- All right, so we are kicking off this year by taking down
our Christmas tree, and setting up a Geartree.
A couple of reasons why I'm really excited to try this out.
I really like having a filming space
where you just have to turn on the lights, the camera,
everything looks good, and you just hit record.
And over the last six months
we've been renovating the house.
So I haven't really been able to really set up a good space.
So I want to get back into it
because when you do have a space where you don't have
to worry about the camera angle and the lighting,
and everything's already preset up,
it just makes things so much easier.
So my plan is to get this space set up,
because as soon as you put down a couple of stands,
it feels like a Mission Impossible course,
where you're trying to like dodge things
and not hit a stand and not trip over a cable.
So I think it would be awesome
to just have everything consolidated,
hang it off of one post.
So let's go ahead and clear everything out
and we'll start from the top.
And with the magic of editing,
we will make all this stuff disappear, ready?
(fingers snap)
How many times do I have to teach you
how to fold down a C-stand?
Lefty loosey.
- You show me.
- No, it's lefty loosey
- I'll do this. - You have to.
(upbeat music)
- This is actually pretty heavy-duty.
Now when you order this, you have to know generally
how tall your ceiling is.
It doesn't have to be exact
you just have to know the range,
because these are adjustable to an extent.
Balls.
(upbeat music)
(plastic clatters)
So the main color is super strong.
I should've been a stripper.
Just make sure you find a nice stud to press it up against
or else this would probably go straight through drywall.
So now we can start attaching some of these anchors
and these feel really well built actually
like once I lock it in, it's on there good.
I can actually hang off it,
I'm literally hanging off it, whoa.
Now in my last space I've been using these things called
varipole made by Impact which is kind of like the same
type of concept, but they're quick attach.
They've been perfect for something like a small light.
Probably look pretty similar,
but this definitely feels like it has a lot more strength,
but the varipoles are quick and fast, so that is nice.
What do you think Carrie?
- Pretty cool.
- Yeah.
- I just remember the Varipole, you like cracked the.
- Yeah, no, that's the first thing I said is like,
make sure you find a stud on the ceiling.
So I had one of these varipoles set up just a store while we
were renovating the house, and I had it set up right here
and actually made a little crack in the ceiling.
Carrie was not happy with me,
it was literally right after we finished taking off the
popcorn ceiling and painting it and everything.
So we're pretty much done setting up this Geartree,
and I will say I'm really happy with the build quality,
everything fit together really nicely,
and it feels good putting it together,
and when you tighten something down, it stays locked on.
This arm is his height adjustable.
So I can bring it up, bring it down,
and it just feels really good cause it stays
where it needs to be.
Everything attaches on here with these clamps.
And then you can drop the arms or accessory right into the
slot and tighten it up.
Now this is, I think called a five eighth inch baby stud,
which is very common, which is nice,
cause I already have a bunch of stuff that will fit into,
actually not this one.
It's got this hex shape here,
but if I feed this in through the other side,
I think I should be good.
And if you have some light stands,
you're probably familiar with this or some C-stands,
actually speaking of C-stands
I could probably throw in like a 40 inch arm through here.
I got my C-stand arm here at AKA
my self defense tool in case of a break-in.
Okay. So this is barely does not fit through,
but basically, this pin is pretty similar to what you get
on the top of one of the C-stands.
And then from here you can just kind of build it out to
however layout you want.
So there's a million different ways to set this up,
and I'm pretty sure that this one is made for microphones.
I actually think this would be great for a top down camera,
it's got a quarter inch right there.
like you could position this desk wherever you want
maybe put like a plank of wood with some nice texture on it.
And then you can just position this wherever and then have
another arm coming out for the frontal angle.
Now this knot right here is feeling pretty heavy-duty,
which is great cause lights can get really heavy
and this one is mounted on at two different spots,
but everything else is just mounted on with one.
Now, one of my biggest concerns is
am I going to be able to place the light where I want it?
Or is it going to be right on top of the camera?
Well, let's try it out.
All right, let's go ahead and fire this up.
Not turning on, why?
Oh interesting, I think this cable went bad.
I wonder if it's because I accidentally plugged it into the
DMX out instead and tried to fire it up.
Luckily I got extra
so let me try the new cable and take two.
Hmm. Oh, there it is.
I forgot how bright the 300d Mark II is
you don't have a hard time waking up every morning
I just want to go back to sleep,
but I should just have this by my bed
and every morning I'll just be like, okay, I'm awake.
Now if there's one thing I could live without,
its probably this tripod head.
