YouTube Needs to Fix This!

34:56It happened to me the other day because I was doing the dishes as we do here in this podcast. And I usually just leave my phone off in the corner playing videos while I have an AirPod in or something. And I had changed my phone recently to the Spanish language to help me like just get more into reading Spanish. And it auto-dubbed it. It was so weird. I had to like dry my hair. If Duolingo had this feature and you were like doing French or whatever and then it just started talking in English to you, that'd be pretty funny. Yeah. The Duo AI just takes over your phone and starts dubbing things. You know, YouTube calls this a dub feature.

35:29I call it an L. Nice. Thanks. I mean, I think we all understand what they're trying to get at. Yeah, buddy. Yeah. Jesus. Did you make that joke first? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something, something, big bang, we get it.

35:47Like, I remember Squid Games came out and everyone, like, it had all the different dub tracks on it already and, like, got super popular. And, like, we all understand the benefits of this dubbing in here to be able to reach it. I think it's just, like, way too surface level and people aren't understanding that. like what we saw from feedback from our audiences really upset about people who already listen to you in English and the other thing is is like we did it in Hindi we had so many people saying hey India speaks like 12 different languages like not even all a lot of us probably know English better than Hindi but now you're gonna all get region locked to Hindi or maybe it's based on phone I'm still not 100 % sure about how that works yeah I don't know if I just like maybe it was just a weird hack that happened or something because i changed the system language on my phone but i can easily see youtube's point of view from this because it's like there's all of this content that people could be watching that would just give them so many more ad dollars so if you turn if you make it opt out instead of opt in people can just watch any video and enjoy it and then youtube gets more ad revenue so it makes sense from a monetary perspective yeah here's a my proposition to youtube to make it make sense for everyone, allow users, like viewers, a little bit of control over the default viewing experience for their channel.

37:08I brought this up before. I brought this up like many, many years ago where I was like, I would like YouTube to automatically default whatever video I'm watching to the highest available resolution. I will wait for it to buffer. I will. And I don't mind that that's like gonna take longer for certain videos or certain worse connection environments, but that's a flip I would switch in my YouTube experience. Let me flip the switch. But that's not a flip that I can switch. That's not a switch that I can flip. But I want another switch, another switch, because this would make sense. If you're going to do this YouTube, I get it.

37:37Great. Give us another switch that just says default all videos to their naturally uploaded language or default all videos to English or default all videos to dubbing in this language so that I don't automatically get videos in the language I don't speak and I have to like switch them a whole bunch of times. I just want to watch everything in whatever language it was natively made in give me that or I just want to watch everything in English because I speak English and just do that companies are strangely adverse to giving you like granular control of things yeah you know they know better yeah yeah I also I don't think subtitles is that bad of a thing to do like I don't know why it needs to dub because the anime world has that's what I'm very strong opinions about that exactly and there's so many like not even outside of anime like I'll watch YouTube from YouTubers in other countries doing like, I don't know, EDC travel videos or something like that.

