Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - How We Make Our YouTube Videos: A Deep Dive

Episode Date: January 24, 2020

The workflow for the MKBHD YouTube channel might not be what you'd normally expect from a production company, or even another successful YouTube channel. We break down what a day or week might look like when we're in production mode and creating content. See what everyone on the team does and how we do it, and stay for several fun stories along the way. To wrap it all up, we answer your questions from Twitter about how exactly we produce our videos. Get 25% off your order from The Bouqs Co. by going to: bouqs.com/wave with promo code WAVE Links: https://twitter.com/WVFRM https://twitter.com/MKBHD https://twitter.com/AndyManganelli https://twitter.com/daangvinh https://twitter.com/BrandonJHavard Peter McKinnon Studio: https://bit.ly/2RjzrrC Peter McKinnon Sound Proofing: https://bit.ly/30JDCQB Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Welcome back to another episode of Waveform. We're your hosts. I'm Marques Brownlee. And I'm Andrew Manganielli. So in this week's episode, we're going to be talking the process. We're pulling back the curtain and sort of shedding some light on the production side of the MKBHD channel and sort of giving, I guess we've sort of structured this as like a guided tour of like how something goes from an idea to a video on the channel and everything in between. This is sort of like the original reason we made this podcast. So we can talk about stuff like this. Also, fun fact,

I'll just toss this in here. We were actually nominated for a Shorty Award in 2020 for this podcast specifically in the podcast section. But we're also up against, we'll leave a link in the show notes in case you want to vote for us. It is open voting, but we're up against Conan O'Brien, Bill Simmons, Gabby Dunn, Emma Chamberlain, a bunch of other super talented people. So if you feel like voting.

Pretty exciting, yeah. It's super exciting, but obviously that's a pretty tall, pretty stacked category. It's a stacked category, but in tech and innovation. So as much as it's stacked, I feel like we make a little more sense. Yeah, that's an interesting, I don't know

exactly how they define the category, but I think for a podcaster, that's pretty sweet to be recognized. So there it is. We always start though with a little recap of the past, well, it's been a week since the last episode, so we can go back a week. And there have been two videos, the desk setup tour 2020 and the air pod, why everyone seems to be copying them explainer. And these are two fun ones. I mean, the desk setup tour, people sort of, we made a habit of doing this around the beginning of every year of what's on my tech or something like that.

And this is the last setup tour in this space before we move studios. Yeah. We're really close. I'm excited to actually, I guess, put together a video of the whole moving studios process. Yeah, I guess in the setup, though, isn't going to be that much different because it's still going to be your desk setup. So it's like you've personalized it for so long that it's just going to be a new space soon. Exactly. And that might be cool. But yeah, I'm basically going to be lifting up most of this

stuff and moving it down there. But that was fun you can check that out and there's also the explainer that was also a pretty quick idea video where it was like i there's 17 different wireless earbuds in the studio and i want to talk about them all but i don't know how to make one video that shows all of this stuff and eventually it wound up on just like explaining their existence yeah it kind of also sparked because a like clone so we talk about in it there are clones of like different big companies making truly wireless because of airpods and then there's also just the like straight ripoff oh yeah airpod clones and somebody sent us a pair and we the first thing we thought when we got it was like hey they don't look that bad but uh all the reviews we see about them people are wondering where their shipment is so it's not a great sign yeah we kind of also saw

all those weird knockoffs and how shady those might be yeah so that's all encompassed in this one high look like video yeah which i think is fun yeah um so yeah that's out those are the last two videos here's what i'll say i'll leave you with this january is walking so february can run there's i just checking the calendar there's three secret video shoots in a row yeah and all those things will come out in february and then slowly start ramping real quick it's funny because we talked about how like once we hit the new year it usually slows down but you've traveled every week this month and we're traveling for the next two weeks. Yeah, it's a lot.

It's going to be a little more busy than we expected. Yeah, there's always a lull after CES, but we're hopping right back into it. So I'll say February will run and we'll have some great stuff coming up. But until then, a little quiet with the videos, but that's fine. We got an episode of Waveform.

I also have some content I liked. Cool. We always do this as sort of a throwback too. And it's actually two videos, both by Peter McKinnon. Is that cheating? I can, I feel like it's not cheating. I can do that. And they are, he's actually going through a really similar process. We've been texting back and forth about he's moving studios too. And so he's been like building up this new space also in Canada, but also then moving everything from one space to the other. That's what the first video is about. And then the second video is he gets in that new space

and he starts talking and there's just an immense amount of echo. And so it's, yeah, I mean, I had those experiences as well. So if when you're in a big empty box and you're trying to do better sound, his second video goes through a bunch of different soundproofing tips. Even if you don't fully furnish this room, you can do some things with sound blankets and specifically pointing the mic and things around it in a certain way to minimize the bounce. So, I mean, we just literally were shooting today and I looked down at the floor at the bass traps and was like, we're moving soon. We need to order like three times as many of these. Oh, that's there. The bass traps might be the most underrated thing about sound proofing. I mean, you know, to put stuff on the wall because that's, it bounces back and forth

between the walls and a big empty rectangle, but the corners are where sound waves amplify and they sort of spread more than they would if they were just going back and forth. So anyway, not to get into the weeds, but check out those videos. And, uh, those are some processes we'll probably be going through too. I think I'm going to watch those just to get informed for the next month of us moving. Yeah, they are worth it. All right, so diving into kind of our main topic today. I think I kind of sparked my interest the other week when you tweeted something that said, did something yesterday that I never do.

I left the studio in the middle of an edit, went outside, went home, ate dinner, went to sleep. Coming back to the studio this morning with fresh eyes is going to make the video better in so many ways. New year, new me, new video today. All right. So yeah, when I saw this tweet, I didn't think much about it because I think like a week before you, we were just sitting here planning the week out and you said to me like, one of my resolutions this year is I want to not just blow out an entire edit in one sitting like I want to take a step back come back the next morning and give it a shot so I guess I kind of knew about this right but then all the replies when you tweeted this you have there are a lot of replies and people were very surprised that you don't take breaks when it comes to editing so I

I thought let's take a whole episode. Let's tell people what we do here, how we do it. I can give a little background on that tweet, just because, like, yeah, we had a video. I forgot exactly which video this was, but I think it was one that we had a little bit of animation in. But the point was, yeah, every time I sit down to edit a video, I edit from cover to cover, and I don't stop until it's done. And then I edit

and then I upload it. So it's typically like when we upload videos at like 11 PM, it's because that's when I finished. That's when I finished making the video. So a couple of times I've done this and it's never really been comfortable, but I've finished editing a video, then gone home and then come back the next morning and then had sort of fresh eyes to look at this edit again and maybe, oh, you know what, I'll tweak a few things. Let me add a couple things. The graphics here could be a little better.

