphragm vibrates in response to sound, it makes the coil move around the magnetic core and that generates electromagnetic flux. Which then is, yeah, then you have signal as voltage, I would imagine. I know so little about these things. I started learning about them. I got bad grades. I moved to computer science and I haven't gotten back to it yet.

James Munns: Hell yeah.

Amos Wenger: I just did a deep dive on sound itself, but not this part of sound. I thought it might be a fun project to make your own mic, like your own shitty mic. That'd be very fun. I have no idea what it takes though, but apparently not much looking at this.

Slide 12, no iPhones yet

James Munns: So I like that the title of this was "You Need Three iPhones."

Amos Wenger: We're on slide 12.

James Munns: And now we've gotten into the physical theory of microphones.

Amos Wenger: We haven't, yeah.

James Munns: And we're about to look at lights.

Amos Wenger: And a professional mic and some lights. Yeah, yeah, let's talk about lights. So those mics, okay, so this light is there to explain that I was doing everything from my desk. Because at first I used a webcam. The webcam sits atop the display. And then you just kind of add the mic on the side with a mechanical arm like the RØDE PSA1, which is the thing everyone has, or the PSA1+, which is the same with a little sleeve that hides the metal arms. And then if you're an idiot like me, you realize, "Oh, I need light!" The thing that goes in the camera that produces the image is light. I need light. And the shitty IKEA light bulb I have at the ceiling is not really enough. So you get a set of softboxes. If you're an idiot like me, you get some LED ones that do RGB, but also have this little very annoying cooling system. So you get the "Eeee!" The background of all your recordings. And then you get one like the one I showed on the slide, an Interfit F5. Don't buy it because you can't buy it anymore. They stop making it. I don't know why. It's just five CFL bulbs in a trench coat-- in a softbox. And softboxes are just really black fabric with something reflective inside. And then in the direction in which you want the light, you have two different layers of white fabric. So it really diffuses the light a lot. You don't get any sharp edges. You get a soft light.

James Munns: For everyone I've talked to who does video, they say that lighting is... A lot of people focus on cameras and other things like that when they start off. And that lighting is like... When you're learning how to cook, it's like adding the right amount of salt. Like everything else: your chopping technique, how you cut things all come second to just figuring out the right amount of salt. And that video is all figuring out the right amount of light for your setup.

Amos Wenger: As you can imagine, having two... Those are actually pretty big. Those are like as big as me. They're like over two meters. Having those set up around your desk means that your desk is taking the space of like four desks. Because you need to now pull your desk away from the wall. Because you need space behind the desk to put those at a distance so that they light you up correctly. So what I used to do is I used to set everything up and tear everything down. And it took a lot of time. And you get some hacks like this slide shows a collapsible green screen from Elgato. I actually like this one. The only problem with that one is that it's too small, but they have an XL version. Which I didn't know existed when I bought this one. And also shown on this slide are some Elgato key lights, which are much smaller than the soft boxes I saw earlier. And obviously not as soft, but for... I don't know, for a webcam if you have one or two of these, you're in a good place. So after a lot of times of just shooting in my living room around my desk, having to deal with getting rid of the fridge sound or the cats fighting or whatever. I decided I would just use my guest bedroom to set up an actual studio. So that I can shoot, stop doing something else, come back days later. And it's exactly the same setup, it's exactly the same lighting and everything. It's kind of treated for sound a little bit, not really. And so this is what I came up with.

What do I look at?

Amos Wenger: Question one, what do I look at? When you're on a desk, you have a computer. So you can look at the computer screen. It's not great to do that. If you look at my first videos, you can see that I'm looking at the computer screen and the camera is up here. So you can see that I'm not looking at the camera.

James Munns: You're always looking like 10 degrees down from where you really want to be looking.

Amos Wenger: So the fix for that is the teleprompter, which is really just a pane of glass, 45 degrees. And then you can read what's on a little tablet or phone, which lays horizontally on a little holder. And then you have the 45 degree pane of glass. And then behind the pane of glass, you're looking into the camera that's looking back at you. And that's the first teleprompter I bought. It's a Glide Gear TMP 100 or TMP 50. I forget which one. And I bought a cheap Android tablet just for that. You can do like $100 bucks, just so it's big enough to serve it. But you don't need the fancy screen, it's just scrolling white on black text. And I got one of those little remote pads, which act as a Bluetooth controller. So I can hold something in my hand and like scroll the script and it comes with its own shitty little app. It's not very good, but it did the job.

iPhone #1: Teleprompter

Amos Wenger: What I actually use today, I gave up on the little Android tablet that's sitting in a drawer somewhere. I just use an iPhone XR, which I'll have a list of prices later on in my last slide. But it's not that expensive. And I have the little, what are they called? Bluetooth pedal page turner thingies that professional musicians use to turn pages because they have both hands on their instruments.

James Munns: And this is our first iPhone. So we've now reached the first of three. So this is the ones that are in cahoots. This is the first one. This is the one that is showing us text and listening to a Bluetooth page turner and sitting behind the teleprompter.

Amos Wenger: Yes, not behind. It's...

James Munns: ... underneath, I guess. Yeah.

Amos Wenger: I see it. I'll show you a shot. Also importantly, I've given up on teleprompter apps because essentially what they do is they just mirror text the right way so that when you look at it in the mirror, it looks the right way around. But you can do that with CSS. And I really like writing content in my blog, as you've noticed. So I just use my blog. Here's a little Easter egg. If you go on my website, any article, and you tap the 'estimated reading time' five times, it's going to switch to presentation mode, which forces dark mode, does the mirroring thing, makes fonts larger. Amanda and James are both trying it out.

