Unpopular Gear Opinions

I hope you don't hate me after this one. From drones and gimbals to wireless systems and computers, it's time to get geared up for some unpopular gear opinions!

🎙This week's  mic:
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•The ETHOS was running through the Rodecaster Pro II with  my custom SM7B preset.

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S11E8 | Series Episode 162

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Podcast Artwork by Kevin Ramirez
Original theme music written by Patrick Boberg and performed by Mike Alvarez

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:32

Hello and welcome. My name is Tom. This is the Enthusiasm Project season eleven, episode eight. Ain't it great? And today we're going to be talking about some of my unpopular gear opinions. So get geared up to talk about gear. And what I mean when I say unpopular gear opinions is I'm not trying to this is all in good fun. Okay. This is not an old man yells at cloud episode. This is not me trying to make you feel bad about any gear that you may or may not have. So if I say something critical about a piece of gear that you love, we can still be friends. But I just was sort of thinking about some opinions I have about audio video equipment that might be semi-unpopular. And I kind of wanted to share those. But before we dive into that, as is tradition, I'm going to talk about the gear that I am using right now, which is the same as last week, actually. I'm still on the Earthworks Ethos, which I just really love the way this microphone sounded last week. And I'm running that into the RodeCaster Pro 2 on my SM7B custom preset that I put together. It's the generic condenser setting with the SM7B preset. I actually don't know which one of those takes precedent over that. And I'm also recording this for a video that I'm putting together about my podcast workflow from start to finish. So obviously, this whole episode is not going to be in that YouTube video because it would be very, very long. But um if you want to know how I make all my episodes, including this specific one, that video should be out uh this week, I think. And uh yeah, that's what we're gonna be talking about today is not that, we're gonna be talking about unpopular gear opinions. And again, this is just these are all just my own opinions. So I don't want to be too offensive or critical. And I've tried to put a relatively positive spin on each thing as well. So it's not just me like this sucks, that sucks, everything sucks, uh, which is a great real big fish album from the late 90s, by the way. So uh my first maybe unpopular opinion, which is sort of maybe not what you would expect, is has to do with drones and gimbals. I'm kind of lumping those two bits of technology together. Uh drones and gimbals are not trendy anymore. That is, I don't think that's my opinion. I think that's a popular I don't wait. Did I just oh my gosh. I just I was recording the intro to the YouTube video about this episode, and I just stumbled in my brain and paused to restart the way that I would when recording a YouTube video. But the whole video is about how I am able to record the podcast without editing, so I'm not going to edit that out. What I was trying to say, I need to get out of my like YouTube video brain and into my podcast brain. What I was trying to say is that drones and gimbals were incredibly trendy for a long time when they, you know, when they first kind of hit the scene. And I have seen a lot of dialogue in the audio video community about drones are dead, gimbals are dead, it's not worth it anymore. And I do agree that they are not nearly as trendy as they used to be, especially maybe five years ago, four to six years ago, something like that. But my unpopular opinion is that drones and gimbals are definitely not dead and they're not going anywhere. I know it's so controversial. What is interesting though to me is how drones and gimbals have matured to become genuinely useful tools. But the same way, like I have, you know, I have tools in the garage of our house. And while I don't always need my hacksaw or a rubber mallet, there are times when that's exactly what I need, and that's specifically what I need. So just because I'm not using those things every single day doesn't mean they're completely useless or anything like that. And I think with new technology, drones and gimbals were both cases where the technology was so elevating and so different. I don't know if you remember if you watched, you know, early drone footage from the early 2010s, where it's like, you know, the camera quality was really bad, or it was old, old, early generation GoPros attached to a drone and it's it's shaky and it's muddy, and you can see the propellers in the top of the frame. It's not like beautiful, sweeping, cinematic 4K footage, it's very rough. But just the fact that you could see stuff from the sky was amazing. Like just someone flying over their neighborhood or just in a weird landscape or whatever was so interesting and so fun to watch because the only way that you could ever get those perspectives before was to, you know, book a helicopter trip or something. And that is very expensive and out of the reach of most people. And suddenly drones were putting these types of perspectives and these types of shots into the reach of many more people. It really democratized that type of thing. And you can go back, you know, in time to those to that era of YouTube. I'm not even talking about like the 2018 sort of cinematic B-roll era where everything had drone shots in it. I mean, even before that, where it's like someone could put up a clip that's three minutes of a drone flying through any any random landscape, and that video is gonna have like a million views on it because people are just so fascinated by it and can't even believe it, even though there's there's really no story, there's no context, the image quality is not great, the drone flying sometimes isn't that great, and it still blew people's mind. And then drones got better and better, right? Like they they became easier to use, they became more affordable, they became higher quality, the cameras got really, really good very, very quickly, and suddenly it was like everybody could get this amazing aerial footage that was incredibly high quality and smooth and could be mixed in with footage from other cameras, and then it got kind of overdone, right? Like there was a drone shot and everything, it's to the point where it's kind of distracting, and I think people got tired of that. Same thing with you know the 2018-2019 cinematic montages that used to be in everything, the b-roll montages, where there