There have been quite a few changes to my desk set up over the past year,
and I've gotten quite a few messages from people who are deskperate to know
what has changed and how it all works.
So I will do my best today to deskribe it,
and if there's anything that you think would be good for your workflow,
I'll be sure to put links in the deskscription! Believe it or not
I think the best place to start on this desk tour is with the desks themselves.
There are two of them and they are the same Husky workbenches
that I've used basically forever.
And they're in an L configuration...kind of,
but they're not totally. This one
isn't totally put to the edge over there
so that way I have more usable space on it.
These are really just work benches from Home Depot, but what I've
changed mostly since last time I talked about my desk setup is I've
removed all of the crossbars on these.
So for example, here's my regular workbench in our garage.
And this is just totally standard.
It has crossbars at the top, crossbars too at the bottom, and
that makes these incredibly stable.
I think they're rated to hold like 2000 pounds. But if you're somebody who wants
to mount like boom arms and things here, you don't have a lot of room.
And because of this crossbar in the back, you have no space on
the other side to mount anything.
So without those crossbars, this desk is no longer like 2000 pounds stable,
but it's still way more sturdy than any normal desk would be.
I did have a bunch of stickers on my desk, and I love stickers almost
as much as Bandrew from Podcastage,
so I took this cross piece and put it here on this desk because I still
wanted the stickers to be there.
And they look neat in the background of videos.
But while we're under the desk, one of the big changes is I found these little
mounts for the Mac Mini on Amazon.
And so I mounted my base model M1 Mac mMni underneath the desk.
And I also mounted my
SSD USB hub as well, which is great.
So now that stuff's off the desk,
and when I'm sitting here, I have easy access to USB ports
and card reader and stuff, and there's nothing on the desk.
And then I also have this XLR cable mounted underneath,
so if I ever do need to add a second microphone or a second boom arm
over here, I can do that really easily.
And when I don't need it, it's just tucked away right there.
It's XLR-ent!
And the last thing under the desk is something that I don't
think, I think it's like the most underrated release of the past year.
That's the Elgato Streamdeck Pedal.
This thing is amazing because you can program it just the same
way you would a Streamdeck.
I did a whole video about it,
but you can control everything with your feet.
So I use it all the time.
It's absolutely awesome,
and I never really hear anybody talking about it, but it's great.
So getting rid of that crossbar allowed for my other biggest change to
the desk, which is this monitor arm.
And again, I have a whole video about it,
but this has really kind of just leveled up everything
being able to freely and easily–
maybe not while I'm holding a camera– move my monitor, and swivel it, and position it
without it really taking up any space on the desk is pretty awesome.
And this is a nice heavy duty arm.
And so what this lets me do now is when I'm streaming or recording,
I can push the monitor out of the way, but when I'm editing and I'm
not using the camera, I can move the monitor into a really comfortable,
ergonomic position
so that way it's very easy to work for long periods of time.
And this monitor is still my same
LG 34 inch ultrawide.
It's the least expensive, 34 inch curved ultrawide
that LG makes. It's not a 4k monitor
or anything, but
It works really well
so I didn't want to 4K over any more cash.
One of my favorite features is that it has thunderbolt
so that way with just this one cable, I can connect and charge
my MacBook Pro. It's awesome.
And so this workspace then kind of brings me to the next
upgrade, which is my keyboard.
I was using the Apple wireless keyboard for a long time, and I
really like it except it's a total pain to switch between devices.
So when I got my MacBook and I wanted to use this display with it,
switching keyboards was a total pain.
This is the Logitech MX Keys, and you can easily switch
between three different devices.
So I can have MacBook, Mac Mini, and my iPad, and I can switch at the
push of a button, which is great.
So it's very easy to plug in my MacBook,
now I have dual MacBook display with keyboard, and if I need to
switch back, I can just push the Mac Mini button and then I can go
right back to my Mac Mini's display.
This is probably my most controversial opinion, but my mouse is the Apple
Magic Mouse, which I actually like
despite the stupid way you have to charge it, but you only have to do that
like once every six weeks. I really like this mouse, and
I feel like a lot of people who don't like it don't know
that you can side scroll on it,
you can right click, you can program it to do whatever you want.