38:28And you miss a lot of like how they feel about something. Even though I don't understand the language, I could tell they get excited about certain things or like things like that, which I can read what it says perfectly fine as long as I'm getting like the intuition of their excitement through their voice. Yeah. I have a thought and I have one more step further on a proposition for how to fix it. My thought is this feels like a very American step because I feel like in America, we don't know a lot of other languages where in a lot of other countries people know three four five languages that's super common so it feels like to us oh you live in another country you speak different language here it is rather than like they might know a bunch of different languages and watch different channels in different languages yeah um so that's what causes this issue of default locking that to a region or a language based on your phone being annoying my proposition is when you subscribe to a channel you get to click keep this defaulted all the time I watch this person's videos in original or that it brings back the subscribe button to actually being important again because it's not really that important right now but they don't want it to be important right they want people to just go roaming around watching videos but I don't think YouTube would be mad at seeing those numbers continuing to increase because it still does represent success i mean they just changed all the shorts views numbers for literally no reason to just pretend to be successful so if we bring back the subscribe button to meaning a little bit something then somebody who maybe does watch other videos in hindi but wants to watch you in english can subscribe to your channel and be like all videos from mkbhd are in the original audio file original language that would be the best user in my eyes like user flip to switch yeah or like giving the users but you would only get that subscribing to someone right yeah what if you're just like on the tv clicking around random videos yeah i had this happen to me and it was totally by accident but there's another youtuber who does car videos and i don't know where romanian somewhere in europe they had this this foreign language channel that they are very successful with but they did dubs of it in english just to get a larger audience and they made an english channel and so i was looking up car reviews and i was watching a bunch and i clicked on one and it started playing and it was very clearly an ai dub but i i went with it because i was still learning facts about the car or whatever so i i i had encountered this channel and they had this english-speaking ai dub channel just for these videos and i made it through the video and it was okay and i think in an ideal world instead of those views going to a separate channel that they had to make it would all go to one original video just with different dubs playing for different people watching the video without me subscribing or having to engage or anything necessarily it would just know who i am what language i want to watch the video in and play it for me so i just want that toggle on my end to be like hey youtube you might think i want to watch in this language but i actually just want to watch the original or actually just want to watch english and that would be fine yeah yeah there are some people though who probably know different languages where they might watch one channel in spanish and might watch another channel in english and then it has to default to everything so i guess that's my reason for like if i subscribe to a channel this is the channel i know i want to watch in this language sure therefore it all does that and then you default your non-subscribed channels to right whatever language you pick that makes sense because i do have just like straight up spanish youtubers that i watch that only speak spanish so yeah that would be weird to have make everything english as a toggle yeah andrews it's really crazy that you made that point about the like letting the subscribers choose based on on their channel because I actually tweeted that six years ago.

42:14I'm so sorry. I really, I really - Wait, can you pull it up and read it to us? I actually have been thinking about this all episode and it really was a really big, it was a huge move. I promise we're okay, I just love callbacks. Well, so did I, that's why I pulled up the six year old joke.

42:36Damn, that was good. So to wrap this up, I think the moral of it is if you're a larger channel, you probably should opt out of auto dubbing, right? Yeah. If you have an international audience, it's hard to say. If you're a channel like us where you have a large English speaking audience in a whole bunch of countries that speak English and then there are a bunch of other countries that probably wouldn't benefit from you having auto dubbing, then you're good. but maybe you are a small Romanian car channel and you are very limited in your audience and only people who speak that language, maybe you do want autodubbing turned on for your channel and then you get a whole bunch more viewership that you wouldn't ordinarily have gotten.

43:21So it depends on who you are or what channel you are and how popular the language that you're speaking is that you might want to turn it on or off. So it's typical YouTube. This is a decent idea that will probably not be that great because they don't let users have enough control over them. Yeah, just a little control. I've always wanted, there's definitely like a lot of technical reasons and I know that companies will like sunset features that are not getting enough use, which is always very frustrating because it's like, well, some of your users use it, but the problem is then they have a code base that they have to keep up and it makes it slower and whatever.

43:54I just think companies are very adverse to giving more granular control, which is frustrating. So many products could be made better if even really, really, really deep in the settings, you just gave us so much specific tweaking control. Yeah. But they don't want to do that because the code base would be too complicated. This reminds me a lot of how YouTube rolled out shorts because remember at first we were kind of confused and we made a whole separate channel just for shorts because we didn't want to mess up with our algos and stuff like that and viewership. Yeah. It seems like they just kind of rush out these features before they're completely baked in in the way that they should be at launch.

44:32Yeah. Yeah. Because none of the things Shorts is fine, like on your channel. Totally. Separate it out perfectly fine. No big deal. Shorts is a good example because it is a huge feature on the site, so it obviously takes time. You can't necessarily roll it out perfectly on the first try. Yeah. But it is tough because you have this whole ecosystem of power users and people who depend on it and want to do well immediately with it that will be frustrated as it evolves and changes and gets better. So yeah, you want to do as well as you can right out the box, but it's not going to be perfect. You do have to improve it.

45:05And then there are features that just go away. Like I remember I go to the Creator Summit every year and every year Linus brings up, I'm not trying to call him out, but YouTube Stories. All other creators will bring this up too. Like YouTube used to have Stories. And every year there's a question about like, how do we avoid that happening again? Because you guys rolled out Stories for a couple months and it was actually working for some of us and it was like a cool feature we could use to give temporary updates and then it just stopped and it just went away. And now we were relying on that feature.

