Youtube and Podcast Creators Meetup

Okay. We're gonna kick this off in just a moment. So welcome. If you haven't been to these before, this is— I'm just gonna check my livestream real quick. Is my volume going? It's off in just a moment. Okay, perfect. So, um, if you haven't been to these before, welcome. This is the YouTube and Podcast Meetup. I do this once a month, and it's, uh, I took it over from a group that had been running this for a couple of years and it was getting posted out to various places like Eventbrite and Meetup and, uh, where I can't remember all the different places she was posting it. And they were walking away from the group, the 2 co-hosts that started it. They just didn't have time to run it anymore. And so she passed off the ownership, the administration of that group to me. And I've been running it since July, I believe. This is our 3rd one. And we do different things like different masterclasses. I've done sessions on, um, let me back up a second. This is actually an extension of what I did before. The first 6 months of this year, I was running a YouTube meetup. And in that group, before I folded it into the group that was started by these 2 women that were hosting it, they called it the YouTube and Podcast Meetup. Then, um, yeah, we were, we were doing it just through the Descript Made Easy members. And we did deep dives on things like brand deals was one of them. We talked about like how to talk to, um, potential sponsors that reach out to you and how to negotiate, how to do your due diligence on those companies. And then we talked once about setting up your channel homepage, like what kind of profile picture to use, how to write your description, how to get people to subscribe when they see your channel page. So all sorts of basic things like that when it comes to running a YouTube channel. So now it's a little bit broader in that we're also including podcasters. Podcast here being, you know, audio only, maybe for Spotify, things like that. And this is currently getting distributed out on YouTube. We're on a live call here. So a couple people are here live. And so anyways, drop your questions into the chat as we go. And the topic of today, if I didn't say it, is live streaming. So exactly what I'm doing right now, we're gonna talk about some tools that you can do to live stream for your own channel and why you might consider doing it, why it's a, it's a good thing to do. And then I'm also gonna, while people are trickling in, I'll talk about some changes to YouTube. So there was a pretty major change to YouTube A week ago, I think it was the 24th, whatever day that was last week, Monday maybe. Um, so I have some slides here and it's casual. So for the 2 that are on Zoom, if you guys want to talk, uh, like we do on our morning Descript Mastery calls, feel free to come off mute, ask questions. We can keep it casual. Um, these are scheduled for 90 minutes, but we don't have to use the whole time if If we get through this quicker than, uh, than expected, because my, my PowerPoint is pretty short. So, um, I'm hoping for some engagement, some questions, and we can go wherever you guys want. So, oh, and we'll do breakout groups at the end. So for those on Zoom, which is just 2 of you, so we, we may or may not get to that. We'll see. Um, okay. And like I said, monthly meetings, 90 minutes. is what's planned. I should have shown this slide earlier. I had the masterclasses before about things like strategy, packaging, which refers to the titles and thumbnails. So coming up with packaging to actually get the click when it comes to your videos and optimizing your channel pages, et cetera. And the way that the 2 women I took this group over from ran it Is they had guests on. So I was their final guest in June, the last time they hosted. And that was like the handover meeting, sort of. And so, um, yeah, if you want to, if there's interest for me to have guests on again, let me know if you have any suggestions or if you want to introduce me to somebody that you think would be a good interview to talk about podcasting and YouTubing. Then I'd love to connect with them and we can do that type of thing. And then like I said, networking, we'll do some breakout groups at the end and stuff and you can kind of get to know people. Okay, so the new view count method that I talked about as of August 24th, the big change is that every single time even one frame of your video is played, that counts as a view. Before, YouTube never published an official number, but it was around 30 seconds. So somebody would have to play your video for around 30 seconds for that to register as a view. Now it's just if it gets clicked on at all, it starts playing, it registers as a view. So quite a big difference, and I'll show you how that actually looks. So this, uh, Screenshot right here that I'm dragging around the slide is from one of my videos that I posted last week. So I posted it since the change was made, and it has officially— it shows 22,000, 25,000 views, something like that. And so that's, that's the public view number, the new view number. The engaged views are what used to be the old views, the views that have existed for the 20 years of YouTube until now. The 30-second or so limit. So like, by that standard, this video actually had less than 12,000 views, even though the public number is saying 25,000. So in a lot of cases, it's double. Sometimes I've seen examples of people posting online of triple the amount of views where, you know, it says 10,000 or it says 30,000 views. On the page, but then if you look at the engaged views, it's a third of that, 10,000. So, and this is from Patty Galloway. Patty Galloway is a great follow if you haven't heard of him. He's a YouTube strategist, probably the top guy out there talking about YouTube strategy. And this was a tweet he made. So similar to the view I have here, he has like the new count views and then the engaged views. And by the way, If you don't know how to find that, that is in the, maybe I won't show the whole thing, but that is in the advanced view button that you find on the analytics page of your YouTube Studio. So real quick, I'm just gonna pause and see if there is anything in the chat. Looks like we are good. So, Yeah, let me know if any questions on that and we can talk more about it. Um, and also curious if anyone's posted videos recently, have you seen any changes? I know across my channels and the channels that I manage for clients, it's like almost across the board 1s of 10. So if you don't know what that means, it's YouTube lets you know how your most recent video is doing against your most recent 10 videos. And so a 1 of 10 means it's your top performer out of your last 10 videos. And almost all the videos I've posted for myself and my clients are saying that right now because of this new methodology. So it was expected. Um, but it's just causing in the short term here, it's causing some weirdness with the numbers. Um, and the reason for all that, by the way, is this is how the other social media platforms do it. So. YouTube is getting on par with the other platforms. Like, if you look at TikTok, the numbers are just insane because they've been doing this for a long time, and that is counting your views from the very first frame of the view, um, of the video. But yeah, so that, that's, uh, what's going on with that. And then Next, let's get into the actual topic of today, which is live streaming. So first of all, let me define live streaming. Live streaming is what I'm doing right now. This is not a replay. This is me speaking to you at, in, in Mountain Time right now, it's 4:41 PM, uh, local time on September 2nd, 2026. This is not a recording, and I'm here to field your questions. For those who are on the Zoom call, you can, you can come off mute and actually talk. If you're in the chats on any of the platforms, you can reach me in the chat there and I can respond to them in real time. So it's reaching people live. And in the age of AI, it's particularly interesting. I wasn't a fan of live streaming until recently. Like, literally in the last couple months, I've had more and more clients starting to do live streams and getting incredible results with it. And I think the reason for that is the, the trajectory of things becoming more and more fake. And we're going to reach a point— arguably we're already there— I could show you channels like Julia McCoy. Let me just pull this up for those who haven't seen it. And since no one's asking questions, I got a little time here. Julia McCoy. So she's got 300,000 subscribers, and she's completely an avatar. Not completely. I mean, she does sometimes have real videos that she makes, but let me show you. Yesterday, bankrupts going back to 1986.

