# Office Hours 2025-03-17

**Eliot:** [00:00:00] All right. Sometimes, sometimes it turns out the office hours recordings are really good and we transcribe them and it's really useful to refer back to and sometimes it's like, yeah, okay, you know, yeah, absolutely. Yep. Okay. So let's, let's take a quick look. So we got this. Let's take a, let's go ahead and grab a little annotator and let's, uh, click the eye.

Let's just take a look at, at the take information. And I think it probably popped up. Uh, I think you're probably going to need to share the, the window. Because I think it popped up something that I don't see so probably just share the actual. 

**Justin:** Oh, let me, um, let's see. Let me stop sharing just share my whole desktop.

And

then we'll go to Autoshot 

**Eliot:** as exciting as this is a fun to see when to see all the different projects happening. 

**Justin:** Yeah, I'm excited so I'm a film educator. [00:01:00] Um, And there we go. Do you see, do you see it now? All right. Let's see. 

**Eliot:** Graduation. That's right. I like one drop frame. That shouldn't do that much. Um, let's see.

And this is, is this rendering in Unreal? Is this, uh, 

**Justin:** Yeah. Okay. I like it where you see drop frame. Okay. That's useful. Yeah. Future reference. 

**Eliot:** One drop frame is, that's not a big deal. I don't have that many duplicates. That's, everything is tracking as normal. Mapping is mapped. Um, thermal is fair. That's, that should be fine.

Um, I'll tell you what, let's see. Just so, uh, one way I always end up doing stuff. Uh, let's go back to AutoShop for a second. Yep. 

**Justin:** Uh, 

**Eliot:** Click on the window or whatever. Oh, wait, there we go. All right. Let's see. So you've got, okay. So it's going to be the tail end of 500 frames and this is okay. So it's a BRAW file.

[00:02:00] Okay. So let's actually, uh, all right. So we've got Cine footage match. You know what? Oh, okay. I see. That's right. That's right. Cause we haven't updated the Mac auto shot and we've got like. 15 revs, because what happens is we end up testing out a bunch of stuff on the PC out of shot. And then we, then we, you know, do a sync, a sync build of it.

And we are way behind on our max sync build. So the feature I was looking for is not there yet. Um, let's see. Do you, let me think about this for just a second. Um, you're probably on, are you running Unreal on a, on a Windows box or a Mac box? 

**Justin:** Oh, I'm running on the MacBook right now. I have a brand new.

Macbook M4. 

**Eliot:** I'll do it. Um, all right. So there's oh there's our cine offset time. Okay, 

**Justin:** but I've definitely also used, um, like I have a PC in, uh, the studio. It's just I'm lazy and at home right now. So I, I can do troubleshooting. Through the PC as well. 

**Eliot:** You know, what I'm [00:03:00] curious about is, and the first thing I want to check is so, uh, and was this, did you, uh, synchronize with markers and stuff, or is it synced with time code or how, how's the, uh, uh, how are you doing?

I'm going to be honest. 

**Justin:** I have no idea. I followed your tutorial and I, I use the technical time code, so it's, it should be in there, but I also did the digital slate. 

**Eliot:** Okay. 

**Justin:** Another, like, um, you have another guest as well, so I don't want to dominate this office. Hey, well, 

**Eliot:** no worries. Let's just, uh, let's try to figure it out.

Cause I, uh, the first thing I want to check is to see if the, the overall sync is correct, um, and matched. And one of the things we end up doing is, is, uh, are you, do you use Resolve much? 

**Justin:** Yeah, yeah, I did, I did all this in Resolve. 

**Eliot:** Okay, so I'll tell you what, can we, um, what we'll do is we'll do a manual sync check in Resolve.

Okay. And I don't have a tutorial for it, but we can just kind of walk through the, walk through the process. And what we'll do is we'll just pop in that BRAW file into Resolve, make a new timeline with that, and set, uh, with the timeline set to whatever the BRAW file was set to. And we're just gonna put [00:04:00] markers at the end, uh, at the beginning flashpoints and just measure it, measure it, uh, you know, measure it manually.

So 3. 193 was your Um, 

**Justin:** so I'm using, you just want me to make a new timeline with that original? Yeah, with 

**Eliot:** B RAW, with the B RAW take and what we're just going to do. Yeah, there we go. And, uh, what's the frame rate before we automatically create the timeline? I just want to, 

**Justin:** uh, it should be 24. 24. Let's 

**Eliot:** just double check that that's, uh, it is making a, uh, uncheck use project settings.

And let's just look at the format. Yeah, 24. Okay. That sounds great. I just want to verify that. And we can just double check on that. And then, uh, let's scroll through to find, uh, Now, is there a sync? Let's just, uh, Did you use the flashing QR sync markers? Or are we using the, um, Uh, I think I might have an idea what's going on, uh, because if you're using time code based sync, we don't have time code based sync, uh, [00:05:00] in, uh, in the Mac build of autoshot yet.

I think that that's, that might be our first, our first. Oh, I 

**Justin:** see. No, uh. Uh, I know what happened. I do have sync. It's just, uh, I have an in and an out point set. Oh, 

**Eliot:** okay. Oh, okay. There we go. Yeah, let's, let's, let's go to the very beginning of the take, put it set at zero. There we go. And let's go to the very first time that a, a, a frame flashes onto the screen.

So let's go back and let's look for the very, very first, first instant. There we go. There's a flat light flash. We're going to frame forward a couple of, couple of frames. Whoop, there he goes. That's it. And then hit M to put a marker in. Okay. And the timeline. Now we're gonna drag in the, uh, the jet set, um, uh, take, uh, from that, the, um, the cam doc underscore cam file.

