Last night the last videos were being filmed at the STH studio in Austin, Texas. Photography and B-roll stopped on September 1, 2023. I thought that it would be worth at least taking a second to memorialize the old studio as it transitioned from a fun space to shambles and then boxes over the last 18 hours.
The End of Another STH Era: The Austin Texas Studio is in Shambles
Since this is me, and folks who know me also know that I do not like looking back, I totally forgot to take an entire studio shot before taking the entire studio down. After last night’s filming session, I took a photograph with my phone with just the LED smiley face that has been on set for years.
Regular STH viewers will see that there are Sony FX6, FX3, FX30, and A7S III cameras that migrated on set along with a Canon R5c. There are even some cool lenses like two of the Canon 28-70mm f/2 lenses that all of our product photography uses. In fact, that Sony FX30 standing on its lens has been the B Camera over the summer, so even the main set has seen a reduction in swag. You will see cameras migrate on the YouTube set in videos in October due to other items exiting the set.
Eight hours later, all of the sound treatment was down, microphones, the Canon C70, and even the smiley face.
Folks may remember some of the round tables in these photos from the 2021 to early 2022-era STH photos.
Those were perhaps more colorful days.
The Austin Texas studio transition happened in 2021 and marked an enormous upgrade from the pandemic-era STH Blue Door Studio, with features like better cameras, lighting, sets, and so forth.
In Austin, we had more than twice the filming and photography space as we had in Mountain View, plus more room to queue and prep items and store gear. To say that STH grew by a huge amount in Austin would be an understatement, to say the least.
Final Words
A big part of what is going on is that while the STH main site so many have been reading for years has continued racking up page views, the STH YouTube channel is been an enormous source of growth. For some perspective, I am penning this at the cusp of 294K YouTube subscribers and we just hit 100K 361 days ago. The nice part about this next transition is that we are going to be planning for a much larger STH.
More to come later this week when I finish the Q3 STH Letter from the Editor! Most likely I will finish that on the plane tomorrow so look out for it on Saturday.