James Munns: Yeah, I'm sitting quietly because I'm now, I'm now-- I have to go test this out. Okay, so hold on. Let's go to the most recent article. And then what is it? The reading time 12345. Oh, wow. Look at that! Although mine's not black and white. It is reverse though, but I still get full color reverse.

Amos Wenger: Yeah, no, no, it's not black and white. It's forcing dark mode.

James Munns: I guess I'm always in dark mode.

Amanda Majorowicz: I'm also always in dark mode. This is crazy. Wait, how do we undo it now?

James Munns: Although pressing it five times does not bring it back.

Amos Wenger: No, no, no, you have to reload the page.

Amanda Majorowicz: Oh, okay. Thank you!

Amos Wenger: So this slide now shows what I'm actually looking at. You can see it is this little tablet. I don't know, a little drawer or whatever. And it's just sitting on top. When I look straight at the camera, it is right side up or like whatever. It's flipped. It's readable. And yeah, and the pedal doesn't actually go next page, previous page. It just gently scrolls. So I'm usually standing with my big toes standing on either pedal so I can just move them a little bit. And when I have shoots of like an hour, two hours, it's just really bad. Your big toe is supposed to be in contact with the floor.

James Munns: Say how's your ankle? Like how's your ankles doing?

Amos Wenger: Really bad!

James Munns: Yeah, your shins probably burn. You're going to have like very defined shins after that.

How am I mic'd?

Amos Wenger: I have to take breaks. I have to stretch. It's terrible. Okay, next up, how I'm mic'd. This one's a fun one. I went crazy over the years trying to get something to work. So there are shotgun mics that are designed to go directly on your camera. So when I use the camera, I bought a RØDE VideoMic. It didn't work for me.

James Munns: So, Amos, what is a shotgun mic and how is it different than the other mics that we talked about?

Amos Wenger: We'll see the pick up pattern later. Well, it also tries to pick up something from the front and tries to reject the sides. But it's really designed so you can aim somewhere far enough and like get that sound.

James Munns: It's the sniper rifle of mics.

Amos Wenger: Yeah. In some movies, you can actually see them using a sniper. They're like, "What are they saying in that window?" They just aim the thing in the window. I have no idea if that's accurate or not. I don't know. Maybe I just wasn't good with EQs back then or something, but I didn't have a very good experience. I think this would be great at a wedding. Just going around, aiming at people and then you would get mostly what they say with a bit of what everyone also says. You get the ambience, but you can still make out what people are saying. If you do have the time, it's better to mic people up with a lav, a lavalier mic that you clip yay high... about a chest level. Not up on the collar, but like lower. So you get some some resonance from the chest. You can do it underneath the clothing, but that's going to muffle sound a bit. So you're going to have to compensate for that and EQ. There's a bunch of ways. There's very good videos on how to mic up people. Problem. It's not great to do that inside and also like good lav mics-- So the bit that actually looks like a mic has a cable and everything on that slide are expensive. The Wireless Go 2 kit that you can see here with two transmitters and one receiver is expensive ish, but it's so good and comes with built in mics and everything. I really love that. There's so many so many good features on that thing. But the actual mic part, the tiny tiny tiny bit like it's very expensive to get a good one. And I think the ones that I had are just not very good. But you can see people using them all the time on YouTube. If you've ever seen someone with a kind of little square box hanging off of their clothes or a collar or something, that's usually either a RØDE Wireless Go

James Munns: RØDE has one or like DJI has the other like pill shaped one.

Amos Wenger: RØDE Wireless Pro or DJI. Yeah DJI, DJI actually... I think they make better ones. I think I bought the wrong brand.

James Munns: We went we went with the RØDE Wireless Pro. So like the exact ones you have on your screen right now. So there's like one at the conference episode of Chats with James. And that's what we use to record that.

Amos Wenger: Yeah, what I discovered when I did my shoots is that when I mic'd myself up with the lav mic, I got worse sound than just using the built in mic on the transmitter. So that's why you see people with the visible transmitter hanging out. The thing I have on the slide is a short from Roman Doduik, is a French comedian. And yeah, you see those everywhere and you see them in one of my videos as well. I don't actually know if this one's released or not. I forget. But yeah, you can see not only my Wireless Go II transmitter, but also a little old bonnet, a little wind shield protection going on. I have two of those on this slide. James, do you know what they're called?

James Munns: The big one is called a dead cat and the little one is called a dead kitten.

Amos Wenger: Exactly.

James Munns: Yeah, I learned this when we bought this. They're like the wind protector things and they're very lovingly called. I'm sure there's a nicer term for them, but...

Amos Wenger: I don't know. The dead kitten thing makes me laugh every time. They're fake for don't don't be scared. I even have one for my portable recorder. We'll actually get to it. Moving on. I essentially I got tired of having to record sounds separately. I got tired of having something that I can accidentally put my hands in front of or like tap with my hands because I'd like to move around a lot. I got tired of having friction against my clothing. You can hear that very, very much with a lav mic. And it just didn't sound very good compared to a nice dynamic mic like the SM7B. You get this when I do voiceover, I get this nice full voice deep voice. And then when I moved to the mic, it sounds like baby's first YouTube video. So...

James Munns: Oh! I learned the name for this. It's the proximity effect in that when you are so close, the pressure wave actually gives a lot more bass into the mic. Where if you're further away and you don't get the actual like pressure impact that you would from direct proximity, then you have to EQ it to almost match that. But that's why a lot of these like cardioid mics and things like that sound so like full and bassy when you're close to them, because you're actually like you're close enough that you're pushing enough pressure on them.

