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Welcome to the rack room. The Production Geeks is a deep-dive into the obsessive engineering, high-stakes problem solving, and "nerd-level" passion that fuels Sorrentino Media. Join founder Mike Sorrentino and Dave Shaw (VP, Content and Creative Engineering) as they pull back the curtain on the complex infrastructure behind the world’s most ambitious broadcasts.
From live-streaming test flights for aerospace innovators to architecting massive multi-stream control centers and building turnkey studios for global enterprise leaders, Mike and Dave explore the "how" and "why" behind the tech.
This isn’t just a talk show; it’s a technical post-mortem. We dive into the spec sheets, the signal flows, and the "engineer the hell out of it" philosophy that makes the impossible look easy. If you love the gear as much as the result, and believe that the best production is built on a foundation of relentless technical curiosity, you’ve found your people. Engineered in Midtown Manhattan at 37th & Madison.
SorrentinoMedia.com and MadisonAveLive.com
Michael Sorrentino 0:08
I'm Mike Sorrentino. This is my colleague, Dave Shaw, our Vice President of Content and Creative Engineering here at Sorrentino Media, and we want to welcome you to our second episode of The Production Geeks.
Dave Shaw 0:31
an Spring Book, Spring Brook Farm Distillery, and Adirondack straight rye whiskey, and we have no idea where we got that from. We don't, but it's handmade in the Adirondack Mountains with pure unprocessed spring water. Okay, so let's take a little taste. Welcome to our second episode, and thanks for hanging on.
Michael Sorrentino 0:51
That's good. Yeah, I like a rye that's
Dave Shaw 0:54
Michael Goodwin, an old like rye old fashioned or something like, yeah.
Michael Sorrentino 0:58
So today we're going to talk about a project that we just finished
Dave Shaw 1:04
last week,
Michael Sorrentino 1:05
filming last week, and it was quite involved, and the whole concept is a podcast recorded in a vehicle, and this is for a client who has a podcast with a pretty solid following, so much so that they've been able to get a very well-known automobile manufacturer to sponsor a couple episodes of the podcast, so the concept was to film in the pot in the vehicle and you know, drop some mentions of that vehicle as a sponsored brand,
Dave Shaw 1:44
and just like there's a video podcast, not just audio, audio would have been simple, but yeah, yeah, it made our lives much easier.
Michael Sorrentino 1:50
So, what we wanted to talk about is the setup, so as we went into the production of this, the, you know, the idea was just two people having a conversation in a car, right, sounds nice and easy, and it should be, and to the client, and now we've got many layers, so we've got the client, who are the people who produce the podcast, then there is the talent, who's paid to come and host and be part of this sponsored podcast, and then you have the agency who has brought in the sponsor that comes in between the sponsor and the podcast production podcast company and then you have the actual client who is the vehicle manufacturer in this case paying the bill and then of course you have us the production company who's who's doing this so you have a lot of levels, a lot of layers, so things need to be very timely, they need to work right. So, what would you say were the key challenges before we even talk about how we solve them? A was probably
Dave Shaw 2:55
how to, how is the client or their representative going to see what's happening in a vehicle
Michael Sorrentino 3:01
in a moving vehicle,
Dave Shaw 3:02
yep,
so you can't
Michael Sorrentino 3:03
cram 13 people in a single car
Dave Shaw 3:06
now,
Michael Sorrentino 3:07
and it needs to look like there's only two people in the car,
Dave Shaw 3:10
yep, and an audio tech that has to hide behind a seat, but that was a,
Michael Sorrentino 3:15
and we'll get to that in a second, but like the that, so How do you give what we would call a video village to the client and the agency and let them see something? Number one, number two, you have a limited amount of time with talent, so we can't futz with stuff,
Dave Shaw 3:32
and unfortunately, with this, a limited amount of time with the vehicle as well to do a quick setup, so we had to be all buttoned up and literally be able to set this up in two hours or less,
Michael Sorrentino 3:42
and that was, and then, of course, there's the obvious challenge, which is recording great quality video in an environment that's constantly changing, in weather that is not predictable, and in recording quality sound, obviously, with people who are moving and talking, and you know, not in a controlled environment, where I'm talking right into a podcast, exactly. And then, of course, we have the unforeseen challenges, like delivery of the vehicle
Dave Shaw 4:15
stuff that is well beyond our control,
and what
Michael Sorrentino 4:17
happened,
Dave Shaw 4:19
so the person that was responsible for it said it was delayed. We don't know if it was delayed or whatever happened, but we were supposed to receive it the day before the shoot by 9am have an entire day to prep everything, hook up everything, wire it all together. We wound up getting it at about 1030 on the shoot day.