Google says it'll use it to improve.

So that right there is not a real human. That is her avatar. And she does like daily news updates and it looks, it looks real for people that don't know. And she doesn't like cover that up. She's very upfront. In fact, she has a business teaching people how to do this for themselves. And more and more people are hopping on this trend of it. It might be an avatar of themselves based on real photos and videos of themselves, or it might just be some completely made up AI-generated look. So anyways, if you extrapolate this out and the technology continues to get better, which it will, then a year from now, 18 months from now, It'll be significantly easier to just make a video of yourself talking to the camera, delivering the script that you made, than to actually spend the time setting up your camera, sitting down, filming, scripting, all that stuff that's involved. So live streaming is the antidote to that. It's the opposite of that where I can't fake this. I mean, at least as the technology is now, I can't fake this. I'm actually here answering your questions. And I mean, you see me pausing a lot. I'm looking at the chat, like all this stuff. It's not perfect, but in some ways that is what people want. They want to see your humanity. It's authentic. So, um, the other thing is, in some ways it's easier than scripting a video. Like I made this PowerPoint, which I did this afternoon. But when I make a video, depending on the video, but sometimes I sit down and I write a script and it takes several days. I, I write it, I revise it, I trim it, I run it through different, you know, have other people look at it. And it can be a process that takes a lot of time. And then I set up my lighting, I set up my background, I set up my camera, get the lens right. All that kind of stuff. And it takes a lot of time. With this live stream, I hit the live button on Zoom. And of course there was some scheduling and things like that to set up. And we'll talk about that, but it can play to your strengths. If you're more of a person, if you can do really, really good just talking off the cuff, then it can be a really good format for you. Um, some people prefer that versus having to write something out and scripting it very carefully. And then, um, you can also hit all the platforms at once. So it's— which is really great about it. You can show up on X, on LinkedIn, on YouTube, on Twitch if you're making that kind of content. It's, uh, mostly for video gaming. You can, uh, hit everything at once and it shows up differently in the algorithm. So for example, If I go to my channel right now, you see when I, I type it in, it shows up this with that live, that red live badge, and that's the first thing that shows up. And if I go to my channel, it shows up right there. It tells how many are watching it. You can see a little preview of What I'm currently showing. And so it's not showing up here for some reason. Oh, because I'm on— I was thinking I was on a different channel. Hang on, let me go to my other channel. Okay, so when I'm on my personal channel looking at my Descript Made Easy channel, the channel I'm currently live streaming from, this is how it looks when I visit the channel page. It's got the red live badge around it. And then on my subscriptions feed over here, it's got the little live icon, the little radio waves thing.

Totally.

And so, and it, it surfaced me up near the top, usually at the very top. I don't know why it's 3 down, but so if any of my other subscriptions, people that I'm subscribed to were live, I would see that and it would surface it at the top. And so for somebody who's currently on YouTube and they're kind of just, browsing around, they got some free time, they're just like, it catches their eye and they're like, oh, let's see what's going on on Descript Made Easy right now and check out what he's talking about. So that's, that's the strategy behind all this. You wanna, you know, get yourself out in different places. The long-form videos that you publish to YouTube is one algorithm. The Shorts is a different algorithm and the livestream is a different algorithm. They all show up in different ways. And they reach different audiences, and also some audiences prefer to watch in different formats, so you can just appeal to different people in different ways. Now the tactics, the logistics of how do you actually do a live stream? Well, step 1 is get the word out. So presumably that you all on this call, you found me through Eventbrite, through meetup.com. Through Luma, through my Descript Made Easy platform, or Descript Made Easy on YouTube. So it got posted out in a lot of different places. And, uh, you can, you can have it be like a scheduling page, like it goes to a Google Calendar that people can add to their digital calendars. You can have it be a, um, like a webinar format where it captures their email and then it sends them reminders and puts them onto your Your marketing funnel. That's a popular way to do it. And it could be a social media page. Like if you have a Facebook group, it could be something that you post there and go live there. But whatever you do, you're probably gonna wanna schedule it in, in advance. Um, the more heads up you give people, the better. But I would say, yeah, as, as much as you can, as soon as you know that you're gonna be doing it, then go ahead and put it out there. For example, on my page, um, let me see here. It doesn't actually show it, upcoming live streams, but I have live streams scheduled all the way out at the, every, the monthly one all the way through January of 2027. You can schedule them, I think, up to 3 years in advance on YouTube, maybe even farther.

So.

