[Music] Jake man good to see you back uh on the podcast man it's been a minute since we've done these things huh yeah I know we uh we we definitely gave this a go a couple times to see if we can get it going and you know hey maybe this is the the time that it works for sure um you know who knows but you know I think it's cool to have these kind of conversations uh you know kind of these little filmmaker conversations um because we're dealing with with different challenges on set and we do you know our focus is client work right I've done a lot of client work you've done a lot of client work we are doing a bunch of client work now and this is one of those things where you know probably what 90% of the time your client work is going to be very cutting you know simple standard you know it's going to be uh a camera B camera C camera you know C lens all your camera support your lights everything like that but we are in a unique situation and these things come up from time to time when you have a client um that you need to you know serve you know tell the story and serve them in a different way than your typical just a camera B camera C setup and we're in a unique spot right now because there's a client um that we're taking care of right now and it's a huge construction project right and and you came to me and and you remember the kind of what you said to me when it was when you were trying to figure out how to do this what what was your first reaction when when the client came to you with with this request and what were they using like like paint paint the picture and then we'll go into like what solution we're considering sure well I I think you and I both are always on the same page with it starts you know if it's commercial or if it's narrative it's telling a story right um most of the clients that you know we work with it's you know at the end of the day they want to tell a story and I think with this one it's just a big scope and and and scale but also they want to talk a little bit about you know who they are um what they offer and honestly at the end of the day it's just like they want to show the scope and scale of the project but also it's like we dive into how uh how it goes on the operational side as well but this this particular project I think um uh you know we'll probably do some updates with it as as we go uh along but uh we're in the pre-production phase and something I kind of wanted to talk to you about is is you know on every project right we storyboard ideas and Concepts and uh this one here is we want to uh I came to you when we were talking I said you know the client wants to do a big time lapse right over the whole facil facility it's a big facility but we also want to have good quality uh of a time lapse and then there's weather elements so I said Jacob how are we going to do this there's a construction type of uh time lapse but we wanted to have more of a cinematic look a cinematic fill and then you proposed the instant 360 so tell me in your opinion like you know I come I I've worked with the GoPros 360 like what's the difference why do you prefer the insta 360 what can that do to help us get what we want to do right so yeah so obviously a unique challenge right you have a a client that's putting together they're essentially erecting in a giant steel building and it's going to span over multiple acres and um you know this is a unique challenge for construction sites regardless of video production they're trying to get a record of of the construction process they use it for internal marketing and little external marketing on sales pitches when they're trying to bid work they could say hey look this is the you know we did this building you know from from leveling the ground all the way up to a finished product and so we're dealing with a massively commercial construction site right here and there are companies that offer solutions for time lapse for these for these you know projects um these are not Cinema focused companies these are not high-end production focused companies this is basically the equivalent for a trail camer for a hunter right you know who cares about the quality I want to see I want to see Bigfoot on this thing or a bunch of dud so this is just literally checking a box this is not for technically Savvy people they're using a camera and yeah I can't think of the manufacturer name but um we'll put it on the screen so you can just kind of see what they're currently using and it essentially it's an action cam so to speak it's really a time-lapse camera only um and it is inside of a housing and that housing um really it it it's just a weatherproof housing and it's got you know kind of a glass Dome on the front as a lens but it's not a lens it's just you know some acrylic and then the camera actually butts up against it and if you position it just right you can get you know we found out today when the client was showing us some footage it'll fishee if it's not set just right so I mean it really is so utilitarian um and and you know the challenge that we looked at when we saw these and the in the specs on these these cameras are not that there's zero production value in mind this is like I said strictly utilitarian and so while we can use that footage and it's an MP4 format I mean it's not a foreign format to to to work with um it's just it's not it doesn't have the com you know the right compression we way too much compression uh bit depth um bit rate um color color space all of these things I mean there's no log options and and obviously who wants log in 8 bit anyway I'd almost rather the camera process it because we're going to get so much banding and artifacting it's not even worth it so but what's good though is you know they are they are better than nothing and they started using these and when you came to me this project is already underway they kind of you know brought us in right after it just got started so we're kind of jumping in there you know when the Project's like what did they say 16 to 18% done so you know we still have a lot we can capture but my initial thought was like you were just mentioning earlier insta 3 60 as opposed to GoPro now right I've used GoPro in the past and it's been a reliable product in the past going forward I haven't had good