Hey, welcome to another Flarecorp Media video thing.
I’m Jason and today's episode is all about an experiment that I did in the last episode.
Now in the previous episode I did a video talking about what I considered the ultimate
portable video recording setup, but the experiment that I did was, I recorded the entire thing,
edited the entire thing, created the thumbnail, and uploaded it all from my Samsung Galaxy
Note 20 Ultra.
Now that may or may not surprise you on the idea behind that because lots of people record
videos that upload them, no problem, but I want to edit it and color grade it and treat
it like I would a normal Flarecorp Media video.
But the reasoning behind trying this was the fact that over the past four years I had the
Pixel phones, but I saw where the trend was going.
The Pixel 4, it didn't have that many more features than the Pixel 3.
They added another 2X telephone lens that didn't do hardly anything and so I jumped
ship back to Samsung where I was before the Galaxy Note 7 explosion days.
Anyway, so I thought ‘well maybe I have a phone that's capable of said experiment’
especially because Samsung for the last five years or so has been putting something into
their phones called DeX and they've been improving it each year.
Now what DeX is is a desktop environment that uses your Android file system, the phone.
It basically turns it into as close to a computer as it can without running an official Linux
or Windows or MacOS and it's pretty neat.
In this latest iteration all you need is an HDMI cable or a Miracast capable display or
even a computer.
You can run a program and it'll run DeX as a program on your computer and this has, I
believe, 12 gigabytes of RAM, I’ll fix it up here if I’m wrong, and that should be
enough power then to edit in a desktop environment and so this video is going over the results
of that experiment.
So to start with I set up my phone in this little contraption right here and I had this
on my tripod and then this would allow me to hook on like an external microphone.
I was thinking ‘oh I’ll try the internal microphone, I’ll try using a USB connected
microphone, try different things to see how capable this was’.
Well that's where I ran into issue number one.
I have this little 3.5 millimeter jack to USB-C cable that I've used on my Pixel 4 with
said microphones.
This microphone is always weird because it's the Rode Videomicro.
The power requirements on it is weird but so I tried my big Rode NTG up here as well
as one of these Rode microphones here.
For some reason the Samsung phone would not pick up a signal from two of those microphones.
It did pick up a signal from this one when I jacked the power all the way up but the
audio recording that it produced was hissy and just not pleasant to listen to.
Testing the Rode VideoMic NTG plugged into my Zoom F6 field recorder and then into my
Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra using the USB adapter.
So I quickly scrapped the idea of using an external microphone.
So currently as it stands with my Rode microphones, the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 Ultra does not
work well with them.
So I decided, well I’m just going to then use the built-in microphone because they have
the ability to record from the front, the front of the phone, the back of the phone,
omnidirectional, or via Bluetooth if you had those Samsung Galaxy Buds Live, the beans,
and I didn't have those but so I just went ahead and used the internal microphone.
That sounds okay, you'll hear it in the final video.
I did do a little post, maybe a little too much post processing, on it because I was
trying to clear up a little hum that was going on in the room and that kind of made my voice
slightly tinny.
If I were to listen to the raw video and jack the volume to maximum it didn't sound quite
that bad but in order to get the volume up to a broadcast level I had to manipulate it
a bit and the software that I manipulated it with was not the best.
It just slips on.
It uses compression to lock onto the phone.
It just slips on.
It uses compression to lock onto the phone.
Then I figured, well okay if I can't use the microphones then I’m just going to not use
anything.
I’m just going to go straight phone.
So normally I record with a fill light which is always blinding me in the face and I thought,
‘okay in the original experiment I would use that on and off to see the difference’,
but no.
I threw that away.
Threw that out the door because I just… now I’m just going to use just the phone.
So it does have the ability to turn on the flash the entire time it's recording so I
had that little bit of a light shining on me it did make a bit of a difference.
You can actually see it in my eyes.
I have a little fill light in my eyes.
So yeah, worth having on and the nice thing is that I had the… it took me about an hour
to record.
The phone never overheated once.
The flashlight never overheated.
It worked well.
So then the next thing that I was really looking forward to is with the Samsung Galaxy Note
phones obviously the whole point is you have the S Pen.
Now the S Pen in the last two versions has had Bluetooth in it so you can actually use
it as a remote shutter by clicking the pen button.
I’m like ‘Yes!
I no longer have to get up and walk around to the camera every time I want to stop a
take and stop wasting film!’.
I can just pick this up, click it, and have lower file sizes.
However, there is no way to know that you have stopped recording.
There's no red recording light on here, no option to turn it on that I could find.
It would have been nice if that flashlight fill light would have turned off when it wasn't
recording and then turned on when it was recording or give me the option to do that but as it
stands using the S Pen to record a video that you can't monitor because there is no uh external
screen because you're looking at the back of the phone, using this is worthless.