was a point that it was like that was so much fun, at least on the world of YouTube. And then there's a point where you find yourself just double tapping to skip through it as quickly as possible because there's only so much footage of pouring coffee that one person can consume in a lifetime. And I think there's been there was then some pushback where people were like, okay, I'm sick of drones. Uh gimbals were kind of the same thing. Where if you remember before cameras and phones and all this stuff had amazing stabilization built in. Like, do you remember GoPro had a gimbal at one point and it worked great, but then eventually GoPros just started having amazing stabilization built into them. And so, why would you need this other piece of gear which is bigger? It's another thing you have to charge, it's another thing you have to calibrate. You can just get that same quality built right into the camera. Remember, like the the phone gimbals were really handy, and I know those are still around, but most newer phones have amazing built-in stabilization. Same thing with mirrorless cameras. A lot of them have great built-in stabilization, great IBIS now. Not all of them, but that wasn't always the case. And so what a gimbal did was it allowed for this smooth footage, whether it's a you know a DSLR or a mirrorless camera or a phone or an action camera, you could get this incredibly stable, incredibly smooth footage that that you'd never really seen that quality of before. And not only did it look so much better than handheld stuff, but it opened up a lot more creative possibilities because now you could have cameras in places that they couldn't fit before. You could bring them on locations where you know a big tripod or a slider or something wouldn't have been practical. Now the gimbal made that practical. So there was the practical side of things, and then as gimbal technology developed, there was almost the gimmicky, the gimbal gimmicks, which are really fun, but that's stuff where now it's like you know, you can do 360-degree barrel rolls and stuff, which are some of my favorite things to do. Uh oh, my GoPro beeped. I was doing a time lapse and it stopped. Um, speaking of GoPros, but uh that that kind of stuff I think is what it was very similar. Like someone would cut from their drone shot to a 360-degree barrel roll gimbal shot. It's it's a lot of like, what are we doing? Why are we doing this? Do we really need to do this? And the answer most of the time is is probably no, and it's pretty superfluous, as the kids say. And the other commonality that I found between drones and gimbals is that they are very common pieces of equipment that people say they buy and never use, especially gimbals, I think even more than drones, but you know, people have all these big ideas when they buy their drone or they buy their gimbal, and then it just kind of ends up sitting in its case, you know, in a closet or under a desk somewhere most of the time. And I just feel like whenever I hear conversations or I see videos about, you know, gear regrets or most least least used pieces of gear, it's usually a drone or a gimbal is kind of at the top of the list. And they're definitely not something for everybody, and they're definitely not something you need all the time. But this is where the unpopular opinion comes into play. Drones and gimbals, I think, have just matured to the point where they are just that genuine tool. And I think that an independent creator like myself, or maybe even someone who works on a small video production team, has a different relationship with gear than maybe like a filmmaker does, whether that's narrative filmmaker or corporate filmmaking. I just feel like there's slightly different relationships with gear, where if a production company is making a film, a narrative film, I feel like within budget constraints, they sort of look at everything as just a buffet. Every tool, everything that's available, you know, a movie will not hesitate to get something very specific and time consuming and impractical to get one specific shot or film one specific scene. Whereas an independent creator like myself, we're we tend to focus a lot more on when will this thing make its money back? You know, if I get this gimbal and it lets me book this many more jobs, and that means it'll pay for itself in three months or whatever math you might do to justify a new piece of gear. It's a lot of it is will I use this all the time? And if the answer is no, then we sometimes feel like it was a bad purchase. Whereas I I can tell you I do not use my drone very often. But when I need a drone, there's nothing else that's going to get the job done, right? Like I don't need to get a new drone every year. Uh, I don't need to have the highest, you know, the highest end best drone that's available. But having a good solid drone available whenever I do need it is really invaluable to me. I don't currently have a gimbal because I did the thing. I bought a gimbal and I didn't use it that much. And then especially when camera stabilization improved, and now that I have cameras with you know 4K120, it's like I can just do so much stuff handheld, slow it down a little bit, and it looks just like a gimbal, but it's so much easier because I don't have to deal with a gimbal or set one up. But if I were doing more client work or more commercial type projects, one of the first things I would get is a gimbal because I just feel like that's a time where you almost would find yourself using it basically every single day. And so it depends on the workflow, it depends on the purpose, and it's it's one of those things too where I think sometimes people, especially I I know I'm giving my own opinion as I'm about to say this, but especially on something like YouTube or the internet, where everybody can share their opinion, it's sort of easy for you know smaller groups or smaller opinions to sound louder than they really are, or maybe get more attention than they really necessarily accurately deserve. I'm even thinking of things like I always see a lot of criticism about the iPad mini. And why would anyone need the iPad mini? The iPad mini is dumb, it's not powerful. I see all the YouTube videos that compare an iPad mini, like it's it's you know, it's nice, but it could be more powerful than this. Why is it forgetting a lot of these people forgetting specific, you know, community, same thing with the iPad Air or like the cheaper iPads? Why do people need need these specific things? Forgetting there's education, there's medicine, there's aviation, those are just three industries off the top of my head where those either smaller or less powerful iPads are really in high