Hey. My name is Matt Johnson, and I am so excited to share with you
my video editing desk set up.
It's been a long time coming.
I've had people ask me to show where I edit,
and to be honest, I haven't had something that I really been proud of
until this point, but I'm pretty proud of this.
So super excited to share it with you.
All right, starting off, let's talk about this desk, which is my uplifted desk.
And also, incidentally, for the sake of ethics,
this video was not paid or sponsored by any company.
And I bought pretty much all of this stuff except for this monitor
with my own money.
So back to uplift desk.
The reason that I went with this company is they're very highly reviewed.
I think I spent about 1500 dollars for the L-shaped configuration,
which is what I really wanted put in this desk into a corner.
And biggest two reasons that I went with them are, one,
they offered a ton of different desktop types, and
I really wanted an actual wood This is their rubber wood top.
The other reason I was with Uplift Desk is they are
based in Texas, specifically in Austin, very close to me.
So my thinking was, Hey, if this desk ever does break,
I could literally dismantle it, throw it in my car and drive it to them
to have it repaired,
which you really can't say for a lot of companies
that are based overseas, for example.
So I really liked being able to have something that was local.
Of course, it's in it's standing configuration right now.
If I want to, I can lower it if I want to sit.
And speaking of sitting, we have the best chair on the planet,
at least in my opinion, here.
So I think this on like Joe Rogan's podcast,
but that's not how I learned about it.
I learned about this chair from Matt Harris over at the film Poets,
which if you don't follow him on YouTube, you really should.
His stuff is fantastic.
He told me about this chair called the Ka Pisco Chair, and I said, Really?
What's cool about it?
And he's like, It's amazing.
So finally bought one and I agreed.
Is it expensive? Heck yes. It's expensive.
This chair is basically made if you're a foreigner like me.
So if I want to sit like this, I can sit like this,
I can lock it, I can rotate it around, I can sit like this.
If I want to and work versatility, hear me as somebody that's always moving.
I love having a chair that can move with me.
Also, this chair is kind of made with a standing desk in mind.
It can go absurdly high, like,
wow, I have to like climbing on a horse up here.
My feet.
My feet ain't touching the ground now.
Oh, no.
I'm kind of worried that I could fall at this height.
But I got to say, if I want to have the standing desk turned up here,
just come on up to me. Come up to my level.
OK, let's see if I can work here.
Honestly.
Honestly, I've never done this before, but this is pretty cool.
For real.
Normally it is a standing there so I want to be standing.
So we'll get this out of the way here. Oh, OK.
Whenever I bought the uplift desk, I bought it
and it was like a Black Friday deal, and they're like,
Hey, we're going to throw in this a little surfboard
looking thing that you can stand on.
And I'm like, That's dumb. I'm never going to use it.
I use this thing all the freaking time.
Oh, my goodness.
It's just you put it on and you're surfing and I don't know, OK?
I don't know. I love it.
I just love it.
OK, my daughter likes it. It's great. I
highly recommend a little rocking board because this room has carpet.
I needed to get a hard plastic surface, which means that the rocker board
can work with it.
Let's talk about
some of the other big things that you've probably noticed in this room.
Starting off with the Cat Wall.
One of my favorite things ever, whenever we got
married, one of my groomsmen at our wedding gave me this cat painting
because he said his wife hated it, which how can you hate this?
And so over the years, we slowly built out this
collection of cat paintings that we've collected from around the world.
So we got these in Mexico.
These are from some friends of ours here in Texas about this in Arkansas.
This guy is from Seattle.
My brother had this ordered, though, and I.
I just love it.
Granted, with that, my daughter always asked me, Daddy, where is your cat suit?
And she's only three.
But we're trying to explain to her like, no, like, is this a painting?
It's not actually catsuit anyways.
Probably wondering what this situation is over here.
What is this?
Well, welcome to the world of dual purpose equipment
that you can not only use for film making, but for children as well.
So this is called a nugget, and
I think they're about 200 bucks, right, Rachel? 200.
300. Now, it's basically a set of foam covered in cloth
that you can set up into exciting styles that your kid can climb all over.
And then one day I was looking at and I was like, You know what sound
reduction is basically just foam, right?
