 Thank you for joining me. I just- Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! That didn't quite go as smoothly as I thought, but- Yep. That's me, 10 years ago. Videos like this were filmed on a Sony Handycam that actually belonged to my boss at NCIX's son. So, we're using the camera's onboard audio, an entry-level photography light that we borrowed, and instead of taking screen capture, we just... we zoomed in on the screen. And yes, that is actually electrical tape stuck to the front of the screen. Nowadays, we put a lot more technology, talent, and time into our videos, and I like to think that it really shows. So thanks to B&H Photo for sponsoring this video, where we'll be doing a 10-year challenge, not with Facebook profile pics, but rather with the production quality in our videos that continues to change as our channel ages. And I have got to admit, I actually got really nostalgic going through all this stuff. And I'm not the only one. Brandon? Can I get a challah? Super nostalgic! That's not a challah! B&H Photo is the largest non-chain electronics retailer in the US, serving amateur and professional photographers and videographers since 1973. With fair pricing and a fantastic shopping experience, both online and in store, B&H has been our go-to gear store for over six years now. Check them out at the link in the video description, or learn more about our experiences with B&H at the end of the video. The early days were pretty rough. Like, this one, where we accidentally filmed an entire video without audio, and then instead of reshooting it, because I didn't have time, I just dubbed a voiceover at my desk. Wow, what is that? That's the transmitter, the infrared transmitter. Then there's this video that has audio, but with unbearable background noise, because the camera and its onboard microphone were so close to the computer hardware we were trying to film. So there's a few buttons down at the bottom of the board. You've got your OC Genie. It's so funny for me to hear people harken back to the good old days when Linus Tech Tips was better, back when he was at NCIX. I mean, can you guys even imagine if I uploaded this video today? Why does Yvonne get a properly cut off at the end of the clip? Oh, I feel bad for the girl. That's the actual end of the video. Like, we didn't edit that just now. And sadly, the quality of Linus Tech Tips basically didn't change for a solid year. LTT's first real hardware purchase was a Canon Powershot SX1IS, which was decidedly consumer grade, but definitely an upgrade over the original Sony camera, because that one recorded to tape. So to ingest our footage, we actually had to connect the camera to a PC over Firewire, or actually a Mac, to be more specific, and then capture the footage off of it. So yes, my friends, that thing was from the era when faster than real-time footage capture was a feature. What a pain in the butt. The SX1IS actually recorded 1080p 30fps video, fully digitally to SD cards, and had a pretty wicked optical zoom. But there were actually some ways that it was worse. It didn't support any form of external audio, so we couldn't even use that stupid gray Twinkie microphone. Mind you, at that point, the goal was not great production values on Linus Tech Tips, which was supposed to be our vlog channel anyway. Because remember, when I worked at NCIX, we were actually working on two video series concurrently. NCIX Tech Tips was, believe it or not, the higher production value one, with editing, some graphics, and a little bit of preparation on my part. The problem was that we couldn't make those videos fast enough to meet the demand from all of our partners. So as a compromise, and it was actually my boss's idea, even though it ended up biting him in the butt when I ended up splitting later, we created Linus Tech Tips, which was still owned by NCIX at that time, and the videos still went on the NCIX website, but the company name was no longer in the title of the channel. So the idea was to give me a bit more leeway to be edgier and not worry as much about quality, which quickly turned into what I called the one-take policy, where we would just keep recording through stumbles with the goal of shooting as many as six to eight videos in a single session that would last just one to two hours. Today we'll be unboxing the Sans Digital Tower Raid. You know what I like? I like things that are called special edition. You can see there's some more black stickers. These are to prevent people from taking it apart. Never take apart a hard drive. Thank you for checking out my blog on the WD Black. And that was really how things were for a long while. That is until we upgraded to a... Well, okay, looking back, it's kind of cute to me that I was so excited about this, but to a Canon XA10 that I pre-ordered thanks to our increased NCIX Tech Tips budget back in 2011. Actually, you know what? No, in fairness, this was a big upgrade, because even though it was a fixed lens camera, so barely even above a consumer camcorder, unlike the old Sony one, which used a proprietary interface for external audio sources, really limiting our upgrade