Oh, let me add some, you know, like I go through the edit again. Yeah, or just like a frame here or there that you missed that looks awkward, and because you were staring at it for six hours, you'll never notice that. Yeah, and it was always weird and uncomfortable to me because I always feel like as soon as a video is done, it's old. Like I want to get it uploaded because two days later, if I wait a day or two to upload it, it's going to feel like, man, this thing's been done forever. Everyone's seen it already, even though it's not even true. In my brain, I'm like, this is over.

true like in my brain i'm like this is this is over um but yeah coming back the next day i left halfway through an edit and finished the second half with like way more energy and way more fun so yeah that's gonna be something that i think we do a bit more this year but yes we can dive into the process itself uh because it all starts with an idea yeah for video. Yeah, I think people don't realize we're not a channel that has a backlog of videos that we do in advance. And we're a very, this is the video we're working on and nothing else really happens until that video is done and we move to the next. So maybe it's not the most ideal way of doing it,

but you've been doing it for 10 years now and it seems to be working pretty well. I'm so jealous of all my friends who are like, yeah, I've shot, you know, I sat down on Monday and I made three videos and I'll upload them on Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Oh my, I would die for that. I'm going on vacation, but we've got like five in the bank

and we can just post them when I'm gone. It is nothing like that here. So it's literally, yeah, when a project is underway, like we are full steam ahead on that. Every all hands on deck for that project until it's done then it's done and we like come up for air a little bit we get to listen to the feedback we see the comments we're proud of the video and then it's the next one yeah so yeah there's there's definitely no backlog i wish there was but yeah um so we we generally

start like every week i try to just because there's multiple people involved, you can't just keep everything in your head. I try to put the plan down for the week at the beginning of every week. Then we have, you know, maybe two videos that we're definitely going to do this week, maybe a third if we have the time. And then we just get started one at a time as we go into it. And, and really all of this starts with the script. And this is another question I think a lot of people might have about the videos like how scripted or planned are they and I will say

the most scripted part of it is all the information and the information density and what I'm actually trying to communicate and the least scripted part of it is the shots themselves yeah that just sort of fall into place unless there's something super specific you want to do like that's usually never written on the script so when marquez is like pretty far through the script he usually sends it out to all of us so we all read it get a get a chance to know like what we should be looking for when we're all shooting then so usually it's a day where just you and i are in when you're writing then the next day vin and brandon come in and that's when we go into like full-blown shoot mode. We turn to a production studio.

But by that point, all of us have read the script. There aren't really any shot lists or anything in there. You might have a couple ideas, and everyone might have an idea or two from reading the script, but just the words are pretty much scripted out. I think that's also a part of why a lot of the video comes to life in the edit is because it's not so structurally scripted that it's like, all right, I'm going to start with the intro shot. Then I'm going to say, hey, what's up, guys?

Then it's going to be a shot of the outside of the phone. Then it's going to be a shot of the back and the front. Like it's not that planned at all. It's more of like, all right, here are the things I want to say. I either write every sentence out or I have some bullets and the specs and it's all written down. every sentence out or I have some bullets and the specs and it's all written down. And then we go out and we shoot and we aim to cover everything that's being talked about in whatever creative way makes sense. And we'll probably talk about like the crazy in-depth shots in a little bit later.

But then we basically make sure the script is covered. And once everything is covered, then we can import and bring it in. And if there's any little missing holes here and there, we can shoot those later. But essentially, then it goes from shooting mode to production. So from pre-production to production. So yeah, it's mainly just a matter of getting everything written. Yeah. So pretty much pre-production is just Marques does the majority of the writing, gets a couple ideas from all of us, and then it's just the fun. I mean, the part that all of us enjoy the most is shooting the video.

If I were to guess what most people are probably curious about is how long does it take to review something or how long does it take to make a video or to make that script? Let's do like a quick TLDR of how long a start to finish one does so you guys can all picture what,

like we say shoot day, it's usually just a day. Right. So there are different types of videos too. So there's the explainer videos that have different types of videos too so there's the explainer videos that have a certain flow to them there's the reviews that we're super engaged with those have their own flow there's the autofocus videos yeah totally different you know uh the interviews everything has a sort of a different flow to it um i'd say if we're gonna go typical

video we might as well just talk about like a review. Yeah. That'll be, we get the device. Let's say it's a smartphone review. Let's go, let's go. It's just the new Galaxy S20. No, that's too recent. I'll go with an imaginary phone. Okay. The Doogee MX free folding.

Go back in time a little bit. There's the Doogee MX free fold. Is that what you said? Oh God. Doogee MX free fold. I'm not very creative. So we'll get the device oftentimes before it comes out, and we'll have it for whether it's a couple days or a week or two weeks, whatever it is.

And I will, as I use the phone, I have a little Google Keep dock, and I just literally, every time I notice something that I want to definitely remember to say, I'll open Google Keep and write that down. And I had just this ongoing list, this running list of like, and usually within the first like two hours, I'm noticing a ton of things. Yeah. And it sort of waterfalls down over like, I get most of my stuff in the first like two days and then it trickles off and I may notice one or two new things on the third day and the fourth day. But by the time I'm at like five days, I have a pretty good idea of what the deal is. You know what you're looking for. You've been doing this for 10 years. Exactly. Smartphones are the bread and butter. If I'm reviewing something

I'm unfamiliar with, this will take longer. But with a smartphone, I take it out of the box. I'm like, oh, okay, I get it. So it's pretty quick. Once this process is over, then I'm taking all those notes from Google Keep. This is why my life runs through Google. I open Google Docs, Google Drive, and I start to put together the bullet point list and the eventual script, which is what I'm sharing with all the guys who can see it as I'm writing it live. And I'm basically adding all those bullet points and trying to find an order to them that flows, makes sense. You watch the final video, it tends to sort of look like it's more off the cuff, but it's very obviously planned to make sure I can fit as much as possible

in as short a time as possible. And so that'll turn over in about five days from the time I get the device to the time we're actually done writing and starting to actually make that video. Now, if this is something like an interview, there is no, I can't write the interview beforehand. It's like I write all the questions, but then it just goes how it goes. If there's an explainer video, it can take anywhere from a day to a week to write it,

depending on how complex the topic is. If it's an autofocus video, there isn't a lot of writing because it's mainly just driving the car yeah and getting the feel for it yeah getting to know the car which for me i'm not a car reviewer this is going to take longer than like a phone review so i'm really trying to get immersed in that car and then writing a lot of things that i found after the fact so it's a little different for every type of video but yeah hopefully that gives you an idea of of the general pre-production process yeah i would say a typical week is like monday marquez and i come in he writes quite a

bit all of us have an idea of what we're doing that week already uh monday we plan it out script gets done tuesday vin and brandon comes in and most of the time the video will be posted on tuesday yeah tuesday at like 11 p.m maybe. But unless it's a really big review, maybe two days of shooting, maybe Vin and Brandon come in Tuesday, Wednesday. But I would say the typical week is Vin and Brandon in around Tuesday, Thursday. And it's plan, shoot, plan, shoot. And then maybe like you and me do a like talking head video on Friday if we're lucky to scoot a third one in or just plan to get next Monday going.