Michael Sorrentino 4:41
Well,
Dave Shaw 4:42
a different one,
Michael Sorrentino 4:43
yeah, a different one, right. So, like, somewhere in logistics process, but beyond our control, the delivery, and we've dealt with vehicle deliveries there, and they're horrible. It's like it's the same thing as, like, a FedEx, you know, most of the time they show up on time, and then there's that one time out of 10 where it shows. Up, like, a week late, and you're like, "Where's my package? Where's my bag? That's exactly what happens sometimes with automobile, automobile deliveries, and that's what happened here. So then the producer, the client, Dave, was driving the car dealerships out in Long Island, trying to find this matching vehicle, and
Dave Shaw 5:18
luckily we got one. Had a not gonna give them a shout out, because we're not going to name the client right now, but, but the local family-owned dealership out in Riverhead really helped us out for this, and we appreciate that.
Michael Sorrentino 5:31
So, all right, so those were the challenges, and then many other things that popped up, and then obviously what cascades is that other challenges are then created because the vehicle comes late. We don't have it the day before.
Dave Shaw 5:46
Nope,
Michael Sorrentino 5:46
to set up the gear.
Dave Shaw 5:48
Nope, not at all.
Michael Sorrentino 5:50
We had planned on having it the night before. We were going to rig it up, test it out, all that stuff. We were going to have what, four hours in the morning to also like test it and stuff,
Dave Shaw 6:00
and get some B roll in, get some of the earlier shots that just to knock them out, so it's easy day.
Michael Sorrentino 6:05
And how much time did we end up having with the vehicle to set up before the talent? I
Dave Shaw 6:09
think we got there about 1030 talent arrived at 1230 so I think we had just about two hours to really do it. Luckily, the other end of it, where we had the producer vehicle that was all hooked up, wired up the day before, but
Michael Sorrentino 6:24
so explain to us not the tech and the specific gear yet, but explain to me the 10,000 foot view of the two vehicles and what's happening in the production and how it worked.
Dave Shaw 6:37
So we had three cameras, unfortunately the fourth camera, just we couldn't get it without hiding it in the vehicle itself. Recording the podcast,
Michael Sorrentino 6:48
we had the day before, we could have found a way to hide,
Dave Shaw 6:51
yeah, a
different type of mount or something, or just different placement, but in the time that we had, we just couldn't do that. We had the microphones in there, I think we had four different mics, so they're each lobbed up, and then we had a mini shotgun mic on the visor, just in case they moved around, or
Michael Sorrentino 7:08
but from even a higher perspective here, like you've got two cars,
Dave Shaw 7:13
yep,
Michael Sorrentino 7:13
right, and and what's in car A and what's in car B,
Dave Shaw 7:16
so
Michael Sorrentino 7:17
you know what's the point of car A, what's the point of car B,
Dave Shaw 7:19
so car B is obviously our talent vehicle, and what really the client wants to show off needs to show off. So we really just had the cameras and audio in there. We had the two talent, and we hit our audio tech kind of in the back of it. The other vehicle we had basically, we had a lead camera, so the camera was mounted onto the back, and we'll get into specifics on how we did that, and that was basically leading everything, shooting the vehicle from the front the entire time.