And that'll probably be in if we open up auto shot. Uh, okay. Go pop that guy open. And if you click on the, uh, next to the take, you can click on open. Uh, lemme grab my little annotator here, right there. Yep. That's the guy. Yeah. And then we'll just go, we can go look at source [00:06:00] data and when it's creating this, this, uh, file tree for post processing a shot, it, uh, copies over the, the, just, just the, only the, uh, the reference videos.

So you can just click on videos and go in there and then we just want to drag and drop the ZL cam file, uh, back into the resolve timeline and, and like, you know, track two or something like that. 

**Justin:** Yep. 

**Eliot:** Uh, and all we're doing is we're just going to verify the, the timing Delta, uh, between this and we can, we can get it.

Really accurate inside a visual check. So we're just going to do exactly the same thing. Go forward until we have the very first flashing frame on the monitor. 

**Justin:** Okay. This 

**Eliot:** is 

**Justin:** the raw coming off the iPhone. 

**Eliot:** Yep. That's coming off the iPhone. And once again, we're just going to click M and put a marker on that on that track.

And I'm going to slide those back and forth until the markers line up. Let's just make sure you have enough. Um, Uh, enough leeway. You might have to trim the front end of your, of your, uh, Oh, actually, wait, we don't want to trim that clip. Sorry. [00:07:00] Don't, that was a bad idea. That's all right. Uh, let's go ahead and just move.

Oh, so are they, are they all lined up? Okay. And so now what we should be able to do is set our composite opacity, uh, on the top clip on the video too, to like 50%. Yeah, there's, there's the guy. There we go. And we should be able to play through the timeline and see those two. Uh, like, yep. It looks like it looks like it's in clean sync.

This is also how I check to see, uh, I see. So every once in a while, sometimes somebody will have their image stabilizer on, on their C camera. Which one? The C camera's doing a lot sorts of crazy stabilization stuff that we can't track. So you can tell that if they're moving the camera on these things are like, whoa.

Like, uh, that's not gonna track Houston, we have a problem. Okay. So that sounds good. So now what we can do is we go back to the very, very beginning of the, uh, the timeline. Yep. And we make sure that we're at the, with the outmost. Uh, you know, beginnings of all the clips and just gonna position the playhead at the, where the very beginning of the jet set take is happening.

[00:08:00] There we go. Let's snap to it and then we're gonna calc out this. Um, so we've got three seconds at 24 frames per second, and then three frames. So lemme just run a little bit of math here. All right, so three times 24, and then 72, and then add three. And then I'm going to divide all that by 24. And all I'm just doing is calculating the time offset.

3. 125. Alright. So let's go ahead, um, back in Autoshot.

Alright. And instead of 3. 193, let's just try 3. 125. Okay.

And let's, um, let's go ahead and regenerate our, uh, frames. Let me just look at, let me just double check to make sure there's nothing weird going on there. I think that's all, that's all fine. And For fun, can, let's, um, also, let's, uh, let's try this, do you have, do you have Blender on [00:09:00] your system? 

**Justin:** Um, I haven't installed Blender on this new one yet.

**Eliot:** Let's, let's go ahead and do that. Blender's easier to debug stuff with sometimes. Okay. Because there's just sort of less layers going on. 

**Justin:** Let's see. 

**Eliot:** Because it goes back and forth in a frame, you know that it's gone backward and forth in a frame. Unreal has, by the time you have level sequencer and all this other stuff going, there's a lot of levels.

**Justin:** Yeah, it's been a massive learning curve for me. Uh, it's a lot of fun. It's interesting stuff, but once you get into Unreal, it's like, lots of hidden boxes with lots of things to check. 

**Eliot:** And you're working in education? You're teaching a 

**Justin:** Yeah, so I teach a film program to high schoolers and I've Uh, made the wild, uh, decision to guide them through a virtual production without really knowing how to do it myself, which is both things.

So, so we're shooting, uh, for two days in April, we're shooting with some actors, uh, [00:10:00] and, you know, we'll see what we get. 

**Eliot:** This is great. This is great. I'm actually super excited to hear. It's exactly what I want to see happening. We've got a fellow over in Utah. Uh, who's doing some great work with that.

Actually, let me see if I can find his. Well, I think 

**Justin:** I've been looking at his stuff from your, the Jet Set Academy guy. 

**Eliot:** Well, there's, there's, uh, that's Doug. And then Spencer Bell is another fellow who's, uh. Oh, nice. His, his stuff is, let me see if I can find this. Okay, I don't think he's got it posted yet.

Um, but he's got, he's teaching, it's a, uh, like middle school, high school media program, and it's mostly in a, uh, blender jet set and, uh, after, uh, after effects for compositing, uh, cause they're, they're on all on max, et cetera, because a lot of schools are on pure max. And, and, uh, I, I. said, let's start off in Blender because it's going to be a lot easier for your team to ramp up.

And we can, I can, we made a Megascans importer so the kids can like drag and drop in all the assets and make, make stuff, uh, easily. Oh, yeah. 

**Justin:** I'd love to be connected with them. Uh, yeah, [00:11:00] definitely in the wild west right now. So, uh, it's good to talk to other educators about it. 

**Eliot:** Yeah, he's actually, he's going to be starting to post some videos on how he's teaching his class on it and how he's putting the course together.

Cause it's, I mean, it's a really interesting question and just, just a, like, for example, how's your media program set up? Are you guys mostly Mac windows PC? You know, 

**Justin:** we're, we're actually about to move into a brand new, um, Film studio and digital media lab, uh, starting next fall, and it'll be outfitted with 15 Mac minis that are souped up with like 32 gigs of RAM.

