Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - An Unboxing of the Galaxy Z Fold 2 in the Arizona Desert

Episode Date: September 4, 2020

This week, we take a slightly different approach and open the episode with the epic tale of our hectic start to "Techtember". We present a detailed re-telling of Marques' bumpy trip to Arizona for a video shoot with David Blaine and the adversity that followed. From editing mishaps to clandestine overnight shipping strategies, we had to work through quite a bit of craziness to film and upload our Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 unboxing video. So grab a comfortable seat and enjoy a special "Waveform Story Time"! Links: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ shop.mkbhd.com Music by KamrenB: https://spoti.fi/2WRJOFh David Blaine Ascension: https://bit.ly/31UuWc8 Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 2 Unboxing: https://bit.ly/3jKwknT Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC optimum points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Hey, what's up, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of that Waveform podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques Brownlee. And I'm Andrew Manganielli. And today we've got a little different episode for everyone. Marques landed at 7 a.m. this morning, I think. It is Thursday, so it's the day before. It's

probably like 12 hours before this episode releases. We've had a very, very busy week. If you didn't know,quez was shooting with david blaine for his ascension uh project live project yeah pretty awesome i hope everyone watched it if not we'll put it in the show notes but this week's just been kind of crazy because a lot of things happened so we're gonna kind of we literally don't even have a script written for this episode marquez is kind of just gonna give us story time here, and we're going to talk about his week, not just Ascension, but how we kind of made a video during that and how we had to handle all that. And then I think one more thing at the end of today's episode, Marques is going to show

me the Galaxy Z Fold 2, and I'm going to just give my impressions on it. Yeah, and we'll just talk about it a little bit. So perfect. Let's go. Let's start. oh god where do where do i start so i actually want to start this way back i don't know how many months ago when we like to randomly put up our predictions of when the channel hit certain milestones you're going pretty far back yeah so this is how many march well so it must have whenever we hit 11 million right um yeah probably around March so when the channel hit 11 million we're like all right everybody place your bets write it down on

a sheet of paper when do you think the channel will hit 12 million and we all put the dates down it's in the slack I don't remember the exact date but my guess was September 2nd and so you know there's there's all sorts of different things that can go into that there's all kinds of fluctuations on tech on YouTube but uh there's a pretty good spread. And I think Michael's guess, Michael, motion graphics specialist on the team, his guess was September 1st, right before my date. Maybe a little bit of trolling there,

but that's the preface to all this. So I got the call from David Blaine, yeah, to work with him on this Ascension project. He told me, he literally FaceTimed me. He's like, Marques, I've got this idea, man. And he's got this way of talking where you're already kind of hooked in because it's David Blaine explaining something. And it's like, I'm going to float up on all these balloons into the sky and then I'm going

to skydive down. But you got to be here to see it. And there's going to be all this tech involved. And I want you to be the eyes and ears of the audience. And we're gonna do this whole thing with YouTube Originals, it'll be a great show. And I was like, well, there's no way I say no to that. There's no way I watch this on YouTube later.

Like I could have been a part of that. So I was in, I was super in. So eventually the dates show up and they were originally planning on doing it, believe it or not, in New York. You saw those announcements. And that was going to be crazy if they were to pull that off. But they went to their backup location because of a couple hurricanes blowing through.

Yeah, those ones coming in. Even though we're nowhere near where they hit, I guess the winds were just bad enough up here. That and just cloud cover. Yeah, actually this whole week, it's been been nice temperature wise but it's been super cloudy so that would be a huge bummer to watch him drift a couple hundred feet and then be gone exactly or a big part of this so uh they moved it to page arizona and for those who don't know page arizona is in i don't want to yeah i do want to say it's the middle of nowhere. It is super isolated. So for some context, it was a four-hour flight from here to Phoenix and then a four-hour drive from the Phoenix airport to the top half of Arizona right next to Utah where there's this beautiful Lake Powell little golf courses in there tucked away in the desert, this little airport, and the site of Ascension. So super remote but super beautiful so i get it and of course you know perfectly still air out in the desert yeah

so the thing is the dates moved for this uh a couple of days beforehand they started shifting started shifting we're like we get these weather patterns we're trying to lock down the exact day we're not announcing it yet but behind the, I was watching it slowly line up with the Galaxy Fold 2 announced date and the Galaxy Fold 2 ship date for reviewers. And so they eventually landed, boom, September 1st. And that was going to be the date of Unpacked. And so I just kind of accepted that, well, I guess'm just gonna have to do the fold two when i get back i think we just thought like a day late's not gonna be that bad i think the video will still do well we like debated this for a while i think we sat there for like a whole day

just being like do we send this to arizona will you have time do we just wait a day that's an amazing luxury to have like oh yeah if you're trying to consider like you get a device on day one and you want to be right in that first wave of coverage you really do want to be right at the top to give your impressions and opinions unboxing whatever you want to do yeah uh and the other fun fact was the most viewed video i have ever put on youtube is last year's galaxy fold unboxing believe it or not, that passed everything. That has over, I think, 21 million views at this point. So it was kind of a no-brainer that I want to do some sort of an unboxing of the Fold 2, a sequel, give my impressions, that sort of thing.

But I'm watching the dates line up. I'm like, dang, it won't be day one. All right, that's too bad. But you know what? Ascension, I got to be there. It's going to be super worth it. I think one of the things we mentioned also was like like it'll be fine if it's a day late but if it has one of those like day one issues like when we tore the screen protector and broke yeah i gotta be there like we were gonna miss that we're not gonna be i mean it stinks that we broke that first one but we were also one of the only people you know one of like five people that broke it so like we got also one of the only people, you know, one of like five people that broke it. So like we got a ton of extra views and news coverage because of it. Exactly. So yeah, you know, the Unpacked event was the morning of September 1st.

