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[Music] all right welcome back to another episode of the waveform podcast we're your hosts i'm marquez and i'm andrew
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and we are closing out 2021 with a bit of a shake it up episode we're changing up the format because we had some fun
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ideas we want to go over them yeah which are mainly looking back at 2021 and then eventually
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looking forward at 2022. so today this week we're looking back at 2021 and there was some really cool stuff that we
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really enjoyed that was fun and that we want to see more of going forward um but i think we want we just wanted to look back at 2021 because it was a pretty big big big year for a huge year
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for the whole team the channel everything we've been doing we obviously have grown the team a bit we have the studio channel now we have the waveform
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as a video podcast and as a clips channel and it's weekly as well this year and it's it's constant it's working
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it's going great and so for this episode we want to bring on some of the team members who have joined actually everyone on the team we're going to have on and we're going to talk through
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the best highlights of 2021 in the tech and youtube world that's what we're going to do so i guess we'll just start it off we'll kick it off with adam you want to come over here from behind the board let's
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let's get it started all right adam welcome to the set in front of the cameras this time
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right over there so i'm over there i can see my chair got the mic on this side too now so i would describe you as a podcast producer
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i say producer instead of editor because it's kind of like the whole process it's the recording it's the editing it's the
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production the video and the audio it's all the whole thing all of it um welcome to the the other side of the camera good
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to be here i've never been in this room before it's pretty nice you've been on camera up here a couple of times we've tried yeah i think once or twice yeah so
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i guess uh retrospective would be having worked on all of these podcast episodes now since the video's launched
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and everything do you have a favorite or one that sticks out as uh as a behind the camera person yeah
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so it's funny both of my favorites are not videos they were from before when we started the video yeah because the first one i would say is neil degrasse tysons
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yeah that one was amazing that's like he's one of my idols so being able to like edit his whole conversation that he had with marquez and like retro tech because we
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got like the full interview so i could chop it down for an episode once that one was pretty cool so that was like right when you started right that
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was like my second week you got to come in and directly edit neil degrasse like the raw audio where he's like talking to
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you behind the camera like cracking jokes dad jokes and stuff that's great he must be a fun edit because he sort of
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just talks in waves and he can sort of go on for five consecutive minutes on one thing
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yeah and if you don't edit it at all it's just kind of like it's very difficult to take time out of a neil answer because he just keeps talking
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about time some of his points later on are like directly built on points he made earlier in the sentence so like you
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can't just hop around it yeah you like take a part out and then like 10 minutes later yeah i need to put that back i
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should have kept that in yep exactly it was really interesting and then my second one was probably the rise
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and fall of boosted that david and i did that's what i was gonna get yeah that one was insane just the whole process of like
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talking to all the people that talked to us that was really nice and then editing it was mayhem because david and
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i had never done anything like this before like together a full story like this so we were here till like i think
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like three in the morning that day yeah just like editing and when we got certain background tracks to like fade into
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certain things we were literally at our desk jumping around like oh my god that sounds so good yeah david adam take it
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away [Applause] what's up y'all i'm david mel and this is waveform today's episode boosted to
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busted the rise and fall of boosted boards yeah i feel like the the way that we edit especially on the mkbhd channel
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where things are so planned we actually don't have that much of a challenge of shrinking down the amount of things recorded into the final video because there isn't that much extra that gets recorded you know maybe for the video
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where i went to jimmy's you know huge studio there's a little extra that i'm cutting down trying to fit the story
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right but for a podcast like that there's i'm imagining a ton of stuff that got recorded and didn't make it in
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everyone we spoke to was an hour-long interview yeah and we spoke to like five or six different people
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so you probably cut out like half of the things that were said we said like the week leading up to the edit night we
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were just sending each other transcripts and being like if there's anything that stands out to you just highlight it in
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the transcript so we can just find it in the audio and edit it together when we need it yeah it was it was chaos but it was really fun it came together really
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well i i wonder now about our challenge for doing a video version of it because it was really fun and we planned it
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around audio and the transitions and the interviews and everything and now we're doing a video podcast and i wonder if
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there's something like that in our future but i think that was a really well put together piece yeah david and i have
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been talking about how to translate that something like that to video and we're going to need a lot of help from michael
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so michael if you're watching you do a lot yeah we could ask about it later so for everyone who watches on youtube they've kind of come to know you as the person who's putting in all these like
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little meme-worthy like edits or little captions of kind of the editor responding to them and people love it do
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you have a specific small piece that maybe an audio listener hasn't seen because it's in the video or
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just like something you worked really really hard on for like two seconds of a joke that you remember yeah so there was
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one podcast i think it was it was the one that came out on october 22nd it had something to do with the macbooks and
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you mentioned something about the land of misfit toys when referring to samsung products i remember this one yeah and that was the first one that i was editing at home on the laptop so the
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whole process was like new to me because it's not obviously not running as smooth as the computers here and in the office
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and stuff so i was at home sitting on my couch it's like 11 o'clock at night and i'm only halfway
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through the edit but i must have spent like an hour and a half trying to like track all the points to
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make like the the samsung bixby home speaker float by people's faces and everything like that and then i finished
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it and i felt so proud and i looked at the time marker and it was like i'm a minute 32. i really need to like bunker
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down and really edit this yeah no i was gonna there's so many little things that are like what is the
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what is the worst roi on a moment in a video where it's like we spent an entire day on five seconds like we've done that
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before oh yeah i mean it's real all of our robot shots are like five-hour shoots i think most of that list of
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worst roi would be robot shots i think there's some uh some really heavily edited like graphics stuff where it's
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like we just try a bunch of different versions of it until we get the right one um but yeah i know some of it's some
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of it's practical and we'll spend a very long time and it's so worth it yeah and that one freaked me out because we
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published at 4 00 a.m on fridays and it was like 11 30 on thursday night and i'm still editing
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and i was like that was not a smart investment of my time i appreciate it because it probably made my joke actually land where if without it it
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probably wouldn't have so thank you thank you for having me all the time do you have a favorite piece of tech for 2021 2021 the ipad mini hands down
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mini hands down easily really yeah well i don't have a m1 pro max whatever macbook like i don't really need it so i didn't really like i wasn't as excited as everyone else in
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the studio for it but the ipad mini has like directly changed the way i used my ipad like i traded in my pro or i tried
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to i'm still going through that process but traded into pro didn't need it got the mini it's been working perfectly for me
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how have you been using it because i remember you really debating on getting it because you love the form factor but you're a
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physical note-taking yeah person and how has that transition been yeah the pencil for sure yeah i've been
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using notebooks and actual bullet journals for like the past five or six years so like i wanted to be the digital
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guy but i really couldn't get away from the notebook just because opening a book in the morning and sitting down and writing down your tasks and everything
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is just like an experience but there's apps like notability and things on the ipad that make it great and there's a
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paper like screen cover this is not an ad that works perfectly i got a well now it's definitely not an ad because i got
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a knock off off amazon so it's nice for knock offs for knockoffs but it works perfectly fine it's done well yeah it's
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it can't be hard when we ban you from looking at your screens in the morning for 2022. yeah to be part of this so
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yeah writing unfortunate can't do that still works for 2021 though yeah so far we have another two
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weeks of it all right thank you so much that was awesome see you all right hi auto yeah welcome to the in front of the cameras yeah yeah i'm introducing everyone who's been behind
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the cameras a lot to also in front of the cameras because everyone's got both in front of the cameras on the studio yeah yeah that's true um i would
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describe you as and you can correct me or add to this if you want as the uh studio channel producer yeah yeah
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that's pretty much what i've been saying yeah it's like a it's a it's a video planning job a video shooting job a
