(bouncy music)
- So, here it is.
Did I just attach a bunch of crap on here
to get a nice clickbaity thumbnail?
Okay, maybe a little bit, but hear me out.
So right now I can hit the record button from right here.
And now we are recording on this setup.
I'm also monitoring audio, which is a must.
And I have a microphone for my voice as well as this light
but at the same time, I'm also recording Sam over there.
And I think you need a little bit of lighting there, sir.
So I just turn on the aperture that's pointed towards you
as well as a microphone
that is recorded on a separate channel.
So now I have the flexibility to cut
between both of our cameras
and use one audio track or the other, or both if I want to.
You could do like a little podcast, just like this, huh?
- Yeah, at what age was the last time you sharted Gene?
- My point is that everything on here
actually serves a purpose.
Are you gonna go out and rig out your phone just like this?
Probably not, but what's cool about this is depending on
what you're trying to shoot or set up
you can borrow pieces and parts of this setup
and customize it to how you want it.
So let's go ahead and start from the basics.
We're doing our first stop at Target to pick up some things.
This must be it right here.
These must to be very valuable for it to be locked up.
- [Sam] Can we get this too?
- [Gene] What is that?
Dojo Battle?
- [Sam] Yeah, look how much fun they're having in the box.
- [Gene] Wait this looks like laser tag, but with swords.
First accessory right here,
Lightning To Headphone Jack Adapter.
Old iPhones used to come with this, but not anymore.
Did you actually buy that?
- Yeah, ninja sword! - Oh, my God.
- [Sam] We're gonna battle like ninjas from the future.
- All right, so we got our very first accessory
right here and if there's one thing
I don't like about vlogging on the phone,
it's the audio quality.
Right now it might not sound too bad
but if you have a lot going on, or if it's windy,
it's gonna start sounding really bad, really fast.
So we're gonna plug this in and this is gonna allow us
to hook up a microphone onto here, but keep in mind
that there's a difference between TRS and TRRS.
They look very similar, they're the same size pretty much.
So it's very easy to mix them up
but they may not be compatible with each other.
So this is a TRS and this is a TRRS.
And the way you know is you can count it.
It starts from the top is the tip
and then there's one ring in there and then a sleeve.
So that's a TRS.
Here, this is a tip, ring, another ring, and then a sleeve.
So this is a TRRS.
Now this Lightening Adapter is a TRRS,
a lot of phone accessories are TRRS.
So if you plug in a regular microphone
that's just a regular TRS, you plug it in,
it's not gonna recognize it.
Two things you could do,
you might be able to get a cable that is a TRRS on one side,
or you can also run it through an adapter like this.
So this will receive a TRS.
Plug this into the phone
and now your phone should recognize your microphone.
And there, just like that,
we have great audio quality coming out of this phone
but now the problem is we have two separate devices.
So to consolidate that,
this is the simplest solution I found,
this is made by SmallRig.
You can go ahead and place that wherever, like on a table
but you can also close it,
hold it as like a little vlog setup.
And then you can attach your microphone up top like that,
piece of cake.
Now my favorite phone's the iPhone 12 Pro Max.
But this set up should work
with pretty much every other iPhone
that's at least somewhat recent, I think.
So this is the iPhone 10, what, 10s?
- Yes. - Wait,
how does this work?
You just like whack each other or what?
(game beeping loudly)
- Yeah, you just attacked me!
- Okay, are you guys about to battle now or what?
- It is time.
(dramatic music)
(swords clanking)
(laughing)
(eyes zinging)
(electricity zapping)
(chest piece tapping)
- So let's make this more interesting,
whoever wins this next one gets 100 bucks.
I'm gonna film it in slow motion, make it look more epic.
(intense music)
(electricity zapping)
(swords clanking)
(laughing)
(swords clanking)
(electricity zapping)
(Sam screaming)
What are you gonna do with your new earnings of $100?
- Just blow it all on drugs.
Buy groceries.
- Yeah, Better answer.
There's kids watching, all right, Dylan.
Stop being such a (beep) influence.
Anyways, yeah, how'd that battle look?
Another thing I noticed is that the stabilization
on the 10 isn't as good as on the newer ones, but anyways.
Yeah, dude, you look super wealthy right now.
- This is all of my houses.
- We've been driving around for a quiet place to film
and this is where we ended up, it's really nice here.
You know, you're in a really wealthy neighborhood
as you drive in you see signs that say vacation homes
for $1.5 million.
