Know How... 125 (Transcript)
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This episode of Know-How is brought to you by ITProTV. Are you looking to upgrade your IT skills or prepare for certification? ITProTV offers engaging and informative tutorials streamed to your Roku computer or mobile device. For a free seven day trial and 30% off the lifetime of your account go to itpro.tv/knowhow and use the code KNOWHOW30.
Father Robert Ballecer: On this episode of Know-How: universal translators, the Kepler satellite and what we should do down here to have the same kind of tech, oh and did you buy a Syma over Christmas? Because if you did, we’re going to show you how to fix it.
Fr. Robert: Welcome to Know-How, it’s the Twit show where we build, bend, break and upgrade. I’m Father Robert Ballecer.
Bryan Burnett: And I’m Bryan Burnett.
Fr. Robert: Welcome to 2015!
Bryan: It feels like 2015. It has a different smell to it.
Fr. Robert: I feel the car. The car is right here.
Bryan: The car?
Fr. Robert: The car. It is a new word for 2015.
Bryan: It is going to be the new hot word. We are starting it here on know-how. Already off to a good start this year.
Fr. Robert: Folks we want to thank you for joining us for this brand-new year of know-how. We had a fun time last year. You came onto the show, you kind of own it now and this is been your show for almost a year. We've had a time building stuff.
Bryan: We’ve had a lot of fun. We have learned a lot, we’ve crammed a lot of knowledge into certain holes and stuff. So it has been a lot of fun. Still not on the intro yet though.
Fr. Robert: It is kind of strange that you are still not on the cover art. But, okay maybe we can fix that. I feel so lonely there. I have a cohost.
Bryan: I think the problem is that I don’t transfer to cartoon very well.
Fr. Robert: Someone sent me a version of that that we could use for cover art. That you look like one of the people from Ah-Ha video.
Bryan: I think Alex should be doing some Tri-caster magic. So I will hold still. The Ah-Ha? The pencil sketch stuff?
Fr. Robert: That would be okay. I would actually be down with that.
Bryan: Ah-Ha! Welcome to KN.
Fr. Robert: This is Know-How, where we know how to fix things to make them broken.
Bryan: No! There we go. Father Robert Ballecer.
Fr. Robert: Do you want to do a show?
Bryan: We are a little loopy. It is obviously not 2015. We are pre-recording.
Fr. Robert: I’m actually at CES.
Bryan: That time of year again.
Fr. Robert: That time of year. Speaking of that time of year, at the end of 2014 there was a very cool announcement about a new technology that Microsoft had just released. Did you hear about that?
Bryan: I did. This was crazy. This was like, okay it feels like the future now.
Fr. Robert: It does feel like the future. Skype translator. So if you ever watch start trek or any sci-fi there is always that piece of tech that allows different cultures, aliens, to talk to one another.
Bryan: And it just works.
Fr. Robert: It just works. Well, Skype hasn’t figured out a way to inject microbes into your body from hitchhikers or from Farscape or any piece of technology that does instant translation. But they have done something to Skype itself. Skype translator essentially is a bot so it uses the most popular video/audio communications tool on the planet and it places a robot between two participants that will do, in real time, translation between two languages. Right now it is English and Spanish but here is the thing. I saw a demo of this technology and it was amazing. It was spot on. The translation was really good. The cool thing is, we actually had Spanish speaking reporters in the crowd and they applauded because the translations were that bang on.
Bryan: Because Google translator has been around for a long time and it is fun to put text into it, see what comes out and then revert it back. That is not what I was trying to say.
Fr. Robert: That is actually a great point, because a lot of the technology that we think is a universal translator type of material is actually just simple search and replace. You search for something in one language and you replace it with a word from the other language. Which we know, doesn’t work. It is hilarious sometimes. But with Skype translator they are using something that Microsoft research has been working on for a long time. And it is called Deep Neuro Network. The whole idea is that rather than doing a search and replace, it is actually looking for patterns. So what it does is it gives you context which is always the problem with translation software. If it doesn’t have a context it replaces it with a word that makes absolutely no sense because it doesn’t understand what you are actually trying to say.
Bryan: My mind is melting a little bit because how do you code a machine to know context?
Fr. Robert: Yeah. And that is what they have been working on. That Deep Neuro Network is a concept that was introduced quite a bit ago. But they haven’t really had the hardware, the horsepower to do it. Here is the cool thing about Deep Neuro Network. They learn, they grow.
