[00:00:00] 

Tyler: I have a repeat guest. Alex Lindsay is back. Thanks for joining me again.

Alex: Glad to be

here. 

Tyler: I mostly know you from Mac Break Weekly, which you've been doing for a long time now. And you were always the voice of. What do professionals really think, [00:01:00] which is sometimes a hard, uh, opinion to find access to?

A lot of the sort of tech media will come at it from the perspective of a writer or, you know, just a internet personality, but you do big productions that require a lot of gear, and so your opinion has always been very valuable.

Alex: Thanks. Thanks. I, I think it's, it's, you can't be very, uh, I guess when you're in production, a lot of times it's hard to be idealistic, you know, like you, you know, I like to call it, um, I tend to call it, uh, being a, a practical perfectionist. I. You know, which is that you're always trying to make it better.

You're always trying to get to that next thing. You're always looking to kind of keep on making it go, going down the path, but you understand that this is where we are right

Tyler: Right. 

Alex: And.

this is what we need, you know, to, to do this. Right now. We can't. It's not all gonna be perfect. 

Tyler: And sometimes without overcomplicating your setup too. I, uh, I've, I've got this, this is kind of the back and forth I've done with even how I do this podcast of sometimes I'm like, you know what? The video quality doesn't matter. I'm just gonna like, focus on the audio. [00:02:00] And then I look at the video after one of those episodes, I'm like, I can make it better.

And then I add a whole bunch of, uh, external cameras and complicate it. And it's always just going back and forth between the gear versus the content. And it's a 

Alex: Yeah, I, I have a hard a very hard time with that. I, I, I keep on changing cameras. Like I, so I keep on in increasing the, the quality of the camera. Um, and, uh, and so that, that, that's the kind of the constant challenge that I have. But yeah, my whole set is kind of in chaos. I mean, it's, it's kind, it's kind of, it doesn't move super fast, but it, it's constantly moving.

You know, I'm adding a couple more things here and a couple more things there. And the hard part is. Every day I am on with other people that are doing the same thing. And so all of us just keep pushing

each other.

very gently forward. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And you're like, oh, what is he using there? What are they, what is she doing there?

And, and I was like, I gotta try that. And then next thing you know, you spend another a thousand dollars so.

Tyler: Well, and to give people that aren't familiar with you, a sense of what you do outside of, when you're talking on the internet, what kind of productions are you working on? What sort of setups do you usually, uh, work with?

Alex: Yeah, [00:03:00] so I, I mostly manage, uh, i manage com.

I.

mean, my job is mostly as a fixer like I go in and fix Things that aren't quite working quite right. Um, and usually I would say that what I do in my job is mostly that I replace complex solutions with simple solutions that do complex things. You know, so how do we simplify everything so that it's more predictable and how do we make that work?

And inside of that, I do a lot of live events. Right now I'm mostly doing live activations to theaters. So the, when I do live, I'm mostly thinking not so much about the internet, I do that. For my own shows, but for my job I'm mostly thinking about, um, theater distribution. So it's, it's how do we send over fiber or over the internet to multiple theaters or multiple venues, um, a, a live experience and then tie the, the viewers back in and so on and so forth.

So that's mostly what I'm working on.

Tyler: Cool. Well, some of the things I wanted to go over today, uh, starting with, uh, the M three. Family of chips, um, and your perspective using them, if you have yet? I'm not sure, but I've had my hands on the M [00:04:00] three max and I haven't made anything to talk about it yet. I've just been kind of testing it and using it and pushing it.

But, um, this is my first chance really to go over what it's been like. And, um, I think before going to my specific model, I just want to talk a bit about the, there feels like there's been this shift in the relationship of the M three family between the base model, the pro and the max. It's, it's not the same as what we had with the, well, nothing's been the same.

M one, M two, M three, nothing's really, we haven't found a predictable rhythm each time. The sort of what, what to expect about like release schedules or performance relative to each other is shifting. But this time, what I've really found to be the biggest shift is kind of the relationship between, you know, what does pro mean, what does max mean?

And, um, it's, it's just been kind of surprising. Have you had a chance to use any of them or.

Alex: I haven't used any of them yet. Uh, you know, I'm, I'm a heavy desktop user with, but not an iMac user, and so I really haven't needed to, needed [00:05:00] to move up. I I, I've never really got, I haven't gotten review copies, uh, hardware from Apple for a long time, And so, uh, so I buy what I need and, um, right now what I have are a, a Mac studio and a stack of Mac Minis that I use on my desk for, for what I do.

And so I, you know, I I'm not, I don't travel enough post covid to warrant getting a really powerful laptop, so I still have a, an Intel laptop. It's like my last Intel machine is my

laptop because,

I mean, I don't even, you know, because I, I, it's, you know, because I turn it on, it's like all I do is use it for office hours in the morning and maybe to check a couple things. I mostly, uh, I don't, and I usually, my travel is usually a day or two. Like it's not, I used to be gone for six weeks and I'd have to do all the production that I needed to do. And so I always had a laptop and I worried about it, and I just don't, don't use laptops very much anymore. And so, um, it's just, it's just the connectivity is difficult.

And I, again, I have a desk that I'm in most days and it's got a lot of power, um, that's built into it. And so I don't worry about it as much. I really love the Mac Minis [00:06:00] and the, and the studios. Um, the Mac Studio, I haven't. The Mac Pro, I haven't really justified yet. Like, I don't know what I would do with that yet. Um, you know, from what I do right

now. Um, so it's not, I haven't had something to pay for it, I guess is the, the bottom line. And then the, and the, and the iMac. I go, oh, that'd be really good to buy for my parents, or my grand, you know, my parents-in-Law or something like that, but I don't, or my kids maybe. But I haven't really needed one yet, um, on my end. And so, because I really love the, the problem that I have, it's hard to, I don't have a good wide shot to show here, but I've got, you know, eight monitors, uh, or you know. Usually it's six to eight monitors, but I have more screens available to me, you know, um, than I have

monitors. And so I have a router that I'm routing back. I'm routing stuff to my mixer or my switcher and my, my screens and everything else. And I think that generates a certain lifestyle, which is that I really like Mac Minis and stuff 'cause I just stack 'em up. And then I have my studio that I work on and I don't have to, um, uh, you know, I'm trying to figure out what I would do with a [00:07:00] laptop is half the problem, you know, like, where would I put it? You know, because I have kind of a whole workstation, a work workspace

Tyler: Let's just say that the M three studio had been updated at this point. Would the, what you've seen in processor gains, would that be tempting enough to upgrade from Actually, which, sorry? Which one are you on with the studio? Is it 

Alex: I'm on the max, the, the M two,

the the, the last or the first one, whatever came out. I mean, I bought the studio as it was being released as a, as a, um, uh. As the max version, not the

ultra version. So I, I stayed one behind. I do find it weird that I, I know that Apple has a reason for this, but I do think it's weird that they're, they're releasing the laptops and the, and the IMAX before the studio and the pro, like, it just, it just, it cognitively, I'm like, you know, you should, the high performance machine should get the high performance chips

Tyler: Yeah, you, you 

Alex: then you 

Tyler: features to like trickle down, not

trickle up. That's not 

really a thing.

Alex: and.

It's just weird. Like I haven't, I haven't seen anybody test it against their pro, and I haven't tested it against my, my, uh, [00:08:00] my Mac studio, but I feel like if I had a laptop that was going faster than the Mac studio, I feel like I'm back in the nineties. 'cause that's what happened in the nineties,

which, which was that the G three was suddenly, the laptops were suddenly faster than the six oh fours.