demand. When a school needs to buy 17,000 iPads, they're not gonna buy the top, the top model. They're gonna want the cheaper education edition. When a pilot or a doctor needs to carry a tablet with them as they're, you know, either in a super small cock cockpit or making rounds around a hospital and they just have like their coat pocket to keep things in. An iPad mini makes sense. But if you're just a tech YouTuber, I don't mean just a tech youtuber, if you're a tech youtuber who just compares specs all the time, you're gonna look at this and just go, why this is this seems useless. Who would want it? I would just want the other thing. Because in your use case, that's what would make the most sense. I don't know if that makes sense. That might have been a terrible example, but that that's just kind of how I feel about drones and gimbals is they've gone from this groundbreaking technology to something that people got tired of, and now they've just sort of settled into being usable tools that may or may not be right for everybody, but they definitely serve a purpose. And I think a lot of times the best use of a drone, the best use of a gimbal is when you don't notice them at all. When a camera move isn't necessarily, you know, highlighting the 360-degree barrel roll, but someone's using a gimbal to get a really steady camera shot where then the camera disappears and you don't think about it because it's not shaking and it's not looking weird, and and it just is able to communicate whatever it needs to communicate very clearly. Same with a drone shot. I don't need you know 15 cinematic drone shots in every YouTube video. But hey, if we're talking about getting an establishing shot somewhere in a video or a TV show, if we're talking about looking at a real estate listing and just wanting to see the whole property and the context of the property within a bigger neighborhood, a drone shot is absolutely essential and something that you wouldn't be able to do the thing without. And the funny, the funny thing, the last point I'll I'll put on this, which is just sort of funny, is the reason I thought of this was I saw this discussion online the other day that was, you know, our drones dead. And it was a bunch of people saying, like, yeah, I'm selling my drone, I don't need my drone, um, it's useless. You know, people don't want to maintain Part 107 certifications if they're not going to use their drones that often, which is very true. But a big part of the conversation then shifted to people going, like, yeah, I don't need my drone. I just buy drone shots, I just buy stock footage whenever I need drone footage and I just use that instead, which is practical. Like, I'm I don't have any critique with that. It's like, yeah, okay, instead of buying a drone and maintaining a Part 107 certification, yeah, just go buy some stock footage if you need a drone shot. But the part that I was laughing at was like, where do you think the stock footage is coming from? When you're like, drones are useless. I don't need a drone, I just buy my drone footage whenever I need it. Well, somebody has to film the drone footage that you're buying. So it was just I I don't know, my head just exploded a little bit when I when I when I read that. Okay, probably enough about my unpopular opinion number one. Uh, unpopular opinion number two. I feel like this one might might rile up some some feathers, ruffle some feathers a little bit more. And this is all of the 2.4 gigahertz wireless audio systems, like the Rode Wireless Go, the DJI mic, the Holly Land stuff, all of those things, they are great, but they are also incredibly limited and they are very much consumer level gear. I will hide under my desk now after saying that. Um, so I wanted I really have been wanting to make a video about this specifically. Um, because I I'm honestly, you want to talk about gear, I'm tired of. I am so tired of these things, which is so strange because for so many years, like I wished for something that would make wireless audio simple. And then Rode came out with the wireless Go, well, like five years ago at this point, and it was amazing because it was so simple and it was so affordable, and then every other company saw this and did their own version of it, and in some cases, like you know, improved on it. Like HollyLand was, I think, the first one that had two transmitters and a charging case, and then DJI took that design and approved upon it. I think the DJI one has built-in recording and better audio quality, and then Rode kind of came out with their two-transmitter version, and you know, they've gotten better and better, but when I say that they're consumer gear, they are so they're not something I would rely on very much because they're just I they're so unreliable, whether it's whatever brand it is Rode, DJI, Deity, Holly Land, there's only so much they can do because they're based around the 2.4 gigahertz stand transmission standard. And that is a very crowded space in terms of frequencies. This is not my area of expertise, but it's one of those things where you're trying to rely on your audio. And if you don't have a very clear line of sight with the receiver, if somebody turns away from the camera too much, as soon as you get slightly far away, or maybe go around a corner or something, then you have audio dropouts, you have interference. If other people are using not just other audio gear, but anything else that that's on that 2.4 gigahertz thing, sometimes a cordless phone, like whatever, you get all kinds of interference, but sometimes you don't. And you never know when you're going to. Like you could maybe go to, I don't know, something like NAB, a huge convention where there's a whole bunch of audio video nerds, thousands and thousands of people using all this equipment, and you could find that you have no problems at all, no interference whatsoever. But then you could be using it in, I don't know, a park or something, and someone walks by with a phone that just completely screws up your whole audio, and you never know when that is or is not going to happen. And it's the number of times I've recorded things where for some reason the audio decided to drop out, even though I was, I seemed like I was within range and clear line of sight, but maybe I'd put the thing in my back pocket instead of a front pocket or whatever. And then I just recorded a whole bunch of audio that was unusable, is very frustrating. Now, a lot of companies have gotten around that by adding in built-in recording to their systems, which is brilliant. And at first it was really clunky, and now, like with the Rode Wireless Pro, that is a sort of pared everything down. That is my one 2.4 gigahertz