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A podcast by the PodcastVideos.com team focused on gear reviews, studio equipment setups, and lessons and experiences from building an audio and video content creator business.
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Behind the Lens: Our Early GoPro Experiment
Join Dan Craft, Brooke Galligan, and special guest Parker Dotson as they take you on a technological journey through the early days of PodcastVideos.com's camera setups.
The team starts by revealing their unexpected first setup - Samsung phones mounted in what they jokingly call "the WWE cage." This creative but cumbersome solution quickly hit roadblocks when they discovered the nightmare of transferring files from Android phones to Mac computers.
Their next solution - GoPro Hero 8 cameras - seemed perfect for a bootstrap startup mentality. These compact, affordable cameras delivered excellent quality for shorter recordings, but Parker explains how they discovered the action cameras' limitations when used for long-form content.
From mysterious shutdowns during recording to files automatically splitting every 17 minutes, the team shares the technical headaches they navigated while building their production process.
The conversation provides valuable insights for content creators at any level, demonstrating how equipment choices should match specific use cases rather than just budget or specifications.
Parker's experience removing GoPro battery doors and hardwiring cameras shows the lengths creators often go to make technology work for their needs. The progression to Logitech Mevo cameras and finally to their current 4K Blackmagic setup mirrors the growth many content businesses experience as they evolve from startup to established studio.
Whether you're just starting your content creation journey or looking to upgrade your current setup, this candid discussion about camera technology, workflow challenges, and budget considerations offers both practical advice and the reassurance that every professional studio started somewhere.
Welcome back everybody. This is Autofocus. I'm Dan Kraft, we've got Brooke Galligan with me, of course, and we've brought in Parker Dotson, our sales guy, who has worn many hats yes, all of the hats In the time that he's been here. Yeah, we brought in Parker because we're going to talk about some of our early cameras and our experiences, particularly with the GoPro cameras that we used in the prototype studio we had before this wonderful space. The reason Parker is here is because when we say we, brooke and I didn't work here yet, yeah technically If we want some info on the days of these boys.
Speaker 3:there was what a three-man operation at that time too uh, when I first introduced the gopros, it was still just me, and then it became two, and then it became three.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, yeah well technically in 2022, when eric had this idea first. That's when I he was. He wanted it to be cell phones, which is how we ended ended up with those, and so I actually was the one that fixed. I had to do all the research and fix and pick those cell phones out. Yeah, and that's what Parker inherited. You're welcome, yeah.
Speaker 3:This terrible system. Not terrible, it was a good system for what it was. But I know Eric was responsible for the cage. The WWE cage.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah, that was over rectangular table. You had basically four still vertical bars with these little cross braces and they had the phones hanging off of them. It was To its credit. The phones weren't terrible. I did pick the right phones. The issue was just the file management at that point in time, like getting it from the phone over to there. Plus the file sizes would get a little strange and things like that. So I mean it wasn't bad with the phones, but it was just one of those situations where it was like okay, if we're going to actually do this in the right capacity, let's make it into a camera.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that was one of the things with the, with the, with the phones, cause, like we were, we you know we, we use Macs and I was like this Samsung phone is going to be great. Not realizing that Samsung, like get a phone, get the, get the files off the Samsung phones To a Mac, to a Mac, was actually just like. It was like a day on Google just to figure that out.
Speaker 1:They hate each other. They do hate each other, and that's probably still true today. Oh, a hundred percent.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So we went to and I say we, you went to the GoPros. Now that went to the GoPros Now that wasn't a brand new product at the time. No, these were already well-established as what you see. Gopros commercialized as yeah, rugged outdoors, strapped into the helmet as you're parachuting or the side of your race car kind of thing. Yep, talk a little bit about the use case and what we saw in the studio.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I mean we went with these Hero 8. So I mean, obviously they're on the eighth generation of it, so that's great, and I'd had a GoPro in the past. And so there was this fine balance of okay, we're in very much startup, bootstrap mode, so investing in multi-thousand dollar cameras didn't really make sense. Plus, in the studio that we were in, which I love, which is what we're recording on now, but what? The old studio too? You know, we had really no solid walls, it was just the acoustic curtains. So it's really hard to try to mount those cameras in a higher level camera in that space. So the whole idea was let's redesign the mounting system. That was on the table. And then I had a lot of familiarity with GoPro just through outdoors things and I was like quality looks good, they're very easy to operate, set it, push the button, it's done pretty much. So in theory, I was like this will work great, we can just replace the phones with the GoPros and go from there.