And, um, it should be pretty decent set up. And then we have a Mac studio, um, As well as a Windows PC that are both for the heavier duty finishing of things. 

**Eliot:** Oh, this is perfect. This is really perfect. Okay, so let's uh, go ahead, you know, and have you used Blender much? Are you familiar with 

**Justin:** it? No, I a long time ago looked at it and [00:12:00] ran away, but 

**Eliot:** They fixed the UI, basically, in a single sentence thing back in Blender 2.

8, they fixed the UI that was before that was just utterly intractable. And now it's, it's really, this, this is, uh, when people are starting out, this is really where I have them start out, because, uh, there's, Unreal is amazing, but it's huge, and it's all about the checkboxes, and you can, you can lose days hunting that checkbox.

I've done so, so, um, okay. So let's, uh, let's, uh, go to the, the lightcraft. pro slash downloads and let's download the autoshot blender instance, uh, plugin.

**Justin:** Blender add on. 

**Eliot:** Yep. Blender add on download that. All right. And then we're going to go, let's, so download it and, uh, you don't even need to unzip it. Don't even worry about unzipping it. What we're going to do is going to go into blender and, uh, there we go. And under edit and they're going to go to preferences and about halfway down.

There's, uh, [00:13:00] add ons. Click on add ons and in the upper right hand corner, there's a little downward facing arrow. Again, it's to install from disk. There we go. And go to your downloads. Yeah, that's fine. And then you want auto shot blender. Yep. That's the one. 

**Justin:** The zip. 

**Eliot:** Yep. Just the zip. Okay. The way the blender add ons work is you just always install them from the zip file.

Okay, great. Now we're, uh, yeah, you can exit out of the, out of there. All right, and let's see. So let's go ahead and you can exit out of Blender. That's fine.

All right. And, actually it probably helps to exit out of Blender, because every once in a while registering its add ons, it needs, you have to actually have, you have to, and, and the ex, ex, execute, bleh, and the executable. There we go. Okay, so now, let's, uh, we're going to start at frame 556, uh, to 1027. Let's just go over to Blender, uh, program, and, uh, under the run values, and switch from [00:14:00] Unreal over to Blender.

Yes, 

**Justin:** there's a guy I've also know, do you know this about your, maybe it's my resolution saying, but I've found that the like alignment of the clicking in the Mac version is not, 

**Eliot:** yes, no, you know, something very real. And what that is, is as a Mac 10. 5. They changed something, broke some switch inside the toolkit that we happen to use to build this.

So you actually have to click drag on the buttons very slightly. That then it'll work. If you click drag on the button, it's just the slightest one pixel thing, and then it, then it works. Okay. Maddening. Uh, it's something we're dealing with. So, um, okay. And then you can go ahead and click on the pick executable under blender.

Just click, drag that. And then yep. Go into, uh, is that in the blend? I think that's it, you know? Okay. 

**Justin:** That's 

**Eliot:** Mac OS and then the Blender app. Yeah, looking for, I think we usually go into applications [00:15:00] and then yeah, just click on Blender and then, uh, click open. There we go. There we go. And what we're just doing is telling, uh, telling AutoShot where the Blender executable is.

Okay. So then let's go ahead and, um, let's click, uh, regenerate frames. That's a check, check the regenerate frames checkbox. 

Uh, 

where is that? This guy. Oh, yep. Because we changed our, we changed our time offset in the Cine, uh, Cine Camera. So let's go ahead and save and run. Oh, it's, that's, actually that's right.

Uh, change the append scene over here to, uh, which like, uh, empty comp starter will be fine.

Got it. Alright, let's go ahead and save and run. There we go. Oh, invalid, oh, invalid blender. I could, I could see what's going on. Um, give me a second. Thought we had that [00:16:00] knocked out of there. Let's take a look.

Where are we at? On the shot of Mac Beta, you're on the 1. 48 build. Um,

okay. I thought we had that. Cracked them a couple builds. Alright, let me take a snapshot of that. Maybe we're going to be back in Unreal anyway. Um, that's interesting. Let me look at this first. Empty CompStarter, extract GXRs. Let me just snap a picture of this. Send it over to Greg. Yeah, this is telling us I need to do an updated Autoshot build ASAP.[00:17:00] 

Send a note to our CTO to take a look at that. I think probably what's going on is that our [00:18:00] Our Mac auto shot is like two months old, and I think we cracked that bug and I think we just haven't uploaded that. So, okay. In the, in the interim, uh, let's go back to Unreal and let's go do that. Okay. And then we're just gonna re regenerate our frames, check that box, and let's go ahead and click save and run.

And, uh, one thing, uh, when you're doing Jetset Cini, and we actually put a new thing in the, uh, in the UI to have a checkbox on the, uh, uh, on the record button. You always wanna have a scan. Of the environment. Like you drop your, drop your origin. Oh, and scan always, always, always, because that scan can get you out of so many, so many problems.

**Justin:** Yeah. Yeah. That's a piece of the puzzle. I'm like, I saw you do it in one of your tutorials, but I don't know if I got my head around, like, like I I'm very like, you know, I've done some after effects and things, but like a lot of the visual effects, I was like. I know that's useful data. I just don't know why I'm doing that.

And I forgot to do it, of course, but 

**Eliot:** and let me also point it toward, this is, this is a [00:19:00] really awesome course. Uh, give me a second. It is let's, there we go. 

**Justin:** Oh yeah. I, the job I just subscribed to that yesterday. 

**Eliot:** Yeah. 

**Justin:** So I, I'm going to dig into that. I I'm like. I think I'm five videos into it now. So yeah, he goes through all the, I, I, I had hoped he goes through it all.

Yeah. 

