00:00.53 James Welcome back everyone to Merge Conflict, your weekly developer podcasting about all things in the world of data recovery. I'm one of your data recovery experts, James Watson Magno, and with me, the one, the exuberant... 00:12.74 Frank o 00:12.78 James Data miner. recover it expert. LLC. Frank, how's it going, buddy? 00:18.89 Frank Oh, hello, James. um Yeah, I am not a data miner expert LLC. I am your apprentice. um I believe I have lost data twice in my life, and both times were very sad. 00:33.01 Frank And the way I do data recovery is... I just don't recover it If you don't try to recover it. You can't fail at recovering it. So there. not recovered james did you lose some data why are we talking about data recovery 00:42.28 James There you go. 00:46.00 James Okay. So we were ending last week's podcast. If you were listening to last week's podcast and we talked about some of the really cool. 00:50.07 Frank Right. 00:54.47 James um new things that I was kind of like developing and doing. and and things like that. with the captioning and a bunch of other cool stuff. And. We were talking about... 01:07.19 James a whole bunch of cool apple stuff it was a really long episode we went for like an hour plus 01:11.00 Frank Forever. 01:11.10 James And we got right to the end of the episode where we just talked about how we were improving the audio video, making sure it wasn't freezing, making sure the captions were better. And I was like, wow, we're doing like lots of great work for our listeners. 01:22.79 James And then we got to the end and I went to go hit stop in Zencaster. And I kept seeing this little pop-up that's like. your stream media something has stopped blah blah blah and i and and i thought about as we're ending i said well no big deal because we're about an hour in i can't do anything now and also everything's recording locally so no big deal okay if it it just uploads at the end 01:39.48 Frank Yeah. 01:42.10 James Um, That is not what happened, Frank Kruger. What happened, Frank Kruger, is that... 01:45.13 Frank Oh. Oof. 01:47.36 James I stopped. recording locally. 7 minutes in. 01:52.64 Frank Oh. Oh. Yeah, so that guaranteed backup that you had that you were totally reliant on didn't exist. Excellent, excellent. All I remember is you just acting very suspicious when we ended the episode. 02:07.03 Frank And you're just I like how you kept putting it off to your like. it's probably not a problem. It's probably not a problem. Can't find the video. Probably not a problem. Can't find the audio. 02:18.28 Frank And it just went on like that. And I kept getting more and more freaked out so much to the point that I told everyone about it after the podcast. so like You won't believe what happened after the podcast. 02:24.65 James Oh no. 02:27.39 Frank We totally lost all the data for the podcast. 02:31.12 James Um, So yeah, so... So in Zencastr, after it uploads, there's little download buttons. I downloaded. and i And I previewed and and sure enough. It was having all sorts of issues. Yours uploaded just fine, which is great. 02:45.02 James Um, Now, that being said. Technically, those aren't. the backups, technically the backups. are the... cloud versions. Those are the backups. 02:55.73 James the primary the primary is your locals remember how zen caster works and whenever our podcast you and me version where all you and I will be the only users use it. 02:55.89 Frank Those are backups. Hmm. 03:06.32 James that version also will be like the source is local backup because that's like the source of truth. 03:12.29 Frank right 03:12.46 James And this is also. uh how stream yard works too stream yard will record locally and then It will then upload. 03:20.12 Frank Yeah. 03:21.00 James you know upload those files at the end and use that as the source of truth for video recordings that you can then download and things like that And then there's a cloud version, obviously you could download too, because whatever's there. 03:32.03 Frank Yeah. 03:32.57 James Now Zencastr works a little bit different. Because what you see on our screen, Frank, here. It's just... two independent sources in stream yard it's like a whole production obs studio 03:45.19 Frank right 03:45.48 James zen casters just like here's a bunch of webcams skype style on a screen there's feeds coming in And. That's kind of it. I think there's times some timestamps happening. 03:55.14 James And that's. 03:55.66 Frank Sure. 03:56.41 James Nothing special. so When I finish and I went to one. produce the podcast, which I do inside of Zencaster. And then when I was to download the files because the production failed. 04:08.70 James I then realized that. Yes. your ah Your video and audio. to completion, one hour. eight minutes or whatever. My audio. Done in seven minutes. But Frank, I knew that there was. 04:21.28 James One of two things. One. I said, well, one As you said, there is a backup, which is. There should be a file inside my browser, right? There should be a file. 04:30.32 Frank Right. 04:30.49 James Like, it's it's there. 04:31.100 Frank Good. Because we've done this, and I've always been inspired by it because... they use like local storage or something like that. And there's just a million little chunks in there. I remember this because I used to not have enough hard drive space for us to even stream and I would have to free hard drive space. 04:43.66 James Yep. 04:47.77 James So... I first try to find information on how to set find it. location of files and i could not find it and i was like i this should just be in an faq 04:54.48 Frank Yeah. Yeah. 04:57.04 James um but they did say if for some reason the audio wasn't uploaded you would see a warning sign. You could refresh the page and it would finish uploading. So that didn't happen. So my assumption here is that. 05:10.82 James It just stopped recording locally. That was my. on TLDR. 05:13.48 Frank Scary. 