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video editing job all right into the one and then we publish and it's all it's a whole thing it's the studio channel it's behind the scenes you guys have seen it
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you're subscribed hopefully hopefully yeah you better you better be um anyway how how's your 2021
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been what was your what was your last 365 days like it's been good man i mean i moved to brooklyn we from from
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indianapolis to long lasting so yeah i came from the midwest i'm all i'm out here now uh
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we launched a channel it kind of it got pretty big pretty quickly i mean we're 600k right now
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that's awesome doing pretty well uh it's been a good year i think well it's been a bad year uh
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existentially personally personally it's been a great year yeah yeah yeah uh i guess i want to ask a couple well
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we have some questions about 2021 we're gonna go we're gonna go back a little bit for this episode i wanna ask though
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since you started this year you joined the studio you met all of us what was the number one thing that you expected
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the studio to be like that it wasn't when you got here oh that's a good question uh that's not one
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of the prepped questions just springing them on you um i think most things have been pretty
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pretty uh like as expected for me but i guess one thing i i didn't know like how all of us would get along like i didn't really know you guys personally you know like we met like once or twice
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yeah just like briefings but i i don't think i ever like had a conversation with any of you guys um i knew like adam
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and david we already were good friends before this but um yeah just getting to know everybody and like i didn't know
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anything about you guys as as just like people it's it's a weird yeah it's like a
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something you have to think about more as it becomes a team instead of just like oh it's just me and my apartment whatever like it's it's a team building
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process as much as anything else so that's that's another thing for me is like i've never worked uh in person with
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people in like the tech field it's always been a remote job so it's been a big adjustment kind of kind of switching
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over to in person like we're always in the office every week yeah it's way different when you're like constantly only doing work stuff from
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being like in the same space yeah every single day like for a long amount of time like you're past some work stuff
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you're doing more like personal things and everything and it i'd like to say we've all meshed very well yeah so far i
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i love working with everyone here it's like super fun yeah yeah um so out of all the positions we hired for the
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second channel was is a little different for us it's something we hired for that hasn't been created yet yeah it's kind
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of like the least defined position we did so what were you kind of expecting when you came into the position and what
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kind of did it meet those expectations has it been very different i'd love to know your thoughts on how it's been so
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when we first uh talked about bringing me on to the team like marquez we we facetimed basically and just had a like
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quick 10-minute interview and um and and he basically just outlined what exactly
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what we're doing now which is like we want to do uh behind the scenes videos obviously but also do like challenge videos do sort of like vlog style and
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you know kind of play with different formats and i think we've kind of done all of that so far it's been it's been pretty good um
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yeah i think this is this has pretty much been almost exactly yeah yeah yeah yeah that's awesome i mean it's it's a lot to come in and say like hey we're starting a whole nother channel
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running point on it like yeah it's different for all of us and we're a channel that's so focused on like very
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specific things at very specific times we do reviews we do like pretty specific tech stuff where this was like
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there's a whole broad stuff we've never even attempted to step foot in before the other thing though about the studio channel is like uh when i've i've done videos for so long and they've gotten
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more and more planned and more and more you know well executed around what we're
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planning and so you know i get comments all the time like oh we want to see marquez vlog something or we want to see
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like the behind the scenes of how something's made or something unplanned or something like that and i like i know i'm supposed to be able to like
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pivot and stop on a dime and change up things really quickly but i just couldn't get myself to to suddenly do
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that type of video again and so i feel like the studio channel is the perfect place for that obviously that's what
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it's built around but it allows us to sort of play with that the format a little bit more play with the perspective and and i guess that's the
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word the perspective each person can be first person or third person in any studio video i'm happy to be able to
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bring uh a less polished less professional format it's not even about linkedin i think it's less about polish it's just about planning it's about like when i shoot an mkbhd video i think we've we've
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like we have this sort of game where we'll we'll shoot all the a-roll and then we'll guess like how long the edit will be yeah it'll be like a 35-minute
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talking to camera for a 15-minute video yeah where a studio video i mean you can speak to this how long do we shoot for
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this road trip versus how long the video ended up with a board game it's a very different ratio so that's a different
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that's the format to my brain that's the biggest difference between them yeah i mean i think the road trip was something like 30 hours of footage just between
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the the three cameras we had over over two days yeah it was ridiculous is that your favorite project of the studio so
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far yeah so yeah by far yeah i was going to ask that question next but yeah yeah i mean it was the best it's been cool
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because we've done a lot of different things that we've done short reactions bts game videos we made a parody video
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one day just like out of the blue like like you said before you came in and we kind of talked about accomplishing all
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these different mediums and for going on six months i think we've done almost all of them we have a couple
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other ideas but like where the studios come is awesome it's i think it's really really fun to watch i think it's going to have
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a huge 2022. yeah yeah for sure do you have a favorite piece of tech in 2021 uh so the obvious answer is is i'm sure like everybody's gonna say when they come on here is like the new macbooks
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they're great it's a very easy answer yes um but it's for a reason yeah yeah well yeah like i
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think that is my actual answer but the the more fun answer that i i think i would throw out there is i think the rivien the r1t oh yeah oh oh yeah you
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got you guys i never saw how it was that's how you were yeah yeah it's um you know i've never been like a huge car
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guy in general i've especially never been a huge truck guy but um that that that thing was really
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just so different it did so many things it's so modular it's so uh interesting yeah yeah like i love
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the i love seeing more competition in the ev space and as much as i do love tesla's
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that's not the only car brand that i would like to own in the future so it's like let's you know let's get more
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competition out there the riven looks looks great yeah one motor trends car truck truck of the year here we have
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made that mistake plenty of times already no i i i think the rivian was my favorite new ev yeah and it's
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interesting because we do get to see a lot of them yeah like we had what do we have we had the hummer here we had the
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mini cooper ev here we had the audi e-tron rs gt 150 f-150 lightning eqs a bunch of different evs come through the studio some of them we point a camera at some of them will get written up for top gear but i think the rivian
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has been far and away also my favorite ev that's come through the studio that we've gotten to take a look at and i'm
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i'm rooting for it i know they're not prioritizing it as a company but i'm rooting for the rivian r1t yeah so
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that's that's a i like that answer well thank you for that thanks for reminding me of how great the riviera is always a
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pleasure see you in the next episode sounds good all right david welcome to the 2021 retrospective thanks for joining us in
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front of the camera again yeah hello hello i forgot you've been in front of no crazy
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entrance this time hey well i could have edited it in but now that you said it i guess i can't so it's my fault i
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apologize to all the viewers 100 percent your phone so we so i want to i'm starting off with like sort of
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introducing everybody just so we all have the face to the name on the podcast we have a studio channel you join the
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team this year and as the position i would describe as sort of a writer researcher script supervisor idea
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generator creator create creative brain helper i don't know there's a lot of words in my head
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to describe it how would you describe it and how has your 2021 been i'm a content farm
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that's all i do i pump out content that sounds so sinister um yeah actually a lot of people have uh have asked me like what exactly do you do there because i think
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for like adam for example his job is very obvious right like he produces and edits the video podcast heyauto produces
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and edits the studio channel videos and that's something i've thought about a lot like how do i like measure my
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success at this job yeah it's very difficult yeah um what i tend to tell people is like
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well i have a lot of conversations and i try to like make ideas more interesting than they seem on the surface yeah um it's hard i i mean like i've been here for a bit too and
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i've it's been hard to have like one kind of position and like a lot of it is helping facilitate more conversation and
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more ideas and while that sounds like when you just say it out loud not that crazy but like it is vastly important to
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not a traditional name of a position no i thought about that myself like how do i measure my like importance or success at this position but the thing also is is while
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you're adding all of that this whole team is wildly talented in so many different