The Ascension live stream was the morning of September 1st. In my head, I'm like, wow, we're going to be competing against the Samsung live stream. All right, fine. But, you know, when I get back, we'll work on the fold. So, of course, Weatherman, Don, and Bert, and the whole team, I have so much respect for these guys that we are working with. I'm on set with them. We're going through David's training. He's putting on a parachute suspended from ropes 10 feet in the air.

It's this whole crazy scene. And I'm sort of just watching and documenting and learning my lines and all this stuff. and documenting and learning my lines and all this stuff. And eventually I get word that it's delayed by another day. So now Ascension is going to be September 2nd. And that means I won't be able to fly home till the end of the day in September 3rd. Now it's two days late, but I have a day off on September 1st. Now the gears start turning in my head.

Okay, wait a second. Maybe I can get Samsung to ship the phone out to the desert and I can get it there. And I brought my A7S, but maybe I want to have like more than just that camera to actually make a video. I have a hotel room, but maybe I can use the trailer on site. You know, the gears are turning. I think this was like Saturday when we first started talking about it. And Tuesday was the day you would have off.

It was the weekend, right? So we're debating over the weekend. Should we try to pull this all together on the first before Ascension? And I was like, hell yeah, let's do it. I was like, let's make this happen. So I sent some emails. Samsung's like, yeah, we'll get it out to you. But there's no guarantees it'll get to your remote location by the morning.

You might get it at the end of the day, but whatever. I was like, all right, fine. And we were like, let's get a Komodo, a red Komodo out here. Because you don't want to ship a whole huge thing. I think the Samsung confirmation was on Sunday. So we were like, OK, we have to pack everything up. The issue here is we can't overnight it today because of the fact that it's Sunday. So we have to go to Monday.

Wait till Monday, yeah. We decided I was still going to go in Sunday anyways, come to the office. We decided Komodo is the best. Yeah, just because I only had my MacBook Pro and I know how it handles monster footage and I don't have like the imac pro or anything and i also know that when i fly home i'm gonna have an extra bag now with whatever camera you send me so if you send me a monstro and some big lenses and all these batteries that's a little extra to have like trusted in a hard case and it's also a lot more expensive yeah also we i think our

biggest hard so we have a couple pelican cases the biggest one that is not for like the imac pro which is gigantic is um what the raven came in yeah so it's in order to fit a like monstro in there i would probably get like one lens and maybe a battery or two like in there um so komodo gave us a lot more space i still packed this camera that uh pelican you packed it full i everything i gave you what i thought was everything you needed i mean i just was like if i'm overnighting this to you and we have such a small window i can't we can't forget something um so i sent you komodo three different lenses i could fit in there the batteries we also did the 633 sound mixer and the shotgun mic shotgun microphone batteries for that handles i gave put the battery chargers for

everything in there just in case i knew everything was full yeah um and i just crammed it in there a million sd cards and c-fest cards and everything and i was like poor marquez is gonna have to it probably took me like 25 minutes to just pack it in there and make sure it's all safe and i was like oh man he's gonna be up so late doing this and i'm gonna have to pack this in the morning and be miserable but but you know what i was thinking on my end this is best case scenario for komodo i was like i don't have the r5 with me and yes, I could do it all A7S, but I know I want to make a good video out here and deliver the best thing I can. And I've shot with Komodo for a bit now and I know red color and the footage is, yeah, let's do Komodo. And it's

the smaller camera. It's going to fit in this Pelican case. Yes, this is it. It turned out being a perfect example of how to use it quickly. And also, you only had the only tripod. I wasn't going to send a tripod also, so you had a SwitchPod out there. I had a SwitchPod. Monster would probably bend the SwitchPod at the feet. That's a great point. Yeah, we got it all.

I think we also decided that come Monday, so I woke up like 7 a.m. because the first FedEx that opened was at 8am and not, I didn't even go to the FedEx near me. I drove an hour North closer to an airport knowing that's where FedEx would fly it out of because I didn't, I don't trust any of these shipping companies anymore. So I wanted one less step in there. I wanted get it as close as possible went in i even had a ups site on backup in case fedex told me it couldn't do overnight but she guaranteed it for me um sent it in and then just crossed my fingers and looked at that tracking number like every hour

until you got it um so you got the komodo you got the Komodo en route and it was via FedEx and you got it to an airport. So it would be quickly overnighted. This is all on Monday and we're hoping to make the video on Tuesday. Yes. Okay. In the meantime, I'd also gotten an email back from Samsung saying, yeah, we can, we can get it to you.

We can't guarantee it, but you know, it'll be at you at some point during the day. I said, you know what? That's fine. Ship it. So fast forward to tuesday morning wake up we do a little rehearsal we've got some stuff going on i am lasered in on these tracking numbers on my phone in between every take and like blocking off camera stuff i'm checking the tracking numbers how's the stuff is it shipping did it did it fly overnight yet

they shipped the fold via ups and you shipped the commode via fedex yeah when you told me ups i was like oh man did i make the wrong choice i i just don't trust either of them so i like yeah i was literally doing research and just looking up people's experiences i know we've had pretty bad experiences with fedex and i know mr mobile has had the worst experiences with fedex but whenever a company sends us something overnight, it's almost always FedEx. So I just, I knew there was one close to the airport. It opened earlier than everywhere else did.