45:34We had like a whole show going on stories and now it's gone. Just don't do that again. That's the goal if you're a big company. I think the hard thing is with a lot of products, you can roll out beta features and it's like it's either good or bad or whatever, but with products that people rely on for like their livelihood, it's very difficult when companies just roll out features that they have to rapidly adapt to and then maybe it will disappear and there's just not that much transparency. It's the hard thing though because social media, if you are a social media company, you want to try and figure it out as fast as possible and gain.

46:07So like I'm sure Linus did a good job of figuring out how to make stories work for their business, but it didn't for everyone else. And you're almost like, you almost have to try and succeed. And I mean, pretty sure it's, do you remember IGTV? We tried to do stuff on IGTV. it's a weird weird thing that just completely went away and now is reels and shorts and everything and now tech talk is just what i do tv was it's just short videos i just don't know if youtube for example cares that much about us as the creators not in a way that like all big companies don't really care i just mean more so that we are not the customer of the product you know like there's the viewer who is clicking around and that's who they want to reach there's the people that buy ads which are the actual customers for youtube and then there are creators who make the content yeah so all of this stuff is like kind of getting into weeds of who gets what control when you give people you have to distribute incentives right like you have to make it lucrative for the creators to make the content but you also have to make it look like interesting enough for people to want to keep watching the content and then you have to make it so the advertisers want to advertise on the platform and it's just the whole yeah i think i called this like the 90 10 problem or something like that where like the 90 of users don't do most of the content generation but you have to incentivize the small 10 who are making all the content even though it might not be ideal for the 90 of people who are watching it but also you want to make things that are great for the 90 of people who are watching content it's hard on youtube it's about like one percent of one percent of people make the content a tiny fraction make all the content This, though, is something that is hurting potentially viewers.

47:52Like, people who come to watch MKBHD are watching things on YouTube for MKBHD, and if now they're getting mad that they have to switch the audio track every time, they might be spending less time on YouTube versus, like, us wanting this very specific thing. Like, this is the 90 % potentially being, or 20 % of the 90 % possibly being mad or something. Yeah, the question, and we saw the list of languages. So the question will be, what fraction of people who are used to watching in English will have it switched on them and that's bad for them versus all the people in those regions who speak those languages who weren't watching MKBHD videos who suddenly will?

48:28Yeah. I don't know the math of that. That's really hard. Ours is probably unique, but I would argue ours in some of those is probably more people mad than more people gamed. It's some ratio and hopefully more people helped than hurt. I have a question because I've been in podcast studio rewire world for the past week or so. So I haven't quite been following this. What what happens to the music and sound effect? Do you have to upload a separate dialogue track and then it swaps that out? I know I was giving you separate dialogue and music for a while. So that's a good question. When we were doing the human the human method.

49:01Yeah. We would have to export a separate track for all the sound effects and music and a separate track for the voice. Right. So that when we had someone do the re-recording in a different language, it would be overlaid in place of what my voice track was and it would still have the underlaid music. The AI dub is doing a remarkably good job with one single audio track of just replacing the voice. Wow. Now, the AI, like, small car channel that I watched, it was bad. Like, whatever tool they were using, it had, like, the music, like, fading in and out and, like, breaking and it was pretty bad. but it was just like a robot English voice so I could at least get the information about the car.

49:38But some of these AI tools and now the ones we've been using and YouTube's tool ideally, we'll be able to do it all with a single audio track. Yeah. I just, you know, just, I'm sure it does a great job. It's just like, I spend all this time, man, like trying to make stuff sound good on the channel. And then it's just like, only for like a robot to decide what to do with it is so painful. We shoot an 8K only for all the content. I mean, if you walked into a movie theater and you saw like an AI dub of like a like a THX sound like it wouldn't be worth it. I'm a big compressor nerd. And when I'm especially when I'm working on music ducking or making a mix or any of like a channel intro, which doesn't usually.

50:22Well, sometimes they have dialogue like I'm doing a lot with like how what what logarithmic curve should the compressor roll off on? Like, how is it going to and then just to have a robot be like, I know better. Yeah, I think the original file will always be best. And so if I'm making English content, those who enjoy the original will always have it best. And then it's sort of like, for those who don't speak English, would you rather not be able to understand the video at all or get like a C plus mix version where you can understand it? And I think YouTube's answer is let's give accessibility.

