[ __ ] you here for the studio - right well life is a total blow right now but come on and keep a
six feet distance or two meters depends on where you're from it and then I show you around keep
your two feet distance and hey do you mind going quickly to the bathroom and wash your hands and
then I see you right in the studio right set go wash your hands bathroom is right there
hey so since most of us are bound to our homes for good reasons these days we may want to use
the time and think about how we could turn our living space into a versatile good-looking studio
to record our YouTube videos on our own from our home actually some of these setups and tips that
I'm gonna cover today could be even used to make you look better on video calls that we
get to love and hate these days my mom loves it right yeah yeah I'm gonna call you tomorrow and
and I have enough food don't worry but I gotta say that I'm actually super excited about this
particular video because I always get a lot of joy out of watching how other creators and
filmmakers are working behind the scenes and the gear they're choosing to use so I find it always
very inspiring and I always learn something in fact pretty much everything you will see
today was inspired by one of the many amazing filmmaking creators out on YouTube so you know
who they are and with no further ado let's get started and and show you the two of you
okay so this is the main space here that you might be familiar with from other my latest videos it's
located for the most part in my kitchen as you can see here in the background that's because I
live in a 570 square feet apartment in downtown Chicago and there is just not that much space
and the centerpiece is really let me go around here this kitchen island that I got from Wayfarer
which are usually lined this way when I when you're like doing the daytime but when I turn
it into studio I put it on these little fleece pads here so it can easily move it around on the
hardwood floor and and use it for different kind of video angles okay so before we get
to the camera let's talk about one of the most important part of your studio setup and that's
lighting and you may have heard me and other creators say that before but it is so so easy
to just geek out on the cameras and the lenses of whatnot but what you will learn and have possibly
already learned over time is that a good lighting setup makes actually so much more of a difference
so right now I'm actually just using one main key light which is the aperture 120 D maybe you can
see it right there but this is possibly the most popular light with creators YouTube creators as
Gerald and Dunn pointed out after reviewing and going through a bunch of YouTube studios it is
super powerful it's about seven hundred forty five dollars you can pick up a cheaper version
for example by godox it's called the SL 60 W and you see also that I'm using the light dome
to to create a very very big light source with this LED light and you want to have a big light
source because the bigger and softer the light is it is the nicer it is on your skin because
you avoid big harsh shadows and you also avoid micro shadows that may be caused by these LED
points so I'm personally a big fan of this light I also have this egg crate on it you see it here
this is to avoid light spill to the background I can turn around you see like to make it very
dark but if I if I want to actually have the background illuminated I just pointed like this
and then you see my gray backdrop and now you also see here a practical light which a position in the
frame to make it a little look a little bit more interesting but it also functions as a backlight
as a hair light to separate me from the background and I put it now on a tungsten color warmer color
this is a bi color light by dry cast I have them for a couple of years already filling over here as
you can see I have a little aperture M C which is an absolute beast of a little RGB LED light
I use it as a fill but also to highlight and spot they put a spotlight on the gear that I'm putting
here on the table comes in very very handy oh and then I have another drag cast LED panel which I
positioned right here at the bottom of the of the backdrop and as you can see I clamped a gel on it
hey first of all clamps incredibly important and an absolute must in every studio so I put a gel
basically color modifier on this LED light to create this kind of teal term which goes really
nicely in contrast a with my warmer ish backdrop as well as with my face it really you like makes
me pop a little bit more out here and it gives a bit of a different more interesting look at
this point a little disclaimer all the gear I'm showing you today I accumulated over years and
years of photography and filmmaking and just this just didn't happen overnight by no means and by no
means do you need all this gear to have really great-looking studio results believe it or not
I have a 9 to 5 job and like other people geek out on cars and dump their money into new rims
I have constantly been investing into my passion for cinematography and thriving to get better and
and learn along the way so I needed to get this off my chest before I get slag in the comments
but if you want to pick up any of these pieces of gear I'm using in this video I will leave
the links to the stuff in the description below but yeah let's go over to the camera
so let's get to the heart of it my a camera which is the Panasonic Evy a1 and it's a so-called kick
cinema camera I got it last year and made a video like I talked about it a little bit more in detail
we'll leave it up on the right top corner right here but it is shooting in 5.7 K raw at 12 bit or
at 10 bit in 60 frames per second in 4k it also has two XLR inputs which I'm running my audio