**Eliot:** Every, every detail of it. I, I, I always, uh, I'm so happy that he did that because I mean, I have tutorials that are sort of the technical tutorials to kind of go through and, and, and, you know, make things work, but he's gone through it to show you how to put it together to make, you know, make a movie, which is the artistic aspect of it.

The reason people want to do this. Um, so it's fantastic. Okay. So it looks like. Alright, so it's transcoding. Looks like it's chugging through it. Alright, so we'll take a look at that. And we'll give that a couple hundred frames to chug through it. And it was, because it was interesting, because I saw Big sweep, you know, at the end of it, like much, much more like there are, uh, [00:20:00] sometimes the tracking will have inaccuracies, but it's usually a very subtle shift.

Uh, I mean, sometimes you're in something where there's just no tracking points in which case the tracking can jump around, but, um, I don't think that was the case. I think there was enough information in the scene to, to detect. I would, I would expect. Slight drifts, you know, like if you look really closely at the feet, but that was a big one.

That was, that was on the order of a third of a meter jump. And so something, something's funny and I was just go figure out what it is, uh, what's going on with it. But it's super exciting that you're doing this. I think this is a, this is exactly what we want to do. 

**Justin:** Yeah, it's, it's very fun. And we're, as you might imagine, like shooting with high schoolers, our locations, especially in the constraints of a schedule, locations are always, uh, Um, hurdle, so to be able to like start to like drop in virtual environments, it just opens up the storytelling abilities tremendously for them.

**Eliot:** Oh, yeah, 

**Justin:** yeah. Pretty cool. 

**Eliot:** And then you can go into class and it's well [00:21:00] contained, right? You can set up a green screen in your, in your media room and that's, that's exactly what Spencer's been doing with his, with his group. And yeah, I saw some of the first shots and the kids of course are building like space stations so they have these, you know.

Right. 13 year olds running around in the middle of space stations and his, uh, his program coordinator, he's trying it out. This program coordinator just went, principal just went, just tell us what you need after you saw some of the initial things, like, this is amazing. So it's really fun to see it.

Alright, so let's take a quick look at that and then we're gonna 

**Justin:** Okay, so I just paste in the command box? Yeah, 

**Eliot:** no, if you, uh, if it's the same, same one, we might want to delete the old one. Okay. And, uh, so we don't just, uh, overwrite it and stuff. 

**Justin:** I mean, I could just Delete both of these. Save.

Delete.[00:22:00] 

I've experienced this before. Like, I try and delete something. And, uh, function delete. And it doesn't seem to want to get rid of them.

**Eliot:** Unreal does its own 

**Justin:** thing. Well, we can 

**Eliot:** do something. Um, give me a second to think through this for a second. What we can do. Oh, okay. Let's try this approach. Oh, the new shot naming thing is on the Windows builds right now. Sorry. Give me a second. Okay, I think you can go ahead and and hit paste in this and I think it'll just put a a new track in there So let's just go try that.

There we go. 

**Justin:** Yeah, it just made a new one. It's made a new one. Okay, so then It must be this one because the other two I did the Composure. Yeah, so it's this one. 

**Eliot:** Okay All right, so let's do the usual, uh, [00:23:00] key out sort of stuff. Um, and, um, now, okay, that's interesting. Why is that super crazy bright? 

**Justin:** That was another question I had for you.

I don't, Will, I don't know if you have a question. I don't want to dominate this whole thing. Um, like if you have a quick question or something. No, you 

**Will:** guys, you guys can keep after it. I mean, I can, I can wait. You were here first. I've got some questions. Uh, Elliot, you and I connected on the, uh, The boundless, um, entertainment course.

I was asking some questions about the rigs and stuff, but I can wait till you all are done. I've got plenty of stuff to do. It's no big deal. 

**Eliot:** All right. All right. Let's go through this and see, see how this is going. So, okay. So, so it looks like at least in the, in the image, then that the image is fine. Yeah.

That looks, that looks correct. Correct. And everything. Okay. So let's go ahead and, um, Uh, at the top, uh, you click on the autoshot and then, you know, let's, let's go right click on custom color diff and make another material instance, drag it into [00:24:00] the correct, uh, the correct, correct. One of those.

**Justin:** There we go. Then I double click on do all the things. Um, let's see, check this, check this, drag this over, right? 

**Eliot:** Yep. And, uh, you can enable, yeah, do a color pick on that. And at some point I would love to figure out how to do a faster version of this. And I would, I generally would recommend like, even if you're going to preview this in unreal, you, you don't.

Right now, I don't trust Unreal to do the compositing part. There's something weird where we try to, if we try to render both the background frames and we try and, and the, um, and the keyed, um, keyed image plate at the same time, I get, I get image, I get synchronization problems. Whereas if I render out the background frames and compliment After Effects or something, that is fine.

And I don't fully, there's something to do with the antialiasing, still hunting it down. [00:25:00] Anyway, 

**Justin:** I, I haven't, yeah, like the composure is also, it just doesn't seem like it's, I know there's lots of tutorials on it, but I haven't had as much success with it as using like Delta key or Ultra key. 

**Eliot:** Yeah. Yeah. The composure, the key is just not really up to snuff.

And in fact, we're actually adding in a workflow with X symmetry for real time, uh, real time green screen, because exactly that is just, you just, you basically can't get there from here with composure. It's just, you know, they put it in years and years ago and they haven't really updated it. Um, okay. So let's go ahead and save the, uh, color, uh, color difference care and exit out of that.

Okay. And then we're going to go back to our sequencer, how they are. Image plate. There we go. And type in Matt.