It's great.
But it also is really stupid if you want to use it with multiple devices.
So this one, this black one is for my Mac Mini and then I went to Colorware.com
and got a custom blue one that is for my MacBook Pro.
So this is kind of dumb to have to have two of the same mouse, but I really
like this mouse and how it works.
So this is my MacBook mouse, and this is my Mac Mini mouse.
And this keyboard works for everything.
And my desk mat is still the same one that I found on Amazon.
I really like it.
It's starting to show a little bit of wear, but you can usually
just wipe it down with a damp cloth.
The brand is GDBT and they have a whole bunch of different designs.
I think it looks great when I put like products on it.
So I use this a lot in thumbnails and B roll shots, and I also love it for
top-down shots where it just as a really cool textured background instead of just
like the table or something like that.
So on the desk, we have my Streamdeck, my just regular Streamdeck.
I don't have the fancy giant one.
I have my little Sony remote, which works for the a7SIII that I'm using right now.
And the FX3 there, but it doesn't work with the a7IV
over there, but it's great.
And then of course I have the ATEM Mini Extreme ISO, which is an eight input
switcher that I use for everything.
I've got these little speakers, these Edifier speakers here,
one there and one there.
And I know they are positioned terribly for being like studio monitors,
but they're fine
and they sound great for listening to music and stuff. Because any other
time that I'm actually editing audio or video, I'm using my Rode NTH-100 headphones
here that I just have on this little,
it's actually a really cool little wooden headphone clampy thing.
And these are basically the best headphones ever.
One of the biggest changes now, RODECaster Pro II! It is 2 cool. 😎
Mt chair is still the same white Ikea chair.
I don't think they make this pure white color anymore.
They make like an off white one, but this is just like the basic Ikea desk chair.
But I also have my drum stool here, and this is super comfy
aside from having cool colors.
It's really comfortable.
And I like it.
I've been using it more in videos because sometimes when I'm in the
chair and this big thing is sticking up behind me, it almost makes me feel
like a James Bond villain or something.
And I have a tendency to just keep spinning in it,
so I found that can sometimes be distracting in videos.
So instead I've been using the stool a bit more because it just
looks a little cleaner on video and it's still super comfortable.
It's stoolpendous, you might say! That sort of covers the main stuff that's on
my desk, but there are the things around it that are important.
Of course, this shouldn't really be a surprise,
This is the Sony FX3, my main camera.
And then I just have my Sennheiser
MKH50, which I've been using for like six months now.
Absolutely love this microphone.
To keep more arms and things off of my desk
I use this iFootage Spider Crabs arm that just mounts directly
onto the side of my tripod head.
And now the camera and the microphone are
one thing.
And last year I got this big beefy Manfrotto tripod, which
can handle all the cameras
I have plus accessories.
I used to have a C stand here, but it was taking up way too much space
and I couldn't c-stand it anymore.
So I put my VariPole here going from floor to ceiling, and it's super easy to
mount stuff on, it's pretty sturdy.
But the thing I'm most excited about is I finally got a new camera monitor.
This is the Lilliput Camera Assist 4K
I think it's called. It's great.
It's not super expensive or anything.
I use it for a lot of things, but typically I'll have it here
so that when I have my b camera,
in this case is the Sony a7IV, but it might be the a7SIII,
when I have that over here, I can just run along HDMI cable
and when I'm sitting here, I can then see myself in Ecamm for the main camera,
and then I can see myself over here for the B camera.
And this is clamped to the Vari–oh
it's not the VariPole,
It's the AutoPole.
Oops.
It's clamped to that
using more of the iFootage Spider Crab arms and things.
These are so strong and they're just so awesome.
This part actually came with this arm,
but I sort of swapped them out
so that way I could use the little mount from this to attach to the tripod,
and I used the clamp from the arm to attach this tiny arm here.
And over here in this corner is where I've got my UPS, not my delivery system,
but my uninterrupted power supply.
So I guess it does deliver power.
And that I think is this entire desk set up here, and we're going to talk about
I'm going to show you something cool that it does in a second.
Now my second desk could probably be a bit more practical, but it's gotten better.
So you might've seen my video where I reorganized everything.
