The 10 Worst + Best Purchases I Made in 2020

you know that feeling where you see something you want you're thinking about it like should i and you look at your bank and you look at your wallet and they're like don't do it i don't know if it's been just being home all year or what but i feel like this year was particularly rough for not buying things i spent far too much money this year just in general and there's still so much i want to get so much when i look at my year and i realize that was a terrible purchase or actually i'm really glad i got this one but that's what we're doing today i'm going to share with you the top five worst money mistakes as far as purchasing decisions i've made this year and the five best and a few honorable mentions in the middle and before i dive into my picks if you're looking for your best five items of the year you could always add the shirt i made these i drew these as my spline shirt and i'll have a link to it below also the comfiest hoodie comes in multiple colors for the shirts and the hoodie splines for that understated animation apparel that we so desperately need the shirts and the sweatshirts as well as everything else in the rest of this video will be linked down below even the stuff that's not the great purchases because maybe it wasn't a good idea for me maybe you might actually like it so everything will be linked below and in case you're new here hi i'm sir wade i do a ton of animation stuff here on the channel so if you enjoy this video hit the subscribe button you can always unsubscribe and change mine later let's dive in let's leave with some positivity the five best items that i picked up this year the first ones one i use every day my desk if you watched my studio tour video you may have seen that i had a terrible non-ergonomic desk set up that actually caused me physical pain daily so switching to a standing desk minus from uplift desk has been a game changer it's a lot healthier i don't have as many aches and pains i have a lot more energy throughout the day and i'm way more productive but with all the sitting and sedentary activity i've had this year not really going to events or walking around or doing a whole lot this has been a really good upgrade and i'm very very glad that i went to a standing desk good purchase number two is actually a little bit of a stretch it's the move i actually moved from la to austin texas so i moved out of california that's where i'm from i grew up in california i've always been around the southern california area and we moved to austin in the last couple of months and it has been actually fantastic we moved partially because of the whole covent thing like we can't really do much in la all the benefits of being there and as expensive as it is considering i work from home i work for myself as a as my own business we were paying a ton of money for very little return on being there so moving to austin we literally doubled our square footage and half our rent not an exaggeration thing number three are actually my wireless headphones so these are the steelseries arctis pro wireless they're wireless they have absolutely no lag they're super comfy i usually don't like wearing headphones for long periods of time but these are really nice they have this little what do you call this fabric thing in the middle so it's not the hard metal sitting on top of your head like so many of my headphones have just like they press in after a few hours these you have a cloth thing on your head and this just keeps the shape and the other thing i really like is they come with the battery inside but they come with a spare battery inside the base station so if you're listening to this and you hear the little bb low battery you just pop this out swap it into the base take the other one fully charged out put it in you can keep going you never have to like plug in your headset and then like stay really close to the computer because you're plugged in because it ran out not an issue love these headphones i also bought this cheap little thing on amazon that i used just to kind of it's been nice thing number four cost a lot but we actually didn't have to pay that much for it i'll get into why in a minute this 86 inch lg tv five years ago i worked at best buy and while i was there right before i left and ultimately got hired to dreamworks i bought a tv and i bought it i had some discounts and stuff for being an employee but i bought my tv and i bought the five year warranty on that tv now through a really crazy turn of events literally like two months before my five year warranty ended we were at our last apartment before we moved here we had this weird issue where a toaster caused one of the outlets in our kitchen to not work or something so we had one of the building maintenance staff come in to see if he could figure out like hey like do we need to replace the outlet but i specifically was like hey can you only turn off the kitchen and not anything else because i have like you know desktop computer jess was working in the other room like we needed the wi-fi to stay on i don't wanna just flipping breakers because that's just not good and he did not listen to me he just started flipping breakers turning things off and he literally fried the tv like i kid you not he literally was just flipping a breaker back and forth without even checking to see what it was doing i don't know what this guy was thinking but either way he shorted out the tv bruh so through a whole process of getting the maintenance involved the management and blah blah blah we ended up getting a little bit of a credit for our tv rightfully because they broke our tv but lucky for me i also had a 5 year warranty on the tv that included like electrical surges and stuff ultimately long story short we got this tv for not a whole lot out of pocket because we had some credit from our building breaking it and we had the warranty of the tv giving us you know close to similar value converted whatever hopefully you stuck with me through that but warranties are great so technically that was a good purchase of 2015 but the good purchase of 2020 was this new tv i'm very very happy with it now my final favorite purchase of the year is kind of a collection of things all different elgato products i've gotten the main one that i wanted to talk about was the cam link it's the little hdmi to usb adapter that allows me to use this camera as my webcam so if i'm in a zoom meeting or if i'm on stream and all that stuff the camera quality is super nice and i can use my background and it's great i basically have all the elgato stuff i've got this i've got the key lights i have the um 4k capture card and the 1080 capture card in each of my two computers because i have a two pc setup if you're curious about like what the heck that's all about the studio tour video actually talks about why and