The six oh threes were faster because they had a bigger L two cache, and that made them faster than the G four in, in almost every So you had laptops that were faster than desktops and it just, the whole thing felt inverted. And that's what I feel like we're in right now, is that Apple somehow is inverting this, and I think it's just the way that their manufacturing works and everything else, but I feel like they're gonna have to sync that up at some point where they, they get back to that, that TikTok.

Tyler: Well, yeah, I haven't verified it entirely myself yet. I've done a few tests, but based on everything I've been saying, it's looking like, you know, the M three max is outperforming the M two Ultra in certain situations, like certain multi core processes, it's doing better than I. The best desktop you can buy right now, which is just such a strange situation to be in. And

you know, I, it's like they all, they, for the most part, [00:09:00] this MacBook Pro release, like leveled out the, the choices for the laptops. I think it's, it's a little easier to choose, but it really confuses things. Now comparing it to the desktops, it's that like it, uh uh, yeah.

Alex: Yeah. And, and I'm excited. I'm ex, I mean, I will say that I'm excited that the chips are doing so well. The, the, that the chips are interesting that they are, it's exciting that the, that the, uh, that Apple has gone on to this new path where they're not . Contained by Intel's ability to move forward. Um, and they have an architecture.

And the advantage of this architecture is stunning because you, when you own the programming platform, when you own the hardware and the software, the ability to create integration is just stunning. And I don't think any, you know, there's not really been any company that's ever really been in that position where they were doing the operating system, the programming environment, the hardware, everything about it is all tied together. That gives Apple an incredible, I mean, it's like a, it's like a crus arms

vertical integration. That that really gives them a, a lot, a superpower. So I think [00:10:00] it's, I'm really excited about where they're going. I just think that this one part of it is like, I don't understand, like why we don't get the new ProE versions of, of things.

And I'm, I'm not in a rush. I'm kind of glad that they're not doing that because I'm saving up my money for a vision,

Vision Pro. And so I'm like, I'm like, it's really good for them not to put anything out until June. 'cause that'll, I'll take the money that I saved and spend it on So.

Tyler: it was just on, uh, the Petal Pet AIX podcast talking about cameras and things. But, um, one of the conversations we had there was about is there still a reason to to purchase PCs? And, um, I'm starting to get to the point where, of course desktops, there are all sorts of applications that will always make sense.

The big tower, lots of power, lots of GPUs, but . For laptops or anything portable. The, you know, if you don't specifically need windows, the actual machines don't. I, I, I can't justify it anymore for anyone. It, it doesn't make 

Alex: I get so under $500. So these little, these are like these little quieter threes or quieter twos. [00:11:00] Uh, quieter three, I guess is the one. This is this one. And so this is

a little pc and as a little like utility knife, um, this isn't a bad PC to have. Uh, I got a couple of these that I kind of use as glue. You know, to, to tie things together, to play, to jump into Zoom in after hours or to do other things like that. Um, uh, and then below that, of course is like raspberry pies, and below that is, is Arduinos. And then you have the Mac, and the Mac starts for me at about five or $600 and it goes all the way up to 12,000.

You know, that

like, that's all. I don't, I have a very hard, unless I need a specific application, I have a hard time excusing buying anything. Between those, the 500 to 12,000 range over that, I need multiple GPUs, I need, 

Nvidia, I need, you know, whatever those things are. That makes sense.

You know, like to me, PCs make sense at, at those levels because you just can't scale them back to that, to what some of those can do.

Tyler: Yeah. What use cases do you still find for a, a built out pc? Like what, 'cause I always try to put myself in an imaginary position of, oh, I [00:12:00] know there are people that do this. Three D is an obvious one. But in the world of just like more video production or live, when would, when does it still make sense to build out a tower?

Alex: I mean, sometimes you're, you're looking at, I mean, where we have built them out in the past where we couldn't get a mac is when we're stitching like three sixties or, or 180. We're stitching all that live. We've got six cameras coming in. We're running a stitch across all of those, and those all have to be tied together.

We might even be adding graphics to that. We might be flowing data into those things. And you need Multiple, we needed up to four G GPUs just to make the thing run, you know, and even those were on, on fire, busy, you know, to make that actually happen. And so those are one place. Another place is with photogrammetry.

You can do it on the Mac. Um, the more hardware you add to it, the faster it goes. And some of the photogrammetry stuff I've done has taken days to calculate. So reducing that from days down to six hours or three hours of, of, of, of. Processing power makes a difference. Um, when you get into, so those, and [00:13:00] some realtime, there's some realtime stuff that you might wanna do that is, that wants to be, you know, uh, multiscreen multi background, but still integrated into one machine. So those are some other areas that, that I think are still a, a PC world. We go, oh, I can't do that on the Mac right now. You know, and, and some of it has to do with software, but a lot of it has to do with multiple GPUs, you know, and specifically multiple Nvidia cards. NVIDIA's got a lot of subsystems that people have written to. So the Nvidia cards are really the thing that probably pulls us towards the PCs more than Apple will never support those. And so, so we, you know, we, we've given up the, the idea of let's argue with Apple about supporting the

in Nvidia cards. That's not gonna happen. 

Tyler: Well, yeah, and that reminds me actually, but let's circle back eventually to . Both photogrammetry and also like, uh, ga gian splats. Is that the new word for it? And nerfs and, 

Alex: Nerf, nerfs, orian,

splats, whatever you wanna call 'em. 

Tyler: love to chat about that a bit more afterwards. But, um, directly, uh, what I've actually been testing lately, which again, the, so I, this is the review unit from Apple.

[00:14:00] They sent me the N three max with everything and

I. I mean the, so far, the the most exciting thing so far I think might be the fact that it has 128 gigs of ram, which I don't know if I'd pull that trigger myself. It's incredibly expensive,

but once it's there, there becomes this feeling of invincibility where you can just keep.

Everything open all the time, and I, what, what I keep running into, in, in each of my reviews, I'm like, well, I need to find more and more aggressive tests that are still realistic in the real world that actually might slow this down. And the one that I'm still running into, the one that hasn't been able to pass, that's, that's pretty common is running noise removal.

Some kind of, uh, grain emulation as well at the same time.

Those both continue to slow it down so

Alex: Well, and then, and also rendering. I mean, if you,

if you render three D, you're gonna run into. Global elimination. There's no, you know, we, we joke that it's, you know, [00:15:00] when you render for film, generally the accepted number is 45 minutes of frame, you know, like 45 minutes of frame and you just keep the, the frames keep getting more and more detailed.

But if you look back at, at Toy Story, I think it was actually, toy Story might have been a little bit more, but there was some time in the nineties where it became like 40 minute, 45 minutes of frame is something we see often. As the hardware got better, we, it didn't become 30 minutes of frame or 15 minutes of frame.

We just kept on adding things into it until it was, until it was back to 45 minutes of frame on average. Then, you know, now, and now we're, you know, getting these incredible images that, that come out of it. But it's, but we just keep on throwing it out the hardware. But, and then again, the photometry, I, I can probably send you, I remind me and I'll send you 

a file 

Tyler: Well, this is something I've been trying to sort out from Apple's, um, sort of their pitch to, to me, right? When they show the demos at their events, they're like, look at this Redshift render and how great you can do all these three D things and now there's more octane sport and all this stuff. I don't actually do that work, and I always wonder.