If it's, you know, it's something that's going to be a consistent thing, then you can go ahead and schedule those. And on YouTube, there's a notify me button. So when you click on that notify me button, it'll send out a notification to the, the bell right there in the top right corner that'll say Ross is live, or 24-hour reminder, Ross is going to be live 24 hours from now. That kind of stuff. And then if you use a platform, a different platform for streaming, which I'll talk about on the next slide, then it can handle some of those reminders for you. And then, yeah, pick a tool. That's the next slide. And connecting your platform. So if you're going out to YouTube, to X, to LinkedIn, you need to verify or connect your your social media account to all the places that it's gonna be distributed. So for example, right before this, I was trying to set up the X connection and it need— it required a premium account. So I wasn't gonna sign up and try to get all the technical stuff set up right in the minutes before I, I hit live. Um, but that's— some of them require A paid account. Some of them are free, like YouTube is free, and they all have different parameters and requirements on how you set up, set them up. And live streaming is kind of technical. There is some, it's in my neck. I have a tip slide and one of them is to prepare, do a practice run before you hit live for the first time, because there's a lot of things that can go wrong. So when it comes to tools, the simplest is to open up your YouTube Studio, and there's a button for the live stream portion of the studio. And I can actually show you this right now. Here's what I have open on my other screen. So I got a little preview of what it looks like from the YouTube Studio side. And you can manage streams here. So here's the ones where I have them scheduled out. So there's like September. Oh, that's why I wasn't seeing them because they're private, even though they are in fact scheduled. So September, October, November, December, January. And then when I, in my software, I can choose the date when it's time to go live and I hit go live. There's a little bit more to it than that, but like, that's the gist of it. And you can set your thumbnail for it. You can set a title and a description just like you can with a normal YouTube video. And then all that stuff will be in place as soon as you make it public. But when you're actually in the process of streaming, you can see here, this is the one that I have currently active, the stream that we are on right now. And then up here, this stream button, You can start another stream. Hopefully this isn't gonna mess up my existing stream, but if you were starting from scratch, you could right in here, um, set up to go live directly through YouTube. So this is going to be your simplest way to go live. Um, let me just reposition my stuff here. And let's go back to my existing live stream. Any questions so far? The chat has been completely silent. If anyone has anything, I will take a breath here while I pull this up again. Okay. The chat is clear, so we'll continue on. The next step up would be to use, and this is in order of complexity. So again, just going straight to Zoom or, or sorry, YouTube or your platform of choice. If you're going to LinkedIn, Facebook, you can go straight to your viewers on those platforms as well. The next step up in complexity would be Zoom. And that's what I'm using right now. The great thing about Zoom is it's simple. Like, it's— again, it can be pretty technical to set this stuff up. Um, okay, you have questions about editing? Yeah, we can come to that. Well, I think we'll have plenty of time. I'm almost done with my slides here, so we can definitely talk about just general Descript and editing. Um, but Zoom is paid, so that's, that's one downside of it. You got to be on paid plan to do it, a live stream. Um, it's simple. There's just a live button. When you're a host, you can click on the more button and then there's a live stream button and it walks you through plugging in. There's certain pieces of code that you have to give to the platform you're streaming to. And if you got people coming in to participate in the call, then one advantage is that it's familiar. Everyone uses Zoom. So People presumably already have it downloaded. They know how to use it. And it's not going to cause— it's going to cause minimal tech issues compared to some of the other options that are out there. The next step up would be something like OBS. OBS is extremely popular piece of software. It's completely free. You don't need an account or anything to run it. However, it's a little bit more complex. It requires some more setup. And unlike Zoom, it's not as, uh, they don't have all the user-friendly instructions and things like that when it comes to getting it set up. So that is, uh, the next step up in complexity as I see it. And then platforms like Restream. So my livestream right now is going out on Restream and Restream. So it goes, let me walk through the flow here. Zoom is the origination. That's, that's what's taking in my camera, my screen share, and my microphone. Zoom is then sending it to Restream, another platform, via connection, and Restream is sending it to YouTube. And Restream could be sending it to other platforms. I don't currently have that set up, but if it was, Restream could be broadcasting it out to as many platforms as I wanted to. Um, so that's, that's the, the reason for those type of intermediaries. And StreamYard, same thing. Restream is also cool in that you can take a recorded video. So if I had an hour of me talking about this and it was not done live, then I could take that recording upload it to Restream, and Restream can distribute it out as if it's a live stream. Okay, so best practices for a live stream is, first of all, prepare. So if you have slides like I do, um, you're going to want to have those pulled up and ready to go. If you have any browser tabs that you're going to be showing, make sure those are pulled up. And if you have an agenda, make sure those are pulled up. You can have all sorts of tools inside of Zoom and these other ones where, for example, you may have seen live streams where they do a countdown. So 20 minutes before the live stream actually happens, it starts a 20-minute countdown, and then there can be different fun things happening during that countdown. Like it shows It plays different prerecorded videos or, uh, I don't know. I'm trying to, I don't have an example off the top of my head, but there's different things you can do with that. So, and then the agenda you can have, like in Zoom specifically, you can have things where there's a tool that can keep everyone on track if it's more interactive, where from 0 to 5 minutes are icebreakers. From 5 minutes to 15 minutes is housekeeping and, you know, administrative announcements. And then, and so on, you can just have your entire meeting run through an agenda that keeps everyone on track. Um, and that's all done inside of the app. And then when it comes to, uh, all this stuff, my recommendation is to keep it simple because like I said, It can get complex. And that's why I'm not streaming to a bunch of places yet. I'm testing the waters with just YouTube on Restream. And then next month I'm gonna add X and the month after that I'll add LinkedIn and so on. Because each bit of complexity you add is another point of failure. So, you know, I wouldn't go live and have a 500-person livestream with, on every platform your very first time if you've never done it before. And you can, you can test stuff. You can do a livestream and test it in private mode on the various platforms so that nobody else sees it. You're only talking to yourself, and maybe you have your spouse or your partner tune in from wherever they are in the world, and they can just, they can be the only ones there testing how it looks and sounds before you go live in front of the world. And keep them fun. So, uh, I haven't maybe done a very good job about this today because we haven't had any participation, but, you know, keep them interactive or whatever your niche is. There's all sorts of different ways that you can do things to bring in participation. So you can do polls throughout, like you can ask, do little pop quizzes or breakout groups, or it all is tailored to your audience and your personality and what it is that you're talking about, but there's all sorts of creative ways that you can foster participation in this remote setting. Okay, so since we only have 2 people on the Zoom call and no one has asked anything in the chat, Bart, if you wanted to ask your question about editing, and you're welcome to ask it in the chat, or if you want to come off mute, it's up to you.

Well, I don't want to hijack the topic. Let's just focus on your topic for now, live streaming, because it's kind of interesting. And then maybe if there's time at, you know, time at the end. But I will answer that. It is annoying when things don't go smooth as a view. Sorry. I don't have a podcast. I don't. I'm totally newbie. I'm just here to learn about how how the sausage is made, so to speak. And so I kind of want to learn from you. So to answer your question there, what's your experience been? Well, as we've seen when things don't go well, you know, I think Elon Musk tried something on Twitter. They had those spaces or whatever. Remember those Twitter spaces? I think he tried the first time. I don't know if Trump was with him or not, but I do remember it was a failure. And it's like, yeah, you're gonna go big, uh, make sure your technical, uh, chops are, uh, are good. So, so that's annoying as a viewer. I'll just say that.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's a great point. When you have literally the biggest president of the United States is gonna be your guest, hopefully you've done some prep. Um, but If you even, even if it's not a big name, if it's, uh, somebody, a friend that's coming on and you're doing a live, uh, interview, you can test a live stream on your own. Like I said, uh, with in private mode and just have somebody join it just to test it out. Or even if you don't have anyone to help you test it, you could start it on your computer, open up the live stream on your cell phone. Just to see how it looks and sounds, go into a different room in your house or something, and you'll kind of have an idea of how it looks as a viewer. Um, so yeah, absolutely. Like, that's super critical to test it out as much as you can. Um, okay. Yeah. And Doug, I see your hand up. Do you have anything to add to that?

Yeah. Hey, Ross. So, um, thank you for all this information. I'm just trying to sort out the differences. Again, what I'm hearing is that the strength of live streaming is that it is authentic. It minimally can be done by artificial intelligence. And that kind of is one of your arguments for why people are doing live streaming. And again, it's genuine, it's live. And I get that. Um, Now, I think another dimension of livestream, if the host, say for us as a podcaster, is to open— like, I can envision Patty and I talking about a topic on food. It's livestream. And an opportunity exists with the livestream to open it up. To audience. Now you've been doing that. Hey, send me something through chat, or like what I'm doing, raise your hand. Now this is again Zoom-based. I'm not sure I understand what might happen if you just go through YouTube, if YouTube also allows people to raise hands and to share. But to me, a huge difference between Like what, for example, what you do with us in community when you are hosting a Zoom meeting, you know all of us, so you have a feel for all of us. Now, if you open it up to livestream, you don't know your audience.

Yeah.