Michael Sorrentino 7:48
There were four of us in that front car,
Dave Shaw 7:50
yep, four
Michael Sorrentino 7:51
of us
driving on comms and headsets. You've got the talent for the next shoot, and the client who was relaying information, pictures and video clips to the agency and the sponsor, and then me on the computer communicating with the audio tech in the backseat,
Dave Shaw 8:14
who was also kind of directing the shoot from that other vehicle. It
Michael Sorrentino 8:17
was really fun.
Dave Shaw 8:18
It was, it was a lot of, a lot of work, and then we had the monitors in there, so they could see all the cameras and listen to everything. And
Michael Sorrentino 8:27
all right, let's talk about the car with the talent first. Audio, what did we do for audio
Dave Shaw 8:35
mentioned previously? But yeah, we had two shotgun mini shotgun mics that were mounted on the visor, I think Kevin, our audio tech, brought the DPAs, which are sounded really, really great. And then he had a lava on each. We double mic each talent, because you never know if they're going to scratch the mic, especially the driver moving around. You don't want to get that scratching and then not have usable sound. So we did the shotgun mics, it sounded great, and then for video we wound up using iPhones mounted onto the windshield, but not just the iPhone, we had the Blackmagic Cam app, which allowed us to not only put out the video through HDMI clean, but also record ProRes high-quality files directly onto an SSD at the same time,
Michael Sorrentino 9:23
so, so you've got, we've got iPhones, we have three iPhones suction cup to the windshield, yeah, and each iPhone has a, an HDMI cable running out of it, and it has an SSD plugged into it, we're using a dongle,
Dave Shaw 9:42
yeah,
Michael Sorrentino 9:43
but you had to run, you were smart enough. Dave always thinks of every.. I always joke when, whenever we're like putting building a studio or something, how you know where everything in the island, we're out
Dave Shaw 9:56
in LA, we planned out, I planned out every single aisle at what store we were getting the stuff. From and
Michael Sorrentino 10:01
so Dave's always like thinking, and then yeah, you were like, you're like, we're gonna need USB extension cables because we don't want the dongles to hang right next to the camera because it's gonna be loose, and so that really worked out for us, obviously, because sometimes these cables are cheap, and even though we had a million of them, some some phones, there was one phone that did the extension cable wasn't effective, even with other cables when it didn't work, so we had to work it, but the bottom line is USB-C extension cable coming out of an iPhone, running to the back seat where we had the dongle,
Dave Shaw 10:34
yep, and we had an ATEM Mini back there where we were taking in all the cameras, the three cameras, the fourth GoPro was hooked into it, even though we didn't wind up using it, and then we spit the multi view out of that, and also recorded backup isos within the the ATEM.
Michael Sorrentino 10:51
Yeah, so that really the ATEM Mini, in our case, we use the ATEM Mini ISO Extreme, the eight, the one that has eight ports, and the ATEM Mini. Like, I love that little device, all of them.
Dave Shaw 11:05
I mean, it goes back to this. I think we talked about it last time, like finding the right gear for the right job. Would I want to switch a huge show on an ATEM Mini? Probably not, but everything serves a purpose. Like, it's a good little tool for minimal production needs.
Michael Sorrentino 11:20
So, it made the it made our multi viewer, which was nice. So we output the multi view signal, which we'll talk about, to the viewer, the video village, and the front car. And then it also recorded isos in sync of each other.
Dave Shaw 11:37
So basically we had a backup of all the cameras coming out, which was a good thing, because we did run into some overheating with the devices because of the time shift and things like that. We didn't necessarily account for the midday sun pouring into a windshield when we charge our phone, where phones are charging, recording, and really kind of maxing out the capability of what these phones can do,
Michael Sorrentino 12:06
so when we were bringing in the footage yesterday with our editor and looking at it, the Blackmagic camera footage made it's definitely it's 4k so it's higher quality and all that, but but it start and stopped, it started and stopped, and so it took him some time to string that out and kind of figure out where things went, whereas the ATEM mini footage would just be one long file with little black spots if the camera dropped out, so
Dave Shaw 12:34
it was way,
and luckily that I mean it was just a quick overheat and it popped back up, we still have all the files and
Michael Sorrentino 12:41
there was enough contingencies planned for that, like that, you, you covered that, so then, so, yeah, so the ATEM Mini record, and we found that just yesterday, just being able to look at the ATEM Mini ISOs, which also, which was great, and we almost can use those as proxies, another cool thing that I didn't know until we started testing this was that the Blackmagic camera app will also create proxy files, which really, you know, is nice if you're dealing with 4k although we use proxies that much anymore. It
Dave Shaw 13:13
depends. I mean, it depends on the out, the client, the output of the video. I mean, the proxy files are nice if you don't need the true 4k yeah, really. So,
Michael Sorrentino 13:24
so then let's talk about power. So, the iPhones were getting powered, the Blackmagic camera had power. So, what did.. what was our power situation in that car?
