NC_2026_09_16

[music] Hi, this is Allison Sheridan of the Nosilicas podcast hosted at podfeed.com, a technology geek podcast with an ever so slight Apple [music] bias. Today is Wednesday, September 16th, 2026, and this is show number 1,115. [music] Now, if the show is coming out on a Wednesday, you know what that means? There is no live show this weekend. We'll be back in another week, but we're off to see Lindsay up in Canada, and we're very, very excited about it. But we can't miss the show, so you're getting it early. One of these days, I got to give myself some grace and be late, but uh I think I've banked enough early time so far. Well, no faffing about. Let's just dig right in. As I said in my 2022 article introducing CleanShot X, I'm addicted to screenshot apps. I take a lot of screenshots for the podcast, as you can imagine. You see them in the show notes all the time. But I also find that screenshots are a helpful and very useful tool for sending bug reports to software developers. I also do a lot of tech support for family and friends. And it's great to be able to point to a button with an arrow in a screenshot or maybe add some helpful text to a screenshot. You may be yelling at your phone, but Allison, I thought you love Shotter for screenshots. You'd be right. I love Shatter, too. The annotations are playful and easy to use, and for a simple screenshot, it's still my go-to app. has a really nice tool to drop a rounded border on screenshots that otherwise would be pure white, which blends into white emails or articles, but it turns out you can load two screenshot apps at the same time, or even more. For example, I always reach for screenshot X to take a scrolling screenshot. In my article about Brett Turstra's Marked QL app to render Markdown with Quicklook, I wanted to include the settings screen for the app, but it was a long scroll to see all of it. No problem with CleanShot X. You can select an area and then tap the button that says autoscroll and it smoothly scrolls at a speed it can record. Shouter provides scrolling screenshot options too, but I favor Clean Shot X for this task. I use both tools for what I find they do best. When I want to record a short video to explain a problem to developer to a developer or to teach a friend, that's where Cleanshot X really shines. You can even upload your videos to CleanShot Cloud so you can link to them. We'll talk a little more about that later. You can get Cleanshot X from the developers website at cleansshot.com and by the way that's an affiliate link and you can also get it through setup. Now on David Ross advice I finally broke down and I started paying for the formac for iOS device power user plan on setup. Once I made that decision I found that I was much more likely to leverage that subscription where before I was just wasting the money because I wasn't able to use it on all of my devices. So now I reach for it first before buying apps outright and Steve can join in the fun too with his devices. And why am I telling you all of this backstory that you probably already knew? Because CleanShot X just announced a huge new feature of the tool called studio mode. If you have an active setup subscription or you're within the first year of your one-time license purchase, you don't pay anything extra for this amazing feature of CleanShot 5.0. Studio mode is a brand new editor that turns Cleanshot into a quite capable screencasting application. Now, I use Screenflow from Teleream for my video tutorials for Screencast Online. And while CleanShot isn't quite ready to replace it yet, it does an awful lot of what I use the $200 ScreenFlow app for today. I'm especially interested in new apps in this space because Teleream doesn't seem to be investing any time in ScreenFlow over the past few years. As you listen to me talk about this, I don't want you to let my need for a professional app put you off from listening to how cool studio mode in CleanShot 5.0 is for normal people. I should mention that I'm kind of sometimes calling it CleanShot X and sometimes calling it CleanShot. That's because it appears that they might be migrating their name to just CleanShot, but it's still when you launch the app, it still says CleanShot X. So, I'm just going to bounce around and call it both. Now, when you initiate a recording in of any video with CleanShot X, you're first asked to select a region of the screen or a window and then you give the option to record either an animated GIF or normal video. But now you have a third option called record in studio mode. Once you've selected studio mode, you let it roll like any other video recording method while you work on whatever it is you want to demonstrate. The magic happens when you hit stop. Your video editor opens in a very fullfeatured timeline video editor. You see your video in the upper right pane with the timeline across the bottom. But that's not the coolest part. Cleanshot adds automatic zooming when you do something in the video that it thinks could benefit from a zoom. For example, I recorded activity monitor and I went up to the menu bar and I chose view all processes hierarchically from the drop- down menu. Cleanshot X automatically zoomed in on that action. so those watching the video could see it more clearly. Having an auto mode is like this is great, but what if it zooms up too much? You can change the zoom level and set it to the same level for all zooms. If you click on the zoom track in the timeline, you can automatically add another zoom in a different part of the timeline. You can grab either end of the zoom to lengthen or shorten the time it zoomed, and you can slide it left and right to change when it zooms. The ability to have both the automatic zooming applied and full manual control to tweak those settings is the perfect sweet spot. Now, the main video track can be trimmed from either end just by grabbing the handles. Additionally, you can split tracks either by moving the scrubber and holding down commandB or by using the little scissors icon in the bottom of the left toolbar and clicking at your desired location. With the scissors selected, as you move along the timeline, the preview is showing you exactly where you are. So, it's pretty easy to hit just the right spot. Clicking the scissors again gets you out of that split mode. Now, to cut out a section, you need to select two spots to split and then uncheck the scissors and tap the section you want to remove. If you want more granularity when editing, you can zoom the timeline with the plus minus slider above the timeline. Or you can use your fingers to pinch in and out on a trackpad to zoom in and out. You can also use the classic double expanding arrows icon in the upper right to make the video full screen and hide all of the tools and the timeline, leaving only a progress slider and a play pause button. It's a good way to check whether your edits are looking good before you export your final video. Now, before you record your screen with CleShot, you have the option to enable animation of cursor clicks and whether to record keystrokes. But just like Fancy Pants screencasting software, studio mode lets you enable these options after the fact, even if you didn't enable them before you did the recording. In studio mode, there's a left sidebar with six options. The first of which is the cursor. From the cursor section, you can choose whether or not to show the cursor, change the shape and size of the cursor, and change the zoom between natural and smooth. You can choose to have a press effect, which makes the cursor kind of shrink a little bit as the cursor is clicked, so it looks like it's kind of going into the screen, and you really feel like you experienced a click. If that's not obvious enough for your audience to notice, you can add a ripple animation to the click. This gives you a colorful circle that radiates out from the click. Still not enough options? You can change the color of the circle and choose whether to have it be solid or a hollow circle. When you're screencasting, it's not uncommon to just leave the cursor still while explaining something. In fact, it's desirable to leave the cursor alone rather than frenetically moving it around. I find it's often even better if the cursor gracefully disappears when I'm not moving it, so there's no distraction. CleanShot X's Studio Mode lets you do that with a checkbox. There's a separate checkbox to hide the cursor when typing, which is great because it's also not uncommon for the cursor to end up sitting in a weird place, maybe covering up the field where you're typing, and you'd like them to be able to see. All right, kick back and relax. We're only done with the first section of studio mode. The second option on the lefth hand side allows you to show keystrokes on screen if you used any. This can be a great way to help your audience understand how to replicate what you're demonstrating to them. We all have our own taste, so Clean Shot X gives you a lot of flexibility on how and where to show the keystrokes. There's a slider for size. You can toggle between a dark background with white text or light with black text. The text can be in any of the four corners, dead center, or centered at the top, bottom left, or right. I'm curious whether anyone ever chooses anything but bottom center. Maybe bottom left. I don't know. Anyway, you often don't want to show every single keystroke like when you're typing. So, the default is to show only command keys like option and control. But if you do want to see all of them, you can definitely show all keys. When splitting clips, I expected to be able to show keystrokes on for one clip and off for the next, but the show keystrokes toggle applies to the entire recording. That's a bit of an area for improvement in my opinion. All right, let's go down to the next one is audio. When making recordings with CleanShot, you have the option to enable your microphone in studio mode. On the audio tab, you could choose whether or not to include the microphone audio that was