So just to me, I was like, if I can get there and I will physically ask them, not can you ship this overnight? Can you guarantee it? And they said by 4.30. And I was like, that's probably later than I would want. But it is also in the middle of nowhere. It's as good as we can do. Yeah. So I'm sitting in Page, Arizona, and the FedEx tracking number updates. It says by 4.30 PM,

we'll get it. I was like, all right, great. The UPS tracking number says by 9 PM, I'll get that phone. I was like, all right, well, you know, if we get it at 9 PM, I can still, we'll work with that, right? Might not be sunny out, but we can work with that. So we finish shooting. They're not shooting, rehearsing. We go back to the hotel, and I just tap on the little receptionist thing at the front desk. I'm like, hey, all right, so I got two packages coming here. They'll have my name and room number on them, but I just wanted to let you know they're coming.

What should I do? They're like, oh, yeah, we'll call you. We'll let you know, and we'll get them to you. I was like, great. So I go back up to the room and I'm just like writing some stuff down that I want to make sure I want to shoot. I eat lunch. I check the tracking numbers and they both say delivered. I'm like, whoa, I didn't get any calls. So I jogged down there. I'm like, Hey, is there any, uh, is there any packages here? She's like, oh, yeah, what was your name again? And she hands me a FedEx package and a UPS package.

And I go up there and I open them both. And it's the Komodo that you shipped me. And it's the Z Fold 2. And I'm pumped. This is like, I think this is about 3 o'clock, 3 p.m. I have both. I was weirdly freaking out at home because i just was so focused on it i wasn't paying attention to this time zone so it was like

5 5 30 my time and you hadn't said anything i'm like oh no oh no oh wait wait he's on a different time zone like yeah we're we're still in the in the clear so far also that was that package was thirty five pounds and shipped it overnight. So it's not a cheap package to send. But but yeah, it was packed. So you got so you get everything. So I get everything. I immediately I'm pumped. I unbox it.

Well, I don't unbox it right away. I like peek in the box, make sure everything's like not broken. I'm like, all right, we're good. And I'm in this like sort of yellow, dingy hotel room. I'm like, let me go back to the trailer. Here's the thing about Page Arizona. There are no Ubers, literally. So if I want to transport anywhere,

I have to get ahold of some of the crew and let me borrow the van and get a ride back from the hotel to the site where the trailer is. So I'm organizing all that. I'm like writing everything down. I'm like, I want to make sure I get shots of this and shots of that and make sure I say these things. And we get it. I get back to the trailer and I immediately take everything out of the box. You

saw this little precarious setup of the unboxing. Wait, let's talk about this for a second. So I'm showing you a picture right now I took from behind the scenes i think i tweeted this picture you did yeah and this is the first shot of the day which is i've got komodo all set up it's on the switch pod and i put the z fold to in the box on the table and it's a little wobbly so i uh i ended up counterweighting just that back leg by tying it to my backpack and then the backpack is like in a drawer hanging underneath it so it's hanging down yeah it's hanging but it's not in the drawer it'll fall into the drawer if it drops okay but i open the drawer for a safety so it's like free hanging it is hanging okay so imagine switch yeah switch pod with literally just like a backpack hanging by a cord on the side just to make sure it doesn't

fall forward because yeah i mean the camera is probably a foot and a half over the side of it just to make sure it doesn't fall forward because yeah i mean the camera is probably a foot and a half over the surface you have the phone on so like leaning it would probably that lens could probably crack if that fell it's not not fantastic so yeah first shot of the day looks a lot different than our top down setup to say the least that's the first thing i thought i was like can i make a top down with a komodo and a switch pod and very quickly the answer was no so this is this is as good as it got but the shot turned out great i've got the monitor facing me i can see focus i unbox it i turn the air conditioner off in there because by the way it's 110 degrees at the airport so i turn the air conditioner off so i can hear the unboxing and taking the plastic off and everything how quickly did that uh go south

did it get really hot in there? No, it only got up to like 70 something degrees because I did the unboxing pretty quick and then I could shoot B-roll with air conditioning on. Okay. So yeah, quickly. I'm moving quick now at this point. You're getting the vibe, right? It's like 3.30. I'm like done with the unboxing. I'm shooting a bunch of my A-roll. I get that all set up and now I'm getting word that i have to leave the trailer by 5 p.m they don't want us uh on site at the airport anymore at 5 p.m gotta go back to the hotel so i shoot every a roll bit i can before 5 p.m and then i quickly pack everything up and go back into the van they take me back to the hotel hotel i get a whole bunch more uh b-roll and i'm

out here in the in the parking lot luke luke akins who's the expert skydiver is like playing with a parachute toy with his kid probably just calming his nerves down just like hey marquez what are you doing by the way luke is a total boss he's he's jumping out of planes with red heliums oh that guy i saw in the video. I saw it. That's so sick. Yeah. So I showed him the Komodo.

He's like, dude, I can't wait to jump with these things. They're so much lighter. He's used to jumping with much bigger cameras, which is crazy. That's really cool. We got to find a way to collab with this guy. Yeah, or get him on the podcast or something. That would be sick. Also, can we do a video where we just tape a Komodo to Vin's head and shoot the entirety

of B-roll on that just as he's walking around don't be magenta don't be magenta yeah man this is uh so now we're in that's a good looking shot by the way with all the rocks yeah we got a i'm not really too worried about color as i'm shooting this because we're shooting raw but i'm out in the parking lot the sun is going down i'm getting shots before the light is dying they're looking really good you know everything you sent is working perfectly so i'm pumped at this point um this is time it makes me worried that you say everything you sent is working at this point well that's the truth so the time stamp you see here 6 54 p.m uh-huh so i'm finishing shooting

at 6 54 right okay cool that's a good three four hours of rock solid work here's the timeline at 8 30 p.m i've imported all the footage and i'm getting ready to jump into the edit because this is my bread and butter right i've got all my footage i've got all my a-roll i've done the unboxing i've made all my notes i've said the things i want to say into a mic I import all of it and it doesn't work oh crap wait what's going on with Final Cut Pro and basically what I'm seeing is I import everything into Final Cut Pro and all the files show up but they sometimes load a couple of frames and then they sort of glitch and go black yeah it looked like as you were scrolling through all everything in like your uh your library it was all black it's all black so i'm looking at all my imported clips and they're all black and i'm like well i mean it is komodo and it's beta and i know some

