 Welcome to the show! It's me, JP. It's time for John Park's Workshop. And I'm in my workshop, but I'm pretending I'm up in New York or over in New York in the factory because I still have my green screen up from the live stream yesterday, the Eight of Box Unboxing, and we're going to talk about that a whole bunch today. Talk about some behind-the-scenes stuff with the unboxing. But I figured we either get to look at me, the Mime version, on black, or we can have this background. I really what I need to do is take a good picture of my workshop when I don't have the green screen up so then I can just stick it back there and cheat. In fact, my friend who hiped me to this retro reflective green screen material and method said that he just uses that trick so that doesn't have to clean his workshop or his workspace where he broadcasts from. So he has a picture of a cleaned version of his office. I love that. Okay, so Doctor says they're watching the behind-the-scenes before watching the unboxing itself. Just got the Eight of Box 18. That's excellent. Alright, so let's first of all start off with a couple things. I've got this help wanted job board sign up. So if you head on over to the page right there, that's jobs. You'll see that there are open job positions including this one up at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories up in Sunnyvale up in Northern California. Terrific people making very cool products. You may be familiar with some of them including, let's see, they've got the egg bot. They had a watercolor painting robot at one point. I'm not sure if they're selling that at this point. They have the AxiDraw which is a signature drawing and line plotter product. So head on over to, in fact, let's click on, if you go to the Evil Mad Scientist site, there you go. There's AxiDraw, excuse me, and a bunch of other products. And so they've got an opening listed right here on our jobs board for a light duty mechanical manufacturing and assembly tasks needed. So manufacturing assistant full-time. So if you're up in Northern California or thinking of moving there and looking for some work, check it out. That might be interesting too. So that's the jobs board over at jobs.adofruit.com. Let's see, what else do we have? When you say, hey, who's he talking to? Keeping an eye over on YouTube chat. Hello, Keith and Dave. Welcome to the chat. And then a whole bunch of people over in our Discord. If you go to adafru.it, that's our URL shortener, adafru.it-discord. You'll get an instant invite link into our Discord and the live broadcast chat channel is where the conversation is happening. So head on over there. And let's see. The next thing I want to mention is my show on Tuesdays is the JP's product pick of the week. And my pick this week was this NeoKey Trinky. And the product pick of the week is about 15 minute long, do a bunch of demos or at least a demo, do some background on the product show some code examples. And then I also make this little one minute recap. So let's take a look at that. Here you go. The NeoKey Trinky. This is like a USB key or a thumb drive, but it accepts a keyboard key switch, mechanical key switch. You solder it onto there. And it's got the capacitive touch on the end. You can do any sort of HID thing. So this can be MIDI. You can do control out delete button. I've got a Raspberry Pi 400 computer sitting right here. This is going to when I press it enter in my toe beans emoji. It is the NeoKey Trinky and it is a mechanical key switch USB key style trinket with an under litneo pixel and capacitive touch. Yeah. Okay. So go check that out. And those were discounted 50% off during the live stream. So if you are able to catch the live stream, you can watch from inside the product page. One of the first things I do is send out a blog post that has a little link. It'll take you the product page. You can watch it from in there and you can get that 50% off during the live stream. So go check that out next week. I'll be doing another one on Tuesday. Let's see. Next up. How about this little thing called the circuit Python Parsec. That was me talking about the fact that I didn't think my audio was working. So thanks for alerting me over in the chat. People are like, Hey, you're muted. I was like, Yeah, you know what? My audio mixer window up. So I just peeled that off and set that over the side so I can see some VU meters bouncing up and down. So whew. All right. For the circuit Python Parsec today, I wanted to talk about analog output. So we've talked about digital in digital out analog in and now analog out. So these general purpose in out pins, I'm in this case using the cutie pie. The a lot of these pins can serve many different duties. In the case of this board, the A zero pin can act as an analog output. So that's a digital digital to analog converter DAC. What that means is we can send it commands and it will send a voltage varying from zero to 3.3 volts, which is the range that this board can do on those pins, or maybe zero to three, I forget. The code that you need to do that is very straightforward. So if you look here, I'm importing time. I'm importing time so that we can do pauses importing boards that we get the pin definitions, and I'm importing the analog IO library. Then I set up my analog pin by calling this analog out equals analog IO dot analog out, and then name the pin in this case board a zero. That's the pin that I have this yellow wire plugged into that's running to one terminal on this meter. And then my black pin there is going to ground and the other terminal on the meter. And then in code here, I've just set up a little variable that's the maximum value. So in this case, 65,535 is the maximum value that that can go to, which equates