how about that one yeah hey everybody adam savage here in my cave and i am answering
some questions about my time on mythbusters uh right now and the question i have comes from
tested patron adam joseph adam says if mythbusters started tomorrow and followed the same episode
plan same myths how do you think it would be different given 15 plus years of technology
advancements what a great question um so many ways so so many ways it would be different
let me count some of the ways uh one high speed cameras we had a phantom back in those days
it could film up to a thousand frames per second at standard definition and it took once you got
a shot took about 30 to 45 minutes to get it onto a to get it off the camera onto a computer
yeah as a point of reference in the middle of mythbusters around about 2012 or so 2011 um
i purchased a sony fs700 which at that point was the first consumer level camera that could shoot
hd at 250 frames per second something that this now does um yeah so high speed shots i
can't even tell you how much of the first years of mythbusters were spent going waiting on high speed
poor helene who was the first high-speed camera op she just had to sit there and play like waiting on
you're waiting on me i'm sorry it was just it was awful it was awful
uh so cameras have gotten way faster high speed shots uh are much more ubiquitous than
they were they were such a luxury back then we had to carefully choose every single one
um so that's the biggest step that and camera resolution right there those are the two biggest
biggest differences because we started mythbusters there was there wasn't 4k tv um yeah
yeah so the resolution of the show immediately would look much better
um and the high speeds would be much more plentiful than they are in the earlier seasons
um also you get a lot more shots from the action uh and i'll exp and that reason is because
of the gopro before the gopro oh kids it was so primitive um we were using hang on a second
so um before the gopro everything was shot on handicaps and we had like
six or seven of them we had to we again we had to make decisions carefully
but here's the worst part about a camera covering the action of a show like mythbusters is that
the older cameras the older dvd cams these are all digital but the older tape driven dvd cams
which was what we were shooting the show on they had this feature where if you bumped
them while they were recording they would stop operating and lose the last 30 seconds of material
so like jostling the cameras was not just like to be avoided it was a disaster and so when things
like bounced you put a camera inside something and it would roll sometimes we wouldn't get that
footage gopros like one of the first things about the gopro that was its selling point
is you could beat on it and it would still be recording that was that was i mean i can't even
tell you my camera department was just beaming when we got our first gopros and then i remember
the following season where we ordered like 15 or 18 gopros when they were like the gopro 2
was like the newest thing and this box came and i just remember all of us in the camera room like
super exciting we also had so the other thing about cameras is oh man it was so primitive
this was like the lifeblood of the mythbusters production and this is a portable dv cam deck
um and you can record to this from a camera so we would have to you'd have to be setting a camera
up a lot like it was this whole thing you'd be looking at it in here sometimes you'd have to use
this to do the recording but here's the thing is if there was stuff on the screen from this
like the time and the date and what it was that would all be recorded onto the footage itself
oh i mean yeah this became a problem in lawn chair larry one of our very first pilot episodes
there's footage in which we the data on the screen was recorded right onto the
footage we couldn't remove it we had this whole set of footage which was unusable um
okay so high-speed camera the resolution of the cameras the cheapness of robust high-speed cameras
that can both bounce and also keep recording and all of that stuff those those are all significant
significant ways in which mythbusters would instantly be visually radically different um
okay you asked specifically if we were following the same exact lesson plan as it were i mean the
other big technological advancement of the past 50 years has been the internet
as captain america said super useful um
there was no real youtube for looking for myths there was no twitter there was no
facebook when we started i think there might have been facebook but it was barely there
um yeah the the acquisition of stories and the doing of research is something that became easier
the more ubiquitous the internet got and in terms of looking for substantive material
we were always looking for new avenues for material whether it was popular misconceptions
idiomatic phrases movie physics which was really fertile and then just what was coming
up on twitter and now instagram uh would have been a sea change in the first few years of mythbusters
what else would have changed technological advancements those are the oh the other
thing that would be different is how much we'd be using a lot more arduino and raspberry pi
um those were you know certainly ascending when we were wrapping up mythbusters and we used them
here and there dennis kwan did some custom metering setups for us at one point
but it was far from a piece of our toolkit but the ubiquity of small cheap computers means
that nowadays with sensors and stuff that you can buy from robotics
there'd be plenty of things which we paid a lot of money to get done back in the day that would
be a lot cheaper and faster now in fact i think one of the biggest technological differences
is we probably have someone on our crew whose core competence was programming and utilizing
the the the cheap computers the arduinos and the raspberry pi's um those could have gotten us data
in ways and places that we wouldn't have otherwise been able to do that is a really lovely i mean
i very much enjoyed the thought experiment of thinking of thinking through that question um
i like to say the person's name at the end and i've just forgotten who asked this question
adam joseph adam joseph excellent question i'm sorry i'd look up your name again um a delightful
thought experiment and i'm sure there are others that i'm not thinking about but those are the
biggest differences absolutely oh gopros gopros might be one of the most important technological
advancements even more important than high speed yeah they give you that bird's eye view of
the world yeah so important so important and the internet so useful uh thank you guys for joining
me for this q a and uh i will continue to answer questions tested patrons uh if you'd like to find
out how to be a test patron it's in the comments below i will see you guys next time cheers