Distractible - Lens Chats With Mark: Part One [Bonus Episode]

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

Take a seat with the dudes in Bob's living room and join this casual conversation about improv mishaps, 3D porn shows, and... (drumroll) Mark's lenses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So let's be clear. When it comes to shipping internationally, can I provide trade documents electronically? Mm-hmm. The answer is FedEx. Okay. But what about estimating duties and taxes on my shipments? How do I find all the... Also FedEx. Impressive. Is there a regulatory specialist I can ask about? FedEx. Oh. But let's say that... FedEx.

What a... FedEx. Thanks. No more questions. Always your answer for international shipping. FedEx. What? FedEx. Thanks. No more questions. Always your answer for international shipping. FedEx, where now meets next. This episode is brought to you by Tresemme. Want silky smooth hair that's still full of natural movement? The Tresemme Keratin Smooth Weightless Collection is your simple solution.

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Oh, okay. Now I see the TV behind you that's coming on and I see your Amazon box. Yeah, if actually you all sync it up to your phones and just hold your phone up to me, I'd rather look at that. Everyone just stare at your phone like, ah, yeah. Are we doing an episode or are we just chatting? I thought we were going to record an episode of Mark's Lens Dry Case. Who's hosting?

This is a bonus episode. I did just look directly at the screen on the camera instead of your face to talk to you. This is weird. Should we three-headed expert the intro? No, no. Do we need a warm-up? K-K-K-Katy. Beautiful.

I don't know if that helps. I think that makes it worse. Well, I'm out of ideas. What kind of warm-up? Katie! Beautiful. I don't know if that helps. I think that makes it worse. Well, I'm out of ideas. What kind of warm-up were you thinking, Mark? I don't know. I don't want to do a warm-up. This was pointed into my chest. I don't think that's going to help.

Mine is kind of like in my chest, too. Is that okay? Maybe it's just like a heartbeat. His was just too high. Oh, that's cool. That's fair. It's like it's on your lapel. I know, right?

I got this jacket in Iceland. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not Icelandic. Well, there's no more of those because it was swallowed your lapel i know right i got this jacket in iceland oh really yeah yeah i mean it's not icelandic well there's no more of those because it was swallowed up by a volcano right yeah whole island gone i was doing a video where i was reviewing icelandic candy and i wanted to start it off by like talking about volcanoes and amy was very concerned because she didn't it was gonna at this point it hadn't erupted when i recorded this video so it was like a concern of

like if i said a joke about it at the beginning of the video, and then it was horrible and people died, that might not be cool. And I might want to do a different intro. And she's totally right. That would be not ideal. Totally right. But once the camera goes, I can't stop the bit. And I had a whole bit about magma and lava and prehistoric.

The whole time in your head you're like not volcanoes not volcanic i hate when that happens you're like don't say this don't say this don't say this i hope that doesn't happen to you guys and you're thinking of something horribly racist ever you ever worry about that on stage is like you know not that you ever would but for some reason you're like i i guess maybe it's not a smart idea i never worried about racism coming out because i really just like i don't feel like i have those kind of thoughts generally but i do always think of the time when we were we were with rachel and we were like practicing we were learning like how improv works and stuff and somehow we ended up doing a thing

where a school shooting happened. And like, it was just a random bit. And we started and right in the middle of it, like everyone in the whole room, even people who weren't in on this, this skit were just like, cut, cut that one. Start a new one. You guys are done. Start. It was like, how did we, how did that happen? One of our warmups, we had Hitler go to Cracker Barrel.

Hey, that was normal. was very that was fine i feel like if hitler were alive today he would appreciate cracker barrel he might and then we had one where tyler was like doing a cleanup i don't remember what happened but his cleanup one got a little like edgy too but i don't remember why maybe we should cut this out i don't even know no listen this is this i think it's fair to leave in like we all acknowledged in the moment and also after the fact we were like ah that's not that's not comedic material it's like you you try to think of the things like it's not like necessarily we think of those things often it's just like before you're about to record or go live you're like all right just get all the weird thoughts out now and sometimes when your brain starts thinking of

things you shouldn't think of you start thinking of things you shouldn't think of and like you kind of force your brain to go there even though you normally wouldn't. It's a weird thing that you try to avoid but you go there by trying to avoid it. I've never done that. Yeah, not me. No, I don't have that problem. I live there. My problem, you know what my problem is? It's when I talk to you guys. That's when I say bad stuff. It's your fault. Oh, I actually think that it's Wade's fault. Oh, that's fair. So I just want to throw that out there. Wade's fault. My fault.