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positions where when one member is out another member can step in and like we have had almost everyone in here has
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probably done every job that's true yeah and that is so so important and so the reason why
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this team can churn out content like we can in such a small team no i think what you hired me for is definitely the the
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thing that i love doing the most which is just like having like just really like nailing down into an idea further and
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further until you find the golden nugget in the haystack that's the wrong terminology
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in the chocolate yeah exactly exactly um like for example i don't even know if this is a future question you were gonna bring out but like for example like the air tags video we did the like
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apple wins even when they lose yeah that was like one of my favorite i remember we had like a four hour conversation in
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the studio about that and it wasn't forced it was just all like wait but if they do this and it's just like it just
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extrapolated itself yeah um and so yeah those are my favorite type of conversations to have in general and so
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when we can have them like together in a studio setting yeah that kind of was one of my questions i mean i
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feel like the the many minds is greater than one many arms make light work something something something like i
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think the fact is if i were to just keep making videos about my own thoughts i would i would run out much faster and i
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think when we get different perspectives and different thoughts and different experiences all into one it makes for much more interesting dynamic different
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looks at things and that also was one of my favorite videos i i don't know why i like animal references so much so much
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to think about like the way sharks and their little menorah fish yeah like that that was that happy hanukkah everyone i like i like that we got to do like uh c
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research for that video too a lot i also did uh what was the other animal planet there's octopi and another one there's
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another round yeah well you had the the multiple arms oh no you had the uh the general the cicada potatoes for a
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folding phone that was a flex by two so that might have been right before you guys yeah yeah but yeah um
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kind of going off that you're doing a lot of research here not all of it is on like specific things
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you normally would research because you used to do your own videos and reviews and everything like that is there anything you've like
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become seriously interested in after you did research for a video and like just kind of were like oh this is crazy
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interesting and went almost deeper than what you needed to for the video um i don't know if any particular thing but
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it is like even just doing basic research like when we did the like reviewing every iphone video
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and just going on the wikipedia page of that particular model and reading everything about it and then like
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interlinking to different things and being like oh this cost like the equivalent of a
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thousand dollars when it came out and the next year it was 300 like that's insane and just like sort of seeing like the trends of things moving i will say
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when we do the long form podcast episodes which um those have been amazing and i think
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the boosted board episode even it was the first one was the most freaking wild insane story that i never ever
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anticipated was gonna be that crazy and then it just ended up being like what yeah previously mentioned with adam
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but we were like yeah how do we do more of these because obviously we're video now so we've done we crafted this whole thing around audio and we had the voices
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and the interviews popping in how do we as a way as a video podcast sort of deliver that experience but also in a
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visual way too so that's a new challenge i think we we can take on in 2022 i think it'll be
00:22:36
really interesting especially because there are so many of those stories out there yeah um but yeah i think that that is also
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it's consistently one of our favorite things to talk about from this last year it's definitely something you want to explore because like
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it's really interesting you can you have so much flexibility when you only use audio because you can just control the
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environment so easily and cutting and cutting yeah yeah like when we had like all the people being like casey casey
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casey ckc hey i'm casey neistat and i guess i'm a youtuber i guess it's harder to do that with video you
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can but it's it's different yeah we'll figure it out we have michael he does wonderful things yeah he can i'm sure he
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can whip some stuff up wizardry yeah so i'm really excited to like dive deeper into some of those ideas um in the
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coming year for sure we did like two or three of them maybe four but i would like we did a couple i
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would like to do for sure it was the first year and we're getting into the flow of things and everything um do you have something so you cover a lot
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of things and like we're obviously restraint to restrain to covering so many things was
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there anything in 2021 you're sad we didn't get a chance to cover oh sad sad you had to have cried it's interesting for me because moving from a um
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only android phone like youtube channel slash website for almost five years i worked there and it was just like phone phone phone phone phone phone
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phone and i never really got to cover anything different okay when i first started covering
00:24:04
tech at a publication i was doing only vr and then i did only electric skateboards for
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a while so it was like that but then switching to android it was like just android for
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like four years so even i tell people this like i could not have given a less of a crap
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about cars until i started working here and then i'm really interested in uv tech own a model 3 now and yeah like i i just like i
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it's cool like being able to cover a lot more stuff and having your horizons expanded um
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as far as like what i wish we covered more of it i don't know i like that answer i mean it
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makes us feel good a lot of people don't realize how many evs we get to experience and i think this is also true about me maybe four or five years ago i didn't really have much
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of a foot in the car industry at all i didn't i didn't have that much car testing
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experience i'd i think i went to ces and i was at the bmw like area outside and i
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got to sit in an i3 and they were like all right this is the i3 demo we can like drive around this parking lot a
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little bit and then to test the uh object detection they were like here pointed at this barrier
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floor it like really they're like yeah fluoride and i floor it and it automatically stopped before getting to this very
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obvious barrier and my mind was blown i was like car tech is the future that's what i think that's the reason i think i
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like evs is because they're actually just computers yeah there's a lot on wheels
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so it's like there's so much more to cover because then i mean i'm not a regular car guy and the regular car
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people will probably be really angry at me and she'll hear me say that everyone i just feel like regular cars are like you can measure things in terms of
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horsepower and whatever but there's just so much more in evs this is my this is my don't tag me on with that statement hate comments there's a lot in both of them you're all oh i know there is but
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like i my least favorite thing is the uh the car media traditionalist where they're like well you don't know anything about cars so why are you making car videos when it's like well you know those people had to start
00:26:10
somewhere too right it's not like you're born as the top gear host so yeah you kind of have to work your way into it
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and i was just saying like now we've had at least a new car every month here just to try it and to have it for a couple
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days and to live with it and to learn about it and whether it turns into a piece a video a studio channel thing a short a
00:26:28
top gear article like whatever it is uh all those experiences add up to the context we're able to give so i agree
00:26:34
like their computer is basically on wheels now and that's a whole new thing we're getting into so big fan of that
00:26:40
yeah uh do you have a favorite piece of tech that came out during this calendar year yes so
00:26:46
okay i had to answer this question for um a friend of mine the other day and it was very hard to answer okay and i would
00:26:53
say um if i if i gave like a i'll give a physical piece of tech and then more of
00:26:58
like an idea piece of tech interesting okay i like that the physical one is probably air tags
00:27:04
um and i only realized that this morning but i have like you lose yeah free things i lose everything i have i have an air tag on everything right now even though
00:27:15
my like the iphone i have is not my like main device i use it sort of as like a remote control it's an air tag
00:27:21
it hubs like your metal it's an air tag an apple watch hub it's just like yeah yeah it's like a metal detector yeah um
00:27:28
but i lose so many things and air tags to me like i i've i was a tile user since like 2010 but and i lived in san francisco which is probably the most saturated tile city
00:27:40
there is and even then it sucked and so the idea behind ear tags to me is really
00:27:46
cool just because the network is automatically there and it just works it always works
00:27:52
and like that is really cool yeah um so that's as a physical product i think 30 for peace of mind on anything expensive
00:27:58
that you own is really nice now actual tech that came out this year that i'm like well not physical tech
00:28:05
um two things tensor because i've been waiting for this for so freaking long since like
00:28:10
2016 when the pixel first came out i was like this isn't really a google phone it's just a rebranded nexus that google has
00:28:18
more say in the design of so like having vertical integration in a in a google phone is a big deal yeah
00:28:26
even though the natural language processing on uh the pixel on like tensor is like the most obvious and
00:28:32
really only major thing that people are actually seeing on tensor like the natural language processing is so fast that it's keeping me on the pixel even though my pixel is pretty buggy
00:28:43
it's so fast that i i voice type when i'm at home like yeah 90 of the time i said this in the review but i think i
00:28:49
sort of understated it like i use voice way more on the pixel than i do on other
00:28:55
phones it's like it's dramatically better yeah so yeah i'm fully with you on that yeah also at the risk of turning
00:29:00
this to a whole other podcast um yeah i feel like we're about to see a little bit of a wave of
00:29:06
custom silicon everywhere yeah like we have the off-the-shelf like snapdragon chip and
00:29:12
they're obviously trying to make improvements in these sort of natural language processing and computational photography stuff like that but like
00:29:18
apple's showing what you can do when you have a lot more control over your silicon design and then we start seeing like okay now tensor's doing it and
00:29:24
obviously the iphone's had it for a while and we're going to start seeing more of that i think that's going to be something to keep our eye on for 2022.