Does anybody choose a Mac for it? I mean, it, it looks great that [00:16:00] it will go that much faster, but won't it always 

Alex: There's a lot of designers that would, there's a lot of designers that would prefer Mac. Like, they just like

Macs better, you know, so they, they, they grew up through that, and then they want to use it. Um, you know, they, they could go to a PC to do those things, and I think Apple needs to kind of keep breaking that down a little bit, um, to make that more available.

And so, but I, I think that people, there's, there are definitely designers that use Mac everywhere else other than their workstation. They don't like necessarily using a PC for that part. Um, but, but Apple would've, to prove that it makes, makes a difference. And I think that some companies are really good at optimizing for that.

So like Maxon is pushing cinema four D pretty hard as far as like how to take full advantage of the, of the, um, libraries that Apple's providing, as well as, uh, companies like, um, Black magic and resolve. You know, really looking at how do they optimize for the hardware? And that's where, and so I think that, I think you're seeing some more of that.

And I think as Apple, there's some point where I think Intel has a hard time, [00:17:00] you know that, that everyone's now looking at Arm. But the problem they're gonna have with ARM is that. That they're, they're getting into it now because Apple is, you know, cleaning their clocks in a lot of ways as far as price per watt and price per, per dollar, um, is starting to become problematic for them. The hard part is, is that without owning. The hardware manufacturing design, the operating system, the, the, uh, you know, the, the development

environment as well as all, it's very, very hard to make this work. This is a really hard problem and it, what, what's interesting about it is that Apple takes the thing that was their disadvantage, which is that they're not working with everybody and makes it their advantage.

You know, this is, this plays to this idea that we should own everything in that, in that process and, and, and all the way up to the edge where you start adding out the applications.

Tyler: If you ever see Jared from Red do live streams, which he occasionally does these very candid live streams on YouTube. This one I was watching when he was talking about developing the, the hydrogen phone, right? The, the red was gonna build a phone if anybody forgets with what [00:18:00] would be effectively like a red camera in a, something that holds, oh, hey, and you just happen to have one.

I've never seen one in person, 

Alex: There it is. 

There it is. I love this phone. I love, this is my, this is my, my favorite phone that was ever made. Um, although it's, it's kind of out, along in the tooth now, but it's a stereo phone and it really does

stereo like it, it does good stereo and, and it was just so imaginative. And I love the fact, and it had this great, you know, um, this little connector, the smart connector at the bottom.

I don't know if my, my, uh, smart connector on the bottom that never turned anything, but we were excited.

Like, 

look at this. I love the. I love the idea. I loved what they did here. I loved, um, I bought, I bought it the day of, I bought the plat, the, whatever the, the platinum one,

Tyler: The good one. 

Alex: think, I can't remember the tts.

Yeah. 

Titanium, I think, or platinum or whatever they called it. I bought this one and then they, it was late, so they sent me another one, the regular one, which I, I think I gave to Andy and Naco and, and then, and then I, [00:19:00] I got this one and, and I, I took pictures with it all the time. And now I'm excited about The Apple platform, you know, the, the iPhone 15, but I've been shooting with this one. I was shooting with it for,

for years just because I, I love stereo. I love stereo,

Tyler: What, what he was saying in the live stream that was so kind of revealing is he's like, you know, we, we know how to build great cameras. And of course they do. Like red, red has done it. Their sensors are wonderful. Everybody knows how good they are and they're like, we thought we could do the same thing for phones and just brute force it with great hardware.

And he's like, we just underestimated how much that Apple integration was actually doing to take pretty mediocre hardware. Because the Apple sensor, the, the Sony sensors in an iPhone are not where the red sensor is and just. Pull everything together in these magical ways that even, you know, a, uh, world class camera company like red couldn't, couldn't match it even, you know, even though like top of the line red camera can beat the quality of an iPhone, they couldn't figure out how to have that, you know, end intending, uh, integration.

Alex: [00:20:00] and, and the thing, the hard part is, is that like, I don't know, 10 years ago when, when Uh, 60 Minutes did some tour of, of Apple. It was, they came out with, there's 200 engineers working on the camera. That was 10 years ago

when, when we weren't sure that cameras mattered, you know, like how, how much they mattered.

But the bottom line is everyone's making their decision about what kind of camera, like we were listening to all the iPhone launch. Everyone's just listening for. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What are the specs on the new camera? Like, like, like what are we gonna get on

the new camera? And that's all anybody waits for.

And then you go, okay, I'll decide to buy it or not. Based on whether the camera is enough of a jump from where I'm where, wherever I am now. 'cause we have to remember that a 15, an iPhone 15 is not selling to the iPhone 14. Well, it is for me, but it's not normally for normal people. It's not selling to an iPhone 14 owner.

It's selling to an iPhone 12 or 11 or 10. You know, of them getting to a precipice where they go, okay, it's time to, to upgrade. The 15 is really nice, by

the 

Tyler: Well, let's talk a lot about that in about 10 seconds. I [00:21:00] just, one more thing I wanted to hit on the laptop that I think is somewhat misunderstood, so I wanted to. Emphasize it a little bit is that the display is, is mostly the same. And that's, I think most people have perceived that the new MacBook Pros have the same displays before.

' cause I think the hardware inside might be, but what it's doing now is that the SDR displays 20% brighter. Um, so it's offering 600 knits in just like standard viewing. And I think it's . People spend a lot of time focusing on those HDR numbers 'cause it's the high number, right? It's peak brightness. This is when you're watching HDR content, there's more impact from the HSDR brightness than the HDR.

Like you. It's what you experience day to day. It's can you sit outside and use your computer? Can you crank it up high enough to see what's going on? Uh, the same thing goes for when you, you know, when you buy on camera monitors, right? Like, if you want something that you're gonna use outside. You don't care about p like peak brightness.

It needs to , it needs to stay 2000 niss for, uh, a few hours. So I just want to [00:22:00] kind of drive home something I've seen missed overall, that that bump in SDR brightness is actually really quite nice. I've had it sitting next to, uh, the M one, um, MacBook Pro, and, uh, you can absolutely see it. And if we keep getting those little incremental bumps to the standard brightness level that I, I would take more of it.

I really appreciate it.

Alex: Well, and, and I'm, I'm just ama I, I still have to admit that to go to the phone again is just, I have, because I don't have the new laptop, but I can say from the phone perspective, I'm just amazed at the bright, the, the unbelievable images. You take a photo and it's kinda like, do, do, do, do you take the photo and then it pops up on your photos and it looks dark for a second, and then it goes, oh, here's bright, and it just looks

amazing. 

Tyler: you tried any of the, uh. 

Alex: believe I'm shooting this with a phone.

Tyler: HDMI monitoring through the iPad, like the Orion app that came out 

Alex: Oh, yeah. Yeah. 

Tyler: I just want that on the phone so badly. And I, I know it's a restriction, uh, in somewhere in iOS, uh, Sebastian mentioned that they can't do it yet, but once that app hits and everybody can use an iPhone through HDMI as a monitor.[00:23:00] 

I don't know if they're, if small hds gonna sell a lot of monitors, like, you know, I'm

Alex: The hard part is just being willing to give up your phone. You

know, like I, I, 

Tyler: just. 

Alex: what was funny was I, I was gonna give back my iPhone 14, and the problem is I'm used to using it too much on other things, like a little extra camera

and a little extra thing. And I was like, oh, I'm never gonna give this up.