stuff's gonna go wrong but like there's no way this is broken right i take the cf card out put it back into the camera load up the the clips, they play perfectly fine. These clips look amazing. Why can't I use these right now? I just want to start editing. And basically for the next like three hours, by the way, I have a call time at 445 in the morning coming up. And for the next couple hours, I'm tearing my hair out trying to figure out why this won't work. Is it the red plugin? Delete that. Reinstall that. Nope. Delete that. Install the old one. Nope. Delete that. Put the new one back on. Reinstall Final Cut Pro. Nope. Okay. I think I remembered this point. Right after you reinstalled red plugin, I think you came to Slack and we were trying to like diagnose it sort of, but like there's only so much we can do on Slack.

You also, right, you didn't have any USB drive or anything to try and reinstall. Yeah, I was getting really deep and I was like, well, I am on the Big Sur beta and I think this is probably going to be the reason why it's not working. And so I was trying to do everything I could to not have to reinstall macOS. So I downloaded Premiere and I opened everything in Premiere and it worked in Premiere. But as I was starting to try to go through that Premiere workflow, it was just too slow. And I knew like with this 4 a.m. call time, I'm not going to have nearly enough time to do everything I want. So let me just get into my Final Cut workflow and

this thing will be good in like three hours. So I guess I got to go reinstall Mac OS. And if you don't know, reinstalling Mac OS requires a flash drive or some sort of external drive, which I did not have with me. So I had to borrow one from someone else in the hotel on the film set. Shout out to them. They had a Samsung T7, two terabyte. I finally got one back. They like left it at the front desk for me. I get that. I go through all of reinstalling Mac OS Catalina. I set up a boot drive. I wipe the whole machine clean.

I install Final Cut Pro and the red plugin. They are the only things installed on this computer. And I load up all the footage again and I open it up on final cut pro finally pumped to have done everything i need to do to start the edit and it still doesn't work oh god and this is the point where i'm like okay i guess it's not happening today like uh i got pretty far it's rough to come to that conclusion when we know how much we did to make this happen. Yeah.

Spent a couple hundred dollars shipping a 35-pound package of redirecting stuff to a remote location in Arizona just to film this. Yeah, and the thing is it's probably the most hyped phone of the year. This is the big thing. One of them, for sure.

The previous version, like we mentioned before, has some of our highest view counts of any video on the channel. It's a sick phone. It's everything. And we just want to get it out. And then so we did everything possible to get it. And there's just people asking about it, too, by the way, because I've shared, you know, Ascension is happening and it's super pumped and I can't wait to get started with that

at four in the morning. But also people are like, wait, everyone just started doing fold videos and I want to see what you have to say about the fold. And I had some fun stuff to say about it. And obviously you can see that's up now, but this was like a, this is like a creative bottleneck of like, I have this thing. I want to share it. I can't, I'm tweaking until I want to say about 11 p.m maybe midnight I do want to get some sleep before this huge live performance which broke records on YouTube originals so I want to do a couple last tweaks I end up and by the way when I'm messing with the footage and it's blank in Final Cut Pro there's like moments where it'll like blip and show itself and i'm like oh that's weird

it's showing itself and then i'll like drag a slider and it goes black again and i'm like anytime i manipulate the footage oh it goes black it's so weird um i put it on my instagram story if you want to see it i guess it might probably gone by now but yeah it's just it's behaving super weirdly i'm toggling gpu stuff on and. I feel like I'm kind of figuring it out, but it's not really making any progress. So I go, you know what? I'll tackle this after Ascension tomorrow. I just need my mind on this project.

David Blaine's all in. Luke Akins is all in. I gotta be all in. I just gotta drop this now. So I get to sleep sleep get up at four crack a sunrise you know we're we're out there the balloons are going up i got my cue cards everything is you know got that feel in the air the electricity is there it's it's a great show if you guys haven't seen it we'll link ascension in the show notes it was amazing to watch i basically got a front row

seat of like the absolute Avengers team of like balloon experts and aviation experts and electronics and skydiving and David Blaine. Like it's, it's a, it's a dream show. Um, but of course, because it started so early in the morning when the winds were perfect, we were wrapped by 9am. And so, yeah, you know, the live stream ends, they go get him in a helicopter he comes back he's saying hi to everyone we shoot some like post-game interview type stuff you know and we're wrapped by 9 a.m so at this point i know that my travel schedule from hell is coming up so uh maybe we'll take a quick break we'll come back we'll talk about the second half of this adventure yeah

which is actually figuring out the footage and then the upload disaster. We'll be right back. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in vegas that's a feeling you can only get with bet mgm and no matter your team your favorite player or your style there's something every nba fan will love about bet mgm download the app today and discover why bet mgm is your basketball home for the season raise your game

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or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. You know what's great about ambition? You can't see it. Some things look ambitious, but looks can be deceiving.

For example, a runner could be training for a marathon or they could be late for the bus you never know ambition is on the inside so that thing you love keep doing it drive your ambition Mitsubishi motors all right welcome back we are we are in the middle of it. We're in the thick of it. So where am I picking up? Ascension just wrapped. I am back in the trailer,

sitting in front of this MacBook Pro, like I gotta figure this out. Yeah, and so you're traveling later that night. When do you have to get to the airport? So we wrap at 9 a.m. and my travel schedule says in the middle of nowhere in Page, Arizona. First, I have a get to the airport? So we wrap at 9am and my travel schedule says in the middle of nowhere in Page, Arizona. First, I have a flight from that airport where the stunt happened to Phoenix at 3pm. Okay. But you went to the airport by car, right? Yes. But now you're taking a plane.