Bryan: They are getting smarter. Faster. Stronger. So they have the hardware now and stuff and so it is on the fly?
Fr. Robert: It is on the fly. It is almost instantaneous. It has to go into the bot, the bot has to translate it, so right now you really want one party speaking and the other party to speak. So that you can go through the bot and you don’t have any crosstalk. But in time, they will fix even that. It is limited to English and Spanish at the moment. But they are working on Mandarin, Cantonese, Polish, Russian and some of the major languages. So pretty soon you should be able to have a conversation with anybody, anywhere in the world at any time. And be able to speak to them in their language. Now here is the cool part. If you want to try it, there is actually a link where you can sign up for the preview. Do it right now because it may take some time for you to get approved for the program. You are going to need Windows 8 or 8.1. So go ahead and upgrade but there are versions coming for all other platforms soon. But register and at least give it a try. Because, I tell you it does feel like the future.
Brian: I can see having some fun with that. Very cool. Although I am wondering when we do encounter an alien race is it going to just learn automatically?
Fr. Robert: When we do encounter an alien race we are going to drop connection. Can you unplug your USB mic?
Brian: Are you on Wi-Fi? Or Ethernet? Do you think they understand?
Fr. Robert: And we just lost a sponsor. Speaking of sponsor, let’s go ahead and take a moment to think the sponsor for the first episode of Know-How in 2015.
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Fr. Robert: Hey Bryan!
Bryan: Huh?
Fr. Robert: Have you heard of Kepler?
Bryan: Yeah. I have. The space telescope.
Fr. Robert: $600 million spacecraft. Kind of like the Hubble, the next version. Which is designed specifically to spot XO planets, the planets way the heck out there.
Bryan: Right. This is the new one, Hubble had been around for a long time but still producing amazing photos. But now Kepler is the new and improved version.
Fr. Robert: If you know that history of the space program you will understand that is one of the reasons why they de-orbited the Hubble. Because it takes money to continue running a program and they wanted to take that money and use it for Kepler. And Kepler has been the most prolific XO planet spotting spacecraft in history. It has been fantastic because it has been specifically designed to do it. It has a 1.4 m mirror that drives light down into a 95 megapixel sensor that can actually tell the difference in brightness for pixels that are adjacent to each other down to 10 ppm. It is ridiculous sensitivity.
Bryan: We have some bad news about it right?
Fr. Robert: There was some bad news and the bad news actually came in 2013. In order to keep it pointed in the right direction they had to use what they called reaction wheels. Which are essentially gyros. Did you ever have a gyroscope when you were a kid?
Bryan: Were you tied a string around it and you pulled it and then the motion would just keep it in orbit?
Fr. Robert: Exactly. That is Newtonian physics. The whole idea of motion tends to want to stay in motion. And if you've got something spinning it is not going to want to turn. Same idea except scale that up a bit to $200,000 per gyroscope.
Bryan: And flying around in space.
Fr. Robert: So this Kepler had four of these things and what it could do is that either it accelerated or decelerated one of those reaction wheels, it would turn the craft. It is just the same way that we do torque. It needed three of those to maintain operation. It lost the second one in 2013 and so then the Kepler went into safe mode. Imagine how hard it is for you to keep a camcorder pointed, now zoom in and 185,000,000 light years.
Bryan: I’ve gone way out into the country where there wasn’t a lot of pollution and tried to use my DSLR to take pictures of the stars and even just the motion of pushing the shutter would be enough to blur the image.
Fr. Robert: So you can imagine what is going to happen when it is trying to detect a planet at the edge of its known reach. And for a while there they thought they might lose the Kepler beginning figured out an ingenious solution. So they still had two gyroscopes, two reaction wheels. And what they were able to figure out is that they could use the pressure of the sunlight on the solar panels of the spacecraft to replace the third reaction wheel. It wasn’t permanent but it worked just long enough to keep the spacecraft stable enough to go ahead and take its pictures.
Bryan: That is amazing.
Fr. Robert: It is pretty amazing. I geek out over science like that.
Bryan: There can’t be a lot of force.
Fr. Robert: It is not a law to force. But you don’t need a lot because remember you are falling through space so all you need is just enough to keep steady. That is why the reaction wheels would work. They didn’t need to propel it, they’d just could increase or decrease acceleration will bet on those wheels and you are good to go.