50:57You can at least understand it. It's not going to be a perfect mix, but more views everywhere. And theoretically more views everywhere is still better for the creators because they still make more money. I think from YouTube's perspective it makes sense even if it's rough. Speaking of English language content. This podcast. And the thing we do exclusively in English on this podcast. Trivia. I was reminded that One of the few movies that I've seen has a character voiced by Vin Diesel who just says, I am Groot over and over again. And they do a bunch of languages of this movie. And so there are many recordings of Vin Diesel going, yo soy Groot.

51:49Is Groot the good guy or the bad guy? Groot's always good. All right. Trivia question number two. So we finally have an Instagram app coming to iPad. Allegedly. Allegedly, maybe we'll see. Possibly. Asterisk. But when Instagram launched, it famously had a one by one aspect ratio. What were the pixel dimensions of each image? Blank by blank. Originally? Originally, when it launched. Yeah, I know, right? It's crazy. Originally? I remember back in the day you could only upload from the viewfinder. Oh, that's right. Remember you couldn't upload a file? Holy crap, yeah. That was instant. Yeah, that's instant.

52:31The world would be better. I will also accept the actual number of pixels that Ellis calculated out for me. Oh, like the calculator. Yeah, yeah. Oh, God. Okay. Cool. You know, fun fact, it's called Instagram because in between the four square thing and the photo sharing thing. They try to do an easy bake oven, but exclusively for Teddy Graham crackers. Little cinnamon bears. So you make a big cracker into a little cracker? No, you make a nondescript slurry of powder and liquid under an incandescent bulb into a little tiny graham cracker. Where's that in your Twitter six years ago, David? I'm sorry.

53:12This horse is dead and still being beaten. The audience is going to hate me after this episode. Not as much as me. And on that note, you know what? We'll be back after the break. I give up.

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54:39The pumpkin spice latte is back at Starbucks. Crafted with our signature espresso and real pumpkin sauce. then topped with whipped cream, cinnamon, and nutmeg. The PSL. Get it while it's hot or iced. Only at Starbucks. Welcome back. This is my section of the podcast now. Ha ha ha ha ha. But also David's. Sort of. Sort of. We're going to be talking about the Fuji X half camera that I have right here. I've been playing with it for a few days. I don't know how to feel about it. It's awesome and also weird and also bad. in very specific ways. So it is a camera from Fujifilm. It's a new camera. And if you look at the back of the camera, instead of like a screen that's normally landscape when you like line up pictures or whatever, it is a portrait like - Orientation.

55:30Thank you. It is a portrait oriented screen. So it's basically for Instagram. Show the class, turn it around. I was just going to put B-roll, but show that works too. Yeah. For reference, half frame cameras in the film era, were half a 35 millimeter strip of film. And because of that, the Aspaticio was vertical, which is why this is a vertical. And it was supposed to save you money back in the day because instead of, yeah, you would get 72 shots instead of 36. This is a very expensive camera for what it is. How much did that cost you? This was 850. To be clear, they were going to sell this for 700 and then the tariffs happened.

56:10700 is still too much. I think if this was like 500, it'd be a must buy. Okay, I think you should explain it more. Wait, wait, before you do that, can I ask a question specifically about what you just said? Yeah. They said out loud this was going to be 700 and now it's 850. On the briefing I was on, they said it was like 700. And 700 is the MSRP in other countries. Okay. But in the US, it's 850. So we might get to see when tariffs are not, if they will actually bring it back down. They won't lower it, I don't think. I don't think so either. But I just don't think we had a clear thing to point to to see if this would happen.

56:41and now we do. Yeah. Fun fact, this camera has a one inch sensor, which famously means the sensor measures exactly one inch diagonally. It doesn't. It does not. Wouldn't that be nice? 1.0 type. Yeah. So this is a digital camera, but the whole point of it is to kind of emulate a film camera. So there's a mode, a film camera mode that you can turn this into. You just like set it on where you will not be able to see what you're shooting on the back screen. You have to look through the viewfinder. And it is basically just like a film camera where you take a picture and all you see on the back is a number go from zero to one.