captured. You can also set the overall volume for the microphone. In some situations, it's quite useful to record system audio while conducting a demonstration, and you can toggle that on and off and change its volume in the sound section for CleanShot X. Just like with show keystrokes, your settings for microphone and system audio affect the entire project, not on a per clip basis. In fact, you don't get any kind of audio track to look at as you do for video. Next up is camera. Now, I am not a big fan of picturein picture of a talking head in demonstration videos, but you know what? If that's your jam, you go, girl. You can record from your camera with CleanShot X in addition to recording your screen. The camera tab in studio mode allows you to toggle the camera on and off, change the size from.5x to 2x, and change the shape. Your choices of shape are circle or square or portrait or landscape rectangular area. Oddly, even though they're both rectangles, they call the landscape version rectangle and the portrait mode vertical. Just like with show keystrokes, you have the same nine positions for your talking head. Maybe I'll make a screencast where I make my camera huge and I just plop it right in the center so nobody can see what I'm doing. That would be awesome. All right. You can automatically flip the camera so your Star Wars nerd t-shirt can be read properly. You can also choose to have the video automatically shrink when the video is being zoomed in. For my measurements, it shrinks the picture and picture to 80.8% of its original size. It's kind of a not nice subtle effect. The next icon in the sidebar looks like the picture icon that usually would let you insert an image, but that's not what it's for. It reveals two controls that affect the look and feel of the video. The top half of this control is dedicated to background. By default, your video will just fill the screen with no background. But if you choose one of the gradients, solid colors, or even wallpapers, your video will be offset from the edges with the background of your choice. It's quite lovely, actually. Gives your video a nice, professionally produced look. The aspect ratio controls are interesting. By default, it's set to auto, which means the video's a aspect ratio matches the area you captured. But what if you want to make sure that your video looks good in the 16x9 video format on YouTube? You can change it to that aspect ratio and it does so automatically. But maybe you want to post this video on Tik Tok. You can choose something like 3x4. You have control of the percentage of padding on the video, whether and how much shadow you want on your video, and how rounded the corners are. All done by percentage. They do something quite clever while you're changing these slider controls. If the video scrubber is on a zoomed portion of your video, while you're moving the padding, shadow, and corner sliders, the preview window changes to full screen. This shows a real attention to detail in the design. The final control in the left sidebar is motion blur. Motion blur has a slider from low to high and then two zoom animations, smooth and dynamic. Took me a bit to figure out what this was doing and when. I couldn't quite tell the difference between the effects. While playing the video at normal speed, I couldn't see the difference between the two animations, even when motion blur was set to high. It wasn't until I very slowly moved the timeline scrubber while a zoom was ending that I noticed the entire video was blurry. It also blurred rapid cursor movement. I've been screencasting for around 15 years, and in all that time, I cannot think of a single time I'd wished I had a feature that would make my content blurry while moving. But, you know, their marketing video makes it look really slick. Maybe I'm just old school. Oh, we know the answer to that. I am old school. All right. When you record normal, not studio mode videos with CleanShot, you can enable cursor animations, keystrokes, pictureand picture audio from your microphone, and system audio. When you're done recording these normal videos, they will open in the new interface for studio mode, but several of the features I've described will not be available. Your keystrokes and mouse clicks, for example, will be permanently in the video. So, they're like embedded in it, so you can't disable or enable them. You can toggle the microphone and system audio on and off, but you can't remove the pictureand picture you recorded or change it at all. You can add nice backgrounds and change your aspect ratio and use that silly motion blur if you it makes you happy. When you're done, you can save your studio mode projects in their native cleanshot video format for editing later. One of my favorite things about CleShot is that they give you cloud storage for your videos. Instead of trying to squeeze a huge video file into an email to a developer to show them a problem you found, you can tap on the export button and just save it to CleanShot XCloud. And in a few seconds, you get a link to send. In the web interface, you can name and tag the file, which helps with cleaning up the videos at a later date. You even get a notification when someone views your video. For example, I just sent one to a developer team I'm rather cross with right now, and I know they've watched the video, but they had not written back as of the time of the writing. The pricing is amazingly good. If you buy CleanShop Basic, it's $35. Pay once and use forever, no subscription. That gives you one year of updates and 1 gigabyte of cloud storage for 35 bucks. Now, if you pay annually for Clean Shop Pro at 10 bucks a month, you get all the updates and unlimited storage for your videos. Like, no matter what they do, you get all those updates. You even get a custom domain and branding and a few more features. With the setup version of CleanShot X, you get 10 GB of video storage in the cloud. I think that's more than fair for all those prices. Don't forget, this is also a fantastic screenshot tool with excellent annotations. Cleanshot X by itself is almost paying for my subscription to set app. So I I can't recommend it enough. The bottom line is that CleanShot X has been transformed into a very capable screencasting tool with no increase in price, which is astonishing. I think for 90% of users, this is going to meet all of their needs. I'd love to see it grow into a replacement for ScreenFlow in the following ways. I'd like them to add an audio editor timeline. I'd like to allow them to allow controls by clip. So, like whether to show the cursor or not in one clip and not in another clip because that's something you kind of want to turn on and off. I like them to allow adding new video clips and even stills because I record my screencasts in a bunch of different chunks. I do don't do it all in one fell swoop. In fact, it takes me about a week to make a 30 40minute video. I'd like them to add the ability to overlay to overlap tracks and create transitions such as a crossfade or maybe a page curl between clips. Finally, annotations such as arrows and rectangles, you know, with transitions, too. I don't use those often, but it's the kind of thing that's handy when you want to just point to something. This is what we're talking about right here on the screen. I got to say, I will definitely be using every bit of what CleanShot has given us already. And again, I still can't believe we're getting all of this with no price increase. Now, if you want to check out this amazing tool, go to my affiliate link at cleanshot.com. The link's in the show notes. One of the most powerful tools that I sometimes take for granted on my Mac is Keyboard Maestro. I have a lot of cool little automations running that I sometimes I forget they aren't even part of the operating system because I've been using them for so long. I would not call myself a power user of the tool compared to some other folks, but I know my way around it well enough. This week I solved a peculiar problem that had been bugging me for years and I did it with Keyboard Maestro. Well, let's talk about that problem to be solved. We were just talking about CleanShot 5.0. And in that article, I explained to you that like ScreenFlow, it can record keystrokes and display them in the video recording. This is an important feature of Screencasting that helps keep your audience allow them to follow along better with what you're demonstrating. Now, if you don't create screencasts, but you do say demos to live audiences, you can use a tool like Keyscreen or Keycaster to display your keystrokes on screen to help the audience follow along. I use Keyscreen all the time for my demonstrations. But if you're recording the screen, there's a problem. Both Screenflow and CleanShot allow you to choose to display either all keystrokes or just modifier keys such as command, control, and option in in combination with regular keys. For example, if you hold down option, controlV to paste without formatting, it shows the keys option, control, and a capital V, and it shows it on screen. Overall, this is a dandy feature. There's one set of keys that the screencasting tools I've tested cannot seem to capture, and that's the function keys. Now, you might be wondering why I would care to show these particular keys. Well, in my most recent Screencast Online tutorial, I was teaching a bunch of my tiny Mac tips. One of them was how if you hold down option F1 or option F2, the brightness keys, you can jump directly into system settings, right to the display settings pane. No faffing about launching system settings, finding displays, and then selecting it. That's built-in functionality that really speeds up getting to the right place in the labyrinth that is system settings. You can also hold down option and any one of the three volume keys, F10, F11, or F12, and that'll jump you right to sound settings in system settings. Well, I was on a roll with modifier keys added to function keys. So, I also wanted to demonstrate how you can make teeny adjustments