system, is the Rode Wireless Pro because I think it's the best one, not just in terms of quality, but also with everything you get with it. It comes with two lavalier, it comes with every accessory, every cable, two microphones, not just two transmitters, but two lavalier microphones to connect to the transmitters. It's like everything you need and it works pretty well. And it has built-in 32-bit recording to each or 32-bit float recording into each transmitter. So it is a great peace of mind because each one is then basically its own little audio recorder. If your audio drops out, you you have a good backup. Or if you just mess up the audio and things are too loud and crazy, you have a 32-bit float version, so you can fix it, either boost it, or lower it if necessary. That does not help, though, if you're doing something live. That's very helpful if you're editing. So any project that's editing, if you're using these on something where you're going to throw your footage into a video editor, then that built-in recording is a lifesaver. If you're using these for something that is done live where there's no chance to edit, then those built-in recording options don't matter. And all of the frustration of interference and signal dropouts can really cause problems. And that's what I mean when I say they're consumer gear. It's not that you couldn't use them on pro projects. I see these things on TV all the time. Like, and you know, they are used in pro professional level projects, but they really don't have the reliability and the flexibility to be what I would call truly professional, even if it's called the wireless pro or whatever it might be. It's not reliable enough. It's not flexible enough. I mean, you can't even change the batteries, and I don't know if. If any of them have changeable batteries, they'll have built-in rechargeable batteries, which means that after a couple years and a and a few hundred charge cycles, the battery's just not going to last anymore, and the whole thing's kind of useless. Even if it's still working just fine, the battery's dead. So the alternative there, so the unpopular opinion is that they're limited consumer gear. They're very handy. And I think it's worth, if you're someone who's an audio video person, having one system, whether it's the Rode one or a DJI one or whatever, having one system in your setup is a very good, helpful thing to have. And they do distill wireless audio, which is very confusing, into a much simpler system that pretty much anyone can use. You can even use it with a phone, you know. So people who are just recording terrible phone audio can now relatively easily get better sounding wireless audio. And that is super cool. But that that's that's consumer, that's a consumer market, right? Like that's not a professional market, that's a consumer level market that has those needs and doesn't want to either doesn't understand or doesn't want to spend the time to understand higher-end wireless audio. And the reason that that I feel like this goes into unpopular opinion territory is like now I'm bored with these. They're all the same, they're all fine, they all pretty much have the same limitations. The same, like I'm just tired of new ones coming out constantly as if it's a groundbreaking breakthrough. Like, we got it, they're good, they're great options, the useful thing to have. Let's move on to something else. And let's not try to pretend that these consumer-level things are professional because that is it's just setting up unrealistic expectations. And I think it's very important to have a realistic understanding and realistic expectations for any gear that you might purchase. So, what is the alternative then? The alternative is a more traditional UHF-based wireless system. Um, you know, companies, tons of companies make these. Sony and Sennheiser are the ones that come to mind. I've used the Sennheiser systems for years. When I was teaching, we used the G2, G3, G4, and then currently, uh earlier this year, I bought the Sennheiser EWDP, which is like their new uh UHF wireless system. And though they are so much better for so many reasons, for the most part. Um, the reason that they're better is because you're on a UHF instead of 2.4 gigahertz, you not only have more reliable transmission, it's you can turn away from the camera, you can get better distance, you can go on the other side of a wall more easily without having signal dropouts or interference. You can choose your frequency. So, in the case of the EWDP, it will it will choose the best frequency, but you can then manually mess with that. So if I were to go to something like NAB and a whole bunch of people were on a frequency and I was getting interference, I can just move to a different frequency and not have any interference. So that is that kind of thing right there. The fact that I can be in virtually any environment and have crystal clear audio with a super strong signal, that's what makes it professional. You can also change the batteries. You can change the batteries in the receiver, in the transmitter, you can use alkaline batteries, rechargeable batteries, like you have a lot of flexibility, which means that if you're in the middle of a situation and you find that your batteries are dead, you have options for how to continually power the device. You don't just have to worry about the built-in battery that may or may not degrade over time. The area where these don't offer the same flexibility as a lot of the consumer versions is I don't know if any of these types of systems do. There must be one that does, but mine doesn't, and none of the ones I've used have had built-in recording. So there is not that backup. The systems themselves are much more reliable. So, you know, like a lot of the consumer systems, the reason they have built-in recording is because, like, yeah, our transmission reliability kind of sucks. So we're gonna just back up your recording right here, which again is totally fine if you're editing, but it's not great if you're gonna use them live. Whereas the more professional systems, it's a more professional system. A lot of times it is designed to be used in live situations when going back to you know broadcast news or any kind of thing like that, where you need something to work in crazy real-world environments without getting second takes, without having mistakes. That is when these UHF systems come into play. And the Sennheiser one is just it's it's the best one I've ever used by far. It's so good. Um, so I want to make a video that kind of there's I want to make a video about the Rode Wireless Pro because I do think that it's great and I think it's kind of the maxed out, like, that's