So one micro technical question is, is there a capacity to screen like, like, like you're on a topic and someone— and you've opened it up for participation. Yes, you can screen chat, you know, and answer that question. But if you bring somebody on live, you know, how— like, like in radio shows, you know, they, they have a call-in, but they have somebody that is screening that person before they get on to the live Broadcast. So how in the livestream world, if you're going to open it up for audience participation, how do you, how do you best manage that audience participation?

Yeah, really good question. So it's, when it's small like this, like there's only 3 people on, on YouTube even, and then 2 people on Zoom, and nobody's asked a question like these. This is the chat feed right here that I pulled up. And so it's super manageable, but you're right. If there's like hundreds of people there, sometimes the live streams, I don't know if you've ever been on one with a lot of people, they're moving so fast you can't even possibly read them. So if you get to that point, then you can, you could have somebody that's there as a producer. Like I've done that for clients. Yeah, I, I'll back up a second. I wanted to share that I have one of my really great success stories was a client who has a, like, gets very small traction on his videos and he's started live streaming. And in 1 hour of live stream, we'll get more watch time than like his videos will get in 3 months. And more importantly, it's like people that are like Talking to him face to face. They then follow up with him, send him an email, and a lot of them become customers. So in a very, very high-ticket service that he offers. So, um, yeah, that, that is like one of the, the main success cases that I've seen. And so anyways, I act as a producer on those live streams. He's focused on talking. He might have some slides prepared. And then I'm looking at the chat stream.

Mm-hmm.

And he'll, he'll answer a question and then he'll say, is there anything else? And I'll say, oh yeah, somebody in the chat asked X, Y, and Z, and then he'll talk about that. So yeah, if you can, if you have a producer, that's, that's awesome. Um, otherwise it looks like this. And this is Restream, by the way, that I'm showing. So with Restream, if you go to channels, you can see it's going out to YouTube. And then if I had X, that, that would be live right now. And you can see that's exactly what I was— oops, where'd it go? That it, it's telling me I need to upgrade to premium in order to go out to X. And then, but this is where you could add Facebook, LinkedIn, all the other platforms. Um, and some of these, like Naver is a South Korean thing. Some of these are Chinese. Um, Substack, that would probably be a good one to go out to if you have a newsletter. Um, Rumble. So anyways, this is how it looks like. You connect multiple channels and then it puts all of the feeds into one place here in the, into the chat. And so yeah, that could, that could be overwhelming if it's just you alone trying to manage that. But ideally, you would have— if you get to that point where that becomes a problem, then hopefully you have someone helping you out that could field those questions.

So, Ross, what I'm hearing, at least up until this point, is that the audience participation comes through chat versus allowing somebody's voice or, like right now, face to come on. So the recommendation is Yeah, you, you leave the interaction access at the level of chat, not where you're getting— where you're going to give them screen time, either, uh, video or audio.

Yeah, yeah, sorry, I, I went off track there. That's, um, yeah, so Zoom, for example, you could not have Zoom at all. Like, you could have you and Patty are the only 2 people on Zoom that can talk, and then everyone else is in listening mode. Um, but even in Zoom, you can say, like, as the host, you can restrict people from being able to talk.

Right.

So you could have people join and listen in and be able to talk in the Zoom chat. And then on YouTube side, it's only chat. There's— there is no voice functionality. Um, and then there's checks and balances there. So you can have in settings, you can make it where somebody has to be subscribed In order to message, or they have to be subscribed for more than a week in order to message. You can set like time limits. And so there's all sorts of like checks and balances in each platform that you can implement. Um, yeah.

Hey Ross, another, another question. Have you found with your clients that have had success with livestream that it's best that they do it at a, um, consistent time through the week so that the audience, they can build an audience that's gonna listen versus random times and people are just randomly coming in. What do you find is the better way to manage schedule that?

So, for reach, giving some heads up is obviously gonna be better if people can put it to their calendars and plan for it. If it's just, um, like where live streaming has really taken off is for gamers, like young kids or like high schoolers, and they're, they live stream themselves playing games. That's a giant, giant sector. And in those cases, they're not, they're, they're often not scheduled. They just go live. So it works. Uh, but for maximum reach, it's usually best to announce it and say like, I have a Q&A on Friday at 5 o'clock and here's how you sign up. So, yeah, you will get better reach if you give people a heads up.

Got it. Yeah, makes sense. Again, I think it could be fun, but I imagine the build-out of a livestream is to have some content and then different from a recorded podcast, you know, if you're going to have like what you did, 10, 15 minutes of content, Slash presentation, but then the bulk of it is open for conversation, for discussion. And that, that to me, in addition to the authenticity, that's the value and the simplicity. The third thing is the value of the livestream is the audience participation that cannot be done with prerecording.

So, that's a very good point. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And also, just to mention, this is like the video is live while it's live, obviously. And my stats right now are telling me it's got 74 views. So again, here's the YouTube dashboard. 3 people are watching right now. 74 in total have at least opened it. So the This might end up with a couple hours of watch time by the time I'm done. But the really cool thing is it lives on forever on the channel. So there's a live tab here. And now after forever, the rest of the existence of YouTube, people will be able to come up here and watch the recording of this call here in the livestream feed. So it becomes content, like enduring content after that. Um, but yeah, absolutely, you're right. Like, it's—

it—

you pull out— when there's a question asked, you can pull out things that you wouldn't have otherwise meant, thought to say, like, like I just did. So that's a good point.

All right, cool. Those are my questions for today. I'm good.

All right. Um, and yeah, for the sake of a podcast It's like a lot of shows are exclusively that—they're live streams. Like there's a one that comes to mind, TVPN. It's it's basically like live news, you know, like what live news has been throughout the history of TV, where it's people sitting in a studio and or you know ESPN or anything like that, and they just talk about news of the day. And these guys talk about. technology specifically, but they get, you know, this was streamed 2 hours ago, has 3,000 views. So let's see here. And then they clip it up. So they, out of this, what is it, 2-hour, 20-minute episode, they have this half an hour clip that was, you know, probably one particular topic of interest that then goes out as a video. Um, and so anyways, I want to just show kind of the format here. Oh, by the way, this is the countdown I was talking about. Let me mute this and play it. I was talking about how you could do like a countdown before the video actually starts. So you can see here, I don't know how early this started, maybe 5 minutes before, and they got video playing in the background and people can already start commenting. As they trickle in. And then when the show goes live, the 2 hosts are there and, you know, they got all sorts of, uh, overlays going on. Like they got this, the today's date and their, uh, signs for presumably X and then stock news, stuff like that. So yeah, just to give you ideas, like this is how you can tailor stuff. And if you were on YouTube or on Zoom, You could have Patty on one side of the screen and you on the other side. And look at this, you can see how the chat's starting to populate. And, uh, and the chat continues to show up even after the livestream is over. So this, this happened 5 hours ago. They started the livestream and then, uh, the chat remains there. Let's see if I scroll forward in the video.