05:14.74 James However, Luckily, people. Frank? saw me the entire time heard me the entire time which means the clued must have seen me and heard me right so there is a magical button in Zencastr, which is recover cloud files. 05:19.06 Frank Hi. 05:25.28 Frank Right. 05:30.84 James which you think. you wouldn't have to recover said files, but there is a button that says recover. So what do you think that button does, Frank? 05:39.41 Frank Oh, I assume it opens up an AI chat and it says to the AI chat, please recover these files. And it just gives all its... um Oh, it's public keys and maybe some private keys to the AI so the AI can just log into their production servers and go find you files or something like that. James, it's really scary that they have that button at all. Like, okay, it's it's good data discipline. um 06:02.84 Frank It's not a backup unless you've practiced restoring your backup. That's a thing. um But also... What? just because it's just because it went to a server once. 06:13.82 Frank doesn't mean that wasn't just like a relay server there's no guarantee that it was actually making a copy now you know the zencaster so you had more faith than i do but I would have very little faith. So what does that button do? 06:24.70 Frank Who knows? That's my answer. Who knows what that button does? 06:28.40 James um i've never I've never had to use said button, to be honest with you. So that was a kind of a surprise for me. And that will say that that button. Send you. A little pop-up notification that says we will email you within an hour. 06:42.35 Frank Uh oh. I love that. I love this. I love it when you go to a web website and you're like, I would like this data. And they're like, we'll email you. Someday. With that data. It feels kind of like that. 06:52.23 James sir Now, what people don't know and why this was. a little time burn is like we normally record on a Tuesday, which is today. Happy September. 07:00.22 Frank Hi. 07:00.33 James However, We recorded on a Sunday night and it went pretty long. 07:03.92 Frank My fault. 07:03.87 James And no, no, no, it was my fault. It's everybody's fault. And. 07:06.93 Frank ah 07:07.95 James It was already. Um... 9pm. and i go to heather and i go 07:13.05 Frank Yeah. 07:14.83 James Here's what happened. She goes, oh, no. 07:17.15 Frank but 07:17.72 James Uh, she goes, Oh no. And I go, yep. I said, okay, I'm gonna try to figure this out. But I was like, we got an hour. I said, we got an hour. 07:24.33 Frank I. 07:24.40 James So I waited an hour and I get an email, Frank, I get said email. 07:27.77 Frank Okay. 07:27.64 James It happened. 07:28.94 Frank Okay, amazing. Well, I mean, and email, I could have said, sorry, buddy, we don't make backups. You should use your local backup or something like that. I just have no faith up until like the data is actually there. 07:38.26 James Yeah. 07:41.25 Frank Can I tell you, I just thought for sure we were actually going to finally miss a week. We've never missed a week of this podcast. When we were done recording and you hung up on me, I was like. I think this is it. I think this is gonna be the first time. And so I was actually nervous Monday morning. I'm like, okay. God, is there going to be a podcast or not? And there was. So I'm assuming the email said something good. What did the email say? 08:02.45 James Well, I'm glad to say something good because this is our number one podcast on YouTube ever. By the way, it has like more views than any others. I'm glad it got uploaded there. 08:10.24 Frank Cool. 08:11.59 James Um, And then people are complaining about the audio and video. quality which is great. 08:15.77 Frank Fantastic. 08:17.41 James I should leave a note. 08:18.19 Frank ah Can never win. 08:19.60 James ah 08:20.32 Frank Can never win. 08:21.48 James Can never win. The one episode that we needed to be perfect. 08:23.17 Frank but 08:24.79 James uh so well what's interesting is i'm wondering what's happening behind the scenes Because... The audio video is going somewhere and being captured. somewhere. And. 08:35.99 James on some server, but obviously it is real time. you know, however that is. happening and i'm wondering like oh do they do they Put it in. well they must not put it in cold storage right it doesn't make any Sans. 08:49.16 Frank No. Medium. 08:50.42 James You know, I don't. 08:51.72 Frank You don't want to pay for hot, but you don't want to pay for cold at the same time. So maybe they're on a medium. 08:57.23 James It's like they. maybe they start on hot and they move to cold and they're like oh the people are never going to touch it or 09:02.04 Frank Yeah. 09:02.53 James Maybe it's on some sort of... Weird queuing system, like that's processing. I don't really, I can't understand why it would take so when we upload our videos we can instantaneously download them right away which means it's probably in some s3 bucket or azure blob storage and i can just bingo bango get it right away 09:21.11 Frank Yeah. 09:21.01 James But I can't understand why there's that. The only thing I can think of is that these files are being uploaded. somewhere. And. they need to then Process some sort of. 09:34.73 James Data. Security. privacy transferring to some other machine like my my assumption is that these can be recovered for a certain amount of time. and then they're gone so maybe they're in some sort of 09:47.32 Frank Yeah. 09:48.17 James Maybe they spin up a VM. Maybe they spin up a VM for our podcast recording and then they spin it down. I don't i don't know. 09:54.70 Frank I mean, in the 90s, it would just be a hard drive on a server somewhere and you would just hope for the best. What I'm actually really afraid is that there is literally one engineer there whose whole job it is to respond to that button. click It's like they have a queue of 50 people. they They have to go scrounge around and try to find the backup for them. Hopefully it's more automated than that. but I'm imagining there's one engineer. 