Can I set these up vertically and then block some sound?
And because this room over here is like the foyer of our house,
there's a lot of echo.
And so because I have this nugget foam here,
it is basically blocking any of the audio that is coming from this direction.
Yeah, I know that they make like dedicated V flat walls you can buy.
They're made of foam that'll help block sound.
But do you just get one of these in?
Your kids can plan it when you don't want to use it.
It literally sits over here in the room and then whenever I need it,
I just set it up in like 2 seconds and I've got awesome sound reduction.
It's pretty amazing.
Now with this, I also have more sound reduction
and that is going to be in the form of these white panels
that are kind of difficult for you to see up here.
But that's kind of the point.
I did not want them to be super disruptive, so
I went to a company called Acoustic Mac and ordered
three of their 48 inch by 12 inch sound panels.
These just have acoustic insulation inside and they absorb any of that audio of me
speaking and prevent it from reverberating back
if I'm doing the live stream, et cetera.
So as far as sound stuff goes, we're doing pretty good here.
Of course, I'm talking in this direction of the room, which has no sound treatment
working on that, convincing the wife that we need to add it everywhere.
It'll happen eventually, but for the most part,
I feel like the diffusion is pretty good,
especially if I'm talking in this direction toward my camera.
Next, if we're still talking sound here, you'll notice that I have a road
mike arm that goes up and down. Pretty cool.
Love this thing.
Have my road into G two Shock
and Mike on this thing, which I've had literally since 2009.
Still going strong.
Still sounds great.
For live streams, been repurposed for that pretty much permanently lives here
and then I can move it around if I need to depending on
how I'm doing a video call or a live stream, et cetera.
Audio sounds pretty good with that.
In addition to sound, we also have light of course, with filmmaking.
And so you'll see that I have a light set up here in the corner.
This has been clamped to this desk using a slightly
janky man, Frodo Clamp arm.
Then I have a C stand arm going up that holds my practice light. 602.
If you remember, I had a video review of the Practice Light,
which I love for wedding filmmaking, but that light has basically been replaced
by the aperture 60 x, which I love even more than that light.
And so I said, Hey, I still need to use something with this practice light.
And so and now lives here and thankfully it has Bluetooth control,
so I can turn it on and on whenever I want to remotely,
which prevents me from needing to crawl over this desk
to try to get there, which is very difficult to do.
So as far as monitors go, a little backstory here.
I used to edit on 132 inch Ben Cue Monitor, which was great,
but after about five years it died on me and I said, Crap, I need a new monitor.
I then opted to purchase 227 inch Dell monitors,
which are 4K and awesome, really, really like them.
But literally one day after I ordered those monitors, literally one day
I get an email from Gigabyte and they're like, Hey,
do you want us to send you this ultra wide monitor?
And you can check it out and see how you like it for video editing,
which I then made a review about.
So whenever Gigabyte sent me that monitor, I suddenly had a dilemma.
I said, OK, do I get rid of the Gigabyte after making this video
and then keep the two Dells that I originally purchased? Or
do I say no?
How about
I keep all of them, which is excessive and ridiculous?
I get that.
But I was already planning on using two monitors.
Why don't you just throw a third one in there too?
So for video editing, et cetera, I have the gigabyte which I'm
normally working from, and then I have a dedicated screen
over here that I use for web browsing on the side
if I want to be watching a YouTube video, et cetera, while I'm editing
and then this third monitor over here doesn't get quite as much use,
but it's still very useful
if I have things that I want to do and be able to keep track of like
FTP, some files or sending something that I need to upload
or doing anything when I want to look at my progress bars,
I can put them all over here and then check them as they're working.
Well, I still am productive.
On the other two monitors, it's a little ridiculous.
I may eventually
get rid of this third one, but for now it's here and it looks cool.
I'll put that in the thumbnail and you'll see it and you're like,
Oh my gosh, I click on this triple monitor set up.
This is ridiculous.
So hey, at least it made you click.
Now, one thing that I am particularly proud of
is how these monitors are mounted.
They came with traditional monitor stands, of course, but I really wanted
a more floating set up to regain as much disk space as I could get.
So in this case here, I'm running three Vevo monitor arms
that are then holding these monitors and levitating them above,
which gives me a lot more room
to move things around and position things on the desk, which is really great.