the one to get if you're looking for a 2.4 gigahertz super simple wireless system. And then I also want to make another video either about the Sennheiser or about uh 2.4 gigahertz versus UHF. And the other downside to these more professional units is they are way more expensive, they are not in the same price category at all as the other ones. The Rode Wireless Pro, I forget off the top of my head, I think it's $300, and you get two transmitters, two microphones, all the cables, all the everything. Um, you know, to get a single transmitter, single receiver system, UHF system is probably minimum $600 up to endless amounts of money. Uh, so it's a very different price category, and they are a little more complicated to use. They're not the plug and play. When I say something is consumer-based, I don't, I'm not necessarily even meaning that as a dig. I'm they are the road things, the DJI things are just plug and play. They are super simple. Anyone can figure it out, but that's also the limitation because then you don't always have the same flexibility that you would have on the higher-end units, which aren't as simple to figure out. But once you learn them and understand them, you you know, the sky's the limit with what you can do. All right, next unpopular gear opinion. If you still like me enough to keep listening, uh, I'm just calling this one you probably don't need that upgrade. And this could apply to anything: cameras, phones, uh, podcast mixers, microphones, whatever, you probably don't need that upgrade. Uh in my GoPro 12 review, I talked about iterative product updates. And I think something, you know, I I'm trying to think of when this might have happened with drones. But when something is new, when a technology is emerging, what happens is each update tends to be bigger. Like there's a huge difference because there's just bigger leaps to be made. As the technology matures, each update is less and less big. Look at this with phones, right? Like if you go from you know, the first four generations of iPhone, every time a new one came out, it was like huge new capabilities, huge leaps forward. And then, you know, that kind of stuff still happened over time. But if you look at the last what five years of phone updates, it's you know, slight design changes, slight processor improvements, slight camera improvements. You know, if you go from an iPhone 10 to an iPhone 15, huge camera improvement there. But if you go from a 14 to a 15, despite what things say on paper, you're probably not gonna notice that much of a difference in quality unless you have a very specific use case. And I think a good way to sort of judge this is when something moves to an annual release cycle. So, what I was thinking of specifically was Apple's M series processors, of which I'm a huge fan. Uh, because you don't need huge fans with them because they tend to run pretty cool overall for the most part. Uh the M1 came out several years ago and was such a game changer because uh even the I'm still using my base model M1 Mac Mini that was like $500 three years ago, four years ago, and it works great. It still works like such a champ. And now we're on the the M3 series of things. These things are amazing. The power and the price and the performance, it's just unreal. But something you might notice is, you know, Apple announced the M1, that was their first chip, and that was a big deal, and then time went on, and that's when they, I believe, if I'm remembering correctly, then they announced, you know, like the M1 Max and the M1 Ultra, like higher-end versions of the M1. And then more time went on, and they came out with the M2. And then it was like almost exactly a year later, they came out with the M3. So it's a good example of technology shifting from updates as necessary or as available to regular update cycle. Where now it wouldn't surprise me if every year, pretty much around the same time, it's the M4, it's the M5. The same way in September of every year, a new iPhone comes out. So you might not know all the details of the iPhone 16, but it's very likely that in September of 2024, Apple will announce the iPhone 16. And it's hilarious as the numbers just get bigger and bigger because yeah, I don't. The iterative update, as I said in my GoPro video, I think is a good thing for customers because it means you're getting the best version of something at any given time. You're not, you know, the thing that's always frustrating is if something is at the end of like a four or five-year product life cycle and you're like, is there gonna be a new one? Is there not? And there's gonna be a huge leap when a new thing comes out and you're scared to spend your money. When something is updated regularly with like iterative annual updates, you know, if you bought a GoPro 11 last summer and then GoPro announced the 12 this fall, you there I wouldn't really have any buyer's remorse. Like it's fine. But if you've never had a GoPro or you have a GoPro 5 or something, and then you want to jump in and buy a new one, being able to go right to the 12 from the start is awesome. And that means you're getting like the best version of something, you're getting the most up-to-date version, but you don't need to update everything all the time. And I think so many companies and so much marketing material, of course, it's designed to make you want to update right away. Your computer is out of date, your phone is old, your camera's old, whatever it is, you need you knew, you need something, a new thing right away. And I found out, at least for me, the way to tell if I actually need to upgrade something or not and kind of distill it from the marketing. And I found that if if you're asking yourself, should I upgrade, you don't need to upgrade. If you're asking yourself, hey, Apple just came out with these M3 computers, should I upgrade my M1 to the M3? No, you don't need to. You will know you need to upgrade when you're using your computer and you say, Oh, I need a new computer because mine's not working for me. I need a new camera because this doesn't work. I need a new phone for like you will find yourself saying, I need a new blank, rather than should I get a new blank? If you have to ask yourself, that means you probably don't. Of course, I'm not talking about enthusiasts, like people who just like phones or like computers or whatever, and it's fun for you to have the new one every year. And it's not about practicality or anything, it's just like that's something you enjoy. Like that's that's totally different than talking about necessity and whether or not something is genuinely necessary. So I think for the most part, you probably don't need that upgrade when new