10:16.36 Frank a poor poor engineer that has to go find find whatever shard your data got put on 10:21.82 James Find these files, go. Well, so I get the email, I get the files. And now what's fascinating is now I'm on my laptop and the problem with my laptop. Unlike my Mac mini here. i'm I'm out of said garage. Computers are off and I can do all my normal podcast flow on my MacBook Air. 10:39.01 James However, on my said MacBook Air, Frank Krueger. I do not have any of my podcast editing things set up. 10:44.82 Frank Right. 10:44.68 James to go because i never have to really edit our podcast Because it's done for us automatically. So I don't have my Camtasia. 10:51.19 Frank Okay. 10:51.30 James I don't have any premiere. I don't have anything. and 10:55.29 Frank DaVinci Resolve. 10:55.29 James I'm like. um I'm like, I could install DaVinci resolve and learn all of that in the next 45 minutes. 10:56.92 Frank No. awesome 11:01.44 Frank Yeah. 11:02.39 James Or. 11:04.27 Frank Or... 11:03.97 James I could have a look. I could have a little chat with AI. 11:07.52 Frank Heck yeah, AI solves all problems. That's what I've learned, and creates all problems. Basically, all problems revolve around AI. 11:16.22 James Yeah. Because as you know, I created Localmorph, which will be an app that I released onto the App Store eventually here that allows you to interact with your FFmpeg and through the browser. 11:21.19 Frank suggestion 11:23.41 James But it's really for just converting one file to another. But what I thought was fascinating at this moment in time is like. I have FFmpeg! I have two video files. 11:31.95 Frank Yes. Yes. 11:33.60 James I wonder if FFM pay can. More from together. 11:36.99 Frank Oh yeah. Oh it certainly can. 11:38.43 James Transform. 11:39.92 Frank It can. 11:42.07 James said 11:42.64 Frank And you can create like 12 different audio channels and then people will hear you out of the left ear and me out of the right ear. That would be kind of fun. 11:51.04 James Very awesome. 11:50.76 Frank There's lots of ways to do it and lots of ways to mess it up. That's what I know. um But actually, FFmpeg has amazing muxing. boxing controls like you can actually feed it a whole script file basically of like pull the segment out of this file uh map channel six out of this file into channel one of the output and like you can do all that kind of stuff and it's fantastic ah But like all things FFmpeg, it requires a PhD to understand Flash. 12:20.33 Frank um I don't know, maybe like 3000 credits worth of an AI to help you come up with the right command line for what you need to do. 12:28.01 James it's It's true. that That's the problem. So this is kind of where. From Disastery to help with GitHub Copilot and the CLI, it went into a masterclass, Frank. 12:39.32 Frank Yes. 12:39.33 James And. End. I've done this before where I'll go in and I'm like, Hey, cool pilot. And you can just pick like a small model, like a baby Luna or something. And you can just say, Hey, listen. you know baby luna or even i mean i code one flash i mean you can do this for pennies right which it's a time saver is, hey, I have this file. 12:52.95 Frank Yeah. 12:56.16 James over here i need you to convert it over here so i was just converting some moves to an mp4 and i'm like i need this compatibility i need these specs basically like you know just do this thing go 13:03.56 Frank Yeah. 13:06.56 James And it can do a great job. It'll even verify like it'll take like screenshots of the, you know, it'll do a bunch of cool stuff. like pull stuff out and verify that it did the thing which i think is just absolutely delicious and lovely um but in this scenario i was like wow this is like really complex but this is the cool part about ai is that in In days of yore, I guess I'd be like, hey, I got to go to the garage. 13:24.67 James I got to go to Camtasia to do this whole thing, right? Then I'm just sitting there. 13:27.27 Frank Yeah. 13:27.81 James I was like. open the fold folder, copilot, open the copilot CLI. And I was like. Hey bro, I have these two files. Here's what I want. And I was like, you know, I could, Frank, I could just say. 13:36.31 Frank Yeah. 13:38.23 James put them side by side do a thing i go no no no Here's what I want you to do is I want you. I'm such a butt to this. And I was like, I want you to pip this. 13:45.02 Frank Oh yeah. 13:46.58 James I want you to picture and picture. I want you to understand who's talking when. 13:50.69 Frank Wow 13:50.97 James put frames around it, transform back and forth, crossfade. 13:56.04 Frank wait but how do you expect it to actually generate this video like do you expect it to like write a python script and re-encode the entire video as like a procedural thing what what are your expectations though like because obviously you're not like you didn't give it an mcp connection to camtasia or blender or something like that so it's kind of on its own these things are advanced but they're on their own is it doing picture and picture and ffmpeg because that's a muck setting i don't know 14:24.98 James I got FFmpeg. I don't know. um All I said is... 14:27.13 Frank All FFmpeg? 14:28.09 James i said hey i said hey bro i got ffmpeg i got all the dev tools and as i say i said figure it out so 14:28.12 Frank Really? Oh my god. 14:32.88 Frank hilarious. 