That's it. And go back to our, 

**Justin:** and then I drag [00:26:00] this in. 

**Eliot:** Yep. Just drag that, that in. There we go. All right. So now keys are, and we can put her on top of the world. Like if we, um, um, let's see, let me go back to a threat. Cause we're several reps behind. We're doing this in the windows builds. Um, go ahead and go back to that, um, on the top level auto shot.

**Justin:** Yep. 

**Eliot:** Then go double click on the m custom color diff and, uh, let's open up that window a bit and we're looking at the, uh, yeah, there we go. And let's scroll down on the left. Um, and what we want to do is

click on advanced. Let's click on this advanced thing. Scroll down a little bit. Um, yeah. Disabled Death test. Go ahead and disable the death test on that. There we go. And, um, all right, let's see if [00:27:00] I, sorry, let me clear my drawings. Okay. And then, uh, go ahead and at the top of it, do you have to compile it?

Let me stop. Remember Unreal. I think you just save it. Save that to the asset. All right. Then we can exit out of there. Okay. Yeah, there we go. So now, now she's on top of it. Oh, I 

**Justin:** see. Yeah. 

**Eliot:** Yeah. And so what that did is, you know, disable the depth test. Now we can go back, uh, into Sequencer. And, uh, then we can, uh, then we can lock the, um, camera track.

There we go. And is 

**Justin:** that this one? 

**Eliot:** Let's see. Yeah. And it looks like it's locked. Um, there we go. Oh, 

**Justin:** now it's locked. 

**Eliot:** So now as we scroll through that, we should be able to see, yeah, that looks, that looks pretty well locked. 

**Justin:** Here's the, where the big, oh yeah. So this, this tracks, that looks much better than, whoop, it disappears, but [00:28:00] that's where that huge swipe was in resolve.

**Eliot:** Yeah. Okay. So I think what happened is that the automatic, um, the automatic timing offsets. Weren't quite right and so what we did we went through is we went through and calced it manually And then then it locked up pretty well. So in um in more recent stuff what we're we're moving toward is We can do that.

The markers are great because they're, it's an absolute thing, right? You can, but you know, that marker happened at that point in time. And there's just no, there's no debate about it. It's just like, that's just how it works. Uh, double 

**Justin:** system, uh, video and sound. It's yeah, yeah. 

**Eliot:** This is nothing new. Like this dates back to the twenties and what we, but some, in some cases, it's a pain in the neck to run the digital slate system on set, like they're going too fast and in those cases, what we have.

Is, uh, with the newer builds, what we can do is time code based sync. Um, so we have a tentacle sync. Now the problem with time code based sync is what you find out is the dirty secret of time code is [00:29:00] not frame accurate. It's plus or minus a frame, depending on which camera you're using, which, which output this there, it's not anywhere near as accurate as people would have you think is accurate.

So we, um, we built in the time code sync and then we followed up with a secondary. Optical flow, um, that looks at the motion in the clips and tries to match the Delta motion of it. And that can generally work pretty well. Um, but as you see, it's boy, the digital slate is nice to have, cause it's an absolute, you know, even if you can't do a digital slate, just have someone do this and you can always lock, you know, always, always, always, no matter what, even if the automated tools are acting.

**Justin:** Yeah. I guess now that you say that, and maybe I'm missing some obvious thing, but. Is there a reason you need a digital slate and you couldn't just use a good old fashioned physical slate because isn't, aren't you just looking for a sync point? 

**Eliot:** Yeah, you're looking for a sync point with a digital slate.

Um, usually it actually does a great job of, of aligning things. And for some reason the alignment was a little bit off on this one. [00:30:00] Oh, that'll do the 

**Justin:** automated thing. I see. Okay, got it. Point it at it 

**Eliot:** and it'll buzz through 30 takes and, and, and lock them up. Clean. Got it. Once you have, have that, then it's, and we're always trying to automate these tools as much as we can, because that's, you know, one shot, whatever, it doesn't matter when you got 50 shots, 

**Justin:** it 

**Eliot:** starts.

**Justin:** Yeah. Well, that's what I'm it's I'll check out that boundless, uh, course, because that's the big question, which is like, okay, I can do this with one shot and I'm getting quicker, but like, if we're shooting an entire production with. Like 50 plus shots for a short film. This is going to be a lot of work. Um, so I, I know you're working on an EDL workflow because that seems like.

In my mind, it's like you edit with the comped rough statute out of auto shot. You create an EDL, you spit that back into auto shot and then it generates all this for you, is the hope, right? I think you're, yeah. And, 

**Eliot:** and in, in fact, it's even slightly better than that. Okay. Um, the, um, the, by NAB we should have, uh, [00:31:00] we have, we'll have compositing in the phone running, which is where we take the cine feed.

'cause right now we rerun the cine feed into the phone. We use it for calibration, but after that, we're not, we're not using it. Well, of course, what you'd really want to do is use the live cine feed and comp and track in the phone. So you can actually, you can see it. And then you have a 24, four frame per second proxy, right?

It's we're probably gonna have to record it like 540p or something pretty heavily cut down just to get that in the phone. But then that's a time code match proxy with the live comp. Yeah. So you drop an editorial, this time could match to your cam originals, right? And then, then you, then you have a clean editorial workflow.

It's, you know, that's time code locked between to your cam originals. You know, and then, you know, and we, we have to get to the point where we're processing EDLs and we're, we're crunching toward it, you know, because it's the obvious way to do this. So we're, we're absolutely, absolutely hammering toward it.

Um, all right, great. Now that looks, that looks great. I 

**Justin:** will, I'll play with this and I'm going to, uh, uh, step off the mic here so I can let other people, uh, jump in, but thank you so much, Elliot. This is great. And [00:32:00] I'm really thrilled with what you guys are doing. 