Bryan: Is there a plan to fix it?
Fr. Robert: No. It is really expensive. But, what I thought in celebration of NASA’s momentous occasion because they actually use this system with the solar panel balancing to spot a planet that was 185,000,000 light years away, that is 20,000 miles in diameter and about 12 times more massive than the earth. Which is kind of cool. I can’t do that, but what I can do is offer a stabilization platform that works here on earth.
Bryan: Just as impressive.
Fr. Robert: Just as impressive. You were talking about trying to take staple images with your DSLR right?
Bryan: Yes.
Fr. Robert: And of course the problem is just your body shakes, you shake, everything shakes.
Bryan: Any little bit of motion was transferred into the sensor.
Fr. Robert: Right. And there are all sorts of products that attempt to stabilize your cameras. A lot of them actually have built-in digital stabilization but this is full manual. This is a steady cam mount so you can use it on the go Pro. What you have, is he basically have a camera on a stick but you can detach the bottom of the stick so that if you hold it really steady the camera theoretically won’t bounce around so much. And as you can see…
Bryan: I think he needs more solar arrays to get some resistance.
Fr. Robert: Here is the problem with a lot of these systems. They are really hard to use unless you are very careful, and I’m not very careful.
Bryan: I don’t know. I think I would have that are results just holding the go Pro.
Fr. Robert: So I thought maybe we could show two of our crew in 2015 a little something that we picked up during our quad copter days. Because those are over and we don’t talk about quad copters anymore.
Bryan: What?
Fr. Robert: Exactly. But a piece of technology that you don’t need to use a quad copter for to maybe get those super steady images.
Bryan: That is something I’ve been wanting to play with for a long time.
Fr. Robert: This is a gimbal. So this was designed to hang on the bottom of a quad copter but you could use this on anything. In fact I have seen people attach these two skateboards. And all it is, this is two pieces of a PCB that are sand wedge between nasal rubber balls. So that isolates it from vibration. But the important part is the electronics on the inside. This is essentially a flight controller. So just like the flight controller on a quad copter balances out that the rest to keep your craft level, this is looking at the acceleration in three axis and then it will try to provide counter force through the gimbal motors in order to keep a steady image.
Bryan: How much is one of these?
Fr. Robert: This one is a little on the less expensive side. You can find something like this for between $50 and $100 depending on how advanced you want it. I got a nice one that also allows me to hook up my servo leads for it, so in addition to stabilizing for me it will also allow me to use an extra channel so I can pointed down and up.
Bryan: That is cool because I've been looking at one on Amazon and it is a stick that has the Gyro on the end of it and you put the Go Pro on it and do that. If I could just get one of those…
Fr. Robert: That would actually work. This has mounting points so you could put this on a stick and raise it way above the crowd and hold it up and it would try to maintain its position. Let’s show the good folks at home how this actually works.
Bryan: So you don't have to use both connectors, just the one right?
Fr. Robert: Right. So go ahead and hook up the balance connector, it is going to calibrate a little bit but once we get this powered on. The controller is powered on and right now it is checking its level to make sure that it is in the right position. The brushless motors have now moved the camera into what it thinks is a stable configuration. So now if I move the camera, the gimbal actually tries to keep it steady. That shaking is actually coming from me. And so this would actually give you a really steady picture. There are limits of course. If I run into the top of the gimbal, there is a range of motion here. There are more advanced gimbals that will allow you to stick it in the front of a craft and get more range of motion. This one obviously is designed to be slung under the bottom of the craft. But here is the cool thing. This is tech for quad copter but we don't have to use it for quad copter. Look how smooth that transition is.
Bryan: That is cool. Like you said you could totally put that on a skateboard or whatever kind of mounting hardware you could come up with. Just a hold it steady like that. That is neat.
Fr. Robert: It doesn’t use much battery at all. In fact this 1000 ml amp hour battery will probably run this thing for two hours. Of course depending on how much motion you have. If people are wondering that this is an actually doing anything, go ahead and disconnect the power. And let me show you what it looks like when it is not powered. So without power, it does that.
Bryan: If you were to use this on a quad copter, which I really want to now badly, that would make all the difference in the world.
Fr. Robert: It really does. Now, here is the cool thing. Technology like this five years ago, would have cost you up in the $1500-$3000 range. But with the advent of the iPhone and the continuing downward pressure for the price of accelerometers it is really made technology crazy inexpensive. In that the most expensive part is the aluminum mount. The controller itself is only like $10.