Like, I've never given up a, I haven't given up an app iPhone since I bought one. Like, I, they just slowly die and the battery gets to a point where they're not useful, but I use 'em for, I've got an iPhone eight that's like a clock that's up here, that, that, it just tells me what time it is, you know, and it's just.

You know, they, they slowly just kind of wind their way down into some version of usefulness, so,

Tyler: This is something we've already talked about a lot 'cause uh, I came on your show recently, uh, office Hours and we went through every single detail of the shot on iPhone app event. And I feel like we didn't even scratch the surface even in an hour of that. Um.

Alex: Yeah. We ran outta time. We were just like, okay, well we got to it, and they, they just put out another ad with another behind the scenes. I was

like, I was gonna, I was gonna say, Hey, you gotta come back

on 'cause we're gonna, 

we're gonna, 

we're 

Tyler: talk about the future of it. Like, let's, I, I wanna figure out, or I, I think [00:24:00] I want to, you know, tease out the story of what will this actually be, because it's easy to see like, okay, well I. Uh, you know, the video looks good, but the conversation in, in my comment section anyway is usually okay.

Sure, it looks better than it used to, but when is a filmmaker ever gonna choose an iPhone over an Alexa or Red? They're not. They're gonna choose the big camera every single time. So this isn't, this doesn't even matter

Alex: Maybe 

what, what really shook 

that 

Tyler: don't agree with, but I want to, I wanna know your take on that.

Alex: Um, the creator. Did you see the creator?

Tyler: I didn't watch it yet, but I am aware.

Alex: FX

FX three, not even an FX six. Like he shot, like Gareth Edwards did an FX three. And you see the behind the scenes. And, and here's what I, here's what I notice watching, and it's not perfect, by the way. So when you watch the, when you watch the movie, there are things that I can, I can see that, I can tell you that it looks that way because they shot it on an FX three, they don't have the data there.

They had to push it. And now I see a bunch of green, you know, like there are times when it, and it's not like nice [00:25:00] green, like, like, like. Digital green there, there's a couple shots that I was just like, Ooh,

that didn't work. You know, and, and so, um, so there was, uh, but, but for the most part, it works really well. And the thing that he talked about less than, I mean some of it might have been budgetary, um, but what he talked about. Related to that was the freedom it gives you. You, you, you see a bunch of shots of him shooting on an RS two. I think it was an RS two or RS three, you know, so the, he's got Ronans there that he's, that he's using for that instead of a steady CAM operator, you know, that he can control.

Like he, he doesn't know how to, I mean, I don't think, I don't think he's a steady cam operator. My brother is 

so he'll, 

my brother will tell you the 

Tyler: a real skill.

Alex: Yeah. And so my brother will tell you all the things you can do with a steady cam that are really hard to do with a Ronan. And, um, but, but he, uh, um. But the thing is, is it lets him decide that as the director, there's things that he can just grab onto and shoot the way he wants to shoot it. And it's not complex and it's really small and it's on these little rigs and it gives him a [00:26:00] certain level of freedom. I can see where, and I've started to shoot some footage on my, uh, I mean, I, I shot a, I shot 14 minutes of my daughter.

My daughter just started playing in a band. She was playing at a, at a local venue. And, um, she's playing the drums and I. I shot, uh, 14 minutes of it. I was like, holy smokes. This is a 38 gig file. Like, it was a huge file and I opened it up and it looks really nice, you know, it's a really nice shot. And, uh, and I was kind of amazed that I shot that with my phone and I, and I started, it started to get me going and, uh, of like, where would I shoot this?

And we already, like for instance, that behind the scenes, I think that whole, the whole launch for the Mac Pros and everything else, apple in the past has oftentimes just made those like A press release. I personally think that a big part of that launch was a commercial for the

iPhone. We wanna show you, you know, like more than more than anything else we wanna show you that you, we can shoot a keynote with

an 

Tyler: I mean, that's what most of my coverage was afterwards. Like, I, I, I, I, 

Alex: everyone forgot about the 

Tyler: exactly. I, 

Alex: you know, they were like, [00:27:00] but they shot it 

Tyler: videos about this, and, uh, not as many of the, I know. I mean, it, it's huge news.

Alex: well, and, and within a week I was starting to get question, we work with a lot of film partners. I was getting questions from film companies of, if we shoot this interview with an iPhone 15, what are the specs?

And I'm, I, I gave 'em back. I was like, well, we'd really like to see four K, you know, like four K, and if you can do six, you know, 24, it's okay if we can do six. The pipeline that I was working with was a 60 frame pipeline, so I was like, Give it to us in 60 or 30 if you don't have a external hard drive, which you can just plug into your, which is amazing. Um, and, and so, so it was, I just found it to be a little surreal that I was making these requests that were just out. You know, like that I was making this request of, of someone. And when you look at all the rigs, when you look at what's happening, I think that, uh, I think you could shoot scenes where it's a lot more portable than what you would, um, it's a lot more portable than what you would do otherwise.

And, and I, as I know that, like when I do [00:28:00] training, for instance. I shoot a lot of stuff with everything from Aries to Venices to Black Magic 12 Ks to six black magic six Ks to, you know, I have all these cameras that we shoot with. Um, you know, a lot of my heavier work is done in those, in the, in that realm. Um, my webcams are mostly Sony because of auto focus, so, so, um, but the, um, but the, the, I I, I could see where when I train switch to training, like we have this big kit that we send out to people like C level that has got an instruction, 45 minutes, it'll take you to

set it up and it's got a video instructions on how to put it together.

And this is a six. It's a black magic six k with a mix pre and it ties into a Mac mini. And we can remote control it. And this is how you and it, this is as easy to put together as we could make it. When we built that training, I did not shoot it with a six K camera. I shot it with my iPhone because I can move it to where I need it to be really quickly.

I can hand hold it, I can move it up and I can move it down. I can show you this other angle. I can do all these other things. And so there's a flexibility that I chose to go [00:29:00] with to build the training video. And I do that a lot if I wanna show you something. And so I think that, but I think that now you could shoot short films, especially as a filmmaker. Maybe not once you have budget, but there's a lot of people The most important thing about filmmaking is to go do it. You know, like, and write a story over a weekend and go shoot it like a 48 hour film festival, or do those things like go through the process of shooting it because the map is never the territory.

And you have to go through this pain of just like, I'm gonna shoot it. I'm gonna live with my mistakes, I'm gonna be excited about my successes, and I'm gonna cut, cut a film and I'm gonna

deliver it. You know? And, and I think that being able to do that on a phone. It's pretty 

powerful, you know, like in it. And it's, and and I think that that's the thing that, um, you know, for people starting and, you know, being able to tell a story, you can now tell a story that is easily broadcast able on tv. Um, and definitely for news, um, that you shot with your iPhone. And it's not gonna look any less, it's not gonna look any less than the broadcast cameras, which are, you know, 10 80

Tyler: Well, or I 

Alex: a two thirds inch 

Tyler: [00:30:00] seeing the difference when reality TV started switching to good cameras. 'cause for a long time, I mean, I don't know what they're shooting on, but it was, you know, small sensors, the highlights were clipped. And if it was a reality show, it looked bad. That was part of the deal. You know what, the watch over my wife's

Shoulder when she's watching Netflix right now. And I'm like, that looks pretty good. Like, I don't, I don't know what they're using, but they, it's a set of modern Sonys and it's like, this is, you know, basically as good as a movie just with a different grading and lighting choice. Um, but now that, that's a really good example of where I think it'll fit in.