to its top voltage. And then I also set one up for half of that and integer of half of that. Then in my code, all I'm doing to test this out, and this could be writing to anything that can receive a sort of low current analog value. And in this case, what I'm doing is I'm sending the value of zero, waiting a second, sending that half value. And that's when you'll see it ping up here in a second, it'll jump up, boop, half, then full, boop, then drop it to medium, drop it to zero. And then I'm using this little range for loop to sweep through every value pretty quickly, and then drop by subtracting one from that so that we drop down back down to zero. And so that is how you can use an analog output inside of circuit Python. And that is your circuit Python parsec. Alright, so let's see any questions in the chat there. The one thing I'll say is a couple places to find out some of these very basic things that I've been covering are one, the circuit Python essentials page. So if we jump back over into Chrome here, I'm going to go to learn dot adafruit.com. And I usually just type in essentials, ESS, and that jumps right to this great guide by Katnie called circuit Python essentials. If you head here, you will see a whole bunch of essential tasks that you can go through, and how to wire them up as well as run the code and get set up with the proper libraries. And the other resource I've been using is the circuit Python tricks page that Todd bot has set up. So let's see, it is here GitHub slash Todd bot slash circuit Python dash tricks. And in here, you'll find a lot of real fundamental things, some of them, not so basic, some of them a little more advanced, but really great tricks to remember. And so he's got them all here on this GitHub page. So those are a couple places to look for fundamental circuit Python things. And let's see, wow, there's so many of me. What have we got next? I think we're ready to jump in. Have I forgotten anything? No, I think we're ready to jump into talking about some behind the scenes stuff from the unboxing videos. First thing I'm going to do is I have to turn on the AC because it's getting a little hot in here and my cameras like to overheat. So come back here. So first thing I'll do is I'm going to bring up the copy of the video here, we're not going to go through it painstakingly step by step, I promise, but I got some good questions from people about how how this process works of creating the unboxing, everything from concept to shooting to compositing and effects and post production. So I'm going to cover a few of those things. Here is a copy of the video. So you can go and check this out on our YouTube for the full unboxing evening. I'm not going to go through the whole thing. And you can also find this inside of the guide for a to box 18. So there were essentially three major sections of this in my mind that I'll show you. So one is this intro. And the intro goes from a logo to a character inside of a cutout version of the a to box product, which is that funhouse there on a backdrop with these rolling clouds, looking like Kansas, then it transitions from that into a sort of intro to the unboxing. And in this section, early section, I'm actually reading the copy, I usually read the copy from our blow in card. So this has some usually three, four paragraphs there. And I I'll read those sometimes just as a voiceover while I'm showing something else in this case, I decided to do it on camera. Then I cut to kind of a closer up of me and the clouds are no longer rolling back there. And then I transition into Technicolor. So we go into this color mode, just like Wizard of Oz. So if you didn't know, and I'll talk about that a bit, the concept here, some of the theming was around the, the there's no place like home, because it's a home assistance device. And the Wizard of Oz, from sepia tone to Technicolor, and then back to sepia tone, at the end, when we go back back home, was was a concept there. And so then you can see after that that shift, I'm in this color land, I'm using kind of a theatrical backdrop of Oz, I'll talk about that a little bit. And then it's straight into the unboxing with some exception. So you can see here, I've got a second character here. So initially it's Dorothy, then I've got the second character of Scarecrow. In the background, just as a little teaser, I'll talk about that, why I did it, and how it's done technically. And then maybe a couple other little things along the way. There was another one that Stuart had asked about doing a second character. Fast forward there. So you can see I've got a second me coming in as Tin Man as the Scarecrow leaves the scene. And so let's pull that out of the way for a second. So in fact, I'll go to the black backdrop there. The questions that I had. So I'm going to start with one from Sea Grover, which was interested in the evolution of the artistic design, how you go from a sort of a brief, hey, you're going to be doing an unboxing to that that that performance as well as that pre edited part. If you didn't know, by the way, I pre shoot and edit and composite and post production on a 20 ish minute long video. And that's the unboxing video. And then that that plays and then I go to live where I usually do demos. So I've actually kind of got both of those aspects to talk about. So if you look actually right here right behind me, I've mentioned this before, I've actually shown this as a project. The green screen here is a couple of pieces of this retro reflective material. And you can see I've got one right here right behind me at my workstation where I do this part of the show and some parts of the unboxing. It's actually some tape came off. So that's going to have a little bit of a seam. But