Now we're taking a plane. Yeah. When I arrived, the charter plane was done flying that flight. It was in the middle of the night. so it was a four-hour car ride. But now we're at this airport. I have a 3 p.m. flight from there to Phoenix. I have a 6 p.m. flight from Phoenix to San Francisco. And then I have a 10.40 p.m. flight from San Francisco overnight back to Newark this morning. And I'm like, I got to figure this out before that series of flights or it's not happening and I'm going to be really sad and I might as well just not try

in the trailer I'm figuring it out I eventually find a way and it's not even that I found a way it's just kind of I was luckily messing with it long enough to switch with some GPU decode settings and letting it sit for long enough and And I was trying exports over and over again and would just say failed within like two seconds of starting the export. And I would just, I would leave stuff on the timeline and then mess with it. And it would work for a little bit before I started crashing again. Eventually I just take all the clips, put them all on a new timeline and a new project, immediately hit export on the whole thing and i watched it one percent at a time get all the way to 100 and export all my clips in pro res and i was like all right i

have the footage and it's it's like i can't do the the manipulation i usually do with red raw clips which is the whole reason we brought komodo and you know the footage still looks good but it's not as as manipulatable as i want but But you know what? We have the footage. I got the clips now. Let me just edit with what I got. So I do that. I sit in the trailer, like, literally as soon as breakfast is over, and I just start crushing this edit. I'm, like, taking the clips because I just exported one big 25-minute clip.

So you don't even get to see, where the cuts are if no like clips you made exactly literally i gotta scrub that sounds miserable yeah but i was like you know what i this is farther than i got last night with all my like hours and hours of work so you know if i wasn't gonna finish it yesterday i'm gonna finish it today before this flight i do that whole edit uh and i start i export the whole thing and i'm like kind of proud of it and i it you know again it's not the best quality but at least my impressions of the phone are going to be in people's hands who want to hear about it right so uh i hit upload and this is when i take this screenshot okay here we go i'm going to show you something a photo that i took at 12 38 p.m

so it just says uh starting to upload will be on unlisted three percent uploaded and yeah 12 38 so your flight's in two and a half hours yeah i mean two and a half hours leaving departing yeah yeah so three percent and this is on the guest wi-Fi at the airport because the whole production wrapped the 3G tent and the trailers are all getting taken down. I don't have fast Wi-Fi anymore. I'm going either tethering on my phone or Wi-Fi of this airport. Yeah. And it's not like Newark airport. It's like a small... Oh, it's not like newark airport it's like a small it's not like newark airport it's like imagining a couple uh gates and that's about it there is one gate okay yeah there is one runway

and there is one waiting area and one everything and you basically head through and there's one flight at a time probably one 10 year old router in the back. Exactly. Like 10 down. Exactly. 10 down would have been great. I was getting two and a half up and down. And so this is why I was trying tethering because, you know, maybe it'll be faster than this, this airport wifi, but tethering wifi in Page, Arizona was also not that great. Not imagining. It was also about two and a half up or down so i waited three hours of like keeping a macbook pro awake and plugged in and next to a window trying to get this thing done and we have to leave for the flight and uh i have this footage here did you

ever debate just telling them you can keep this macbook if you just make sure it stays awake till it uploads and then just wipe it. I was sitting in the waiting area before we boarded the plane and I got to that. To 6% upload. Okay, just scrolling through this, I wanted 3% uploaded at 12.38 p.m. I swipe one time and it says 6% uploaded at 5 p.m yeah so it didn't work it didn't work okay so uh

we board we board the plane i cancel the upload and because the thing about youtube um uploads is you can get halfway and they say that they can resume an upload that gets interrupted halfway through but i don't know if i trust that yet. It hasn't been successful in my past. So we get on the plane. I'm like pretty defeated. Okay. But you know what? I have a 45-minute layover.

Once I land in Phoenix before I take off to San Francisco, maybe I'll give it a shot then. Maybe the Wi-Fi is good. Who knows? It's Phoenix Airport. It's nice. You're an optimist. If you think any airport is gonna have good wi-fi like i would just feel super super defeated i probably would have tweeted out

hey anybody in like phoenix or page could you come over i'm going to oh no you'd have to give them all your info like give them a flash drive can you upload this on your home computer oh my god here's my user password and everything please don't hack it yeah it was like when i was in page in the airport and other people i didn't have an uber but they were like oh we're gonna make a starbucks run do you want anything and i was like maybe i should go with them and try starbucks wi-fi because it's going so slow uh but eventually yeah it doesn't work in Page. I pack everything up. We get on the plane. We head to Phoenix, and it's less than an hour flight, so we land in Phoenix.

Okay, I'm in Phoenix Airport now. Immediately, I take out my laptop, walk to the next gate. It was like a five-minute walk. It's not that big of an airport, and I sit down, I open my laptop, and I hit the upload button, and it's starting to move. I get up to like 35, 45% and I'm pretty pumped, but I'm getting quickly at the board time for this flight.

And so I'm like kind of impressed with Phoenix Wi-Fi and it's free and I'm just letting it go. And now here's a video. They have us board. And when they say everyone board, they're going from the back of the plane to the front in COVID times. And so I'm just waiting to be the last one to board the plane.

I am the last one to board the plane. Here's a clip I took as they're about to close the cabin door and asking everyone to take their laptops and put them away. 34 minutes left. 55%. 549.