I mean, it works, but it's limited in range.
And to make further adjustments,
you have to use tools.
Also I'm not sure if this base plate is supposed
to be an Arca Swiss or not but,
none of Arca Swiss plates are fitting onto here properly.
So I'm probably just going to come up with my own solution
where I can adapt a three eighth inch screw onto
this baby stud and then just throw
my own tripod head on here.
For now this should work.
I do like this arm a lot,
it's nice to just have that flexibility and height.
But see how it's kind of like wanting to go off on its own
I just have to adjust it real quick.
I'm just gonna go this way to lighten it.
Alright, so now we're all set up
so let's switch over to this camera here,
and how does it look?
Now my biggest question is
can I place the light where I want it to?
So right here, if I placed the light
literally right next to the camera, it looks like this,
which looks nice if that's the full lighting that you're
kind of looking for, but I want to see if I can swing
it away and get a little bit more of an angle.
And it seems like we have enough wingspan
on this thing to do so.
And I guess I could always add more of these layers to get
this camera even further away from the post.
And this is the Light Dome II by the way,
which is humongous, so if it was a smaller light,
you could get that like all the way over there,
but I'm actually pretty happy with the distance
I'm able to give the light in relation to this camera.
I am liking how easy it is to maneuver all this,
and I imagine when I'm done filming,
I can just kind of swing everything away and tuck everything
in the corner, so that Carrie doesn't complain about me
having gear everywhere.
Now, instead of having this post go from
the ceiling to floor, there is also the option
to have it clamped onto your desk.
But I probably avoid that because every time
I touch the table or move anything around,
it shakes everything attached to the table
so the camera would just be like this the whole time.
All right. So here, I kind of have to decide
where I want the camera to be and I
can adjust all the positions, but the post,
once I set it up, I don't want to have to move it,
but there is a lot of natural light
that does come in through this window,
so I do have to make it work with this.
I think I'm gonna do it so during the nighttime,
I have one light coming this way during the daytime,
I use natural light plus compliment lighting and bouncing
some light off the wall.
Let's give that a shot.
Alright, so we got it slapped right there
in the center of the closet.
Man, how cool would it be
if this whole set can just collapse into the closet
and once I get a door on here and I just hide everything.
- It's like a techno nightmare movie, you know?
Put like a bunch of screens and stuff on it,
has all these moving arms and stuff.
- This one actually has limited range right now because it
hits this pin right here you can see,
but this knob is removable
and they all come with little pins that I can just tighten
with the Allen wrench so it's flush.
So I do feel like it's pretty well thought out.
So this would be storage mode for the light,
and then I can swing it out to here
to have a nice light from my left side,
and then when it's daytime,
I swing it out like this and bounce
this off of this wall right here.
Just to give it a little bit of kick
because the placement of this window here,
it kinda hits me from the back a little bit.
If the window was here, it would be perfect,
but this will just bounce off the wall right here.
And it will just kind of add to the window in a way.
So I've put in this arm right here
so I can adjust the level of the camera,
and I have one, two, three extensions.
So I could literally get full range from
being all the way over here.
I can get all the way over here if I want to,
and this will stay here, and then I got my overhead.
I just peeks out just like that.
Like I did add a few extra things
like this for the thumbnail.
This is going to be so cool when it's all set up actually.
Now I'm going to have the light come over this
way and bounce off the wall.
Don you wanna try sitting down in that spot?
I definitely have to work on the background,
but this is working.
This guy swings around watch your head.
- (inaudible)
- You like this one? It looks way cooler right?
And I could technically do this set up during the day,
but I would just have to throw up a sheet of duvet team
to cover this window, but I'm digging it
I'm getting two different lighting looks
just by swinging this arm.
What do you think Don, looks pretty cool? Huh?
- Oh, yeah!
- Hi, Don get out of my seat
this seats only for beautiful people like me.
And once I get my closet doors in,
I can just tuck everything back into the closet,
close it up and seem like there's no set here at all.
All right so I went ahead and hooked up this microphone
and I'm not hating this shot.
There is some light bleeding onto the background
and I might try to see if I can control some of it,
with this grid here.
Let me go ahead and throw that on,
and whoa that made a big difference.
I'm just like hanging out there in the dark now.
I might just need one of these to
light up the background there.
Let's see if we can get a little funky with these colors,
let's try seeing what kind of colors that this brings us.
Yeah, if you're like a gamer, probably want to do
some crazy stuff like this,
this is like a really popular type of color
and just throw that back there.