Bryan: That is amazing. In fact it is because of all the mobile devices that use the accelerometer and stuff.
Fr. Robert: Now, what we are going to do is we are going to actually use this. We will show you how to use something like this. We are going to put it in a camera ring to show you the difference between trying to use a steady red or just a rig on a stick. And one of these gimbals, because trust me you are going to want to get one. Even if you don’t fly quad copters, this is cool. This is something you are going to want to have.
Bryan: I don’t know what happened to yours. It was just here a second ago. That’s weird.
Fr. Robert: Now, folks. We've got a little treat for you. Because both of us, we actually only started flying quads about 2 to 3 months ago.
Bryan: And definitely it was a rough start for me.
Fr. Robert: It was for both of us. That little orange Syma, that took a beating.
Bryan: Definitely. It took a beating, kept on ticking up until a certain point. There is only so much trauma you can give a device like that.
Fr. Robert: It took accidental beatings for the first month of its life. And remember, you learn by crashing. And we learned a lot. And then it took intentional beatings after that.
Bryan: Because we were doing battles. That is the progression of the training quads. I thought it would be a good idea to list some of the essential mods that you want to do, if you do happen to buy one of those Syma’s for Christmas or something like that. Because through our extensive testing, we found out a couple weaknesses in a couple of things that you can prevent. So here is a video I did running through those.
Bryan: So may be over the holiday season you’ve got yourself a Syma X5. The first thing were going to want to do is take it apart. I know that sounds like kind of counterintuitive but one of the things we noticed that happens the most with these little guys is the LED panels fall off. So you are going to want to grab some hot glue or some crazy glue like I used here and just kind of weld the edges of the little LED panels on the sides. Because after a couple crashes these were the first things that popped off. So put a dab on its side of the inside of the panel and then, just for good measure put a little bit on the outside on the edges too. Just to make sure that these little guys don’t fall off. Then if you want to make your Syma a little bit more special you can paint it like I did. I just used some neon bright colors. I went with green, orange, and blue. It worked pretty well because it helped me look at the propellers in which direction they were to fly. And eventually you might have to replace a motor on your Syma which is actually not too bad to do. The hardest part is waiting the two weeks for the motor to come in. But you will need to bust out your soldering iron once you have your new motors and and disconnect the old motor. Take off the top and Padre pointed out there is an easier way to do this and that is to de-solder the wires on the board. But, as I had not thought of this before recording I cut the wires, stripped them, used some heat shrink and reattached the new motor that way. Now the motorists do rotate counterclockwise for clockwise that you want to match up the color of the wire with the wire. So if you have a black and white wire, you want to make sure the white wire is connected to the white wire and the black is connected to the black. It is pretty straightforward. Once you have soldered a new motor to the board, you can reassemble your Syma and test it out. And just to make sure we did everything correct we will do a quick test flight an hour Syma is as good as new. With a brand-new motor. Pretty sweet. The next big mod that you will want to do for your Syma is on the controller itself. The range is about 100 feet with a stock Syma, but with this little mind you will be able to get at least three times that. Here is the internal little antenna that comes with the Syma. The Syma works on 2.4 GHz so if you have some Wi-Fi antenna router antennas laying around that is what I did to solder to the board. On most antennas there will be a shielding that you will need to peel back, connected to a smaller inner wire. This does take some delicate soldering work so you will want to de-solder the power cables from the back of the controller so you can get easier access to the board. And then pull the shielding that can solder that to the grounding pad next to the antenna and then solder the core antenna cable to the board. Make sure to give yourself enough length, but not too much length on the antenna. And then I was able to find a washer and nut that fit into a small crevice at the top of the controller and fit the antenna that way. So, be very careful when reassembling your board. Make sure that the shielding is attached to the ground and the antenna is soldered to where the previous antenna was. After that but the controller back together, solder the battery cables back to the back part of the case and your should be able to test it out. Keep your fingers crossed. I test out the new antenna with the Syma and it works. It is just as responsive as before at close range, but the biggest difference is that I can fly it at a point that I can’t see it anymore. So that is far enough for me and that definitely extended the range of the Syma.
Fr. Robert: I love that. Because those are the two things that people complain about the most. The fact that the motors can die.
Bryan: They can. And you know when they are starting to fade when you try and spin it.
Fr. Robert: It is kind of moving, maybe a little bit.