So then it's time to decide what format I’m actually going to record.
Now the Note 20 Ultra has the ability to record in 8k.
You can do 16x9 or I believe 20x9.
I can't quite remember, but you can do the entire wide screen.
So I was kind of playing around with the idea of that and I decided because I'd never uploaded
an 8k video before, I would upload…
I would record in 8k.
Now the 8k in here is pretty much worthless.
I've seen multiple comparisons from other YouTubers comparing an 8k image to a 4k image.
If anything, the 4k looked better.
I just I just wanted to say I had uploaded an 8k image or video plus I wanted to see
if the phone was going to be able to process that 8k image.
So I set it to 8k in video pro mode.
Video pro lets you control more of the settings which I’ll kind of go over here in a little
clip.
Other settings that you can tweak then are your shutter speed so I have it to 1/50th
because at 8k you're recording in 24 frames per second so I like the rule of 180 degree
shutter so I could either go 1/45 or 1/50.
So you take your frame rate and double it and that gives a nice natural motion blur.
You can also set up auto focus.
I just left it on auto because I was coming in and off screen so much.
You can set your white balance.
Again I just left on auto because that seems to be pretty accurate right now.
The zoom though, you're only using the main camera.
You're not, you don't have access to either of the other cameras so if you're zooming,
this is all completely digital zoom.
It's not using that telephoto lens on there.
And finally then you have the ISO so if the scene was too dark you could come in here
and adjust it.
So after all that was set up I recorded the video, took my phone upstairs, I didn't need
to copy the files off onto another computer which was pretty great, and set about hooking
it up for DeX.
Now like I said, you only need an HDMI cable to use Dex on a normal monitor.
I had a Bluetooth keyboard and a Bluetooth mouse but now I ran into issue number three.
So I had DeX up and running and went to launch Premiere Rush, Adobe Premiere Rush, which
is a very lightweight video editor that is designed to get… it's not designed for all
kinds of complicated timelines.
It's more designed to have one timeline with a couple inserts.
It would have been perfect for this.
So I was looking forward to using that because it's a halfway decent, powerful editor.
Well it turns out that at least on the Android phone it cannot handle 8k videos.
Every time I tried to add an 8k video it would say it cannot handle this resolution of file.
So now I had a video that I recorded that I could not edit in the phone.
I did try using another app called PowerDirector which is a decently well-rated video editor
for Android but it also could not handle the 8k videos.
So now I’m left thinking how am I going to edit this video on my phone.
Well Samsung fortunately has thought about that and in their video they have a ‘mini
video editor’ we'll call.
It's not for creating… it's not an NLE, it's not non-linear editing.
It’s just ‘take this video and kind of process it a little bit’.
So I took that and basically exported it as a 4k video, so now I did not get to upload
my 8k video because I had to convert these all down to 4k, but now Adobe Premiere Rush
was able to ingest the media.
Here's where I ran into problem number four in the fact that Adobe Premiere Rush crashes
all the time in running DeX.
Now I have used Rush on just the Android phone and it works fine but for some reason the
moment it's in DeX, if you make too many cuts, or you color grade something, or hit space
bar too fast, or do anything, blink, look at it funny, think bad thoughts about its
mother, it will crash to the point where Android was saying ‘this program keeps crashing
do you want to end it’ and I thought about ending it.
So what I ended up doing then is taking each of my three clips, laying them all out on
one Premiere Rush track and, no edits because the cuts were what was causing it to crash,
and I just color graded it and edited the audio as best I could using Rush’s tools
and exported that as a giant timeline.
So now I have this big 16 minute timeline full of false starts and bad takes and pauses
that I needed to cut out so I took that file into the PowerDirector and was able to cut
my video using that software.
So now I take it and I re-export it as a 4k video and I realize that the audio is still
a little crappy so I bring it back into Premiere Rush to clean up the audio one more time and
do my final export.
Another problem that I ran into while editing is the fact that because I had an HDMI to
USB-C converter in here, I couldn't plug headphones in to listen to the audio properly.
It did pass out the audio via HDMI after I spent some time messing around with it in
Adobe Rush to the speakers in my monitor but those are really crappy speakers and PowerDirector
did not export to the monitor at all over HDMI.
It only played out of the speakers on my phone so I had my phone sitting down here listening
to the audio coming out of my speakers down here on my phone while editing up here.
I did try using my Samsung Galaxy Buds+ Bluetooth headphones and the lag was so bad it, was
up to a second at times, that I couldn't listen to it and cut the video properly because my
brain was not coalescing with what I was seeing my mouth do in the video so in the end I did
most of my edits using just the audio coming out of my phone and I did, like I said, do
the final edits in Adobe Rush, but because I didn't have good speakers I wasn't able
to listen to the sound clear enough to find out if what I was doing was making it better
or worse.