**Eliot:** Oh, super exciting. All right. Glad you could join us.

And, uh, I'll, uh, I'll send you, uh, if you do have a contact, uh, and I'll put y'all put in the Spencer. Let me, uh, let me just do that real quick.

**Kumar:** So that way we have 

**Eliot:** all the educators talking amongst themselves because this is, this is exactly how you want to do, you know, this is going to be the media program of the future. Cause then the kids can actually do films with this stuff. So, that's super exciting. Alright, I'll, I'll send that. I mean, as an 

**Justin:** educator, it's like, this is where the industry is, already is, so I need to be, I need to be teaching them this.

Uh, and if you wouldn't mind sending, I send you my email, if you could send me the, um, MP4 of this Zoom thing, um, so I could track what we just did, that'd be great. 

**Eliot:** What I'll do is, is after, after this, I'll, um, I'll, on the, I, on the office hours where we really crack something good, what I do is, I put them in Descript, transcribe them, and put them up [00:33:00] on the Office Hours page.

And so that way you've got it, and it's transcribed in the whole 90 yards. So just, I'll have that probably later today. 

**Justin:** Thanks, I'm just going to listen in, see if I hear anything. 

**Eliot:** Alright, uh, Will, I think you were up next. 

**Will:** Yeah, man. Um, Yeah, so definitely good to connect. This is kind of like the final piece of my puzzle, right?

So Um, I'm actually going all in and building a movie studio here. So, um, I own, uh, South Fulton Recording Studio in, uh, South Fulton, Tennessee. So I've got a full blown. quarter million dollar recording studio here that I've built over the past two years. Um, and have now recently gone all in with movies.

Um, and, uh, so I've bought just about everything. I already had a good camera. I've already got a ton of audio equipment. I just bought, bought, um, multiple green screen. Lighting, like everything under the sun. I've dropped a lot of money, right? So, um, the last piece that I was looking at, you and I had connected on the Boundless Entertainment, uh, the, the, the [00:34:00] comments right there.

And you had sent me the link to the Jet Set scene rigging, right? So, um, I believe this all goes to small rig. But I guess that's kind of the last piece that I'm looking for is I'm not really sure and I'm still feeling a bit overwhelmed with. What do I buy to build like a rig? Right? Like what should I get?

I have a Sony a7 for camera for right now, um, which is decent enough. Do I just go, you know, through this little article that you sent me? It's like a, you know, the jet scene scene rigging and then piece together all of the a7 stuff that they have. Is there anything else that you can send me? Um, and then from there, I'm going to go subscribe to all your, your guys stuff to the pro plans and all of that.

And then get started. So that's really all I'm 

**Eliot:** looking 

**Will:** for. 

**Eliot:** Well, and then if you're, if you, if you've got the battles courses, three months of jet set city free on that. So that'll get you rolling the, the basic pieces of raking the camera. It's actually pretty simple. You need to cage for the phone cage for the camera and some way [00:35:00] of hooking the two cages together.

That's it, you know, so we have a couple of examples of how we do that. So let me share, share my screen, just kind of walk you through the different, different pieces of it. Okay, cool. All right, sure. That's it. It's, it's conceptually, you know, it's conceptually straightforward, but yeah, I mean, you've been around this stuff.

Rigging, rigging is a thing. And I say that as, as a mechanical engineer, like it's just a lot of stuff to get, to get all dialed, to, to, to put all the bolts together. So yeah. Alright, you guys can see the, see this, right? The, uh, screen. Okay, and so what I just did is, is I gave an example of SmallRig. Now, of course, this is for the Blackmagic camera.

So, in SmallRig, what you just end up doing is you go to products, and we're gonna go find a camera cage. Let's go look at the Sonys. And then we, whoops, try that again. Sony, there we go. Helps if I click on the right thing. They have a different, a bunch of different Sonys, and then you have this A7IV. 

**Will:** Uh, the, [00:36:00] but the, I'm not sure if I've got the R or the, I'll have to check, but it's one of those two though.

**Eliot:** Okay. 

**Will:** Uh, 

**Eliot:** yeah, A7. A7 4, A7 R, okay. Uh, A, okay, A7. Okay. I see. There's a seven four and a seven R four. Okay. That, yeah. You won't want it. I think that's 

**Will:** the one that I have the a seven four there. Yeah. So this is where I start to get kind of overwhelmed, right? I go look at all this stuff and I'm like, well, man, I don't know.

And I definitely have the money, right? I'm willing to invest. This is very serious for me. Um, this is where I start going, ah, what do I do? Right, 

**Eliot:** right, right. Okay. So to make it a lot easier. So Um, how do you usually rig? Do you, are you running on a gimbal? Are you running on, uh 

**Will:** I've never done it before, bro.

Okay. Like, this is, this is my first go around. Like, I've, I've done a ton of photography, but as far as actual, the, the movie production, filming and stuff, I've not done it before. 

**Eliot:** Hey, no worries, no worries. This is, you're starting at, at, honestly, the world's best time to do this, because you have Josh's [00:37:00] course, and you have what we're doing.

And this is the gentlest possible way of going into this stuff. Uh, cause it, it can get, get crazy real quick. So, I'd actually keep it, keep it simple. Um, and uh, what, you just need the basic rig. Um, let's go find a basic rig. So like a, you want a, uh, a camera cage for it. And the basic cage isn't, isn't that much.

Uh, and the things that's, that are really helpful with this is um, kinda zoom in on this guy. Is, um, I'm gonna generally suggest starting simple and using the rails instead of the, um, uh, instead of the magic arm approach. So over here on, um, on CineRigging, I, I, there's two different ways that we've seen people do it.