So they're about to close the door. There's no way you're finishing it. And that's so frustrating because I only got to like 30% in page. So now in the couple of minutes that I'm down in this airport, I got to 50-something percent, and they're about to in the couple of minutes that I'm down in this airport, I got to 50 something percent and they're about to close the door on me. Oh, I almost had it. That's when you need to be like, I think my seat's broken. Can we get the, can we chill for a minute? Cause honestly, if, if they let me sit there for another 20 something minutes, it would have been done.

Here's what killed me, right? We're sitting on the airplane and i'm starting to notice the connection as i got onto the plane is getting pretty weak yeah i said oh you know let me switch to tethering on my phone just and like hold it up to the window and the tethering on my phone in phoenix airport sitting on the plane was like 21 up and down and as soon as i switched it started speeding up and then they closed the door and then you just lose everything and i just lost everything so do you think if you tethered from your phone inside beforehand you would if i had started with tethering immediately on my phone i would have had it uploaded by then at at that point do you think you wish you never tried tethering so you didn't have to sit on a plane to san francisco going it would be up right now i can't believe you've done this marquez why would you not just try

tethering in the first place it was pretty it was pretty frustrating i gotta say um eventually we fly into san francisco i flew over apple park here's my apple park slideshow i took a some circle pictures i don't i don't know why i think just seeing a circle from there is so cool it's just a circle but when you know what it is it's pretty sick yeah so i flew into san francisco it's a longer flight so i'm like steaming this whole flight i did the wi-fi it's an alaskan air flight the wi-fi doesn't work the whole time i can't even try while i'm on the plane i finally land in san francisco it's uh close to p.m. Now I have my two-hour layover. And the context of why I told you guys at the beginning

that we were looking at the days the channel is going to hit 12 million is the channel is now at 11.99 million. And I am trying to get this video uploaded because if it does and the channel crosses 12 million, my prediction will be correct to the day yeah which is great we've never crazy i think you and i have been doing predictions to the next million since so when i started it was at like 4.5 million we hit 5 million and then i think you and i have been doing predictions since we shot for 6 million yeah so we've been doing

this six times vin and and Brandon came in. No one has ever gotten it to the day. I don't know if anyone's gotten it to the week. It's too variable. There's lots of very linear channels, like daily uploading channels, where you can sort of get into a rhythm and predict how things are going to go.

With us, it's like we have autofocus, and then we'll go back to a smartphone, and then something over here blows up, and it's very spiky. So you can kind of sort of yeah average it out but it's uh it was pretty crazy to get it to the day but either way i'm looking at the clock i'm like wow it could actually happen today which would be crazy if this video goes up it probably most likely would definitely i mean this is arguably one of our

biggest videos of the year we all knew it was gonna get a good spike so i land in san francisco it just went from 110 degrees in phoenix to 65 on the ground in san francisco i walk out on the plane and i walk all the way to the gate and by the way i'll tell another sidetrack story in a second but i walk all the way to the gate i sit down and open my laptop and i open speedtest.net on San Francisco Wi-Fi and this is what I get. 200. 200. That's the dream. 200.

I'm like, it's happening. It's finally happening. I upload that video in minutes, title it, make the thumbnail, upload the thumbnail. I did this all like outside, like right as I landed, I like walked outside and like sat on a bench and just, I probably looked a little crazy actually. Just like outside with a hoodie on. No sleep, probably like bloodshot eyes. Yeah. Like this guy hasn't slept in a while, has he? And I'm just like, I've been up since 4am but this has to happen. What time is this West Coast right now? So this is, let me look at the timestamp. This is about 9 p.m.

Okay. So 9 p.m. I am finishing the upload. And by 9.30, everything's done. And I'm just waiting for it to process so I can go live. And I guess at the end of the day, the story is it did eventually go live technically before midnight West Coast time. West Coast time. And I refreshed on the plane. It did eventually go live technically before midnight West Coast time.

And I refreshed on the plane and the channel did also cross over 12 million subscribers on the day. Thanks to that eventual Herculean effort. I just want to say I had 18 standing hours on my Apple Watch with five hours of flights. Also, huge shout out to San Francisco Airport with 200 down. If any of you guys are in san francisco and need some decent internet just go sit outside the airport i guess that's um it's free yeah yeah wow so uh yeah that that was the eventual story of being a youtuber and having just two things happen in two days but like everything that went through uh the pipes to make that happen here's

the here's the sidetrack story you ready you know the the red raven case that you through the pipes to make that happen. Here's the sidetrack story. You ready? You know the red Raven case that you packed the Komodo in? Yeah. I almost lost it. Here's how. So you shipped that to me, right? When I traveled to Arizona, I had my carry-on bag,

which was my clothes and stuff, and my backpack, which had the A7. So two bags, didn't need to check anything. Flying backpack, which had the A7. So two bags didn't need to check anything flying back. That's a different story. Now that tiny plane from page to Phoenix gate check that the, the red Komodo and barely, barely fit my duffel bag of clothes in the overhead. And I have my backpack with me and you know, this is traveling during COVID times is a little bit different. There's not as many people on the plane. There was no one next to me on any of these flights. Yeah.

How'd you, sorry to interrupt, but I'm super interested. You see all these like American Airlines stories of them like cramming the planes and that just seems like a nightmare. But this is, this is, you did Alaska and you didn't sit next to anyone? Yeah. The Alaska flight was, let me think, where was I? I was on the right side near the window and no one was next to me. No one was in the two seats in front of me or the two seats behind me.