Speaker 1:Sure, they're quality, they're compact, they're easy enough to use.
Speaker 3:Didn't you have it set up where you could like clap, yeah, so they actually do have a? Um. No, it was a vocal uh function. So whenever people would get first people that came in and recorded the old space when they would come in, we'd get ready to go. I would hit the audio and then I would say gopro record. And they would all go and people were like oh, it was really fancy. I was like it is kind of cool that sounds impressive um, but yeah, so you know people that knows GoPros.
Speaker 3:They kind of have that distinct when you start recording, it's a single beep, when it stops recording it's a three beep. Deet, deet, deet is when it stops. And so anyway, we were like, okay, gopros can be good, battery life will be fine. So we got a bunch of them mounted for shorter recordings. It had no issues. The quality of it still looked great. As a matter of fact, I think Doing Business in Bentonville's first episode with Andy talking into the camera was shot with just a GoPro right in front of him. Nice, so it still looks great.
Speaker 3:Quality was never an issue. Quality was never an issue with it. The issue is that GoPro is designed as a outdoor adventure, action, sport type camera, so short bursts of recording is really where their bread and butter is. One of the main issues that I've found before we got to some probably more critical issues later on was not really an issue as much as just kind of like a hurdle headache a little bit was that gopros by default will start a new recording file every 17 minutes of continuous running. So it didn't interrupt the recording or stop the camera any at all, it just literally would just cache that and then start a whole new file.
Speaker 1:So short form. Short form content. You're not, you don't know it's a problem, but hour, hour and a half long recording.
Speaker 3:Suddenly you're dealing with five, six files in from one camera. You multiply that across five cameras, now I've got 25 anywhere from 25 to 30 video files that would pop up for one podcast recording yeah, and you gotta sync the video and add every. So it's a new step to the editing because, you know, at that time I was able to do all of it and a file management headache.
Speaker 3:Oh, I mean, you would literally take the card out of this, throw it in for camera one and you would have five or six recordings, and then you'd have to take those. Put each one of those back-to-back in Premiere, make that in an. To make it easier for me, I would then export that as one video file. So then that was Camper, so you recombine them.
Speaker 3:And then you would sync them, and then I would sync For every camera, yep, and then do it for every all five angles, so each individual person, then a wide-angle camera, and then get all the audio synced back into it too, and so it was a, you know, probably 15, 20 minute process to extract that, combine them, re-export them and then pull it all together for the final multicam edit. So not a end of the world hurdle, just a kind of an inconvenience.
Speaker 1:Not an ideal situation in terms of speed and efficiency.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we want to be really efficient.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's so much easier when it's one file and it's like okay, here's this camera, this camera, this camera done. The bigger issue started arising later on when it was those longer hour hour and a half recordings. They're not really designed for that. Plus, we're indoors, so you know GoPro is exactly what it is right here. These eights have a touchscreen on the back, little screen on the front. You have a little battery door on the side so we would run them on battery, Never really worried too much about battery life.
Speaker 3:If it was a longer hour and a half ish one with continual running it would get a little bit low. But it was enough to kind of make you nervous that if some people did, even though we do one hour recordings, not everyone might drop one or somebody might to an hour, 45, 45 you know a big talk kind of scenario, like our founder, yeah. So the issue with that was my biggest fear would just be a camera would die mid-recording and then you have the worry of okay, that camera died, did it actually back up all those files onto the card or am I going to get trapped if I lost it all?
Speaker 1:not just yeah. So then it was recorded after it died 100.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so then it was hardwiring it essentially so they can run just off the external power. So the whole thing was remove. It took the battery out and then actually remove the battery door and then hardwired it into it so that it just literally sat open the whole time.
Speaker 1:Now this isn't a backyard shade tree mechanic.
Speaker 3:This is something gopro is set up to do that yeah, it was just their normal charging cord, but it can run from just that external power, um, and so would do that. But we noticed and this is by the time nathan had come on board with us, and at the old studio we had the little loft you know, above with the curtain underneath, so you couldn't talk or hardly breathe when people were recording because they were directly below your feet, and so it was one of those situations where we would hit record. I'd go upstairs and I remember the very first time we were recording I don't remember who it was, but I'd just hear a beep, beep, beep and I was like is that the GoPro?