cameras come out, when a new phone or a new computer. The people who like I saw upgrade to from the M1 to the M2 when that was announced, and like, oh my god, now my computer's blazing fast, and then now they're going from the M2 to the M3, and it's like, oh, finally, geez, I'm so sick of all this lag on my computer. It's like, what are you doing? I know everybody's workflows are different, and so speak for yourself. But as somebody who produces a fairly large amount of high-resolution audio and video content on a regular basis, I feel that that's a fairly intense use of a computer's power. And the fact that there's not a huge need for me to move on from the M1 series chips to the M3. I'm sure there would be an improvement, but everything's kind of fine. It's definitely not where I would prefer to spend my money right now. I'd rather wait, get to a point where like my computer is genuinely holding me back, and then upgrade. And by that point, who knows? Maybe like the M5 processor will be out. At which point there will be a huge leap forward, and I will notice like, oh my gosh, it'll be like going from Intel to the M series chip, where I just I couldn't even believe the difference between the two things. So that's my unpopular upgrade opinion. I'm getting more and more nervous as this episode goes on because I don't want to lose all my friends with my opinions over here. Uh speaking of releases, I will jump to my next opinion, which is very specific. I think Sony releases too many cameras. This is my first world camera complaint. I am just not interested in any more Sony camera releases, please. I Sony firmware updates, yes, please. Happy they announced that an incoming update for the A7S3, I would say, is imminent, but they said March 2024 at the earliest, which is super lame. Uh, you could probably do that yesterday. So anyway, Sony has done this thing, and I get it. Like Sony's product strategy seems to be we want you to buy a Sony camera. I think I've talked about this before. I I have the most experience with Canon and Sony. I don't necessarily know how other companies approach it. Canon's marketing does seem to be very specific at like leaving out certain features to make you like work your way as high up in their product line as possible. You you know, they have a uh entry-level model of a camera that might get you looking at Canon, going, okay, this is really cool. And then if you need certain features, certain frame rates, resolutions, physical uh components on the camera itself, then you kind of jump up model to model to model. And they they very strategically seem to you know leave out features on models, add them to higher end models to get you as high up in their product lineup as possible before you make your purchasing decision. Sony's strategy, which I actually don't dislike, seems to be buy a Sony camera. They don't seem to care if you buy the Sony ZV E10 or an FX6, they just want you to buy a Sony camera and then get into that Sony ecosystem and then they got you. And you're gonna buy some lenses and you're gonna, you know, base your workflow around these cameras and you're gonna be trapped for better or worse. Maybe it's a maybe it's a good place to be trapped. I like my Sony cameras quite a bit, but that seems to be their strategy. And so part of that is we will just keep releasing how many new cameras does Sony come out with just this calendar year. Maybe it's not as many as it seems, but it feels like half a dozen more. And some of them are amazing, you know, like the A93 that was just announced. That seems like a pretty massive update. It's a very expensive camera, it's a very high-end camera, but it seems like, okay, here's something that offers a whole bunch of stuff that wasn't available, wasn't possible before. Everything else, at least this year, maybe even the last two or more years that Sony has released has been just different. Like it's here's all of our parts, all our camera bodies, all our features, and we're just gonna sort of smash them together in different combinations and put different letters and numbers next to the model number for this camera. And it's like it gets very confusing because that's where you end up with a lower end camera that has some more advanced features than a higher end camera, but it's not that the higher-end camera is outdated because it's still a it's still the flagship model of a lineup or it's still the most recent version of something. And it gets very confusing. Like the good part about this is that there is something for everyone. Whatever your budget is, whatever your your feature needs are, there's a Sony camera for that. It's like the old Apple thing. Like, there's an app for that, there's a Sony for that. There really is. But it's also impossible to keep track of it all and what the different features are. The product lines are super muddy and confusing, and features are weirdly mismatched between the lines and the different models. And it's it's definitely those things where they come out with a new camera and you can't tell. Like, I just talked about, you know, if you ask yourself, should I update or I need to update? It's very like you genuinely can't tell because you might have a camera where you're like, okay, I love this, but I'd really love, you know, I'm struggling with this and I need this feature, that feature, whatever. And then Sony releases a new camera, and you it's really hard to figure out like, wait, would that be an upgrade? Does that solve my problem? Okay, it checks this box, but then it seems like it loses this other feature over here. Like, there is no clear, there is no clear I don't know, delineation between their products, and it's it's just funny to me. So, Sony, you released too many cameras. Knock it off. Uh my next unpopular opinion, again, I know if you're a professional, this might really bother you. Log footage. We talked about cameras just now. Let's talk about log footage. I think that log footage is often super unnecessary. Not that it is unnecessary, but that it's often unnecessary. Log footage serves a really specific purpose. And I think if you're looking up reviews and you live in the world of YouTube, the most common place that you see log footage is in camera reviews, or you know, now with the iPhone 15 Pro being able to film log footage. And what you see all the time is someone will put, I've done this too in my videos, someone will put footage up on screen that's ungraded, untouched log footage, and then there will be a transition to color graded, color corrected log footage that just looks a whole lot better. Yeah. To me, that's the equivalent of like walking into a dark room, going like, wow, it's dark in