options, the XA10 had XLR, which meant that we could finally use professional external mics like the Sennheiser EW110G3. Later that year, we would make our first hire, Luke, who, by the way, grossly misrepresented his experience in both camera operation and video editing. Yeah, you heard me, Luke. And let's start with a warm welcome for our guest camera operator, who is also interviewing for the Tech Tips assistant job. And we also reached 100,000 subscribers. This was after three years of videos that, quite honestly, I can't even bear to go back and watch now. Like, those of you who have been with us since then, you guys are hardcore. Like, just amazing. That stuff sucked. A year after that, in October 2012, we finally got our first piece of real professional caliber gear. At $8,000, the Sony FS700 would be our company's, which hadn't officially started yet, most expensive equipment purchase for years to come. By the end of 2012, we had moved into the era of Linus Media Group being a thing, and Linus using his garage as a studio, which actually worked great because we could open the garage door to give us some natural light, because we still didn't have enough lights, and we reno'd the whole thing into a state that, I mean, we thought looked kind of cool and techy, including the original Tech Quickie set, which, believe it or not, was not an actual green screen, but rather real white walls that were supposed to look kind of like I was inside one of those infinite white Apple commercials, but actually looked more like I was standing in front of an ugly piece of drywall. Overall, though, even in spite of some stumbles, this was when our videos began to look like not complete scorched garbage for the first time. We had two Kino Flow Diva lights, plus whatever cheapies we could borrow from NCIX when we weren't back there doing contract work, we had a lav mic of our own, and we had our FS700 still shooting at 1080p, equipped with a new shoulder stock and a counterweight that seemed like a great idea for balancing the rig, but in reality was just brutally heavy to carry around anytime we'd actually need it, like our first year at CES, where we made over 50 videos with just three full-time employees. Speaking of employees, this is actually the first video that our fourth employee, Brandon, ever shot. Look at that. It's like the guy was destined for greatness, isn't it? You got some nice bokeh in the background there and everything. I mean, not that we paid for the privilege. Even though we had a decent camera by this point, it would be over a year before we bought any extra lenses for it. I actually never told Ed or Brandon to bring their personal lenses to work, but like, they refused to use the kit one, and I refused to buy any more, so everyone's a winner, right? Anyway, when we finally bought a couple of Sigma lenses, we didn't really get a quality boost because they were the same ones that we had already been borrowing for some time. Now, around the time that Brandon showed up, coincidence, we also released our first video with dedicated B-roll footage, and it's actually, frankly, kind of amazing that we continued with the concept, considering how bad these shots are in hindsight. I mean, I thought at that time that it was just a waste of time. I was like, well, come on, you already have the host there. You've already got the camera there. You've already got the product. If you want to see it closer, just move your butt over closer to the thing, and then just like step back when I'm ready to address the camera. Like, what do you need to come back later for? But we did, and it was around this time that we also made our first PC build guide ever online as Tech Tips. This was actually supposed to be a statement piece for us. It was the first time that we were going to try to meet or even exceed the production values of the NCIX Tech Tips that we had left behind with my old employer. And we spent a lot of time on the intro, the graphics, the lighting setup, and we even tried to get like as much depth to the shot as possible by pulling the table out from the shelves behind me and then positioning Brandon literally cheeks to the wall at the other end of the garage. One of the most amazing things about this video to me, which ended up doing 50,000 views in the first day, which was like a huge deal for us at that time, is that I was still doing all of these videos unscripted with at most bullet point notes open on a nearby laptop or scrawled on a nearby piece of paper. That changed when we switched sets yet again to the infamous Langley house, and Brandon won another battle with me. This is where the teleprompter makes its first appearance, allowing me to read my notes while looking directly into the lens. That is at least once we started shooting our A-roll on a tripod because Brandon refused to try to hold the camera with the teleprompter hanging off the front of it. What a lightweight. Oddly enough, the kitchen set that we moved over to shortly after that became so beloved by our fans that even though we were only actually in the Langley house for just over a year, here we are today, years into