Tong Family

It is incredible how knowledge can fade, I last did a podcast back on July 14, 2023, and am just starting again, I learned a bunch of new things I can’t wait to share and forgot, but here’s a quick list of things that I forgot and finally know how to do:

1. Shure VP83F Microphone tuning. I had these both completely wrong, my Shure VP83F was set way too high at +33dB gain and it should have been at +5dB I didn’t have the right settings at all and forgot the filters I needed (reminder, it is set the gain to in the red in OBS, then RNNoise filter, then 3-band equalize to mids, then the expander gain so whisper is in the “yellow” and threshold cuts out the below whisper noises, then compressor threshold to keep shouts down below -0.1 dB and finally a limiter at 0.1dB).
2. Rode NT1A turned it around. Please make sure the gold dot is in front otherwise, you have the mike backward and it sounds like tin. Then readjust the 3-band equalizer in OBS (for me, right now completely flat works because the NT1A is already tuned to emphasize vocals).
3. OBS Output should be in MP4 format, not MKV. Final Cut Pro understands the former and not the later, you set this up in OBS > Preferences > Output > Recording. I set it to Large File Size and MPEG-4.
4. OBS sometimes lagging at 4K Video input with Brio. I want to product in 4Kp60, but the late release of OBS is way slower, so I had to drop to 1080p HD from the Brio and 30 fps so it would work. There a bunch of posts on this, but some folks report it works bettern with MJPEG (a less difficult compression scheme) than H.264. Unfortunately this was removed in later versions of MacOS. Other solutions are to make sure the input is not buffered, this didn’t help for me. Some report getting rid of low light compensation in the Logitune utlity helps. The Brio may just not be able to handle 4K conversions at speed but I’ve found it is quite variable
5. Apple Motion for Final Cut Pro. You should add MixKit free templates as they are really nice. They come in two flavors, Titles and Transitions. Note that you need to create two folders in ~/Movies/Motion Templates/Titles.localized and Transitions.localized. And, yes, I need to learn how to use Apple Motion sometime soon.
6. Stingers for Podcasts. It’s traditional in radio to have intro music, outro music and transition music. Fortunately, you can get some nice open source ones or just make your own if you are talented. I drop these into an Event in Final Cut Pro called “A0. Assets” and then sort by name so they are at the top.
7. SDR to HDR Conversion. but I want to produce in real HDR, fortunately you can use an effect called HDR Tools. Just drop it on a clip and in the settings choose, “SDR to PQ” and make sure it is set to Rec.2020 PQ. You can even set the peak brightness, I set it at 600 nits which works for most normal HDR Televisions. Note that the OLED screens on iPhone work up to 1600 nits, but I wouldn’t suggest that.
8. Brio shoots in HDR at UHD 30 fps (but I don’t think this is real HDR, I think it just means it has more exposure latitude which is what RightLight 3 means),I do find that the Brio definitely runs to overexposure. That is the colors are really washed out particularly with studio lighting. Longer term, I might just switch to a real dSLR to get a nice shallow depth of field as I find the Brio pretty harsh.
9. Apple Compressor change name to .mp4. The default Apple Devices at 4K HDR seems to work really well with YouTube and even Spotify Podcaster. Just note that you have to change the name to .mp4 from .m4v since YouTube only accepts .mp4 extensions.
10. YouTube takes a while to offer HDR, but eventually you should get to 4K HDR. It first produces SDR and then in the background encodes, so be patient