Yeah. And we should probably explain what Vin and Brandon do exactly. But I think we'll we'll take a quick break and we'll come back to that. We'll talk about shoot days, Vin and Brandon's role at the studio and much more. Cool. 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 BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style,

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So we talked about pre-production, which is the writing, the research, the putting everything down on paper, theoretical, metaphorical paper. And now we can talk about the actual production itself, which is for a lot of us, the fun part, the meat of it, most of the work that goes into everything before the edit. It's the reason there's four people on the team. Exactly.

Okay, yeah. So we can start with, so we have me, Marques, Andrew, and then Vin and Brandon. vin and brandon are i would say a power tag team duo of like cinematography plus set design plus uh camera work so when i say cinematography they're good at being behind the camera when i'm not touching the camera um they're of course good with like the stabilizer stuff the focus all this other stuff that i can't control most of the time.

And then a lot of the stuff we do in post-production, which is the motion graphics and editing. But we'll get to that of course even later. But we're talking about the shooting. The shooting itself, okay. I guess we basically separate it into A-roll, B-roll. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think that's the easiest way to start.

If for everyone who doesn't know, A-roll is when you're sitting down in front of the camera, a design set, and you're talking to the camera. Talking to the camera, yeah. And then we have B-roll, which is more like close-up shots that describe what we're talking about. B-roll is the overlaid footage. That's usually most of the video, but that is of the product itself, not of me talking. Yeah. Right. What do you want to do first, A-roll or B-roll? Let's do B-roll. It's more fun. B-roll? Okay. Yeah, most of the video but that is of the product itself not of me talking yeah right uh what do you want to do first a roll a b-roll let's do b-roll it's more fun okay yeah that's where we have a lot of fun yeah okay so b-roll is uh it's a variety of things actually to be honest we get

either the first person shots there's a there's a bunch of different shots i think we almost have our b-roll split into two sections after we've already split A and B-roll. Yeah, because I would clip B-roll into first-person shots, third-person shots, which are VIN or branded behind the camera, and then robot shots are B-roll. True, yeah. And then there's like the, I guess slider shots are still third-person, but I'm not necessarily in the shot. Like there's a bunch of types of shots you can get, jib shots.

Yeah, and then our like bread and butter is top-down. And then the top-down, exactly. That's probably the most important shots on the channel, jib shots. Our like bread and butter is top down. And then the top down, exactly. That's probably the most important shots on the channel, I would say. All right, so top downs are, yeah, pretty thematic and pretty valuable and important to the channel and often getting product shots.

I always say from the beginning of all of this, the product is the star of the show. There is Arrow with me talking and usually that's leading you into it and that gets you comfortable, but the product is the star of the show. There is Arrow with me talking and usually that's leading you into it and that gets you comfortable, but the product is the star of the show. And my goal is to hopefully get you the best possible, most realistic and entertaining view of already owning

and holding this piece of tech. Like real hand, in your hand feel. Exactly. Top down footage happens to be like a really pretty aesthetic way of doing it there's a bunch of other channels doing it in different genres there's other tech channels doing it uh but i really like shooting top down yeah it's perfect because so much of the products we do are our consumer technology products that you probably have at your desk or in your lap or

something like that so putting something on a table or in a desk, it sounds really simple, but it's way more complicated to make that look nice. Do you remember when we had that top-down set? Trust me, I remember. I was the one setting it up every time. Okay, so we used to back in, this was probably three, two or three years ago at this point. Every time we wanted to do top-downs,

we would set up the top-down set either at that dream desk over there or at whatever table made sense to do top downs we would set up the top down set either at that dream desk over there or at whatever table made sense to do the top downs we'd get the light set up we'd get the flagging all done the diffusion we'd get it just right it would take a little while and then we'd shoot top downs yeah i like quick nitty-gritty of what the setup is is you have a table you have a large soft kino flow light coming at the opposite side of the table from where you would be standing. And then you have four flags, two above and two on the side. It's simple, but it's a lot of stuff to move around this table because you want to control

everything that's getting into the shot. You want that nice soft light coming in from the top. You don't want any overhead lights causing reflections. Yeah. The problem with tech is it's so reflective and it's really a pain in the neck most of the time. So that's kind of like what a regular top down set is. But thank goodness we've upgraded because I think my back was starting to hurt after carrying four flags and a giant light to a table three times a week. So what we did is we created an entire dedicated top-down set that's permanently set up. So it has this super simple setup,

but it's all built out like a box and you have the jib leaning into that box and the camera goes on it. And you're basically press two buttons, set the camera up, plug it in. There's an HDMI monitor and you're ready to go. So we shoot top-downs that often that it's valuable to have that space dedicated for it.

And then we have the actual surface because when you're shooting top down, well, the surface of the bottom of the table or whatever you're looking at is going to be pretty constant. If you have the same surface every time, that's fine. But what we do have is about 20 to 30 maybe. More than we need for a lot a lot of different uh surfaces colors textures gradients different looks for the background of the top down these are all literally i'm going to say about four foot by two foot metal sheets yeah that have d brands 3m stickers across the entire thing so whether it's a pattern or a texture or the carbon fiber or just a color all of that is from dbrand and they've made these huge metal sheets and

shipped them to us and came here in like a the first couple came here in like a 400 like a 300 pound package that the ups got left outside that i had to drag in that was great um but now we have these all all around the studio they're like literally leaning up against the wall if you you can picture this. And we'll pick one and we'll go, all right, we got a phone in. This phone's got a little blue to it. Let's go orange background. So we got the blue and orange look. Or maybe let's go color matching. Maybe let's go all matte black, everything. You've seen the looks. You know what we're talking about. This is the point where we probably get a little into Easter eggs too. Yeah. Well, the whole thing is just like a top-down set seems so simple and and we're pretty proud of how well they look um but we want to change it up because if we

just had the same exact which sometimes we do we do if you've noticed we do white marble we do oh i have my favorites like we have favorites and you'll see them in most videos but it would be kind of boring if it was the same thing all the time so we like to spice it up and be as creative as possible but it's sometimes it's hard to be creative with just one background a product that you don't get to pick and then what four or five maybe props set up around it yeah and just as a as a visual for you we have that top down set on one half of the room and then about another third of the room is just full of shelves of props of things that were willing to mess around with it's kind of a mess right now I think when we move we'll try to like

clean that up make it like a setup for sure a system if you will but right now yeah we have basically a bunch of props sitting around and yeah I to be honest I could shoot an entire video over and over again with just top-down B-roll. Because I could talk about a device in my hands. A smartphone's not that big. I can show all the ports. I can show all my using the phone. I can show everything in top-down.