00:29:30
um but what you're going to say yeah i just think it's amazing that you can tailor well right i was going to get it yeah
00:29:37
i just think it's amazing that you can tailor your own like soc hardware to what you want to do on your device and i
00:29:42
think that's going to add differentiation in android phones over the next few years because like oppo
00:29:47
group is supposedly making their own chip and xiaomi is supposedly making their own chip anyway that's done yep so
00:29:54
other thing um material you i think is like really cool it's not tech but it's it's like tech design i think it's cool i think it's a good design direction for google do you change your wallpaper on
00:30:05
your phone just to see what material you will do occasionally i did that a couple i actually just changed the crop of one
00:30:10
of my wallpapers and my accent colors changed and i thought that was interesting interesting yeah it's like the sample area
00:30:16
yeah like pixel by pixel yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so that was fun um yeah no super into that i think we'll we'll look forward to a lot of this keep an eye on 2022 and that's of course
00:30:28
what we're talking about in the next episode but yeah thanks for thanks for joining us in the retrospective david appreciate it thank you guys i'll be
00:30:34
back with a vengeance soon for sure next week next week oh shoot all right welcome on tim welcome tim to the waveform podcast
00:30:48
tim's coming in coming in hot from his remote location today so you've got your little you got this you got the mic you
00:30:54
got the setup going welcome yeah you guys are in my childhood bedroom i've slept in that bed and that
00:31:00
bed both that is rare is it i don't actually have bunk beds as a kid i mean like did you switch nights or i like originally slept on the top bunk then after a while it's thursday i'm feeling like the top
00:31:13
bunk yeah no okay no it's like i slept bottom bunk with my older brother until he went to college and then we swapped and then the cycle repeated with my younger brother so i was top and
00:31:25
bottom starting to realize that i had bunk beds by myself and that was kind of weird but all right cool all right let's get
00:31:32
to some tech stuff yeah all right so i'm introducing everybody so tim i'm gonna describe your position and then you can
00:31:38
add or adjust as needed tim is our uh graphics wizard i think i nailed it i didn't i definitely didn't realize how many
00:31:49
image manipulation needs that we had at the studio until we had the ability to do them yeah like this is one of those
00:31:56
things where like i'll talk to other youtubers and they're like oh yeah i just gave it to my graphics guy and he did it and i was like what do
00:32:02
you mean i don't have a what are you talking about and then obviously tim joins the team you joined this year
00:32:08
right this calendar year and i was in may yeah and so there's there's obviously thumbnails but there's
00:32:14
also like our discord and our our channel banners and our social media stuff and there's just a ton of
00:32:20
image manipulation wizardry necessary to make the stuff that we're picturing in our heads and make it come to life is
00:32:27
that is that an accurate description yeah i'd say that's accurate you could have stopped at wizard and that would
00:32:32
have been perfect okay perfect so yeah i like it i think it's good no so so we're looking
00:32:39
back at our past year obviously 2021 was a pretty intense year pretty chaotic in
00:32:44
a lot of ways but also a lot of fun do you have any uh favorite now that you're on the team any favorite projects
00:32:50
that you've worked on uh over various mkbhd channels in the past calendar year ooh um okay so favorite project for the studio
00:33:02
was making the studio making that channel because you guys were very uh lenient on timing i had a whole month to come up with the branding the logo the
00:33:13
look for that which from my last job is not something that i got we usually had if we were
00:33:18
pitching a client we had you know a logo or brand package we had like a week so it was very hard deadlines very fast deadlines so to have a month was like oh man i can like sit with this i can you
00:33:31
know see if it works see if it's something that can like expand and breathe and the teemo like and so yeah
00:33:38
coming up with the branding for that was awesome um for the main channel probably doing the ford f-150 thumb yeah because they got in a top gear magazine and that
00:33:49
was pretty that was pretty sick uh waveform clips i love i love doing all the waveform clips mainly because like we come up with some goofy stuff sometimes but they're so quick
00:34:02
that like it's kind of satisfying to adam will come over with an idea and then we'll just bang it out and then
00:34:09
it's done but it's it's it's pretty cool with those and then wait main main waveform is fun just because i can mash your guys's faces together every now and then that would have to come up
00:34:21
this is do we have to explain what this is we might have to explain explain what you're talking about i think it'll be
00:34:26
easiest if you do it i might have to put out like a gallery maybe we'll do one example i'll take the
00:34:34
i'll take the fall it can be a picture of me i think we'll put it on the point i think you know you can do a lot a lot
00:34:39
of different things for thumbnails for videos for the podcast we like to use cutouts of actual frames from the
00:34:45
podcast and so we have the angle that's on me we have the angle that's on andrew and so
00:34:52
tim is always working with i don't know five to six screenshots or images from each camera's frames
00:34:58
and can easily overlay them very quickly and make us look like a hybrid frankenstein human which is
00:35:05
quite hilarious sometimes if i'm right it's usually because you're just using the previous week's thumbnail
00:35:10
cutout and then matching us up framing wise yeah like the the sizes of your heads
00:35:16
are the same i just have like the new thumbnail on 50 opacity so it looks like um what was that annoying orange it basically looks like annoying orange where like the eyes are right down next
00:35:27
to the mouth yeah and uh it's just it's like left us in tears like so many times and it's one of my favorite things to do on accident and definitely on purpose
00:35:40
what you were saying before about uh you know coming up with the graphics and logos and a whole visual identity for a
00:35:46
brand in a week is kind it's so kind of crazy to me like if you're coming up with
00:35:51
uh this whole thing to be sort of representing this brand going forward for any number of years basically i feel like you would want to spend extra time
00:36:02
getting it right getting a couple different iterations down and making sure you feel comfortable with it before putting yourself on a deadline
00:36:08
is that i guess was that a typical like difference between sort of the previous traditional job versus this one i mean that just depends on studio to
00:36:19
studio and client and like i my first internship we were rebranding john frieda hair care and we were doing their packaging and that took i think four months and they went
00:36:30
through testing we went through prints we talked to the japanese team we had a skype call like that was a huge thing
00:36:37
but like the last company i was at was a small studio we had international clients but like some of the small
00:36:43
clients we had just didn't have big budgets and when you don't have a big budget your time is cut really short
00:36:49
and so a week to them is like actually a long time because it's thousands and thousands of dollars that they're
00:36:54
investing into these designers so uh it just depends like yeah you you would love to have two weeks and like really talk it through the team but it's
00:37:06
it kind of is what it is but yeah there's a big difference between my last job and this one and just previous
00:37:11
design jobs like the workload was probably way more at previous jobs and way more
00:37:18
consistent like there are definitely days here where it gets really busy but for the most part it's pretty contrasting in workload it's it's a lot
00:37:24
lighter here um but i uh oh the another big difference is just not having like as many creative heads above me
00:37:36
like an art director senior designer creative director like that's a very big difference between last job and this job and
00:37:43
something i like kind of had a hard time grasping in the first month of being here but like all of you guys is talking to you
00:37:50
guys and getting feedback and review like i felt pretty like i was in good hands like this channel has been running for
00:37:56
10 plus years so it's been it's been chugging along just fine so um i knew if i asked you guys about advice or if something wasn't working it would it'd be fine yeah i feel like my favorite
00:38:08
task now is explaining something visually that i want to exist that doesn't exist yet i mean we i think we have to bring up one of the weirdest things we've made tim do which was
00:38:19
marquez's handsome squidward oh yeah yeah that's the thing yeah so we'll have an idea and we're like all right so
00:38:25
basically i don't know how to do this but what i'm picturing is and then just word vomit and then hopefully you
00:38:30
understand what i'm picturing in my head and then can create it or use what we've given you to create such a thing
00:38:36
and so i don't know if you want to describe the last one but i think basically it was a video thumbnail where uh we had an image of me
00:38:43
and we're like we need one of them to be me and then the other one to be kind of like a super exaggerated you know kind
00:38:50
of like handsome squidward kind of like that version of me and then good luck tim and we'll see how
00:38:56
it goes and you act exactly what you made uh yeah that was probably my favorite project of the year because like getting a creative brief that was like can you turn me in a handsome
00:39:07
squidward anything spongebob i'm in and it was like it was kind it was such a weird thing because it was like all right i can do a lot of stuff with him in photoshop like
00:39:17
there's the ar with the faces but i was like that's not enough i got to make him look crazy weird
00:39:23
and so i like googled like beauty apps and there's one that i downloaded that was like a free trial but after a week
00:39:29
it's like 30 a month or 30 i can't remember i think it was a subscription but it's expensive
00:39:35
but you can change everything on your face there's like three filters just for your ch your chin
00:39:42
and so it was like i like yeah i took your face ran it through saved it and then took that
00:39:49
picture and ran that through and it just like kept yeah like exponentially getting more
00:39:56
handsome squidward so i think what someone called you lord marquad that was good shout out to the rappers comments always get me yeah no that's but yeah that one
00:40:09
was a lot of fun yeah you we've definitely asked you to do some weird some weird things some things i'm assuming you did not do at
00:40:16
your other previous design positions uh no i used to i worked so when i worked at apple i did that to my art director like all the time when he would walk away to go to briefings or something i would get