here, turning on a light, and then going like, now it's not dark in here anymore. It's like, yeah, the light wasn't on. The log footage wasn't graded. It was raw, well, maybe not literally raw, but it was untouched log footage. It's not going to look good. Log footage does not look good out of the camera. It's very flat, it's very washed out. That's what it's supposed to be. And the reason I say log footage is unnecessary a lot of times is because when you see those transitions from ungraded or untouched log footage to finished log footage, it always looks better. Of course, it always looks better. The thing that people never show the difference of is your corrected graded footage compared to just the default picture profile out of a camera, which I found, which is one of the reasons I oftentimes stick with the default picture profile in my cameras, is that that looks better than me messing with log footage. There's a couple reasons for that. One, I'm not a skilled colorist. So there are people who, you know, color correcting, color grading footage is their passion. It's it's a thing that they love and that they have a skill for. That's very different. For someone like me who just wants stuff to look away that I like, the people who are better at handling color and all that stuff are the super skilled and smart engineers that built my camera and put the processing and the sensor and all that stuff together in my camera. So when I select a picture profile that has been built for that camera, I'm usually starting from a better place right away. And then I can just do some very small fine-tuning adjustments to dial things in exactly how I like them, you know, save that as a preset, and then I'm done and ready to go. I think the reason I think log footage is unnecessary is I think so many times people go from no, you know, from the raw footage to corrected footage, and it looks so much better that then it's like, wow, this looks so great. But what I end up seeing is people having these workflows that are very long and very time consuming, and they they don't actually end up anywhere better than if they had just used the default picture profile and they would have been done as soon as they stopped recording with their camera, like things would have been almost perfect exactly where they need it to be. This, of course, is a very specific, like this is very specific to certain things. Obviously, with log footage, the intent with log footage is not to give you crappy looking footage that you then make look good. The intent with log footage is to give flexibility for adjusting your exposure and your colors. So that is incredibly helpful, but it's not always necessary. If you're filming in a studio environment that you set up, like you know, a lot of the stuff I film is in the same space that has. Controlled lighting, controlled colors, controlled angles. There's no need for me to be filming in log footage in here. Like I can do everything with a default picture profile and right out of the camera, stuff looks pretty good. And then just go into final cut, apply a quick preset that I made, everything looks amazing. If I were doing more client stuff or more things on location, that's where log footage then could come in and save the day because maybe I'm dealing with a scene that has high dynamic range. We have bright skies, dark shadows. I'm struggling with my exposure. Rather than risking ruining this shot by having something under or overexposed, I can film it in log, and then I can adapt that, add in as much contrast as I want, focus on the highlights, focus on the low lights, whatever it might be, and then get the colors exactly how I want. So I'm not saying log footage is unnecessary. I'm not saying no one should shoot log footage. I think there are plenty of cases, especially, you know, on the more professional side of things or the more challenging shooting condition side of things, where log footage saves the day so many times. But, you know, I just I just laugh at like the amount of time some people spend in their workflows to end up with something that just looks slightly worse than the default picture profile. You probably didn't probably didn't need to shoot and log for that one. I'm gonna log off of that opinion and go to my last opinion. Uh, this is a semi-controversial audio opinion that was in my most recent video, which is the comparison of the Lewitt LCT 240 and 440. And this is uh condenser versus dynamic microphones. In terms of your environment, don't really worry about it. My controversial opinion is that uh a condenser or a dynamic microphone doesn't really matter in relation to your environment. Now, I think I heard some heads exploding after I said that. That's not to say that condenser and dynamic microphones don't pick up audio differently, but the reason that that I feel so strongly about this specifically and why I saved it to the end is because I've gotten so many messages over the years from people asking for help figuring out their microphone setup. And what they what they ends up happening is they have a condenser microphone that they want. Like maybe it's this Earthworks that I'm using, maybe it's one of the Lewitt's or something, you know, a condenser that I've talked about, and they're like, gosh, I really love the Lewitt LCT240. It sounds amazing. I think it'd be perfect on my voice, but I don't have a super well-treated space, so I should go with a dynamic microphone, and then they list off a couple options they're considering, none of which they're very excited about. That's not me saying dynamic microphones are not exciting. I love dynamic microphones, they're amazing. This is me saying that when you're choosing between a microphone, go with what you like the sound of the most. Go with the microphone that excites you the most, that sounds the best on your voice. Don't feel like, well, I love this microphone, but it's a condenser microphone, so I can't use it. No, go with what sounds best. Don't shortchange yourself and limit yourself to something that you don't even enjoy just be just because it's you heard somewhere in a YouTube video that, like, oh, I need a different kind of sound treatment to use this microphone. In my Lewitt video that I mentioned a minute ago, I do comparisons between how dynamic and condenser microphones pick up sound in my environment, which is a semi-okay treated space. It's a very average treated environment. And there's not a lot of difference. If anything, in my example, the dynamic microphone picked up more background noise because it has a it was a quieter microphone. It needed more gain in order to have a usable signal, which meant that because I increased the