to brightness and volume if you had option and shift to their respective function keys. If the function keys didn't show in this video, the tutorial would be much harder to follow. It would even look wrong because the option key would show and the shift key would show but not the function key. So, as I said, hold down option F1, all the op audience would see would be the option key. That would look stupid. I simply had to find a good permanent solution to this problem. And the awesome Keyboard Maestro was the perfect tool for the job. While the final solution may look intimidating, it's only because the steps needed to be replicated for each function key you want to capture. The individual macros are quite simple. At a high level, what we're going to do is disable the normal way the function keys operate, and then we're going to turn around and put the functionality right back with Keyboard Maestro. This requires a little bit of setup. By default on the Mac, the function keys aren't really acting as function keys. I know that sounds funny, but see if I can explain this. If you tap the F1 and F2 keys, they don't do F1 and F2 functions. What you see is the brightness go up and down. That's a special thing that's going on when you hit that key. If you hold down the globe key in the bottom lefthand corner, it also says Fn next to it. Then F1 through F12. Those keys act like function keys. Okay, you with me? Function keys don't act as function keys by default. For this trick to work, we have to swap that behavior. This is going to make sense in a minute. I I I think I hope so. What I need you to do to follow along is open system settings, keyboard, and go to keyboard shortcuts. Select function keys in the left side sidebar. Toggle on use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys. So under this toggle, it explains exactly what I'm trying to say. When this option is selected, that is turning it on, press and hold the globe key to use the special features printed on each key. So the special features are those things like brightness and volume. So now F1 through F12 are going to act like function keys, but if you hold down the globe, then you get the things that are printed above those keys. Hope that's clear. All right. If you have nothing assigned to a function key, tapping it now will just kind of boop at you. But if you hold down the globe key with a function key, then it's going to execute those special features. So, for example, globe F2 will increase the brightness of the display. Now, this may be the way you would like your function keys to behave anyway, and it's always felt backwards to you. If so, you're welcome for this embedded tiny Mac tip, and you should stop listening right here because I'm going to change it back, but we're going to do it with Keyboard Maestro. So, for the rest of us, we're going to go do something that sounds nutty. We're going to use keyboard maestro macros to bring back the original functionality. When we're done, we won't have to use globe to use the function keys to do things like control brightness and volume. Okay, even to me this sounds kind of baddy, but let's soldier on cuz it does work. Keyboard Maestro is incredibly capable tool and I'm not going to do a full tutorial on it, but a quick primer will be helpful. The Keyboard Maestro interface has three columns. The left column is for groups. You can group your macros by app if you want, but you can also group them just any way you like. Grouping by app is cool because you can have the macros only function within a certain app. For example, I wrote a macro that only exists when I'm editing the podcast in Hindenburg. The rest of the time, I could hit the same keystroke and it doesn't do anything at all. Now, the second column is a list of the macros you have in the selected group. At the bottom of this second column, there's a plus button to create a new macro within the group. Pretty easy so far. Now, with the macro selected, the third column is where you build, view, and test the macro. At the bottom of the third column is a plus button, amongst other things. And this button pops up all of the available actions you can add to your macro. That's it for the primer. See, that wasn't so bad. Let's walk through how to create our first macro to return the default functionality to one of our function keys. And that'll allow ScreenFlow and CleanShot to display those keys when we're recording video. In our left column, we can tap the plus button at the bottom to create a group, and I'm going to call it demo. Since these macros will be used while demonstrating in any application, we'll leave the defaults for the new group to be available everything everywhere all at once. Next, we select the plus button in the second column to create a new macro in that group. Creating one macro to put the functionality back on the function keys is quite easy. To solve my problem, I created 16 different macros, but their form is very similar. I created the first one, duplicated it, made a fire a few minor tweaks, and then moved on to the next one. All right, the first macro I added was to return normal functionality to the F1 key, which should be to turn the brightness down. When invited to give the macro memorable name, I chose show F1 key brightness down. I'm clever that way. All right, the fun part is now in the right pane. Below the macros's name is a checkbox that says triggered by any of the following, and you're invited to add a trigger with the green plus box. You can add more than one trigger, but we're only going to do one. When you press the plus button next to new trigger, you're going to see an alarming number of options, but don't panic. The first option is hotkey, and that's what we want. We want to trigger this macro when the F1 key is pressed. Now, you get the familiar field to type that hotkey. Super easy. All right, we're actually almost done. We have a macro and keyboard bicer knows how to trigger it, but it doesn't yet know what action to take. At the bottom of the right pane is a plus button which will pop up a list of the gazillion actions you can choose from. Again, do not panic. At the top of the ginormous list is a search field. We want F1 without the globe key to trigger a brightness change as it did before. Search for brightness returns a list of four options. decrease and increase brightness, but also small decrease and increase of brightness. For this macro, we can simply select decrease screen brightness and drag it down into the action field and our macro is done. Now, it sounded like a lot, but we really only did three things after creating the group. Added a new macro and named it, added a hotkey trigger, and told it what action we wanted for the hotkey. That's all we did. And with those three simple steps, now a tap of F1 brings the brightness down just like nature intended. More importantly, and for reasons I can't really explain, now when you do a screen recording, your software will see the F1 key being pressed. Once I had F1 working properly, I only needed 15 more macros for my tutorial. And why so many, you might wonder. Well, I needed to show how brightness up and down worked by themselves by tapping F1 and F2. But the big excitement I was really there to demonstrate was that adding the option key to both of them brings up displays and system settings. I had to duplicate my original macro and add ones for option F1 and option F2 as the triggers. Likewise, I wanted to demo holding down option and any of the three volume keys, mute, volume down, and volume up. And that's what's going to get them to the sound settings. You can see how the number of macros I had to create was multiplying. five function keys providing their normal functionality and then the same five with the option key held down. We're at 10 already. Then I decided to teach another trick. If you hold down shift an option with volume up down and brightness up down, you get tiny incremental changes instead of the bigger default changes. Remember that was one of the actions we found when we searched for brightness. I know this one is really for true control freaks amongst us, but it's fun and people might learn something from that. So that anyway that gave me four more to do now that I'm doing shift and option. The final trick was to show the audience how to have the volume keys play a little boop sound to let you know how loud or quiet your changes were when you're changing the volume. That used to be the normal behavior, but Apple took it away from us indeed 10.10. If you hold the shift key down with the volume up or down, you get it back. That gave me the last two macros, bringing the grand total to 16. Now, the real proof of success was when I recorded my tutorial video with ScreenFlow, added a video action to show modifier keys, and I could see my function keys. I put a screenshot from the final video in the show notes to prove it. I'm quite skilled at coming up with nifty automations like this, but I often forget how I did these things or like why I did it the way I did it. I was worried that if I succeeded in remembering that I'd even created these macros next time I was doing a video that needed the function keys, it would be really helpful if I left myself some breadcrumbs about how to enable all of this. In particular, I needed to remind myself that I'd have to toggle the way function keys work for any of this to work. So, I created another macro, but all it is is a read me that actually just shows a couple of comment boxes to remind me of how it works and what toggles to flip. After I got all 16 of these working as designed, I found a problem. It turns out the F11 key wouldn't mute the audio, even though it should because I gave it that macro. Turns out F11 is assigned to show desktop by the system. In order to use F11 with these macros, you have to go back into keyboard shortcuts, but this time under mission control, uncheck the box to show desktop with F11. You can bet I added that to my readme macro. If I ever need to show the remaining seven