00:40:28
into his computer and change his background and i would put him and me in a situation and put
00:40:35
our faces on like you remember like the seth rogen video with um where they did uh kanye's thing with kim
00:40:42
kardashian where he's on the motorcycle oh yeah yeah what video is that um bounce
00:40:54
there's like joe rogan and um i can't remember his friend that did like the step in here this wasn't something your
00:41:00
superiors asked you to do though i'm getting way off i'm getting way off-topic uh previous employees haven't asked you to do whether you've done them before on your own time tim that's oh no they're
00:41:12
not here or they're totally oh no they supported it like i would have a review every few weeks with my my
00:41:19
boss and he was like hey man you're doing great you know things are really looking good and we love that you're
00:41:24
like messing with rob keep it up no it was like everyone was egging me on but i'm used to getting vague descriptions from like friends that i work with for freelance
00:41:36
and like the last job we would just not even get briefs sometimes and it would be like we want to use this picture and
00:41:43
do this you're like that's it so i'm uh i'm kind of used with having to to um translate things into what i need them
00:41:54
to be so i do want to add a fun fact though so the last job i worked at was called one
00:42:00
trick pony and we always refer to ourselves as ponies and the interview you did with colin and
00:42:06
samir was talking about hiring people to become and like trying to find unicorns and so when i got the job i
00:42:13
texted michael's like this pony's a unicorn now and i'm so sorry i was like i got the whole word
00:42:20
that's awesome now we are going to graduate photoshop yourself into a unicorn so yeah we're
00:42:26
going to need that photoshop real quick uh i have a question though so what is now what's gonna happen you've used a
00:42:31
bunch of different things as like uh you know you have tools on your desk i don't have you have a tablet you have a stylus see all this stuff what was your what
00:42:37
was your favorite piece of tech to come out maybe in the last year in 2021 i mean obvious answer would be like the
00:42:43
macbook the 2021 macbook pros just because like i'm running a 2015 and like they're just dreamy but uh my real favorite would probably be like
00:42:57
i don't really care about cars but the rivian was a pretty cool car i think it was like
00:43:03
polarizing in some respects but like that's what draws people to it um [Music] i thought that was super cool it was also because like my parents got really amped about it my mom just doesn't like
00:43:14
cars so i was like oh this is like really making waves with like just generations like so um that
00:43:21
was really cool astrobot was probably like you're definitely the first person to
00:43:26
say that i could tell you astrobot was like top tier tech because it just brought on waves of like we saw that and
00:43:34
we heard about it launching itself down the stairs and everyone in the studio ran to their photoshop and was like
00:43:40
memes i'm making memes and we all just generated like the best stuff so yeah astrobot gets my
00:43:47
vote there it is astrobot top tech of 2024 love that all right thank you tim um that's that's our 2021 year in review with the man the myth the legend himself fan
00:44:02
favorite tim thank you so much we'll see you we'll see episode you in the next episode
00:44:09
sounds good all right welcome michael to the 2021 retrospective thank you for joining us thank you for having me so i guess i'm i'm starting everybody's off with uh i'm
00:44:23
gonna give a description of what you do and then you can add to it or refine it or whatever you want to do but i'm gonna i'm gonna call you michael our
00:44:30
our motion graphics wizard i think you like wizard a lot yeah wizard is a good good inclusive word magical because really again it comes down to like all right we have ideas and we have things
00:44:43
that we we're picturing in our head that we want to turn into actual content that other people can can consume things we
00:44:50
picture and have no idea where to even start at making if we had to do it yeah yeah and so we we try our best to
00:44:57
translate those ideas and deliver them from within through the power of the internet to you across the country and
00:45:03
then you take that and somehow deliver it back and in a world of uh technology are able to create magic it's great yeah i think i nailed it magic i love it
00:45:16
yeah the internet is a big part of that isn't it considering that i've been in the office with you guys like a
00:45:22
total of one time right right yeah no it's definitely about and it's about not only just being able to
00:45:28
translate that stuff but also passing files back and forth a lot is just an exercise of like what's the most efficient way to do this i think we'll
00:45:34
just go upload this to dropbox or slack or something like that and then pass drafts back and forth and then like
00:45:39
screenshots of motion graphics before we're finishing them and then finally passing the final file back and
00:45:45
forth but uh yeah how was your how was your 2021 and how was your what was the maybe
00:45:51
your favorite stuff that you worked on during this past year yeah um i guess favorite stuff i've worked on this year i mean for sure the studio intro has to
00:46:04
be a big part of that um it was just so cool to like start from scratch like we've done so much with the mkbhd brand um and moving forward and being able to create
00:46:16
this entirely new style with the help of tim of course um shout out to tim who you just
00:46:23
interviewed and i heard was hilarious um um but no uh being able to start from scratch with a completely new style i mean
00:46:36
the textural elements and the colors and everything has just been completely blown out so we've done a lot of really
00:46:42
fun stuff with it i think at one point when i uh rendered that stuff out i gave like
00:46:47
three options at the very beginning and it was like a super safe one that was like almost black and white sort of
00:46:53
newspaper printy looking texture and then went all the way to like insane colors like no real color palette just
00:47:00
an explosion of colors and like that's the one we ended up going with so i was like okay sweet
00:47:05
at first i was like i didn't need to present that range probably but that was good so yeah
00:47:11
that was a lot of fun yeah i think one of the like coolest things on the studio intro is how when
00:47:16
you guys brainstormed it like you and tim obviously worked very close with this together is that you've incorporated something into it that's a
00:47:23
little different than the mkbhc channel in that you added a bunch of assets that we can then replace and make in
00:47:29
reference to the video so like we have ones with mia you guys just did a holiday one which is awesome that was like gumdrops and candy canes and stuff
00:47:36
like that and you've done all these really really cool things with it do you have a favorite asset you've created or
00:47:43
animated so far in there i think um you mentioned it but mia has to be my favorite on that one i think it's just like it's probably pretty obvious yeah i like it yeah yeah because
00:47:55
it was it was fun to have like you know i started with a still shot i cut it up into like segments so that it looked
00:48:01
like you know i could rotate the arms and make it look like it's a video of her or something like that
00:48:06
um but her do you guys call her her ideas for some reason immediately now we don't
00:48:12
know about the bigger one yet but the thing is i know that's we we are calling it mamamoo i think mamma
00:48:19
i feel like it has to be a her again just for that reason on the note of that if we need to we
00:48:25
need to place mia with mama mia we do need to give you an updated photo of that so it can be yeah
00:48:31
for sure but no and then of course the other thing making that fun is the most recent intro i couldn't resist uh putting a
00:48:38
santa hat on top yeah which would probably like make it malfunction but it would we could probably actually probably get caught in the gears business yeah
00:48:49
yeah so i i'm gonna i'm gonna guess i already know the answer but let's do it anyway
00:48:54
what what was your favorite piece of tech to come out during 2021 oh you already think you know the answer
00:49:00
i think i know the answer but i'm going to let you say it okay um for me it is the m1 macbook pro called it is that your guess i called it yeah
00:49:12
this thing is like i feel like we're like trying to not like say it too much and not give it too much praise but like
00:49:18
as media professionals this thing was like right up our alley i'm not i'm not shocked that it's like everyone's
00:49:23
favorite thing but yeah clearly it was great when i'm yeah i was gonna preface my answer with i would
00:49:30
guess that probably i'm not the only one that said that i yeah multiple people have said it as one of
00:49:36
their things and i think they've been like i'm gonna think of something else as well because it's like so easy but i
00:49:41
think you probably are one of the people that are you you have one right now yeah we've tested it so we've we've tested different specs and we're we've decided on a spec that will be the new
00:49:52
uh have you yes i'm so interested to see how it changes your workload and stuff like that because you're someone who's
00:49:58
working through some massive massive rendering and and also i'm someone who uh works on a laptop 100 of the time so i don't i mean i
00:50:11
we originally i got like last year whenever we were talking about my setup um we talked about mac pros and macbook
00:50:17
pros and stuff like that but honestly like i i am someone who loves the change of scenery and loves being able to well back in the day used to be like go work in a cafe or something like that
00:50:28
but now it's more so like if even just leaving from my office desk to the kitchen table to the living room
00:50:34
couch like i just i need change of space and like being able to be flexible i like that i can be in an
00:50:41
airport on the way to somewhere and like render something or like fix you know yeah i've never really been tied down to
00:50:47
a desk with a desktop so i'm not ready to do that so but then when i saw this come out i was like oh
00:50:54
here we go i can i can make this happen i mean and that's not something that like in your field of work motion graphics usually needs a lot of computing power so that's not something that's been like very possible and this
00:51:06
is why you said you have been doing it this is going to make it far far easier and maybe way more people doing motion
00:51:13
graphics to be doing how you're doing it yeah i feel like most people are using like
00:51:18
built pc desktops for my work of my line of work but i just got too sucked into mac os to
00:51:24
begin with and then um yeah just the portability i've just i've been struggling through but now i think
00:51:31
it has paid off because eventually i'll have one of those bad boys in my hand and we'll be good and then we can
00:51:37
get you a new mouse too and silver yeah yeah yeah you like how i'm always not that darker space gray stuff look at
00:51:44