this is really forgiving stuff compared to a traditional green screen because it's got that retro reflection. And so if I turn that chroma key back on, you can see basically disappears with with some small accession exceptions, if you create a blur. So I have one here and I have one over here in this part of my workshop. Again, if we turn that off, you'll see, let's grab that layer one second. So you can see there again, I got got a screen over there. If I turn that light off or even just kind of cover it with my my hand, I can go to blue screen, pure white and offsets the actual screen back there. So the that is a separate project that I've done. So you can go to learn guide and check out retro reflective green screen. So I know there were some questions about that. One thing I did in in the case of the scarecrow shots, if you look at these shots here, I'm wearing a green shirt, I've got a little bit of green makeup. So I actually shot that on blue screen. So those were blue screen so that we didn't have to worry as much about shooting through probably. That's just me flexing on the fact that the setup can do that because my green in the shirt is fairly far away. But sometimes you can have problems if you're even kind of in the neighborhood of the hue that you're trying to pull the key on. But back to the question that see Grover had. So that was sort of the abstract was like, hey, we've got this concept of a Wizard of Oz thing, and there's no place like home thing. And so fill in the more said, hey, you're gonna figure out a character or some characters to dress up as. And one of my thoughts was, rather than do like a full blown character in a full costume, what if I did kind of a nod to it? And this this home thing had me thinking about like a handyman and this idea of doing work shirts. And I was inspired actually by this thing. You may or may not have heard of it's called Disney bound in or bounding or to Disney bound. And what this is is a sort of a variation on cosplay that people are allowed to do at Disneyland and Disney World resorts because they don't allow anyone over a certain age like 12 or something to dress in a costume. So they let kids dress in costumes, but Disney doesn't want people adults dressing up in full blown costumes, for whatever reason. And so people come up with this idea of dressing in a way that suggests a character without being a full blown costume. So if you just look up Disney bound or Disney bounding, you'll see lots of examples. I love this guy here in this photo who's who's got a sort of Donald Duck look by doing this, this white pants, yellow belt, blue shirt, red bow tie, and the shades. So that was a thought as I would do kind of a nod to rather than full blown costume work for those characters. And then once I decided to do that, my wife had the idea of getting name badges. So we thought, Okay, if I'm going to be Dorothy, I've got to have a sort of gingham check shirt. And we found a seller on Etsy who would do these name badges pretty quick. So these are nice embroidered badges. And I got one for each character. So I've got the Dorothy character, we bought that shirt, I happened to already have the green and the tan shirts. So there's the scarecrow. Here is the Tin Man shirt, work shirt that I got. And then here's lion. And then part of that was it would also free me up to not be in character like deeply in character during this, which I loved doing for the Rocky Horror Picture Show, particularly that was an absolute blast to get to play riffraff and frank and further. But for this one, it seemed like it would be a bit much. Some of those characters are not really able to talk to you in a straightforward way if you're being the cowardly lion or the scarecrow. So I figured I would be mostly me delivering that with a little hint of those characters. So that was, I think, to answer your question, C Grover, some of the creative thought process that I went through for doing that. I got a question about how you prepare something like this from Mr. Certainly, who said, who asked, do you storyboard the flow of the scenes? What I often do is actually do a shot breakdown of the scenes that I want to do. And then I make bullet points of the beats that I want to hit. So I have scene zero is my intro. So that's either just going to be the voiceover, and I'll do graphics on top of it later. Or in this case, I decided to shoot it, not being sure exactly how I was going to show it visually, but knowing that if I shot it on the green screen, I'd have options. And so then when I got to that section of the assembly process, I decided to make it different from the sort of intro of me standing there and talking at my workbench and instead set it inside of this little cut out version of the of the fun house, like I'm in a house like I'm in Dorothy's house. So I have these major beats and I think there are six major scenes plus this scene zero intro. And those go through an introduction. Hello, it goes into a let's open the box. It goes into I'm going to take the things out. I switch characters to scarecrow and I actually show each thing. Then I switched to the tin man to do the let's go into deep detail on the main event thing. And I've done this on on most of the unboxings I've done, which I think I started these on maybe eight box seven or six was the first one I did. So this was number 18. So I've done a bunch of these. And I've largely kept that format of saying, I'm going to introduce it, I'm going to show you the contents. I'm going to go into deeper dive on the main thing. Then if there's assembly or something you have to put together, I'll show that and then do a little bit of a wrap up and then go to the live section. So that's my my planning