14:34.59 James So, that so what it did. And this is where I got fun. And so I started to ask me questions. What do you want? What kind of pip this and that? What corners do you want? Or do you want a frame around us? and well put it Just so you'll see, we have like a cool frame around ourselves. 14:43.68 Frank Yes. her 14:45.37 James It's like a whole thing. I should have put us in hexagons. I don't know. I could have done anything. 14:48.43 Frank a 14:49.19 James it started asking me questions and i was like yeah that's i never thought about doing something like that wass like do you want this do you want this and're like how how often and then it was like what they're like it's like what if 14:53.94 Frank Yeah. 14:58.93 James For example, James, ah one of one speakers talking, but the other speaker just kind of says. something for a little bit do you want to switch then like you know what i mean like and it's like no you you actually wanna smooth, you want you want the overlap to be there. 15:11.90 Frank Because I interrupt you all the time. You don't want it switching over. 15:14.14 James That is correct. A hundred percent. You know, you want that, that, that long tail and get the, the thing. I also didn't have any transcriptions or anything like that. So that would have been helpful with the time codes, you know, in general, but I was like. 15:28.20 James You got the audio stream. Figure it out. just figure it out so this little this little puppy gets to work now 15:31.68 Frank Oh my god. 15:36.61 James I don't know. I'm just auto piling it here. So I don't know exactly what it's doing, but it could have been writing Python scripts. It could have been running. um other things who knows i mean that's my assumption 15:45.10 Frank I just applaud your faith that like, okay, so it's, it's Sunday night. ah publishing time it's midnight Sunday night and like it's a small miracle you actually got the data files but I love that you're not willing to like what like what walk up some stairs or something to a computer that actually has editing software on it you're willing to just like 15:51.78 James Got two hours. 16:05.72 Frank Hope that you could write three or four paragraphs to an AI and the AI can just take over and I guess render out the stream. I applaud your... 16:13.33 James Ciao. 16:15.58 Frank Chutzpah. 16:17.01 James I have faith. i what We were watching Love is Blind UK, and i can't I can't stop watching that to go edit a podcast, right? 16:23.94 Frank ah 16:24.85 James Um, And I'll tell you so much. I sit down and and I start my little M1 starts to heat up a little bit. And I was like, oh, what's going on here? 16:30.99 Frank Yeah. 16:31.95 James I was like, oh. it's starting to render it's ffm pegging it's a rendering 16:35.63 Frank It's rendering on the M1, okay. 16:35.89 James Now. The. Other problem we had here is that we record a one hour and eight minute podcast, which takes. a while to render, by the way, because we're muxing. 16:46.40 James multiple things together here and doing custom pipping because I'm a butt. 16:50.71 Frank And you. But you didn't do it the easy way where normally like you could copy whole segments out of one file like a mux could be copies and that way you're really just Bit bound. IO bound. But no, you're... 17:03.17 Frank re-encoding you're generating frames the auto and then re-encoding both of those good job Good job. 17:10.11 James So. I wait. you know, about 15 minutes. Boom. MP4, 1080p. 17:15.37 Frank So impatient. 17:17.25 James Oh, no, by the way. I asked for a 1080p and then it was like, Hey, I just want to let you know, this is a 720p backup. And I was like. 17:23.90 Frank Wow. 17:24.52 James oh no i was like well don't do 1080p then only do 720p it's like Good idea. and out I was like, well, that's amazing, right? 17:30.40 Frank It's just an M1 babe. 17:30.89 James I didn't even check. I didn't even check. 17:31.69 Frank ah 17:32.93 James So. I get the MUX file. Frank Krueger. is beautiful. It's just like. 17:39.88 Frank yeah Okay. 17:39.88 James One shot. It won. It won. Shot at it. 17:43.94 Frank i I tell you what, I was so nervous about the podcast. Like I was too afraid to even click on the podcast link in my podcast player. Like eventually, like I clicked on it and fast forwarded to the middle just to see if we were both there. We were both there, thank goodness. But I've been too afraid to check the YouTube. So now I'm going to be, I'm super excited to check the YouTube now. 18:01.69 James well so now at this point The fun part is this. is Um, I was like, OK, I start listening to the MP3. It sounds really good. I get, I get to uploading, right? 18:12.79 James I got to upload a fireside to Patreon. Thanks for Patreon supporters. um and for those ai credits didn't get to go i get ready to upload it to to youtube but i said you know 18:16.58 Frank listen 18:23.61 James I should probably actually like watch more than five seconds of the first transition. So I watch and poor Heather, she's like watching me watch the video and I'm like, well, go back to merge conflict about, you know, there's like over and she's like, and then she starts to say it. 18:32.75 Frank Yeah. yeah 18:34.86 James She's like, okay, I'm sorry. It's just all like, I'm almost done. And. 18:39.52 Frank Can we get her to do the intro from now on? 18:39.51 James It's a bath. That'd be cool Well, now it's about 11 o 'clock at night. 18:43.19 Frank ah 18:44.41 James So she's like, I'm going to bed. And I said, okay. Uh, I said, I think I'm close. But then I start watching. Five minutes in, 10 minutes in. And all of a sudden... 18:52.83 Frank Oh. Let me guess. Did you learn something about synchronizing two different computers who have two different media timers and are not in sync? Did you learn that all media is out of sync? Even if you record from two different sources on the same machine, they're going to be out of sync. 19:10.84 Frank Did you learn that ugly, ugly lesson of computers? 