So this sample you're showing is a highly produced livestream. I mean, yeah, you know, you've got the 2 hosts and they're talking. There must be 2 or 3 people in the background that are rearranging the view, adding in all of this B-roll or video, bringing in somebody else. I mean, this is, this is a— I mean, people are getting paid to do this. This is a, this is a very expensive production to me.

Yeah, yeah, they're in a studio for sure. They've got— they do have laptops in front of them, so they might be pulling stuff up like I am right now playing them the Meta stream. But they— you're right, they— I'm sure they've got a team. They've got, you know, they might even have a makeup team that are like preparing them beforehand, and lights and cameras and Yeah, it's a production. Wow. Um, oh, and like they got an ad, so I don't know if they're actually— access requests and password resets. Our next guest is Nikesh Arora. And they're bringing on guests and stuff like that. So yeah, it's basically like, uh, Channel 5 News, you know, like it's, it's a real production that is, is happening.

Wow.

Um, let's see here. I'm just gonna take the livestream thing over here. Still no questions in the chat on, on YouTube. Um, yeah, so that's to give you an idea of the, the high end. The low end is what I'm doing right now, where it's just me blasting out to the platforms on my own. Um, all right. Anything else? Any other questions that sparked?

I'm good, thanks.

All right, uh, Bart, did you want to go into your questions? We could talk about— Well, well, I missed what year is Descript.

Is that a propri— proprietary, um, uh, program that you've developed or what?

Oh no, sorry, I wasn't, I wasn't sure how you even found me because I, I blasted this out in so many places.

Uh, most people I mean, on Meetup.

Okay, okay. Yeah, so most people— like, the, the channel I'm streaming to right now is— I teach a software called Descript. I didn't make it, it's not mine. Uh, okay, it's just a video editing platform. And so that happens to be my expertise, and that's where Doug found me through that. He's part of my community where I teach that. And, uh, yeah, so that's what it is. It's a, it's a video editing software that uses a lot of AI. It's very simple compared to— do you use any tools currently?

Uh, no, no, I'm just kind of fascinated with the, uh, the streamlined, um, production value that like all, um, like that's the standard. Like, I, I think I just really wanted to ask like, how do they— I guess it's the program, but how do, uh, content creators edit their videos such that there's no pauses and, you know, and the awkward spaces and also control for volume and make sure like that's equalized and whatnot. So I was kind of curious, like Descript, does that do all that?

Yeah, yeah. So let me pull up Descript.

The podcast Trigonometry.

It sounds very familiar. Let me— I don't know it offhand.

It's pretty, pretty famous, you know, kind of modern, like political and culture war stuff.

But anyways, Trigonometry, this one. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

And so I was listening to it the other day and the one guy, he's the host and he speaks louder than— and I got my earbuds in. And I'm just so annoyed when these guys who are supposed to be great, they can't, um, um, noise gate the, the volume to, to make sure that everyone is equal. I feel like that's something that people should, should learn to do.

Yeah, yeah.

So that is a good example of something that Descript actually makes really easy, because some— like, they're probably not using Descript. I can tell they're not, actually. I could The way some of the animations they use here, Descript can't do, because Descript's very simple. It's like, it, the, it's got very, it's got fewer features than the pro tools. Um, but that's also makes it more, uh, idiot-proof. So when you bring in a piece of media into Descript, and I'll show it here, what it kind of looks like. This is a Descript project that I made. Um, so it auto-levels the audio to an extent. It might still be pro— like, it depends on how they have their mic set up, but like generally when you bring something into Descript, let me see what this is. So this layer, this row down here represents my video. And so if I click on it, I can see the properties for it. And the audio section right here, this is the volume level. I didn't set that 113.5. Descript decided that my video was a little bit quiet, so it bumped it up. Like 100% would be like what it came in at, but then it automatically raised it to make it sound like at a normal level. Um, it gets a little bit, it can get a little wonky if you have totally different mics and stuff, but this is one area where like Descript kind of does it for you. Whereas if you're in a more professional tool, that's something that you should do yourself, need to do yourself.

Right. Yeah. With multiple microphones going on and, um, yeah. So say you got 4 speakers and someone, you know, speaks really loudly and it just, it ruins it. I find if people aren't equalized, it just, you know, it speaks to production value at the end of the day. Okay, so that's sound. Now back to the question about pauses, like when it's just a single person speaking and they're not live streaming, but they're recording. Is this like a standard feature of like modern editing that they— is it AI technology that automatically takes out the pauses or?

So yeah, probably like on Descript, that's the case. There's a, this button that says AI tools, and then there's a feature called remove filler words.

Oh yeah.

And then when you click on that and say find all filler words, and let me, I'll just toggle that off. So it found 4. And if I, if I click this down, I can see what it found. So it found 2 uh's, it found 1 like and 1 repeated word. And so a lot of people do this, they just click remove all and it just takes them all out. Um, I personally only do um's and uh's, it's just a little cleaner. But yeah, I can click remove all and now it's gone from my video. So that is, yeah, absolutely, that type of thing is probably what you're seeing a lot of. And that is the style on YouTube where it's like very compact. There's no pauses. It's just, it's quick. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

And for better or worse, like, I wonder if this style of editing is gonna give us all ADD in, you know, 10, 20 years because we just, we need to hear it now. We need to hear it now. Like, what's, what's this podcast?

Yeah. And some people, they'll even like click on their video. Go to properties and you can speed it up. So like right now it's playing at 1x, but they'll do like 1.1. It's like where you can't quite tell, but it is faster. And it's just like, because YouTube's all about holding attention, so they'll do all these like techniques to just nothing but like meat. Right, right, right.

Cool. Thanks for, yeah, just kind of dipping into that. Yeah, I'd seen you do your ad for this meetup, and that's right on meetup.com. And I meant to kind of pop in and just kind of learn what I can because I listen to podcasts like all day long and watch a bunch. You know, that's where I get a lot of my news, watch a variety of things, and just kind of, you know, curious about the backend, the production value of, or the production aspect of how it all comes together. So thank you for your service, sir.

Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for hopping in. And, uh, yeah, I can talk a little bit more about it if at least to fill some time here if no one else has any questions in the live stream, um, which I don't see. So yeah, Descript, like, they also have different things that can edit for clarity. So if you like go off on a tangent, it's looking at your transcript. And by the way, this, this is the transcript, so It turns your video into text, and then the AI can look at that and see if you've made any tangents or repeated sentences or paragraphs and help you identify those to edit those out. And, uh, Studio Sound is what a lot of people that are using this tool use to clean up their audio. So that'll take out like background noise, you know, air conditioner hums, traffic, stuff like that. And it'll make it sound like it's focused on the human voice versus any ambient sounds. Um, and so it's just like, it's like more simple, user-friendly editing than what's out there. So there's some very pro tools that are like much, much more challenging to use than this. Um, and then it's got a, this thing called Underlord in the bottom right. And I'm sure you've probably used Claude or ChatGPT or some sort of LLM. It's got those, so you can choose Claude, GPT-5.5, et cetera. And you just tell it what you want it to do to your video to the point where you can have it, you can give it a long prompt and have it do an entire podcast edit all at once. with varying results. It's not going to be perfect, but it's, it's getting pretty good, and it's signif— it's every week is getting better. So, um, more and more people are doing that.

