This episode is different than what we typically do on this channel; this is a pep talk, words of encouragement.

Have you ever experienced a case where you're working on a production, a video, and for whatever reason it just didn't work out? And you're frustrated because you invested a good amount of time to make it happen, but it just didn't work out or you weren't able to meet your own self imposed deadline, or an external deadline?

I just wanted to share our experience over the last couple of weeks where that's exactly what happened on a few fronts. We did have one success, but three failures.

And they're failures for a variety of reasons. So, one, we had a light that came in. We were going to make a light review on this particular light.

Turns out that it's a it's a $2,000 light, so it's not a cheap light. However, its build quality wasn't amazing and it was a light that would probably serve photographers a lot better than video people. So it would be a light that a photographer would use primarily for photography and a little bit for video.

But it doesn't make any sense from my point of view for video people who do a tiny bit of photography.

So: failure, and it took us probably fifteen hours to realize that– fifteen hours of work invested in that before we realized this isn't gonna work, and it's not going to play well with the audience is not something they're gonna be interested in.

Let's abandon it. So we did. Sometimes you have to do that.

Second one was a video I was planning to do on the distinction, in 2023, between LED lights and traditional tungsten or halogen lights in terms of color quality.

And believe it or not, there is still a difference in most cases.

LEDs are getting way better.

And the thing that I wanted to explore was with all these different color metrics we have out there,

CRI, TLCI, TM-30,

SSI, that measure color quality in various ways.

I wanted to see if we could identify, at least with SSI, some sort of number that would give you pretty good confidence that what you were working with would get you the same results as a tungsten halogen light, and it just didn't pan out.

We may come back to that one. That's an interesting topic to me.

Love to come back to that, but it didn't pan out in the way that we were were approaching it.

So that one– and then what happened was I got very, very busy at work. I work at a company called Webflow,

I work with an amazing team there that makes educational videos.

We were deep in post production on a new course.

We did get the course out. That's the one success.

If you are at all interested in that, that's over at university.webflow.com, and the course is called Webflow 101.

Then this week, we were working on another review. Something I was pretty excited about for the vloggers amongst us is the RODE Wireless ME.

It looks a lot like the RODE Wireless GO; this is the transmitter here, you just clip it on.

It has a microphone built in, or it's got a 3.5 mm port to plug in an external microphone, a lavalier microphone. $150 for the kit, comes with a transmitter and receiver.

Other interesting features, it has what is called GainAssist, which is probably the most effective automatic gain technology I've experienced, in consumer products at least. So you don't have to set the gain or the input level, it just figures it out for you.

And then also on the receiver, it has a microphone. So if you are out and vlogging and you want to have the camera operator interview the person that's on camera, you can capture the operator of the camera as well because there's a receiver microphone.

So what's interesting about the kit? You can also add another transmitter, so it actually is a dual channel receiver.

And it worked beautifully when we used it with our iPhone.

And then I went to go record the main story line and feed the audio from the receiver into a Panasonic GH5, a micro four-thirds camera, an old one that is… still works well.

And what we found is that we were getting some sort of whine, hum, something like that.

And I think it's probably the cable, but we're kind of checking into it to see if that's the case.

So, third video in five weeks that is not going to be ready on time.

And we're trying to do one a week. So, I just want you to know that these things happen.

It's not just you. If you think that you're experiencing that, don't give up. Get out there, make some great sound, and we'll talk to you again soon.