Amos Wenger: Yeah, the waves of different frequency don't travel exactly the same way or react to the same way to the room and whatnot. So I eventually bought-- well, actually, I bought it a while ago when I tried it once and it didn't sound good. So I gave up and it gets sat in the drawer for two years. But then I brought it back recently. A shotgun mic, I got the cheapo version by RØDE. It's an NTG4+. Again, weird naming conventions. The NTG4 is not that expensive. The NTG3 is a lot more expensive and NTG2 is like I need to take out a loan. But it's, you know, I got this nice shock mount to avoid vibrations, even though it's just sitting on a-- this would be more relevant, I think, if someone was actually holding a boom pole and we were just walking around, then it would make sense to have a shock mount. But this fixed setup, it doesn't really make sense. This is what it looks like. You just plug-- It's exactly the size of an XLR plug. Well, a little more because you have to fit it in, obviously. But yeah, you just got this long shotgun like cylinder and then you just plug an XLR cable into it. And it does need power. So it has something interesting where you can plug it with not USB-C. I wish. You have to plug it with, I think mini or micro... It has to be micro USB, I think. And then you can charge it up and you have 150 hours of it. Or you can power it with phantom power, which we've seen. The plus 48 volts. So I actually never charge it. I just have phantom power coming through XLR. And that's... that's great because batteries are the enemy... batteries are the enemy. I will show you. The problem is now you need to connect that XLR thing to something and it's certainly not going to be a camera. It's not going to be an iPhone or whatever. You have to be something that has an XLR input that can provide that phantom power. And one of those things is the Zoom H4n Pro Black, which has. So on this side, you can see that it has mics going that way. And that way they're kind of crossing. They're going to X pattern. They're called XY mic. I'm not sure why, but they do a great job at recording stereo. It's actually very funny to just hold one of these and have the-- have to do headphones plugged in and just go around and listen to the world in stereo because it's like having ears, but more sensitive, I guess. It's a very funny sensation. It does come with its own little dead cat. I included the accessories, but it's actually big because you have to cover both the X and Y mics. You have to stretch it over. It's really weird.

James Munns: These are the kind of mics that like the first ones that were portable enough to get good recording portably. And they were used for a lot of bootleg recording of concerts because they were small enough to fit in pockets and things like that, but still high quality enough to get like solid bootleg recordings.

Amos Wenger: That makes sense. I've seen them used mostly for well, recording ambient sounds. You go into the forest near a river, get some birds, whatever. And those work off of two AA batteries, which is great when you want to move around and not great when you just want a freaking home studio set up that reliably works because the rule of maximum annoyance. One of your things will be out of battery by the time you need to shoot.

James Munns: I was enough of a theater kid that I remember like for mic packs and stuff like that. That was like one of the big things that the tech team would always have is they would just have walls of double A's and nine volts and whatever else all the mic packs required. Because at any moment you had to be like-- or before every show, you would just cycle all the batteries so that you didn't run out, even if you could probably go two or three shows, like you don't want to be mid something and then totally drop your recording or your mic or whatever.

Amos Wenger: And that's funny because sometimes I get emails from people like, "Oh Amos, I would like to like work with you, learn from you!" or whatever. I'm like, "Okay, are you ready to charge batteries?" Because that's what I do. That's the-- there's so much to the job. So like thinking of how are you going to plug things in and like figuring out how to hang your lights so they don't fall off and kill everyone. That's just you really-- But anyway, yeah, batteries are a big, a big bad thing. So we have these fake ones. We have fake... It's called a DC coupler on there. I'm actually happy with that job. It's a thing that has the exact shape of the battery, but there's a little cable coming out going into a power supply. And this is how it looks in situ in the DC-GH5 This is one for my camera. And you can see that the camera manufacturer knows about it, even though they don't sell that, I think. But you have this little how do you describe it, James? Help me out here.

James Munns: It's like the mouse hole that you see in every comic. It's like that little round corner in there. And if you've ever wondered why your battery door has like a little rubber door on it, it's exactly for this. And I have one of these for my cameras as well. And I realized I was like- oh, I had never noticed that before. But it's for exactly this.

Amos Wenger: But it got me nervous to use those because you're buying a camera that costs upwards of a thousand and then you're buying a fifteen dollar

James Munns: Ali Express

Amos Wenger: adapter like this

James Munns: USB adapter

The most cursed USB cable

Amos Wenger: which could fry your thing. Yeah, I was very nervous the first time, but it works fine. And so for the the Zoom H4n Pro Black recorder, you can actually see from that angle, you can see the XLR inputs between both XLR inputs. You have a power input. It doesn't just run off of batteries. And so I bought the most cursed USB cable you've ever seen, probably. Can you describe it?

James Munns: Oh, I this... we will get into some cursed stuff. Yeah, this is like a traditional USB to a barrel jack where you have like five volt-- because everything uses a five volt barrel jack. And if you just need five volts, you can do that. The really cursed ones are the ones that look like this, but aren't really five volts. Or they do like cursed things like boost the power. Or now that USB-C is a thing, you can use USB PD and you can get up to 20 volts on these barrel jacks. And barrel jacks have no actual standard for what their voltage is. By convention, the 2.1 millimeter ones tend to be five volts. But whether it's center positive or not center positive and what the actual voltage is all very, very cursed.