Sorry, you're, you're talking about a, um, a customized prompt for editing?

Is that what you're talking about?

Yeah, yeah.

Can you perhaps give me— give us an example?

Yeah, so if you click here, it says start with a prompt template. These are ones that are made by Descript, the company. And then you can go to Created by Me. So these are like my own prompts. And, um, let's see here. I'll look at this one. So this one, here's the prompt, and this is a very simple one. I've had some prompts that are like hundreds of lines long that have like different contingencies and So it depends on what you're doing, but like this particular prompt, it has 5 bullet points. So apply studio sound, that's the feature that cleans up the sound. Normalize volume levels, that's what we were talking about with the sometimes it's loud, sometimes it's quiet. Like that'll auto-level everything out. Rough cut, that'll like take out the ums and ahs, excessive silences, things like that. Add chapters throughout, so these are those parts in YouTube. Let's see if this, uh, these things here where you can skip. So like if I just want to know about, uh, impartiality, I can click on that and it scrolls me to that moment in time in the video. So back to Descript, that's what that will add is those chapters. And then apply the Descript Mastery layout pack. So in Descript, you can make what's called layout packs, which are like certain looks and feels. So for example, an intro slide, if I want the same intro where it pops up my logo and the name of the episode, then I can save that and it gets applied. It gets saved into what's called a layout pack, and then it can get applied to all of my videos going forward. So that's what that is. It's looking at a particular layout pack called Descript Mastery, and it's going to apply the layouts from that. Um, so that's a very simple— I probably made this as a demo, but that's a very simple one. Let me look at a more—

Now, how would it know to make, uh, chapters? Like, does it automatically kind of, uh, um, predict or understand like when the topic changes?

Yeah, yeah. So it'll look at the transcript to know what's being talked about and then make chapters based off of that. So let me— cool. I made a video yesterday, uh, Let me do a search. September. Huh, where is that? I'm gonna stop the screen share real quick while I look for it. I have a video, brand new video on the, the YouTube channel that I'm streaming to right now. Oh, maybe it's this one. No, that's not it either. Um, there it is. Okay, I found it. Let me share my screen again. So this is a video that was published on my YouTube channel yesterday. It's an hour and 2 minutes long, and if I click on this thing right here, these are the chapters it made. So that feature did it. It, uh, it came up with welcome to Descript is the first one, create a new project. So if I click on it, it scrolls me to that part of the video. And so you can see there's the, the transcript of like what was actually being said, and then the bold parts are the chapters that it made. And I can see like down on the timeline, which is this part down here, these little purple flags indicate that there's a chapter, AKA marker, there. And so anyways, those were completely made by AI based on what was being talked about at that point in the video. And it made like, in an hour-long video, it made, I don't know, 30 of them, something like that, like every couple minutes. And then I can scroll down. And then when it comes to putting this onto YouTube, there's an export button at the top right. You say destination YouTube, and then those chapters, AKA markers, are interchangeably used, um, are here. This goes into the YouTube description. So just like we saw on This video, it's, it's in this format. So YouTube automatically detects those numbers, like that format of like 00:00, as something to turn into a hyperlink. And so it becomes a blue link that you can click and go straight to that part of the video. Um, and so this formats it for specifically for YouTube. So anyways, yeah, that's great.

It adds to the production value. Just, it's nice when you have those chapters, uh, when watching a YouTube, uh, video, uh, you know, if maybe, you know, whatever, maybe there's an interesting topic you want to fast forward to. It just adds to the whole production value. So that's really cool.

Yeah. Yeah. So most tools nowadays, like certainly Descript, obviously Descript, Uh, they do that, they can handle that for you. And that's why that's part of my AI prompt. Um, so yeah, yeah, it's definitely nice for the viewer. And actually, I showed exactly that in this tutorial. I showed how to, how to do that. Let me see if I can find it. Auto chapter creation right there. So for those watching on YouTube, if you want to watch this video, go to my channel It's the video that was published yesterday, and 32 minutes, 45 seconds in, I show the chapter creation feature, AKA add chapters under AI tools. Um, and all this stuff uses AI credits. The reason I'm not running it right now to show you from scratch is I'm— I've burned through most of my credits for the month. So it would probably use— let's see if it's got it in here. It was yesterday. Uh, right there, add chapters. You use 5 credits to, to make those chapters. So, um, let's see here. I see something in the chat. Okay, thanks for joining, Doug. See ya. Doug just dropped off. So yeah, if there's nothing else, anyone else, since we've only got— I see we got one new on the Zoom call. You got anything, Peter? Any questions you want to ask?

Hi, sorry I'm late. I had a commitment. I am new to this. And I'm going to be starting a podcast for my local town, the local cable station. Awesome. And I wanted to see what this was about because the description said it was for anyone from brand new beginner to experienced to everything in between, it seemed like. So I wanted to see.

Yeah, thanks for joining. Yeah, so the topic was Uh, the main meat of the presentation was about live streaming. So I don't know if you plan to do that with your production, but you can blast— like, this is a live stream right now. You're here on Zoom. It's also going out on my YouTube channel. And then, um, so you could do that for your town if, if it's relevant. Um, what, what kind of show is it? It's like news or interviews or—

Uh, it's— first of all, it's with the local cable station, and they have all the equipment that— oh, that I could want. So all this stuff I want to be able to develop some of it so I could do it myself because who knows where I'm going to go next. But for now, I don't have to take care of the technical part. To answer your question, it's a podcast about local history, the local town history.

Okay, very cool. Yeah, so probably not going to be live streaming for that then, probably just do edited stuff. But, um, so Descript is, is a tool that I teach. That's what my business is, is about. And, uh, it's a very simple editing tool. I was just showing off a couple of features like that it automatically uses AI to create chapters, and which become inside of— I think you were joined to see that part where you can scroll to the different parts of the video. Um, but it can do all sorts of stuff that in legacy video editors you'd have to do yourself, like cutting out pauses, cutting out filler words, um, different things like that. Right. So, so yeah, it's a— if, if you're just beginning your search of a tool to use, are you gonna be doing editing yourself or they'll— the station?

No, they're, they're, they're gonna take care— well, I, I will do edits when I do my own personal stuff, but that'll be in the service of getting ready for this thing. Um, so it's good to know. Um, but they'll be doing the, the editing and—

Okay.

Uh, the technical part of it. I— my, my, uh, my charge is to put the script together and, and, uh, the content. And, uh, it will be live streamed. So I'm thinking of different formats.