Wow. So that was great. And, you know, by the way, the whole Ascension project had like top notch safety. Every single person had a mask on, but also every on-screen talent had daily covid testing so we're all testing negative every day making sure we're all set classic boat horn um so you know all these flights i'm i'm sort of just in cruise control i'm only really thinking about the uploads so i'm just getting through them basically uh but yeah so so I gate check that hard case and the first tiny plane. And when I get off the tiny plane in Phoenix, I pick it up at the gate and I walk in. Then the second plane,

which is going from Phoenix to San Francisco, again, I walk up to the front desk and I'm like, hey, I have an extra bag. I didn't fly here with it, but I have to gate check it. They're like, sure. Put a little tag on it. And he asked me when I was there, you're going to Newark, right? And I said, yeah. And they're like, all right, it'll be with you at your final destination. Great. So I gate check it, walk onto the plane. I'm doing my whole upload fit. I'm just forgetting about the bag. I get to San Francisco and I just get off the plane and walk to the next gate so after this whole upload thing happens i'm sitting at the gate there's a couple minutes left before boarding and i get a phone

call from a random number and i pick it up hi is this marquez brownlee oh yeah it is and who is this and so this is uh sam from alaska airlines you left your bag on the plane. I was like, what? Like, yeah, this hard case here, we're trying to see if we can find you. Did you go to the next gate or where'd you go? And I was like, oh yeah, I'm in terminal three. I don't know what, I thought it was going to be. And they're like, oh yeah, we're sending Sergio out there. He's tall. He'll look for you. And here's his number and he's got the case. And sure enough, I walk all the way back out to the front from the back of the international terminal. And this guy is like rolling the red case long.

He's like, yeah, I, someone lost the bag and we had to figure out who it was. And yeah, I just figured I'd get this to you. And the flight attendants were just going to leave it. And then I said,

this is a red camera in here. It says red on it. We got to get it to whoever it is. How on earth did they find out it was you? There's I don oh it had your tag had the tag on it Thank goodness, cuz yeah, I don't know if I in the scramble of packing that I don't think I put a business card or anything In there like that was not on my mind. I was too focused So here I was thinking gate check it it'll arrive at the final destination But apparently something probably between switching Airlines from alaska to united or whatever happens they did not have that memo go through and so luckily they they called me and found me and realized it was an important bag and i got it

so uh i then got that bag too and uh it made it to newark what do you know it's in the year of 2020 airline stories are the positive. Wow. At least one of them had fast internet. You really know everything is messed up in the world. If we're talking good about airlines. 2020 man. With Uber reserve,

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Don't get it yet. If you need a stable workhorse, this is not the camera yet. It's 1.0 software. Ended up exchanging emails from a few people I read, and we figured out what it was. It's basically the newest version of their Final Cut Pro plugin, which has metal support, only works with certain GPUs. And the MacBook Pro, as we know, has an internal integrated Intel GPU and a dedicated AMD GPU. It was optimized for only, well, it was functional with only the dedicated GPU. The MacBook Pro, on the other other hand is busy switching back and forth based on

what it thinks you need when and so this is why i could never figure out what was going on it was just blacking out randomly it's because the macbook pro is switching gpus so uh long story short komodo will continue to get updates and i will not be trying to edit komodo footage on a macbook pro again anytime soon i think you mentioned this, but why on earth would Final Cut ever want to use the integrated GPU over... Yeah, that was weird to me that it would ever... I'm sure there's some reason, but I wish you could just be like,

I'm going to work this computer right now. Please do not choose anything. That's the thing is I didn't find out until later that that was the exact issue. I'm emailing them and they're like, what's happening with the footage? And tell me's happening it doesn't work it's going blank blah blah so you know i think it was like literally this morning we figured out what i got that email from jared about the gpus and yes you can't actually force the macbook pro to just see the

dedicated gpu and use it all the time all right if i had known that in the moment probably last thing you're thinking of you just want to get it all done. And yeah. So yeah. Anyone who watched this unboxing video, if you think it's a little off, there's why colors might be a tiny bit off. And if you enjoyed it, just now you know how much work went into that and what we do to try and get everyone videos on time. Yeah. So there it is.

That's just the beginning of Tech-tember. There's a lot of stuff happening behind the scenes in the first few weeks of this quarter, but there it is. Yeah, we're hitting the busy season, and we really hit it as hard as possible. We made it, I mean, maybe we made it a little harder on ourself, but like we said, you can't pass up an opportunity when David Bladen says,

I'm going to float into the atmosphere and i want you to be there so yeah exactly you want to see the fold too i do i do um yeah so i actually refrained from watching the video because i kind of wanted to oh you didn't watch it or anything to watch this well there's a full see this in person all right let's see i'm going to practice my skills here on describing to the podcast audience first the screen on the front is obviously like the this thing is heavy it is it is solid it feels like i'm holding a brick like you talk about like candy bar like phones and everything like that this feels like a brick. It's not the worst. It feels really solid, which is great.

Front screen is just like a total, total upgrade from last time. What a difference. It's really strange, though, that it's kind of like folding over the right side. The screen's like curved over the right side, but not on the left side because it has to go into the the hinge uh color's nice it's like that copper color huge camera bump on the back kind of maybe a little smaller than note 20 yes right but very similar to note 20 essentially the same camera bump yeah yeah opening it up it's so weird how the screen on the front feels so like

you know the screen feels a little off on the inside because it i'm guessing it has that like plastic it does screen cover on it but before when you had it you couldn't really tell but now you can feel the front glass in the middle so you can tell it has a screen protector on it right oh yeah so samsung told me specifically i mean i asked actually you can tell it has a screen protector on it right oh yeah so samsung told me specifically i mean i asked actually you can see the corners right yeah i'm surprised they didn't make that more flush so that people aren't scraping their fingernails in there so it's in the instructions on the box don't remove that screen protector and i asked samsung and they said i remember curiously yes it is removable no you should not remove it yourself yeah they said, curiously, yes, it is removable.