I don't know if that will do what I think it did. I don't think that does what you think it does. But this will do what it... Oh. Don't, please don't. My finger is still on screen. I'm doing like a very like shaky anime finger point. Anyway, that's not...

I mean, we're here to talk about anything we want. Right. I do think about that a lot because it's just that moment of like, well, don't do anything horrible. Let's say whatever we think of first. That's the problem with improv. It really trains you to just like spit it out. Like whatever's on your mind. And then when something goes astray, I talk about this one a lot.

We did a skit. Remember the day in the life bit we did where we would like have someone come up on stage. They would talk and we would do like a skit based on their lives right and i went out there and i was like carrying a blanket and i had like my thumb in my mouth and i was like trying to be the little girl in the story i don't remember the whole story but i was gonna be like the little girl in the story and i'm like all right well i think it's time for and then tyler came out and he's like yeah mom and i was like, you know me, sweetie. And I had to switch from like a three-year-old to like mom.

Well, you don't change characters. That's just how that mind is. Well, no, I just all of a sudden was mom with a blanket in my thumb about that. I had to yes and it. Moms do that. But my point is like whenever you're thrown something like that, like out of the left field and you have to adapt on stage. I just want to say, Mark, those are infant fidget toys they're really good if

they're too complicated for you we could see if they have any newborn fidget my story is dumb anyway we can move on no no i was listening i do remember that one i mean that just happens also we all did that to each other because like it's already improv is already tough but whenever you're thrown a loop that's when your brain can go to those other places because you're just like all of a sudden grasping to like try to regain some semblance of where you are you you felt like you weren't grasping every moment of every improv scene you were ever a part of no i think that one specifically happened it happened in la because i think la was my weakest show i don't know if it's supposed to feel like this but i every moment i'm in in any improv thing my mind

is just like oh word any word keep it going what's the next word and it's like like i don't not like i just randomly fear off of whatever the scene is but i never feel like oh this is what's happening i'm always like is this what's happening am i sure only musical improv that i had that regular improv i was okay anytime we did musical stuff i was was like, oh, sweet baby Jesus, what am I going to do? I would be so curious to see how we would do now after so long not doing it. I don't know. Maybe it would. Who knows?

You know, the thing that always strikes me whenever I watch clips of Whose Line or clips of other stuff Ryan and Colin and those guys do the physical stuff was so hard to work in and i don't know why because like you really want to plant your feet yeah just something about doing that where you're like i'm standing here and but but like just to do a simple motion one of the things that killed you guys we were doing a show we're doing the day in the life bit and the person was like an artist or something and they were drawing and i just walked out and started a thing and i was just like and like turned a page and started and you guys were like losing it behind me and i was

like i didn't do anything i didn't say shit that was one of the funniest things i did the whole time it was purely like one motion. had the ding for that we would do it in a different way and then he started he dan stopped changing for you guys and then started changing us in the background that's why he gets it got so rapid fire because it worked from like us holding something like this to like this to in our teeth he and then at the end of it tyler was just humping like i think it was a piece of like full-on all body thrusting this thing into the ground like i I thought it was like the physicality sometimes just killing it. Whoa, what are you listening to this for? Wait, who's talking?