process. And then in this case, I had the extra layer. And last few have had extra layer of trying to determine what character I'm going to be or what sort of scene it is if there's a change. So in this one, it was deciding which character does each thing kind of distributing among the four of the the characters I was going to do. The another question here actually that that is related was, I'm going to turn this AC off for a second because I think it's cooled off enough and I hate shouting over it. Another question I got from see Grover is do you ever essentially bite off more than you could chew you have a plan for something and then go Oh, wow, this is either going to be too hard or I don't have a footage for it or whatever and just like bail or shift. That was a brief consideration on this this one here of doing some animation of the house either flying kind of always moving in camera like I'm flying in the house that Dorothy's sort of spinning up in the tornado. But the amount of time it would take to do it well to do the animation in a way that that I was happy with I just didn't have it. And so I said this is just straight up not going to happen. So that was a case where I briefly considered getting real fancy and animating that flying around but I just didn't have the time time for it. Let's see the other case of this actually is sometimes when I get into the filming process because I'm doing this as sort of a solo venture it's it can be tricky to keep track of all the different things from like technical stuff like lighting and sound and and recording to doing the performances and remembering all the lines which I tend to have bullet points in my head and just speak freely. I don't like to read from a script when I can avoid it. In this case is one of the few cases where I've actually used a screen as a teleprompter just so I could get all the facts right on the exact sensors that are on the board so I wouldn't leave one out. And the specifications the resolution all those things I used to teleprompter so that I wouldn't have to do a bunch of takes or really sit there memorizing something. But that said, sometimes I miss something I forget something. So when I got to this tin man going through the board. It went well, I talked about all the parts on it. Let's see, can I turn the sound off on that? Turn that off. I talked about all of the pieces and parts this one I hit everything was happy with it did like a rough edit of it later to look at it. I think I maybe did two takes of this one. And then like a day later I woke up at like five in the morning said I never turned the thing on. I should have. So since I didn't have this one didn't ship with a battery doesn't use batteries and I didn't it didn't ship with the USB plugs I just have it sitting there so it didn't even occur to me. And so I decided rather than reshoot that I would just make a essentially second unit photography shoot and film what you see there on the left. So just film it put a mat around it overlay it and and then when I filmed that I listened to myself and watched that on a confidence monitor so I was just kind of doing things as my faces and on it doesn't matter so I'm watching a monitor turning things on touching things at the at the appropriate moments so that it matched up pretty well. So that was another case of of going things not going exactly as planned. So Stuart had some questions about the green screen when I replaced myself. And I think someone else had asked about that too. And by the way let me know in the chat if you have other questions I'll try to keep an eye on that. So let me jump over to Premiere here. So here you can see this is my editing software and the techniques I'm showing here I'm happy to show them sorry microphone is peeling off I hope you can still hear me. I'm happy to show these techniques because they are fairly universal and for people who don't pay for Premiere you're going to find very very similar techniques work in other software particularly DaVinci Resolve which I recommend to people it's a professional grade sweet that includes video editing compositing effects audio it's really terrific. So here in Premiere for for example let's look at the the process of one of these shots. So here we have show. Yeah okay so what I tend to do is I can you still hear me yeah I tend to shoot two or three cameras for these unboxings usually two cameras that are not synced to each other I'm not using Genlock there's your consumer level mirrorless micro four thirds cameras so I'm not running them into each other with with a sync cable so it they may or may not be perfect but it's good enough for this and that means I'm also not running any sort of automated sync to audio so I use a time honored method of picking up a film slate will clapper and I point that at both cameras I kind of angle it and I and I clap it so that I can see let me show you on this one let's see there you go I've just snapped it down let's see can I bring that one up there you go so that's what that looks like and bam so you just match the audio waveform which will be a big spike with that moment when the clapper slapped down and then you get you get sync and then what I end up with over here on the right is two perfectly synced camera shots that I can cut between at any time and that's what the sort of majority of my workflow is for showing things is this multi cam session where I basically have rough edited things I hit play and then I can hit some keys some hot keys to make an edit point between one camera the other and I can see both of them as I do it so in that process I end up with the me talking my hands me talking my hands and it's all in sync so that's that's called multi cam typically paranoid about this