All of a sudden you need a bunch of pickup shots of the location. Like, you know, you're gonna send a really small crew around the city just to get establishing shots. They might, they might do better on the iPhone without having to rig anything up, without having to worry about setting up Ronins or having a bigger team. Like if you send one person with a phone, they might cover more ground and come back with better material than if they had a bigger set.

Alex: I, I had a, I had a situation where we stole, you know, we, we, we call it stealing shots, right? So we were, we were stealing shots in [00:31:00] LA and which is a hard place to steal shots because they all know what's up. You know, like, like you, you bring a tripod to most cities and they're like, eh, you know, what are they doing?

It's so cute. And in LA they're like, Hey, you need a permit for

that? You know? and so 

Tyler: so underrated is that you don't need a tripod with a , an iPhone like the stabilization is actually amazing.

Alex: Yeah. Yeah. And, and we shot, we shot a shot where we needed a, the foreground element we shot in Japan. This is a subject and he's sitting on the beach. We can't, we don't have the, we didn't have the budget or he didn't have the schedule to fly out, so we're gonna shoot him in front of green screen in between a bunch of other shots that we were doing. We needed a, um, we needed a background shot of Santa Monica, of the beach in Santa Monica. So we went to Santa Monica and we pulled out AF 23, the old Sony F 23, which is a digital film camera. And we take that out on the beach and we set it up and we shoot a background plate that I absolutely could shoot now with an iPhone.

And, and it got, you know, it wasn't the right, same grading, we had to do all the grading that we'd have to do. But if I shot that with log, um, with on a, on an iPhone, I to could [00:32:00] have totally done exactly what I did for that shot with that iPhone that I did with it, you know, in the, in the, in the shot that I did there. And, and that's the kind of those background shots, pick up shots, wide shots, establishing shots, all of those things. Not for a big feature film. We have to, you know, but, but for small budget films and medium budget films and TV and web and web, you know, and I think that the other thing we have to look at is when we look at the business of, of this, the coming market is

YouTube 

like, like, you know, 

and 

Tyler: people shooting the small and medium budget stuff than there are shooting the big budget. There's just more of it.

Alex: And, and, and the thing is, is that that what Apple's giving them is a product that they can shoot, that can aspire towards being a big filmmaker. Uh, you know, a, a filmmaker with $80

million budget and they can shoot something that they can actually take into resolve or Final Cut or premiere and grade, you know, and, and grade it and make it look good.

And they're not like, well, it's okay. You know, it's, you know, like they, they actually can do something with it, they can be proud of. Um, and I think that's a huge. [00:33:00] As they as, as we see the next filmmakers building those out. We don't see a ton of narrative on YouTube, but I think that we'll see more and more of it and, and I think that the phone is definitely becoming, I think by Apple building a big keynote with it. It also legitimizes all the people who they don't feel small,

like they don't feel, they feel like I could.

I could, and there's, again, I'm doing a project in a couple weeks that's all done on

Venice .Like, it's not, it's, I'm, I'm not like saying, oh, hey, you know what we should use as an iPhone for this.

There's a ton of advantages to having big cameras. You know, like, so it's not, but, but the, there is this huge, uh, area of production and of creativity and of communication that is available on the iPhone. That is amazing.

Tyler: I, I think where there is a lot of narrative and just real filmmaking that is always underrated is on TikTok and Instagram, which, I mean, I don't, I don't know if you spend much time watching things there, but 

Alex: I watch a lot on TikTok. I don't spend a lot of time on

Instagram. I, I, and it, it's mostly I I I, I had a, I, I have to admit, [00:34:00] I'm a little, I've been using TikTok since it was musically, and I study it

in detail. 

Tyler: I, remember those days. I just, I wrote it off at the time though. I, I couldn't stand it and I.

Alex: I got brought in to consult for doing some musically live, some musically live activations. And so I got brought in to look at it and then I was like, this is a really interesting model and I, what I should have done right then is started creating content for it . But I didn't, I just kept on helping people with live activations and working on those things, and then it turned into TikTok and then I kept on helping people with live stuff and everything else, but I didn't Didn't have time. And I, I made some with my, my kids, my kids. We made some tos, um, you know, mostly 'cause I just wanted to, I needed somewhere else to experiment, you know, to play with it. And so we made some, um, that are up there, but, but I. For the most part, I watch it. What's interesting is the watching the trends, you know, watching the trends of what works in TikTok and also what works in shorts.

'cause shorts is so different than TikTok because TikTok has a derivative culture that shorts doesn't

have, which I think kind of kneecap shorts a little bit. [00:35:00] But shorts has more original content in it than TikTok. But TikTok really still lives in this, um, which I love. I'm gonna take the same audio and do something different with it.

To tell you my version of that story, which I just think is as a, from a human like research perspective, is so fascinating, is to replicate that over and over again,

Tyler: I have this feeling, I remember back in the days of like, you know, dig and Reddit, that there, there's sort of this pipeline of like, idea or memes would come from four chan to Reddit and then to dig and uh, you know, now it's from TikTok to Instagram to YouTube or so, you know, like TikTok is still where the craziest ideas are generated, like.

There's the most experimentation and it's still really the wild West, and people will just do any, there's no barrier to ent. There's the least barrier to entry because there's no expectation of image quality or fidelity or 

Alex: Well, and like, 

Tyler: cool all the time.

Alex: like the ones that I, for some reason [00:36:00] I find, and, and they're a little off color, they're a little not safe for work, but the Jason Banks stuff is so funny. I dunno if you watch any of

the Jason Banks stuff, but it's . It's so funny, like he's a comedian and he does this thing where he is got a wide face and he is got thing, but everyone just uses his audio and there's all these people voicing the audio and they're, and they're just acting along with it. And I don't know why I think it's so funny, but I just find it to be hilarious that they're doing, you know, these men and women, mostly women are doing it, you know, like they do these funny ones to the, to the thing. But, but it's, it's a really funny, um, and he does all these skits about this really inappropriate. Kid who's like nine or 10 years old that just says the worst things anyway. So, but, but it's the, um, but those are the kind of things that, uh, I, I think that The, a level of production that can be done, you know, now with the iPhone is dramatically changing a lot of these things. 'cause even for when I did TikTok, of course, when I was doing TikTok with my kids, of course I didn't do it with an iPhone.

For the most part, I did it with,

Tyler: A Venice

Alex: Magic six K.

You know, and so I, so I, I did, I had this, uh, the way I, I, [00:37:00] mean, I did one with that, you know? Did, have you ever thought about killing me? You know, like that there was that meme, you know, like, oh yeah. And I. And, um, so I made, uh, I made this one, but of course, I, I put the, I, I mounted the iPhone over top of the, over top of the phone so they could hear it, you know, and I could, you know, see what I was shooting.

And I would then I shot all the closeups and did all the wides, and then I cut a nine by 16 for TikTok and put the 16 by nine on the, you know, on YouTube. And, and so, um, I, I didn't do it quite that way. And now I could probably do that more easily with an

iPhone. 