It doesn't say like, oh, yeah, live here for 1.5,
they know who they're targeting.
Half of these homes are probably empty.
You wanna just go in one and just start living there?
- This is incriminating evidence.
(laughing)
- Now looking at the footage from the iPhone 10.
I think it looked all right,
but you could definitely use a lot of improvement.
I think the biggest issues I had with it
was the lack of image stabilization,
and also the lack of wide angle options.
So if you're on a 10, it might make sense to upgrade
'cause it is more pleasant to vlog on an 11 or 12
because of that stabilization, wider angles.
But if you already have like an 11,
then you know there are upgrades going up to the 12 Pro Max
but those differences become more minor.
Dylan I thought you said this was your tennis court.
Where are the keys?
- Yeah, it's so exclusive I don't even have the keys.
- [Gene] Are you sure this is your tennis court?
- Of course it is, why would I lie?
- [Gene] Dylan how rich are you really?
- Oh, you know, like second only to Jeff Bezos.
- [Gene] Elon Musk is actually now number one.
- Well, okay, third, I guess, technically.
- Now a problem that I did have
with the earlier setup was that the audio quality,
sure it was better
because we were using a better microphone,
but it did clip a couple of times.
And basically that means the audio was recorded too loud.
So it kinda sounds like this.
(Sam screaming)
It's not pleasant at all.
And we can prevent that by controlling our audio levels.
One way to do that is with an app called Protake.
Now it's free to install.
There's a bunch of useful features in here
that are completely free.
And then you can also get a subscription
which will unlock a few more features.
I first heard about this app from Matti Haapoja.
See how it says resolution 4K frame rate,
24 frames per second.
You can go ahead and adjust your resolution
and it's as straightforward as it gets
which is why I like it.
Right now it's 4K, 128 megabits per second
but you can adjust the bit rate, which is cool right there.
If you wanna adjust your frame rate you just tap that.
But what we're looking at right now
are these audio levels right down here on the bottom.
I'm gonna tap that.
So now I'm gonna go ahead and plug in a microphone.
And now you will see that this external icon will light up.
So now we're switched over to external microphone.
So it's nice that you can monitor it and also see how
there's these two little arrows right there?
That lets you know
that you are recording external microphones.
So it gives you a lot more information
about what your camera is doing.
And of course, now we can control our audio levels
and by doing this,
this should prevent so much audio clipping.
Now Protake is sponsoring this episode,
so we are giving away an iPhone 12.
For a chance to win you just gotta drop a comment
within the first six hours of this video going live
and what do they comment?
- Hippopotamus.
- Okay, that's the word.
Hippopotamus somewhere in the comment, first six hours,
you have a chance to win an iPhone 12
and not just the basic 64 gig, the lowest one.
No, we're gonna hook you up with the middle one,
not the top one, okay?
I already had to pay Dylan a hundred bucks
for doing that sword fight earlier.
So I'm trying to stay on a budget.
Lets go into some of more of the free features.
If I go into the settings I can go between 8-bit,
10-bit, HDR, so I love how it gives you a lot
of control over what you're recording.
And also you have different modes of stabilization
and you can go into cinematic or extreme
and you see that it has some latency?
So if you do record in these settings
then what you actually look at is gonna be delayed.
The audio right now is live, but the visual is delayed.
But because of that you get this ultra smooth stabilization.
So in some cases it might be useful
but a lot of times you can just leave it in standard.
And that would be your typical stabilization
but that's just one of the cool features you get.
Now, if you look at this little color wheel right here
you can bake in some looks.
So some of the free ones would be like a Vlog.
So you can see that it kind of neutralizes the colors
a little bit.
And I believe there's a couple others that were free
and they're actually pretty fun to experiment with
but I ended up going ahead and paying for it.
So now I have like ALEXA 709.
So this is supposed to imitate some of the colors
of the area, ALEXA.
I actually had some fun playing
with the different film emulations.
And then we go here and we have movie inspired.
Like here we have Transformer.
So now it looks like we're in a Michael Bay film
and you can also adjust how strong these looks are as well.
So you could really push it or put it in the middle.
We have Her, Roma, we used this setting
to get some really sad-looking shots of Dylan.
Oh, check it out, there's a Saving Private Ryan look.
Look at that.
Dylan pretend like you're in Saving Private Ryan right now.
Go!
(gunshots blasting) (explosions booming)
(footsteps tapping)
Now one of the paid features,
see how it says auto right there.