And so I could really easily get carried away and just shoot all top-down B-roll. And then it'll just be A-roll to straight top-downs. But we don't do that. So that's, I guess, where we'll cut the top-down talk and talk about other B-roll, which is all kinds of other stuff. So another very common shot you've probably seen in the videos, especially in like the handheld gadgets and things like that, is like the first person holding the device out in front of you handheld sometimes shot I would just call it the first person shot yeah where you're sort of feeling like you're

holding it yourself sometimes it's me just holding the camera against my chest or my chin or something like that terrifying it's not easy either because this is a manual focus camera so I'm going back and forth between adjusting focus holding it back out again does it look right a little off adjust the focus again hold it back out all right it's right we're all the way wide shoot get the shot finish all right now i'll move to the next angle like it's it's a whole lot of that imagine doing like uh shoulder lifts with dumbbells except that if you drop the dumbbell it's like a tens of thousand dollar camera yeah don't don't drop the camera is the number one i like i'm almost always ready to just

dive underneath the camera and let my body absorb the impact because I'm really scared Marcus is going to drop it one of these days. Hopefully it never comes down to that, but I definitely have improved my grip strength over the years to hold that camera. But sometimes we also do that with a pedestal and with a jib and with a tripod, and there's all sorts of other mounting,

basically bracketing solutions to hold the camera. I really like the jib setup because we have these jibs that are, they're called pocket jibs, but they're really just barely tall enough to go over my shoulder and point down. But like a tripod can't do that. Tripod's not tall enough.

It can almost get tall enough, but it doesn't have the reach then over top of you. So the jib lets it come directly over your shoulder. I think you call them first person top downs. You'll see a lot of them like in the studio. You'll see Marquez's feet and then he like pulls the phone out. And it's just like you're looking down at your phone like 99% of us do all day, which is why our posture is terrible and why our necks hurt.

But the point of that shot is it's meant to feel like real life. Like if you were just looking around and you're like, let me go check out, see what the back of my phone looks like. That's something you can do through our video. So that's, I think, one of my favorite shots of just like real life looking stuff. Yeah, I think our favorite is our way we solve the problem. This is kind of a fun story, but we wanted to.

I think it happened in the Apple Watch video. I think the thing was you were saying if you're walking and your phone's not out and you have something in your hand and you want to check a notification yeah you can just do that with apple watch so we were like all right well we need a walking shot but if you're holding the camera like we were talking about before and walking while trying to focus it on a phone you're you're gonna lose focus it's such a hard shot to get yeah very very hard so we have something called a pedestal which marquez mentioned before right imagine a tripod

very very securely attached to three different wheels um yeah and has kind of like this wheel that you can spin the like you're sitting in like a bus driver it's like a bus wheel yeah and it's called crab steering because when you turn the bus wheel all of the wheels on the bottom of this pedestal like the tripod all turn the same way so it's kind of a genius i mean you've seen this in well maybe you haven't but in tv studios they have gigantic pedestals like this they telescope up and down so you can get vertical shots but really the fact that it has wheels on it has made it so that we can get moving rolling shots with it. Which is another term we use. I just realized how many terms we have.

We have like rolling shots, top downs. Yeah, okay. So this is like a first person rolling shot. Yeah, not as common, but definitely fun. We've made them pretty common. I'd say almost anything you can hold in your hand has gotten this. I'll try it. I'm willing to try it, yeah. But so pretty much what we did is we took this pedestal,

which is very heavy duty, and the one day we were shooting the Apple Watch, I was just like, Marques, can you stand on this? And can we just push you? So pretty much he stood up on the legs, anchored his elbows onto the wheel that's underneath the camera, and then put his hand up in front, figured out where focus was and it wound up being a really cool shot. You were holding Mac's leash and Mac was walking in front. So the shot starts with like a moving hallway, Mac on the

leash, the leash leads all the way up into the camera and then boop, the watch comes up, shows a notification, shows that you can check it perfectly still. I mean, you need really smooth concrete floors for it because they're not exactly... That's the one thing, yeah. We happen to have polished concrete floors in a lot of places, either in our studio or in this building. So we can do that with the wheels on that little pedestal over there. But if you don't have smooth floors,

this sort of rolling shot is that much harder. Yeah, but it was just a fun little story of a way we found out how to get a shot. And I definitely know we've done it with some cell phone things, some shots since then. So it's turned into kind of not a staple, but a very common thing we do. Here's what I'll say about a lot of these shots

is if I zoom out, there are a ton of tech channels and tech videos out there now, right? And because we've been shooting in high quality and so many of our peers have been shooting in such high quality, it's become a sort of a staple of the tech community on YouTube. I don't know if you've noticed this, is to be like incredibly well-produced, well-shot, high quality video. Like if you look in, you know, beauty, you'll see some of that. You look in the vlogs, you'll see one or two guys vlogging with a red, but then that's not that common.

But in tech, pretty much everyone, because we're all gear heads. That's the thing is the thing that makes it high quality is tech. Yeah, a lot of us. For the most part. Right, we get super into the gear and shooting as high quality as possible.

So now, if I'm to differentiate myself to really being the highest quality video I can make and the best entertainment value in terms of quality, I'm now busy trying to come up with things that are specifically difficult to replicate. And so I'm describing them here on this podcast, but they're still very difficult to do and to commonly come up with,

even if you have the equipment. I mean, this is, yeah, sometimes these things we say, here's a shot we want to do, and it's four of us sitting around trying to figure out how to do it. Trying to figure out how to get the shot. And it'll take a while, and sometimes the shot will take 30 minutes.

Sometimes the shot will take an hour. We've had top-down shots take two hours before for like a five-second opening. Worth it. Yeah. It lets us learn and be more creative with the stuff we're doing when we've been doing this three or four times a week for the last you've been doing it for 10 years i've been here for three even and brandon have been here for two and we're still

discovering new things even though it's in this very similar yeah like creative style that hasn't changed that much yeah it's kind of funny a lot of people that I've talked to that are also either creators or YouTubers, they will have such cookie cutter, like almost factory engineered, like ways of just pumping out videos. And these are people who might have like a backlog of videos where like they'll hit one button, all the lights turn on and they can just do the same thing in the same set. And they'll and they'll effortlessly make like three videos. And I'm like, wow, that seems amazing. I wish I could do that. And then you think of like all the videos we make

and it's like, it's different every single time, but we also do have like our structures of like, we know what a top down is, we know what a jib shot is and we sort of have the ability to put these things together. We're at enough of a structure. Like there's definitely enough common things to the point where now whenever we finish a role, Vin just usually says film burn outro. It's like it happens in every video.

Yeah. So we're consistent. But in that consistency, we're trying to find ways to be more creative and differentiate ourself a bit. That also, I guess, brings us nicely to the robots. Yeah. The robot, again, it came down to like, we went and hung out with Motorized Precision in Portland. We made that dope tech video. And the more we thought about it, we were like, if we want to differentiate our videos and make it hard to replicate, this robot shot is going to be it. And we don't try to overuse it and we try to really use it when it's appropriate but boy is that fun it's fun robot shot i kind of say she's like a blessing and a curse because if you want to talk about a shot that takes two hours for five seconds it's

almost guaranteed yeah probably mostly our fault but so here's the thing about the robot and the robot shot if you haven't seen the dope tech video go check that out oh it'll be in the show notes yeah describes what this robot does but if you can imagine like one of those arms in a car factory that picks the chassis up and moves it across to the assembly line it's one of those with a video head on the end of it and a camera and then attached to an iMac running special software where we can keyframe and control exactly what this robot does, play back through moves, visualize things, etc. It's got a couple of articulating joints. And if you can't quite get the shot perfect due to those joints, good luck.