I've got my super nice organized drawers that are all labeled down here.
And that's been great.
I have these little glass monitor stands.
I got these from Monoprice, and they're really cool
and I use them for product shots sometimes
because they're nice black reflective glass. And this has just become
now my like odd camera collection.
I do have, again, my headphone mount here.
I have my Rode PSA1+ which currently has the Shure SM7B on it.
And then right here I
Velcroed a little remote control, because this is also important.
I have two of these remotes.
They come with these like power things,
so that way I can just turn everything on my main key light and some of my
other lights, I can just turn them on with this remote, including the ATEM Mini
which does not have a power button.
And that is annoying.
So now I can just
turn it on and off with this remote and it works really great. Up here,
this is where I have my other monitor,
I have my Bob's Burgers Gene
Funko Pop.
This is my fill light, the same one that I've had for like four or five years.
Now here's a PodMic, this is the power supply for my hair light
that's mounted to the ceiling.
So that's where I can turn it on and off and change some of the settings.
Here's my Canon GL2 MiniDV camera,
my Canon XL1, my Canon L1, my RED One and my Sony TV news
ENG broadcast DVCam from 2003.
And then I've also got just some, you know, here's my Procaster
and extra lights that I use for accents and stuff from time to time.
And then I've got this camera, which I'm currently borrowing from B&H.
This is the Blackmagic Ursa Broadcast G2.
B&H let me borrow it for a month, basically just for fun to play with it.
And it's a really cool camera.
There's a lot of super cool similarities between an
affordable broadcast camera and a traditional television
broadcast camera. Back here.
I have a Nanlite PavoTube X that does the pixel hue shift.
You can do anything, but I love it
just constantly shifting colors.
I think it looks great in the background of videos.
I do have another one in the corner over there, and then
I've got this other PavoTube
that's just an accent light kind of leaning in the corner.
Then here I've got a couple of cool things.
This is my nixie tube clock.
This is from a company called Millclock.
A lot of people ask me about this.
They're a Ukrainian company and they use real Nixie tubes.
Super fun.
And then I have this thing, which I haven't used yet, but
my wife and I are big fans of The Expanse book and TV series.
And in that they have these things called "hand terminals" and I found a video
from the prop department where they explained how they make them.
So I 3D printed and cut some, was it like plexiglass to make my own hand terminals.
So there's a little LED in there and then it looks like a cool
holographic piece of scifi tech.
And so what I wanted to do I do is whenever I do a tutorial or something
where I need to talk about using my phone or a phone app, I want to use
this instead and then find a way to super impose the phone iOS onto here.
And there's no reason to do that, but I think it's
really really fun and will look super cool.
And this just looks neat, and there you go, iPhone 15 Pro Max Plus. One thing
that's really exciting about some of the changes I've made is how it's
allowed me to use this area over here.
So there's a window behind here which used to just be kind of ugly and distracting.
So I hung these Impact paper rollers here,
so there's backdrop rollers, and I use them all the time for everything.
You've probably seen them in B roll,
thumbnails, and stuff. But because of how the desk is set up, I can
now very easily– will semi easily,
when I went to film over there, I can move the monitor out of the way,
I can reposition the light or set up other lights,
and then I also found these surfaces here, shiny black and shiny
white that I can put over here.
And then very quickly create a super cool little photo studio for B roll
and thumbnails and stuff like that.
So even though this is a very small seemingly useless corner of a room
back there, it's actually now become like a cool photo/B roll space.
And I'm sure as you know, when you're limited on space, anytime you can
get any more use out of any square inch, it becomes really, really
helpful and really, really efficient.
The biggest things I've learned as my workspace has evolved over the
years is that you definitely have to make your space work for you.
And sometimes there's a difference between what is aesthetically pleasing
and what is actually practical.
And maybe there can be a nice overlap where something is pleasing and practical.
It's not always possible, but sometimes it is.
And the most important thing is to just pay attention to what your
specific needs are, so that you can adapt to your space to YOU.
And speaking of things that are highly adaptable, thank you to everyone who
helps support my channel on Patreon and YouTube Channel Memberships.
And if you want to know a bit more about this workspace of
mine that is ever-evolving, check out these videos right here.