This is one of the top-rated baby monitors on Amazon,
and this is the $9,000 monstrosity I made
from the extra video equipment I had in my studio
in an effort to do everything this one does, but better.
Let's get undone.
(upbeat music)
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening, everybody?
I'm Gerald Undone and I am a rooster illusion.
So let's start with a little disclosure.
None of the gear in this video is paid product placement.
I have worked with some of these brands in the past,
but I wanted to challenge myself to build this rig
using gear I already had with no sponsors attached.
That being said, I did run into a snag
with the talkback function
and so I reached out to Deity
to send over some stuff to help with that.
They aren't sponsoring this video,
but I appreciate their equipment contribution,
so shout-out to them.
And regarding this control baby monitor over here,
also not sponsored.
I bought this one from Amazon Canada
based on popularity and reviews
and it cost me $269 Canadian plus tax.
This video does have an actual sponsor though
and that's Storyblocks.
So in a few weeks,
my partner and I are expecting our first child.
And in fact, shout-out to the momma, Lindsey,
who is operating the zoom right now.
Having a baby on the way
means that we had a bunch of baby-related paraphernalia
that we needed to purchase.
Now, I knew nothing
about the current state of baby monitors,
but when it was brought up that we needed one,
my reaction was, "Pfft, I'll just build one."
Now, this started as a bit of a joke,
but eventually turned into a fun challenge.
But in order to do that,
I first needed to know what the capabilities
of a current, popular baby monitor are,
which is why I have this one here.
And of course, this is the one we're actually going to use
because there's no way Lindsey would actually let me
stick this atrocity near our baby's bassinet.
So this eufy SpaceView model offers a 720p video system
with a rated max range of 460 to a thousand feet,
two-way audio functionality, a rechargeable battery,
and digital zoom up to 2x.
And like I said, my challenge was to build something
that can do all of that, but better.
So let's start by giving you a bit of a tour of the setup.
Now, if you're new to this channel
or if you got here by searching baby stuff,
let me just acknowledge that I realize
this is completely absurd
and should not be considered a viable option
or a good use of money.
I did this solely as a passion project
because these kinds of builds entertain me
and I felt compelled to share them with you.
So the main camera and screen components on this combo
are the Sony a7S III for the camera
and the Atomos Ninja V+ for the monitor.
Now, both of these devices are capable of 4K,
which definitely beats the 720p over here on the SpaceView,
but the transmitter that I'm using for this,
which is the Accsoon CineEye 2S Pro,
is a 1080p max transmitter.
Now, you can use 4K transmitters
but they're gonna inflate the cost of this
by another couple, maybe few thousand dollars.
So these, I think, are 650 and they transfer audio as well,
which is why I thought they'd be a good pick.
And I have more frame rate control as well
because I can shoot at 24, 25, 30,
all the way up to 60 frames per second
with this combination,
where I feel like these baby monitors
aren't even fully 24 or 30p.
They feel a little bit more sluggish than that.
like maybe they're in like the 15 to 20 frames per second.
Now, when it comes to maximum rated range,
on the Accsoons, we beat this by a little bit
by getting 1,200 feet.
This said 460 to a thousand feet.
Maybe that's based on which band it's using.
What I did find is that in our home,
both of these basically exceeded what we needed.
So they either both get a perfect score,
but on paper, this one did win by scoring 1,200 feet
instead of a thousand feet.
Now, to emulate the audio was more challenging
and actually quite a bit of fun
and this is what I reached out to Deity for.
So on the SpaceView,
it always streams audio to the monitor.
So you can always hear what's going on.
But if you want to talk back to the baby,
there's a button you can press
and then it activates the microphone on the monitor
and then you can talk through the camera
in wherever the baby is.
So I tried to recreate that.
So on the camera itself, we've got the Rode VideoMic NTG.
This is picking up audio
from whatever the camera's pointed at,
which would be baby sounds, let's say,
and it goes into the camera
and then is relayed out using the transmitter
over here to the monitor.
But the monitor, this one doesn't have speakers on it.
So how do we hear the baby?
So I've attached one of these little,
these are from Amazon,
they're a little portable speaker
that just has a 3.5-millimeter plug on the one end
and I just stuck that into the headphone jack on the Ninja V
and now we can hear what's being transmitted.
But then in order to do the push-to-talk function,
we had to put a microphone on top of the monitor
and then this is a wireless transmitter
that the microphone's connected to.
And on the wireless transmitter,
there is a button that mutes it.
So rather than push-to-talk,
it's like push-to-unmute, which operates the same way.
So you would push to unmute,
then talk into this microphone,
and then that would be transmitted back
over the wireless transmitter now
instead of the video transmitter
to this wireless body pack,
which also has its own 3.5-millimeter portable speaker
attached to it.
So when we do push-to-talk on the monitor,
it will get transmitted through the wireless transmitter
and then out through this little speaker,
which is pointed in the same direction as the camera.
So if the baby's here and it's looking at it,
the voice comes out.
And it all works.
I wasn't expecting it to.
I thought that they would interfere with each other,
there'd be something wrong,
but it all works
and I'll show you a practical example in a minute.