Amos Wenger: I learned that at a very young age because we had some of those universal power supplies. And I learned that you can go like get the voltage from 1.5 all the way up to 9. I think it was from our model. And then you can also switch the polarity. And I think I killed a couple of devices just by getting it wrong. Just go pop. And it goes like, which one was it again? Oh, yeah. OK, so let's say you do all this, right? You have your you have your portable H4n recorder. You plug your shotgun mic into it. Everything is charged, everything-- Or you use those- those power cables. Then you have the audio that comes from the camera and you have the audio that comes- the good audio, the audio you want. So how do you sync that up? Well, professionals have time code. I don't know exactly how it works, but all their equipment is connected together. And there's something that generates the clock signal and they record it. And so to align it, they just say the different clips align them with the time code. I don't have that. You definitely cannot rely on the daytime of any given device, especially battery powered ones. There's no way this is precise enough. So you do it by waveform or by whatever feels right. And you get it wrong a lot. Again, if you go to my early videos, you can see delays is large as 200 milliseconds. Now I'm pissy if I'm looking at something and it's 15 milliseconds off. I'm like, no, no, no, let me- let me go in the setting. Something's not right.

James Munns: You've caught that on some of our stuff. I feel like one of the older tools we had did that once. And you're like, "No! I can tell! There's 50 milliseconds. It's not right..." And I'm like, oh, OK.

Amos Wenger: Oh, and you can't really, really do waveform because if your camera is further away, it actually takes time for sound to travel all the way to the camera. So you have to choose like what feels right and what is actually right. You have to choose a compromise because I don't know, it's complicated. But yeah, the slide is of the DaVinci Resolve timeline with two audio clips. And you can see actually the one that says external mic. You can see there's fewer... There's less noise than on the iPhone mic in the middle. And if you see there's... there's only one noise and there's like two or three at the bottom on the- on the yellow timeline. That's because, yeah, the iPhone picks up a bunch of stuff and the shotgun is sitting literally just above me, just out of frame with the safety margin because I'm not crazy. And I found a better way. I don't have to do AV sync again in my life. This is the whole reason I made the slide. Not just because he asked that because I discovered something. So I have my shotgun mic go into the Zoom UAC-232 external USB audio interface, which I originally bought because I wanted to test out floating point audio. Why did I want to do that? Because on the list of things that maybe lose recordings, clipping is definitely one of them. It's like, "Oh, I can't hear anything! Better turn it up!" And then you're clipping and then the entire recording is ruined. You can see actually on this slide 32 bit float is enabled. They have a little marker for it. I think it's one of the first USB ones that are consumer grade. Sounds weird because Zoom is definitely released. Like the F6 could do that. Some portable ones could do it before. But I think it's the first consumer grade. You can just plug it into your computer and it works. So the shotgun mic goes into that Zoom UAC-232. And then what's really interesting about this one, and that I can't do with my other ones, which are Scarlett Solos, Scarlett Duo, is that it has two USB-C inputs. One for signal or data rather and one for power. So you can barely see it from that shot. But if you look next to that, you can see there's two cables going in. The left one says DC 5 volt and the right one has the little USB symbol. And so you don't have to plug both in. If you plug only one into a computer, only the data one to the computer, it'll work. But if you use this accessory, the camera accessory for iPhone, that the male end goes into the iPhone is a lightning cable. And then you have three... Is there a better terminology that male-female that we've come up with in the year 2025?

James Munns: Yeah, plug and receptacle.

Amos Wenger: Plug and receptacle. OK, cool. So the plug is lightning. It goes into the iPhone and then you have three receptacles. Two are USB-A, correct me if I'm wrong, and one is lightning as well. So you can have two USB-A accessories connected and also still provide power to the phone, which is important again when you shoot for a long period of time. And that USB-A cable goes all the way to the external USB audio interface. I was kind of-- I thought about it. I was probably having a nap and I was like, "But could I? Like, what... would it just work? It's just USB, right? I don't know what the iPhone has drivers for. And yeah, it does work. It does work. And you can even get floating point audio captured directly from the- this-- So this is a screenshot of the Blackmagic camera app on iPhone. And you can see the audio source is not set to iPhone microphone. It's set to Zoom UAC-232. So I get floating point audio synchronized from my nice little mic directly in the recording as a single file. I never have to-- It's never out of sync.

James Munns: So this is our this is our second iPhone. So the first one is a teleprompter. The second one is a receiver.

Amos Wenger: It's a camera, but... I'll show it. We're getting there.

James Munns: OK, camera and receiver

How am I lit?

Amos Wenger: camera and monitor. Essentially, those are the three iPhones. Teleprompter, camera, monitor. Yeah, yeah. For some reason, this is where I put slides in about lighting. Lighting is hard. As you said, it's probably one of the most important things. And I realize that super late. What we see on the slide here is that I have glasses. And the problem when you have glasses is that light reflects on them. So you have coding on glasses. They try to remove reflections mostly for visual comfort as a glasses wearer. But while you are shooting your face... How do I say this? When you're-- when the camera films your face, there's a lot of reflections if you have hard lighting. And I do because I have this couple of key lights, which are just big LED panels with a little plastic white plastic sheet on... in front of it. It's not soft light. I don't have room. I simply do not have the physical space for soft boxes in the guest room. It is-- I'm too tall and the room is not big enough.

James Munns: I can't remember if it was you or someone else who I was talking to who is saying that they actually kind of like the ring light look, that it's like now it's becoming like familiar and kitschy, I guess? Or not kitschy, but like familiar and comforting?

Amos Wenger: In the eyeballs, yeah.

James Munns: Yeah. Having the ring light in your glasses or your eyes or whatever.

Amos Wenger: But in the glasses, I don't know.

James Munns: I guess you do-- You must not have been you because you do not subscribe to that opinion.