microphone falling off so then in the case of this scarecrow shot here's kind of layers of what I have let's take off a color correction node so this is this is me making a a color correction it's actually subtle and I don't think you can see it on this as well as I see it on my monitor here but this is to match a consistent color grading across all of my shots so I do little little color tweaks and so let me turn that off and then I've also done some pre color balancing of the individual elements there's that little scarecrow shot so that was actually a separate shot you can see it here and there you can see him on the blue screen for that shot and this was another case of I didn't quite know what I was going to do with this I was in costume I think I had not yet shot yet and I said I'm just going to kind of be the character for a moment so that I can kind of get into it do a funny goofy antique of some kind and I'm not sure what I'm going to use them for I didn't transition right from those into talking and then later during the editing process I said oh you know what since I'm being Dorothy now and then I'm going to be scarecrow I'm going to preview or or sort of hint at that character a little bit give a little easter egg of that character so I don't make you know the Dorothy character doesn't really make any acknowledgement of that by the way I can see my my playback is is probably kind of stuttering as I do that but so that's that was kind of the genesis of that idea of putting that character in there the background is actually a kind of quick and dirty painting I did in Photoshop to just sort of mimic the look of the backdrops in in the movie uh oh that's funny I can see that I am my premiere session is chroma keying the green out one second yeah there's the green back um that didn't need to have a green screen apply so the um I had brought it in as this as a background I while I built it in layers in Photoshop rather than go and grab two layers to put myself behind that hill there because I basically shot you can see with the with the workbench in my lap so I had to had to get that out of there so for something like this I'm doing kind of two mats one is the green screen or in this case the blue screen mat chroma key and then there's also a let me go to this mask here let me see if I can zoom in a bit so you can see how that works and so all this does is allow me to very roughly pull out some sections like a little cut out little garbage mat cut out this is often called so that in this case I might have just left it still or I might have needed to animate it yeah sometimes I animate these if I if I'm moving around a lot and there's a need to you can animate the points of those in this case it just it just allowed me to make it look like I'm sitting behind that hill and so it's a very similar technique actually when we get to the tin man so here is another shot where I had done a little bit of character antics of of me being this tin man zoom in here a little bit so I just sat in front of the camera and did some little tin man kind of stuff but then I comped it you know did the did the green screen pull and then I did some animation of its scale and position on screen so when when that comes in rather than us both being up on top of each other I kind of make it seem like the characters sort of being wheeled up or something it doesn't look like I'm walking but that's okay for the tin man and those are again two separate shots that are so there's this one and you can see actually on this in this case I had to swap which workbench you saw so you didn't notice the shift over because things had moved on the workbench so I did I brought in the tin man's workbench on top of the scarecrow so so there's a again a bunch of shenanigans to make that work so there's this there's this and then there's this shot that's just the workbench a little little composite of those elements something else that I did hear up towards the beginning is if we go to by the way one thing that I'm doing here is I'm kind of building things up so I'll edit the majority of it except they didn't edit the intro all in one go and then I rendered that out brought it back in and now the software isn't thinking as much I'm kind of pre compositing things pre rendering things and then doing more on top of it where I can get away with it so that's why you'll see in this timeline here a bunch of this has nothing going on other than some looped audio but this is all of the the intro stuff here at the beginning let's see and why is that okay so on this one let's see if I can zoom some of these things up a little bit more for this let's see does that have yeah this will be subtle can you see that you may or may not be able to see that so one of the things that happens is that since you've got different elements in this case I've got like a very clear photo of this from our product page and then I've got this sort of blurry depth of field blur Kansas background with some composited clouds and then I've got me cut out using using the chroma key a lot of these elements don't seem to kind of fit together very well until you start doing things like applying a universal color grade across them and adding grain so I added a bit of film grain on top of it it's heavy-handed a little more heavy-handed at the beginning because of that sepia tone look but it emulates the noise that you get from film grain moving changing the emulsion changing from frame to frame and one of the things is that this does is it tends to unify stuff so getting this this composited top layer of grain that is consistent across the whole thing so as it's changing it looks like the change is kind of you know across the whole thing that helps marry all the