luck with GoPros um not you know some people may use them and love them I found that the DJI brand and the insta 360 brand is just to me offering more features and more customization and just yeah more more latitude there's a bigger envelope of of of of of you know features that are better for filmmakers like us and and on our kind of mission so so the the 360 uh we're going to we're able to shoot 4k on it it actually shoot 6K 6K yes yeah yeah and then it's a 360 uh which is great I guess um I guess some pros and cons that I think you know we were talking about the 360 the instant 360 is you know weather right uh weather how we're going to house it how we're going to keep it away from the elements cuz it's going to be out overnight so and I'm sure a lot of filmmakers understand that as well so how how do you how do you think we could solve that problem yeah so that was one of yeah obviously weatherproofing this camera so the camera inherently is is waterproof it's um I think up to 35 ft so you know it it's designed self-contained to be used in a variety of conditions the problem we're facing is is we're doing a time lapse over such a long period of time um we need to be on Shore power we need to have this thing externally powered and so we have to figure out we have so many challenges right we initially thought that we could place these cameras and have access to an AC um power source like a wall outlet right well this facility is so big they have their own substation so they they're getting transmitted power in there and they there's they're have a substation conver it uh down to you know another high voltage and so there's there's there's nothing there's things are still being worked on I mean this it's literally like a little city but it has no infrastructure everything's gas powerered right now they're using cranes and stuff so we have no short power long story short we have no AC power available to us not really you know so we need an external battery solution and the internal battery is just not good enough the construction cameras they're using right now these utilitarian cameras are like running on doublea's and they last a year and that's great but these these cameras that we want to use and like the 360 you know there's a trade-off right so if we use these it's going to require a lot more uh we're going to have to tend to them a lot more we're going to have to check on them check you know check the uh file size check battery life um because you know we're trying to go for a desired result we the end product deserves a better result than it is required of us to work during production if that makes sense right so like the outcome is going to far um exceed the the work requirement the production requirement so it's it's worth it to do this and so we're my initial thought was okay how do we keep this camera the Integrity of the waterproofing of this camera as as intact as possible knowing that we're going to have to expose a port USBC port to keep it powered and so um I my mind immediately went to like how would I do this a pinch and then work up from there so the first thing I thought was okay we got to make this work in a day or in half a day and it has to start today how do we make that work and I I go to the most bare Bon simple way of doing it and it's just like you know plug in a USBC cable uh oh you know open the port plug in the USBC cable just smash a bunch of hot glue in there you know make a make a temporary but you know durable seal it won't be perfect but it'll stop the weather and we can get rolling right away and then it's it's like okay where does this plug into well it'll be a USB type A probably it needs to plug into a block and that would go into AC that was my initial thought and then we found out there was no AC power but you know I was going to weatherproof these links in the chain along the way just to get us up and running and then I thought well maybe we need a housing so you know I was starting to think how can we make a a somewhat of a housing on top to keep direct sunlight off the camera to prevent overheating or just overall UV exposure and you know it might degradate um and then maybe you know something to block um direct rain right cuz um we can kind of compromise the camera's waterproofing spec as long as it's not submerged or in direct rain you know I think we can do a a lot of moisture blocking with something like hot glue which you know it sounds so bad to say you love your hot glue I'm telling you I use it all the time you know I do a lot of 3D printing and it's great but but no the hot you know I say that as like I'm telling you that's a Quick Fix right it heats up fast it dries fast but really what you'd want to do is get some type of Aqua seal some type of you know um moisture rated type of medium but something that also won't leave permanent residue and damage the camera so um you think about housing and things like that well we find out on a on a on a technical Scout that you know we don't have access to power and then um our mounting options are somewhat limited and they're in high traffic High activity um just busy construction areas uh there's like a power pole that we can you know attach to and I looked at on site today where their you know their other time-lapse camera is and this Pole's 60 foot you know it's a 60ft pole and it's probably buried you know it was a good vantage point it it it would showcase all all the whole facility I do have a question too we were talking about um you know uh time like it I guess um we would have uh one what was it one SD terabyte card would shoot you know would take a time lapse about every what five minutes how long would that last in your opinion that's a good question so like obviously file size um you have a terabyte to work with um a frame every 5 Seconds which means you know if you're looking at a 2398 timeline which is what we're going to use so 24 frames a second um every 5 Seconds you get one frame so how many seconds to get you know one second of footage you know you need 24 frames to make one second and so um you know you you run the numbers on that and I believe it's something like um I guess it would be 5 * 24 and that would give you that one second right so we're looking at you know um we get