gain, it was picking up more of the environmental noise versus the condenser microphones. Condenser and dynamic microphones can also each have totally different pickup patterns. That's probably going to make a bigger difference in whether it is a condenser or a dynamic. You know, they have different sound qualities, like they do have different sound qualities to them. Condensers typically tend to be brighter and a little more crisp. Dynamic microphones may be a little more well-rounded, almost muddy somewhat in some ways, where you need to add in some EQ to really bring out to really make them shine in a special way. It's all just it's not good, bad, right or wrong. It's just, it's just different. Focusing on sound treating a space is incredibly important. I'm not saying that it's not, but you know, if you if you are in an environment where things aren't sounding good, like you have too much background noise or you're picking up stuff outside or whatever it might be, switching to a dynamic microphone is not going to be a silver bullet that then solves all the problems and fixes everything. You're still gonna hear all that stuff. Now you just might be using a microphone that you don't like as much. So that's a lose-lose situation. What you want to do is find a microphone that sounds like honestly, I think I think the number one important thing in a case where you're looking for a microphone to use for yourself is to find one that sounds the best on your voice. If you're somebody, you know, this could be different. If you're somebody who um it works with a lot of clients, and so you're buying microphones to include in your setup that you're going to be using on all kinds of different projects, all kinds of different voices, what you choose and how you choose to use that's going to be a little bit different. But if you're choosing stuff that you're going to use all the time, you know, do what sounds right on your voice. And as someone who makes a lot of microphone reviews, I am fully aware that how something sounds on my voice, whether it's good or bad, it's it's hard to tell what that's gonna sound like on your voice. You can listen to my voice, you can hear the qualities of my voice, and then you can decide how similar or dissimilar our voices are, and that might help you figure out what a mic might sound like on your voice. But it's, you know, it's not gonna be the same as you bringing the microphone into your environment on your voice with your equipment and hearing what that sounds like. And when you're trying to find that microphone to use, I think the one that that excites you the most is the way to go. Like the one where you just love the way that it sounds, you like the way that it looks, you like the way that it that it works. You know, is it easy to adjust and attach to your boom arm and position where you want it? Is it something you're gonna be fighting with all the time? I think all of those things are so much more important than you know, being obsessed with whether it's a condenser or a dynamic microphone. There are differences between them. It's probably good to be aware of the difference, but going with what you like regardless. Heck, get a rivet microphone. Like get the microphone that you like the most. Don't worry so much about what type of microphone that it is. And then there are universal truths like focusing on sound treatment and mic positioning and EQ and processing. Those are things that are going to be important no matter what microphone you use, no matter what equipment you use, or anything like that. But if you if you get something you feel like you should get versus what you want to get, then you might find yourself not excited to use it. And I know a very common thing in the world of content creation and audio video production is to talk about how gear doesn't matter. We've talked about it on this show many times. Gear should never be the thing that stops you from getting started, but gear can absolutely make a difference. There's certain things that you need specific type of types of gear for in order to be able to do. But also, gear does have the ability to make you really excited about what you're doing. And if you've ever found something that you genuinely love, a piece of gear, a tool that you really love using, you know that you find yourself being more excited to use it, sometimes even looking for reasons to use it. Versus if you have something that's just sort of like, eh, it gets the job done, it's the thing I felt like I was supposed to get. That's the thing that maybe ends up sitting in a drawer, never leaving its case, not really, you know, maybe you're just a little bit frustrated every time you use it because there's something that just, you know, there's a pain point that you're never able to resolve. And so including as much, as many tools that you genuinely love using into your workflow is the best way to be excited about what you're doing, and that's going to make you want to keep doing more. And that feels like a really positive way to end this critical episode. So going back to what I said at the beginning, uh, I really hope that you know I'm not trying to throw shade on anything or be overly critical. It's just, I don't know, these are just unpopular gear opinions. They're not they're not necessarily the popular ones. Although I'd be interested to know your takes or if you have any unpopular gear opinions as well. So feel free to send those in. Either uh go to HiMynamistom.com and leave a voice message, or just shoot an email to Tom at Enthusiasm Project.com. We've got two episodes left this season, season 11, and then we will be wrapping up heading into season 12, delve into 12 uh early next year. So, all that being said, thank you for listening. If you made it to the end and you heard all my like just crazy person ramblings, thank you for being here all the way to the end. Definitely check out the video I'm putting together. This is it's gonna be awkward if I some for some reason don't finish that video, but the video I'm making about my podcast production workflow, definitely check that out. I did one several years ago, um, and it I've been asked to refresh it, which is why I'm making this one now. And I feel like my workflow hasn't necessarily changed too much, but maybe it has been such a slow evolution that it's changed a lot, and I I don't realize it. So hopefully this updated version will show you how I do audio only episodes with uh, you know, and make them as sustainable as possible without having to spend many, many hours on them each week. So, with that being said, I hope you have a safe, happy, healthy, fun rest of your week, and I will see you next time.