This is Self-Directed Research.
Our hosts, James and Amos, host weekly
hyper-focused technical deep dives.
In this episode, Amos gives us a tour of
their entire recording setup with
"All you need is three iPhones."
Make sure to like, follow, and subscribe
wherever you find us and visit
sdr-podcast.com/episodes for all
the presentations, videos,
show notes, and transcripts.
And as usual, stay tuned to the end to
hear more about Depot, the
sponsor of this episode.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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