Try it out. Try some new things. It might fault out. You need to know how to unfault the robot and reset it. All these things come into play. But at the end of the day, you now can make things and move the camera in ways that a tripod can't, that a slider can't, that a jib can't, that a human arm can't with incredible precision and repetition. Repetition is easily the biggest thing about it, I feel like. Just being able to swap out things and have the perfect shot. So then later in editing, you can fade between whatever you want and just change.

It changes everything. It makes it feel like we have special effects and you don't even really need to know that much about effects to be able to pull it off. But those shots are usually like we said, they take a long time. So we keep them for more special things. Or if one of us has a usually Marquez will be like this is a this is a big video i want a robot shot everyone try and think of a shot yeah we'll sit down we'll brainstorm it for like 20 or 30 minutes usually we have some like insane idea that everyone loves and we're always like it's not gonna be quite that but i think this is a a good shooting point for then even if we get knocked down a couple pegs, we're still what I'd like to say above average shooting.

So then, yeah, we usually get in there and slowly set up the move. I think we usually just start with like a surface and the product, get the move set up. See how the arms move into the space. Realize it's not gonna work how exactly how we want it tone it down a little bit still be happy with it start setting up some objects start making a scene and then probably the biggest pain in the neck or the hardest part is lighting right there's a couple different restrictions that you actually wouldn't maybe think of if you didn't have the robot that you do have to think about when you have it one of them is the robots not perfectly smooth all the time so there are certain angles where

you'll start to move past a certain 90 degree space and the arm will have to switch joint like locations real quick essentially one part of the joint has to do like a full 180 and even though the camera is still facing the same way when it does the 180 it shakes yeah imagine turning your hand from palm up to palm down and keep going all the way to the other side when the robot arm has to twist like that it can shake so we typically want to avoid shake yeah so that's number one two the robot has a maximum speed uh it's a three foot arm and that usually hasn't been a problem. We are maybe eyeing the bigger version, but there is a maximum, I think it's

three meters per second, which is nine feet per second speed. We have done a shot of following a phone in free fall as the camera pop-up retracts back into the phone. And that was nearly 9.8 meters per second squared, which is the speed of gravity. And it still didn't even keep up with the phone, right? Right, yeah. It's tough to, if you go over that speed limit, it will not break the robot, but it'll fault the robot and it'll stop halfway through,

hey, our motors can't go that fast, reset me and we'll do that. So that's another limit of the robot. And a third limit is, yeah, lighting. When you're moving a camera around with this arm attached to it, you have to figure out where to put the lights and sort of hang them in there so that you're not obstructing the actual arm moving.

Yeah, I didn't even think of it like that. So we'll usually start in the starting shot, and then it's like, okay, flag everything for this. And then that'll take two or three flags because like we said before, tech is very shiny and reflective. Then you'll let it move to the last shot without looking at the screen. And then you'll flag for that. Then you'll let it move to make sure it's not slamming flags over in the process.

I mean, we've done some. We've had it hit tables. We've knocked whole tables over with brand new unreleased phones on it. We've hit a couple things with it. Not proud of it, but... Haven't broken anything with it. Yeah, when nothing gets in its way. If you're in the way of the robot arm, you're toast.

It's not stopping for you. So we do have an emergency switch, which we've used many times for it. But the problem is, all right, so you've lit everything and flagged everything for is all right so you've lit everything and flagged everything for the first position you've lit everything and flagged everything for the second position now you need to watch it through slow because every single position in between that can potentially bring a new reflection exactly yeah it usually looks like we're like making a a fort like a pillow fort yeah or a blanket fort eventually that's just what the studio is going to be we're going to paint all the walls black and just, like a pillow fort or a blanket fort. Eventually, that's just what the studio is going to be. We're going to paint all the walls black and just have like a pillow fort of flags in there.

But yeah, I guess when we say, the other thing is we'll mention like, okay, we have this great idea. We'll literally plant it on the whiteboard. Like, all right, here's A, here's B, here's how it moves between them. That could be cool, right? That's dramatic. We go real close to the screen here and then twist it. And so we'll have this great idea. We'll head over to there to the robot. And we'll start to put those keyframes in and we'll realize, oh, the rails are a little too low, so we can't get that close.

All right. Oh, the joint is like doing a weird twist at this angle. And no matter how we do it, it's going to have to do that twist. So we can't do this twist here. So maybe we'll keep it flat through this plane oh it's doing and by the time we get through all these things that we have to make sure to account for all these reflections are a little weird over here oh we want to make sure we shoot a little tighter and avoid getting the background in all these things it'll kind of totally change the shot and it'll still be pretty cool like there's a lot of shots some of the cool shots we've made were

not the original idea and they wound up amazing i I think the OnePlus, was that OnePlus 6 Pro with the two quasars on each side and the Pro Blends? Yeah. Like that was supposed to be completely different. I think the Pro Blends was supposed to like just come over the screen and keep the really small focus over all the buttons and like, because the display was beautiful. Right. It didn't happen at all.

I think we wound up somehow pushing the phone, rotating the phone up on something and it was completely different, but I think it's one of the coolest shots we've ever done with the robot. Yeah, and I could walk through every piece of that because we'd realized, okay, if we're doing this slow-mo shot with the ProBlends,

the ProBlends is a foot and a half long and every little shake with the robot got magnified. And so the tip of the probe lens would literally be wobbling. So we're like, all right, we can't do this crazy thing with the robot. So we slowed down, minimize the robot move and put the phone itself on a motorized slider head. We basically taped it to it and then had that smoothly move the phone. Um, also a phone screen is not very bright. So a an f8 or f11 at the end of a probe lens we had to shut all the lights off so you could actually see the phone so we wanted to do that in bright lighting but then you couldn't see the phone screen turned all the lights off you know all these things you don't think of when you're trying to make shots like this but you still end

up with some pretty cool stuff i think we just brought the quasars in to try and light up the side of the phone with the same color of the phone but just wound it looks like some really cool like light speeds uh star wars action kind of stuff like that and it wound up amazing so the robot has definitely opened up our creativity yeah for sure it's probably it's made us think we're more creative than we really are um we go a little overboard with some of them sometimes but it always winds up coming down and being a shot that's still like every time we do the robot there are comments on twitter and in the video that are like oh my god that shot at 10 seconds in or something is yeah yeah yeah so it's well worth it yeah and to top it all off it's all controlled by an xbox controller that's the maybe the most fun part is i've memorized every button on the controller and what it does to the robot as we're designing it um so that's a little little quirk a little tidbit

and it's fun but yeah i think that's that's another tool in b-roll when it comes down to it is just like anyone can do b-roll but if we can make our stuff incredibly fun creative and difficult to replicate then that's a win for that shot I think that's what makes it a unique challenge. For sure. So that is... That covers B-roll pretty well, I think, right? Do you want to hop into A-roll? I guess, yeah.