how and whatever i use a lot of it while i'm streaming and while i'm making videos but i actually use a lot of it while i'm animating the lights would be a little overkill the green screen i picked up would not be super useful for just doing work sure but the stream deck is actually really great for putting a whole bunch of different hotkeys animbot stuff in maya or different things in blender that if i don't remember what the key combinations are i can push them because they have a screen and i can actually just assign easy visual identifiers to know what i'm doing very quickly but both for productivity and for content creation a lot of the elgato stuff has been super useful now before we go to the worst five things i purchased in 2020 a few honorable mentions of things that i did enjoy but for one reason or another they didn't make the top five list either were they were close or i actually didn't pay for them for example my one i actually got a onewheel xr which i've been looking at for years but i didn't buy it because i was the winner of the how ridiculous uh onewheel sponsorship giveaway i watch all their videos it's one of my favorite channels just watches they drop stuff it's great highly recommend i'll put a link to their channel because it's just good fun but they did a video with one wheel and one person randomly in the comments was going to win so i put a comment down there i also bought a shirt from their store on the same day so you know good karma came around and i ended up winning the one wheel which is also how i fractured my arm in case you didn't know my arm's currently not broken but it's fractured and messed up and it's on my tick tock so if you want to see what happened head over to my tick tock but i love that thing and i'm super super happy with it i would highly recommend a onewheel to anyone who's thinking about it honorable mention number two is my rtx 3090. the reason that didn't make it into top five is because again nvidia sent that to me to make the review video and i'm actually gonna be making a few more videos about it coming soon so if you're curious about the new graphics cards and whether it's worth upgrading in your computer that's coming in the next couple of weeks two more quick ones one are actually these blue light glasses they look kind of funny would recommend don't get like the five dollar ones in amazon i tried them they don't work it should actually make things like you should see it cancel the blues we should have like yellow look see see that you should see a difference if you get headaches this should hopefully help final positive thing i bought was the 360 camera i just picked up a couple like a week or two ago you take photos or videos 360 degrees and the reason i bought this was because i used to do a lot of this kind of live action integration with animation and i really really enjoy that i've been wanting to get back to it and if you are interested in seeing those types of videos those are coming soon in a big way because that's kind of what i got this for i got this so i could grab hdr images wherever i am that's all coming soon i haven't had it long enough to know if it was like a great purchase but i'm very very excited about it i've been thinking about buying it for like two years now the part you're probably here to see the worst purchases of 2020. some of them they aren't bad they just weren't right for me and others were just bad so jumping in the first thing is actually an eye tracker the way this works is you stick it to your monitor and then it tracks where you're looking on the screen and shows say your viewers on twitch for example what it is you're looking at but i thought if i was reviewing animation you'd be able to see what is it catching my attention if you're showing me your shot and i'm supposed to be looking at the left but i'm looking over here for some reason well clearly there's too much motion here or whatever so i thought it'd be really cool to analyze animation and things like that anyways i really liked it but the problem is because i use a cintiq and an ultrawide monitor it doesn't have anywhere to go like i can't stick it to a cintiq because i'm gonna bump it as i use my arm to draw and on the other monitors the the curved ultra wide it that's a it's a straight thing it doesn't have any work to like it needs to adhere but there's a distance like it can't actually it doesn't work because i don't have any normal monitors i don't have anywhere to put it so i think i spent like 150 bucks on this thing and i can't it just sits in the closet because i can't do anything with it so that was kind of a stupid purchase for me even though i really liked the idea of it i just did worse purchase number two this one sucked this was literally like the most money that got sucked out of our accounts that was just so stupid this entire year and i'm just i'm still mad about it our lease the last apartment in la was up i think february or march i think it ended in march we were actually thinking of moving somewhere else we wanted to go look at another we we didn't know we'd moved to austin that wasn't the plan we were going to move somewhere else in la right when we were getting ready to go start looking everything shut down no way to go view other apartments they hadn't even figured out the virtual stuff yet like we didn't have any options so we had to renew our lease and then shortly after like a month or two later we decided to move across the country so not only did we renew our lease and get into a new contract and then pay a couple more months in very expensive rent we then had to pay a lease breaking fee god it was so expensive like literally we paid like oh how much did we pay i think we had to pay like eight or nine thousand dollars for the lease break fee and that was like everything i had in savings at the time like that was all the money that i'd been like saving up so that sucks next is actually related to my cintiq now the cintiq itself the the drawing monitor right here you can kind of see it the drawing monitor that i use every day i love it i actually really like it and it was expensive as heck for sure it worked it works great i don't have any issues with it except when i did i did have one issue when i was streaming at one point this little remote uh express key remote thing the little hotkeys this just magnetizes to the left and the right side when i was streaming for some reason i like bumped it and not even hard i just kind of bumped this and it fell off and it wouldn't stick back on the magnet inside the screen that faces and like sticks to this had fallen and flipped or something like that because it wouldn't stick to the left it'd stick to the right so it wasn't this was the screen i had to send it in for repairs wacom is a huge company i spent two maybe three thousand dollars on this device and