function keys in a video, I'll have some work to do. But for now, I'm going to take a rest. The bottom line is that this is a pretty narrow need I'm describing, but I think it shows how easy Keyboard Maestro is to solve interesting problems, and I was so proud of my solution, I felt compelled to share. I also now have an article I can reference in 6 months when I can't figure out how I did this or why I did it the way I did it. If you want my macros, I've put a link in the show notes where you can download a zip file of the entire group. When you import the macros, make sure you have your settings to disable any imported macros and then carefully review what I've given you. Macros are like little executables. They can change things on your system, so they are very dangerous. Mine aren't, of course, but you know, practice good hygiene even with a trusted source. One final bit of advice. When you're not actively screencasting while needing to see the function keys, you might want to disable the entire group and toggle the function keys back to their original behavior in system settings. And one more thing, somehow, and I don't know how this is, apps like keycreen and keycaster, which display type characters on screen, can show function keys without any of this fra. I wrote a note today trying to get these developers to talk to each other. Maybe the CleanShot and Screenflow people can learn from uh Ram Patra of of Keyscreen and he can tell them how does he do it with that uh software to do it real time and it doesn't work with screencasting software. If I find out the answer to why these things don't work, I'll be sure to tell you. Well, I have a confession to make. The Nosiliccastaways have been so generous lately that I actually forgot a donation from back in August. One of the founding members of the Podfeed Start Club, Kevin, made a contribution to the show. When he bought me a coffee, his note on the donation said, and I'm quoting here, "Steve is an awesome producer, and this is so Allison is less snarky and forgives me for missing the live show last week." Now, he lives on the edge at times, but I appreciate that he spent his hard-earned money by going to podfey.com/donate just so he could make amends. If you'd like to invent some imagine transgression and ask for absolution too, considering being cool like Kevin and making a donation there as well. Maybe he and John will let you join the snark club. [music] Well, it's that time of the week again. It's time for Chitchat across the pond. This is episode number 841 for September 14th, 2026. And I'm your host, Allison Sheridan. This week, our guest is the lovely Steve Sheridan, here to talk about the technology behind how he captured and produced an amazing short video of the total solar eclipse we witnessed in Spain this year. Welcome back to the show, Steve. >> Well, it's good to be back, Allison. It's been way too long. I I should come on more often. You know, it was funny. We were uh I was asking uh Siri when the last time Steve was on and uh he hasn't been on chithat across the pond in a long time, but back in 2019 on Noelcast number 741, you did a segment on how you captured the solar eclipse we saw in Chile, which was also very cool. But this year, you really took things up a notch. We're going to get into all of the details of the cameras and the software you used and how you mixed it all together. But I want to start with what your vision was for this particular solar eclipse before we got started. Yeah. So, you know, I like to have a goal for uh what I'm trying to achieve for the video that I'm shooting. And this one was basically to get the uh the three major phases of the eclipse and also to get the sun setting u because it's still partially eclipsed. Um so, and it was a short eclipse. It was only um a minute 95 seconds of totality. >> I think it was a total of 95. >> Oh, I'm sorry. You're right. 95 seconds. It's a minute 35 total. So, really things have to be in place. You don't have a lot of time to mess around with cameras and set up. >> Now, to be fair, the one how long was the one we saw in Texas? We've spent a fortune to get to to uh uh Austin and see the eclipse. And how long did we actually witness totality? >> I think it was less than 5 seconds due to cloud cover basically. And the clouds opened up briefly while it was in totality and then closed up again. [laughter] >> Yeah, that was the shortest one we've seen yet. Technically, we did see it, which makes this was our fifth solar eclipse, right? >> That's right. Five. So, I think we can officially be labeled as eclipse chasers. And and by the way, a sixth one, the annular eclipse in Utah. Don't forget that one. >> Yeah, we could count that one. So, back on creating this this uh video, you wanted to get particular phases. Explain what the phases of the eclipse are that you wanted to capture. >> Yeah. So there's the partial phase where the the moon is just partially covering the sun or the the shadow I should say. Uh the shadow of the moon on the sun. Wait, am I looking at this right? [laughter] >> No, the moon is between us and the sun. >> Correct. Yeah. So the moon is blocking us. So >> we're in the shadow. >> It's really not the shadow, but we're in the shadow. So the moon blocking us. Uh partial means that part of the sun is showing still. But as you approach um totality, there's a special phase called the diamond ring where it's just a sliver of the of the sun's outer surface and a very thin crescent with a very bright spot where the sun is still shining through. So it's like the corona plus a bright spot which looks like a diamond ring. >> What causes that effect? Um, well, it's just it's so bright in that one spot that is still uh totally visible, not blocked at all. But >> it's just what's left. It's not because of a crater on the moon or anything like that. >> No, it's it's just what's left of the crescent and it slowly gets smaller and smaller and smaller until it's just a a bright dot almost. >> Okay. So, that's called the diamond ring and you see one as it goes into totality and then you get totality. >> Correct. And that's what lasted in this case only 95 seconds. And then you see the same thing coming out on the other side. The o equal and opposite diamond ring effect as it uh >> kind of a it makes it even flashier. You know that you get to see this effect as it as it goes in and out. And then in our case, like you said, it was going to be setting while it was still eclipsed. And we saw that down >> uh yeah, sorry, partially eclipsed. And we saw that down in Chile. It went behind a mountain, which was a really cool effect. But what I'm forgetting was it, but it was just on the horizon here, right? >> Yeah, there was a a set of hills in the distance. I wouldn't call it a mountain, but um you could see it definitely set a clear line of sight to the horizon. So, it was a clear shot of the sunset. >> Okay. >> All the way down. >> You wanted to get all of that, but >> anybody [clears throat] can take a video of that with a big enough zoom lens, but you you actually went after this with four cameras. And again, we're going to get into the details of what each one does, but what what were the the four types of cameras you were going to go for? >> Yeah. So, uh, the first main one was the camcorder to zoom in on the Eclipse. The second was the DJI Osmo Pocket 3, and that was basically set up for audience reaction. The third was a GoPro, and there I'm trying to get an effect called shadow bands, which we can talk about later, and maybe the uh the shadow of the eclipse as it swept across the ground. And then the last was an Insta 360 full 360 camera stationary. >> Right. So this is what's going to make it more complicated to produce. But what I think really created something unusual from this. Before we get into the uh the details, which is is a lot of fun and obviously the nerd part that we all love. Um, explain why it's so extraordinary that we have eclipses because eclipses don't exist to total eclipses of the sun from the moons of other planets don't happen. Is that right? Not like we have here. We just have a an incredible coincidence that the distance from the the moon from the earth to the moon compared to the distance from the earth to the sun is 400 times closer. The moon is 400 times closer to us than the sun. but it's also 400 times smaller in diameter. So they just happen to match up at almost precisely the same size. Now that varies a little bit depending on how far the moon is away from us and it does follow an ellipse, not a circle, but most of the time it's almost identical to the sun's apparent size and therefore you get a just perfect covering of the sun with the moon. >> So that's why we were able to see an annular eclipse was because the moon was closer right >> farther from us. >> Shoot. farther. I always >> It appeared smaller. >> I get it backwards every single time. So, it was farther away. So, it appeared smaller. So, it left a ring. And with that, you can't look at the eclipse because that's still way too bright. It'll burn your eyes out. >> You cannot look at an eclipse solar eclipse unless it's in totality, at least safely, with your eyes. >> Um, and an annular still has it's uh still has a ring of the actual sun's surface showing and it's bright. Yeah, >> it's amazing how bright it is outside with just a small amount of the sun showing. Even like the diamond ring, it's still it's darker, but it's still bright outside. Bright enough that you could read and >> nothing nothing's like the total eclipse. Now, if the moon was closer, same size, but a lot closer, it would completely obscure it, which wouldn't might not be as interesting either. >> Yeah, you can get pretty close. Um, I mean, we don't, the moon never gets close enough in our case to obscure the beauty of what we call the corona, which is the surrounding atmosphere surrounding the the sun. And that's pretty large. It it's the glowing stuff that you can safe safely look at when the sun's main disc is blocked, >> right? >> Then