that silver stuff um i'm always like trying to tip so i'm like i'm like if you already have one that you're sending
00:51:50
me it's okay if it's space gray but if you're gonna buy one please god make it silver yeah
00:51:56
no i kind of was experiencing the same thing i edited the uh the 20 questions with mr beast video we shot that in
00:52:02
north carolina of course where he's at imported it all there started editing it there
00:52:08
continued editing on the plane back here and then have been editing in various rooms like around the studio and my own
00:52:14
house over the weekend until like bringing the finished edit here which is something i honestly don't think i've ever done with
00:52:20
a video before um and yeah the change of scenery is kind of nice so i've uh i can relate i can relate this
00:52:27
it's like we can't stop talking about this laptop because it's so good at so many things that we do but
00:52:33
that'd be like if an amazing camera came out like there's no way we wouldn't talk about it i know it makes you mad because you're
00:52:39
like we can't just keep giving apple credit here but at the same time i'm sure there's plenty of good job with this one
00:52:45
if you can't give apple credit for this then i just i don't know how to get into like how to convince you otherwise
00:52:52
that might have been my favorite genre of youtube video this year which is notoriously apple critical youtube channels trying really hard not to give apple too
00:53:04
much credit for this one anti-apple contrary intake had a really i didn't see a lot of them for this and that just
00:53:09
shows you how good this yes it was really fun to watch those videos for me and probably for apple to be honest
00:53:16
um yeah okay sure yeah no we i think there's a lot of good stuff there i honestly also like as far as specialized
00:53:23
workflow stuff i just want to give your setup right now a shout out real quick so we've got you recording on your
00:53:29
iphone for the podcast but then hold up your watch because the viewfinder's still playing right oh it's gone
00:53:35
okay what's happening it's happening yeah it was pulled up before what there it is so you're using the rear cameras
00:53:41
on the phone so there you go you can see the actual shot from the watch that is that's pretty special we
00:53:47
appreciate that um i was like yeah i'm i can't be the only one with a webcam sorry am i allowed to
00:53:53
cuss is that a thing no you're good yeah also now tim's the only one with the bad webcam so
00:54:00
congrats tim thank michael for that one well yeah we're gonna we're gonna talk future in the next episode but i think it's safe to say uh pretty much everyone here has really liked the new macbook
00:54:12
pros so far for sure yeah it's it's insane um yeah yeah sure so we've asked you to do some kind of wild things at least wild things we think of at least and some of them are
00:54:23
like if you think about the road trip like he had to do a crazy map of everything do you have like a hardest
00:54:29
thing we've asked you to do it's funny you teed it up that way uh i was going to turn around to you and say i asked if you had a guess of what i would say i guess but you already said
00:54:40
it yeah the funny thing is like i think that might be the hardest but then i also just have no idea like when
00:54:47
you send stuff to us we just think it's like magic so we don't know i i would kind of maybe yes the thing about the
00:54:54
the stuff i'm saying like i i feel like i kind of have an idea of how it would be done meaning i took one motion graphics class in college like i have a fundamentals of after effects i have i
00:55:06
understand like if i had to do this stuff myself subtract the design element of it just keyframing and moving things around i could do it it would just take me a really long time
00:55:17
yeah that being said when i sent you all the instructions and how i was imagining this map and all of the different things
00:55:24
moving around and panning and showing exactly how this road trip went i honestly i'll admit i didn't know how
00:55:31
to do it at all i didn't i wasn't sure if you'd come back and say listen i have a different idea for how to do this because honestly this is a little too
00:55:37
complex we probably can't get this done um yeah and you did exactly how i was picturing it which was like showing the different progresses of the different cars around this thousand mile loop of three
00:55:48
different cars at once and where they charged and where they took pictures and all of that and uh yeah i'm not shocked that that
00:55:54
was easily the most complex thing i probably should have told you that it was too hard to do
00:56:00
no because that's just far higher for more things i'm remembering now like the the
00:56:06
spreadsheet i had to send you of every car stop and how much they added and everything and yeah that definitely had to have been the hardest it wasn't a
00:56:13
technically difficult like as far as like after effects like abilities that was not a technically difficult one but it was the gathering of data from like six
00:56:24
different places which you guys did a great job of like providing but it was still just like you know the
00:56:32
like person one car stops at like 9 30 a.m next car stops at like 9 45 a.m but is
00:56:39
like slightly up like geographically is like here versus there and then like the the extra layer of all of that was like the gas tank range and the or the gas
00:56:51
tank it was a lot of information yeah yeah yeah and on top of that with the batteries and everything and it was like
00:56:57
i would get like um you know with one car stops um at a gas station that doesn't mean that it's
00:57:04
at zero it's like at a quarter tank so you have to like make sure the little meter things at like a quarter but then like the tesla stopped and it was like
00:57:11
10 miles remaining and i'm like what is 10 miles on like a circle chart you know what i mean it sounds like
00:57:16
so that was like an interesting thing also um i wasn't there so like that level of
00:57:21
like putting all the pieces together it was it was a challenge to wrap my head around at first but then like once we
00:57:26
got halfway through it was like okay i get this it turned out pretty cool i'm excited about it
00:57:32
i love the way it turned out i honestly don't think there was a better way to explain what happened in a more succinct
00:57:38
information dense understandable way like i can tell people how the road trip went as me explaining it to the camera
00:57:45
but you don't really get to visualize like the whole point of the video is figuring out how far behind you get based on the
00:57:52
method of transportation and maybe it's just because i'm a visual learner but that was the best way for us to
00:57:57
illustrate that that we possibly could have come up with for a youtube video well what was interesting is like for
00:58:03
the viewers but also for ourselves even like i sure i didn't i knew how i was going to turn
00:58:08
out how i was going to look but you you kind of gleaned new information from seeing it that way it's pretty
00:58:14
interesting yeah well we're planning on maybe doing another one so maybe maybe with the you
00:58:20
know yeah electric trucks we might do another version who knows but uh i think there's
00:58:27
there's some sequel potential from from this one for sure so you should do electric trucks but like all off-roading
00:58:33
oh god well yeah don't give us too many ideas uh thanks for thanks for joining us on
00:58:39
this retrospective and uh catch in next week for our future looks sounds good all right we've got venom brandon on at the same time we've got a little uh quad
00:58:55
camera setup going which is we don't use this very often but here we are and we got vin and brandon on because not only
00:59:01
are you both insanely talented on your own but sort of like a dynamic duo sort of like
00:59:06
like daft punk sort of collaborating and making like the best possible thing yeah
00:59:12
one of us explodes by the end yeah yeah have you both on it take your pick um welcome to the waveform podcast first
00:59:19
of all thank you so much been here before they have been oh yes i think once or twice we've never done the
00:59:24
camera no no phone not video yeah you're right we've usually been on the other side but not not in front of the camera
00:59:30
so yeah i like the squad camera thing so we're talking 2021 in this episode and some of our favorite predictions or sorry some of our favorite things we've worked on favorite
00:59:41
parts of the year stuff that was good or memorable about the past 365 days does anything come to
00:59:48
mind does anything jump off the page for you guys as the oh by the way i'm supposed to i'm supposed to describe
00:59:53
your role in the mkbhd studio which i want to condense it as much as possible to like cinematography masterminds
01:00:01
because that includes a set design that includes camera work that includes b-roll that includes
01:00:08
intros which is a whole nother umbrella that includes motion graphics and color and sound design so it's a whole bunch of things that all end up making the videos you watch better
01:00:20
anyway how was your year tiring yeah i would agree with that alone yeah it's i mean it's been it's been a fun year though i mean it's it's amazing how the pandemic has
01:00:32
sort of made us kind of figure out how to make the at-home in-office thing more creative and uh more interesting um because largely before this we were
01:00:45
traveling a lot for different types of videos and now we're here in the office a lot yeah it's
01:00:51
hard to feel inspired when you're not going anywhere exactly there's no influence but it is a it is a new office
01:00:56
i mean we only got a month or two last year like in this new space so like this is the first year we really had this all
01:01:02
set up which for you two is like tons tons more shooting space and let alone a dedicated robot room which is yeah for youtube which is definitely the
01:01:13
most fun i mean that's been that's been a game changer because i mean studio b which was our robot top-down uh kind of like sometimes set room combo
01:01:26
it was like very long and kind of awkwardly shaped so like you could do some stuff but not much
01:01:32
um now we have this whole entire room which is so fun um because not only do we have a massive robot which i know is
01:01:39
kind of a to be discussed later um but we also have just so much more room to play with
01:01:47
colors toys props uh so much more you know room for activities exactly yeah so that that's probably for me my favorite room so far also top down room
01:01:59
which is uh cool to have like its own space and like we bring new props into it all the time it's it's been really
01:02:05
fun but yeah yeah i forgot that top down and robot room or the same room uh-huh i don't know we have to walk the
01:02:12
entire building to get to it every time it was also like our furniture holding place so we just like throw like
01:02:19
all the couches in there right right good times so yeah a little more spread out a little more room it also gives me
01:02:25
like the the mental throwback of like when i shot in my college apartment it you know 10 by 10 room like you can
01:02:32
only shoot for so long in that room before you've seen every corner every angle every possible way the lights
