(smooth upbeat music) - So what do you guys
think of the new set? I, for one, am really digging it. I think buying this $2.5 million house for this view, totally worth it. Yeah, and I didn't stop there. I also got myself a beach
house out in Malibu. Let me just match the lighting here. And there you go. Now look at this ocean view. But sometimes it gets a
little bit lonely up here in the beautiful mountains of Malibu. So I like to, you know, have another place for some nightlife. I get some skiing in this winter. Huge shout out to our sponsor, DJI, for sponsoring this episode. First of all, they gave
us upgrade allowance which we've needed to make this work. Backgrounds like this one have been shot on the DJI Mini 3, and it's honestly impressive how even though their smaller drones
are considered entry level, like, the amount of details
that I can actually see, just coming up close. I mean, this is the amount
of quality you can get out of entry-level drones these days. I'm really excited to utilize this set. It's been a a pretty long time since I've had a set that I'm
just like, "Oh, I love this," and last time was probably
when we set up the backdrop and we ran with that for a while. Okay, who is that? Who is that? That's not me. It's funny how you don't
even realize you gain weight until you look at some old
photos or the doctor calls you and goes, "Hey, your cholesterol is high and you're prediabetic," which,
that kinda happened to me. So we're kind of in this process of just like trying to
reintroduce ourselves to some good food, eating more vegetables. This has been a nice little reminder to always prioritize health first, even though it's not
fun to starve yourself. But anyways, let's go ahead and go back to before we had all this set up. Benefits of not having children
is you have extra room. There would be like a baby
cradle right here. Nope! I'm gonna enjoy every
square inch of this house until that day comes. If I wanted to turn this
bedroom into a giant video wall, how much would that cost me? - It'd probably cost you
like 100-and-something-k. - Oh, 100-something-k? - And then you would also
need to upgrade the power in your house considerably. Probably four 30 amp outputs. Brompton processor would
run you, like, 20k. So yeah, you'd probably be, like, 150k. - I think my budget's about 1% of that. How about if I just want a window that looks like I have a nice view? At Costco there was a
sale for 55-inch TVs. Recorded all the TVs at
240 frames per second. Checked which ones flickers. Can I take three of them,
put them on their sides? - You'd have an edge between each one. - Right, but if I'm trying to make
it look like a window, I could make it look like a window frame and just put, like, a
little bar through it. - Any screen will work. I mean, we've done video
displays on a wall. - All right, window number 1. What's a good way to hold this vertically? Should I just put this on this chair? Dylan's the most expensive TV stand ever. - [Dylan] Well, with me you
get, like, years of experience. - Don't you hate it when you have to type
in passwords like this? - [Dylan] Yeah.
- God, this is gonna take forever. "Unable to connect to..." Ah! Took me 16 years to type
in that password (laughs) and it didn't work. I guess we're gonna try again. How does that look?
Like, pretty realistic? Or does it just look like there's a guy back there holding a TV? - [Dylan] Does it look
like a TV with legs? - Or why don't you just use
the actual windows you have in the room? We have the view of brick walls. So. Oh, cool. So we can adjust the brightness. So this is useful, to be able to adjust the
exposure of the screen. Okay. This background's looking a
little bit better now, huh? - Yeah, this is a little more realistic. - Saw it on YouTube, right? Shout out to, what is it? - Yeah, to Cozy Sound. - Now we have to match the lighting. Welcome to my loft on the 80th floor. Yes. I pay $12,000 a month to live here. All right. Excellent work, Dylan. Do we need to hire two more Dylans for if we wanna do three TVs? (smooth, upbeat music) This should just hook on window number 1. Complete firmware update.
This is just weird. Does every electronic
on this planet require way too many firmware updates? Now, the whole concept of using a display to fake a background or
environment, it's nothing original. We made a video a while back, checking out a mixed reality
stage on a big scale. And more recently I had
a chance to check out how virtual production is
used in smaller spaces. - I'm Sam Nicholson, founder
of the Stargate Studios, and we've been working on virtual reality: "Pan Am," "Walking Dead,"
"Ugly Betty," "CSI," "24." - [Gene] This is unusual because you're turning the set. - What we've got is Sony
VENICE 2 with the C LED wall, Prolights, Kino Flos, everything tied in with motion and coding
so that we can do 360s around the set. - What's the difference between this and a giant TV in the background? - High refresh rates, which gives us the ability to shoot up to 200 frames a second. A much higher dynamic
range than a television. You want the high lights to almost clip like real lights do, real sun. - It's really maximizing the space. - So you wanna go to daylight?