what you see is a glowing corona. And normally you can't see it. The sun's too bright. That's big. So even if the moon were 10% bigger, you'd probably still see >> it's part of the corona, maybe 5% bigger. >> But again, we're we're special in our solar system at least. >> Yeah. And and at this point in time, because the moon is gradually getting farther and farther away. >> Okay. So not anytime soon though, right? >> No. Millions of years. >> All right. So, one of the pieces that makes all of this work is that you packed uh two tripods in your luggage to be able to hold the camcorders. And um you're smart enough and traveled enough that you knew not to put any of these expensive cameras in your check luggage, but the tripods had to fit in check luggage. And then what happened, Steve? And then uh Iberia Airlines I won't say lost. They forgot to fly our luggage from uh LAX to Spain. >> Yeah. Yeah. So >> five. >> Sorry. >> So we did not have that luggage for the first five days of our trip. And that was about how I think it was day five when the eclipse occurred. Maybe day six. >> Yeah. I think it was the day before the eclipse that we finally uh got the luggage. But we were we were sweating bullets. I mean, you can wash your underwear in the sink or something. You can get by with that, but how do you do this video without those tripods? >> Yeah, you have to have a stable stable platform. And tripod is the only way to do it e easily. And without tripods, I wasn't going to get the shots I needed. Luckily, we were able to uh skip a a tour, a walking tour, I think, in Madrid, and we found a uh giant department store was really cool that had everything. And they had exactly two tripods. One one big one that would hold your camcorder. And what was the second one was our idea was that for the >> That one I think we used for the uh the Insta 360. >> Okay. Because that one was a little more important to get up. >> No, no, I'm sorry. No, for the Osmo Pocket 3. >> Okay. Okay. So, we bought those two and uh as it turned out, you got this the second two tripods and that actually gave you more flexibility to do even more because you ended up with a uh a plethora of tripods by the time we got there. >> Yes, plenty of tripods. >> All right, so let's build this up now. Um the setup, we saw the eclipse on the top of the main building of a winery, which was a cool place to do it while Steve is >> not that place. [laughter] >> No. And it was a private party, so there was only 30 or so of us there. And uh we were on the top of the building and plus we had wine, so that was cool. You didn't end up take partaking of much, but I just sat back and watch you work and sip some nice wines. Um, but anyway, being on the roof, there was there was this nice patio where they told you everybody was going to be standing and that you could go out on the on the rock covered roof and put your cameras in place and and you wouldn't be bothered. It didn't quite turn out the way we expected. >> That's what they told me. [laughter] >> Well, they also allowed Jean Luke, our resident astronomer, to be out there with me, >> right? >> The two of us were allowed to be on the roof, >> but anarchy ensued later. But anyway, so let's start with the uh camcorder. What describe what your camcorder is and why this was the right tool for the first job. >> So this is what I would call a proumer camcorder is Panasonic. I'll I'll go ahead and say the the number HC WXF991 and its feature uh well it's a 4K camcorder and it zooms 25 to1 and I really wanted that zoom and I wanted that resolution. So, it's perfect for zooming in on the eclipse and getting a full frame. >> Right now, you you did not put that anywhere near the crowd. >> No. So, that's the one where you do not want any blockage. You don't want anyone walking in front of that. So, I went to the farthest edge of the building that I could go. And by the way, no railings on this rooftop. So, you had to be a little careful about how you're walking around, especially when it got dark. >> Yeah. By the way, when it gets dark, it gets dark. It's like nighttime. >> Yeah. It's It's Yeah, it's like night. So, I put it at the far edge where no one could walk between because that was the edge of the building. Set it up on the the biggest tripod we had, your Manfrtto, the one that had to go in the suitcase. >> Replacing the one that you forgot in Chile, but we won't bring that up yet again. >> No. >> And just and just set that up. Um, and it's it was very stable. A little bit of a challenge since the the roof of this building had rocks all over it. So, I had to kind of settle the legs of the tripod into the rocks. But once once I got that in, it was fine. >> Not little pebbles. They're like 2, three inch diameter rocks. >> Yeah. River rocks. Smooth, but still rocks. >> Now, there's a trick to actually figuring out where to point the camcorder. >> Yeah. Um, since I don't want to be moving the camera while the eclipse is occurring, I just want a steady frame and and let the let the sun travel through it. I had to make sure that during the eclipse and a little bit before for the diamond ring and and after for the diamond ring that it could travel the distance through that frame without leaving it and have the totality period roughly in the center. So basically the way you do that is you measure how much time it takes for the sun to travel across the frame at and this also depends on your zoom. uh get that time and then cut that in half and you know that's when to start the beginning of your eclipse run or you just hit record and let it be and uh you know it'll travel halfway across totality occurs in the middle and then it'll travel out. But you'll catch both diamond rings. >> I was glad to see you used elapse time adder my little app to calculate some of that. >> I did. [laughter] >> Now the other advantage of doing that is you got to enjoy the eclipse >> right? So I'm not having to aim or or you know hit record. Everything is free running at that point. There is one there is one manual step before and after totality which we can talk about but other than that it's it's hands off. >> Yeah it's it's a good time for that part. >> Okay. So, when you're shooting uh the sun, you you need to use a solar filter, whether it's your eyes or a camera that's zoomed in, a real wide frame camera, real wide angle. Um, you could damage a lens, but it's it's harder to because you're not getting a lot of focus light. But >> probably the sensor you'd damage. You could. I mean, but you've taken pictures of the sun before with an iPhone, and you don't damage it just by a photo, right? If you're staring at it, >> right, >> with a long video, that could damage it over time. Anyway, so I I have a case where I would damage the uh my sensor immediately with a 25 to one zoom. So, solar filter is required anytime the sun has any of the surface exposed. That means right up to the diamond ring. However, when when you have the solar filter on, you don't get the diamond ring effect. What you see is the sliver, just the sliver and no glowing bright diamond >> because so much is being uh filtered out on purpose. >> Right. Right. And so, right before the sliver goes to nothing, you pull off the solar filter or in my case, screw it off and then you boom, you get the diamond ring effect. It's not enough sunlight to to hurt your lens because it it's a minimal amount and it's brief. It's seconds, not, you know, minutes. So that way you can capture the diamond ring totality. Also, you don't need a filter. You don't want a filter. You wouldn't see anything if you had one. And then as it comes out of totality and the other diamond ring starts forming, you let that let that view go for a few seconds and then you got to put back the the solar filter. So, you're taking a little bit of a risk, but it's worth it. That's one of the main reasons you own that camera is to get this. >> Yeah. Yeah. And and I've done this before, and it hasn't damaged my my sensor in uh in any previous camera. So, I'm pretty sure that the time I the time that I'm exposing the sensor and the amount of light is okay. >> Okay. Now, did you record any audio with the camcorder? >> I did. Um, I I recorded audio with all of the cameras as I recall. Uh, I didn't use very much of it, but there are times there are clips from each of the cameras where I use some audio. There was one camera where I used mostly its audio for the entire >> And there's an advantage in editing too of having the audio on every one of these cam camcorders. >> Yeah. So, in this case, our group was a little spread out and we're walking on rocks. Um, now as the eclipse is occurring, I wasn't doing much walking, but other people by the location of my other cameras were doing some walking. And so I I had to get some audio that had that minimized that rock effect because it was in some cases drowning out the u the audience reaction that I was trying to pull out >> in the audio. >> But when you're when you put all of the video from all of the cameras into your editing tool, doesn't the audio helps you line it up, right? Yeah, very important point. If so, the audio um has features in it on all of the cameras, even though they're positioned differently, that the editor I'm using, Final Cut Pro, can take that audio, that audio, and synchronize all of those clips. Bring >> So, the video lines up because you have the audio. >> Yes, it uses the audio to synchronize the video. >> Okay. Now, you brought a boom mic for the camcorder. Um, but you didn't end up using that. >> Yeah. What my goal, my idea was to take the boom mic and fa face it backwards to where all the people were standing behind the camera because they weren't in front. But it turns out it was quite a distance and I had a lot of um >> had a lot going on. >> I had a lot going on. I had a lot of mics closer to the audience where I'd get better audio. >> Right. >> So, I didn't really use the boom mic. >> You've used the boom mic, I think, at uh Mactock to get the audience when the