A-roll would be... A-roll is much simpler, I think. Yeah. I mean, A-roll... Okay. Me talking to a camera, how interesting could it possibly be? I mean, you sort of pick the set in general. So we have a lot of different sets and angles in here to a point

where maybe it feels like you've seen every angle in here. I remember when I was shooting a roll in my college apartment, man, you pretty much have seen every angle of that room because I tried to mix up the a roll. And so what is it? My bed behind me, my desk behind me. I've been in that room before. You could scoot off the edge of the bed and touch your desk with your foot if you wanted to. So there was not a lot of room. Not a lot of room to work with, but we have much more room in here and many more angles. And then what we'll do is basically

a once over of set design. Like, okay, we're doing a video about photography. Let's start to work in some themes of photography and elements of that into either the table next to me or the background or the shirt I'm wearing or any of the other stuff around it. And that'll make that video much more interesting. Yeah. This is again where Vin and Brandon have come in and just like completely taken this channel to another level and stuff like that. Like, I mean, we used to have nice A-roll sets before they came in, but they've come in with just like especially lighting i feel like they've

just knocked lighting out of the park ours was always just like here's a softbox on you so you're lit well they've started bringing in like the westcott flex and they've been using edison bulbs in there and all these different lightings to make some part of the scene warm and part of the scene like lit up we recently got the this aperture spotlight that has like a fake window looking shadow on it and they do amazing things with that so like they've brought like you said we've used every aspect of every one of these studios and everyone's seen it but vin and brandon go into that and be like okay well i'm gonna change it so you may have seen this angle but now everything in the background is going to be different. New shelves, different props on the shelves, lighting here,

different bokeh. Ever since we got the, what's the, sorry, the old lens. The Helios lens. Vin bought all these dangling lights in the background that made this incredible bokeh, and we've been using that like crazy. I think Vin's the one who introduced us to quasar tubes. Love the quasar tubes. So they've just come, and they've made the sets fun and and like you said before

the product is the what we we really want you to see a roll is necessary and in order to make a roll fun you have to make the set fun yeah like you're gonna be talking people don't need to be watching your mouth to know exactly what you're saying about they can enjoy the set that's creative and since we've switched to two to one also like got way more room yeah fun fact i think most of the a-roll i think 90 plus percent of the a-roll shots of me talking to the camera are shot with the sigma 24 to 35 and that's a f2 lens it's a cine lens so it's t 2.0 and it's a nice wide angle shallow depth of field great look it's a little bit zoom so if i want to like go punch into 28 or 30 i can do that depending on what the set looks like but that's just a tidbit is we typically go about 24 mil actually speaking on that and this is going to go into editing a little bit but we're not going to

talk about editing too much here so you shoot fairly wide and is a part of that not just because of the look but a way you edit as well as with a jump cut you usually punch in on that do you a little bit of both i think that's something that like people don't really notice but is a good way to to cut and take away from like if you mess a lineup and you're adding a new or to add emphasis or something like that? Yes, so there's a couple reasons why I shoot specifically wide angle, shallow depth of field the way I do. One is when I started, I needed to be close enough to the camera to focus on myself and hit the record button.

So like physically reach? If I had a 50 mil, I physically could not turn the camera on and focus on myself. I hate bringing a story into a story that's already kind of off topic, but I remember when you first's already kind of off topic but i remember when you first texted me kind of being like i'm thinking of hiring someone like would you be interested blah blah i think like the next day you sent me a text of you reaching across the

dream desk to try and focus the camera and you're like yeah we definitely yeah i can't be behind the camera and in front of it um yeah so that's originally how it started and and another benefit of that is it's a very personal look when you're when you're way out at with like it still looks really cool when you're at like a 60 or a 55 the helios is i think a 58 millimeter lens it's fun to shoot with those lenses but when you compress the field of view like that you do feel like you're further away from me. And you do get that blurrier background and you can mess with the bokeh and all those other things are fun. But yeah, compressing the field of view does make it feel a little bit less personal. I never really thought about it like that. Yeah, a little bit more like a broadcast or like, you know, looking

into a window or something like that. So I think when you're closer to me and it's wide angle and you feel closer to me, it's because you are. You feel like you're sitting right across from me exactly um so that's been like a main reason and then yeah the other thing like you said is we shoot 8k and so if i'm wide and i have my 24 mil and there's more in the frame than i really need i can punch in and not really lose any quality in a 4k timeline if i want to get closer to my face or closer to the thing i'm holding or a punch in for emphasis or something like that a lot of that also comes from shooting high res wide so all of that is why that Sigma is probably my most used lens ever oh yeah for sure yeah I think a roll is also we talked about the background being fun yeah probably where we do the most easter eggs that's gotta be it's either top downs or a roll

probably top downs have to be like so subtle because it's right there i think the most that's probably i've mentioned this i think the most subtle one we ever did is we added i don't know if it's in the home pod video or we a video after that we used the board that the home pod stained do you i do remember that if you don't really yeah if you don't remember if you're listening right now um home pod when it originally came out, if you left it on a wood countertop, it left this white circle on the table. So specific. Yeah. So we did that.

We just had it on this piece of wood that we use for a top-down backdrop. It left the white ring stain. So we used it for a while just randomly and see if anyone noticed. I don't think they did. Nobody noticed. When it comes to A-Roll,

we have all the room in the world, especially if your back is to the whole studio. There's so much room back there for things we can do. I think it's a little more subtle too because it's now blurred out in the background. So if you're in a top-down and you were just looking at the phone in my hand or whatever else is above the background,

the background stuff, it's there, but it's really obvious, like whatever's there behind you. Meanwhile, if you have a shot where i'm sitting here in the studio blur it out 15 feet behind me could be like the mac pro as a trash can or some other like random that's still my favorite we've definitely mentioned it but yeah are there any other easter eggs you're proud of or like that you want to call out that haven't been brought up before so let's see my like i said my favorite one was when we were so you used to shoot in front of this gear cabinet all the time and you have the trash can down there so one day we were just messing around and i think we said

let's put the trash can mac pro inside the trash can and then i went to empty your trash can out to do it and i was like wait a minute i just took all the paper from it and just put it inside the trash the mac the mac pro to look like a trash can and people lost it i don't know if there are even comments about what that video is about in that one everyone looked back they loved it that was a good one you know if uh like not johnny ive or como code on twitter are tweeting about something that's funny you know you did a good job for sure um but other than that we have these things called bear bricks oh yeah they're pretty popular i'd never known what the name was but we have these two little white bears that their arms and legs can kind of contort to how you want it and they kind of look

like daft punk i have an absolute blast hiding them in scenes sometimes it's not all of them so don't look all over the place but i think the most recent one i had it kind of like peeking up from behind a throw pillow on the couch and yeah i've hooked them up so they're like hanging from ledges in the background that was my favorite yeah it's like one of them was reaching over and holding the other one's hand so it like wouldn't fall so i just have fun doing stuff like that we've done linuses we made the line of sandals with the off-white tag that we've thrown in the background a couple times and Legends, classics. Anything that you come to mind? We did the skeleton for a while.