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I don't know. I don't know where I would go with that. As with everything, my actual funniest bit that everyone really enjoyed was lost forever because the footage was lost and or wasn't recorded because we weren't recording the whale warm-up. You're ragey on the bus thing or the bus interview that where the footage got corrupted and the sadness of the whale my socks are long gone my pants are on fire my socks are longer no i that's why nowadays i'm so much about data redundancies people think i go crazy talking about storage, but it's like, that's a real thing. Couldn't lose a lot of files really easy. My brother just said, I didn't know that he was

doing this, but my dad has had computers forever. And he's had a computer that he's carried with him since we were like five years old. And my brother was looking on that computer to see if it would turn on and it did turn on this is a 20 year old hard drive that uh platter disc that still spun up he was making a backup of it because those hard drives do not last very long no those things suck and to get one that's like 20 years old there's every chance that for every second it's on it could die at any moment uh and so he's copying files off it but it's like a it's like um i forget many gigabytes, but it's in the gigabyte range of storage, which doesn't seem like a lot nowadays to transfer.

That seems like a lot to me from back then, 20 years old, gigabytes of storage. Well, I'm sure it was a nice computer. Your dad was a real computer guy. He had the top of the line stuff all the time. So he was very much about that. So, but however many gigabytes it was, it only had a USB 1.00 connection the first iteration of usb it had that and it transfers at maybe maybe a megabyte a second like i don't even know if it transfers that fast it's extremely slow so he ran this overnight just crossing his fingers that the hard drive would

transfer everything because there were some like old documents there might have been a few pictures there this stuff that he worked on things that'll never would have been gone forever if he hadn't been able to copy it but he did he copied it all data preservation in an era when everyone thinks that everything lasts forever on the on the cloud you know it's it's it's much more fragile than people believe like it is actually incredibly fragile um and just because you have something in the cloud does not mean that there are backups of it somewhere else. Because if that server infrastructure goes down, if it gets hit with the wrong number of drive failures, you could lose data. There's

no guarantee that it's going to stay. Well, and no matter how big the company is, they just straight up go out of business. There are games being deleted off of the PlayStation store and the Xbox store that once that version of it is gone, just don't exist. Like there's all kinds of stuff where companies, if it goes out of business, even if like Google is basically invincible, right? Alphabet runs the world through a secret cabal. Sure. They're not actually invulnerable to going out of business. In our lifetimes, they could absolutely encounter some

kind of problem, get bought by some other conglomerate, who knows, and like the server that you count on to like, all my stuff is there, it's totally safe. It just could be turned off in a moment. They have no obligation to you or your data. It's pure, you're relying on their continued existence and their continued playing nice and letting you keep that data on their thing. Yeah. And cost cutting, like, cause you letting you keep that data on their thing. Yeah. And cost cutting, like, cause you'd think that it's on the cloud. So there must be multiple copies of your data. Probably not. If you have, if you don't pay a premium, they probably only have one copy on one server shard of your data. And if it goes away, it's kind of gone. They might

have backups, but who's to know that they even could find it after it goes through all of their twisting tubes of inter-computer networks. If it's lost, it could just be lost in, like think of in any sci-fi shows when you got libraries going on into the infinite of nothingness. That could be the equivalent of where your data is and it could be lost back there. That's why preservation is is actually an important and active process you have to actually try to preserve these things i don't even remember what i might have lost well you probably won't miss it then yeah i probably won't your mic's pointed away from you hey come back where are you going they make pills for that no no it's fine it's a real droopy yeah yeah it's fine it's kind of connected

there you don't have any like childhood pictures from any random stuff so we want to put them on like cds and stuff at my aunt's house she lives down in georgia she has just boxes and boxes of pictures my grandma took and she would always put them in albums so we just have tons of albums of photos and then we had vhs tapes of like our trip to Disney World and other stuff like that, that she's also put on CDs. So a lot of our stuff, we have physical copies of. We don't have it like just on the internet somewhere. We actually have physical copies.

Yeah. But even those can degrade. Stop. You're scaring me. Stop them or stop it? All of it. You're right though. I mean, you have to do multiple copies.