Amos Wenger: I've been trying very hard to get rid of it. One of the things I've done so you can see this is what my actual shooting station looks like. You can see that the ceiling is not... it's not right. It's not flat. It's angled. And so my first thought was like, well, if I get my key lights aimed at the ceiling, then the whole ceiling is like one big softbox, which not really because you still have a bunch of stands and whatnot that obstruct the light coming back. And you can actually see that in the reflection. So you see all the it's it's weird. It's not great. So what I do have right now is it's called clamshell lighting like a- like a shell. You can open and close. You get something from the bottom, something from the top. Usually at the bottom, you would not have a secondary light source like I do. You would have a reflector, but I don't have a reflector. So I just have another key light that I'm almost stepping on. It's bumping against my belly when I shoot. It's just like just below my chin and it's lighting me from below so that I don't look like I'm telling a horror story at a campfire while the opposite of that because it's coming from above. Whatever! It's balancing the light a little bit because if it only comes from above the shadows are terrible. And I look like I've slept even less than I actually have. So the top lights, those are all controlled by HomeKit, by the way. It's all Apple. I just I come in. I say, "Siri, I'm going to record" and then it turns on the lights and "On Air" sign. It's very nice. And it works pretty well. The bottom light is at like three percent, I think, out of 100 percent. But it makes all the difference. And this is what you get. If I look straight at the camera, you can barely see-- You can see a hint if you zoom in. You can see a hint of the bottom lighting in the bottom. But it's not distracting. You can look me in the eye. I look well lit. I wouldn't say look good because I've been working too much. And you can see that in my eye, the bags underneath my eyes. But the lighting is OK.

James Munns: I have to ask, how much do you have to up your glasses cleaning game? Like, do you have to get like special microfiber and cleaning...?

Amos Wenger: I have a lot of microfiber. I own glasses for a long time

James Munns: Because I come in here and I have a window behind my monitor. And a lot of times I just work in my living room, which isn't like super directly lit. Anytime I come in here and the windows open and I get light directly on there, I'm like, "Oh, my glasses are awful right now!"

Check out the difference!

Amos Wenger: I have a bunch of microfiber cloths. It's just around the guest bedroom. Sorry, the studio. It's still not enough to have this clamshell lighting where I have light coming from above and from below. So nothing directly in my eyes. because I move around. I look up, I look down. So if I look up, you can definitely see the top lights. But what you're seeing in that slide on the left hand side is the unprocessed raw image from the camera. Not raw, not unprocessed. There's a lot of processing, but like not color graded in DaVinci Resolve. And on the right hand side, it's just a single effect called Despill. And it's designed for green screen. When you have a green screen behind you, there's light that goes on the green screen. It bounces off of it. It becomes green light only and it reflects on you. And then the green spills onto you. And so it's trying to remove that. And by doing that, it's actually changing the color of the clothes you wear. So obviously you cannot wear green. But even if you wear something else, it's going to become a slightly different shade because it thinks it's green from the green screen when it's just the color of your clothing. But as you can see, you can still tell the shape of the light, but it's much less distracting, right? It's now kind of skin colored. If you're just, I don't know, I'm moving around a lot. It's very fast. It's not as distracting as this big green aggressive lighting. So I'm really happy with that. I thought about it, I think two weeks ago. I was like, "Hey, there's a Despill now. What if it? Oh, wow, that's great." So with those two things like the light placement plus this, I'm fairly happy. The next time I have uncontrollable urges to spend money, I will get this. Well, it's two things.

James Munns: I love when you get distilled just to the like, you can tell it's just a Cree LED element and then there's a heatsink with probably a fan on the back of it. And then, yeah, a mount to the...

Amos Wenger: This one is fanless. That's why I haven't bought it yet is because it's actually expensive.

James Munns: Oh, is it fanless? OK, then it's probably a big chunk of aluminum.

Amos Wenger: This one is fanless. It's completely silent. This is what I want. I don't want-- because when you're outside, it doesn't freaking matter. The um... ground noise? The base level noise? I don't know. It's already so high.

James Munns: It'll usually be like high frequency transformer noise or fans or you get what's called coil whine through inductors and stuff like that.

Amos Wenger: So, yeah, because the studio is so small because you can hear everything inside of there, I have to turn off the AC obviously when recording, even though, you know, the perch, the shotgun mic is sitting right above me. I still try to avoid any... I would get one of those silence LED protectors, which has a Bowen mount. And then on that, I would screw in a collapsible lantern softbox also by Godox that I think it would look great. Honestly, it would be like softer lighting, but there's many things I want to buy. But yeah, lighting is important. Now that I have this lighting, which is very, very close to my face. I have to make an effort not to look too much up or down. I don't have the problem anymore where the black screen, which is a large piece of black clothing behind me, is also lit. So I used to have to this is a steam de-wrinkler. You can get one of those for 20 bucks in the supermarket, just to get your... if you-- don't want to iron fully your shirt if you're traveling, whatever. You just de-wrinkle them. I used to do that for like an hour before shooting. Just de-wrinkle my black screen. Now I don't have to if you go back to the you can't even see the screen. I didn't-- I used to play with the levels.

James Munns: It looks green screen almost like you green screen to like a black background onto it.