The skeleton around Halloween sort of made its debut and then also randomly showed up in the background of a couple of videos. I think that was a fun one. I think really they all just sort of end up slowly starting to feel like characters in like a recurring series. Even if it's just sitting in the background

of some A-roll in one video, you're like, oh, I've seen that before. And then you see it in the next video doing something different. And you're like, okay, it's got a little personality. We throw Bixby Speaker out there all the time. Our fake one. If you haven't seen that April Fool's video,

definitely should. I'll definitely put that in the show notes. That's one thing that I'm very proud of on this channel. That's probably been one of my favorite videos. Bixby Speaker. Yeah. All right. I think that covers A-roll. Yeah. If we're going that deep into the stupid stuff we do in the background of A-roll,

I think we're pretty done with it. We've covered that. Well, I guess let's take a quick break. And then when we come back, we'll talk to the audience questions from Twitter. Cool. This is an ad from BetterHelp. This holiday season, do something for a special person in your life. You. Give yourself the gift of better mental health. BetterHelp Online Therapy connects you with a qualified therapist via phone, video, or live chat.

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about the process, about making videos. And we got a bunch of questions from you guys on the Waveform Twitter. And so we'll go through these. I'm sure we've answered a lot of them in our last 45 minutes of ranting, but let's see what people wanna know. So Miguel at the top here says,

I think these are gonna be interesting questions actually, a lot of good ones. How many videos have you given up on and never finished? That's an interesting question because I don't think it's very many. It's not very many. It matters at what point do you count it being a video. There's plenty of things we've written on the whiteboard

as good ideas that have never come to fruition. Some of them turned into podcast episodes. And I think now that we we have it's one of the reasons we decided to do the podcast also like yeah here's stuff we wanted to talk about a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor yeah i would say in the idea forum miguel many many videos have been axed but typically once we start shooting it ends up going to completion and being a final project i think maybe three videos in the last year we started shooting and then didn't finish i can only for sure think of one it was state of 4k

2019 that's one shot the first half i think there's a little bit of tesla stuff we started shooting but then stopped because i was gonna it got cold but we were gonna do a video on uh i think this the state of electric vehicles was gonna be a video okay that turned into that was one yeah turn to the podcast and then yeah there's maybe one or two others but typically once we start shooting then it goes yeah and it kind of goes to what we said before like if the cameras are turning on most likely we have a script for it already so unless like something huge comes out that video is most likely getting me yeah oh another one from Miguel okay how many how much of the video in minutes do you start and end with in making a video that video is most likely getting made. Yeah. Oh, another one from Miguel. Okay. How many,

how much of the video in minutes do you start and end with in making a video? What percentage of the total footage makes it into the final video? So typically videos around 10 minutes long. Yeah. The A-roll when I'm talking to camera and basically giving most of the audio that is for that video will typically be between 20 and 45 minutes long, which I think for a 10 minute video for a roll, you mean? Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of that, I'd say like 25% of that is like a line going wrong or you messing something up. And then like 50 to 75% of that is some random noise, someone slamming a door, an elevator opening, someone on a phone call right outside. I cannot wait to minimize that percentage. Yeah, I think that's a big part.

Do you know what's funny too is when you sit down to edit, we always have this question that goes around the studio here is, A-roll took this long, how long do we all think the video is going to be? And we try and guess it to the second. I think. I'm always wrong. I think we've, everyone's won at least once. Right.

You know, you win this competition. If you guess to the second how long the video is going to be. I am typically very, I say optimistic when I think of videos as being like 12 minutes long and they turn out like 11 minutes long. But a lot of us will think like, yeah, it it'll be seven and it'll be like twelve and a half So it's almost always over. Yeah, it's almost always over Isaac asks, what's your least favorite thing about editing? Hearing my own voice really? Yeah, and you would you would think this was something after about

10 years that you would get used to this is year 11 You don't I don't like hearing that since I edit all the podcast stuff now and I I think this was something after about 10 years that you would get used to. This is year 11. You don't. I don't like hearing that since I edit all the podcast stuff now. And it's been so new to me, like hearing my own voice. But you will never get used to hearing a recording of your own voice. At first, I do remember now you've said that. And I didn't believe you when you first told me. And the way you kind of proved it to me is,

so Marquez mostly edits with his studio speakers out loud so many times he's playing an editing clip and I think he's talking to me and I turn turn to my desk and look at him thinking he's like trying to converse with me and he's not and when I say that to him he goes oh like no point of me ever thinks I'm talking to you because the sound sounds so much different coming out of my computer than it does to me. So you're 10 years into this now and there's like this such a distinct cut between your voice and the computer voice. It's just confusing me. And it's, uh, it's the, I mean, yeah, I do. I edit from the, the Yamaha HSA. It's have been my

speakers of choice. They're like my reference for everything and have been for like five, six years now. So like that's, that's my go-to and yeah, it sounds different coming out of the speakers than out of my own face. So for sure. That's, that's my tip. All right. Yeah. Good answer. Oh yeah. Okay. Nathan wants to know what's your workflow like on the go? Any advice for traveling light and still producing high quality content? Here's, here's my advice and it's. And it's, I'm sorry in advance, Nathan, this is not actually good advice. But my best practice for me has been avoid that at all costs and bring everything back to the studio

and produce it here where I'm comfortable and calibrated. Another thing a lot of people like to do when you go out to an event, whether it's a Samsung event or an Apple event, and they go out to the show floor, they all shoot their audio out there and talk to the camera while it's incredibly loud and just not a friendly shooting environment. And I have never to this day tried, actually I have done that at CES, but I really try

to avoid ever shooting any audio out there. I do all my video, all my b-roll out there and then i come back to the hotel and shoot my a-roll and all my audio so as far as traveling light and producing high quality content uh i i try to bring a studio to the hotel yeah we definitely do that i mean there's sometimes where if there's an embargo on the video like you said you'll just not bring editing stuff and wait to come back here and finish the edits um that's the lightest we travel and that still is very heavy uh we don't travel light pretty much yep yeah so i don't have any way to help you sorry about the lack of advice richard wants to know who's responsible for motion

design like motion graphics intro graphics so there's a couple different answers for that actually yeah there's typically a couple different so we have in video graphics, the bookend graphics you've seen, the intro and the outro that you're probably asking about. We have an animator. His name is Michael, and he's worked with us for years on multiple years of intros. We typically have a new one every year, and we have a different themed one for the behind-the-scenes videos

and the explained videos and dope tech, autofocus. He's made all of those those and he's super talented incredible yeah and then we have uh brandon and vin who have done in video animations for some some things like adding text or adding you know trackers of like pointing out things in videos or specs and things like that brandon's done some cool so i think one of the coolest things brandon did was the intro to the ROG phone 2, where we did a robot shot and the whole thing was supposed to be this whiteboard of ideas creating the ROG phone 2 and he added all these kind of like- Floating elements. Yeah. Oh, what's that meme where the guy's like looking up and thinking and there's a million math problems

in his head? Galaxy brain, whatever stuff. Yeah. I feel like that's what it kind of replicated. Yeah. No, those are a lot of fun. So we have a little bit of a combination of those two things. So Michael asks, how is your footage organized and will you ever delete any of it? Michael, every video project we've made is typically somewhere between 600 and 1200 gigs. I delete everything. Yeah. Everything that's not the finished file.