Dave Shaw 13:32
So, this was another thing, which we didn't have a chance to test, and kind of threw us a little bit of a curveball setting up. We had the Jackery
Michael Sorrentino 13:42
Power
Dave Shaw 13:42
Port-A-Powler. Zachary, yeah, which was, I think, a 300 watt, which should have powered everything for a couple hours, and it's supposed to take pass through. So these vehicles, the vehicle that we were using, had a built-in inverter, and we should have had enough power to pull through whatever it was. The it worked in my vehicle through that inverter, but I don't think the one that we got had a powerful enough inverter to do pass through power into that, so it wouldn't even charge, so the the power bank is supposed to do pass through, so we would have been able to get through the entire day without even thinking about it, because it'd
Michael Sorrentino 14:18
be right, so essentially this whole concept is that if
Dave Shaw 14:22
Mike's got to dumb down my nerd,
Michael Sorrentino 14:23
yeah, exactly. So the car shuts off in the, in the, it's not feeding electricity to our to our power bank. The power bank's got a battery that's long enough to power this stuff for two hours if it needs to. Yeah,
Dave Shaw 14:36
so luckily we weren't drawing that much power, we able to go directly into the inverter now. If they shut the vehicle off, we would have lost power.
Michael Sorrentino 14:45
Yeah,
Dave Shaw 14:46
so we'd had to keep the other vehicle running all day, which wasn't too bad, because our sheet was compressed anyway.
Michael Sorrentino 14:52
So, and then you know, audio was getting, I mean, well, he's probably all on battery,
Dave Shaw 14:57
he was all on battery, but he could have pulled the feed and. If you needed to charge,
Michael Sorrentino 15:01
so that's that's the main car, which was really cool to see that set up. And then, how were we transmitting everything up to the front?
Dave Shaw 15:10
So we've been doing a lot with the, we talked about it on the last episode. Hollyland, is it good, is it bad? Honestly, everything serves a purpose. We use the, this is the Cosmo setup, so we have one of the transmitters. It's a two channel unit, so we could have up to two transmitters coming into one receiver, which is really nice on the production end, but we basically fed the multi view into this transmitter, which was clamped onto the roof rack of the other vehicle, and we mounted this receiver on the back of the truck, the production truck on a bed extender, so we had a nice clear line of sight. I think these go up to about 1000 feet, and we did find when we were doing another project, and he'd use these, that
Michael Sorrentino 16:01
was the
Dave Shaw 16:01
cut, the
line of seats, line of sight, really is important on them. When somebody was in the crowd and kind of blocked, we definitely would lose some of the range on it. So that was one of the big considerations, is how do we do this line of sight in moving vehicles to make sure that we don't have any drops,
Michael Sorrentino 16:19
and these, I mean, the one thing I love about some of these, like prosumer Hollyland type brands, is they think of a lot of the little addition, Blackmagic does this too, most of the time, but for example, the receivers on these, so these are SDI and HDMI, it has a, is it has a pass through, yeah, it's got a loop loop out,
Dave Shaw 16:45
yep,
Michael Sorrentino 16:46
which is, you know, very handy. So I don't know if you can put HDMI in and SDI loop out, so
Dave Shaw 16:53
I don't think we've tried that yet,
Michael Sorrentino 16:55
try, because if that, if that did offer that sort of crossover, that would be like a really great feature, but the other thing I love is USB on the receivers on both this Hollyland Cosmo, and I don't remember what the brand, the line is that we have of our single, the other wireless kit, but
Dave Shaw 17:13
it's another Hollyland, but it's not, it's the Lark, not Larson microphone, it's not the Cosmo, it's a shorter distance, but it's still wasn't one to one.