But it's actually kind of, it's kind of wild.
And again, thanks to Deity for helping me plan it
and figure out how we would get that to work.
Okay, so here we are.
I'm in another room.
I've got the monitor here
and I'm gonna talk into the microphone
and it should be coming through in the other room
on the little speaker now.
And I guess the idea here
would be that if you were looking at the monitor
and the baby was fussing or something
and you wanted to just talk to it to calm it down,
you'd be like, "Oh, hey, baby.
Stop kicking things,"
or whatever babies, I don't know what babies do.
I don't have one yet.
But you could talk to it
and then you would hopefully solve all of its problems
via this handy push-to-talk mic configuration.
Okay. Check, check, check.
Okay, so here we are.
I'm in the other room again.
I'm using this massive camera as sort of a vlogging camera.
I'm trying to hold it stable.
I've got active stabilization on,
which is I guess another advantage of this setup.
I've got a flip-out screen
so I can see myself and frame myself
and I have active stabilization
while holding like a 10-pound camera rig here
and I'm talking into the microphone on top of it.
So, effectively, I'm the baby now.
And so out there,
you can see what you would see with the monitor
and you can hear me.
It would come through over there.
I gotta stop doing this because my arms are getting sore
holding this up like a vlogging camera.
Now, another thing is that the monitor
has rechargeable batteries.
Now, it's actually different.
The camera over here on the SpaceView,
you gotta plug it into the wall using USB.
I suppose you could plug it into a USB battery bank
if you wanted to
and then have it on battery power,
but it's usually plugged into the wall.
And then this has a rechargeable battery on the screen.
In my case, both the camera and the monitor
are on rechargeable batteries.
These are V-Mount 98 watt-hours.
But they're also interchangeable.
So if they died or if I wanted to use a bigger battery,
I can take them out and sub in a larger battery
or a smaller one, depending on my needs,
charge this one, swap them back and forth.
So that's great.
And I can actually operate all of the devices
from that V-Mount
and I can even charge the other devices as well.
So if I wanted to keep my Deity packs charged
by just plugging them in USB-C
and then plugging them into the V-Mount.
And if I wanted to run it on mains power, I can.
With these V-Mount plates from bebob,
I can use their AC adapter
to, you know, D-Tap and then connect this
and I could run the whole rig on wall power
just like I can with the SpaceView.
And then lastly,
to achieve the same 2x punch-in digital zoom
that you can do on the SpaceView,
I can do that on my monitor here
with this 2x magnification button,
which allows me to punch in on the image
and then kind of like pan and scan around,
which kind of emulates a feature
that you can also do on the SpaceView.
But of course, this is much higher resolution now
with a much crisper image to begin with.
And didn't really talk about this,
but it's kind of obvious that on the camera itself,
there's a flip-out screen.
So I can actually see what the camera sees
whether I'm in with the baby or remotely.
Not that that's a feature that anybody needs,
but we've got it.
So I beat the SpaceView in every category like I set out to
except the SpaceView has a trick up its sleeve.
It has a night vision mode.
My camera does not.
However, I am using the Sony a7S III,
which is the lowlight king.
So let's see how well they compare
in very dimly lit environments.
All right, so for the lowlight test,
I have both cameras set up over in the corner of the room,
blocked off by sound blankets.
So the only light that they're getting
is light that's actually leaking through
the blackout curtains,
which you can kind of see a little bit in these shots.
Also, something of note
is you'll notice that the monitor over here
for the custom rig
is a lot wider of a shot than the eufy
and neither one of them are punched in currently.
I went with a 20mm lens on the Sony a7S III
because I thought that the baby monitor
kind of looked wide angle,
but there is a wide angle attachment you can put on it.
But right now, it's just in the standard one
and clearly it's a lot tighter of a shot
than what the 20mm looks like over here on the Sony.
But anyway, I wanted to show you how the night vision works.
So I've already just tweaked the Sony
to have auto ISO enabled.
So it's gonna change the exposure automatically.
And I gave it full,
normally I have it limited
to it can only go so high with auto ISO,
but this time I let it go all the way up
to like half a million ISO if it needs to.
But you'll also see the night vision click in on the eufy.
Now, first off, right away,
when you have this lowlight environment,
you can see there's some weird
sort of color banding going on.
But let's turn off the light
to make it even darker over there.
And you can see, I heard a sound
and you can see all of a sudden it clicked in.
So I'll do it one more time.
When I turn the light off,
watch it sort of flash into night vision mode.
There, it clicked
and then it goes into night vision,
where the Sony just sort of seamlessly ramps up the ISO.
So if I turn the light back on, it's too overexposed
and just brings the exposure down.
This one kind of flutters with it.
And it also goes to show
that frame rate thing I was talking about.
When I try and pan the camera over here,
watch how sort of slow and choppy it is.
So if I pan.
See how it kind of smears the image?
And it can actually be kind of difficult to pan it,
(chuckles) I overshoot all the time
trying to get it to pan exactly where I want.
I'm actually pleasantly surprised
by how the a7S III is performing.