We can go ahead and switch that
now that I have the paid version
and we can go over to Pro.
This is gonna give you full manual control
over the settings, and again,
I do like how intuitive this app is.
It's very straightforward, very easy to figure out
which is why it's my personal favorite.
Let's go ahead and switch into dual.
So now this is the setting that we saw earlier
where it's recording two cameras at once
and then they also do have aspect ratio, safe areas.
So I'm gonna throw some links for Protake down below.
Definitely worth checking them out.
Even if you're just planning on using the free features
'cause there's enough in this app
to make it worth your time.
All right now, we're just chilling here in Dylan's gazebo
and there's birds chirping in the background and stuff.
Now this right here is where it's at.
It's the bees knees.
- What is that anyway?
Bees don't have knees.
- Now this is an adapter made for iPhones by RODE.
So we have a Lightning connector up here,
but the beauty is we have two separate mic inputs right here
as well as a headphone jack.
The beauty of this thing
is that it keeps the audio channels separate.
Now the adapter we used at the beginning of this video
I tried a bunch of different ways to try
to isolate the audio tracks.
But if you hook up two microphones to the adapter
it just mashes everything together.
And it also has a headphone jack.
So you can monitor the audio live.
Now it is a pretty pricey adapter, it's about 80 bucks,
but I think it's worth it
because not only can you use it to record video
but there's a free app called the RODE Reporter
and I'll be able to hit record
and even if you're not trying to use your phone as video
now it is a recorder of two separate audio channels.
And then if you want to
you can sync this up with whatever camera you want.
So that's really cool
but even if we just pull up Protake,
you can see that the audio levels
are still being recorded separately.
Do keep in mind that both these mic inputs are TRRS.
So if your microphone is a TRS you're gonna need an adapter.
But now that we have two audio channels
that opens up a lot of different possibilities like this.
I have one microphone pointed in each direction.
So even if I'm talking or someone over here is talking,
we capture that well.
Another option is to have two separate lavaliers
hooked up to this one phone and you can wire up two people.
One thing to keep in mind is when you control audio levels
through the app you only have one slider control.
So you can't really independently control the audio levels
on the microphones.
So if you're doing a set up like this
you probably at least want one microphone
that has control over how much gain it is.
Now, these wireless lavaliers may not have as much control
but you still have three different levels of output.
You just have to get the output levels similar
on the microphones and then you just use
that one slider to control everything.
Now, this setup only has one cold shoe slot
but if you wanna attach two microphones
you can easily split it up like this.
This one's made by Ulanzi.
And I believe RODE makes one right now
that's a little bit shorter,
which I probably would have preferred
but they're back ordered right now.
So I just ended up getting this one.
Now you can attach two different microphones.
Now being wireless is great
because you don't have to worry about being
that close to this microphone.
And this is probably one of my favorite setups
along with the RODE microphone and it does come with a clip.
So you can just clip it onto your shirt
if you wanna do it that way, but these are pretty cool.
This is Undercovers by Rycote and I like these
'cause they're these little pre-cutout stickies
that you can peel off then you stick the microphone on there
and there's these different colored fuzzies.
This one's black.
So I'm gonna use that because I'm wearing a dark shirt.
Stick that right there so it's super easy to attach.
So now with this setup, I'm recording with the shotgun mic
that's mounted up top, which usually tends to
sound a little bit more natural, but as I walk away,
I'm not glued to the phone
because I can be all the way back here
and I can just switch it over to this microphone
and now I don't have to worry
about how close I am towards the microphone.
And if I didn't have this lavalier
I would have to be shouting if I'm all the way back here.
So I love that flexibility
of having two different audio channels.
You don't have to worry as much about
where the microphone is and being close to it.
It's always on me and now that I'm close, I can go ahead
and switch back to the other shotgun microphone
and you can have all this flexibility, isn't that cool?
Now, when it comes to these phone grip slash tripod things,
I guess, this one's probably my favorite.
Although I do still feel like there's room for improvement
but the reason why I like this one is
because one it telescopes out so you can make it tall
and have it stand.
There's also two different stages
of how wide you have your feet.
There's already a cold shoe and two quarter inches,
side to side, so you could attach all kinds
of stuff on here as well as a Bluetooth button.
But the reason why I don't love it is
because I do have to fiddle with it sometimes.
Like, for example, if I wanna very quickly open it up
and set it down, you can't really
because this bottom part kind of sticks out.