One of them, this is, uh, how Alden set it up with the magic arm approach. And so you see he's got a cage on here, a cage on here, and he's hooking the magic arm from one to the other. And that can work, you know, that can work. You have to be careful that you don't bang your magic arm because then, then it's, [00:38:00] it's kind of out of whack.

Whereas the rails, it takes a little bit longer to set it up, but it's pretty bomb proof. I mean, it's really hard to jack up the rails. By the time you jack up the rails, something else, something big has gone, has, has then happened. So I'm going to say, you're probably going to want to go with this one. And, um, so I'll, so the key thing on this is, you know, there's, the rails are going to mount up to these.

Let me grab my, you guys can see my mouse pointer, right? 

**Will:** Yep. 

**Eliot:** Okay. But the rails are gonna, um, uh, you'll get two rail blocks, uh, that, that, that's also in the list. And the screws in that rail block should align cleanly with the screw holes on the small rig. Uh, they're all made by the same company, and so all the screw holes mount, the screw mounts align with that.

And so, uh, so you're gonna start off with a rig, um, and that, you know, mounts to the camera. It's pretty clean usually. Um, and I've got a, a rigging video you can, you can look at where I go through and mount something similar on a black magic camera. It's going to be the same kind of thing. Um, let [00:39:00] me show you the, show you that, the, the tutorial under resources, tutorials.

And then I kind of go deep on this, uh, on the, the first Jetset City rigging tutorial. Um, and I just, I just start from, you know, from basically zero, like with all the different pieces of it and walk through, walk through it piece by piece. Of all the different components and how they go together, rigging up the cage, uh, putting in the screws in there, rigging up the phone, adding the, uh, the, the rail blocks to the phone, and two quarter inch washers, because it turns out that the, uh, the default screws that the small rig comes from, comes with.

Our great correct size. All everything matches. They're just one millimeter too long to fit tightly. So you need to put a quarter inch, uh, uh, washer as a spacer. Again, super easy, you know, this is stuff you probably already have. Um, yeah. And then, you know how, how that mounts up. And then I do the same thing on the, uh, on the black magic camera and how, you know, how the [00:40:00] screws go in, how everything tightens up.

And mounting the iPhone on the rails, you know, so things line up pretty well. Adding in the CMO, adding in the MagSafe cooler. You know, so just basically very, very piece by piece, step by step in terms of how all the different pieces go together. And including the tentacle sync, hooking that guy up and verifying that, uh, setting up the time code and verifying that the time code Uh, on the tentacle matches the time code in, uh, in the camera.

So just, you know, all the little details of it. And then once you have all those pieces together, uh, that's, then, then you have, then you have, uh, then it's rigged. Um, yeah, yeah. So for you, I'd say you probably want to do, uh, all right, let's go back here. Products, resources, uh, no, not tutorials, documentation, and I'm going to put the link of, of this, uh, Um, there we go.

Production rigging. There we go. So camera cage, iPhone cage, get it [00:41:00] to match, you know, whichever iPhone, which what's iPhone are you running? 

**Will:** So that's another question that I had. I did just get the brand new one, the pro 16 max, but for this particular thing, I also have my old 14 pro max. 

**Eliot:** Yeah. 

**Will:** Um, is there a big, and again, so I haven't done this before.

So for its purpose, will it be fine to use that iPhone 14? Then I can have my other phone, you know, for actual use while I'm shooting, or is there going to be a big difference or something, a reason I would want the 16 on there? Oh, 

**Eliot:** yeah. Yeah. Um, if you're, I'd say you're going to lean toward wanting the 16 on the phone or on the camera, because, um, what happened between the 14 and the 15 is they switched from a lightning base connector to a USB C base connector and the cooling got a lot and the GPU, it went up a big jump from the 14, the 14, not that big of a jump from 14 to 15, a big jump.

And the 16 also has, has the new USB C connector. And what it means is that we get the [00:42:00] bandwidth that you can get coming out of the phone is, is at least 10 times what the, what the old one is. And that starts to matter. Yeah. And there's like these little things you're going to probably want. None of it costs much.

It's just little details that really help. Um, so for example, in our project production recommendations, um, if you're, if you're traveling around, you're gonna want to travel router, but it sounds like you have your own studio. So you can just set up your, your wifi, however you want. Uh, this network adapter is super useful.

It's like 16 bucks and. It's the thing you want because when you start having a bunch of takes on the phone, trying to get like 30 takes off the phone on wifi is going to take its own sweet time. Uh, whereas you just plug this thing into, uh, because your, your iPhone 16 pro max has USB C. That means that connector is gigabit ethernet and you can get, you know, a gigabit coming off the phone into your network when you're transferring files.

Again, it just, it's all the production stuff. When you start, when you start running, running, running heavy, um, And, uh, and [00:43:00] again, it's useful to have a Mac cover for the digital slate because otherwise the default like iPad or laptop or whatever screen is super shiny. So what happens is it reflects your studio lights and it screws up the optical recognition.

Okay. And this, uh, vertical origin target stand is again, these are inexpensive. It lets you put the, um, uh, drop the origin in your studio, wherever you're, you want very easily. And I, I just recorded, um, and Josh's tutorial is, is, uh, is exactly the right way to go. If you want, um. A little bit more detail in some of the Jetset operations.

I just recorded the introduction, rerecorded the introduction to jetset, so it's up to date, uh, with the, the current current user, informa, user information, user interface stuff. Excuse me. Um, so I'll put that link in in the chat. I, we go. All right. Um, lemme go rediscover where I put the chat. . There it is.[00:44:00] 

There's a chat.

All right.

Uh, okay. Fantastic. So that, and that should help, um, help kind of, uh, get some of the pieces together on this. And let's, let's go through the last few pieces you're going to want on the, um, on the rigging part of it. Go back down here. And I'm just going back to a Jet Set rig, Cine rigging. It's the page on it.