Don't take advice. This whole ask a like Q&A at the end is don't do what we don't do what we do. But it's true. Like every time I need to go back and I think Dave 2D has said this too. This has become a habit because I only have an 80 terabyte like rate array. So if I, you know, I mean, it's 80 terabytes, but if I went back through this last year of videos, that's 100 terabytes of footage. I can't keep it all. But really, I find that when I go back and need footage for an old project, I'm just taking a shot from the original file that was exported already. So I just keep the final file for every video and the thumbnail. And if there's one or two like

special magic moments, I have the Elon interview footage. I have the Bill Gates interview footage, but I really don't keep footage like of a B-roll of a phone or extra A-roll. I don't keep that stuff. So yeah. Here's one. Any online courses which prove to be very helpful

in your video editing? Great question. Yeah, a lot of people can take online courses to learn video editing I am I am self-taught yeah so I learned in let's see my first ever video editor was Windows Movie Maker and then I moved to Camtasia studio nice and then I went from that which was kind of like ScreenFlow was a screen recorder editor I went from that to Adobe Premiere, and I went from that to Final Cut Pro.

At no point during any of this did I ever take any classes in it. I took one college class because they had it called Motion Graphics. There's not that many creative classes at Stevens, but they had that. I took it. I learned some After Effects there, but I wouldn't be the best to answer this one. I've kind of been – I don't really edit here at all all it's been a long time since i've really edited much um but as

someone who considers themselves like semi above average at photoshop and video editing like i consider them both pretty simple or not pretty simple pretty similar even though one's video one's photo but like they're complex programs with a million different things you can do and a million ways you can do everything. Yeah. To me, I would always find something I knew I wanted to do and then look up a YouTube video or something on how to do that or a guide online. I know Photoshop was just like, I want to make this text on fire, search like fire text, how to make fire text and then learn that. And through the process of learning that one thing you have a skill for later on right yeah i say i'm self-taught but that's really how i learned everything i wanted to do is like there's no way i can learn everything that premiere or final cut pro does so this whole process is me going like how do i make this do this then i'll go

through and literally watch youtube tutorials yeah find something you want to replicate and this is what you should if you're like new to editing or new to creating something, like it's not always, don't think of everything you're doing as copying somebody else. Like you can take inspiration from somebody and especially if you're in the learning process of it,

find a video you thought was great and try and replicate that video and see how they did it. See how hard it is. And then when you know how to do that, you can start adding your styles to that and make it yeah make it your own but you're learning so much in the process of doing that um i actually did take some classes in college too but i'd learned so much by myself that at that point it was a little more of a they helped with some timing i guess i

was definitely always a little off on my timing so having having a professional editor, just take a look at it. But for the most part, I wouldn't sign up for any specific classes. Just know what you wanna do. There's millions of resources on the internet for you to figure out how to do that. It's like learning a language. You wouldn't start at A in the dictionary

and just read everything. You need to know what you wanna communicate and then figure out the words that make sense from there. Yeah, exactly. Is that a good analogy? That's pretty solid. I'm much better at editing than I am at second language, though. Fair.

Oh, I got a... There's a pretty simple question. Tommy wants to know, do you primarily use voiceovers or is all of your spoken audio from the primary video track? It is typically pretty much all from the primary video track. We have the shotgun, the Sennheiser MKH416. It's two feet from my face.

That microphone sounds like real life. Like that's an incredible mic. So yeah, we basically take everything from that. And if we need to inject something later, I will literally take that shotgun out again, set it up two feet from my face again in the same environment and fill in that audio the same way. Yeah, I'd say 99% of the stuff is from A-roll. And then the only time you ever do a voiceover is when you're

that far through the edit, A-roll sets broken down and you need to just add something quick. Yeah. Oh, Dean wants to know what titles or graphics or fonts do you use and your Final Cut Pro plugins? I have only right now only one suite of plugins and that's from the motion VFX team and I have about 40 of them and they're all incredible and I really like the din font it's called din pro and there's maybe eight nine versions of it din pro medium din pro condensed din pro light italic all that stuff din if you want to check them out it is paid I paid about 100 bucks for that font but that is what I use for like everything now. I can't tell you how many times I've made a thumbnail

or something for Twitter for the merch or something like that. And he'll be like, yeah, it looks really good. Just change that font. Can we use the DIN instead? Yep. I think I have a fun one to wrap all of this up. It's part of our workflow,

but not like a technical part. Louie wants to know, what do you do during rendering? Well, what's funny actually is rendering used to take a lot longer than it does. When I, a couple years ago, was actually editing everything

on a MacBook Pro, I would have hours to go bleep off and do whatever. When I was rendering a video. Then I went to the iMac Pro and it was like, maybe we can play a game of Rocket League and then it's over. Yeah, we got really into Rocket League for a while.

Yeah, and that would be like 10, 15 minutes before it was done. It's depending, we had quite a few games during some videos. Some would take longer, but then now the Mac Pro will finish a 4K render in like six minutes. So what do I do when exporting i'm usually thinking about the thumbnail making that yeah starting to write the tags yeah a lot of times

the final title and thumbnail don't come until the video is finished in fact that's usually the case yeah um so that's what we're thinking about now that we've finished the video watched it once over on the timeline hit the export button all. What are we thinking for title and thumbnail? Because we have our working title, but let's finalize that. So maybe that's a boring answer, but we used to have more fun stuff. I mean, other than that, if we do title and thumbnail and all that pretty quickly, if Mac is here, we play with Mac for a while. We'll take stupid pictures with Mac. He's usually a pretty good distraction towards the end of the day, and's just excited to go home and eat dinner so he's ready to play

yeah cool awesome i think that's our workflow yeah hopefully that answers uh questions about the process there's a thousand more things we could talk about maybe we'll end up coming back to this in a future episode but um for anyone who's curious or for anyone who maybe is starting their own channel or working on their own sort of craft, this can be of assistance or maybe it's just a fun insight to what we do. So that's been it. Thanks for listening. Catch you guys later. Waveform is brought to you in part with Studio 71 and our intro outro music is created by Cameron Barlow.