Amos Wenger: Yeah, and that's because there's almost no light that goes all the way to the screen or like compared to the light that bounces off of my face. It's nothing. So I used to have to play with the levels a lot. I could compress like play with gamma and gain and stuff. Just exposure, but only for the dark parts in DaVinci Resolve. But now I don't have to! Just the lighting gets you there and I didn't want to leave it. It took me, I guess, six years to learn the lesson. Also, if we go back to the the photo of my setup, where is it? Yeah, this photo. I don't know if-- it's hard to tell... So you can see that there's a- there's a boom pole for the shotgun mic, right? There's a stand. It goes... It's upright. And then there's something that can rotate in the X axis, so that it's bent a little bit. It allows the mic to move away from the stand so that it sits above me. Right? This stand cannot be physically where I am. It has to be offset. So it offsets the mic to be above me. That's one of the two of those kind of stands that I have that I think is called a pole. And then I have another one.

James Munns: I've always heard this is just like C stands like they're just the like what you use for everything.

Amos Wenger: I need one of these, yeah yeah. But instead I have this thing that just bends and it can offset it. But if you look at the top light, it's on one of those as well. But there's usually there's a counterweight because the light is pretty heavy. So you would have the light on one end and then the other end you would have some just a bag of weights. I don't know that keeps it in balance, but I don't. So it's actually resting on my teleprompter. Otherwise it would fall down.

James Munns: Oh nice, yeah.

Media management

Amos Wenger: It's terrible. I don't sleep well at night because I'm like, "Everything's going to collapse. It's going to break my key light. It's going to be terrible." Lastly, we have media management. When I use the Zoom H4n Black Pro Recorder when I shot directly on camera, etc. It was SD card mania. You just- you're always running around copying files on and off of SD cards. It's always so freaking slow because they're spec'd to be just fast enough that you can record video in real time. And that's it. So when you're copying an hour's worth of footage, it could take up to an hour if that's the category of memory cards that you got. When I started shooting on iPhone instead, because I just noticed, "Oh, the iPhone actually just looks better and I don't need to do any set up whatsoever. And it's less trouble and it's easier to control remotely as well. That was a big point. I started AirDropping files to myself. But you know, the problem with AirDrop? it's great and super fast over Wi-Fi and everything. But I think it needs an initial Bluetooth connection just to say, "Oh, OK, I'm near you. We can do Wi-Fi direct or whatever." And my studio is just out of range of my Mac studio downstairs. So I had to physically remove the iPhone I use as a camera, step downstairs a little bit and then it would start the AirDrop file transfer. So kind of defeated the purpose. I tried saving to iCloud, but that syncs whenever it wants to. Sometimes it's instant, sometimes not. It's not really progress indicators or whatever. I just lost so much time waiting for things to transfer. I don't know. Sometimes I gave up, took the phone with me, stepped downstairs with it, plugged it in. And then the wire transfer is slower than the wire- the wireless, because the wire only uses USB 2 speeds and... terrible.

James Munns: I think only like the current very high end models are USB 3 and everything else is still 400 megabit.

Amos Wenger: Yeah. Yeah.

James Munns: Basically.

Amos Wenger: Yeah, that's part of the reason why I didn't bother with iPhone 16. We'll see what the 17 brings. I think it was about like the chip on the iPhone is not new enough or something.

James Munns: There's the marketing reason and then there's whatever they decided because like that was the thing about um... the jump from USB 2 or USB high speed to USB 3 or USB super speed is you need more pairs. It basically goes from a single differential pair to multiple differential pairs. And so if--was it, Thunderbolt has always been USB high speed. So it's only had one data pair, which means they've just been designing their chips for so long to only have a single data pair coming into it. So you can't just do a single pair USB super speed. You need the second differential pair to go up to even the bare minimum USB super speed setup.

Amos Wenger: So now that I only use iPhones for everything, I have one camera iPhone, one monitor iPhone and one teleprompter iPhone. I just put everything on Blackmagic cloud. So Blackmagic are the makers of DaVinci Resolve. My very limited understanding of the company's history is they make expensive Hollywood grade hardware for video production. They sell hardware that's more expensive than all the computers I own combined. And I have too many computers. And as a bonus, they also made a freely available color grading software. And then it actually turned into a nonlinear editing software solution that rivals Adobe Premiere and everything. And then they started selling a studio version of that. I don't know exactly what order things happened in, but they had everything to succeed except the freaking cloud media storage. When I tried working with another person to help with editing my videos, I think only a year ago, two years ago, we had to ferry files on Dropbox or whatever. It was-- it was so annoying. Now they finally have- it's in beta still- but you finally have Blackmagic cloud. So not only do you have the thing that you've always had, which is the way project libraries work in DaVinci Resolve, they're just Postgres databases. So even if you install it just locally, they're running Postgres. And so you can pay them five bucks a month to have a library hosted by them, or you can run your own Postgres server, which is what I ended up doing, which is a pain in the butt because you have to secure it. Because if you just open a Postgres database on the Internet, people will get in. But yeah, it's just a Postgres database. So it locks timeline with someone's editing and it's designed for that collaborative workflow from the beginning. But what's new is that they can also now store media files. And obviously, they're pricing it, selling it as a premium, as everyone does with the cloud storage. But I think what am I paying? I get 500 gigabytes for 10 bucks a month, 15 bucks a month? I don't know

James Munns: It's below the cost of thinking of it. You know, like if you were just a hobbyist, it might be different. But if you do it professionally, it's like...

Amos Wenger: As a company expense, it's nothing.

James Munns: I won't even think about it.

Amos Wenger: Exactly. So I tried it. Ahh, we'll We'll see if the experience is good or whatever. It is amazing. It is amazeballs. You have Blackmagic camera running on your iPhones. You shoot something, you stop shooting, and it's instantly there. If you have the project open in a computer somewhere, I did a demo, you may have seen it on my Discord server. You stop shooting, it uploads immediately the proxy version, which is a low resolution version of what you just shot. It does that first. So you have the assets, you can drag it, you can start playing around with it. And then the original, the full resolution original is synchronizing after that. And it takes care of everything. You can lose the entire project. It's cloud. You can synchronize it from wherever you want. You can share with some editor and have them sync only the proxy so that even if they have a crappy computer with not a lot of disk space, they can still work on cutting and everything.