all the different elements that are kind of cookie-cuttered together so I've got an element of that I've got an element of here's here's this color grade so you can see my Kansas background I had graded already in Photoshop the clouds I had desaturated but they still got some blue in them there the fun house is as is and and I don't have too much color grading on me but then when we put this grade across the top of it of adjusting the color curves and saturation it helps to blend stuff together and again these are things that are I'm doing a fairly quick job at this this isn't like six months of a vfx film or something like this this is a few days but the techniques you can you can use some of these basic techniques for stuff that's real quick and and dirty but still is fun and looks good or you can really refine the heck out of them like people do on you know blockbuster vfx films and let's see what else what other layers do I have on here here's that house there's me again I've cut out actually didn't really need to but I think at one point my hands might go out of go too wide and go out of the window so I put a little bit of a mat on top of me there I think at the towards the beginning of the shot maybe yeah right there so you'll see my hands get cut off there because I'm doing a another one of these masks just kind of keep myself constrained inside the window let's see other questions um I'm going to check the chat actually because I think there's been some questions in there um let's see how long does it take to film a 20 minute production segment like this how long to edit ah that's a good question so I actually um filmed it in two sessions on on two separate days uh a few hours each it went really well you know sometimes it can take many takes to get something I think most of this was within one or two takes um and that's that's great because it means less to deal with when you're editing as well uh in fact I think only two shots had two takes the rest of them have one take which is um a skill that you tend to to some people are great at that anyway but it's by doing a lot of these that are very similar I I've gotten good at doing them in in a take which is uh a gift to future me who has to sort and edit stuff so um sometimes having two takes even if you think you got a good one is good to take a second take because then if you find a mistake it's very easy to cut in since I always go down to the workbench and then back up to me it's really easy for me to to cut in uh and you won't notice a continuity error so a couple days of filming uh editing probably about uh part days about four or five days so so I spread it out the I think the night I finished shooting I did one rough edit I was like I'm just gonna bring in all the A cameras which is the me and the workbench I'm just gonna chop those roughly so I see how long it is and if it feels like it has the right um all right info in it the right arc to it um and then probably uh another couple of days of work of doing some sweetening of audio some effects stuff some film grain things things that I leave when I can towards the end um yeah mr certainly the says the DaVinci Resolve has a free tier too so that's totally free software which I really do recommend I'm gonna turn my AC back on um in fact both of my kids have spent uh a good amount of time in DaVinci Resolve this this school year because they do um they're both in drama and in choir and so shooting and editing music videos and acting scenes and stuff they've they've uh both learned to resolve which is excellent skill I think to have uh and transferable from this to an avid to a premiere to final cut um they all tend to use the same grammar um similar interfaces uh let's see what else um yeah doctor says they sync their cameras and audio by making unique strange sounds for each clip that's good by the way a note about um slating having something like that right towards the beginning makes life a lot easier when a file name goes weird if you can scrub and see what your um scene take the date if there's unique info if you're shooting two different cameras I'll put that on there and then uh for my main camera these are settings that I want to get correct so I just mark down aperture and shutter speed and ISO and white balance setting and as well as my key light what percentage it's a it's a dial-able light so that's what uh that serves a couple of duties there for you you can also use these for uh getting color balance if you have issues between shots because you've got like a um standard set of colors there that you can balance to between shots if you need to so that makes my life a lot easier um and these are 30 bucks on amazon or something like that or go to a film supply if you've got one um we've got a good one here in town let's see what else so um stewart asked uh and I probably confused the issue because I showed that dazzler um games we know last week and I was using that to create video effects all of these are uh created by um either in real time when I did the live section of the show like i'm doing here um in my broadcast software in this case I'm setting a layer so you can think of a layer metaphor and the bottom layer in this case is this picture at ate a fruit uh or I can just go to black uh so those are done in this case in wirecast and then in the edits I'm shooting on green and then later when I go into edit and premiere I'm doing the same thing I'm putting a background in those cases it might be a looped video background uh which is what I did um I made a little uh sort of fading loop of cloud so it could just go endlessly um but the uh the process did not involve the dazzler so sorry if there was confusion there um also if you're wondering about getting