So, on January 1st 2020, I made a goal. I said: let's just see, if we can hit five million subscribers, we just hit six. So I think it's finally time to show you the entire setup, as well as just how many smartphones we've managed to collect over the years come on in. So this is where pretty much every video for the last four years has been filmed from when they used to look like this to now, and they look like this but anyways. There is a lot going on here that I haven't showed anybody like these. I spent pretty much two entire days putting this together.
It's like nine boxes worth of NATO leaf, hexagon panels, and I had to figure out a way of a making sure I just fit them all in b, making sure that every single panel is connected to something and c just making sure that I fill this space evenly and to be really honest, I'm just glad I didn't screw it up, because if I got the first few panels, let's say these three, just a tiny bit off angle: the entire thing would be slanted, but it worked out. These panels take up literally zero physical space in the room. They act as one of the biggest soft boxes I've ever used, but also a thousand other things they can dance to songs. They can react to your voice. You'll be seeing a lot of this in upcoming videos, both as like a background for b-roll, but also just a way to create an atmosphere across the entire room.
Okay, this cabinet, basically just an absolute truckload of smartphone gadgets. Now the thing with smartphone gadgets is that they accumulate quickly like with every smartphone gadgets video. I tried to feature more gadgets than the one before and I think the last one had like 19 in it. So I took everything out I sorted through them and for every gadget that I didn't think I would need again. I gave them away and that actually cleared this up quite nicely.
Oh, yeah also um caps. If you start my videos two three years ago. Well, first, thank you, but you'll also know that in literally every video I would wear a cap and I can't remember getting to a stage where that was my defining characteristic like there was one time when I was attending an honor launch event and for some reason Anna wanted to let people know that I was attending, so they made this teaser post, but the teaser was nothing to do with how I reviewed phones or tested batteries or cameras. It was the fact that I wore a hat but yeah anyways. I used to wear caps.
Now I don't. Okay, let's talk about boxes, so I'm in the lucky position where I get to test a lot of phones. I'm going to show you those phones in just a minute, but with every phone comes a box, so I've kept the important ones and just kind of categorized them, so you've got Samsung. You've got Xiaomi, you've got apple. Actually, you've got a couple of very special phones like uh the Escobar gold 11 pro, that was a fun chapter.
Okay, this is where it gets fascinating. We've got two sets of Napoleon aurora, light panels up top and then two identical lg, OLED, 4k, cx TVs, not sponsored, and we basically use those two to create a mood. So actually, every time I finish a script now I go back through it and think what kinds of messages was I trying to convey and what colors might best represent that and something we started doing on top of that recently is well. Creating our own custom YouTube videos just to play on these TVs to go in the background of our YouTube videos and the hilarious side effect of having two identical screens. This close to each other is that well one remote controls them both whether you want it to or not, okay, it's time to break a bit of an illusion here.
So I'm hoping that if you're watching this video you've watched at least one other video filmed in this setup and if you have, you'll notice that this entire room is symmetrical, but it isn't. If you look a little closer you'll realize that the right-hand side is something like 25 percent longer than the left-hand side and on one hand, big deal, but as someone who's a little nuts for things being aligned, it did create a couple of dilemmas. Like do I make the screen on the right hand, side bigger, because there's more space to fill, that was one option. Do I centralize each screen and each Napoleon pattern on its respective wall, so put the TV something like here, maybe, but the conclusion that I ended up coming to was off central alignment? So I just picked like one point in the room: just actually one line coming down from this lamp here and even though that's not the middle of the room, everything is symmetrical based on that line, and the benefit of that is that unless you see the entire room in one shot, you can't really tell it's not symmetrical. Now right in the middle of the entire setup.
Is the beastless computer that I've ever bought? It's a 2019 mac pro with a 16 core intel, Leon w? It's got an 8, terabyte, SSD and 192 gigabytes of ram. Furthermore, it was one of those purchases where I went back and forwards and back and forwards on, but one day I was just like screw it. If this means, I can spend less time waiting for things to happen and more time with family and friends I'll make the cost work, I'll figure it out and if you're enjoying this video a sub to the channel would be stupendous and that's all being wired up to one of apple's pro display. DRS everything I edit on this machine is something like 25 faster than everything I used to do on my MacBook there's more screen, everything happens instantly and, unlike the MacBook, this doesn't sound like it's about to take off every time. You open, google, chrome, honestly just listen to this thing and if we just go behind a second there's, two important things here: there's a 12 terabyte hard drive to keep the mac pro backed up and the time must, which is one of the world's worst named, but best sounding Bluetooth.
Speakers, which fun fact is actually what I use to just blast out: music right before I jump on camera, because when you're filming a YouTube, video, you've kind of got to be your most energetic self, and sometimes you need a bit of a push to get there. When you spent the entire day prior just sitting and tapping keys, so you get the idea. There is a lot of hardware here, but where are the cables? I'm glad you asked, I don't like cables at all, so I basically use three different techniques to try and get rid of them. One is to create a sort of central point, a point that you can technically reach with one cable from every bit of tech and for me, that's right here. So almost every cable from the TVs to the screen to the mac pro all end up in the same spot, and the second tip is to then cover that spot with something.
That's ideally organic, something that wouldn't look out of place. Even if you weren't trying to hide cables and number three is to use cutouts. So my desk here has a little ridge where I've planted a LED strip, but the ridge also doubles as a completely hidden way to route cables like from this PS5. Yes, we have a PS5, I've been using it for almost a month. Now I love it and I think quite a few of you actually spotted it lingering in the background of other videos and just kind of assumed, that was me teasing a potential upcoming review, but it wasn't.