Michael Sorrentino 17:23
What I really like is they, you know, they have a USB port, and you could use it for USB connectivity to essentially plug it into a laptop for as a webcam input. Yeah, and honestly, like, sometimes you just, you have a problem, or you just need to get a signal to a Zoom call or Stream Yard, or whatever it is, and just that little feature alone. I really like that. These things, so these performed really well. These were great.
Dave Shaw 17:52
Yeah, and definitely, like I said, the line of sight made the big difference on this. So,
Michael Sorrentino 17:56
so then, so that is how we got video to the front car.
Dave Shaw 18:00
Yep,
Michael Sorrentino 18:01
and then how were we viewing
Dave Shaw 18:03
it? So, I found these monitors, these little seven inch no name monitors. They're from Amazon. I think they were like 40 bucks a piece. And I mean, when you talk about throwaway gear, if this thing fell off the, and we'll get into that later about why we use some of the other stuff.
Yeah,
but if this thing broke, nobody would think twice. It's a little seven inch.
Michael Sorrentino 18:30
This also has.. I'm.. I don't know if USB is that just power or
Dave Shaw 18:35
no, there's regular DC. I didn't.. I haven't tried any other stuff, so I don't know what you
Michael Sorrentino 18:39
got a VGA. Oh my gosh, it's got a composite,
Dave Shaw 18:43
yeah,
Michael Sorrentino 18:43
and a HDMI, and it does have ESP people, but who knows what that doesn't,
Dave Shaw 18:49
yeah. So we got some nice, like cup holder mounts, there are tablet mounts, and I had the speakers, the one negative, we can't control the volume, so we actually had to adjust the volume in the ATEM to make sure we could hear everything clean. I'm not going to show off the splitter and DM better. We got because that was
John. We
Michael Sorrentino 19:06
should talk about the concept, because I love the idea. So, first of all, we ended up having to listen to the feed on these little monitors, and it was fine.
Dave Shaw 19:14
Yeah,
Michael Sorrentino 19:15
it was fine, and it worked really well. It was the client experience was awesome. I mean, I'm not the client, but first of all, we know that they loved it. We had the best time, and they could hear it clearly. They could see it clearly. I mean, that level of like assurance was, I'm sure, for them. And, and also, the client was sending pictures and video to the agency and the sponsor, and they were constantly like, "Oh my god, I love the shot, I love the setup. So they were able to see things real time. So, but tell me, what the original idea was for us to hear the highest quality audience.
Dave Shaw 19:53
So we got a splitter again, kind of a last minute thing that also had a DM better. So basically. We were able to split out the video and audio signals, and it just came out of an aux cable. We're going to plug the aux cable into the truck, so we could play it through the speakers. Now, I had that working when I was testing, and everything like that. And then, when we had it going the day of, we were just getting a really, really bad buzz, so we don't know where that was coming from, and it could have been a bad cable, could have been lack of grounding, some type of loop within the inverter, like there could have been a whole number of things that kind of happened with it. So, luckily, the idea was good. Yeah, luckily we pivoted and worked fine.
Michael Sorrentino 20:36
And then, so we were able to monitor the video and the audio and and we were using com, so we had these Hollyland, the
Dave Shaw 20:46
Hollyland
Michael Sorrentino 20:48
headset
Dave Shaw 20:48
headsets, I mean, we've used them in the studio for years, just they worked again, movement that distance, even when we were switched to the three vehicles between when we were moving our kind of home base in the middle of the shoot,
yeah,
between the two episodes, I didn't even realize I still had it on, and all of a sudden somebody was talking into it, and I mean, we had three cars, and we're all talking together, and
Michael Sorrentino 21:15
it was crystal clear, yeah, you know, I mean, that shouldn't be a surprise, but you know, that's,
Dave Shaw 21:21
but when you go into these things, thinking again, kind of this prosumer brand, I was pleasantly surprised with just like the wireless transmission with the Hollyland headsets
as well.