You have to do backups. There's a reason. it you're right though i mean you have to do multiple copies you have to do backups there's a reason i think the legal definition for properly archived something is two lto's which are like magnetic tapes but in huge 80 gigabyte or 100 or 80 terabyte like rolls and then a raid array hard drive backup that that qualifies as adequately protected for like insurance purposes but there are even nowadays some movies i was talking to a vfx guy um that was saying that he was hired to do like some stereo separation for 3d when they go back and they like make it 3d where they cut out something and then create two versions of it oh you know how they do that now

yes i never knew how they did that oh okay i thought it was a trivia thing i was like oh you know how to do that now i wasn't mocking you and it wasn't trivia i was just like oh that's cool well i don't know how to do it myself but it is yeah they cut it they wrote out things out that wrote out characters and things that would be at different depths and then they create two layers and then they mark a plier 3d coming soon yeah absolutely go through all 5 000 my videos but they said he asked because this was a movie where they had already done roto work, right? And this is only the early 2000s. What is roto work?

Rotoscoping. Rotoscoping is when they draw you out of something. So if you were on a green screen, it's not enough to just press green and go key. For movies, they have to rotoscope and actually draw or cut you out. Back in the day, they actually physically cut. It's what green using like a green key filter does, but it's doing it in a more precise and artistic way by hand. So, I need Dana to start doing that for all of my videos. Yes.

Yeah, when you quadruple her pay. Dana, if you could please roto Wade's face cam so that he has no background, it'll totally be worth it. No, I'm going to need a raise. Roto one. I'll pay you. Can you hire me and then can i get a raise no uh well it depends i'll start you at a dollar i'll raise you to two dollars what are his obligations let's talk about that later i don't like no we won't fire you uh but he said that it was cheaper they wouldn't give him the already rotoed stuff because it was archived. And they told him it was cheaper just to pay him to redo everything than it was to unarchive stuff.

Which I found, I don't know how that could possibly be true. Yeah, why they couldn't just rip a copy of one of the archived pieces? There's rules about that? Isn't the point of archiving it so you can access it? No, it's just to have it forever and then maybe access it. Yeah, well, accessing generally, accessing stored data degrades it, but not a lot. You can't make like a copy. Not in the digital age.

I think it's okay. But here's the thing. The problem is old software, old file format. I think this is why it would take too long. It's because that was done in software that doesn't exist anymore. It's not supported. It was made in file formats that are not standardized anymore. So not only would they have to unarchive it, get it off, and put it on something else, they would have to load it up on a computer that ran the software.

So they have to unarchive Windows XP. Then they have to unarchive the software. Then they have to unarchive Windows XP, then they have to unarchive the software, then they have to unarchive it. Pretty much. Yeah. And the companies that make this software go under, just like what you were talking about. Right.

And it's like, it's not even just about, like we're all lucky because, you know, JPEG is ubiquitous and probably will be around forever. But think of it this way, GIF, however you pronounce it, that format is basically dead at this point. I actually say LIF. Say that again?

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Ooh, French lavender soy blend candle. I told you HomeSense has good gift options. Hmm, well, I don't know mom's gonna love it she'll take one sniff and be transported to that anniversary trip you took to central pay a few years ago forget it she complained about her sunburn the whole trip it's only 14 14 now that's a vacation i can get behind deal Deals so good, everyone approves. Only at HomeSense. Yeah, no, that is fascinating to think about.

It's not even the question, maybe it is the question of accessing it, but it's all the component stuff. Especially filmmaking is an interesting example because it's not like they used to use Adobe Premiere 2003 and we're just on Adobe Premiere 2023. At a certain point when technologies are evolving and in the 2000s, like that sort of 3D stuff, well not 3D, but that sort of new roto, digital rotoscoping stuff was evolving to a point where like some of it was probably janked together. Homebrew stuff. Some of it was not official like software releases

it was like the studio developed its own tool to do this one task because it didn't exist and now that's just like a feature in adobe yeah and i guarantee you when that happens it's one dude who made that and the studio was like we made it but that dude was either fired or he's dead and that dude can't remake it again because they have no idea how it happened. That's how most code infrastructure works at like legacy, legacy software and stuff like that is one guy made it because he actually decided, hey, I'm going to fix this one problem. But then when he made it, he made it so janked up that if you go into the like the code, it'll say like, I've tried debugging this. Here's a number counter of the times i've failed and other people have failed and it's like 356 when you try to debug this add another number

like it's just a counter inside the code of how many times people can't fix it do you remember king's island how they had like for a while they had like a little thing you go sit and like it was like a 3d image and like the chairs would kind of move or whatever i think they still have that yeah i don't know if i had this stuff i think they had like a 3d spongebob one for a while we put on glasses there's a spongebob but if they had like a adult version of it where it's like just a porn thing you'd like dodge the pic that was 3d coming at your face while you were sitting in the chairs what what were we talking about that inspired this i I don't know. I thought of Spongebob and then I was like 3D.