like four or five hundred dollars on the arm because i have the flex arm behind it holding it up they don't offer free shipping for the return which i think is just nuts they will ship it back to you at no cost but to send it to them in the first place like you you spend all this money and you buy the thing and then you use it for work and then something happens to it that's like not really your fault and they have to fix it and that's like part of the promise of their warranties like they will fix it for you you have to then pay i think i paid like 260 dollars to send this device to them i didn't have it for like two and a half weeks i actually had to turn down a few opportunities because i couldn't it doesn't matter and then they sent it back and actually sent it back without the power cable they sent the power cable a few days later when i asked them for it for a giant company like that to not just offer free shipping that was in my opinion i'm also i'm salty about it i think it's crazy because they can they absolutely can there are many smaller companies i've dealt with that do offer free returns on much less expensive stuff so welcome love your products but your return shipping policy needs some work speaking of returns i actually bought something from amazon and then i sent it back because it bad the startech 4k kvm switch a kvm switch if you've never heard of one is a little device that allows you to plug two different computers into this device and plug it into one monitor or one set of monitors keyboard mouse all that stuff you just kind of consolidate with like one user experience that can tap into both computers right i got used to having a kvm when i was at dreamworks i used to have a windows and a linux machine because at dreamworks most the production software works on linux and things like photoshop and substance and stuff that doesn't have a linux version i had windows so i needed to have two different computers for software compatibility at dreamworks and i had a cintiq and all that stuff so i had a kvm at work that i could very quickly just go back and forth it was it was seamless that's my point but when i got the star tech one and i would switch between my two computers at home i would hit the button and all of the monitor all of the monitors and all the peripherals everything like everything would like disconnect and then like recalibrate and then all my windows were like reset and then i was on the other computer and i was like oh geez do my work go back does it all over again it actually would drop the signal all the time my colors would invert and get all kinds of weird like it was just a really buggy little box so i ended up switching to an a10 kvm way way better and finally the last bad purchase is actually something that in theory i like but it's just kind of one of the worst purchases i made this year it's actually these these like these lifx beam not these things on top they're cool these beams which i think yeah right here these are lifx beams it's like one two three blocks um i'll show you so it's these they're just individual little light sticks and they connect your wi-fi and you can change the colors they're actually very cool and they're not as expensive as some of the competiting competiting some of the competing brands the problem is they are such a pain to connect to the internet so i usually just leave these as white and i don't touch them because to get them to connect to the app and then adjust them such a pain in the butt so kind of one of the worst purchases because half the ones i have are just sitting in a box still but similar to those actually are my rgb lights my the colored blue and yellow lights that you see here they have this little remote and i mean to be honest they're cheap they were like a 20 or 30 lights they're great functionally but they're also some of the worst lights i have because if i change my camera settings they strobe terribly see this here see these color stripes behind me these lights aren't actually putting out a blue light and an orange light they are flickering between like red and green to make orange they work great if you're on a budget but they're also some of the worst lighting equipment i have and they get hot they make my room very very warm so i need to figure out a better rgb lighting situation that hopefully doesn't cost a fortune because those things are expensive i actually do have a lot of other things i bought that i do and don't like at various degrees my go xlr i love i have a microphone i use but the arm like sucks and i like it like broke and i had to diy like home depot fix it myself because this thing broke off my it actually broke my old desk anyways if you want to talk about any of the stuff or ask questions jump into my live streams twice a week links down below for that and if you want to check out any of the other stuff i use i'll put a link to my studio tour video down below and of course the link to everything in this video can be found in the description as well anyways i hope you enjoyed this video i hope it was fun got a little taste of what you know stuff i spent my money on this year that was good and some that just kind of wasn't but i'd love to know from you what were some of the best and worst things you bought this year i am super curious to find out what you guys are getting liking not liking so drop a comment down below or feel free to jump in the discord we've got over 7000 artists in the discord so get some feedback on your work and be part of the community and if you stuck around this long a fun little tidbit of information for you i'm going to be working on some animation classes and a dailies review program to get your work reviewed and stuff all of that's gonna be happening on my patreon so check out the link down below later this week or next week if you're watching this when it's uploaded there's gonna be some new stuff that i know you guys are gonna be really really excited about so keep an eye on the patreon for that or come hang out on twitch and ask me questions about it but anyways thank you for watching i hope you enjoyed this video subscribe if you haven't already and i will see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Sir Wade Neistadt

Views: 16,147

Keywords: best purchases, worst purchases, 2020, best tech 2020, worst tech 2020, best 2020, worst 2020, gaming, streaming, animation, vfx, wacom, drawing tablet, rtx 3090, elgato, creative, setup, camera, pc, rtx, gpu, holiday gifts, gift ideas, gifts, for artists, for animators, gift guide, cyber monday, sales, best tech sales, lg tv, animator, 3d, 3d animator, top gear, best gear, top picks, worst picks, top 10, top 5, amazon, shopping, holiday, animation ideas, blender animation, blender 2.91

Id: zU3K-7nMGlU

Length: 16min 46sec (1006 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 30 2020