Bryan: That is how you know when one of the motors is about to go out. Is that you have to kind of flick the propeller to make it run.
Fr. Robert: That is not going to work anymore.
Bryan: Fortunately, the biggest pain is having to wait for the motors to come in. Because they are shipping them from China. But, it is not too difficult to replace and the wires are very thin so if you have very limited soldering skills like I do you can still get by.
Fr. Robert: I will say one thing. If you have thought any kind of soldering skills, I would suggest that you solder to the board. Because you soldered between the wires. Those are super thin and a pain in the butt. If you have a fine tip soldering iron I would go ahead and de-solder from the pad and then do it to the board.
Bryan: If I could do it over again padre, I would.
Fr. Robert: The other thing is range. We have some great video of everyone here. Zach, you, me, Patrick and Tony going beyond the range. It is ridiculous because you have that little stubby antenna.
Bryan: The antenna that it comes with doesn’t even go to the end of this. It stops right at the top. So by adding one of the Wi-Fi antennas it goes far enough that I can’t see it anymore.
Fr. Robert: And that is really all you care about. Because this is not a FPV craft. You are not going to be flying this beyond visual range. So as long as it gets you to the point where you can bring it back at any given time it is a perfect model.
Bryan: We were flying it out in the transit guard and we would get about 60 or 100 yards away and we couldn’t tell if the wind was taking it or if it was just flying away.
Fr. Robert: Unfortunately both of these had that unfortunate thing where as it went out of range sometimes it didn’t stop. It would just keep going.
Bryan: It is something like when you have it at full throttle and it goes out of range and just stays at full throttle.
Fr. Robert: It is only a second or two before it drops out of the air but that second or two feels like a year.
Bryan: Everything happens in slow motion. So those are some essential mods and I think a few people have lost a lot of the LED panels on the bottom. Mine haven’t popped out yet. There is a very slight difference between this and the one that you get at Frye’s.
Fr. Robert: We recommended that you buy this Syma because we thought it was exactly the same. It is easier to get. You can get this on Amazon. Otherwise you've got to go to Fry’s to get this thing. But, there is a difference. Even though the parts look the same except for the color the build quality on the Syma is a little bit better. On the quad force. The motors are a little bit more durable, the shell is a little bit more durable and the lights never pop out. Go figure.
Bryan: It gave me something to mod.
Fr. Robert: We have like 10 of these so we've got a large sample size. This is not just the fact that we had a bad copy. It was 10 of the use, versus one of these.
Bryan: I learned from everyone else’s mistakes and made mine better.
Fr. Robert: We do actually have some feedback. We wanted to kick off the year right. Some people have heard about an upgrade program that we are doing here at the Twit Brickhouse. We’ve been looking at updating our editing facilities. Our old edit facilities are working just fine but as we have been adding more and more shows, we have needed to up our game. So we have a question here from Brendan Hauser who wanted to know, “Leo said Twit got new computers to run Adobe Premiere. What kind of computers are they? Thanks.” There was a little bit of discussion on the google plus group about what we did and didn’t do. Some people were saying you just got Mac Pro’s right? No. Because for the price of two Mac Pros we get like five Windows PCs?
Bryan: Right. And we wanted to play games.
Fr. Robert: At this is what we got. Now if only we had an expert. Oh, Alex!
Bryan: Alex! He is the one that kind of put all these together.
Fr. Robert: Alex can you tell us a little about these boxes?
Alex Gumple: It’s a little subtle move there Bryan, good subtle quiet move.
Bryan: I tried.
Alex: Okay, So this is a Dell precision T 3610. It is a workstation class Dell PC. It has a Xeon E51650, six core with hyper threading and 6.5 GHz.
Fr. Robert: Alex there are going to be people who are asking why go with the Xeon inset is an I7?
Alex: Actually, I don’t know that. I know you can only use ECC RAM with Xeon’s, but I don’t think we have ECC Ram. Oh we do. There you go. I think it was more that that is what the Precision’s came with for our purposes.
Fr. Robert: And they actually do render faster.
Alex: So in full disclosure I wasn’t the one who actually picked the hardware. I was just involved in the decision-making I was in the actual guy picking it. So I’m not entirely sure why certain things were done. But, I can read the specs. They each have 32 GB of ECC RAM, 512 GB SSD, and an add-on that we had is 3 GB G-4’s.
Fr. Robert: Why did you only buy three of those?