Shlong. I don't know. It just, you know, it's logic. It was, it had Roto, Roto. Don't say the word logical. It was like, what would be the worst thing to try not to do the Roto thing to? It's like, probably like porn. Like make something like pop that you don't want to make pop.

Like make this butthole pop at you or something. It's like, that'd be a, like make this butthole pop at you or something. It's like, that'd be a dick. Just the butthole. Not the whole thing around the whole butt around it. Just the butthole is like, whoa,

like a snake in honey. I shrunk the kids like, how was work today? Yeah. I don't want to talk about it. Can you show my family what you've been working on? Oh God. Well, here's what I do for a living.

Put these on. Preservation, like that is a thing. Part of the reason why I'm looking at vintage lenses, but we don't need to talk about that. Mark, what about the vintage lenses? What about them? Look, everyone always gets so hype when you talk for hours and hours on end about vintage lenses. No, because all they hear is a big number and they go like, that's a big number. And I go like, yeah, I know. You missed the part where I agreed with you.

It's a big number, which is why I didn't buy it. But you did buy some. I did buy vintage lenses, but not those $100,000 ones. $80,000? No. $60,000? No. $58,000? No. It's like inverted prices, right? vintage lenses but not those hundred thousand dollar ones eighty thousand dollars no sixty thousand dollars no fifty eight thousand dollars no it's like inverted prices right four to three thousand five hundred no it's weird that you said 58 because that's four to three four ninety nine

favorite focal length though no he has a favorite focal length everyone has a favorite focal length i prefer 44 that's not one well that's why i like it it's unique rare it's the big foot of lenses actually no the helios 44-2 is actually a very popular vintage lens. He didn't know that. Don't not give me credit for things I don't deserve. That sounds like a thing I exactly would do. Thank you. I like 35.

35 millimeters is a good all-rounder. I feel like it's become a little too common nowadays as the all-rounder. That's why I like like look for a 40 or a 45 but minolta's 45 is actually of a newer generation so it doesn't match up with the mc3s and so sadly like there's kind of a missing gap however i did discover minolta and leica had a partnership in crafting lenses who doesn't like a minolta that was the commercial yeah that's the was it yeah they should have hired me doesn't like a minolta? That was the commercial. Yeah, that's the... Was it? Yeah. They should have hired me. Who doesn't like a Minolta?

You know, Leica, the Italian company. Leica and Minolta, two traditionally Italian companies. Who doesn't like a Minolta? They practically bleed carbonara. So there's a lens that's popular in the Leica family called the Leica Summicron 40mm. Minolta has a 40 millimeter F2. If you hold these two lenses next to each other, you'll realize they are the exact same lens. So there is a 40 millimeter Minolta, but not many people know about it because it was made for the Leica mount, the CLE.

So I'm thinking because people, I'm thinking that there actually is a missing focal length that people don't know about. I discovered this just recently. A 40 millimeter would be a really cool, different focal length because the 45 is too new. But the 40 millimeter was made back in either the early 70s or the late 60s. There were actually a few different models of it. There were three. The first was actually an identical one to the Summicron. And then the other one was still single-coated, but it was Minolta branded. And then there was another one that's double-coated, which is actually what Minolta is known for, which is double-coating.

But by then, it was already close to the era when there's MD lenses. Double-coated as in like the glasses are double-coated with anoreflexic coating? Yes, exactly. Multi-coated. I don't know if exactly double-coated, but the other one was definitely single-coated. Do they have a 69 length?