- [Gene] Yeah. - That's the other thing we can do is, we can change light extremely fast because we are pixel-mapped
on the lighting. - And the resolution that's required to get this plate back there. These are 8K, heavy, raw, Venice 2 plates, with all the color we can
get, Rec. 2020 and beyond. - As you move the camera,
the whole background shifts, so it maintains that parallax. - So it's an illusion. I mean, these are all magic tricks, right? - Right. So these are tracking
markers that's being watched by these six cameras, or are
they cameras, or infrared? - Yeah, they're cameras.
These are OptiTrack cameras. This is mocap technology
redone for camera tracking. - Wait a second. We were just in a beautiful
place by the water. - Everything's fake. Even the ice is fake. - All right. So now that we have a virtual window that can pretty much take
us to wherever we want, it is time to get some backdrops. And that is where our
sponsor DJI comes in. Let's give this a shot. So right now we're flying the Mini 3, which is the latest
entry-level drone from DJI. And for a budget drone it delivers a surprisingly good 4K image. And what makes this drone
in particular perfect for the shots I'm trying to get is it's ridiculously good battery life. Right now I'm flying it with
the optional plus battery, which is the setup that gave me my personal longest flight record and I want these shots
to be as long as possible so I don't have to loop
it in the background. So now I just have to find a
good spot to go and sit in. I'm thinking having these
rocks in the foreground is gonna make our view a
little bit more believable. Now, if I really wanted to, could I hike this camera up
there and get a shot like... I could, but I just spent
the last couple days falling on a snowboard and my body just
cannot take any more abuse. So this is just gonna be
much easier. (chuckles) So the wind has started to pick up a bit, but that's one of the nice
things about this Mini 3 is it still has Level 5 wind resistance. So it still looks pretty locked off. Now, the camera specs on this
little guy, pretty impressive. 1/1.3-inch sensor, f/1.7 lens and you can get started fine for 559 bucks with the basic controller. And I love how these Minis
have this notch cut out right here for the camera,
which means you could tilt almost all the way up during flight. You can go into portrait mode where the camera actually turns. Now, me personally, if I could
have one and only one drone, I would opt for the
upgraded version of this, the Mini 3 Pro, which has the
same great camera and lens, but few upgraded features. Like, notice there's
forward collision sensors, rear collision sensors,
4K 60 in D-CINELIKE instead of the 4K 30 in fixed color. So that gives you more flexibility in post to color grade and
access to dynamic range. Fold up to be really nice and compact. Thank you so much to DJI
for sponsoring this episode. Links down there in the description if you're thinking about
picking up one of these. So now let's go ahead
and download these clips and try to throw them in the background. This is a light from Aputure. Let there be light! Oh, yeah. Oh hey, that is pretty bright
and that's only 30% too. So what's cool about these mats is that they're super lightweight and soft. Optional frame. This is gonna be perfect
for tighter spaces where I don't have much
space behind the desk, but I can just mount this back there and still have a nice soft source, instead of trying to figure out how to get a big old soft box back there. So this is Aputure's amaran tube light. This is just a two-footer right here. And see how there's a sun right here. So there should be some nice
warm light coming, right? Warm light at your service. Whoa. - This view makes me feel
like we won the lottery and we got a fancy house on the hill. (both laughing) The image looks great, I don't. - What are you talking
about? You look beautiful. - I'm getting a tan. You're
a little late for halloween. - Oh, yeah. Now I want this space
to be fully controlled so I can film day or night. So this stuff here,
duvetyne, is really good for blocking out light and I still don't know
how to spell duvetyne. When I first started
YouTube I actually did have a real window in the background and I remember one of the things
that was tricky about that, the lighting will change
pretty drastically every time a cloud goes over or whatever. So from one shot to the next, it might just be like
bright, dark, bright. And now I'm gonna go ahead and figure out what
lens combo I wanna use. - Ooh, there's a UPS truck. - [Gene] There's a UPS
truck going back there? - [Kari] Yeah, look. - Kari, could you be me? (Kari laughs) That's what you see when I'm filming? Let me go ahead and get you
up on the small HD here. Makes it so much nicer
to just be able to look at a larger screen live. - If you keep the TVs on that wall, you can put the curtains
up much higher on the wall and just dangle them down so
it'll look more luxurious. - I'm getting quite a bit
of spill from this light all around the background. I generally want this to be nice and dark. So grid time. Velcroed in. - I think you should build out something to cover up the base of the TVs. It will almost look like a bay window. Having like a little plant over there. - Hey, this is both of
our world's combined here. Your world, plants,
and my world, C-Stands. - You know what would really sell it is if we got like a little like mini couch and then the dogs were sleeping on it. - Even like your camera stuff
or any more gear that you get, just to place whatever
you're working on at the time back there behind you, that could be nice. - Now to feed the image to the TVs I just have this ASUS Zenbook. Got this USB-C to this adapter,
which has four HDMI outs. And the PC just kind of