I made a conscious decision a few years ago to almost exclusively focus on smartphones, to spend all my time testing one type of product so that in theory I could try and be the best at testing that kind of product. But more and more, I am becoming open to the idea of testing other things. So let me know if that's something you'd like to see. Okay, just before we get to the phone craziness, I feel like we've kind of neglected this part of the room. It looks simple, but this has probably had the most thought put into it of anything here.
This is where we film, for starters, I've ditched the 14 IKEA table that would wobble every time I touched it for just solid wood. That kind of hurt. I swapped out the orange and black racer chair for something that focuses properly on ergonomics. I spent a lot of time sitting, so I just kind of decided at some point that that is a priority. The one I ended up going for is the Herman miller in body, and it does literally feel like sitting on a bubble.
But do you know the main thing? That's recently changed is lighting. So actually, just a couple of months ago, my entire YouTube lighting setup was just two of these they're just cheap amazon. com led flat panels, and they're. Not bad, don't get me wrong, but the way it works with lighting is that the larger your source of light, the softer the light you get, which in this case is a good thing. So, to give you an example, this is what I would have looked like before with the old lights.
This is what I look like now, thanks to this, the future 120d mark ii, but if all we had was that then half my face would be shadow and that's where this comes in the tube light yeah, I know the number of times I wanted to pick this up and use it as a lightsaber. Let's not go there, but basically this is the perfect rim light. It highlights the entirety of one side of my body to almost give me a sort of outline to separate me from the background, and then the entire thing is topped off with this. This is a hair light, which is one of those things that when I first heard about it, like a light for your hair, I thought it was the strangest concept, but to show you what it does. This is a before this is an after.
The hair light really brings your attention to me. Also, though, I should probably just mention that this room has been through a lot of phases. I've had it from when it was literally just a blank canvas and every year I just keep adding more and more to it. Thinking I was making it better, but there definitely is such thing as too much stuff. So with this evolution, the number one priority was just.
How do I declutter? So I looked at every cable, I looked at every stand. I looked at every appliance and just really thought to myself. Do I need this, and I think by being that black and white 70 of the cables are gone, and we've ended up with stuff like this one stand that supports both the microphone and the hair light and the additional benefit of having them both tied together is that you only need to adjust one thing: it's positioned so that as soon as the microphone is in place, the hair light is automatically in place? Also, just a final note on the filming setup, the camera's changed so the main camera, the roll, the one that stays fixed, that's the same, but the b cam, the one that's used for literally every other shot. We've moved from a limit gh5 to the Sony a7s3, which is hopefully going to mean that shots that used to look like this are now going to start. Looking like this alrighty, let's talk about phones, so I'm making videos on YouTube about phones for nine and a half years, and every year I've been doing it more and more phones have come in.
Admittedly, there wasn't exactly much action happening at the start. I had zero budget and zero contacts, but as the channel has grown that has improved, and I've also tried to reinvest more and more into buying the latest and greatest phones so that I can review them, and this is what we're working with these are the current smartphones they're outside the cabinet, because these are the ones that I've most recently used in videos. The order of the phones is a little random here, but basically, whichever ones I've used the last are at the front, but for the phones in the cabinet, which I don't use as often these are sorted so for every major brand that I cover they've got a shelf, you've got Samsung apple, OnePlus, and then you've got Huawei Oppo and Xiaomi. We've got all the Google phones lying flat down here from the T-Mobile g1, which was actually the first android phone to ever exist all the way through to the pixel 5. We've got a couple of novelty phones at the bottom, but then for every other one.
I've had to make a bit of a choice. Obviously, there's not enough space to have one shelf per brand, but that wouldn't even really make sense like from some brands. I have 35 phones from other brands. I have one so the best solution that I could come up with was to sort by color, because, generally speaking, when I think of a phone, I can think of the color of the review model that I have, and so I can be like. Okay yeah, it was roughly dark, blue.
Okay, it's going to be about here great there's, a bit of camera gear here, some of my favorite headphones and then right at the top. We've got more phones, so you might actually remember those videos. I made the ultimate iPhone comparison, the ultimate Samsung Galaxy comparison. This is them. So this is an original Samsung Galaxy s.
We've got what's over here, an iPhone 5s, and if you take a look, I just love this phone. I keep them boxed up at the top, just because their phones that I am very rarely use but also b, some of them are quite rare and probably wouldn't benefit from being squeezed up against each other. Like that- and on that note actually, I should probably mention this- is not an ideal solution like if you were ever planning on storing phones. Don't do it like this, because what a lot of companies do is actually put really hard glass on the cameras of their phones to protect them and that's great, but what it means for something like this is that the cameras on one phone can very easily gouge the screen of another phone. I've seen it happen, so I am actually working on a way of storing these phones in a socially distanced manner.
It was a really cool plan. I was so excited. I was kind of rushing to get it done for this video, but then decided no better. If I do it properly- and I will show you when it's done but yeah, I did count through everything and so far we are looking at 395 phones. The last thing is trash, no literally um.
This is one of my favorite bins. I've ever owned. You literally just swipe up grab your trash, put it inside, and it'll shut. Okay. I just want to finish with a thank-you.
A long time ago, I used to say that I wanted to build the most loving tech community on the planet. I had no idea how we were going to do it. I just knew that that's what I wanted, so I can't believe I'm saying this, but we're nearly there in terms of likes and comments per video, we're already literally bordering on the highest of any tech channel in the world, which is just ludicrous to me, but it's not just that. It's this community, this channel no longer feels like just me telling you about phones. It genuinely feels like just one massive squad who just gets together every couple of days to talk about this.
One thing that we all love and never in my life, that I have a dream of being able to create something like that. So thank you for the opportunity and uh I'll catch you in the next one. You.
Source : Mrwhosetheboss