Actually, I don't hate it.
Wish that i constantly just have it shift,
so like every shot is like a different colored background.
Honestly, I would probably go for like a
sodium vapor type of color,
something like really deep orange and dim it down.
I'm just going to leave that there for now. I mean,
the background is something that's going to take quite a bit
of time to dial in perfectly,
but I got too much stuff going on today,
I don't have to have to think about that.
We just found out all the baseboards and drywall that put in
we have to rip everything out because
there's a leak just chilling behind the wall.
All this got soaked, we have to pull that out,
all this along this wall all the way down.
Then on this side all this time to get ripped out.
Awesome stuff man, buying a house.
It's, it's awesome but it comes with headaches
I'll tell you that much.
But this is awesome we have the stripper pole in the middle,
we have the camera hanging off on one side and I also have a
monitor hooked up so I can see myself
check if I have any boogers.
And we also have this overhead camera right now,
which I don't know what to do with right now,
but it's there.
And this light all off of this one Stand.
I do think I want to get another one of these arms
and put a boom mic up here.
So I don't even need to have one of these
microphones in the frame.
And I just want to do something cool in the background.
I don't know what yet,
but I just want to do something
that looks a little more unique.
And from here I can do a screen grab,
I can show you guys the website.
So this I think is what I got the home studio set up kit
now it is not cheap, $989.
But I will say, I am very, very impressed
with the quality of this,
and this isn't sponsored by the way.
Now they did send this to me for free,
but I didn't promise them anything.
A lot of times when I get sent stuff like this,
it's kind of hit or miss.
Sometimes I get it and like the quality's crap
and it's like, I don't know what to do with this
it's just taking up more space.
It's cool getting free stuff
until you have way too much crap,
and you don't know where to store anything.
My camera battery died so I do wanna
probably run power to all of this,
for now we'll just live with this shot but yeah.
Now this is the home studio set up which comes with
all these parts, but I would actually probably go in
and individually pick out what I need.
So you would need the floor to ceiling Stand.
And then I would just kinda go in and be like, okay,
I want a few of these, few of these, but yeah, overall man
like, I'm excited about this setup.
It's not just like Stands sprawled out everywhere so I can
just take it all and just slide it back into the closet.
Now like I said, I definitely wanna swap out
this tripod head but in the meantime,
I think I'm just going to swap out the case plate
to fit an Arca Swiss, so I don't have to constantly swap
every time I want to just throw the camera on here.
Easy way to do that is, something like this
I'll link this down in the description.
And this can work for pretty much any type of tripod,
but it's just so nice having one base plate on your camera
and then not having to constantly swap it out.
So this adapters two pieces,
so it has the Arca Swiss base plate that I like to use.
And then we just take the bottom piece, attach that.
Probably one of the easiest ways to cover all
your tripods into just one mount.
All right. so here's how this setup looks during the daytime
and this is all just natural lighting
and see how that light kind of comes in from behind.
I would prefer it to be a little bit more frontal.
And then if I turn on this light,
see how it's kind of this light sandwich
It seems a little overwhelming and artificial
and there's all these shadows.
You generally want most of your lighting to come from one
side and the other side would be more of a fill.
So actually what I might be able to do is I actually blast
this light, so it's very bright.
And then I just dropped the exposure on the camera
that actually doesn't look bad.
Cause now they're not really fighting each other.
This is just more like a fill light,
but let's go back to my original plan,
got to take this, swing it around.
So before light was only coming in through this window,
but now I'm bouncing light off this wall,
so it's almost like a bigger window.
There now things look a little bit more natural, right?
It looks like it's just added light to the window.
So let's compare the before and after.
So this is with just natural light,
lighting coming in through that window.
But yeah, this is awesome
the flexibility, the speed of setup is awesome.
I can just throw this back here.
It definitely makes a big difference just having a
solid setup where it only takes you a few
seconds to set up a post five, 10 minutes.
This geared tree, definitely a thumbs up
I'm really impressed with the quality of it.
So links down there in the description,
there are affiliate links.
So I appreciate it because I need to fix a lot of the
flooring and all that stuff and end card time.
Yes, like buttons, appear.
Okay, so I think I might have an idea for back there.
What if I just got a big old TV,
like I see them for like a thousand bucks at Costco
and I just mount it back there,
and depending on what kind of background I feel like
I just load an image and put it back there.
I don't know, could be kind of cool, right?
But if you guys have any ideas,
let me know down there in the comments,
I'm open to suggestions, so yeah.