19:14.22 James Well, let me tell you that It wasn't my fault. Frank Krueger. 19:17.52 Frank Oh, God. 19:17.56 James it wasn't my fault because 19:17.89 Frank Parts. it was my fault 19:19.94 James While the audio, so all of a sudden, as I'm watching. Pretty much what ends up happening here is. Frank says something, but his mouth does not move in sync because the timer of the audio video. So there is a delay. 19:31.65 James But... 19:32.08 Frank It was my fault. Okay. 19:33.54 James But... 19:34.59 Frank Bye. 19:35.35 James I started NSYNC and I got... out of zinc. 19:40.47 Frank Fun. um Yeah, so, hmm. Well, who knows how this backup was made? but tom so So normally what you do on this kind of stuff is you record two timestamps for every media stream. 19:46.78 James Magic. 19:53.84 Frank um You have what the what the codec. thinks the time is. And that's because it knows the sample rate and it knows a frame count. It has an internal integer. It just keeps incrementing that integer. 20:06.04 Frank That number's a lie. then it should also be pulling the system clock time. And so you have that as a second reference. by the way. That number is also a lie. Turns out CPUs throttle up and down constantly and that number gets out of sync. Constantly. So you have two numbers that are both lies. You have a bunch of frames and then you have a second source of audio video. 20:27.73 Frank Both of those numbers. Oh, I forgot. There's two numbers for both audio and video. So there's four numbers. And then you have the other stream. That's four other numbers. All of those are lies. And now what do you do? How do you reconcile eight different lies together? 20:42.40 Frank I love audio video. 20:44.72 James Yeah, I don't know. And that's about my pay grade. And that's like a soul five, six or a fable question, I guess. 20:48.69 Frank It's real. 20:52.17 Frank Well, it's really easy in practice because the drift tends to be um linear constant, so it it drifts. by roughly the same amount over time. So as long as you do what, you know, how we would the clap in the beginning and you do a clap at the end and you synchronize everyone's claps, then you can just repeat a few frames here, insert a tiny bit of silence there, and you can get the stupid things in sync. But without a clap. Without. 21:20.44 Frank A marker at the beginning and a marker at the end, a shared marker in the beginning and a shared marker in the end. It's maddening. It's maddening. I used to do editing like this and there was one I just could not get them in sync. So at every break in silence. 21:35.60 Frank i broke that into a separate segment and would hand move every segment to get everyone lined up and let me tell you you only want to do that once in your life and then you'll never do it again 21:45.63 James Yeah, no, I... Specifically, I've done that many, many a times because. there's some times in which i'm recording a video and like usually at the end or something like that if i have a lot of things running on my machine especially Things are, you know. ah building and processing and testing and agents are running all these things. Even though I'm on this really beautiful. 22:06.57 James mac mini or super powerful pc it's like you're still stressing your machine so 22:10.86 Frank Yeah. 22:11.14 James if you have other additional processing so like often I'll have like voice processing on. here so like right now i I think I have it off right now uh here but if i was to turn on voice focus mode now voice focus mode is on now this is software effects So it's actually going to tax it here. 22:28.24 James Now. If I turn it back off, that it's only hardware. so There's nothing here taxing it. Hardware on this little. my Stream Deck and my audio processor off off of my computer. But I've had it before where I'm doing a bunch of stuff on our pod and I'll have voice focus on the software encoding. And then my audio video starts to drift a little bit, right? And that's kind of a bummer. And then I would do that thing where I'd move it over. 22:49.10 Frank Heh heh. 22:49.39 James Now. 22:49.79 Frank It's the worst 22:50.70 James In this case, what I found fascinating. is the audio drift for you is fairly constant. So you were just about a half second delayed. I was drifting. you know, slowly over time at about a half second by the end or so. 23:04.09 Frank Mm hmm. 23:04.36 James And I was like, okay, can I just get this close? Cause I got an hour at this point. 23:08.64 Frank Yeah. 23:08.91 James So I go back to baby Luna and the co-pilot CLI. And I just talked to her. I said, hey, listen. The video you made was. Fantastic. I said it was so good. 23:18.01 Frank Yeah. shuskis Mm hmm. 23:20.01 James You did exactly what I wanted. 23:20.29 Frank You got to. Compliment sandwich. Always start with a compliment. 23:24.70 James is It's a thing of beauty. It's a thing that I could never possibly imagine making. 23:27.59 Frank so 23:28.24 James And you artisanally crafted this. ah 23:31.22 Frank But... 23:33.29 James But... 23:33.68 Frank But. 23:35.05 James There's a problem. uh the problem is this drift problem so i explained the whole thing blah blah blah So... The first thing Baby Luna asks... And it says... Wow. It didn't actually say that, so I'm gonna assume that it said this. 23:47.41 James wow i'm so sorry that that happened let's let's see if we can fix this so the first thing it asks me it says Can you open the source file? 23:57.05 Frank Okay. 23:57.50 James Because I was looking at... 23:57.72 Frank define source file. 23:59.17 James I was looking at the muxed file, the final file. Can you go look at the recovered file, the original Frank file, the original James file? 24:02.16 Frank Right. 