Bryan: Yeah, that is weird. Why would you only buy three?
Alex: Who knows? Maybe they never came in.
Bryan: They are probably somewhere with Padre’s gimbal.
Fr. Robert: You've also got one of the things I love about this is because we want to be able to edit directly from…
Alex: In addition to replacing all the computers, we are completely up ending the whole infrastructure of the editing infrastructure. We are completely replacing that with a Windows server and they are all connected together over a 10 gig ethernet network rather than the four gig fiber that we had.
Fr. Robert: It is ridiculously fast.
Alex: And so because of that decision, and also how we are sharing this stuff is we are using SMB. Windows 8 and Windows server 2012 introduced SMB 3.0 which is that much better than the old SMB. And this is also what was decided by Russell and so this is what we are doing. We are now working around this. So, we have a Windows server with SMB shares and that was one of the main decisions why we went with Windows machine instead of Mac is because Macs traditionally don’t play well with SMB. And also getting a 10 gig ethernet into a mac pro requires a $1000 thunderbolt box.
Bryan: On the editing side we’ve done traditionally all of our shows with Final Cut seven. And then final cut 10 came out and it really didn’t work for how we do our stuff here.
Alex: So this project originally started as just migrating to premiere on the existing system. And that was going to be it. That would have allowed us to go across platform down the road. But we would start with the existing systems. But then about halfway through we decided that we were going to change the whole server infrastructure and go with all new hardware. So because of that, that kind of rebooted the project which is one of the reasons why it is taking so long. But that also led us to all these decisions.
Fr. Robert: Don’t forget to show them this.
Alex: Yes. With all the edit systems all the editors are getting these lovely keyboards with your premier shortcuts on them. So if they have any questions or don’t know what button you can just look right at your keyboard. And it has a handy little white on it so when you are in your edit room with a light stemmed you have this little light to light up your control server.
Fr. Robert: And we had Jeffrey color on all those keys.
Alex: That's right.
Bryan: Those are hand painted.
Alex: It turned out that was cheaper than just buying the keyboard.
Bryan: It took them 12 hours a day for three weeks but it was totally worth it.
Fr. Robert: Alex one of the things I love about this is that it kind of puts us on very cool ground for 2015. One of the sore spots here at the Twit Brickhouse, if you want a little bit of inside baseball thing is that the sand was always kind of the weak spot of the workflow.
Alex: You have no idea how excited I was to take that thing out back and shoot it.
Fr. Robert: The drives were expensive and it would fill up and it would just kill. The problem is also that the files got so big.
Alex: The files are still going to be big.
Bryan: But every time we ever had to use MP4 format for something we always had to convert to Pro.
Alex: That was a Final Cut issue. In Final Cut you traditionally work with one video code format. So you convert everything to Pro it all works together. But with premier you can kind of mix and match
Fr. Robert: Well there you go folks, that is what we’ve got under the hood. That is what we are deploying throughout 2015. The migration process is actually taking a while. We could have just put all these things end but you’ve got to remember Twit is like a moving engine.
Alex: One thing I could interject that we sort of mentioned on the show before was the new recording system. And that is part of this project because the old record system was a mac pro running Final Cut with a capture card and not just rights onto the sand directly, which is great because it means the file is ready to go when it is done. But it is bad because there is no real failsafe so there is no proper record and that thing can just die all of a sudden. Which happens once a month maybe. So part of this project was because we were getting rid of the sand we can do that anymore so we had to get a new recorder. And that was the whole thing with SSD’s and these things right here. So that was another part of this project. And that piece alone took at least a month to figure out, build and to assemble. That is actually in place now and we are excited about that. We started using the new ed systems a few weeks ago and we are going editor by editor so our editors that has been using the new system for the last few weeks. Bryan, I believe you are next. In a couple weeks. I’m actually working on Know-How’s premier template right now.
Fr. Robert: And the strange thing is one of these ended up in the Know Hole.
Bryan: That is so weird.
Alex: It is so weird because that is not a proper edit station. Especially since you only have it for three shows these days?
Bryan: It feels like more than that.
Fr. Robert: You are TD a lot but your editing responsibilities have decreased.
Bryan: Because I had to use those crummy old machines.
Alex: And now you're excited to use them. It’s because of the keyboard.
Bryan: But I think it was the gray area in the chat room that said we should have a celebration for the old hardware.