Tyler: Yeah. Well, and I, I just think we need to get past this idea that TikTok or, or Instagram is like somehow not professional. A lot, A lot of people are doing it casually, but a lot of people watch it too. You know, there is a lot of serious stuff to be created there, so,

Alex: Well, a lot of creators are making

a lot of money. Like we just have to realize like they're not, uh, you know, they're, uh, some of these creators have, uh, tens and sometimes hundreds of

Tyler: I kind of had 

Alex: not, it's 

Tyler: eyes open to, recently my wife sent me an article that was, I dunno, something pretty, uh, I think it was [00:38:00] Washington Post talking about like, you know, the, the creator economy is bigger than you think. There's more people making more money than you realize. And this is something I've been, you know, I've been in the, I. Creator economy for years now, but I, it really kind of drove home like, wait a minute. Nobody does know how much money is out there in the like, independent, uh, flow of creator economics. 'cause none of it is tracked anywhere. You know, it's like in, in terms of, uh, like a, like direct advertising, right? Like when I do sponsorships on my channel, for example.

It's not part of a platform that can, you know,

create some bigger trend report that Washington Post would have any visibility to. And most people are in 

Alex: and most creators. And the other thing is most creators don't talk

about 

it. You know, so they don't, they don't, they don't want, because they're, it creates separation between them and their audience. And so they, you know, most of them will never talk about, I mean, I, I don't, I don't know if I know any creators that really talk about the numbers,

Tyler: There's a niche of creators that just talk about numbers. That's definitely a thing out [00:39:00] there, but 

Alex: there is that niche, but, but most of the ones that you see that are really doing well, I mean, they may be giving away. I mean, Mr. Beast gives away a lot of money. Um, you know, and there's other people that, that, that are obviously making money at this thing, but a lot of them aren't talking about the actual numbers of how much they're making.

And in some cases it's, you know, a, there's a, there's a group of. Creators, I think that I, that I know that are making a solid living. Like it's, it's a solid upper middle class. Like they're making, you know, a hundred fifty, two hundred, two hundred 50,000, $300,000 a year just doing this. You know, like there's some that are just, this is their extra job, you know, like they're just making little extra money. Um, uh, the, for me it's a big time, a big money hole. Like I just keep putting money into it. I don't actually take any money out. I, I gotta figure out how to reverse that flow. But anyway, but the, um, But the, but then there's the ones that, that are making, you know, millions of dollars doing this. And they don't talk about that.

But they're, when you look at the infrastructure that they have to make this happen, I mean, you know, they're, it's, it's a, there's, there's a lot going on. They've got [00:40:00] big warehouses of, of gear and things and people and everything else that doesn't, you know, as someone who Ru used to run a company that doesn't come for

Tyler: Right. Yeah. And they're gonna be shooting a lot more on iPhones.

Alex: I think so. Oh, and I think that the other thing that we already saw was that When I was in DC I was in DC for about six months, working on my studio there and uh, and building it out. And one of the things I worked, so the building that I was in is called, is right where Euro Eurovision and everything else comes into it.

CVS

is next to next door and it's the most connected building in the country. Like, it's just, there's like 26 dishes on the roof. There's every internet service, there's all the video services all come into this one building. And, um, what's interesting because of that. All of the Eurovision news networks are all on the same floor, or I think the BBC's a couple floors up and there's, but they're all on in that building.

And so what you get to see out on the street near it are all these press people pick doing pickup shots, like doing the, doing the whatever it is, and they're doing it in

Romanian or French [00:41:00] or whatever it is, and they're outside and they're doing it. When I first got there, they had lights and they had cameras and they had two, a producer, and they had a, um, a camera operator.

And they had, they had this little stand for their light, and it was very mobile, but it was, you pulled it with a little cart to get to where you needed to go. And then by the end of the time that I, when I left, I, I kind of closed that up in like 2019. It was One person with an iPhone, with a little wireless thing that, that went to the iPhone and they were just doing all their pickups by

themselves, like just standing 'em up.

And now you can, we can talk about the destruction of broadcast television and everything else, but we're getting to the point where those iPhones were shooting the same footage you was. You couldn't tell the difference

between what, what, what they were doing. 

The audio was a little, 

from the video perspective, you couldn't tell the difference.

The audio is really, the challenge is getting good audio interfaces and getting that stuff in. But, but

Tyler: But that's also getting, getting better now too. It's getting easier to, uh, you know, we've got 32 bit float on these wireless, um, uh, transceiver receivers. And you, [00:42:00] you really can do some, not the same, but you can do something competitive with a pretty minimal kit these days too.

Alex: Oh yeah, well, something the same. That was, I mean, you can have a, you can have a lab, which you had before, which doesn't sound very good, but it's okay. You know, and, and then you can plug that into your, into your, whatever it is. Your, either your, your sound devices, wireless or your

deity wireless or your zaxcom, wireless, whatever, electrical, electonic. Those are all the things that, or Sennheiser, you know, those are the, the ones that we see a lot of, and. It's gonna sound the same, you know, like, you know, and especially if it can record locally, which some of 'em now can

do. Uh, it all depends on whether you're in the United States

or 

Tyler: Yeah, that patent, 

ugh. 

Alex: little patent going on

there. 

Tyler: I'm in, I'm in Canada, so I get the good ver and the nice thing is these companies actually all, they do build it in. So like the road is getting sued for it in the us but I have the Canadian one that can record internally and DAD as well. I can record internally, but the US one can't.

It's

Alex: Oh,

can, I didn't know if the D de 81, I thought that they had made some deal that they could do it in the 

Tyler: Oh, may maybe they eventually unle. It didn't, and[00:43:00] Yeah. 

Alex: Yeah. 'cause like, because like the sound devices, the sound devices, wireless stuff is stunning. Like the controls and this quality and everything else, and the range. And uh, but if, if you buy it outside of the, outside of the United States, you can get you, it'll record locally.

But if you're in the United States,

not 

Tyler: Come to Canada, buy some audio gear.

Alex: Yeah, exactly. And then drive across because it, it, it just, all that matters. I mean, I, they can't say this, but all that matters is you buy it where it needs to be licensed, and then after that it works everywhere.

Tyler: Well, so I do want to also talk to you more about photogrammetry, which I think you're the first one I ever heard talking about this 'cause you've been interested in it for years and, and actually putting it to use. And I've suddenly found a lot more use for it in the last year or maybe two years at this point of being able to generate, again.

Speaking of creating things on your phone. Uh, create pretty realistic three D environments with zero effort or understanding. Um, uh, specifically I'm using that Luma AI for pretty much all of this, but,

um, what changed in that [00:44:00] p period? Like, what got so much easier and better about the fidelity when we switched from those, between those technologies and how, d how is it different from photogrammetry?

Alex: There's been, the photogrammetry has grown, you know, so when, when we first started doing it, I mean, I, I have the, I've been doing this for 30 years now. I can't believe I've been doing photogrammetry for almost 30 years. I mean, maybe a couple years short. When we first did it, what we would do is we'd get photos and then you would take, you would take a, a cube typically, and you'd set it in the photo and you'd use it to match. Your focal length. So you use the, you'd be finding banishing points. So you put a couple cubes in there to find banishing points in your scene, and then you would start to build models against those. You'd start building cubes around it, so there was no nothing automatic.

So in the nineties there was nothing automatic. And then real vis, and a handful of other folks said, well, if you can, if you can show me where eight to 12 points are in each one of these photos. the the crossover between the photos, I can calculate the camera for you and I can calculate and then I can help you put those [00:45:00] points in once I've calculated.