Michael Sorrentino 21:30
And then you wanted to have a reverse shot from your truck, yeah, to see the sort of the view of the car behind us, following, so would you,
Dave Shaw 21:42
yeah, so a big thing was, we, how are we going to do cutaways for edits? Like, yeah, we have the three cameras in the car, we were hoping to have that reverse cam, but also that kind of follow cam, because they're going to want to see the exterior, they're,
Michael Sorrentino 21:53
yeah,
Dave Shaw 21:53
it's a
vehicle,
so there's the 15 $20,000 rigs that we could amount to, something nice too, and then we need somebody to actually set it up and run it, and all that, but we found this. It's made by Tilda, this mini Hydra alien, and hopefully I don't smash the glass, because, but it's actually an electronic suction cup, so when you put it on, it has built-in power, and you should hopefully hear the vacuum if it actually goes, and what it does is it keeps that vacuum seal the entire time, so I can't even pull this off right now, and if you take like a little lip, if so, if it does start to lose suction, that power stays on the entire time, and we'll run that vacuum.
Michael Sorrentino 22:44
Wow,
Dave Shaw 22:45
so,
Michael Sorrentino 22:45
so, if you try to, even if it does come,
Dave Shaw 22:48
that might stay on the table the rest of the episode.
Michael Sorrentino 22:50
Yeah, that's, and it's, it's got this like shock,
Dave Shaw 22:53
and it's a shock, it's a shock mount, so every bump it's a nice
smooth
Michael Sorrentino 22:57
cost,
Dave Shaw 22:59
probably a couple 100 bucks. It was not definitely not crazy expensive, and I mean we had done the test with it, going through like bumpy roads. Unfortunately, we didn't get to go on the off-roading adventure that we were hoping to. We had, we kind of pivoted on that because of time, but I would have loved to see how this actually handled going over huge bumps and all that, but I mean, this thing was perfect, only negative, you really do have to have a very smooth surface, otherwise it's just not going to keep that suction, and it has to be a very firm surface, so I originally had it on the top of the tailgate on the pickup, and because it's a plastic, the plastic lifted up a little bit with the suction,
Michael Sorrentino 23:48
yeah.
Dave Shaw 23:49
So now you don't have any, so this would just constantly be running, trying to keep up with it, and you could just kind of
lift it up.
Michael Sorrentino 23:55
And how did you solve for that?
Dave Shaw 23:56
So we wound up putting it on the bed cover, which was just a much more,
yeah,
like,
Michael Sorrentino 24:01
but it wasn't perfectly flat, like glass, right? It
Dave Shaw 24:03
was not glass like this. I mean, I don't know if we're gonna get this off, but
Michael Sorrentino 24:06
that covers not glass,
Dave Shaw 24:07
but yeah, but it was no, but it's but again, just making sure it's clean. We had the alcohol wipes to make sure you're getting a nice, very clean connection between both, and I mean, this thing didn't move. Now we were going 60 miles an hour, so we had to say, okay, how do we
Michael Sorrentino 24:23
right? So, even with shock mount,
Dave Shaw 24:24
even with the shock mount, it looked great, but also, like, is this gonna fly off the back? Like, what if the suction actually fails?
Yeah,
so we wound up running to some rope, tying it down here, so we had this kind
Michael Sorrentino 24:36
of literal rope,
Dave Shaw 24:37
literally just rope on this, just a the safety chain we used on the Hollylands, we had the super clamps going on to the bed extender for that, and then we ran the safety chains around all the X we had them, so they, the Hollylands run off the, they had the V mount batteries, so we had that in the V mount, and we wrapped zip ties around a safety chain, and then attached it directly to. So, if that clamp were to fail, that also would not go flying off, it would fall down, but it wouldn't fly off and hit the vehicle that we're actually trying to show off. And then we also had to think about the camera on this, so this just has the regular quarter inch screw, and we were using this, the DJI Osmo Pocket Three, relatively new model, I think.