57:20And then you do that until you fill up, quote unquote, the role. So you can choose whether you want 36, 72 role, whatever. So let's say I chose 36. I'll take pictures and all I'll see is the number going up. I will not see a preview of the camera or the picture, anything like that until there's a accompanying app that you can download and you will quote unquote develop the film and it will transfer it to your phone. It's the greatest thing. You can watch the contact sheet fill out as it develops in real time. It's so awesome. It's so cool. I love it. Worse is better, okay? Worse is better. When are you going to learn that?

57:58Marquez, you can take photos. You don't have to be in that mode. This is just a mode. You can just keep it in digital camera mode and it acts just like a digital camera. This is just a specific film camera mode. Show them the paddle. Paddle. The film advance lever. There's a film advance lever. There's a film advance lever on the back that switches into the mode. This thing is my number one complaint with this camera so far. Well, the build quality in general of this camera is very plasticky. It's very lightweight, which is cool. But Fuji cameras are typically like, they feel hunky, durable. They're like really good cameras.

58:30This is more like an expensive toy. Yeah. And I love expensive toys. I buy teenage engineering shit all the time. That's right. So it's right up my alley. But this like lever here, the lever lever thing, whatever, wherever you want. Film advanced lever. The film advanced lever has no ratcheting, no like feedback, no nothing. So it's just like it slides into place, which is like kind of annoying. But I've been having a lot of fun shooting with this thing. It's just it makes me wonder if I know, David, you had a video years ago about this, about how like smartphone cameras are all about software now.

59:04How many years ago? wait it might have actually been six years ago it was not six years ago okay well like four years ago it was on the the pixel six came out so it was four years ago nice okay so four years ago you had a video about how like cameras are all software now and this is like taking that in a different direction which i really find interesting because it's just it's adding features instead of processing the camera the photos in a certain way you know like i find that really intriguing and i wish that Fuji would make another one of these or bring this to their pro level cameras because I think that would be so fun.

59:39If you have an X106. Bring what to the pro level? The film simulation mode. All of these things. They have film simulation modes on X106. Wait, how? Oh, you mean like the real thing. The fun throwback to when cameras were bad. They were not bad. They were so good. David has a whole side career off of his film cameras. Can you talk about the sub-LCD? Yes, that is Andrew's favorite feature. So on the back, there's the main display, which is, as we mentioned, vertically oriented. But there is a sub display LCD thing that you can actually wait. Let me turn it on. So, like, maybe people can see. I'll just put this in B-roll.

1:00:17You can swipe through different film simulations on it. And it shows, like, the canister. Like, it looks like it's the little window that you would get in a film camera. You see, like, the little, like, portrait or, well, not portrait. Astia. like all of those as you swipe through it's really cool it's also how you like navigate menus and stuff it's not super responsive what's a little slow i thought it was great no when you're swiping through it's pretty quick but when you're like tapping through for the menus and stuff it's a little bit slow yeah that part i thought was cool scrolling through the the like fake film canister to pick the different filters was really responsive and i didn't expect it to be because gimmicky stuff like that is usually not really that well built in but it was really good yeah David and I were taking a beautiful walk.

1:01:00Sorry, did I cut you off? I was just going to say the one other thing is that film advanced lever, if you push in, also lets you see the last photo you took. I guess if you're outside of whatever the mode is. But I thought that was a really quick way to check the photo. That's nice. I think they should full send it. And since the sensor is so small, I know it's not actually one inch, guys. It's very, very small. But it's small enough that you could, in theory, put them on a belt and have the film lever just advance which sensor was in line with the... Anyway, David and I were taking a beautiful walk through North Brooklyn on a beautiful summer day a week or two ago, maybe.

1:01:35And we were talking about this bad boy, having a conversation about it. And David, you said one of the funniest things I've ever heard you say. Maybe it's an exaggeration because you've said some pretty funny stuff. We did six months ago. But we were talking about how this camera, you can't pull raw images off of it. You can only pull compressed images off of it. and how people were complaining about that, even though Fujifilm was kind of known for their breathtaking JPEGs. But I was like, you really don't think you'd ever want to pull a RAW out of it? You go, Ellis, all of the features in this camera are to make the pictures worse.