audience is talking. Yeah, a lot of times the audience when they ask questions, they're not miked and so you can miss those questions when they're asking the presenter. So, I try to catch catch that audio with a boom mic facing towards the audience. >> Okay. All right. So, we've got the camcorder got some audio from it, but maybe not the best audio. Uh, what's the next camera you want to talk about? >> The next one, which is now my new favorite camera and the one we use for CES and other uh trade shows, is the DJI Osmo Pocket 3. very compact uh camera on a it's made by DJI, the same company that does the drones. And and in fact, the camera looks similar to the ones they put on their drone. I'm sure there was some cross fertilization of that technology. And so this thing um I had positioned stationary closer to the audience where one I could was basically stationary pointing at them so I could see their reaction, capture their reaction. And then and it's got really good picture quality, good low light um sensitivity, >> which is important during an eclipse. >> Very important. Yes. Um and in high resolution, but it also has a remote mic feature, so I could place the mic even closer to the audience and really get their their their reaction, which I which is then uh picked up by the the Pocket 3. So, you put the Pocket 3 on the second best uh tripod, the newly purchased. Thank you to Iberia Airlines, which by the way, they did pay us back for. But then what did you how did you balance the remote mic? Cuz the remote mic's like an inch by an inch and a half or two inches. It's a little bitty. >> Yeah, I I think I just taped that down somewhere. Or did I have >> According to your notes, it says we were It was on a mini tripod, the second one that we bought. >> That's right. It was the smallest tripod we bought. >> Yeah, we thought that that was going to be for one of the cameras, but since you ended up having four camcord or four tripods, sorry, it was perfect to hold up the uh the little remote mic. >> That's right. And it did a great job with that. >> Yeah, that was that was really good. If it weren't for the rocks, it would have been even better. But, uh, the astronomer's son, Max, is a lot of fun. Great kid. He thought it was really fun to take the rocks and hit them on each other so you can hear like right before the eclipse you're hearing bam bam bam and he's actually smashing rocks right in front of the the microphone. So that was cool. Um but anyway that was uh he was having fun and it I think it adds to it actually. So all right so the DJI cos pocket 3 is getting the audience reaction. Now let's let's talk about this this uh shadowban thing. Yeah, shadow bands is a interesting effect and it's doesn't come across very easily. It it has to it can be seen only under certain conditions. Um, but it happens during total solar eclipses when the sun is just going into that very thin crescent phase and there's just a sliver of light. Sun is still showing. But when you have something that is so narrow in light coming through a turbulent atmosphere, you can start to see the distortion of the atmosphere as it plays as it bends the light waves, the very thin light waves that are striking the ground. Now, you normally don't see this because the sun's got width to it and that distortion gets blended together because of the width of the sun. It's it's got a whole bunch of different paths that the light travel almost >> coming through a slit and then you can start to see the the bands the shadow band dark light wavy bands on the ground uh kind of rippling by due to the atmospheric distortion uh or waves in the atmosphere causing t causing that uh light bending. >> I think the first time I ever saw that was in your video from a Chile. We didn't notice it in real time I don't think. Yep. We saw it later. >> But you're looking at going, "Wait a minute. What is that?" And you show >> I had to look it up. >> Yeah. You showed John Luke and he's like, "Oh my gosh, you caught shadow bands. That's really cool." >> Alex Filipenko was really interested in that effect, too. >> He wanted me to show send that video to him. >> He's our favorite astronomer from UC Berkeley that we're going to be traveling with soon. But uh >> Yeah. >> Okay. So, in order to try to capture that, what camera did you use? So, I had the GoPro Hero 5 set up there for a couple purposes. One was it was pointed down maybe 10° on the edge of the roof looking at a down at a very flat area uh which was driveway concrete. Um it also >> perpendicular to the sunset. You were headed I think north and the sunset was to the west obviously. >> Yes. Yeah. 90 degrees to how the sun was setting and basically try to capture those shadow bands coming across the concrete. But um a couple thing well also I was trying to get um let me back up the the Hero the GoPro has a very wide field of view at least the mode I was in. So you could also capture the horizon and possibly capture the shadow of the sun set. >> How fast was that shadow moving on this eclipse? >> Too fast for me to capture. 8,000 mph for this one. It It varies depending on the geometry, but this was a fast one. >> Yeah. Jeanluke did part did a lecture he does a lecture series on these trips and uh he explained why and the distortion shape of the eclipse as it was coming across and that was the fastest anyone has come across. I think we saw we saw the shadow when we were in Bend, Oregon. We were in front of a giant uh valley and we saw it come across the mountains right towards us and that was that was cool. Yeah, you have to have the right geography um and I guess slow enough shadow to to actually see it. I I I don't think we had time to really see it. And I looked on the video and I couldn't really see it. Although I could see regions that were dark and light, but I couldn't see it on the ground. It it did capture the fact that we were at going into sunset and into darkness, but you had you had one big reason that you couldn't get the shadow bands. >> Yeah. Um much to my dismay, um this winery has very bright I think H hallogen lights on the building shining down on the concrete when it gets dark automatically turning on. So that washed out any chance of seeing shadow bands >> when you set it up. There weren't any lights. >> No lights at all. Yeah. In fact, that that's one of my complaints that I wish they could have turned all the lights off both upstairs where the wine and the patio was where we were located and and down below. >> Yeah, that might be a suggestion for for future eclipse trips. the uh I tried to convince Steve that he tell that he should tell everybody that he did get the shadow bands because you could see a flickering effect of these H hallogen lights on the ground. >> That was the interference between the shutter and the uh the lights >> but too fast. No, he wanted to be pure. So yeah, I think you got a little bit of some added value to that with the sunset showing because it you do use some of that video and there was audio again for the sinking. But, uh, probably another really fun part of it, not probably, but definitely another fun part of what you ended up producing was you had a, uh, an Insta 360 X3 camera. Yeah. Yeah. So, this is the first time I've used this camera to film an eclipse. So, this this truly does capture in one shot, either a photo or a video, a full 360 degree view of the world, of the environment. And it's not just 360 around, it's also above and below. It's so it's really from an engineering perspective it's four pi st radians of volume that's spherical >> that's a spherical collection of of the environment and that is that is nice from a couple perspectives one um >> puns included >> yes several perspectives one one is that you can um you can process that 360 video into more traditional rectangular segments but anywhere where you want as that when that video is is being recorded you can go back and say okay I want to see what happened over here now let's shift over here you and um make a 16 by9 I don't know it's 4K but a high-res video post you know post editing or during editing as opposed to while you're shooting >> so in that case you don't know where it's going to be as interesting and so you you basically have all choices part of the cool thing of the instit 360 is it's it's two hemispherical lenses and the software stitches it together into uh a perfect sphere and it even erases its own tripod. It knows what its tripod looks like so it erases that too and sort of fills it in. Right. >> Yeah. And it can do that because the hemispherical lenses actually um they can see out a bit from the camera down, you know, all around the camera a a few degrees. So there's overlap between those two cameras on the stitch points and that overlap allows them to remove unwanted objects from perspective. They can tell what is not really part of the scene and what is >> think about it. That gap between them is an advantage, not a not a disadvantage. >> It's really not a gap. It's an overlap. >> Right. Right. >> It's an overlap of the lenses. And now the one thing it didn't remove or can't really easily remove are the feet at the bottom of that pole trip that it's really not a tripod. It's a pole with three little feet that stick out at the bottom. >> Were you nervous at all about people knocking that one over? >> Especially on these rocks. I I basically had to dig a spot out and plant those three feet and put some rocks on top. And even then, it it's a little flimsy. >> And one one disadvantage of the placement, we need it needed to be close to the people because in a 360 camera since it's for Pyister Radian, people get really teeny unless they're super close. And a couple of people ended up walking right in front of it. But, uh, I don't know. it's it still works. You you definitely get the feel of the environment, I think, with that. >> So, that's one use of the the uh Insta 360, but another maybe even more uh nifty use is capturing the entire 360 video and uploading that to a site that can process and handle