Michael Sorrentino 25:23
4k and
Dave Shaw 25:24
I believe it does 4k
Michael Sorrentino 25:25
and it shoots vertical, and
Dave Shaw 25:27
yeah, so you can do vertical, horizontal, so you're just mounting this air. You're still, we're still, I still get, there's no real screw mount on it, and so we had to get from Tilta. Also,
Michael Sorrentino 25:38
they make it,
Dave Shaw 25:39
they make it specific to the Osmo, so there's no way to mount this on. There would just been like a USB-C, and we probably would have had to zip tie it, like it would not have been smart. This is not really meant to be mounted, necessarily. It's meant to be the handheld gimbal, which we actually did take advantage of, too, which was nice. Yeah, but Tilta makes the adapter, where you have the screw on the bottom pass through USB power, and it literally locks right into here, so you're not that thing is not coming out.
Michael Sorrentino 26:09
That's awesome.
Dave Shaw 26:10
Without unlocking
Michael Sorrentino 26:11
it, I didn't know we ended up using that,
Dave Shaw 26:14
so that mounted right onto the shock absorber here. So bounce and whatever we needed, it was this came. This was great than the quality of this.
What are
Michael Sorrentino 26:24
those run for pocket threes?
Dave Shaw 26:26
Still, just a couple 100 bucks. They're not nothing crazy. So, I mean, when we were looking at this equipment, like we really didn't have to spend a lot out of pocket to rig this up. I think the most expensive thing we got was probably the bed extender, just so we could have that external mounting points.
Michael Sorrentino 26:43
I mean, granted, we, the wireless system, the eight, and we had all that stuff in house,
Dave Shaw 26:48
but yeah, that's staying there the rest of the
Michael Sorrentino 26:49
show. How does that come off?
Dave Shaw 26:51
We'll have to figure it out. You got to peel up a corner, and usually,
Michael Sorrentino 26:53
oh, really? Yeah, can't push a button and unsuction
Dave Shaw 26:56
it. I don't think so.
Michael Sorrentino 26:58
So that ended up being quite successful, and I think you know this wireless transmission stuff has been remarkable. I remember working in news when they first came out with the line of sight wireless stuff, and we were finally able to set up these line of sight things in a window on a building in Manhattan pointed down at the satellite truck, back when we had to use satellite trucks, you know, and then be able to get it before that we had to use, we'd have to run cable, and we'd have to go sometimes throw a cable out the window if it was a residential or something where we didn't have, and it was like it was crazy when you want to shoot inside of a building and feed to a satellite truck, and now we're talking about, you know, what, a couple $1,000 for this Hollyland kit.
Dave Shaw 27:43
Yeah, I mean, it was a couple, few couple of units we got, and it wasn't anything crazy in the grand scheme of things.
Michael Sorrentino 27:50
What's the other toy we didn't get to play with yet? The,
Dave Shaw 27:52
so we did, we did get a drone, fortunately, we didn't have the time to use it, the DJI Air 3s
Michael Sorrentino 27:59
yeah. So we didn't get to, we can't really report on the success with that one.
Dave Shaw 28:02
I did a
couple of test flights yesterday with the little bit of battery power, but it's, but it's also like the registration - we have to get to take a course with 30 minute course to get approved to actually fly it recreationally, and we use that term recreationally very lightly, so we don't have to pay for the license yet.
Michael Sorrentino 28:20
Well, but I mean, that was, that was an awesome shoot.
Dave Shaw 28:25
Yeah,
Michael Sorrentino 28:25
I, I know the videos are going to come out great. I know the client's going to be happy, and I, I, and I, we already know that they're, they're, they're hoping to do more, so like, and so that's one client that's great, but now we have more tools in our arsenal here,
Dave Shaw 28:42
yeah, and even just little projects like what can we take advantage of. What do we like?
Michael Sorrentino 28:47
This is me, could throw it on a wall if it's soft, yeah.