1:02:12One of the filters is literally called Light Leak. You're like, what are you trying to dial in on this thing? That is my take. A lot of people, yeah, you can only take JPEGs. My take on this is I am in a one-inch camera period of my life right now. I can't explain it. I just am really enjoying shooting on super low dynamic range old one-inch cameras, mostly because the lenses that you can adapt to them are really, really cool. And if they made this with an interchangeable lens system, oh my God. Next level. I'd buy it so fast. I'd buy it so fast. So my take is that Fuji is trying to respond to the Digicam hype that's been going on for the last year or so.

1:02:59I don't know if you know about this. Is this also a throwback retro thing? Basically, Zoomers are going to. So remember in 2020 when all the Zoomers were buying film cameras? Well, they broke boys because film is expensive as hell. So all the Zoomers now are going to thrift stores and buying like three megapixel Samsung Digicams from 2003. because it gives you that like vintage, bad quality party camera look that everyone wants for social media because the whole thing right now is like anti-perfectionism. I'm so cool. I don't care about how good the picture is. I just, I'm living in the moment, bro.

1:03:37Marquez, how much do you think a mint Canon PowerShot G7 costs right now? This is a 10 megapixel Canon G7. On eBay. On eBay, it comes with a battery and a charger and a camera and that's it. How much it costs or how much it's worth? Oh, and a strap. How much it is selling? No. Yeah. Six dollars. I am here. Actually, I should go to the sold listings, but I'm seeing them for... $32. I'm seeing them for in between$200 and$300 right now. Yeah. Like these things are in demand. Yeah. These would have been, these literally would have been$5 at the thrift store like four years ago. Wow. So, but yeah, so Fuji is trying to respond to that.

1:04:16I think the problem is that it's an$850 camera. I think the amount of R &D that they put into this is worth a decent amount of money. It's probably not worth$850. But I think the 1.0 type sensor is intentional because they want the images to have less dynamic range. They want it to look worse. They have all these filter modes that just add these bad effects to it on purpose. But then you get the Fuji colors, which are beautiful. But you get the Fuji colors. I think this makes sense. Two got sold today for over$1 ,000. It's the newer one, the 20 megapixel one, but two Canon today. Yeah. And I just want to say, a lot of people are like, it can't even shoot RAW.

1:05:00And it's like, it has a 1.0 type sensor. It obviously could if they wanted it to be able to. But Fuji intentionally made it not able to because why would you do that? Also, this is not the camera to get if you care about image quality. If you care about shooting RAW, that's the type of person who cares about image quality. and high performance, and this is the opposite of that. On the slider of toy to tool, if you're asking for raw, you're pushing it towards tool. If you're asking for light leak filters, you're asking for toy. So just pick a side, and if you're asking for one, why complain about that?

1:05:35This is like the perfect road trip camera, where you're just in the car, and you're like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Yeah, like if you're shooting a wedding, you're not taking this camera. Actually, maybe. I mean, a lot of people want photos like that. It wouldn't be a only camera. They would take it with a professional camera and add those after. If they were like, you know, a wedding photographer, like a professional tool. If you were at a wedding and wanted to take photos with a phone camera, this is like... Fujifilm's entire Instax line is run by the wedding industry, so, you know.

1:06:04People want those Polaroids. As someone who is entering the wedding age of their life, whoever has the Canon Power Shot is the most beloved person by the... By the way, I was at this Canon event where they were launching the R5 Mark II. They were, oh, canon launching. Boom. Damn. Stop. He's on it today, folks. We have to stop. Notice how I laughed and didn't try to one-up, and then everyone's referencing me trying to one-up. Don't worry, he's opening up Twitter right now. Oh, my God. I can't wait to title this episode. I just have to say, I was at this canon event where they were launching Alice's joke, not mine, the R5 Mark II and also the R1 or whatever it was.

1:06:51I like that. And so these are like the fastest, most insane, like most high professional cameras ever made, basically, that are like not even really cameras anymore. They're kind of just like video feeds in 8K that you can take stills from. But there was a reporter there and she was like 20 years old. She was like, oh my God, I just got this like Canon G7. All of my friends are trying to get these right now. I was like, oh, are you guys like photographers? She's like, oh, no, no. We just like every these are huge in my circles right now. And I was like, what? The Canon? I've never heard of. They take good pictures.