one second of footage every 125 minutes I think it works out something like that or whatever or or yeah something like that um when it comes to doing math I almost want to use like a a calculator online or something because the more you do math and you and you you stack up all the numbers and you divide and you add and you divide you you know every now and then I'll do the math the same exact way and get two different numbers so um but just off the top of my head right you kind of get a feel for the ratio but really I feel like breaking it down to the most basic unit which would be a 360 file right so we know how much the average DSLR a mirrorless camera taking a high quality steel image you know you're thinking about between you know at the lowend 12 megabytes all the way up to like 50 60 megabytes per picture maybe more you know depending on your settings but you can average but what is this insta 360 file giving us um there's going to be a lot of metadata probably because um you know you're going to we're going to be able to open this up in the editor and then reframe and adjust since it's 360 so there's probably some metadata there's probably some propri um data that comes with that file each file so you know what we need to do is really test it out you know I haven't used it insta 360 in a time-lapse mode over a long period of time so um we would need to test it out and what we would basically do is we wouldn't aim to shoot to fill up a one tbyte card we would aim to shoot for a day or a quarter of a day or a half a day but but but a a a userfriendly divisible amount of time and let's say we did from like like 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. you know you know so this would give us a 3-hour window of time lapse in our desired setting and then we can take that and say okay for a quarter of a workday the card fills up three gigs okay so that's so for a full day that's 12 you know that's that's 12 gigs well we know that let's say 12 gigs you know that's not very much um we could do 10 days and that's 120 gigs well that's a little more than the tenth of the card that's 12% of the card yeah so then we know that that card is good for you know however many days and that way you know we have a a good Baseline of what our data rate usage is going to be because we want these cameras to operate without you know with minimal um intrusion uh the more you access the camera you move it you open PCH you you're taking a card out you know the these things um they make move the camera you know and for a camera that's mounted like on a on a tripod or mount it to a pole or something that's not 360 it's a bigger deal you don't want there to be a jolt in your in your composition 360 is going to be a little more forgiving but we still don't want to do that so we want to we want to go as long as we can um with we'll be we'll be able to test it out and have you know we'll be able to see some some of the footage um you know now sorry go ahead no I was just saying we'll be able to test it out and we'll be able to Showcase you know kind of you know we'll go back to this video about what we're talking about and we'll be able to say hey well does this good this good yeah yeah and so right now the big to me the biggest hurdle is going to be how are we going to power this thing and so right now we're you know we're we're we're looking at we need a Battery Solution now um I even thought and like I said I immediately think of the most simple get it done now solution that we can do and I can take you know a 12vt car battery you know and and and and literally connect it to a USB port and plug it in and is that ideal no it's not but a car batter how about a vmount what I mean we could do a vmount so a vmount is great so that the problem with the vmount though what you need to look at is is your your your your milliamp hours right your your yeah how much stored power is this thing going to have and how is that power discharged and what is what's being used so if we can keep these cameras in a low power State you know this is another thing we need to determine this is where you know it might take problem solve this is how you have to problem solve all these scenarios we could figure out how much data we're going to use in three hours but how much power are we going to use we need to run this thing for a day and and then check our levels on our vmount you know we need to run it for a day and then and then put some you know multimeter on a car battery you know whatever but we got to have a portable Solution that's very energy dense that can go a long period of time without needing recharge or anything like that here's another thing to consider let's say my immediate cuz cuz what if we're out there and we don't have access to a vmount I can find access to a car battery I could probably get that it'll be hard but I can do it you I can pull it I don't know if three would allow the battery that just that makes me a bit nervous but I'm I'm really saying this to kind of to kind of make a like set set like a case like make a make a make like an example so like you know what's the hot swapability of a car battery well if you drain a car battery all the way a lead acid battery you have to you know recharge that thing with a trickle charger it's going to take you know a lot of time and you can damage the battery you know and there's all these components but a lithium vmount battery is designed for many many cycles of of full charge to no charge so that's where a vmount actually makes a lot of sense right here's another option a battery power bank you know like one of these anchor power Banks or something that could be a good option and you got to think too most most battery most consumer batteries on the market even prosumer batteries you know like I'm going to show you an example oh this right here this is just a Craftsman drill battery right you know it's not it's not anything special you would think that the battery is you know shaped like this but really it's most likely filled with 18650 batteries which is readily available you can import them from China or wherever um and they're Vape batteries like if you ever had a vape or a rechargeable flashlight um and it's just multiple cylindrical battery cells in here you