There we go.

All right, there we go. It's the rigging page. And so we've got this, got a cage. Um, and then I'm going to, yes, I'd suggest just getting the 15 millimeter rail blocks. You can just buy these on, on small rig. Um, that's [00:45:00] pretty inexpensive. Uh, the carbon fiber rods and, uh, Then, then you can just rig it. This, uh, this is exactly how I rigged it in the video, and it, it should work pretty well.

Uh, it'll be, it'll be super lightweight. You can run it on a stabilizer. You know, those, those rods don't weigh anything. And the rail blocks don't weigh much, and the cage doesn't weigh much. So you can still run it on a, like an RS two Ronin or something like that. 

**Will:** What is that? ? Oh, 

**Eliot:** it's a, it's a neat little stabilizer.

Uh, so yeah, let's see. Uh, there we go. Actually, it's now an RS3, they've updated it. So they make these nifty little stabilizers, uh, that work really, really well. We like them, we like them a lot. And, um, they, their load capacities can hold basically, uh, one, you know, one DSLR camera and, but the, and the phone is lightweight enough that you can run this on a stock Ronin, um, and you won't overload the Ronin.

[00:46:00] Oh, 

nice. 

That's kind of a, it looks like they may have, did they update it? Let me look at, see if it's the current, current one. Uh, where's the RS? Oh, so they have an RS4. Okay. That's what's going on. Um, and keep, they keep updating these things at a high rate of speed. Go look at the Ronin stabilizers. Okay.

Yeah. So there's an RS4. I haven't even tried the RS4, but I'm sure it'll be as good or better than the RS3. 

Yeah. 

Um, what's the RS4 Pro? Yeah, that's probably, it has a little bit more capacity to load stuff. Let's take a look at this guy. Yeah, there we go. And so this, this works great because the, the, um, the neat thing about this is that, you know, if you've used stabilizers much before there, 

**Will:** So this is all like very foreign to me.

Um, and [00:47:00] that's where I started getting overwhelmed because I didn't have a hard time like finding the green screen stuff and then the lights and I mean, I think I've dropped probably three or four grand so far on like everything so now when I'm looking to spend a decent chunk to just make sure I have what I need to get started, that's where I kind of got paralyzed and then we connected on the, you know, on the comments there.

So I haven't used any of this stuff, bro. I mean, I just 

**Eliot:** yeah. Oh, and it's there, there's, there's a bunch of this stuff. So you're, you're in, you're in the right spot. So this is, this is the, uh, this is the right place to start. Uh, and Josh's course, I mean, just. Yeah. Oh, I'm so glad he came out with that. Cause there was such a need for that to go from soup to nuts in an artist, from a, from a filmmaker perspective, uh, which is doing great.

So I I'd say, you know, I don't think you need to buy anything. I mean, you know, the, um, you can buy the, uh. Uh, the rigging pieces to get the iPhone on that and the cooler and that kind of stuff. It's not going to be that much. And then I'd go take it and go through, go through his, his [00:48:00] course. Uh, and, and cause all the rest of the pieces of it, you know, you've got an, uh, unreal or what are you running on PCs, Macs?

What's your, uh, I'm on, 

**Will:** I'm on a Mac. And in fact, I just bought the brand new Mac M three ultra or whatever, with 264 giga RAM. All right. Yeah, it'll be here next week. But, uh, so which course I've got all of the courses, which one are you, which one specifically are you talking about from Josh? 

**Eliot:** I'd say it's his, um, uh, virtual filmmakers playbook.

Yeah, 

**Will:** the new one. Yeah, that's the one that I've got. The newest one. 

**Eliot:** Cause that's, that's really, I think it's the best. Um, and there's There's different ways to go about it. So Josh's is, is going through with unreal, unreal jet set, compositing infusion, you know, there, there's different ways to do it for the, uh, for a bunch of the middle school, high school kind of stuff.

A lot of them are, uh, are much more familiar with blender. And so if those groups or teams are coming in more familiar with blender, then we've got a blender workflow, that's what I'd say. You know, uh, josh's thing. I mean, it's it's just so good and he'll you'll learn [00:49:00] You'll go through that and you'll come out especially seeing how he does precision light matching between the the virtual and the live action world You'll learn things that you're not going to see on production sets unless you're with a very unusually forward group of people He just I looked at that like dude Oh, that's super, that's super clever.

Um, so yeah, I would, uh, I would just intake that. And, uh, yeah, I think, I think you're going to be off to the races. I think it's, uh, he's, he's, he's great. Are you going to be at NAB? Are you, uh, uh, cause, uh, we're going to bring him out to Las Vegas. So he can, I don't 

**Will:** think, I mean, maybe, I don't know, getting ready to do some traveling, but we've got another album coming out in April.

So I'll be sitting here mixing and mastering. Pretty much nonstop and then I just bought all this equipment, but, uh, let me get you guys back after you got some, some other folks. Um, I'll, I'll comment again on our little chain here on, uh, you know, um, on the course there, but, and I'll stay in touch.

Definitely appreciate your help, man. And, [00:50:00] and I'll let you know how it goes. 

**Eliot:** Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. The link up and we're, we're here. All right. Hey, Kumar.

Hello. Oh, yeah, we got ourselves a good echo. Hold it, hold 

**Kumar:** it, hold it. Let me be slowly with the

Okay, let me turn off the

Yeah, that's much better. Much better. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Let me. Yes. So how are you doing? 

**Eliot:** Good. Good. A little crazy.

Where is the ramp toward NAB and then, uh, but I can't looking forward to hearing how I hear it. Let me just, uh, stop the recording.