1:07:25They do. I know. They're actually like great cameras. And especially like the autofocus systems on them are usually really good. Like, yeah, I feel like these these sort of point and shoots got kind of passed over because DSLRs were kind of like pumping out really incredible images, you know? Yeah. But now that we have mirrorless cameras and really incredible images are the default. It's like you get these really beautiful, I don't know. And there's sort of this weird liminal space that people want where they either want a really sh** image of like their life or they want something better than their phone.

1:07:56But nobody wants the phone. And I'm just here to say HDR is bad. And stop doing HDR for everything. HDR has driven these industries. Every industry has a slider from functional to fun. Yeah. And often the nostalgia driven like toy or more like entertaining version that's towards fun is, you know, not necessarily the most functional thing. Doesn't have the most high quality experience, but it has the fun factor. Yeah. And then there's the other side, which is when you push all the way to functional, it feels a little more sterile or a little less exciting. Yeah. But it has, it's the one that's pushing the envelope of technology, et cetera.

1:08:40Yeah. And so, yeah, you just, you pick a set. If phone HDR had never been invented, people would not be buying these. The iPhone 7 camera looks exactly like the Canon. Like, they look the same. I was going to ask, so this might be kind of an embarrassing question. But is there an app I can get for my iPhone that enables? That is canon. Is there an app for my iPhone that enables the sensor to be exposed one time? Even without HDR? Yeah, no HDR, no multiple exposure, no hitting both cameras and deduce. Like, I just want shutter open, quote unquote, shutter open, quote unquote, shutter close. Halide has a feature called process zero that I think we talked about a few months ago, maybe.

1:09:23Can you remind me? Even that is going to not be zero. Because for me, it's the computational. I would be okay if it was possible to do a single exposure high dynamic range. It's not the dynamic range that bugs me. It's how on phones everything is perfectly exposed. Yeah. It's so... Well, that's because of the HDR. Right, right, right. It's the stacking. But Halite has that. There's an app called... ZeroCam? ZeroCam that does the same thing. And it works? Yeah, it works pretty well. Yeah, the images look much better. You have to edit them, obviously, but... That's fine. Yeah. Why don't you just get a Fuji X-Half?

1:10:01I'm just saying tone curves are not meant to be flat. The X-Half costs$400 more than I paid for this iPhone. Wow. So anyway, I think the X-Half is really, really cool. I like it. But I think it's really cool. And I want to say that R &D into building something that interesting and weird and they built an accompanying app with it does cost money. $850 is too much, but it's worth something. No, I agree. They should charge for their work. I just think$850 is a little much. It also accomplishes the most important thing is you get to walk around with a Fujifilm camera. And I feel like, yo, where's the brewery at?

1:10:37I feel so cool. And I have the answer. Yeah. I could be like, if you want to. I'm on my way. Follow me. Not me running beers and cameras. Anyway, Marquez, we're going to get you to love one of these things eventually. You will like an old bad thing. Look, I'm going to tell you right now, I know where I am on the slider of Functional to Fun. and in many of the hobbies that I'm in, and I've been thinking about this, like I am very much towards the functional slider and the fun, this is true in cars, where like if you ever hear about the way people talk about like driving characteristics, like when you watch Porsche 911 reviews and people are like, the car is too perfect.

1:11:16The car is like soulless. To me, I'm like, hell yeah. Hell yeah. It's like a surgical instrument. Hell yeah, it's soulless. Other people are like, I want the skinny rear wheel drive, of like tail happy car that like can't put the power down they want that because it's less functional less performant but more fun so that slider exists in a bunch of different ways i am i know where i am on the slide but i know one arena of your life i don't know if you know that you are where you are more on the please tell me it's your yamaha hs8s which you know i if i can look if i dive in and find out that those are way more towards fun and i can get something way more towards function, I'm kicking them out.

1:11:57No, no, no. What is the Yamaha HSA? My studio monitors speakers. They are trusted studio monitors. They're known to be accurate, especially in their price point. They're really, really great. But the big difference between the 8s and the 7s, or the, yeah, there's a 5, 7, and an 8 in that series, is that the 8s have way larger speaker cabinets than a lot of other 8-inch speaker cone, which gives them a lower roll-off point, which gives them this really punchy, clear, exciting, low-frequency response, which can be a little bit bassier. It can be a little bassier than things are in real life. But when you talk to people who work in studios, even the people who prefer a more clinical, dry, accurate, transparent speaker, the number one word people use for the HS8s is fun.