know not you know bigger than a able a smaller than a c battery but they're just the the standard of you know your lithium battery and then you just you know put them in you know you connect them all in series parallel whatever and then you put them in a housing and you sell the housing for a lot of money that's what Vmail batteries are that's what these batteries are that's what probably is in those anchor power Banks but it's so many of them or maybe they're using like a different form factor than that battery but that's usually what you find in these so you know the more of those so maybe we can we can test out a few different options and then uh kind of come back and do a followup about what we're talking about now and that's kind of what we're what we're going going over with some of these um you know some of these podcast videos is like onset situations problems we're trying to solve right maybe you can help out a few people they can list a few ideas in the comment section but we're just trying to talk talk and brand out to the community right yeah exactly I mean and that's really what film making is about right you're you there's a lot of problem solving and so many times we'll be on autopilot because after you do so many Productions you you learn to anticipate you know everything your client's going to say or want you you you work them away from their radical uh edge of the cliff ideas and you bring them home and you deliver a great prodct you do that so much you know it I guess it's sometimes you can get comp you know not complacent but you get comfortable with your typical production and we're in an atypical production right now a lot of you know the the um prog you know the the production of this is going to be you know um this very custom approach and so you know for people in those situations this is a good muscle to to to to work out because right if you could solve these kind of problems and you could start thinking you know and break break these problem Downs problems down into components you know data power accessibility mounting you know manufacturer all these different little things all come together to form a solution and so you know um sometimes you just need a custom approach and this is kind of our thought process and how we got to this point and you know I could sit and talk about it for a long time but really the gist of it is you break these problems down and you just work through different you know multiple scenarios per category you know for example power car battery it's it'll work but it's not it's not smart vmount it's cool but to put a v-mount battery up there those are expensive and then if we have a production where we need them on a c camera well now V mount's tied up but what we don't use on our cameras is a power bank you know so maybe we get a power bank you know and but there's so many things to consider and really what it comes down to is is budget your time frame and and and how you know how many resources can you have and how much time do you have to experiment you know right um and that's you know those are the things that we we have to consider and every every job I'm sure you can identify and a lot of the other um uh filmmaker people out folks out there can say is like you learn something new on every job there's always it's not if there's something you got to solve it's always what you have to solve on every project y yes and a lot of times you don't have a lot of time you got to improvise on set and uh fast as you can and solve these but it always helps like when you know if we're doing we're anticipating these scenarios and we try to problem solve before we get on set so to make it but but I think it's cool man uh I'm I'm excited to get this uh get this project going I guess we'll just upd this uh this content as we go and and we get and I'm curious to know what everybody else uh likes to use if it's insta 360 GoPro the new GoPros and uh any other manufacturer out there we'd love to like I said it's just a we want to build a community and we we want to share our our documentation on our projects uh films commercials uh documentaries um whatever it may be yeah yeah and that's a great thing about about the filmmaking Community you know you ideas everybody else's experience you know you could tap into that you know and get some great ideas that's what really I feel like helps us grow as a film making you know uh group is is you know um everybody's experience comes together and you you know in a lot of ways that's what influences us artistically so you know it's it's cool but I hope that this brainstorming session uh shed some light on your next project you know for you watching and and maybe you know you look at your next typical production in an atypical way and even if you don't have to uh solve any types of problems like we're facing right now think of potential problems you might have to solve even if you don't have to and start Theory crafting your Solutions start theorizing how you would do it and really it's like going to the gym you work that muscle you know and and absolutely you know if you've ever played with Legos as a kid it's a great time to grab your equipment and piece things trial and error at when there's pressure the you per Under Pressure right absolutely well said and uh I'm excited to uh keep keep this uh keep the podcast going of just updating uh our uh projects and our our ups and downs and our wins and sometimes our fails and you know yeah and it's just it's just what what comes with the nature of the Beast man that is just an insight into a current problem we're trying to solve you know we're we're we're working through it and uh we want to show you guys our thought process right so if you have any comments if you have any ideas let us know cuz we would love to have some more input um it's a long project so you know sooner the better but you know we can Implement things as we go if you are interested in this kind of content if you want to see our behind the-scenes process our thought process in pre-production everything that we can possibly show you you know within reason within our NDA constraints like subscribe follow us whatever we'd love to have your support and uh we appreciate you big time thanks [Music]
2025-01-12 05:16