right now in two which is super handy if you do documentary work and you have multiple microphones
I'm running right now and this is possibly also my always unknowns to seek my 18 to 35 1.8 lens
which is an absolutely gorgeous lens for super 35 or smaller sensors and I can totally recommend
this lens it's 600 bucks or so if you are in the market for such lens I would absolutely go
for this one what you can't see right now is there's also a pro mist filter on it a filter
that basically softens the light the highlights of the light and makes your skin look a little
bit more pleasing I would argue and it is also making it a little bit more organic for a beat
camera I'm actually shooting on my good old proven a7s2 and this has been really my workhorse I can
use it either as a beat camera for a different angle or ask for top-down shots to show stuff
right here and on the a7 assume supporting the Tama on 24 to 70 millimeters 2.8 which is a super
super heavy lens but very versatile especially if you go out and travel since these two cameras are
by different manufacturers and the colors are not matching I'm actually oftentimes especially
when I'm using this as a bee camp using this xride colorchecker video mini I believe that's
a mouthful but it is not only a great car to check your white balance but it also has these
color clips in here which allows you to nail down your colors of both cameras too you know
basically try to match them as good as possible a very very handy piece that I take everywhere where
I like run a proper production super super handy as for audio my main microphone is running over
this boom pole here and it is the ntg-3 by-road it's a shotgun mic which runs straight to my
camera and again this mic specifically is one of those staple products as many craters are using
in their studio Audio is similarly to lighting a quickly overlooked and dismissed when you start
out cuz it's just not as sexy but the importance cannot be overstated enough and you can get away
with shaky and even blurry footage if you viewers will forgive you but if your audio is not clean
our brains just cannot deal with it for too long also the distance the distance between microphone
and and you should be equal to what you have when you have a conversation with another person pre
covert that is otherwise it would be six feet away we learned that actually another audio hack
that I picked up from in the Mogul is using moving blankets to optimize the sound and reduce rework
in your studio and they're just a fraction of the cost of professional sound blankets but get you I
would say you know like eighty to ninety percent there and it makes quite a difference I also put
one here as like almost like a carpet which also helps me to protect my protect my hardwood floor
from from these all these C stands but it's it's definitely a way to optimize a very cheap hack to
optimize the audio it goes oftentimes way further than more expensive microphone talking about cheap
hacks let's talk about my backdrop hack that I use for a recent video and I kept it up so I can talk
about it in this video I actually first saw it on mango street as such a neat and easy tip to
create an interesting backdrop you just use the pages of newspapers or magazines and just create
and build your own backdrop and as you can see it that creates like a very intriguing and interest
interesting background my main back job that I'll just recently got actually is seen this
paper I've never worked with seen this paper before but it is this thick thick paper that
comes on a roll that you position between two C stands and rod and it is very nice because
it creates this very even surface of which the light reflects and bounces off just perfectly so
that you have this very very nice and neutral background a big shout-out to savage who sent
me the seamless paper to try it out and I have to say I'm very very happy with it in fact I actually
ordered two more rolls of different colors for another project of mine so the color I picked
here specifically is called charcoal gray it is just the right gray tone that allows you to go
really dark as we've seen when I turn off the LED light down here but it can also give you a variety
of looks and play with you can play with colors as we've seen by using an RGB light or gel it's
down here Savitch was also kind enough to send me another roll and this is the pure white one which
is also very versatile obviously it's a white background but you can also use it as a bounce
board for light remember how we wanted to create a big soft light source pointing the aperture 120
D right at this and passively basically have the light bounce offered to hit your subject
provides you with an even bigger and softer light source so again Thank You Savage this is great
okay last but not least let's talk and quickly address monitoring because I'm using mostly
indoors when I'm inside the Shogun inferno to make sure that it's all nicely framed that I'm
rightly exposed and it's it's just a nice looking image it's also recorded but it could record in
raw with this camera but I'm just are using it for Speed purposes so I can quickly edit it and
then yes I'm using a teleprompter at times when I especially script out videos it's just so much
faster at times and it's a skill by itself to read off a prompter so I really hope you
enjoyed this little tour it was high-level so please play away any of your questions if
there's any gear that I've used that you have questions about or any gear that I'm missing or
any hacks that you have I want to share with us please let us know down in this comment section
below and as always thanks so much for watching have a good morning have a good night whenever
and wherever you are around this beautiful planet please stay safe thank you bye bye