1:12:49It's a fun speaker to listen to. It's like I'm in the market for new studio monitors. Especially when you have them in a near field configuration. I liked this, but then I found out I could be entertained by it, so now I have to get rid of it. Yeah, so... No, I want... I am all function. As far as... Because I got those HS8s to replace what I had before, which was like a 2.1 system from some plastic Harman Kardon thing I had before. So I went in the direction of accuracy. We can talk if you want ultra accuracy. Okay. Oh, yeah. But first, a little thing we hear at the Waveform Podcast call trivia, dude.

1:13:31There's a Sharpie here. That's dangerous. Oh, that's very dangerous. Eagle-eyed viewers among you watching on YouTube.com may have noticed that Adam and I are sitting in the same chairs that we do every single week and nothing has changed. Question one. Instagram was conceived as a location-based social network, but eventually they had to pivot because a little thing called Foursquare came along. Before they pivoted, what was their name? Oh, I thought it was the aspect ratio. That is question number two. Oh, sorry. Wait, can you ask the question again? Before Instagram was called Instagram, it was called what?

1:14:11Oh. So think very deeply because about six years ago, I'm going to.

1:14:27I literally can't. I can't even think of a guess. Yeah, it's because it's stupid. Yeah. Who wants to go first? Me. Nothing. Nothing. Marquez, what you got? I made a guess. I wrote Instamatic. I'll give you a hint. Their word Insta is not in it. I don't know. This hint is coming way too late. Yeah. I put Insta square. But I know it's not Insta anything. The correct answer is bourbon. All right. Spelled B-U-R. I have actually heard that. B-N. And I've seen the logo as well. Coffee. You know, this is the first time I've said it out loud. Bourbon is an alcohol, Marcus. Well, I assumed it was like urban or suburban because it was a geolocation thing.

1:15:14But yeah, I think it actually is just like. Is it like untapped? No. Which is like. Dude, who knows? That's like the beer rating app, right? Yeah. Quick update on the score. Marquez with 26. Andrew with 16. 10 points behind. David. Dude, how old are you? 30. With 30 points. Nice. All right. So when Instagram first launched, it had an aspect ratio of one by one. the question is how many pixels did it have? Resolution wise Like blank by blank Blank by blank or I will also accept the literal number of pixels Closest without going over You don't get extra points for doing both right? No It's one of two options One of infinite options I think it was one by one Yeah one by one aspect ratio flip him and read what do we got oh oh oh is not an option let's go first I know I'm wrong I wrote 324 by 324 wrong I wrote 418 by 418 wrong I wrote 480 by 480 wait wait wait wait but why did you say that because it was wrong though it was a 720 but why did you choose 480 am I gonna make an answer and say reasoning and then you're going to say, actually, that's not correct.

1:16:42Well, if you're reasoning, your answer's wrong, but if you can nail your reasoning, I'd like to give you a point. Because in resolution, you go like 480p and 720p. I was going to say, do you mind if I take this one? Yeah, go for it. I was going to say, well, the correct answer, is that out of 20p? 500? 512? 640 by 640? Oh. Because the resolution of the first retina display present on the iPhone 4 was 640 pixels wide. I would need to fact check this, but I believe the width of the iPhone's 1, 3G, and 3GS were 480 pixels wide, which is why I thought you picked. That is why I picked it. Yeah. Six years ago?

1:17:28Doubt it. Yeah, no, that's an interesting fun fact. I'm canceled. We all got all of those wrong. That's okay. That just means the scores are all still the same. I'm still 30 years old. Yeah. No, no, I was wrong. It's 320 pixels wide. Don't listen to me. Anyway, yeah. Thanks for watching and listening. Very chaotic week. We'll be back, of course, with your regularly scheduled programming again next Wednesday. If anything, if you made it this far into the podcast. If you made it this far into the podcast, make sure to check in on Looped wherever you are listening to the podcast. Until you're the mayor.

1:18:02And then we'll know that you're really plugged in. hope you finished the dishes. Thanks for watching. Catch you in the next one. Peace. Way from us produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Rovin. Should I say Ellis Rovin and Adam Molina? Now that you guys switched. Yes. Way from us produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Rovin. We're partnered with the Vox Media Podcast Network and our interaction music was created by Vane Silk. Bingo. Let's go.

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