Hi everyone,
so hopefully we'll have improved audio quality again on this particular
video.
We're I think going to do a subscriber Sunday so
on a Sunday a little bit more of a laid-back
chat with you all, going over some of the things that cropped up this week
and just offering you a little bit more context about us here really.
So on the first video I made about
you know, changes to the studio and everything like that, you guys gave me some fantastic comments
and just to address a couple of them...
the lighting situation we've got going on just to explain
we're using a Canon 650D. Now what I want to try and do
is to bring all of our footage up to at very least
60 frames a second at 720p. What we'll actually be doing is
taking 720p footage upscaling it to 1080p
making a few tweaks but running it at 60 frames a second.
Now, where some people have noticed an issue is where the 650D
camera tends to run at 60 frames a second
causes some issues. What we actually have to do
is 60 frames a second is half the
light allowed into the camera relative to 30 frames a second.
We then also have to crank the shutter speed to
alleviate a strobing effect that a lot of light systems tend to generate which is the
hertz that the lights run at which is around 60 but never quite perfect
so in actual fact to achieve 720p 60
on the 650D camera I have to cut the light down by
roughly four times which makes things a little bit difficult. The
ISO then on the camera which is this light sensitivity which has to be boosted up to 60 or 100
and you can get this slightly grainy effect coming throug. It's something were going to work on
and probably it will be a combination of maybe a new camera system
possibly a change in the lights etcetera or some environmental tweaks that we still
haven't quite worked out yet but overall that is an area we are going to
be working on. Next is audio quality.
Now because the set-up changing here, I'm
effectively further away from the microphone. I don't have a lapel microphone on.
I did try one but here was the problem. It picked up so much electromagnetic
interference all you could hear was
and occasionally me talking. No good whatsoever.
So going with the Blue microphones cardioid microphones
they worked beautifully once you get them in just the right position so that
they're not too far away from me and not picking up too much environmental bounce back,
effectively distortion. These are all areas we are working on
and they will continue to improve week by week as we've done over the
last sort of two and a half years.
A few people have mentioned that they really like the content mix that we're going for these days
and that's something that 12 months ago we made a very conscious effort
to kind of widen the scope of the channel. In part because
the subject of pure Android was kind of
running out of rope. If you looked at what devices were coming
through and the chips and specs that they were offering. Android kind of stagnated over the last 12 months
801 processors, taking on from the 800 processors
and then this year we're seeing 805s running into next year. There's
not been a major kind of set of
innovations happening. It's not like we now have a new type of NFC
or new technologies to make Android seem impressive.
So in order to not get bored and to actually have things worth talking about because
we are about the cutting edge
let's start looking at other types of technologies. Let's start looking at
games and the progress that's been made in next-gen because that was a major change that
we had in this last 12 months,
a brand new console architecture coming through from AMD
powering both the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4.
Now you know there were some dark times there especially around the Xbox One
content we were producing because,
you know, as many of you will be aware it tends to be a bit of a war out there
between Sony and Microsoft for God knows what reason, we're
all gamers at the end of the day. It doesn't actually matter what console you're playing the game on as
long as you're enjoying yourself.
But my job here is not to kind of blow smoke
in anyone's general direction but to give you an honest opinion of what I see in the
industry and so when you kind of look at where Microsoft
was with a disastrous launch, frankly, and
having so badly marketed the Xbox One, and
made so many questionable decisions about where it was being positioned in the market and
the price point they were hitting,
I made a number of prediction. Those predictions have turned out to be
absolutely bang on the money. Apart from one where I said Microsoft
would likely go for a redesign of their console. Well,
in the last few weeks we've heard very positive news coming out of AMD
of a move to the 20 nanometer processor, 20 nanometer
processing. Effectively they are taking their CPU/GPU
package. they're shrinking it down. When you shrink the GPU and
CPU as AMD are doing for moving from 28 nanometers to
20 nanometers the number of transistors you can effectively fit in to a
small space what you'll find is that power consumption
goes down, heat, so thermal properties chip
become much more tolerable and so Microsoft and Sony are
going to be able to redesign their consoles. What they're going to be able to do is to make them smaller
and making them smaller and having a in theory a
high yield a more efficient chip architecture they'll get more chips
out of each wafer and so the cost of producing each unit comes down
as well as the physical size of the consoles and so cost of plastics and
cost of shipping comes down as well.