and and play 360 video. And what those sites like YouTube can do is allow the user to pick the viewing direction either with their cursor on a computer and change the viewing direction in real time as the video is playing. So I want to look over here, I want to look over there, or if you're on a mobile device, you basically say an iPhone, you just move the iPhone around to the direction you want to view as the video is playing. It's it's a pretty nifty feature. >> Very cool. We're going to get into a little bit of the tricky bit that you had to do in order to edit that video. So I should spoil a little bit. There are two videos. Uh one is the compilation of all the different sources that he have and the other one is the 360 video. But that turned into a whole [laughter] whole computing challenge too. So I want to talk about the uh compilation video because this was really impressive that it's really easy to make a long boring video. That's really easy. What's hard to do is to make something crisp and short and compelling and uh as Bart said when he described your video, it told a story. So, you managed to take this amazing experience and get it down to two and a half minutes. >> So, it's not something that anybody's going to click away from because it's only two and a half minutes and the good part's right there in the middle. So, let's start talking about how you did this. [snorts] >> Yeah. So I basically I brought in the video from all four cameras into Final Cut Pro on a Mac Mac M1 Studio and um did my editing with Final Cut. Uh again I think I mentioned that Final Cut can synchronize all those videos and you form something called a multicam clip and then later you can edit that clip. But um uh and again it just uses the audio to synchronize across the full the full duration of all the videos. I think Wally Cherinsky taught you about that, right? >> He He may have He may have brought it to my attention first and then I don't know if he actually taught it. >> He told you it existed. >> Yes. And then I dug around and that solved a lot of my problems. I didn't even know Final Cut can do that. It was in the early days when they were just adding this feature to Final Cut. >> Okay. So, I heard the video and audio. I I heard the audio from the video over and over and over again as you were you were doing the editing. So that's the creative process, right? >> Yeah. So yeah, the creative process is knowing or deciding when to cut from one camera view to another because you've got all the views available, but when do you want to see one view versus another? And it was clear that I had some stakes in the ground which were the uh the diamond ring coming in to totality, totality itself, and then the diamond ring coming out. Those had to be captured because that's the show. >> That's that's the big event. >> Um but I didn't have to stay on the the total eclipse for its duration. For instance, I wanted to show I I had a couple shots of just the horizon to show how dark or light it was. So, I showed the horizon with I think the GoPro just a couple second clip to so you could see it's starting to get dark, but it's still twilight. Then I had during totality I cut over to the same shot, but now it's dark. Now you can see the effect >> cuz if you're just looking at the eclipse, it doesn't tell the whole story. You want to see the environment, too. You want to see the people and hear the people. So, I I would go back and forth depending on what might be interesting to the viewer, what I think might be interesting. >> I think part of what you captured too again with the uh I think it was the GoPro was that it was sun setting >> because when you go into an eclipse, you the sunsets basically. >> Yeah. Very fast sunset. [laughter] Near not immediate, but pretty fast. >> Now, I don't think you captured how cold it gets. That's I'd like you to add that next. >> Okay. Maybe smell of vision, too. >> [laughter] >> So you you set all of these switch points and you're doing this by you've got four views in like four tracks at the same time and then a a main track that you're clipping. >> Yeah, Final Cut does it pretty well. They they um the editor shows you four thumbnail shots of one of each of the cameras and uh and as you play you see all of them moving and then there's the main viewer which is which of those shots have you selected for your final your final edit and switching between them is a matter of just clicking a button on which of those four you want with your cursor. You just click this one. Now I want this one. Now I want that one. And you have the ability to select either just switching video or just switching the audio or switching both. >> And so I kept the audio. I didn't switch too much because I wanted the good audio from that uh Pocket 3 with the remote mic. >> I did add some other audio but from the other cameras, but most of it was from the Pocket 3, but I did a lot of the video switching. So, it's only a two and a half minute video and the eclipse was 95 seconds in totality. Did you keep the whole 95 seconds? >> No, I didn't. Um, and typically this is more important for a longer eclipse, but I do a time lapse, you know, in this case, I think it was a 4:1 uh speed up of the video. Um, compressed at 4:1 so that the the 90 seconds was more like 20 seconds or 30 seconds, I forget. So I did not do that with the diamond ring forming coming in and out. I kept that real time. But as soon as I reached totality, not a lot is happening. So there what you would see as as uh as I sped it up 4 to one, you could start to see the actual sun moving across the frame, which is kind of a neat effect. >> I think you did it gently enough that I didn't I didn't notice. And it's because you did cut away a couple of times in the middle of even that 20 seconds, but it really captured the again, it's the feeling and the reaction of the people and the audio is what makes it too is you just hear people >> gasping as they see it. I mean, it's a screaming in joy and delight is just so emotional. >> Yeah. There's a crescendo as you reach totality and everyone just whoops and hollers and claps and whistles. It's it's a great view. And then at the end when when the total eclipse is over and you've come out of the diamond ring and people kind of sense that it's done, there's also usually applause and a lot of discussion. It was fun to capture that, too. >> Now, you actually threw some music in, too. >> Yeah. I um there were um there were two songs that I thought complimented the parts of the eclipse and one was uh during the totality phase itself and I so I just timed it. Basically, I had the audience reaction, faded that as as they were done with the whooping and wall hollering uh into the the music and then brought their audio back as it came out of totality because they're starting to >> talk again and laugh and not laugh but >> applaud. There's there's glee. >> There's glee. Yeah, I guess there is some laughing enjoyment. And then as the sun set because you close the video with the sun with the eclipse setting and by this time we're all drinking wine again. >> Yeah. So I do a cut and then I I think this was um about 50 minutes later I cut to the sun setting. It's got a maybe a quarter of it is still partially eclipsed but I speed that up as well. I don't know if that was 401. And so you can actually see the sun setting with this bite taken out of it coming right down below the horizon with another song appropriate song. >> An interesting effect happened that there there have been fires in Spain and so there was a the smoke in the air didn't bother our view of the eclipse at all. But as it set in the sun it was actually darker than you would expect. So you took the solar filter off for the sunset part. >> Yeah. I and you know when the sun is setting um it is naturally darkened quite a bit enough that most people can actually look at a sunset. >> Yeah. You think about it you do right and [clears throat] so your camera can take it too. And in this case it really I had to turn up the sensitivity a little bit because the sun was so dark >> due to the fires from the the smoke from the fires. Um, and I think that that may have knocked down as well the corona during the totality phase. Normally the corona is a little brighter than I than I saw this time. >> That occurred to me just more recently. I was looking at this corona. It's not as bright and I think it might have been due to the the haze from the >> Yeah. >> the fires. >> Yeah. Because in in Chile it was it was pretty dramatic. But we did see something that was even cooler during the during the eclipse. explain what that was. >> Yeah, we saw what I think is the largest solar prominence or solar flare that we've ever seen on an eclipse. You know, this is a perfect chance. In fact, astronomers use total solar eclipses for studying the sun, but this is a chance to see the outer surface really more the atmosphere of the sun and when they are there are prominences that loop out with falling magnetic fields >> and those >> what is it? It's plasma coming out, right? >> Yeah. Yeah. It's it's superheated plasma, millions of degrees in in temperature. Um several times larger than Earth. >> I believe Jeanluke said 10 times the this diameter of of the Earth was how big that particular one. Yeah, it it really stood out. It's like I said, largest we we had seen during the eclipse. >> It was interesting. He estimated that while standing on the roof and then I went and I read some other astronomer saying the same thing that it was 10 times the size of the Earth. So, uh, his his thumb width view of it apparently was accurate. >> Yeah. >> So, that's the that to me is the big show is your 2 and a half minute video. But you also produced a video of the 360 uh cameras view. And this one took a real nerdy turn in the middle creating this one. >> Yeah. Um, and and it was for a small reason, but so when you do this 360 video, there's kind of a reference angle. the the reference pointing angle and it's one of the perpendicular angles