At any moment had I decided to stop using DeX and just pick up my phone and start editing
it with my finger or the S Pen it would have been so much easier but I was bound to determine
to find out what it took to use your Note 20 Ultra as a desktop video editing environment
and it is not ready for the prime time.
Okay so now the video is edited.
Now we just need to create the thumbnail.
That shouldn't be hard right?
You’ve got a nice camera.
Let's go take some photos and in the end it wasn't that hard to take the pictures, but
I had to keep in the back of my mind that I wasn't going to be able to edit this in
Photoshop like I normally would.
Lots of times I like to cut out the primary subject, put it on a different background
or make it bolder, or something like that and Android does not have a full copy of Photoshop
nor does it have something like Affinity Photo whereas, again, on an iPad or iPhone you have
pretty decent tools.
So I had to use Photoshop Express and Photoshop Mix.
Now one is to create kind of, we’ll call them childish looking edits where you can
put stickers and draw on it and stuff like that and the other lets you work with layers,
but the fine detail isn't there.
So I was really trying to cut out the shape of this and underneath this light I could
not get the auto cutting tool to ignore that part and so eventually I tweaked a whole lot
of things and had to do some feathering just to try to get something that looked halfway
decent and in the end I came up with something that looks pretty cheesy.
I’m not real happy with it.
I did try playing into that look even more by adding some text, just really playing into
the immaturity of it and just for fun then to see what I would have done with it normally,
I took it into Photoshop on my computer and kind of edited it and this is what I came
up with and it just looks cleaner.
It looks sharper and I will probably eventually switch over to this thumbnail instead of the
current one that I made with the phone just to try and make it look more appealing so
more people will click on it.
But this is what I ended up with the Photoshop on my phone.
In terms of render time my initial edit where I did the color correction on the full 16
minute three clips and the audio correction ended up taking 26 minutes and five seconds
to render that out at 4k.
When I did my final cuts in PowerDirector I was left with a much shorter video and exported
that and that was three minutes and 55 seconds to export but it wasn't having to do any color
correction or anything like that.
It was literally just restitching together the clip I'd already edited.
So then when I did my final tweak in the audio after that, of that same size file, it ended
up taking me in Rush then seven minutes and nine seconds.
So Adobe Rush takes a long time to process.
That first one took a very long time because it was doing all the color correction and
things like that but overall I guess that's what I expect from an Android phone.
The final edits were pretty good but the initial edit took a long time, plus remember I had
to convert from 8k to 4k so that, I think, ended up taking about 30 minutes to do all
of that.
So we are looking at over an hour of render time.
So now I had the final video and I had a thumbnail and it was time to upload.
Now for reasons unknown to me, YouTube Studio, the app on Android phones, does not let you
upload videos.
That's where you go to upload in YouTube, well I guess you can do it from youtube.com
but I go into studio.youtube.com and upload.
You can't do it in the Studio app so I just had to fire up the YouTube app where you can
upload the video and I was able to upload just fine as you'd expect.
I was not able to go in and tweak things like closed captions or link other videos, you
know, create the cards, stuff like that.
So then I had to open up the Chrome web browser and do those edits like I normally would on
a normal web browser.
The experience wasn’t bad.
It’s just not quite as fast as on a normal computer, but it got the job done.
So in the end, I would not try this again.
I do not recommend it.
The video editing software is not ready for prime time.
I would go so far as to say if you told me I had to use a mobile device to edit and to
record and edit a video I would be one of those people that we like to make fun of for
recording video with a giant iPad just so that I could edit the video using the iPad
when I was done.
I would walk around like this rather than this just so I could use its editing tools.
I think until Google or Samsung decides to put lots of effort into creating their own
video editor to rival iMovie or something like that, we're going to continue to have
poor video editing results on the Android ecosystem and I don't see Google doing it
anytime soon.
Or Adobe decides to get their act together and focus on expanding into this niche market.
Because not very many people are going to use DeX, they don't have a whole lot of motivation
to improve the experience on DeX though it did supposedly support keyboard shortcuts.
I could, had it not crashed, use my keyboard to help me edit.
But I just think one of them has to decide to make it a priority to create something
usable.
Again, at any time had I used my iPad I could have been done and gone off on a photography
trip and been back before I got done editing this because iOS has much better video editing
tools.
Well, that’s going to do it for this episode.
If you appreciated the information in this video or at least found it entertaining please
consider giving a thumbs up down below.
It's going to help other people find the video when they're looking for this type of thing
and while you're at it if you want to see more content creator focus videos or my Whatever
Wednesday videos, please consider subscribing.
Until next time, I’m doing what I love.
Keep doing what you love.
Thanks for watching.