24:06.41 Frank Ow. Right. Sure. 24:07.49 James And can you tell me? If the audio is in sync in the original file, is it a me problem or is it a them problem? 24:13.28 Frank Right. Yeah. You know how many credits it's going to take for it to figure out if audio and video are in sync? Yeah, that's definitely a human thing. for now. Give it a few years. Then we'll ask the AI to do that part too. 24:25.11 James For now. So I open up set MP4s and guess what? They are out of sync. The recovery. 24:32.59 Frank Ah. 24:32.06 James Files are not pure. They they haven't been processed. 24:34.94 Frank That. 24:35.34 James They're pure raw backups, Frank. 24:38.05 Frank Yeah, it's probably just the moment one started recording. And the moment the others start recording and they set both of those to zero. Because like I said, all those clocks are lies. 24:44.56 James Yep. Yep. 24:46.74 Frank So yeah. Of course. That poor engineer, though. 24:48.40 James And because 24:49.44 Frank I hope you didn't write that poor engineer that had to even find those files. 24:50.09 James Yeah. 24:53.41 James Oh yeah. And then I hit the, you know, I hit the start button. So that makes sense that mine's more in sync. Yours is a little delay. They fix that in the post-processing bingo bango. 24:59.84 Frank Mm hmm. 25:00.64 James Um, Fascinating, right? so I go, hey, this is a problem. 25:03.25 Frank Yeah. 25:04.16 James They say, okay, let's let's they go goes let's talk through it. So it's like, hey, okay, let's talk about James' file. Okay, buth blah, blah, blah. Let's talk about Frank's file, blah, blah, blah. It's like, cool. I think... And he asked me a few other questions. I think I can. I think I can wing it And I was like, all right, let's go. 25:18.97 Frank Half second. One second, two seconds, just put in random seconds and have it like, what? 25:20.45 James Yeah. 25:22.99 James No, no No, no. I was like, I was like, Hey, the andi well, it asked me, it was like, Hey, is it, is it, it is it constant? Is it moving? Is it half second? Is it quarter second? 25:31.63 Frank Yeah. 25:31.53 James Is it blah, blah, blah. Like, what do you think it is? And I go, well, it's about a half second. Yeah, whatever. 25:36.34 Frank You're just guessing. 25:36.56 James So it said here. it said here's what i'm gonna do it's like i'm gonna do um It said halfway into the video. I'm going to... It's like, I'm gonna make a sample for you. 25:47.83 Frank Love it. So cute. 25:49.26 James So stupid. So good. 25:50.31 Frank So helpful. 25:51.59 James it's like i'm going to make a sample for you i'm going to adjust the audio and tell me If the audio is adjusted enough. 25:57.98 Frank Hilarious I'm curious what random constants I picked for that first shot. So did it one shot it? Did it did it vibe podcast us already? 26:08.63 James So... 26:09.00 Frank vibe sync and sync on vibes 26:11.13 James Vibes sink. Well, so I. 26:12.98 Frank Hmm. 26:12.98 James I looked at the i looked at the the samples it made and I was like. Good enough. I was like. I was like. Good enough. 26:20.18 Frank Frank over talks me anyway. 26:20.18 James I think for you. I think for yours, I was like, I was like another 0 .1 second, like very minimal because it was like, it was like. 26:25.89 Frank Okay. 26:27.48 James it It would even ask me, and it was like, Do you hear the audio first or do you hear or do you see? Frank's mouth moving. Wait, what do you, and what, or? Or do you see it right? 26:38.98 James Exactly. 26:39.28 Frank Love it. 26:40.17 James Yeah. So it was a very, it it it really walked me through the process. I was very impressed. 26:44.35 Frank Yeah. 26:45.06 James And I said, Yeah. Okay. Adjust it a little bit more. It gave me another sample. I said, okay, let's, let's, let's do this thing. And that is the file on YouTube that you see there today. The file that you see there today is a... 26:56.82 James GitHub Copilot, CLI, Baby Luna. ffmpeg probably a crap ton of python maybe even a hugging face model in there for good measure transformer who knows just doing its own thing and it's just yolo in it and living its best life and it did it frank and i uploaded it by like i think like 11 30 or something like that so Boom. 27:17.49 Frank Met the deadline. um Yeah, i'm I'm impressed. I'm going to ignore the comments that you said people left because just from your story, I am very impressed. I feel bad for the the team at After Effects. like how How long until you can be like... 27:33.65 Frank and add some explosions in the background. And wouldn't it be cool if, you know, Frank was a blue alien or something like that instead? Could I have a little Andorian ear or antennae or something like that? 27:45.64 Frank um i it's it's kind of super cool this is getting back to what i was saying i've been saying because of course it all has to come back to that of AI. is the software. 27:56.96 Frank at some point it's not so much that i think we're still kind of doing it wrong we're using ais to create software Eventually, AI is the software. and It's going to be expensive, but um I think you'd. 28:08.79 James yeah 28:09.40 Frank kind of proved me right again. So I appreciate that too. 28:12.42 James It was kind of wild. I mean, I put in our show notes here um for. So for the audio one, I then took the audio. And I threw it in Adobe podcast for a full audio cleanup, which is really good. 28:24.08 Frank Okay. 28:24.88 James uh 28:24.79 Frank Remaster it, yeah. 28:26.20 James Because who, you know, it wasn't pure, you know, I don't know what it did. I was just like, let me just do this. A very minimal processing on the AI. And then I put in the bottom, I said, no, we had some issues with local recording. So this is a cloud backup process with GitHub, Copilot, CLI and Adobe podcast. So like it's in there. If you're paying attention, people. 