01:02:39
could look like that got exhausted very quickly you could create a 3d render in your of that room from watching the videos yep 100 100 um so yeah what do you have a let's go
01:02:51
with like do you have a favorite project that you worked on this year from 2021 videos
01:03:00
yeah um i want to say air tags specifically the intro because like honestly it doesn't look like much it's a it's a little circle and you have to make something like magical out of it
01:03:13
and so we saw the air tags demo from apple their introduction for it and the guy reaches down into the couch and
01:03:23
falls into the couch and we were like this would be so cool if we could somehow put the audience
01:03:30
into the backpack and see the air tag as if they were one of the props the discovery moment yeah for that
01:03:36
perspective and we shot that so that was komodo right so we put the komodo in the backpack we
01:03:42
put a light in the backpack we put the other props arranged in the backpack how did you monitor your scale a banana for
01:03:49
scale on the backpack i think there was probably a monitor connected into the backpack but then
01:03:54
outside so you could see in we had my phone wireless that's what it was so that was i i did really like that intro and that moment in the video was
01:04:07
pretty sick did you have a separate one a different one i mean i think i think the intro
01:04:12
this year that was definitely the most exhausting but really rewarding was the ipad intro that we did the m1 the m1 it was two days of uh questioning if any of
01:04:25
it was gonna work or if it even made sense exactly um i feel like like that happens the whole entire time when you're shooting these intros it's like yeah this makes sense in theory but once
01:04:36
it actually hits the editor who knows um but that was that was a lot of fun just
01:04:41
because like vin and i had been talking about it for for so long like i remember being on an
01:04:47
airplane and like drawing it up and being like i think this makes sense i sent it to you
01:04:52
and then we got back we like the track exactly the track definitely helped i think that was like definitely the the perfect um example of like like things just really falling in the
01:05:04
park just like yeah like working very well like communication without communication in
01:05:10
in a certain respect um but yeah it was like a full day of shooting and then the next day was like
01:05:16
purely editing and uh but it came together that's a pretty quick turnaround two days for uh
01:05:22
one of our favorite intros of all time exactly and how did you guys do that again because it was like the pencil drawing on the ipad right yeah it was
01:05:29
the magic pencil i think it was like there's four different lenses that we used for that whole entire intro laowa
01:05:35
was the mvp giving you that like super wide first person device perspective yeah so that was
01:05:42
a apple pencil strapped on to a wooden camera magic arm and i gaffed it to like the moment like plate because it had a quarter 20 at the end
01:05:54
yeah and so that flat surface on the apple pencil was perfect for it to like not wiggle around okay
01:06:01
and so i just i i held the komoda and just drew out on that i gave like the first
01:06:06
it looked like you were holding the pencil but the pencil is just connected right in front of the lens yeah and the
01:06:12
second gen apple pencil has a flat edge so that was the way that we like held it in place and straight i think that was
01:06:17
also a really fun project because that was the first time that tim sort of became instrumental in like
01:06:23
entering the intro i think that was the first one he worked on so he like i i basically gave him
01:06:29
this very simple prompt which was like just like design me like a little um like motion graphic for like m1 ipad pro
01:06:37
yeah that was just it was a top sound and i'm expecting tim to just like i don't know like spend five minutes on
01:06:43
something be like okay how's this he spends like probably five hours just like everybody's been crafted like a real original like handwritten it was at that moment that i knew that tim was you know
01:06:55
the best person ever so yeah um yeah really fun intro though yeah i think some of the some of the craziest things
01:07:01
when you look back at like even just trying to define online video production in general like
01:07:08
there are movies that are super high end there are youtube videos at the other end and then somewhere in between there's like
01:07:14
spending 24 hours on a 12 second intro and i kind of like that in between it's a nice it's a nice little medium happy ground where i think we live right now which is a good time and these two have
01:07:26
perfected it yeah this is where i can only imagine are going to go to bigger and better places in the future yeah with a couple extra
01:07:34
toys we've gotten wink wink we should just talk about classes for a second real quick i think technically
01:07:39
this counts as looking back to 2021 yeah it came in 2021 so i'll just describe it
01:07:44
i'll just explain what it is we've we've had mia i mean first of all we went out and shot with motorized precision and
01:07:51
had no intention of getting one of the robots until we used them and loved them and then within two months we had one so
01:07:58
mia is a three foot by three foot industrial robot arm connected to a computer that talks to an xbox
01:08:04
controller and we can keyframe and build camera moves into it and we didn't feel i don't know would
01:08:10
you say you felt limited by it i don't know if that's the right word to use yes super but it was really it like once you
01:08:16
start using it you immediately became aware of a bunch of other things that you also wanted to be able to do
01:08:22
um there's a bunch of pieces of tech like that but essentially now the one that we've finally upgraded to and
01:08:28
started sharing on the studio channel is a six foot by six foot i believe robot arm
01:08:35
of the same thing oh yeah called colossus colloquially known as mamma mia because
01:08:42
mia was smaller and this one's bigger um and that now moves both smoother faster
01:08:47
and further harder better faster and stronger than before so that's the new tool in the studio and
01:08:53
we've begun orchestrating shots around it we could probably even talk about what we're shooting today which is uh
01:08:59
our first full orbit shot which is kind of sick it's actually more than 360 right it's a little like 4 10 degrees
01:09:07
actually just because we're going from one side fully to the other side get with it right okay but like 4 20. we
01:09:13
yeah almost 420 we didn't want to go as mimi quite yet um but like we couldn't even dream of an orbit shot yeah we
01:09:19
could barely go from like the power button on a smartphone to like the the volume rocker yeah that was the thing
01:09:26
with me and for me though it was just like there was as much as you could get fast
01:09:31
moves out of it there was also a lot of post-production that was necessary to get a lot of the jittering out to it was
01:09:37
also like interrupting the shots that we figured we could pull off i feel like we probably scrapped a
01:09:43
couple shots too how shaky they were um i'm thinking about that one charging intro the the wireless charging uh intro that we tried to shoot it was like that
01:09:55
whole video was scrapped yeah yeah but actually it all started on a bad note because of
01:10:01
the intro just being so shaky it was just yeah um and it was just one move too like a simple
01:10:08
yeah up yeah yep yeah so the the the mia robot it was it's an older piece of hardware but it's belt driven on the inside which essentially had it click every couple of steps and that little
01:10:20
bit of click was amplified at the end of the arm which is where the camera is and mamma mia does have some new i don't
01:10:27
know if it's hydraulic but it's not belt driven it's much smoother and that reduces a lot of the pain after
01:10:32
we shoot of smoothing things out because it's already kind of incredibly smooth once we shoot it so
01:10:37
that's pretty cool to see yeah i i really enjoyed shooting with the robot and i think we're gonna do a lot more i
01:10:43
don't want to overuse it i always say this i don't want to know but i don't want to use the robot for every video but
01:10:48
i think it's like for the podcast it's been even easier to make moves on this so it's it's going to be used more and
01:10:55
with these two i was just thinking like you guys probably have old ideas you could probably bring back that we couldn't do with mia i feel like i
01:11:01
haven't thought of that but uh yeah it'll have some fun stuff i'm pumped for 2022 i've been having so much fun on
01:11:07
this and then when these two tell me what to do it just gets even more fun sick um but before we end we're asking
01:11:13
everyone what their favorite piece of tech was for 2021 who wants to go first i feel like we have the same answer it could be the same answer to most of uh wait go ahead tell us what it is
01:11:25
macbook pro 14-inch yeah oh 14 specifically yes okay interesting that looks different i'm gonna go with raptor you'll have to explain you have to
01:11:36
explain now so why 14 over 16. um just being able to one-hand it and carry it around like docking and like the power it's very close to the 16 when you're editing in
01:11:48
final cut and you're editing red raw and so i wanted the absolute best final cut
01:11:55
machine and the smallest possible like take around form factor that's what it is that's what it is it's much more
01:12:00
portable i'm i went with this 16 personally because just because of my like extra editing
01:12:07
real estate but every time i hold the 14 i'm like this is great this is really nice mm-hmm okay
01:12:12
the raptor so we've been shooting maestro for a couple years now maybe the longest we've
01:12:17
ever gone with a single sensor and body combo you like raptor i do i mean i'm i personally just find it really cool to see technology come down so significantly in price too
01:12:29
oh yeah that's literally half the cost of monstro i think even like more than that like oh yeah once you add
01:12:35
like attachments to monsters it's also just the fact that like like i've had to deal with dsmc2 for a long time and and
01:12:41
seeing so many like parts detach and like having to readjust things because everything is meant to be swappable
01:12:48
um seeing a body like this that's very much all in one um where there's less moving parts less stuff can go wrong it's just making things a lot easier and
01:13:00
a lot more reliable and also autofocus is kind of promising i'm rooting for it because it's got some
01:13:07
it's got some headroom it's got it's got to get a little better but the fact that it has it at all is i would never dream of shooting anything
01:13:13
autofocus with monstro so i agreed and i also like the image straight out of raptor really a lot oh yeah the colors
01:13:19
seem just a little better a little better a little extra dynamic range it's a good time all right well i think that's a good
01:13:25
place to end it we also have to talk about our own but thank you vin and brandon for joining us on the 2021
01:13:30
retrospective thank you for having me yeah you'll be on next week too all right so that's the whole team yeah just us left we haven't given our favorite stuff no not yet so i think we