That was real vi's, uh, image modeler and so, so then we started doing that and that was really exciting. I. And then we had track, we, we started, we had tracking software like Bou and, and, and, uh, pixel Farm and all these other companies would have this tracking software and it was generating all these points because it had to figure out where the mo, where the camera was and match it.

Well then it was generating all those points and we're like, Hey, why don't we take that and figure that out? Microsoft had photos synth, which was never a product that was publicly available, but it would grab, it would use these points to figure out where to put all these photos to kind of give you the

sense of a 

three 

Tyler: I remember that.

Alex: And we figured out how to hack it so that we could pull out all those points. Like we were, I just want the points. So we kept on trying to get the points. So, um, so what's happened is, and then we, then we had medicine, um, and reality, uh, um, engine, which is it, reality engine, reality capture. Um, there's so many realities, you know, that's the problem.

So, so anyways, we had a meta, uh, so the, the meta shape, you know, really started to be the first one where we, okay, [00:46:00] we can take a bunch of photos. We can throw it in there and it's gonna find all the two D points that, that are there. It's going to relate them to each other. It's gonna figure out where those cameras are.

It's gonna, it's gonna figure out where all that, that whole surface is, and build a surface and throw a texture into it and make it all work. And so that, and that's happened very slowly, but Mesha, you know, really was part of that. And again, um, uh, reality capture, which was bought by Epic, um, is another, another version of that.

And One of the things that, that they started to do then is be able to convert these to lidar. So now we can take the LIDAR data. And when we started doing that, that was really, we were taking real lidar cam. I mean, I don't mean real, I mean the, the, the lidar on the.

phone is real, but it's not the, lidar on the phone captures thousands, you know. Thousands of points or hundreds of thousands of points, the ones that we use in production capture million points a second,

you know, like to, to, to go out there and grab onto those for, for a little bit more range too. They'll go a couple hundred feet or a hundred feet, not 30 feet, you know, and so, so anyway, [00:47:00] but I. As that happened, as you started to mix. So what we, we tend to call the photos unstructured light and the lidar structured light. 'cause we know exactly what the distance is. And so, so we, but when you mix the structured light, the structured light acts as a skeleton that you can wrap that, that creates um, a known truth for the unstructured light, which is the photos to be accurate. 'cause the photos can always be, are always gonna be more detailed 'cause they're only limited by the resolution of your

camera. So anyway, so you have this mixture of those going on, and then the real magic, which is gonna keep on getting better and keep on gener, and we're seeing more and more of this is when you take a phone, the issue is you have the structured light, the lidar that's on the phone, but you also have a camera.

And the most important thing is it's a camera that is known to the

camera. So we know that this is a 24 millimeter, um, you know, uh, IM, we know, we know exactly what the camera and lens is and exactly what the sensor is and everything else. That saves us a whole bunch of time, you

know, and if you add the [00:48:00] lar the lidar to it, it now can just grab onto all this imagery really quickly.

And it has a fairly good idea of where every, all the bits and pieces are. So, you know, you have things like, I use a lot of poly cam, you

know, to, to wave around and, um, and, uh, you can kind of build these three D models very, very fast that are very accurate. You know, like I. When I'm trying to figure something out, like I was in a, I was in a, that was my, my, I, I said before my daughter was playing at a venue.

I was in the venue and we were there early because she was able, you know, they were rehearsing and so on and so forth. The place was empty and I was like, you know what I'm gonna do right now? I'm just gonna wander around and build a three D model because

sometimes I, someday I might need to

figure 

Tyler: I, I do that all.

Alex: I just was, and of course my daughter's friends were like, your dad is taking pictures of the wall, Like, I'm going up and down the wall like this. 

And 

just, just, just capturing all the data. They were like, he's so strange. And that did not go over well. But anyway, but, but the, um, uh, but then I have a three D model of it.

And when I measure the height of the, of the stage and I measure the other things, it's all

accurate. [00:49:00] It's plus or minus an inch, you know, and really it's more the accuracy that I can select it more than anything else. And so. That's really changed and, you know, that's gonna keep on getting better. And it, it's, and it feeds into what Apple's doing with photogrammetry, you know, with the, you know, with the Vision Pro and even with just the phone.

Like I, that venue that I captured the other day, I could text it to you. And when you open it, if you open it outside or in a parking lot, it's the same

size as 

Tyler: You can, you can walk 

Alex: you can walk around with your phone, it's amazing if it, if it's, if it's in your apartment, you'll. Your apartment will intersect with it, and it's very

Tyler: Yeah, that's gonna get really interesting once you can view them in a vision pro. That's it. I mean, it's gonna totally change how, uh, how much, I think how much people have sort of dismissed this as like a, just a quirky, you know, pro side 

Alex: Well, I 

Tyler: people. But all of a sudden people will be able to kind of experience the results of it in a very different way.

Alex: Well, and I think that the other thing is, is that photogrammetry, like the number one use I use [00:50:00] for photogrammetry is three D printing. I don't, I'm not printing the object that I

scanned. I am, I do photogrammetry of a lot of the objects on my desk so that I have a accurate three D model so that I can model things that, to hold them

or model little things 

Tyler: Yeah. Accessories for them.

Alex: Like, I had a, I had a, um, uh, there was a, a friend of mine had a pipe that was, that had been mangled, you know, got hit by a, a, um, got hit by a, um, a lawnmower and they needed a new one. Um, and, uh, and so I just. I, I just went, I waved over it and I got the three D model and I went to the, I went to the hardware store and I showed it to 'em.

They're like, I can't, can't quite tell how big it is. And I, I hid it so that it would just sit on the desk in

front of them and they could rotate it around. They go, I know exactly what that is. Here's what you need. And, and, you know, and then, and they went and they went and got it because they understood it.

And that's where we're gonna start to get to where we can do

that. We can, you know, I was at, um, you know, another place that really kind of opened my eyes around that was, I was at Hallmark Cards. We were doing a show at Hallmark Cards, like behind the scenes. I know you don't think that [00:51:00] Hallmark Cards would have engineering, but they do because they have to.

They have all these weird cards that when you open them, they make a

noise that's super hard, like it turns out that that is like I have, you have three pennies per item to use and it has to work every

single time, and that is. Crazy difficult. And so they've got this engineering team that's building these ideas and they've got printers and laser cutters and everything else. And I was talking to one of the guys and he was like, oh, I just print my, uh, I was asking what he's printing, thinking it was something for the card. He's like, no, I got a pipe that I gotta fit in and I'm just printing it for the, for home. And it would've been printing all night. And so those are the kind of things we're gonna constantly be looking at.

And the last thing I'll say about that is if you don't think photogrammetry matters, go to Amazon. Pick out a shelf. Just go to a shelf or something in your house. On your phone and see how often it'll pop up and say, would you like to see this in your, in

your 

Tyler: Oh, Amazon has that. I never see that on Amazon.

Alex: all the

time I use it.

Like, I won't even buy something like a shelf or a, or a chair or anything else from Amazon if I don't see that [00:52:00] because I click on it and it just pops up in my, it says, where, you know, you see this little, these little uh,

dots up appear to show you where the floor is and you hit it and it just puts that thing to scale. In your house and you can look at it and it's if, if, if one of the most future feeling things, you know, like it feels like the future when you can just put the object in there, you can rotate it around next to your couch. I had a chair, we were like rotating around and figuring out if it sits right next to the thing, what is it gonna look like?

And it does a really good job. Yeah. So.