28:41.74 James um But yeah, I'll call out here. 28:43.54 Frank But... 28:45.06 James To Jimmy Scott. was complaining about my audio and he asked if i was encoding on a pentium 266 the answer is 28:48.52 Frank Oh, no. 28:51.08 Frank Close. 28:51.99 James Close. Uh, 28:54.78 Frank Oh, that's funny, but we didn't get the AI checkmark in YouTube, right? We're not an AI. Podcast. Yeah. 29:02.04 James No. 29:02.61 Frank Not that we are, but not that we ever will be. 29:02.81 James No. Yeah. Yeah. 29:05.66 Frank um that's funny though like it's funny like how much processing you can do with ai until you finally get that check mark. 29:12.38 James What? I think this kind of comes down to the point and what's fascinating about this data of recovery, but really this podcast is more than that. It's really about. Using this AI in unique. 29:23.10 James interesting ways um that you may not. 29:24.66 Frank Yeah. 29:25.60 James thing possible so Uh, i was recently doing this and though we know we won't go on forever on this but This is kind of a prime example because on Friday. I was. 29:37.07 James We're launching this new new thing that that I don't know when we're launching, it so I'm not going to talk about it yet. but We're launching this new thing. And. i was like you know what this really needs is like motion graphics i don't think you really need somebody like demoing it in the product i don't think it demos because it's it's a more of a long-running thing i said it's more explanation and there's paths and all these things. 29:47.05 Frank Hmm. 29:51.27 Frank Oh. Mm hmm. 29:55.99 James I said, I really think a motion graphic would be good. So I asked the. the design team i said well how long would this take like i don't know like three weeks And I said, cool, let me just go. 30:02.36 Frank Yeah. 30:03.46 James And I went into. microsoft co-pilot co-works i went into the co-work because it's like a ah work thing you know 30:08.24 Frank Oh, I don't know that one. pap Okay. 30:09.67 James And basically co-pilot, you know, like consumer co-pilot, like chat GPT, like chat GPT, but co-Microsoft version, right? 30:12.15 Frank Mm hmm. 30:16.11 James And I go into co-work, which is like grounded in your work. And I said, here's the PowerPoint. Here's this stuff. And I said, here's what I want you to do. I want you to. I want you to ask me questions, but I want you to turn this 30:27.10 Frank Yeah. 30:27.87 James deck and I want you to turn this image specifically this bla blah blah blah into an entire... 45 second motion graphic explaining everything with animations blah blah the pass i hope the code will go all this stuff And it's like. 30:40.56 James Cool that sounds good. So I just waited like five minutes and it was like. 30:43.03 Frank God. Frickening. 30:44.57 James And i was it was like, here you go. What did it give me, Frank? 30:47.02 Frank What did it do? 30:46.86 James It did not give me it did not give me an MP4. 30:48.56 Frank Yeah. 30:49.72 James It gave me an entire... website. It gave me a full animated website with frames and everything with a play. 30:53.55 Frank aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa that makes more sense. Yeah. 30:57.98 James Pause an editable, configurable. um settings for verbiage and this and that. And it said, when you're ready. Let me know and I'll process the MP4 for you. 31:10.05 James Stupid. 31:10.45 Frank when all When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When all you know how to do is write HTML. you can solve any problem with html i was really curious what it was gonna do um because there are there are ways for ais to do this like um i don't know have you ever used the three blue one brown um They have their like their own Python scripting language for creating animations and things like that. 31:31.02 James Mm. 31:33.61 Frank So I've suggested that to other people. I'm like, hey, if you want to create like presentations or motion graphics and you want an AI to assist you, have it do that. Because then it's not interfacing with like PowerPoint and that's all complicated. 31:44.58 Frank You need MCP servers. This is just a text file. This is just a bunch of Python code that gets rendered out to a thing. I thought I was being smart. uh what you did is even smarter or what the ai decided to do is even smarter ah you know html has canvas it has svg It can has logic. um Sure. Why not? It's the new Flash. 32:05.10 Frank Wow. Okay. 32:05.76 James I was like... 32:06.61 Frank I'm gonna ask for motion graphics for so many things now. 32:09.96 James Oh yeah. 32:10.85 Frank How good do you think Microsoft's... 32:10.66 James How? 32:15.15 Frank MAI can do. at it. That'd be kind of fun. 32:17.67 James i think the image one could do really i mean you can throw anything i mean it's kind of crazy I mean, and then I was like, i now I need an MP4. And I was like, cool, I'll use FFmpeg to do that for you. 32:26.79 Frank Don't stop it. 32:26.61 James and then just that As I... 32:30.11 Frank You're like, no, sir. I have my own screen cap software that I wrote. 32:34.28 James No, I was like, no, give me the MP4. I'm not doing anything. You do it all. So I did it. It totally i exported. I don't know what it did. Raw magic. You know, so so stuff like that is really fascinating. Obviously I generate images. 32:44.79 James I do stuff for like the YouTube and and things like this. 32:46.84 Frank Yeah. 32:47.70 James processor audio i thought this was a really unique use case where i had a real problem On a time crunch. No, I could have just opening editing software, but I actually don't think it was worth it in that instance. I think it was worth my five or $6 of AI tokens to just be like, here's the thing. 