of one of the two lenses. I forget which one. And that happened to be pointed 90 degrees to where the eclipse was occurring. And although with a 360 you could resteer it and see the eclipse, I wanted that to be the initial viewing angle of this 360 video. So I had to find a way to rotate this this 360 video by 90 degrees. You used to do that in the Insta3 software, didn't you? >> Well, yeah. I tr they say you can do that in Insta3. I attempted it, but YouTube did not recognize. And by the way, YouTube is where I put these videos, where I host the video, but uh YouTube was not recognizing the uh default initial angle. It was not behaving. And I don't know why. There may have been a trick I wasn't doing correctly. So there's another option, but it involves a lot of work. And that is so think of the pointing angle as something that's in the metadata of the video. Something that just says instead of starting with the natural angle, start here for the viewer. >> Okay. >> Uh the the other way to do it is actually rotate the video by the desired amount and just have it start where it would naturally start in terms of viewing angle. same viewing angle, but you moved all of the data. >> Yes. And I I didn't know how to do this, but I I thought there was a way to do this. So, brought in my nifty um large language model. I think it was Perplexity. >> Uhhuh. >> And uh started asking it how how do you rotate one of these videos? And that's when I got a little deeper than I had intended. I was so happy when I came into your office and I saw you in homebrew installing something and you've never installed homebrew before. This is all command line utility people folks. So this is he's typing terminal commands to do this. So you installed homebrew and then uh what what uh what tool did it have you install? >> Yeah, so homebrew gave me access to some tools that I needed to do this rotation of the video. And one was XF tool, which I think allows you to get access to the XF data, the metadata on the video. >> Yeah, that works with photos and video. And I've used that before. By the way, anybody who doesn't know what Homebrew is, it's essentially like an app store, but you don't buy anything. It's for command line tools, but you go once you install Homebrew, you can say brew install XIF tool. >> And it's a little on the nerdy side. I wouldn't recommend it for a little >> someone who who's just starting out. So, this was performing a coordinate transformation and how many frames did it go through to to rearrange it? >> Um, so even though this was a short video, it had uh I think it was 5,000 frames. >> Wow. >> That it had to rotate. And this is 360 degrees of video. So, it's >> four rad of videos. >> It's twice the the twice the number of pixels as you'd see in a 4K video. Wow. like it like two two four or 5K videos worth of data for each frame. >> Okay. >> So, it's doing a trans a coordinate transformation of 90 degrees for every pixel of those 5,000 frames. And that really uh exercised my uh Mac Studio. >> You always like using um IP menus to watch your processes processors and they were they were two and away. Yeah, I think I've got 10 uh core CPUs and it took 12 13 minutes of to the rails of CPU processing to complete that coordinate transformation and and it was a two and a half minute video made three minute. >> So when it was done it was it was perfect. >> Yeah, it did exactly. >> No, it wasn't. There was more to do. >> Well Well, okay. I mean this was part of this was part of what uh Perplexity told me to do. >> Okay. But what you know after it does this rotation what um apparently this uh XF tool strips off the XF data that it that the original video had and um so you need to reapply that XF data the metadata to the video and uh so there's another FFmpeg tool that allows you you know through through the terminal that allows you to grab the metadata from the first video and reapply it to the second. Now there are a couple there are a couple parameter changes because of the new angle I believe >> but most of that data doesn't change. >> So what kind of data was missing that you had to put back? >> Um you like yaw pitch roll whether stitching is applied what is the audio type uh what's the projection that parameters that you get with a 360 video. So, this was not as creative as an endeavor, but it definitely stretched your your brain in learning new things, right? >> Yeah. This video was just intended to give the viewer uh a chance to play with it, play with the video and look in any direction they want during an eclipse. >> And that one came out really cool. It's actually a little longer. I think it's three and a half minutes long, >> right? because I I wanted to capture a little more of the beginning and end where it's starting to get dark and it's starting to get light again. So, I think it was about three and a half. >> So, you did do editing. You did edit it down, but it wasn't all this mixing of different uh cameras and microphones. And so, which mic audio did you use? >> I think I I think I stayed with the Insta 360 audio. >> Okay. Okay. >> And which wasn't bad. It's not as good as the X3, the Pocket 3. >> Wow. So, with all this, uh, one of the things I'm always, uh, harping on you for is to make sure you backed things up. I think it was a couple of days later. In fact, we might have already been in Ireland by the time I said, "So, Steve, do you have a copy of that video yet?" >> Yeah, that was a little late, but better late than never. So, we we learned this uh lesson on another trip. >> Yeah. You always want to back up your v your your critical videos and photos and whatever you've taken and have independent copies that don't live together, that don't stay together. When we were in uh Peru on our way back from we' done Machu Picchu and we done uh the Galopagos. Uh, the last thing we did before we got on the plane was I had Steve give me his backup drive and I gave him mine and his backpack got stolen that had his original all of his original audio in it and video in it and and photos. And back then I don't think we had iCloud photos or anything like that >> and I had a a GoPro so that wasn't on >> but because we had backed it up we we uh and it was se in a separate bag it worked. So this time you downloaded to your Mac which gave you a second copy but your Mac and your C and your cameras were all in the same bag so I carried your backup drive again. >> Yep. Yeah. And that's would recommend that to anyone who [laughter] who treasures their video and and photos. >> Right. So let's uh wind this up with would you say you're happy with the results and what would you do differently? >> Definitely happy with the results. I think it it was one of our best experiences and I think the video captured most of that minus some rock sounds and other things [laughter] but and people stepping in front of a camera here and there but but I no big complaints with that. Um I think that the things that um that I learned is that uh well the biggest thing that I really want to improve on is how I apply the solar filter. This is a threaded mount and it takes several turns of that of that mount to get it securely on the camera. And you're doing this at a time is very critical. It's it's just just before things get spectacular. And it it took probably 20 seconds to screw that thing on. And then at one point I even dropped it, I think, when I was >> that was putting it back on. You didn't drop it taking it off, which was good. But uh yeah, I wonder whether there's a ban mount or something we can get for your camera. in mount or a flap mount that just flaps closed or something. There's got to be a better way to do it. I'm sure there is. I I need to investigate that. >> Yeah, we'll have to start now before the next solar eclipse we end up going in. >> Yeah. The other thing I I think I would do is I I would adjust the video sensitivity a little more given how dark, you know, you don't really know in advance how dark it's going to be. I've based this on other eclipses, >> but this one was darker. And I think I could have maybe estimated that based on um you know, how the sun was not quite as bright even when it was in full illumination with the solar filter. >> We also want to give a shout out to Jean Luke for finding such a great location. You know, there's there's people who went to Iceland to watch the uh eclipse and it was just all clouds. But our location, he studied places all over the planet of where it was going to be in totality and found >> historically 20 to 30% chance of cloud cover in that area, which doesn't sound good, but turned out to be great. Uh that that really worked out for us. >> Big big props to Jean Lo. He's he's the best and that's part of the reason we go on these trips. >> Plus, it was at a vineyard. That helped, too. It's nice to have a little wine and some snacks. Um, the lighting could have been improved, but all in all, it was a good experience. >> Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks for coming on, Steve. I I watched how much work you did and how long it took you to do that, and I know you love doing it, but I think you really came out with something that was just fantastic. If people want to see that 2 and a half minute compilation video and the 360 version, and of course, subscribe to your videos, where would they go? >> Probably the best place to go is YouTube. uh YouTube at SPS Sheridan or you just can type in SP Sheridan in the search bar of YouTube and my channel should come up. >> Very good. Thanks again. Uh we'll see you in another uh seven years. I guess we'll let you back on the [laughter] show >> till our next eclipse. I hope it's less than that. Well, >> I'm really glad you got to listen to that because you are getting a little feel for the man behind the magic of the Podfeat podcast and you get to hear how absolutely delightful and interesting and scientific he is. He's just I I really like that guy. Anyway, that's going to wind us up for this week. 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