No, you should not remove it yourself. Yeah, they said to go to a Samsung store, right? Right, have someone from Samsung official remove it. It's also interesting because since it's a hole punch cutout in the middle, you can see almost like the teardrop cutout of the screen protector. So like you could very easily fingernail get that off um all right the crease you can see the crease you can uh but i think just like open youtube or something or like yeah i think the crease when you start seeing video it's not quite right that's what i was gonna say so when you look at the phone just looking at the phone you see the crease pretty

hardcore uh-huh but if you're watching a video on the phone and not really looking at the phone just looking at the phone you see the crease pretty hardcore but if you're watching a video on the phone and not really looking at the phone so much then i think the crease is way less of a an issue yeah okay so the main thing i want to do though is i want to just hold this next to the duo here for a minute yeah um talk about thickness difference yeah it's so weird it's like short and stubby versus tall and thick i don't know so like holding it folded in in one hand i like the fold better because it's skinnier it feels more like a phone i think it could be a little wider but the surface duo in hand folded up is like wide it's very wide yeah um thickness of it on a table though that sorry i'm moving my microphone i think the surface duo is equal if you lay the surf uh the fold to on the camera bump side

on a table the the half with the camera bump is as thick as the whole surface surface duo which means it has another phone on top of that yeah so i think i think you could fit two surface duos on top of each other to be the same thickness as the fold two yeah is that a safe to say thing yeah it is a massive thickness difference yeah so here's my i have a working theory this is kind of how my brain works as i'm reviewing a piece of tech and i've been obviously now testing two folding phones alongside each other at the same time my uh my usage of fold two is is really curious i love it a lot like it's it's way more refined the hinge stays put in better you know i was just opening it the hinge feels much better than much more sturdy more firm more confident more smooth um it's a boxier more it

just feels more like a phone that's ready to be daily used especially just because of that huge front screen yeah here's what i find holding the phone and just using that front screen because of how much bigger it is now it's actually harder for me to reach the top this is like the the silliest complaint is like when you had a tiny crappy screen with huge bezels you could reach all four corners easily and just do whatever on it yeah now it's like i actually have to do a little bit of hand gymnastics and i think the the craziness that is this phone is it's a it's a win-lose. It's a win because you do get a bigger, better screen on the front,

and you want to use it more. But now you kind of lose because you're trying to use it more as a regular phone, and it's worse as a regular phone because it's so thick. Look at the size of the thickness of it, and you're trying to hold it, and now it's super narrow. Imagine someone tried to make a phone that's just the half of the thickness of it and you're trying to hold it and now it's super narrow. Imagine someone tried to make a phone that's just the half of the Galaxy Fold. Like that would be insane.

Yeah. So it's kind of a win-lose and it just makes me open it up and use the middle more. And it's where you look at this duo and like we talked about, like this folded up in terms of thickness is just something I think phones

are gonna have to strive for because this is an incredible thickness for two screens. Yeah. Yes. It has a ton of trade-offs to get to that point, but the hardware of this is pretty crazy and really futuristic in that sense. I have something I just thought about for fold two though, using the front screen,

is it going to be harder as a lefty? And here's my question. Why? It does not fold flat. So it doesn't fold like a book would fold. It folds almost more like a three-ring binder where it folds thinner on one side than the other side because it has a gap. So if you're using it in your left hand on the outside screen

with your thumb coming over, you're almost reaching over and angled down yeah yeah it's just i think a lot of this comes down to the thickness maybe a little bit i think the the form factor is not i think the ideal outside cover screen size is somewhere in between fold two and surface duo yeah i think surface duo is a little bit too wide and this fold is a little bit too tall and narrow. Somewhere in between. Yeah and then hopefully Fold 2 gets thinner at some point. I think it's going to be a while. They're going to have to find a way to I don't know how they're eventually going to get the screen to fold precisely and not have that like little like

curvature on it which makes the it not fold flat when they can pull off it folding fat flat and then get it thinner that's gonna be that's gonna be peak right there i think um the question is just how many generations away is that and i just i don't know where the tech is in the future but that's eventually the goal yeah i think and will that happen before duo potentially goes to a folding screen and not just a folding phone oh if that ever happens i think those two things will probably happen in the same year at the same time because that's the whole idea is i like i think i said this either last episode or in the video but i like that microsoft is going super thin,

stunning hardware and not bothering with this baby tech of folding screens yet. And when the tech is so good that they can keep a stunning piece of hardware and fold the screen, then they'll go folding screen. Same thing with Samsung. They're going to keep going thinner and thinner and folding better and better until it's close to the stunning hardware of Surface Duo. So I think they're converging on that place just from different angles. And that's, I guess, how the tech world should work. Yeah. Cool. Do you want to end this with some ASMR folding closing?

We'll give you Duo and we'll give you Fold 2. You have to guess which one I'm folding when. This is Fold number one. And this is fold number one and this is fold number two let's go back let's go back here let's go back turn your volume up a little bit I know you're listening on headphones so turn your volume up you want me to bump the mixer a little bit no no I'll just do it closer ready this is fold number one again. Here's fold number two. Nice. Feel free to leave what you think it is right next to a five-star

rating on Apple Podcasts. Or tweet at us, WVFRM. Yeah, maybe we'll do like a poll and see if everyone can do that. We'll reveal it by some tweets sometime after this episode goes live. Uh, yeah. Hope everyone enjoyed story time.

This was a little different, but I think we're going to have more fun things like this with our increase in episodes coming out. Um, I just thought that was a really cool behind the scenes story. I didn't even know half of it. Like half of the stuff you told me, I, I'm not sure, probably because you were too busy stressing out about getting the video out yeah i'm glad we have a good story to tell though welcome to tech timber catch you guys uh pretty soon in the next episode later the waveform podcast is brought to you in part with studio 71 and our intro outro music was created by cameron barlow