33:02.63 James get it i don't even know if it was that much to be honest with you because 33:02.83 Frank Yeah. 33:05.37 James it It's mostly just processing it. and writing little scripts. so Yeah. 33:10.31 Frank You're so much better at this than I am. Can I tell you my... AI my data loss story because it involves AI also. I will keep this down to under one or two minutes, I swear. 33:16.87 James Oh. Okay. 33:19.96 Frank Okay. So I'm... I'm training an AI. I am creating the AI. And I like to... Look at past training so I can see if the new training is better. 33:29.23 James Now. 33:29.04 Frank It's good. It's called science. I'm doing science, fake science, but I'm doing science. And then... uh i'm in vs code and i'm like oh look at a bunch of these files i'm going to delete those files press the delete button good they're gone and then i look back and i'm like That was all my data. That was all my trainings. That was everything. 33:50.33 Frank All science out. down the road. or whatever, out the window. That's the right metaphor. and ah How was I logged in? I was logged in through SSH with VS Code because that's my favorite way to run VS Code these days. run that remote SSH. 34:04.48 Frank So I'm like, okay, Unix machine, how do you get data back on a Unix machine? Quick answer is you don't. So you go to an AI and you're like, hey, AI, um please don't make fun of me because now I'm really embarrassed and everything. I'm like. What do I do now? And it's like. 34:20.63 Frank So here's six different apps you could go get to try to scan your hard drive and look for like JVAG files or whatever the heck you're going to look for. And it's just going to output a bunch of stuff. 34:31.67 Frank And then it's like. But don't. Just don't. Just, you know what? murdered the past or whatever whatever the line is from kylo ren it's like you're gonna do this it's gonna take four hours it's gonna generate eight billion files on your hard drive and you're have gonna look through those files you know what just The past doesn't exist. The present exists. The future may exist at some point. Just go with that. And I'm like, you know what, AI? 34:58.57 Frank I'm with you. And so that's what we did. That's how the AI helped me recover my data. by not recovering my data. So you are so much better at this than I am. 35:08.29 James i mean i just got lucky that the files were there but i did turn the files into a real thing in general. And I will say there at least weren't any comments about. the audio lag drifting so that was really good i mean jimmy scott did say that my video got better uh in general and it did but uh yeah i did notice that i got a little fuzzy 35:20.96 Frank Yeah. 35:26.55 Frank No compliments on the picture in picture. No one noticed it's a different picture in picture. 35:30.89 James It's... it did it like put us on different sides and then it put a little like white frame around it I would say it's like not dramatically different, but it is different enough that I notice it, obviously. 35:39.31 Frank Okay. Yeah. 35:42.24 James I like it better, but that's me. Yeah. 35:44.49 Frank So will you be doing this episode? 35:44.80 James Hmm. 35:46.68 Frank With that, uh... with that AI. 35:49.01 James No, I don't got time for that 35:49.28 Frank Have you built a skill yet? You gotta have a generator skill now. 35:53.07 James I think if I was to say generate a skill and a script and blah, blah, nah, I think it's okay. I mean. ah You know. I should. i mean The nice thing now is that I have that. co-pilot session so i could go back and say generate a skill let's create a little repo let's you know understand if there's scripts or code like you said that needs to be run here python scripts let's let it go to work, but. 36:07.38 Frank Yeah. 36:13.35 James um 36:14.43 Frank No. 36:14.45 James Yeah, I should probably do that at a minimum, at least so I could re reproduce it if I needed to. But my hope is that everything just works. Absolutely flawless for that until the end of time. 36:24.84 Frank Only one way to find out. 36:26.78 James Keep recording more episodes of Merge Conflict and keep subscribed to Merge Conflict so you can stay up to date with the latest and greatest and whatever's happening in Frankenstein world. But that's going to do it for this week's Merge Conflict. Like, subscribe. 36:40.03 James Go over to the YouTube. we are there you know YouTube is changing the monetization. Guidelines. We're so close. We're more than two thirds of the way there to monetization. We only need. 36:50.79 James We're at 2086 qualified watch hours. We only need 3000. 36:56.23 Frank so f five five 36:56.99 James So come on, people, go watch. 36:57.46 Frank So close. 36:58.92 James and just turn it on, leave it on on loop. 37:01.47 Frank leave it in the background okay 37:02.100 James Overnight. 37:04.58 Frank Now we're gonna get thrown out. 37:04.83 James Yeah. I mean, technically our watch hours. Okay, so this is in the last. Let me calculate here. 37:11.84 Frank You love looking this up. 37:12.63 James Thank you. 37:13.36 Frank okay 37:15.17 James Calculator. The question is like. Because we've like got more. So let's say our average right now. per 28 days. Is it? 157. And we'd say times. 37:26.46 Frank projecting out. 37:27.97 James 53 weeks. Yeah. No, that's not right. 37:30.17 Frank Fire number. What's our fire number? 37:32.40 James Yeah. 37:33.56 Frank ah 37:33.67 James There you go. times We'll say, yeah, 12. Now we gotta be getting more than that. Cause that's only 2000. So maybe we're at lost hope. We need to, we need more watch time. People go. 37:44.18 James Watch the thing and do the thing. but That's going to do it for this week's Merch Coffee. Until next time, I'm James Montemagno. 37:49.78 Frank And I'm Frank Krueger. Thanks for watching and listening. 37:53.37 James Peace.