This is great for us gamers and for new people wanting to come into the industry
because it creates cheaper consoles. It means
that manufacturers can produce profit which they are desperately needing
both in Microsoft's and Sony's camps are really needing to find the profit margin
for these consoles now.
It works well for absolutely everyone. Now that Microsoft
isn't going to do is they're not going to redesign their consoles from an architecture point of view. They're
not going to suddenly say OK, we're going to clock the
GPU or the CPU even higher, thus boosting frame rates
because that would cause a disparity between consoles they have already in the
market and
the new consoles coming through. That has never, in my understanding,
happened in the console cycle. You generally don't boost
speed, what you'll look to do is to reduce the thermal properties
first and foremost, increase the profit yield you can get
from those wafers and move forward like that. Some other folks were asking why
I always refer to us as 'we'. Well, I'm not the only one here.
There's actually five of us. They are all camera shy and they tend to be working behind
the scenes
looking at various aspects of the YouTube channel and here's the
sixth member just coasting past - one of our cats!
That was Tinky by the way, the one that likes to eat.
So what we have really here is me on-camera personality as it were,
playing all of the games, testing all of the hardware but then people working behind the scenes and
they're responsible for, well the descriptions, the title, the tags,
the kind of background work that goes into making a YouTube channel
successful. The promotion, the marketing, the captioning and everything like that.
Now everyone's working really to kind of my standard as it were.
What I'm looking for and I suppose you could say I'm the lead
person here from that point of view. So if you have criticisms about
something we've done and the way we've put some information across or something, that sits
squarely on my shoulders.
So what about the future? Well a lot of this really is down to
you guys, the regular subscribers. You tell me what you're kind of looking for from us,
what parts of the content which you really enjoy which bits you aren't. Now
bearing in mind we do have a wide range of subscribers now,
you guys as viewers across the divide from physical hardware to
games to mobile gaming to the weird and wonderful tech we've looked at
over the last couple years as well. And so we have to try and keep that in balance.
There's no right or wrong here. What I'd really like to hear from you guys is
how each of these various different channels we've be working on what do you want to see
more of?
We'll try and fold that into our content mix over the next year.
Something else that we're really interested in looking at is
how do we grow to 100,000 subscribers? We're just short of about 46,000 so far
which is a pretty phenomenal number when you compare it against other YouTube channels out there
and the speed at which we've grown.
We're really talking two and a half years to reach 46,000 subscribers which I
consider to be pretty good. I'm happy with that, put it that way. But how do we then
gets to the 100,000? Well one of the things I'm thinking about is a prize pool.
We've obviously got on the wall there quite a lot of things we've been sent
which a lot of the time we either try and give away or
we make use of in future testing projects and so on.
But what if we created a prize pool. What if we took
every product we get sent plus other bits and pieces we've picked up
and bought ourselves for testing and show you guys, and we put it into a single prize pool
that was only won once we hit the 100,000 subscriber mark? And would
only go to our subscribers. Now that effectively is a one in 100,000 chance of
winning
but it's still a chance of winning and if you're in the UK you'll have heard of the gadget show
that's probably still better odds than the gadget show. OK. So
would that be something that you would find interesting. Is that something that you would like to
tell your friends about.
Hey come and subscribe to this channel someone's going to win an ever-growing
pile of cool stuff.
Let me know in the comments. If generally speaking people are interested in that idea. Or if
you have any ideas on how we could do it
differently let me know. If it feels like it will work we're going to go for it,
it's as simple as that really. So anyway, I hope you've enjoyed
a slightly different more laid back video today with me mostly talking.
Hey! Do let me know in the comments what you think and as always
keep that feedback coming in. We do build on it and we're always listening to what you guys say.
We're trying to improve the show as best we can. Obviously we're always going to be
limited by
time and money. If we can ever overcome those two aspects
we can do anything you ever want. Thanks for watching,
do please subscribe to us on YouTube and Twitch and please like and comment on
these videos as well.
We love to chat.