Speaker 3:That's not the beeps we're used to hearing no, and so then I heard one of the people that were in was like hey, I think this camera just shut off because you could no longer see the graphic on the front that said that it was had the camera icon on it, yeah, and so went down there, didn't really know what the deal was. Um, so I basically just we sat for like two or three minutes and just chatted a little bit and then just repowered it back up and it did fine the rest of the episode. It hiccuped. Yeah, it had a little hiccup, so I thought maybe it was just a one-off anomaly, and then it started happening more and more frequently.
Speaker 1:Multiple cameras? Oh, 100%, we said just one camera, that's.
Speaker 3:This one would do it and then this person's would do it. It kind of just got to a point where it was like, okay, there's not a lot of reliability for longer form content recording like that. So once it started happening regularly, I was like we've got an issue. And what did it end up being? I think it was just overheating. I mean they never would really give me like a message per se, but I mean it would just be off the whole time.
Speaker 3:So I mean there's a variety of factors that it could have been. It could have been. It could have been, you know, a bad connection, or maybe that one cable had a wear in it or whatever. But it was so many different cameras at sporadic random times that I was like there's no way every single one of these charging cords is bad. We even had it like cause we had a power strip. I even hadn't put another power strip up there and plugged a couple of them into that to see if it was the strip. It still did it on that one. So there was never really a way to Isolate what exactly the problem was, but you think it was overheating.
Speaker 3:I think it would have me. That's the one that would make sense me, because whenever I would do that and I would go and Go to like grab it to turn it back on, it was very warm on the sides there even without running, it's not like we could put cooling fans on them.
Speaker 1:No, we can't produce that noise into this yeah, you're in the studio.
Speaker 2:There's no way to really pump cooler air directly on it and it's happening inside the camera. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3:Unless you're like going to air it. Yeah, I mean GoPros. You know you got to think about a diving case. You can still take them 30 feet underwater. So I mean it's designed to let nothing in or out. That would be a nice cool yeah, and you would feet under them and you would really think, like when you remove this battery door and then you remove the battery, like if you look into that camera, it's well over half the body.
Speaker 3:There's just not much else going on in there I think it's just a hole and so it's one of those things where it's like I don't really know how it's continuing to overheat, because we removed all the possibilities of it essentially, so I'm not sure.
Speaker 1:It's also sitting there static, where a GoPro is really kind of designed to be strapped to the helmet while you're skydiving. Yeah, bolted to the side of a race car. It the helmet while you're skydiving. Yeah, bolts it to the side of a race car. It's going to get a lot of air being underwater. Different things like that. It'd be fun to talk, hardwired for that yeah, I mean, but yeah, true.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so there is just no definitive factor of okay. This is why we're having this issue.
Speaker 2:Right, but GoPro. If you have any suggestions like, let us know.
Speaker 3:No, I still love GoPros. Like I bought a new one, I think, last year one of the newest models, because I hadn't had one since a four, and I thought these eights were incredible. And then I got a 12 or 13 or whatever it was and I was like I mean, it's incredible the picture quality on them, but for the use case of some long-form content recording, it just wasn't the proper answer for it really rough.
Speaker 1:Not a bad product, just not quite what we need. It's just a misuse of what it's designed for and that's why we ended up moving on to those, uh, logitech mivos yeah, which is there?
Speaker 3:yeah, what we? This was the next replacement for that.
Speaker 1:The start to the new studio here with and where we recorded, uh, quite a few. Uh, did we start autofocus in the 4k or did we get a couple with that? Nope, okay, yeah, so, generationally, our fancy the phones which I didn't even know about until we had the conversation right before this I thought the gopro was were the og.
Speaker 3:No, the phones weren't. I think I did one recording with the phone and I was like, no, I'm not gonna do that, yeah. And I was like the file transfer was the file transfer.
Speaker 2:It was what's up with the issue? And then it was just um, yeah, I did that. I did all that research, uh, the first time I had covid and when, yeah, I had to do all this research and put the studio stuff together.
Speaker 3:So and I mean, I mean I'm, I use an iphone just because I use Mac and it's easily compatible back and forth.
Speaker 2:But the iPhones are really expensive and the Samsung was like affordable.
Speaker 3:But I've always thought Galaxy cameras have better quality than the iPhone.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's what's supposed to. And there was like there was the new one and then there was that one, and so I went with the lower grade just for the startup.
Speaker 1:So truly OG, truly OG. We got some problems. The first solution Yep Good product Use case. Not quite there. Yep, the workhorse we've been using for most of the last what, 15 months, 18 months? Yep 1080p Logitech camera, and then we'll let Brooke grab that one. Oh yeah, this one is the 4K, which is what you're seeing us in today. So, you know, maybe you like the 1080 better because you can't quite see certain things. But yes, the 4K Blackmagic Micro.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So that's yeah.