our current studio, and we still have people kind of harkening back to the good old days in the kitchen. Anyway, by this point, our budget started to increase, so we invested more in lighting, we bought a cheap piece of green screen cloth that was so thin we had to fold it three times over to prevent light leakage from the window behind, even with the blinds closed, and we got our first slider that we used to get shots like this one. This is also around the time that we made our first purpose-made thumbnail image instead of just using a still from the video, and also when we made a pretty significant shift into actually writing full scripts, word-for-word or nearly, instead of just doing vlogs. So you guys see that eye contact I'm making with the camera there? That's because the video is scripted. Ultimately, we made this move as part of a change in direction towards reviews rather than unboxings, and as a way to both improve the information density of our videos and to leverage our larger production team without causing inefficiencies. So it was more work for me upfront to create the scripts, but it made the shoots much easier and less time-consuming because retakes were simple, and editing was also faster because there was just less garbage footage for, at that time, Taron to sift through. In September of 2014, we celebrated one million subscribers with our seven-member production team, and over the following year, we built out our kit with fancier things like diffusers, which are especially important when you're using a jib, which was another new toy that we used for top-down shots like these. In 2015, we moved, finally, to the studio that we're in now. In retrospect, that seems like so few people to occupy this big of a space. We continued to build out our kit with all sorts of random stuff, closing out the year with our purchase of two Sony A7S IIs, which became our B-roll and run-and-gun show coverage cameras, pushing our poor Canon XA cameras to purely channel super fun duty, RIP. In 2016, we bought our first big kid lights, our two Arri Sky panels, which are super bright, not to mention RGB, something our channel was definitely severely lacking, and then we kicked off 2017 by getting a bunch of new gear to make our lives easier at shows like CES, including our much more reliable Lectrosonics wireless mic packs, a variety of pods of various sorts, and a couple of knockoff EZ rigs, which we only just replaced, like last week, with the real deal, because they're like $5,000 each. Honestly, though, worth every penny, because these things have changed our lives, and they allowed us to finally achieve my goal of handheld filming with a teleprompter. Anyway, shortly after we got back from CES, our new cameras arrived from RED, which, while painful for the bank account, and actually for our workflows at the time, because like 8K footage, there was definitely a workstation upgrade in there somewhere, they also gave us kind of a sense of relief, because at that point, we had reached the top. There was nowhere else to go with our gear. I mean, people shoot Hollywood movies on these things. And yeah, who did I think I was kidding? Brandon always wants more stuff. So last year, after we changed over our set from something more setty to something that I think feels quite a bit more natural, we picked up a DJI Ronin 2 gimbal, which allows us to take smooth walking shots like this one, and then right before CES 2019, we bought a handful of Canon C200s to replace our poor A7S IIs that are both in various states of disrepair. And all of these things, aside from the fact that we're just geeks and we love new toys to play with, are essentially being purchased for the sole purpose of you guys being able to see and hear me in greater and greater definition. Something that over the past 10 years has surely become less appealing, which I guess brings us perfectly into how B&H figures into all of this. The vast majority of those purchases have actually been through B&H, going all the way back to our original FS700. And even though I've only been to their New York store once on a day that it happened to be closed, they've been very good to us over the years with fair pricing, great customer service. We've actually had to return a fair few things for an assortment of reasons. Excellent delivery times, especially after their Canadian shipping got more competitive a few years back, and generally great selection. So it is no BS for me to say that it was pretty cool to have them reach out to sponsor this video, because to me, that's yet another indication of just how far we've come, going from just even six years ago, not being able to get an appointment at a trade show, to be shown around someone's booth, to being taken seriously by the real players in the production space. So thanks to B&H for sponsoring this video, and thanks to you guys for watching. If you disliked it, well, you know what to do. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Probably the newer stuff, not the older stuff so much. Also linked down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum, which you should totally join.