Dave Shaw 28:51
I mean, you can really mount it, and then I mean, you can set the angle and
Michael Sorrentino 28:55
the
Dave Shaw 28:56
shock absorbent, like it's crazy.
Michael Sorrentino 28:58
Um, good show and tell. I think that is how we should wrap up today.
Dave Shaw 29:03
Well, just going back to your wireless thing.
Michael Sorrentino 29:05
Yeah,
Dave Shaw 29:05
gonna preview a future episode talking about live view and kind of getting rid of the satellite that you're just talking about. The whole need for something like that wireless transmission, I mean, so that'll be coming up in one of our future episodes, and we're hoping to get a couple, at least one rep from Live View, to join us.
Michael Sorrentino 29:25
There's obviously other, you know, providers out there, we'll, we'll talk about them, we're not biased, but we've really had great luck with Live You. We've tested other, other vendors, you know, and Live View for us is like really been great. Yeah, that's gonna be a fun, dorky episode, you know,
Dave Shaw 29:42
yeah.
Michael Sorrentino 29:43
Well, cheers. Here's, here's to another successful week of production. Yeah, what's what's on our docket for next week? What are we, what problems are we solving?
Dave Shaw 29:53
Well, we got to figure out how to do a 24 hour live stream,
Michael Sorrentino 29:55
yeah,
Dave Shaw 29:57
that overlaps a. Another live stream
Michael Sorrentino 30:02
with the CEO of a company of 100,000 plus employees that they're doing a town hall
Dave Shaw 30:10
that
overlaps the setup, and then another stream on the next day, and then we go right into another huge live event the following week
Michael Sorrentino 30:20
for a Fang company, you know, so that'll be kind of crazy, so
Dave Shaw 30:26
but yeah, we're hoping to actually do a couple of these, these podcasts live from some of these satellite places, and kind
of talk
Michael Sorrentino 30:33
through it, do it when we do the aerospace thing, yeah, where we're gonna do a test flight of the world's first or largest electric battery powered airplane will be really exciting, but we want to appreciate, want to say thank you for listening, and hope you found this information valuable, and
Dave Shaw 30:54
and I'm going to challenge everybody.
Michael Sorrentino 30:56
Yeah, do it. One,
Dave Shaw 30:56
we want you on our podcast. Yeah, so come up with a project that you have, let's talk it through. Let's talk about how we might handle it, how you want to handle it. Good
idea,
kind of see how we can help you.
Michael Sorrentino 31:08
Yeah, let's
Dave Shaw 31:08
with your project.
Let's
Michael Sorrentino 31:09
brainstorm on the podcast.
Dave Shaw 31:11
Yeah, you can see what goes through Mike and I's heads 24/7 and the random texts at 3am when you wake up and have an idea, and so you don't forget it, and right things like that.
Michael Sorrentino 31:20
Like just yesterday for this 24 hour podcast, I was talking, I had my idea in my head, and in about 30 seconds, you're like, or we can do it this way, and first of all, that iteration has changed so much in the last 24 hours, because of staffing and x, y, and z, and you know, client requests, and we want to accommodate, I also got ambitious, and I was like, oh, let's do this, and a graphic in here, and you're like, okay, Michael, there, that goes.
Dave Shaw 31:43
Well, then we go to, we've got to pivot to a different system,
but it's so
Michael Sorrentino 31:46
fun, right? Like, that's the fun part. Like, we have these toys, let's use them like we enjoy. That's why we're the production geeks. So, listen. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for watching. Thank you for live streaming, however you're hearing us. We are Sorrereinino Media. You can also find our small podcast studio if you have your own podcast production at Madison Ave live.com and Sorrereinino media.com is where you'll find us. Shoot us an email, both of our contacts are right there on the website, as you know, we're just geeks, and we just love doing this stuff, and we love sharing info. So, whether you are somebody who's looking for production, or you're a production person yourself who wants to talk through some ideas, we're open. We'd love to have you join in or reach out. So, once again, episode two. Thanks for joining us here on the Production Geeks.
Dave Shaw 32:43
Have a good one. Bye.