So in order to fix that, you do have to rotate it
and then, you know, just slightly bring it up.
So that's just like an extra step.
And if it's just your phone up here
it's not really a problem, but once you start adding
a couple different microphones up here
it does tend to dip sometimes.
So then you just have to tighten it more.
You really have to tighten it to have it to lock into place.
One thing that I think will be really cool is
if the cold shoe was rotatable by 180 degrees.
So if I'm filming like this,
I wish I could just rotate the microphone
so that it would turn around and face me,
and it would just kind of click into place
and you could switch it back and forth.
I think that would be really cool.
And since we have two slots for quarter inches,
I have a articulating arm with an Aputure MC
at the tip of it, so this can just screw on here.
If you're really just trying to get your rig
to become crazy, but the more stuff you have,
the more cumbersome that this gets.
And I think a good thing to do with vlogging
is to try to keep it as minimal as possible.
So just really, you know, pick up the things
that you really need and want, and just use those.
A few more things that you could consider would be
like an ND filter that you could attach on here.
If you're trying to control your shutter speed
by going fully manual
and PolarPro makes some pretty solid ones for the phone.
There's also a few microphones
that you can literally just plug straight
into the Lightning port and it just hangs off the side here.
I haven't really tested any of those.
So I don't know, I'm assuming they're good.
And of course there's the option of throwing it on a gimbal.
Although I would say the new phones
have such good stabilization already,
and I don't really like finessing
with gimbals especially when you have a bunch of other crap
attached to it already.
So I personally just go for a little tripod,
but again the older generation iPhones
didn't have as good stabilization.
So if that's the case,
then it probably makes more sense to use a gimbal.
It's worth keeping in mind which lens you're gonna use.
This one has three in the back
and a selfie camera right here.
So let's start with the selfie.
This is gonna be the easiest, because, of course,
you can just monitor what you're recording.
You can see yourself, it's a pretty decent wide angle.
And again, the iPhone 10s and before
they tend to be a little bit tighter.
So it becomes a little bit harder.
But what I like about these new ones is
that the selfie cameras are nice and wide
so I could hold it out and get a pretty good wide shot.
I can almost get all the dogs in one shot almost
but I'm gonna go ahead
and switch to some of these rear lenses.
And this is the ultra wide angle
which is personally one of my favorites
because you know you get everything in the frame,
which is nice and also right now,
since I'm filming blind, look,
I'm only looking at this lens, I don't see the screen.
So because of how wide it is
even if my aims a little bit off, I know I'm still in frame.
So I like that, but the downside is that the low-light,
not so good, it's definitely the worst out of all the lenses
when it comes to low-light.
So if you're filming in the dark
or you're in a dimly lit place,
I would avoid using this lens.
And then there's the telephoto, which I would only use
if you're trying to zoom in really far.
And then this is just your standard 1X wide-angle lens
which is probably the best lens on this camera.
It's not as wide as I'd like it to be
but it has a good big sensor.
So in low-light, this thing's gonna be really good
and you get a little bit of shallow depth of field.
So that background's a little bit blurry
which is kind of nice.
Honestly, depending on how good my lighting is,
I shuffle between all the different lenses, but anyways
this video's getting super long.
So let's wrap this up by reading a couple of comments
from my last video, where I kinda talk about my experience
of vlogging every single day for a year.
"The butt sprayer is an essential piece
of equipment here in Vietnam."
All right, I'm not gonna lie,
my toilet, it's pretty awesome now.
Every time, boom, boom.
It's been awesome, my butthole, never been cleaner.
Link in description.
Imagine if I just sell a bunch of bidets?
And that's just like how I get all my affiliate money.
"We call them a bum gun here in Thailand, pew, pew."
In Japan my mom has one
and it's like a little robot and a computer.
You type in a code.
Thing comes out and it's like preheated water and sprays it.
But I like this 'cause it's just simple.
You know, Kari kind of complains
about how the water is cold, but you know, hey, it works.
"Finally an American washing their butt properly
instead of wiping only.
I seriously can't comprehend, how do you people wipe only?
It's not even close to being clean!"
I do honestly feel like once you bidet
there's no going back.
"Potato: vlogs in the bathroom.
Me: Yup, this is normal."
Yeah, this is gonna become my new set, guys.
Every video I'm gonna start right here.
Actually sitting here has actually made me realize
I do actually have to use this bathroom.
So that's your cue to leave.
(bass thumping music)