Alex: What I am excited to do is just to get all the Mac pros out and just line them all up… actually what we are going to do is, Anthony still wants to use motion for some stuff and we are going to try to wean him off of that. But in the meantime what we want to do is take the best parts of all the Mac Pros because they are all a little bit different, and make a Franken Mac Pro of all the best parts, make like a super one. In the mean time we’ll wean him off of After Effects.
Bryan: Until we bring him back into the light.
Alex: Speaking of the light. Padre, why don’t you plug that keyboard into your laptop? Or Bryan.
Fr. Robert: Whoooo.
Bryan: Oh man. I can’t wait to edit now. Now Alex won’t get those emails like how do I edit that one thing?
Alex: I'll just say look at your keyboard. Where is the ripple edit tool? Now I have to explain what the ripple tool is.
Fr. Robert: So folks, this is what we are going to be using going forward. You wanted to know. Now you know. This is an actual production unit. We wanted to open up 2015 with a little something something. With a little parting shot. So this time, hey Bryan.
Bryan: What?
Fr. Robert: You want to look at the world’s easiest magnetic train?
Bryan: Yes.
Fr. Robert: This is Kind of cool. Take a cylindrical battery with the positive terminal on one side and the negative terminal on the other. Stack a set of permanent magnets with the same diameter as the battery on each terminal. Now you make a coil of copper wire just a little bit bigger than the battery magnet and you insert the train into the coil. As this thing travels through the coil those magnets will make contact with the copper coil and it will energize them. Just that one section. It looks so silly. It is just perpetual motion. It is providing its own power as it go through. It creates the magnetic field that will interact with the magnets attached to the battery and driving it. This is the hyper loop.
Bryan: I think this goes along with the movie.
Fr. Robert: We could do like train car races in coils of copper.
Bryan: Did you see that movie Snow Piercer? That is how they did it.
Fr. Robert: I wish I had thought of something like that when I was a kid. I would’ve had so much fun with this. Look at that.
Bryan: I would have used some sort of system like that to send myself things to my room.
Fr. Robert: Okay people are asking what kind of battery. I believe this one is actually a AAA battery so you don’t need much power. You can get cylindrical batteries that can provide up to about 12 V and I’m thinking that would create a crazy field that would just shoot it through.
Bryan: Whenever you come up with ideas that always has to be destructive.
Fr. Robert: I want to pass through so much current through that copper wire that it disintegrates as the car goes through. Right? Folks, that does it for this episode of Know-How. Don’t forget that even in 2015 you still need to check out the show notes page. Where do they find it?
Bryan: twit.tv/kh and if you want to look back at 2014, it’s like looking into a time machine.
Fr. Robert: Remember that episode 123?
Bryan: It feels like it was so long ago. Certainly doesn’t feel like it was yesterday.
Fr. Robert: Also don’t forget that you can find us on our Google plus group. If you make a resolution in the New Year join Know How on Google Plus. It is a great community for builders, makers, for people who just want to see cool things like the little magnetic coil train.
Bryan: Or they want to know about our editing systems that we just got. That is why we brought this on the show because some of them wanted to know.
Fr. Robert: Were all about bringing people together before we blow them apart. Don’t forget you can also find us on twitter. If you’re not into the big Google plus five go ahead and drop into twitter you can find me @PadreSJ.
Bryan: And I am @cranky_hippo.
Fr. Robert: If you want to find out more about the editing stations and how much fun Alex has had putting them together drop by his twitter @anelf3.
Bryan: You will not be disappointed.
Alex: I just want to interject. Someone in the chat room asked why you need the video card for editing. Premiere supports GPU rendering with Cooter Coors which is an Nvidea something. Thanks Bryan. Oh. Man. So previously you needed quadro cards which are the high end cards but they are actually the same thing as G4’s and the quadro’s are way more expensive so we bought the G4’s cards and put them in there and now we have GPU running so your encodes will go faster, right Bryan? You’ll be faster to do stuff.
Fr. Robert: So the answer is it is because we are not made out of money.
Alex: Because we like you Bryan, when you turner camera’s off. We’re giving you bigger video cards. You’re welcome Bryan.
Bryan: It’s such a long day.
Fr. Robert: Until next time, I’m Father Robert Ballecer.
Bryan: And I’m Bryan Burnett.
Fr. Robert: And now that you know how…
Bryan: Go do it!
Fr. Robert: Happy New Year!