I see. Okay. Okay. Oh, awesome. So yeah, they probably are using professional tools beyond— they're not using Descript, I'd assume. Um, but yeah, if you— this is a, a good tool and I have a lot of tutorials on my channel if you decide to Go deeper down the rabbit hole on this. Um, but yeah, so this group, we meet once a month for 90 minutes and then different topics like masterminds on a specific topic like today with the live streaming, or we've done ones about like optimizing your channel page, coming up with the artwork for your channel or your podcast. And when we have more people, this one was particularly small. We go into breakout groups and then people can talk about what's working or not working and ideas that they have, things like that.

So I'm on YouTube right now. What is, which is, what is your channel called?

It's Descript Made Easy. Uh, let's see this one here. Descript Made Easy with Ross. I'll drop it in the chat.

Oh, cool.

And there it is. Um, the video I just made yesterday is a really good starting point. Make your first video in Descript. That'll show you from like hitting the button to create your very first project to bringing in what you're— the raw content you're going to edit to to some techniques for cutting it. It takes you through like the whole cycle all the way to publishing. So that's a really solid starting point. And then I also have playlists like Getting Started. Oh no, those are livestream ones.

Why did you pick this particular tool?

Um, so Without telling the whole story, I was introduced to it in about 2022. And the thing, it was super cutting edge at that time. There's a, there's kind of nothing that I think is unique about Descript at this point. There's lots of competitors, but in 2022, it was like the first one to do transcription and be able to edit from the transcript. And as a result, it had the filler word tool. And that was like, they were the only ones doing that at the time, as far as I know. So that was what like sparked my interest is somebody mentioned that to me. They're like, yeah, I filmed this training video and it found 600 filler words and it edited it for me with the click of a button. And so I went home that night and downloaded it, started using it, and, um, was making videos for another business that I had. And then I was having more fun making the videos than doing the thing. I was a business broker is what my industry was. And I started editing for people. So I was like, offered that as a service freelance. And then somebody was like, could you just teach me how to do this? Like, I just, can we get on a Zoom call and you just show me this? So then I set that up as a service. That led to the YouTube channel. And then people on the YouTube channel were like, hey, do you have a course or community? And I was like, I don't, but that's a good idea. And so that's what led to that. And so it's all, it's been like an organic, uh, thing along the way of me just going deeper and deeper into it and teaching it.

Cool.

So yeah.

But of all the editors out there, I don't, I don't know if you said this, um, of all the editors out there, you chose this one. But in 2022, you said it was cutting edge. It's not so much anymore, but you are, you are into this already, so why change when it's working? Is that—

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I just kind of, yeah, it just kind of worked out that way. All right, cool. And I stayed niche rather than— I've dabbled, like I've— my Descript Made Easy for a while, I was Video Made Easy and I was talking about other tools. But, uh, I've returned to the niche, I suppose you could say. So yeah.

Do you happen to know, um, this is, uh, a bit tangential to what we're talking about here, but I'm gonna ask, um, any, any tools or, or groups, or maybe, maybe you do it somewhat on, on the— in this group, um, for script— for creating scripts? People with their— in their creative process?

Yeah, so there, there's a guy, I think his name is George Blackman. He's like, he's the first one that comes to mind who's 100% about scriptwriting. Like, that is his expertise. Um, so he's got lots of videos about that. And he's got all sorts of like Notion documents. I don't know if you use Notion, but he's got—

Go ahead. I'm sorry.

Yeah, he's got things you can download that are like structures and, you know, made it sort of a template. Like right here, he's got like hook setup, tension payoff. So like some, some puzzle pieces that you can plug in your script for.

Is his, is his last name spelled Blackman, like B-L-A-C-K-M-A-N?

Yeah, I'll send this in the chat so you have it. Uh, oh, did I send that in the wrong— oh no, that's good. Okay, I'll put this in the YouTube chat as well.

Oh, there he is. Okay, got it.

Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, you weren't seeing it. Yeah, he's, um, he makes videos about that, he writes about it. I think he's got a Substack and stuff. So he's the first person I think of. I haven't met him. I haven't been in his course or anything like that, but he's 100% focused on scriptwriting.

Mm-hmm.

And then my favorite YouTube advice is Ed Lawrence. I did his course and he's great. I like him a lot. Um, he talks about— I haven't watched his latest stuff, but his stuff from like a year ago I've seen all of it, and he's, he, he's a really good teacher. He's got acronyms for systems, and, you know, he's like, he's got ways to explain things and make abstract YouTube concepts make sense.

Um, oh, that's good.

And he has, he has YouTube tools like this StoryOS. Uh, let's see. I don't even know what this— I guess, okay, I guess this is like the latest iteration of his course. I thought this was like an AI tool. Um, but he has AI tools. Maybe it's, it's part of that His latest iteration of his course. And he's got like things that bots that help you write scripts that are trained off of his approach to YouTube. So yeah, that's another one. Um, and then trying to think.

Yeah, that's—

there's so many YouTube advice people out there.

Yeah, I know. That's why I thought I wanted to try and filter, filter down because—

Yeah.

There's a scene.

Yeah. So I think of all the YouTube gurus, like this is the one where I would, I would focus. He's my favorite.

Well, the 2 you, you mentioned seem like good places to start.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think the gold standard, I showed some of his stuff at the beginning of this call before you joined. Paddy Galloway. He's a big-time YouTube strategist. Um, his own channel, I don't actually know. Oh yeah, he hasn't posted in 4 years.

Oh, well.

So he's not active on his own stuff, but he is active on X.

And I have, which I, I don't do.

Yeah, fair. Um, But yeah, he works with a lot of big YouTubers and stuff, and he's, he's good. So yeah, a few options for you there.

Not, uh, really, uh, your, the, your main thing. And, and I know you probably want to go. I hope you don't mind us picking your brain here.

No, I mean, I got 90 minutes blocked out for it, so I'm glad we're, we're interactive now because the first Our was quiet.

Okay. Yeah, just kind of quick. I don't really have a plan to do a podcast, but if there was anything I would want to do, it's satirical videos. I want to make comedy, some AI. So I'm curious if you, if you play with any AI, you know, video generators that have like very relaxed guardrails. I try to make something with Gemini. I'm subscribed to Gemini Pro and tried to use whatever they have there, Veo. Or going to Omni, I forget. Yeah. Oh, and I try to make something funny and it's like, oh, that's offensive, or that's, you know, it's content and it's like not. So anyway, these big, you know, Google's gonna be like that. These OpenChatGPT are likely gonna make that. Have you played with anything, you know, that has a little more relaxed, you know, that I could kind of have fun with?

Yeah. So, uh, significantly I use AI video extensively and you, Descript has it as well, by the way, you can generate images in video and images in Descript. Um, however, that's always a problem. Google is very strict on the content stuff. The gold standard of the, uh, by the way, what I just pulled up is another tool called Higgsfield.