I don't know how it's pulling so much light
out of the window,
but it's also balancing the exposure nicely,
where the SpaceView is kind of blown out
from the light it's pulling from the window
and then streaking weird colors across the frame.
And if we actually introduce color
how it's supposed to look,
I'll turn on my backlights again.
So obviously when I turn on the purple and orange lights,
we get purple and orange in the shot on the Sony
but the SpaceView is still sort of a monochromatic look
because of the night vision.
And lastly, here's a comparison to demonstrate
a more realistic combination of camera settings,
'cause I don't think you can expect
to get the same lowlight performance
if you're using something other than the a7S III
and a fast lens like I was.
So this is using a more modest aperture on your lens
and letting the ISO only go to 12,800.
As you can see, it's not near as visible
as when you let the ISO go to 200,000
or whatever we can do on the a7S III
and shooting at f1.8.
You can barely see what's going on in the image,
and in this case, the SpaceView takes a clear win.
So maybe you spent $9,000 on a baby monitor
but you still can't really see your baby in the dark,
that's okay.
You can always look at stock footage
of someone else's baby instead
using the sponsor of today's video, Storyblocks.
So sometimes you don't have the shot you need
and there's no way you're gonna be able to go and get it
before you run out of time, run out of money,
or run out of patience
by completely derailing your creative momentum.
And that's where Storyblocks comes in.
They've got subscriptions for every budget
that give you access to a vast royalty free library
with unlimited downloads,
allowing you to use the footage worry-free
for both personal and commercial projects.
They're also focused on enriching their catalog
with diverse and inclusive content
to provide useful assets
for creators of varying needs and audiences.
And this is all easily accessed
using their intuitive interface
with filters for 4K video at multiple frame rates,
along with backgrounds and After Effects templates.
If you've never browsed Storyblocks before,
I think you'll be truly impressed
by just how exhaustive their library is,
and I encourage you to learn more about them
by using the link in the description below.
Okay, just for fun, let's talk about dynamic range.
This is obviously a janky setup.
I got both cameras over there pointed at the Xyla 21.
You're not supposed to do two cameras at the same time.
You're not supposed to have them slightly off-frame.
It doesn't matter though.
I can't actually record internally in the SpaceView.
So this is another advantage for the custom rig,
is I can record either to this Ninja,
like what it's receiving,
or I could record over there on the camera if I wanted to,
or do both at the same time.
So I could actually record
my dynamic range results on the Sony,
run them through Imatest,
and get a score for you.
I can't really do that with the SpaceView.
So instead, we'll just do a visual comparison,
even though this probably isn't worth anything.
So let me turn the lights off and you'll see right away
that the SpaceView over here has an auto exposure.
So if I turn the light back on,
the night vision mode isn't working anymore,
I turned it off,
but see there's kind of this really drastic auto exposure
that completely blows out the highlights
when it's in a lowlight situation?
You can see quite a bit into the shadows,
which I guess is handy
but your highlights are completely nuclear
from the top like five or six stops,
where over here on the Sony,
we're getting a much better gradation
and I believe we can even see further into the shadows
and it's much smoother.
Okay, now let's check the color accuracy.
Okay, so now we got the color chart set up over there
and I think the differences are quite apparent.
The Sony looks pretty color accurate and good
and the SpaceView is, well, it's doing what it can,
but you can see how some of the white chips are overexposed,
some of the blues and purples are just smearing together.
It has reasonable color separation
but if for some reason you needed to really identify
the different hues in your baby's room,
then the custom rig definitely wins in this case.
And when it comes to detail, the Sony wins as well.
But let's do a 2x punch in on both
and compare the finer qualities.
So as you can see,
the 1080p60 signal coming from the Sony
and viewed on the Ninja 4k panel looks much better
than this 720p15 on whatever resolution,
I assume the panel is also 720p resolution to save money,
but you can clearly see some pretty big differences there.
The screen quality on the SpaceView
isn't quite as good as well.
You can see this kind of smeary pattern on it
when viewed from many different angles
where the viewing angles are better on the Ninja.
So obviously this contraption
outperforms the eufy in those areas,
and I would sure hope so,
but there's also some room for upgrades.
For example, this SpaceView can pan remotely
if it's something you need as the child gets older.
I suppose we could rig this custom one up
to a gimbal or a MoCo device
to provide similar functionality.
And what about using those new power zoom lenses from Sony?
You can control them wirelessly
from either their commander remote or the phone app.
I'm envisioning a 16-35 power zoom lens
controlled by a phone, which also doubles as the monitor.
Or just Velcro the commander remote
to the side of a rig similar to this.
Or if we wanna get real fancy,
I have challenge for Josh from Make Art Now.
Why don't you hook up a camera to the new DJI gimbal,
use the focus motor on the zoom ring of the lens,
and control it all
using the new transmission system from DJI?
Then you'd have video, camera movement, and zoom
all in one wireless package.
But that's for another video.
I'm personally satisfied with how mine turned out,
but I'm happy to pass the baton
to the other video-gear- nerd-fathers out there
that wanna pick up where I left off.
Alright... I'm done.