That said, though, I'm still not in love with the height of these monitors.
I wish there were a little bit higher, and I've maxed out the height of these arms
so Vevo sells slightly taller versions for about $50,
and so I may buy one or two of those to raise up some of these monitors.
Of course, you'll notice, though, that this monitor is lower.
Why is this monitor lower than the other ones?
Two reasons here.
First of all, I have a three year old, like I said, and she loves watching
Disney.
Plus every once in a while put this down at her eye level.
It's really great.
I say that as the desk is in a standing formation.
She can't really watch if it's set to standing mode with the desk
lowered, it's more at her height and she can watch something, which I like.
Other reason, the main reason that this monitor is lower
is so that way I can have my camera set up right at eye level.
If I had the camera up higher, it'd be like looking down at me.
And that's not cinematic to have a camera, like looking down at you.
So I really wanted a camera that would be right at my eye.
Level.
And so by lowering this monitor down, I was able to get the camera right here.
I also love how I have this camera mounted about an El Gato mounting arm.
And then I had to buy an extension to make the camera be even closer
because Cam was going to be too far back there.
And I wanted it to be closer with it set up like this.
It's as close as it can be to my face.
While also being at the proper height, which I'm really, really happy with.
Another thing that I'm really happy with is the cable management that I have for
this setup.
Is it perfect no.
But over the months that I've had this system,
I've slowly been working on it to make it look better, and I'm finally at a point
where I'm actually happy showing it to you.
There's still some cables visible over here
that I need to try to get all around this one column back here.
But otherwise, if you saw the amount of cables
that are traditionally under this thing, holy crap, you'd be shocked.
So I have so much stuck up underneath this desk, but it is working.
Another thing that helps with all this cable management is I purchased
this tiny little TV stand shelf from IKEA,
and this is supposed to be for a small television,
but I've now repurposed it to be a cable management system.
I still haven't fully finished building it out, but as it is, I have
a surge protector and a ton of cables all crammed into this little box here.
So they are kept hidden away from your eyes.
Have the router out because I want the router to be able to broadcast as strong
a signal as possible, but otherwise this is all pretty clean and compact
and the wires are mostly hidden, so I'm really happy with it.
As far as headphones go, I have a set of Philips,
HP, 9500 headphones they're open back.
I love them, they're like 75 bucks.
And I used to have a more expensive pair.
But keep in mind I have a toddler.
These things get thrown around and dropped all the time,
and if I had a more expensive pair of headphones,
I'd be really sad if they were broken.
So I love these headphones and I feel like they're a nice mix of quality
and affordability, which that's really what you want with most things.
I will arm that.
I put them on over here so that way they're out of the way
if I'm not using them.
But 95% of the time they're just sitting on my desk.
But hey, I'm doing a tuba here, and I wanted you to see
how pretty the desk can look without stuff cluttering it like it normally does.
I've got two external hard drives here that I keep some footage on
that I'm currently working with, as well as internal SSD that I can edit from.
And then we also have the DOS keyboard, which,
oh, my goodness, this keyboard so loud.
So Clarkie. I have a good Clarkie keyboard.
OK, it's great.
Rachel hates it. Rachel wants the exact opposite of that.
The quietest possible keyboard ever I want noise.
OK, pair that with the best mouse ever.
The Max Master three.
So wonderful mouse is my favorite mouse.
It's just so good. So, so good.
With the desk keyboard.
I do need to buy a little armrest on Amazon for like ten bucks.
I think just because the wrists getting older,
you know, the wrist, the risk, a painful lesson.
We have a set of Bose speakers that I've had.
Oh gosh. For like ten years now.
I really need upgrade these.
But you can see how low these monitors are in relation to these speakers.
If I can raise these monitors higher than I can put larger speakers
and that's kind of the thinking there.
So eventually that will see an upgrade.
Also, of course, wireless phone charging stand really great to have.
I highly recommend have it on your desk. That's great.
Yeah, that is the setup.
I love it.
It's a great productive space where I can get a lot done
and as somebody that likes to move a lot, I can sit,
I can stand, I can do it all and it's really, really awesome. So I
hope you like it.
And thanks for watching.