recognizes everything as separate monitors. So I just arrange them to be
portrait and vertical like this and I just play a video
clip and just spread it out through all the monitors. Now, there are these video processors. Those would be nice 'cause
then you could just plug in one HDMI input and you
could feed any source to it. It will automatically divide it up. Some of the nicer ones, you could even tell it how
big or thick the seams are, so that the image just seems more fluid. It doesn't do the jump when it goes from one TV to the other, but they tend to be a
little bit more expensive. And, honestly, I think
this is good enough. I mean, the way I picture using this is, that it's out of focus for
a majority of it anyways. I like having this lamp here. There's actually a piece
of paper that's in here that I use as diffusion
just to kinda soften it. But this is an Aputure
B7c, so little LED light. Throw this one in here. I'm connected to the Sidus Link App, so I could get really funky with the colors and do
this whole... (roaring) But honestly, most of the time I just go
for, like, the boring color. Now let's try to get a nice
little evening shot here. I just have a preset for that
and everything switches out. Huh? Pretty cool, huh? This lamp right here, if I turn it off it, it's still running. So there must be a battery inside of here. Can I just pull it out
complete? Oh yeah, that's cool. I do also like the idea
that I could just zoom in and do some cool producty shots like this. Ah, look at this. This looks sick, actually. For a while, I'll be honest, not too excited to film
in this studio space. It just feels old after a while, but here I can just keep going out, shooting new backgrounds. I can't take credit for
this background by the way, this is a shot from Storyblocks. Also notice that we got some curtains, but also, I got like a
little piece of sheer. I'm hoping that these little things will just convince people just little bit more that this is not a bunch of TVs. Nobody puts a sofa in front of the TV facing the other direction, right? Still trying to figure out a
few things to put on the shelf. Of course, we have our ALEXA. I just have these Aputure MCs.
I have one hooked up up here. And one that's taped on here. But right now I'm ordering
these adhesive metal plates that I can just stick up here. So that way I can just
magnetically attach all these, have that flexibility. I'm trying to keep everything
Aputure lighting in here so that I can control everything through that one Sidus Link App. But I feel like building out
a set now is so much more fun because all these lights are full RGB. So that just gives us
so much more flexibility than we used to have back then. Like, just having a bi-color
light was really cool. Now we have all the colors
we could possibly want. Size of this set right here, we are about 11 feet
wide from side to side; TV all the way up to the camera
is a little under 12 feet; and we have eight-foot ceilings. So, you know, pretty standard. Nothing fancy in terms of space. - You can adapt the size,
probably, to your space and still get a similar effect. - Yeah, 'cause you could
really just have one TV and put curtains around that. So far one of my favorite things
about this is I kind of get to go out and shoot backdrops like this, and like this, for example,
I shot off a rooftop on my birthday, so happy
birthday to me, yay! But, like, the view that I
was able to capture then, I get to reexperience it every time I film with this backdrop. As for audio, I'm still contemplating if I wanna use the Shure SM7B
or just use these DJI Mics. I mean, what's nice about these is that I have full range to
just move to wherever I want and not have to worry about
being kind of tied to this mic. This is a dynamic mic. So generally speaking, you have to be pretty close
to have it sound good. But when you are, listen
to how my voice sounds when I'm recording on the Shure SM7B, and this is how my voice sounds when I'm talking on the DJI Mics. Now, these displays back here, they're all the same exact screen and model number and everything, but there is definitely a
little bit of inconsistency. So I think I just have
to do a calibration. I mean, since everything's
just hooked up to the pc, I think I could just do it with those simple calibration tools where I put the little
sensor in front of the screen and let it run its thing. The best part of all this is no more, "We're losing the light!" And, of course, without
Kari's help we wouldn't have these beautiful plants. Plants are kind of the
(beep), they're awesome. They just make everything
kinda look nicer. I would never be able to keep one alive. So I'm glad that you like it. - [Kari] I'm glad you said that 'cause I actually just bought- - [Gene] More plants?
- [Kari] Yesterday. - I love the shot and I
think it looks really good, but there's this rule with cinematography that you're never supposed to aim for, like, the prettiest image. You're always supposed to
be going for the best shot for the scene or whatever is happening. And I think one of the
things that's important with YouTube is that there's like a sense of, like, rawness and
a sense of closeness. So in the past I would use a
20 mil, which is pretty wide, and I like the closeness that you feel out of something wider. The problem is, it's a little
bit tough to do that here. So this is almost a 70 mil
and we just pushed it back and this compresses the
space, which is important because we can't really
show the edges, right? I can't really go all the
way out to an 18 or 20 without just losing the illusion. But the other way to make
a scene feel a little bit more close is by eyeline. - Maybe the word you're
looking for is casual. - Yeah, yeah, that's it.