Speaker 3:It's been really cool. I mean, I would have loved to have gone something like that off the rip, but whenever you're a small company, you just hey, I want to invest X amount of money in cameras.
Speaker 1:It's like do you remember what these cost, brand new at the time? Probably $300, $350. Okay, and I think brand new.
Speaker 3:That's about right.
Speaker 2:Those were like $500.
Speaker 1:What are their $399?.
Speaker 3:What are their slow case Ringenberg?
Speaker 2:The $995. For the body, only For the body. And then you've got to buy a $300. And then you've got to build a lens which is like $200 to $300.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we've established kind of what works for us, what didn't. Yeah, there's a little bit of a pricing difference if that's a big factor for you.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but I will say, like one other thing that I love about switching to this, which, as a photo video person before podcast videos I've always had, obviously, interchangeable camera lenses, and so the limitation of having a non-detachable lens is pretty significant unless you're in a smaller setting, and so certain things, even the way this original studio was built, was designed with that in mind of not being able to actually zoom with these cameras. You had the optical zoom, digital optical zoom, whatever it's called um, but it just you're never the same quality drops exponentially how much, how much it falls off as soon as you zoom in with those. So that's fantastic because then you can kind of you have a lot more flexibility to clean up the space and remount cameras different ways and that stuff.
Speaker 3:so because the camera is out of the wide angle yeah, especially mainly in our case scenario, because we use the tv for branding purposes and things like that. So when you have to have this camera within roughly probably four foot of somebody's face Not more, not less it makes it really difficult to get this in my setting without it being hanging somewhere within blocking the TV range.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and they keep a proper angle yeah, and they're super wide, wide angle. So, when it's pointed down, then it like makes basically, we have like, some are really wide for heads.
Speaker 3:Yeah, the Mevo. I mean the Mevos are, there's nothing wrong with them, but they're essentially designed as like a step up above your webcam and to you know, multiple cameras and potential for live streaming, things like that. It just you know something like that.
Speaker 1:So Is a little bit more. Hey, let's try. Yeah. So hey, let's try this. This is going to work better. Yeah, this is gonna work better.
Speaker 2:Yeah, workhorse yep, new and hot, yeah, next level, yeah, now we're, we're like growing up, yeah, like we're gonna, we're like big, big, big boys, now, like we're, we're, we're like going to. You know, it's like, yeah, you're learning to walk, you're, or you're learning to crawl, crawl, walk, run, and then now you're in track yeah, true, true.
Speaker 3:I do have a love, like I have a soft spot for the original Mevos, just simply because the ease of use with being able to open the app and see all the camera angles at one time you don't need a switcher, you don't need all these other components. I did really like that about it. It's just the limitation within the mounting that really kind of held it back.
Speaker 3:So, you also got to keep in mind, too, the scale of the technology that's required to support each of these things. So these two are completely self-sustained. They don't need any kind of additional app or any kind of interface or function whatsoever. This can run pretty simply off of just the app that comes with the Logitech.
Speaker 1:Yeah, computer, you don't even necessarily need an equalizer or a switcher for it.
Speaker 3:No, yeah, I mean it was just. You have an iPad or a cell phone. You can hit record on multiple cameras at once.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it records to its own SD.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it records internally. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But then you have to take the. Brooke went out and bought a bunch of cameras and then just kept spending money on the other stuff.
Speaker 3:We needed to make the canvas work One whole desk in marketing's office that is just full of all the new products, just to be able to make the studio the switch from here to there. But it's going to be really awesome. Oh, it is 100% worth it, like even the stuff that we've seen from those recordings we've been doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the live stream from those recordings we've been doing. Yeah, the live stream. We did a live stream with these the other day. It was so nice.
Speaker 3:The quality difference, for whenever you're taking that content and repurposing it for social media uses and things like that is you start to crop it down, that quality of having a 4K really starts to shine through.
Speaker 1:Alright, so that is our OG report on our days with the GoPro and the days since Parker. Thanks for taking some time to sit down with us. Yeah, absolutely, it's always good to see you yeah good to see you. I think we'll be back to record another one.
Speaker 2:I will see you in like three minutes.
Speaker 1:Yep, yeah, okay, and we will see you next week. Thanks for listening everybody. Thank you, bye, focus.