Um, yeah.

Yeah. Higgsfield is a, it, it's an aggregator, so it's just an interface that you can use the Google models, SeedDance, the latest and greatest video generation tools. Um, so a lot of times those limits aren't like, in this case, if you were running Veo through their tool. It would still get blocked because it's a Google-level block. Um, and same thing with SeedDance. SeedDance is a little bit more permissive than Google, like you can get away with a bit more. Um, I've found if you click on the video thing here, you can see all the different tools they have, like Kling.

Yeah.

I don't know if, if you know any of these, if any of these are things you've heard of.

Play on just the free, you know, tier of like Twing. And because I've been like Googling or whatever, like searching, like, okay, what, what can I get away with? You know, I want to make these fun, like those. Do you saw those Iran videos that were trolling Trump and everything? Those Lego videos? Did you see those ones made by AI?

Oh, I think I I think I don't know if I watched any. I think I— that sounds familiar. Like, yeah, I think I've seen that.

They're, you know, violent to a lot of people and offensive, but whatever. I want to make some comedy that kind of, you know, kind of plays around with some political stuff. And you can really have some fun these days with some satire. So, yeah, yeah, playing was kind of a lot. But I'm not— before I spend the money, I kind of want to do some research, you know.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, you can see here, it's kind of embarrassing. My, my last prompt was like a, a thing that was not safe for work for Veo. And I think Seed Dance blocked this as well. And it was a, it was a ballerina because my wife does ballet. So I put her as a reference image and it was like she spins gracefully around and then delivers a devastating roundhouse kick to the face of a pedestrian passing by. And it was pretty gory, like. It actually like exploded, the head did. And I think what I ended up using for that was minimax H3. So in my testing, I've never been cut off using H3. Um, and sometimes you can, you can massage the wording. Like you might've run into this where you, instead of saying like head explodes, you say like his head turns into a pink mist or something like that. You know, like you use. wording that like gets around their, their filters. Um, but yeah, so, and you can, you can try out the, a tool like Higgsfield. I'm not necessarily advocating for Higgsfield, but you can start on like a $15 a month one just to test out the same prompt and see if it blocks you. If it does block you, it refunds you. It doesn't, it doesn't charge you for what it refuses to do. Um, so yeah, you can, you can start on like a pretty small plan and just test it out.

Yeah, good call.

Yeah, I appreciate that. I'm gonna play around with that.

There was a, um, pretty major breakthrough in the last week because until what I'm about to show you, video generation took like a long time. I mean, not that long. If you think about what it's doing, it's making a video that didn't exist, but it might take like 5 to 10 minutes to generate a 15-second clip. And just a week ago, this tool called fal.ai, F-A-L.ai, released the ability to generate video faster than the video takes to play. So Like these 5-second clips, or I guess this is like a 10-second clip that I generated, took maybe— actually, I think it'll tell me. Okay, so it said it took 12 seconds to generate this one, but still, it's, it's crazy. It's getting faster and the generations are getting longer. Um, some of these generated faster than it took to—

System creep.

18 seconds for a 13-second video. Let's see here. So anyways, yeah, there's so many tools out there, but it's all fun. I've been using it a lot.

It's so fun. Your imagination is the limit of where you want to go with things, kind of within reason, and your ability to prompt.

Right. Yeah. And a work— a really popular workflow is to make an image first, a still image. Yeah. And then use that as the first frame and then, yeah, go from there.

That's a good— I played around with that. That's some good results just for a 10-minute— or sorry, 10-second little clip. But it'd be nice to kind of get to the point to make even a 30-second clip where you kind of string them together. Um, but, uh, but they'll, they'll take some practice.

Yeah. And some of the, like the, the latest, I think the, the gold standard right now is SeedDance 2.5, which isn't even on this list right here, but oh, here SeedDance 2.5 is listed there. That one can do 30-second generations in one shot and pretty good ones. So. Yeah, the trend is faster and longer. Like, I think by the end of the year you're gonna be able to generate multi-minute, 3-minute, 5-minute in under 1 minute of generation time.

But what about the cost?

Yeah, so it depends on the model. Like, SeedDance 2.5 is pretty expensive. It's not the most expensive. I think Google is probably the most expensive. But it's, uh, yeah, 30-second video right now. I think actually, I think it'll tell me. Let's see here. So it tells you based on the resolution. So if you do 1080p, roughly $1.64 per second of generated video. So yeah, you'd be looking at $30 for a 30-second video. If you, if you go down to 480p, which is a lot lower resolution, it's significantly cheaper. It's like a fifth of that price, 22 cents per second. But, uh, yeah, that's a good question. It's, it's, it's expensive. Can be. And yeah, 720p, the mid Mid-tier is about 50 cents a second. And this is a, yeah, here's a 10-second example. It's pretty, looks pretty nice.

Yeah. Like if you have an idea for like, you know, if I was selling any kind of product, like I would be all over it. I don't really, you know, I'm a renovation carpenter. I don't really have anything to sell. I just kind of got hooked on all these funny AI videos and I kind of want to jump in on that fray. But if you are selling anything, man, you can really make your product or service pop with some of these, um, uh, AI possibilities of these videos, these short 15-second videos.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, this might even be what this is. I see the black purse. Oh no, that was just in the first frame. Um, but yeah, totally, you can do all sorts of stuff. Uh, They have, back to Higgsfield, they have this thing called Marketing Studio where you can upload a photo of your product.

Yeah.

So like, they, these are like, oh, let's just pick an example here. This drink. So they probably uploaded a photo of that bottle and then it's just making all this amazing stuff that you would've needed a studio and a million-dollar ad agency to do a year ago.

Exactly.

Yeah, pretty cool.

So yeah. All right, well, uh, if nobody else has any— anything else— you got anything else, Bart? I'll check in before we wrap up.

No, I'm— I think you answered a lot of my questions there, Ross. Thank you. So you're here once a month on, on the meetup?

Yeah, yeah, the meetup, Eventbrite, Luma, and then The YouTube channel for those that are on YouTube. Uh, yeah, I blast it out in all those places.

Okay, now just quickly, I noticed that, uh, I, I didn't— I don't think I saw, um, a subject description for like this particular meetup. Um, oh, that might be helpful if that's— I don't know if it's something you kind of picked last minute or, you know, just could be.

Yeah, that— I appreciate the feedback. Yeah, I'll put that on there. Um, I didn't. It was— I think I decided on it like a couple days ago. So yeah, I'll do that for the next one.

Cool. Cool. Yeah, man, I'll, I'll check in. And, uh, just interesting. It's just so, like I said, to see how the sausage is made, it's, uh, kind of fun.

Awesome. Yeah, glad to have a— yeah, glad to be able to show it to you and share in my world.

Appreciate you for your time.

Thanks, Ross. Appreciate it. Appreciate you