01:13:43
might as well close it out with that do you have a favorite item or maybe favorite tech or a project i do and
01:13:49
actually my favorite project and my favorite piece of tech of the year are the same thing so you know nice short
01:13:55
little answer to get you on to christmas a little bit sounds like a pop quiz kind of favorite favorite item of tech and
01:14:01
favorite video to work on let me preface this by saying it was the most fun video we worked on this year i think so that should give it away a little bit what was that uh fpv drone by dji super
01:14:14
super fun video flying that thing was insane um podcast listeners who remember know i
01:14:21
crashed it so you know that's a pretty awesome experience you're the only one who's technically had that experience no
01:14:28
one else was it was it was terrifying i was the only one who crashed it i think we kind of wrapped up the video around
01:14:34
so not anyone else got the chance but we still do have them and we were just talking before about how we should
01:14:40
probably race them at some point yeah maybe not me but i would lo i think it should be a we need like to structure it
01:14:46
in some way to make it good fun to watch but we definitely should build some sort of obstacle course and erase them through it it's a perfect at the same
01:14:52
time yeah yeah we got the goggles and everything it's just a yeah that is one of my favorite pieces of tech of the year i put that in my favorite tech of
01:14:58
the year video which is probably coming out the same time in this video so yeah it's probably the most different thing
01:15:04
we really got to experience i mean we do cars and stuff like that but that we've done drones but this was just like
01:15:10
drones on a more fun level and it was just a blast to work on so i have a couple random awards i want to give out okay i've just made up some awards just now that i i think pertain to the year
01:15:21
are the trophies on uh overnight shipping it should be we should have trophies for these all right number one i'm gonna give out is the most seamless
01:15:28
video shoot of the year award and we i give out this award because every year we have plans for how a video
01:15:35
should go and then inevitably something gets some wrench gets thrown into it basically whether it's travel or arranging the device or the thing we're making a video on or actually shooting
01:15:47
it or maybe a robot shot takes way too long there's always something okay there's something so i'm giving the most
01:15:52
seamless video shoot award to the rivian r1t oh that one because we shot with the
01:15:57
phone we shot it with a phone but not only that like okay we've had a couple cars here that we want to shoot videos
01:16:03
of and inevitably there's some wrenches like remember when the hummer was here we had both of the hummers here and they were like don't breathe on this too hard or it'll melt yeah like we had some
01:16:14
precautions to take i think when we had the the train we didn't even get to make a video about we've had a couple other
01:16:20
cars here the rivian they brought it here for us to check out for a day and a half so we basically had
01:16:27
an exclusive i lived with the car um and they literally encouraged me to push it around they're like hey you see
01:16:33
that hill over there go drive up it come on drive it try to break it and they really wanted me to like try all these
01:16:38
things with the truck which was fun and then on top of all that yeah we shot this whole thing in prores on an iphone
01:16:44
13 pro max and the edit was smooth and seamless i mean the whole thing went as good as it could have possibly gone so the truck was cool the product was cool in the video it was cool it was great that was awesome so i'm giving
01:16:55
that a word um most unexpected backlash award oh of a video onyx i don't know how did you just come up with this i have one that just came to mind that i
01:17:09
remember is it it's not blind smartphone right that always has like some a bunch of people telling us how to run it of
01:17:15
course of course it wasn't that it's not that good it was uh the teslabot explain video that it oh
01:17:22
that one that one was always fun because i i gave my uh relatively pointed opinion which is that human-sized human-shaped robots are not
01:17:33
efficient at all and don't really have a place in our world where i do believe in
01:17:38
specific task enabled robots that look nothing like humans yeah or just like automation in general yeah and the
01:17:46
entire uh i guess elon musk fan community or just general supporters of anything they
01:17:52
ever announce especially tesla i mean they're people are like literally worship that stock uh came at me and
01:17:59
they were like no this is the way this is tesla bot is the future it's got to be humanoid it's everything you said is right this so you know what do i know
01:18:06
i'm just a you know critic i check out tech products and i give what i feel based on what i've seen but we'll have
01:18:12
to see maybe i'll be wrong but i'm giving my uh unexpected background i'm more upset that i didn't think of that
01:18:17
i've got come to the point where i wish i could mute anyone with dollar sign tsla in their bio on twitter because
01:18:24
it's just like there's just so much blind defending there's so many things that are fantastic about tesla but
01:18:29
there's plenty of things about every company to critique about and those fanboys just seem to be on another level
01:18:35
recently it's which is a great transition to my uh best performing videos award okay i have a best i mean
01:18:43
that helps you probably have a really good hint now but uh i have two actually best performing
01:18:48
video with the most views and best performing video with the most ratings which are two different videos this year
01:18:56
um so the best performing one best performing which one you want to guess i think i can guess the best ratings and
01:19:03
it's because the video is about ratings is my guess okay yep yeah so the best rated video came out a month before the
01:19:10
end of the year it's my dear youtube video which was just talking about how they got rid of the dislike button and
01:19:16
how that's not a great idea uh it has 500 000 likes wow that's absurd it's half a million people is that more likes than ps5 i feel like ps5 is our like uh that's sort of the smart
01:19:28
audio or yeah or the samsung folds first ones were pretty crazy numbers but those didn't even have that many no yes ps5
01:19:35
was wild let me look at ps5 playstation 5 unboxing i'm assuming is the big one opening that up that has 577 000 likes so that's more yeah i mean this is top
01:19:47
top five of all time we're looking at that's crazy really good performing videos um but by views the most uh highly
01:19:54
performing video was actually my tesla model s plaid impressions video when we got it about four months ago that video
01:20:00
has 10 million views in four months so speaking of like rabid tesla fans they're they're on it they're on it i mean i fully intend to like actually review the car i've had it for a while
01:20:12
now i've put gosh maybe 20 000 miles about twenty thousand i think so so i've i've really enjoyed it but full review is definitely in the works but those are some random awards i
01:20:23
wanted to give for uh 2021 awesome it was a good time um i think that's about it for this year
01:20:30
we have one more episode we're going to put out next week which is wait wait i want it to interrupt go for it i have a
01:20:36
question that's not in the list for you guys okay what was the best and worst thing about doubling the team this year
01:20:42
best and worst thing about doubling the team that's a that's a really i actually have a great uh numerical anecdote for
01:20:49
that um i'm scared of this no i i set the goal roughly for a hundred videos okay phd
01:20:57
videos for the year and last year i think we had something like 113 like something crazy like that where it was like oh wow not only are we
01:21:04
making better videos but we're making more videos huge success can't believe we're getting this good let's do even
01:21:09
better this year and this year i looked back and we're right around 91 videos right now and i first saw that number and i was like dang i think you know spending extra
01:21:20
time on like team management and project management and things like that actually brought the output down the
01:21:26
videos are really good yeah but the output went down but then i realized there was that but there's also all the
01:21:33
studio channel videos all the podcasts and all the podcast clips and i think combining all of that it's probably at somewhere like 160 videos and i like i'm really proud of like all
01:21:45
of what we've done from building the team this year so that's both my upside and downside is like i have to reframe
01:21:51
success a little bit because we we sort of unlock doors that didn't exist before by having more on the team i mean if you
01:21:56
think we're gonna come like coming out of 2021 only nine videos shy of 100 whereas 100's been like the most we've ever really hit before i think we just went over it maybe last year but then
01:22:08
launching podcast video and launching studio like that's wildly successful that's that's awesome i honestly thought
01:22:14
we were going to be a little lower than that just seeing we still made it out of that that's awesome it's a good time i think the the best
01:22:20
things have just been like it's been nice to have workloads off on different people and being able to make
01:22:26
everything more efficient um working as a team is super fun and working as a team together just outputs better
01:22:32
quality in general i really think the channel's done that this year i'm super proud of the podcast i'm super
01:22:37
proud of the studio channel and then the main channel's just getting better yeah i can't think of a worse um
01:22:44
that's that's like honestly hard i'm not even joking i can't think of i also put you guys on
01:22:50
the spot so yeah a little on the spot i gave all you guys that wasn't pre-approved we don't have any other things no yeah i i think 2022 you'll see
01:22:58
a a lot more of the same types of ambition and we january might be kind of underrated like
01:23:04
there's kind of a lot happening in january i'll say worst i don't think i'm mac's favorite at the office anymore
01:23:10
because there's so many people that pay a ton of attention to him all the time is it attention or food
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it's food no attention to yeah i don't know yeah mac is a lover of all and i get jealous sometimes so that's the worst part about having a bigger team fair well said
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well catch you guys in a week next week we're talking 2022 predictions hopes dreams foresight crystal ball crystal ball yeah all that stuff it's coming away playing
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guys we'll catch you guys in that video and then see you next year waveform is produced by adam molina we
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are partnering with vox media and our intro outro music was created by vayne sill [Music]
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you