Tyler: Yeah, the, the use case. I've kind of actually going, going back a minute. When you started saying how long you've been doing this, it gave me an idea for a YouTube video that I wonder if I could generate these with film. Like if I could take a disposable camera, and, uh, plug the photos in how well 

Alex: When

we started, that's what we did. 

Tyler: was working.

Alex: Like, we, yeah, yeah. Yeah. 

It'll 

work. I mean, 

Tyler: modern automated software without knowing how to draw the cubes and stuff? And, uh, it would actually,

Alex: Yeah, you could do, I mean, 'cause 

Tyler: wanna try that. 

Alex: you just take, you could take pictures with film and then you scan the film and then you put it [00:53:00] in there. And the only tricky part is the, you'd have to use a real film scanner and you

really have to get it, you know, the full aperture of it there, because if that changes at all, it will screw up the, the system.

That's the only tricky part of it. It would be very hard to do it, but

I did, I did spherical stuff with, with film all the time,

Tyler: Because the thing that excites me about it is the, the filmmaking side. Uh, I mean, personally for me, 'cause I can't, I, I can't work in three DI just don't know how, I haven't, I, it's not a skillset I have, but being able to use the new formats out there, I can generate a three D scan of my room or what I haven't used yet, but I'd like to more is doing it with drone shots where you just record four K video circling around an area and instead of trying some death defying

FPV moves where you're, you know, potentially crashing, flying under a, an arch or something. You just scan the area, get, you know, full quality and then regenerate the move in three D later without having a three D skillset. You know, I, I don't need to learn a new skill. [00:54:00] I can just start scanning rooms and spaces and creating moves that I couldn't have otherwise.

And were e. The points that we're getting to with, with tracking plugins as well, that they're just becoming more pervasive, even things on the phone, um, plugins for Final Cut Pro, there's just so many more ways to track a space and insert objects into it. So I'm, I'm suddenly finding like, oh, I don't need to go learn all these things, but I can start working with three D objects in three D environments and actually using them in two D work.

And that's actually even something I'm, I'm curious, I'm like thinking about for the, the vision. Uh, pro as well is like it. It might also be an interesting tool for generating two D work, which I still think will consume more of that in total. But all of these three D three D tools become most interesting when you can flatten 'em down to conventional video, but it just looks really cool.

Alex: Well, and I think that there's also a, um, for those, there's a lot, when we're thinking about three d like a model, what I've done over the last couple [00:55:00] years is to really focus on like when, for the last 10 years we go in and we used to take photo, lots of photos and we'd hand them to somebody and they'd model out the set.

And that's just us doing pre-vis.

So now we figure out where our, so we had models of, for a long time for pco, we had models of everything we used. So we had The cameras, the tripods, the lights, everything else, and we put 'em all in. And a, we'd figure out if they were gonna fit into that room that we thought we were gonna do and exactly where we're gonna put them. But B, we could show it to the client like, this is what, this is what it's gonna look like, you know, this is what's gonna happen. And then I could also send it to the crew that's, let's say I'm in, we did one in London for, um, this Asop, I think as asos anyway, so they do,

Tyler: The soap. 

Alex: know, kids' clothing. A yeah, ASO

Tyler: ASOS close. Yeah.

Alex: asos. I think it's, anyway, they, uh, and so. They, um, we sent it to the crew so that before I got there, they knew where I wanted all the lights.

You know, like I, I knew all those things and, and in other ways we'll take We'll take models of a location and we'll put all of our gear in and we'll show it to the client and [00:56:00] let them, or the stage right, the stage and the lighting and everything else, and let the client sit in there and put the headset on.

We would let them, at the time it was Oculus, put the Oculus and look around and say, oh yeah, this feels right.

This feels like what I want it to look like. Um, and that saves us so much time, you know, to, to be able to make some of those decisions. Uh, 'cause some of it, you just have to, it's really hard to understand when you look at a. Overhead shot or a three D render of what it's gonna feel like when you're actually standing in it. And I think we're getting past that right

now. 

Tyler: Yeah, I think it's all really cool. Is there anything you see coming, like trying to predict the next year or two? Like what production, what production trends do you see trickling out to being more commonly used? Or are you excited about?

Alex: Well, the, the stereo 180 is gonna be, there's a space race coming, you know, between Apple and Meta

that we're about to see. Billions of dollars being spent you know, in, in this thing because Meta is trying to hang on to what, you know, the leadership position they, they got themselves into and Apple's coming in, you know, heavy. And so I think that you're gonna see a huge push towards, I think, and [00:57:00] I, I don't know where this is all gonna end up, but I can tell you in the next year and a half you're, if you know, year and a half or two years, I would at least think about stereo 180 360 is a little complicated because. It's really hard to shoot 360.

I've done a lot of 360 and it's really hard to shoot 360. Well, because you gotta hide all the stuff and all the gear and everything else. Um, and also does it really matter if you see behind

it, it's easier to tell a story and, and let people watch sports and everything else in the 180 view. Um, and that way you're not having to figure out what to fill with the backend

Tyler: Yeah. I've always found that 360 storytelling, like you're wearing a quest and watching, you know, they have narratives that are created within vr. That experience of when you need to turn your head all the way around to see something that flew by is like not, not ideal and not necessary.

Alex: definitely not when traditional filmmakers do it, like we really found that that was limiting. Is filmmakers wanna do this thing where they, they're gonna give you a, a sound that's gonna get you to, they want, they want it to still be old. They were like, Basically, you know, new wine and old wineskins kind of approach to things, which is that they wanna do traditional filmmaking [00:58:00] inside of a 360 environment, which was a mistake.

What we did, I don't know if we did, did it right, but what we really focused on was this idea that. I'm gonna tell you a story that's very short, but you can explore that story for a while. So we had, we've, we've done things where there's five or six things going on and they're interrelated and you see them all happening.

I'm telling you that story. But you might wanna watch that loop for a little bit because it's, it's, you know, because this is happening over here and you're exploring the story. Seeing how it happens over time. So you might watch something for half an hour, that might only be three minutes

long because you're, you're pulling in all the, what happened here?

Why did that person do this and why did this do this? Or it's just an experience. We did one with a, uh, a runway, you know, where the run, you see the runway models. Changing behind something. Um, but you see them getting made up. You see them, you know, coming off screen. You see them going down the side, and you can watch all the things that were happening in the runway, kind of exposed to you, but you're just, but the runway is just one little part of it.

But you're standing in the middle of all the things that are happening. And that was a, you know, that was a really, I, [00:59:00] I felt like that was fun to watch as opposed to trying to follow along with someone trying to tell a story, which didn't usually

turn 

out. 

Tyler: Yeah. Well, whatever it is, it's gonna be extremely exciting, and I know you're gonna be on top of it and ahead of it. So thanks again for coming on, Alex. Um, if anybody isn't watching office hours, you do it how often? All the, basically every day is what it seems like. 

Alex: every day. We haven't missed a si we haven't missed a single day, including weekends and holidays since March 25th, 2 20 20

So it's been, we've answered now 55,000 questions, 

Tyler: Wow, that's actually really amazing.

Alex: Yeah, So,

it's, it's it's a number that just kind of sneaks up on you 

Tyler: and where should people check it out? 

Alex: it. Uh, they can go to Office Hours Global.

You can sign, if you sign up there, you go to join, you'll get a, uh, an email every day that tells you what we're talking about that day. Um, and, uh, or you can just go to Office Hours Global on YouTube and see the actual video.

Tyler: Well, thanks again for coming, Alex.