James Munns: So a lot of that rough cut of editing is only done with like the low-fi video because you don't need to be doing 4K assets just to like crop out the coughs and um's and takes. Yeah.

iPhone #2: Camera

Amos Wenger: Yeah, you can do a separate pass for color grading, a separate pass for special effects. It's amazing. This is the camera iPhone. It's an iPhone 12 Pro Max that I bought recently. I used to use my personal iPhone, but it's just it's awkward getting a call in the middle of a shoot and having to like disassemble your entire setup just to answer like, "I'm sorry, I was unhooking my camera." It has this very custom. You might be wondering why there's blue tape around the little grip. That's because if it's not there because it's metallic, it's detected as touch.

James Munns: Oh, yeah.

Amos Wenger: So I had to make it distant enough.

James Munns: Put enough insulation in between the two of them.

Amos Wenger: Yep. Why 12 Pro Max? It has a nice camera and it's... it's actually very accessible price wise. Again, we'll have the total in a second. By comparison, when I wanted to go the full DSLR or mirrorless way with like an actual camera looking camera like the DC-GH5 from Lumix, I bought an Atomos Ninja V which is this little monitor slash recorder thingy that you can screw on top of an existing camera with a cold shoe mount. And then you connect them over HDMI and you get this nice little HDR display and it records directly onto SSD, which was one of the things I was really looking forward to because you have these little cards. You you mount the SSD into the card and then you can just slide it in the Ninja V and then you slide it out and you connect it directly over USB to your laptop. It was very fast. You can use it as your main disk if you like living dangerously and you get very fast transfer speed. It was it was kind of ideal, except this thing runs super freaking hot. It hurts to just touch the stop button. It gets so hot and it's so expensive and I really didn't need it. And I spent so much money on it for nothing and you still can't trigger it remotely. I don't know. You need- you need to buy more stuff. You need to buy into their- their own cloud, which they sell also. Um... Yeah, I ended up selling that. I'm not using it anymore. I still have the camera. I don't have the Ninja V anymore.

James Munns: So the takeaway is 'three iPhones' sounds kind of expensive until you buy 20 pieces of the wrong gear and realize--

Amos Wenger: We're literally one slide away from the total. But yeah, this is the--

James Munns: Oh ok. Yeah, yeah.

iPhone #3: Monitor

Amos Wenger: This is the the monitor iPhone. It's just showing me what the camera sees so I can do all the adjustments. I don't need-- I used to think, "Oh, I need to pay someone to help me.." on the list of things that made me lose footage. There's something in the frame that I just didn't see. There's some-- like I set up the shot. I go behind the camera. There's something... here I can check now and then that the shot looks exactly the way I want it. I could do the white balance, the ISO, the everything and trigger the recording and stop. And yeah, just it's not having a monitor. And this is an iPhone 12 mini. That's very small. Don't need something big.

Cost breakdown!

Amos Wenger: And this is the total of like two setups. On the left we have the DC-GH5 and nice camera, which is already not nice. You should get another one now. The Ninja V, the camera is around twelve hundred. The Ninja V is around five hundred and all the accessories you need for the Ninja V, because you need a good SSD for that, just like you need a good SD card to record video. And those don't come cheap. They're like data center SSDs. I had to order them special from somewhere and wait two weeks for delivery. It was really bad. So the total for all of that comes to 2,078 Euros and three iPhones comes to under nine hundred because I bought the iPhone XR in 2023 for 250. I bought the 12 mini in 2024 for 270 and I bought the 12 Pro Max, the like the best iPhone they did, but four generations behind for under four hundred Euros. So 377 Euros for the total of just under nine hundred Euros. And you get a really nice setup. I didn't include all the clamps and hooks and stands and all the things you need to make everything go together and the teleprompter, which was probably forty bucks because it's a mobile phone teleprompter and not a real one. And you get a really, really, really nice setup.

James Munns: I would say how far away are you with just this because you still need the light. I mean, it's fair because you need the same thing for both of them, but you still need the lights and you probably want the mic.

Amos Wenger: Yeah. Yeah, I didn't include the things you would need either way--

James Munns: or how --

Amos Wenger: The entire setup?

James Munns: Close to being good is the mic?

Amos Wenger: From an iPhone?

James Munns: Yeah.

Amos Wenger: I wouldn't use it.

James Munns: Oh OK.

Amos Wenger: But I wouldn't use it because it's getting the-- it depends if the room is treated... I don't know... No, I would get I would get a DJI wireless thingy and just clip it here and be done with it. To start with, it would be perfectly acceptable. Because you can you can move around like YouTubers do that a lot. They move around. They do a little sketch. They have a green screen in some corner. You can also turn the RØDE Wireless Go II, they have this-- You can turn it into an interview mic so they give you a handle.

James Munns: Yeah, it's like a stick that you clip it onto it. Yeah, we saw that and it looked like--

Amos Wenger: You could probably make your own stick.

James Munns: Yeah yeah yeah, exactly.

Amanda Majorowicz: Speaking of RØDE, I was not correct and you were correct. It's Australia, not New Zealand.

Amos Wenger: Yes! So that's 1-0. Are we doing the ... quiz trivia nights at SDR? Cool.

James Munns: There you go.