this kind of effect to happen on zoom or webex um what you can do is use something like I'm using like wirecast you can use OBS uh open broadcast software I think OBS uh if you use software that can do the real-time live composite many of those pieces of software can act as a virtual webcam and they broadcast what they're doing as a USB webcam to the rest of your operating system and so then you can open up zoom and you can pick OBS as your or wirecast as your um camera it doesn't know it's not a webcam and then you've got all the software control over doing fancy things like changing backgrounds and and so on switching cameras if you need to um all that stuff can um it can happen inside of an app other than zoom or whatever you're using um let's see I think there was one other question I wanted to oh yeah I got that uh anything else um thanks for indulging me I love talking about this stuff and uh it's um not often that I get to kind of tell everyone hey here's how I'm putting this stuff together uh I don't have a separate camera that I can point around at things so maybe I can do that another time but uh you know in in this case like I said I've got um for when I went to the live section of the show I kept that background over there up and I didn't have this immediate one here when I was doing my filming I didn't need it but when I went to the live broadcast section I added this one so that I kind of had two stations I could go to which is kind of fun um and allows you to set up kind of two you could set up very different rooms I could you know put two different green screen backgrounds between the two of these and then to make this work I have uh two separate rings of green neopixels or color change neopixels based on that project uh yes pay no attention to the lars behind the uh the curtain back there um so that I know there was there was a there were some questions about that so it was a somewhat different setup for live versus prerecorded because I had this second camera here and so I put a second backdrop um but you can see even that that uh retro screen back there is getting the green light thrown directly back at the camera based on how the retro reflector lenses work inside the fabric um so let's see I'm just going to check my questions to see if I missed anything um I think that's it so let me know if you have any other uh questions otherwise we'll wrap this up and um I'll check over in the youtube too I didn't check over there in a little bit uh what is this doctor strange magic I know Gary right it's great I'm still so amazed and fascinated by uh by this retro reflective green screen because look at it whoo just just ahead uh and the wild thing is that it's so forgiving of lighting um I definitely could have had a lot of trouble shooting a traditional green screen back there because I only have about a foot a distance behind me in a traditional green screen you want five six feet behind you so to light that and not get light spilled back on your subject I light it evenly all those things are are problems that go away magically when you use retro reflective material so I can't get enough of this stuff uh all right yeah so doctor they're not a specific color they're based on the light so if I um if I turn off the chroma key for a second on this shot that's the color of the light I can dim it I can saturate it brighten it more I can switch to blue uh I can switch to white you can switch to any color you want because it's a set of neopixels um in fact I'll peel this one off I just have this one taped to my monitor so all this is is a little cutie pie with a rotary encoder on it thanks to Todd bot for this idea and method of getting a rotary rotor right on top of the cutie pie uh and then that just click encoder to different colors and brightness based on that little wheel there um so now I'll see if I can get it back on there and it just needs to surround your camera because and be on the same plane as the camera because you just want to get um that light sent from the camera's point of view right to the fabric and then returned and uh so long as that happens the chroma keying is a snap after that um pop that back on and voila magic and uh I think that's gonna do it is that everything all right uh thank you all for stopping by for this very special behind the scenes of the eight of box unboxing uh if you haven't uh done it yet go go check out the unboxing if you head to our uh not to donald duck here but if you head to uh ate a fruit you can go to ate a box dot com that'll uh oh that didn't work ate a box there we go uh that'll take you where you can uh check the video out uh that that I just spent this time talking about the unboxing uh you can also uh sign up for the next eight of box eight of box 19 will be coming in the summer uh it's going to be awesome uh matambele says can you fashion a reflective long sleeve shirt yes absolutely uh that's why this material exists and is inexpensive is because it's used for safety garments and fashion stuff so you can find this stuff out there or you can sew your own own stuff so uh yeah that'd be great for for doing some weird uh head only kind of effects um so yeah head head on over to ate a box dot com sign up if you haven't if you uh head on over to the learn guides and uh either type in ate a box or just check the new guides section you'll see there's the ate a box 18 guide the videos right at the top of this second page here and uh and we also go through all the contents of this this one for the fun house uh all right I think that's going to do it for today uh so thank you everyone for stopping by and I will see you next Tuesday for a new JP's product pick of the week and then uh following Thursday for a workshop bye bye