That's exactly right. Casual.
(Kari laughs) I want it to be a little
bit less professional, a little bit more casual. I think the background
is good the way it is. We just have to rotate the
table so I'm facing the camera. I could be like, "Hey, today we're talking about blah blah blah with special guests, Kari and Peter.
- Blah blah blah. - This is gonna look like crap right now because we haven't lit it yet. So let's go do that. (smooth upbeat music) Do you know how this is perfectly parallel to the bottom of the frame? Tough part about that is, it's always hard to get it perfect. It's always slightly, slightly off. So if we do like a little
intentional offset, like this, I love the idea that I can just go straight from talking to you guys and that I can swap out the background and the lighting and then
I can come over here, work on the computer a little bit, and now I'll cut to the Kari cam as she gives some very valuable input. - Why is everything so expensive? - I may go ahead and run a third camera so that we could kind of have
like a little back and forth going this way, close-up angle, like here, if I wanna show you some
stuff up close, like, "Hey, check this out. Isn't this cool?"
(Kari laughs) Interesting conversations and funny talk. And then I could just
turn around and go back to just a regular angle like this, pull up some stuff on the computer. - I do kinda like the
other angle a little bit more aesthetically, but I think this one
probably is gonna work better if you have somebody here. - Since this is a 4K, I can probably extract a
close-up shot outta this thing. So it's kinda like I have a bunch of different camera angles going. But yeah, I think
overall this 35's working and I still have that head room, we're not seeing the tops of the TVs. All right, so now it's like day 8,000 of working on this set. That's one of the things I
really have a hard time with, is finishing up something because I always wanna just keep working
on it until forever. But at certain angles you
could kinda see a little gap between the TVs and at
first I was thinking about getting fancy and putting
in like a piece of wood here or something and painting it. But honestly, I think a piece
of gap tape is (chuckles) gonna work just as good. It's always fun to see how much you can really get away with. I mean, once you lock
down your camera angles and all that stuff, you know
exactly what's in frame, then you just go in and
just do some patchwork. Now, when we were making the
anamorphic video with Atlas, I was kind of inspired by
this light that they had that was retrofitted to be an LED. So I kinda wanna try to pull a page out of the Atlas book. These are the fixtures
that I really learned on. But honestly, like, with LEDs
being so good these days, these use so much power. So I pull out the bulb and
I think I could just put this thing in here and magnetically attach it straight onto this reflector
back here. (chuckles) So I don't know, looks
pretty convincing, right? And since it's attached
to the reflector, look, I can actually kinda change
the shape of the beam. You can kinda tell that it's not perfect. But I mean, hey, now out of the 650 I have
full dimming control, as well as color temp control. But most uniquely, it's full RGB now. I definitely want this
light to have two purposes. One, to be kind of cool back
here to fill out this space a little bit, but also work as a light to light someone that's sitting back here. Really utilizing these
little MCs for this set, but the thing is that
they are battery-powered, so I don't want it to die
halfway through a set. So my plan is to run a
little USB-C to all of them. All right, so here is how it
kinda looks in its final form, but it's not really a final form because every single
time I look at this shot, I'm just like, "I wanna change this or I wanna add a plant right here. That hanging plant I wanna
put on this side, right here." Like there's just an infinite
number of things I wanna still experiment with. But I think for now this works. And for my fill light, right here, I can just use my laptop that
is just slightly out of frame. I have Photoshop open and I
can dial in different colors. Green, purple, red. So in a way a laptop is kind
of, you know, an RGB light. I usually do my comment
reads off the phone, but maybe I can just
make it like an overlay, right here somewhere. How does this look? So comment's from Christian, "Hey, Gene. Would you rather get confronted by one hundred potato-sized
jets OR one jet-sized potato?" Holy crap. This is by far the most liked comment in (laughs) that last video. bloomylicious says, "Asking
the important questions." "This took some serious forethought." "Leaving this video on pause
until Gene answers this." All right, being confronted
by a bunch of tiny jets, that actually sounds terrifying. I'm just picturing like
a bunch of FPV drones that are jet-powered just, or on the other hand, a jet-sized potato. So, basically, just a massive potato, that just sounds incredibly delicious, and I would go for that. I don't even think I can
follow that comment up with anything else. So I am going to wrap this one up here. Thank you guys so much for watching. Click on stuff if you like and hope you enjoyed this build
video set thing that we did. And that is all.
Too-da-loots. See you later.