Amos Wenger: Anyway, that's my TED talk. I'm so freaking pleased with all this because I spent so much time iterating and so much money. I have so many useless things to sell now, but I'm afraid of having people come to my house to buy them. I'm going to get hijacked.

James Munns: It's one of those like I was thinking I was like, "Oh, this is this is real into like production. This is very different than the normal stuff that we do about like the software libraries and stuff we write." But it's your-- it's the same thing like we are building like software stuff for our job. But as someone who records video and produces video, this is the same sausage talk, talking about how the sausage is made and things like that and the tools you use and what you've had to build up around it. So it's interesting to see because you're someone who does video edited content for technical topics, how close it is to the same like process. But it's just all physical components rather than software components.

Amos Wenger: We haven't touched the editing process at all. Again, I've gone through so many different revisions. I've gotten sick of DaVinci Resolve, try to move to different software. Saw that it was probably even worse elsewhere. I started like doing my own presets and stuff like those macros. You can do-- there is so much you can do with DaVinci Resolve. It's intimidating how much you can do. But yeah, that's that's it. I'm sorry for how long it is. And/or you're welcome.

James Munns: Well, we'll let you get back to your iPhones because I know you're in the middle of recording stuff right now. So you get to go back and keep your iPhones company

Amos Wenger: in one of my videos. If I sound really tired in the middle, suddenly it's because I stopped to record the podcast.

James Munns: Very cool.

Amanda Majorowicz: I enjoyed it. Thank you.

Amos Wenger: Aww...

Amanda Majorowicz: Very good.

Amos Wenger: Thanks.

James Munns: I have like an old Sony like a 6100 that I use and I use one of those-- It's funny. Like you went down the list of the stuff you probably don't want to use and I use every single one of them like--

Amos Wenger: Oh, yeah.

James Munns: I use one of those little USB dongles for capturing. I bought the 6100 used because you could get clean HDMI output on it.

Amos Wenger: Yeah.

James Munns: And then I put it into one of those 1080p dongles and--

[[Amos Wenger] I'm so pleased with this slide.

Amos Wenger: It's just the best.

James Munns: It's a good slide.

Amos Wenger: Right? I leveled up my Google Slides game.

James Munns: It's interesting how much it goes from reading is-- the one on the right side just reads as 'ah yes, glasses reflection' versus the one on the left. You're like, "I can see a light." Even though you can see a light in both the one on the right just reads as 'generic reflections,' which you don't notice. And then the one on the left is like 'ah, studio shooting.'

Amos Wenger: I'm really happy with that. I don't know. I don't know if you think it's good, but I'm really happy with this quality. But you know what's shitty is that I have backlog. So I'm going to release another couple of videos that have something substandard now.

Amanda Majorowicz: Oh... and then people are going to go to those videos and be like, what the fuck are you talking about, Amos...

Amos Wenger: I know!

James Munns: I know you got to get them out. You got to get them out. I meant to bring it up. I had that USB cardioid mic that I used for a while.

Amos Wenger: Yeah.

James Munns: The first like eight episodes of Chats with James, I had the mic backwards. It wasn't until I was like streaming on YouTube and there's like a little icon on the front of it.

Amos Wenger: James! Well, if you look at the pattern?

James Munns: There was a little icon and I was- I was live streaming on YouTube. I didn't know shit when I bought that mic. So like-- and I still really don't know shit. But like someone on the YouTube chat was like, "Hey, if the icon's on the side facing the camera, your mic's probably backwards. And I went back and I listened to some old episodes and I'm like-- someone posted the interview with... what's his name... from Oxide.

Amos Wenger: Oh, Bryan Cantrill?

James Munns: Yeah.

Amos Wenger: The founder?

James Munns: So I had an episode talking to him: the whole audio. I'm like (muffled) "Yes! And I'm doing!" It-- Like, it sounds like I'm yelling into the mic.

Amos Wenger: That's amazing. Yes.

James Munns: I don't know how-- like, now listening back to it, I'm like, "How did I edit that and not go fucking crazy?" And I think it must have been that I couldn't get my levels up right. And so because I had my mic backwards, I was just speaking loud and it was picking up the reflections off my monitor or something like that. I'm like, I just sound like I'm like, methed out the entire. I listened to like 10 minutes of it because I'm like--

Amanda Majorowicz: VERY ENTHUSIASTIC.

James Munns: "Oh, this will be a good callback!" And I'm like, "Oh no! It's so bad!"

Amos Wenger: Just imagine all the progress I've done since 2019. I can't even go two videos back without cringing intensely about some aspect of it. And sometimes I spend so much-- I spend like an entire month writing, researching, shooting, editing, post producing something. And then I look back at it and like the audio's-- If it wasn't me, I would skip immediately this video just because the audio is not acceptable. But it's like learning to recognize JPEG compression artifacts once you see them, you can't unsee them. You're ruining everything for yourself.

James Munns: I talk about that a couple of times. There are hobbies that I explicitly avoid. Like I talk about like with wine and coffee and stuff like that. I know some basics on how to make it not terrible, but I don't want to learn the next things because I know it's diminishing return and it will just ruin mediocre coffee for me. You know what I mean?

Amos Wenger: Like I ruined 80% of TVs for myself when I bought a nice little OLED one because I have actual deep blacks and you go to someone else's house and everything just looks gray. It's just... I can't.

James Munns: Yeah, I got a Steam Deck OLED and that's the first I think OLED device that I have. And I'm like- Oh, okay.

Amos Wenger: There you go.

James Munns: I kind of get it. Yeah, I don't know. I could see it when I turn it on. I'm like, " Oh, that looks really good."