- If you've been hanging around the channel for a while,
you've probably seen this shot in one form or another.
Every once in a while, depending on my mood,
I might change something
or maybe put something new on this board back here,
but generally I try to keep it the same
to make it as easy as possible to set up and start shooting.
In this video,
I'm gonna be talking about my main studio setup,
the gear that I use, my settings,
how I color grade and process audio,
basically everything that goes
into getting a shot like this and around my studio.
The final product may look basic,
but I promise you there's a lot that goes into it,
and maybe there'll be some nuggets of information
that will help you with your own setup.
As always, I'll leave links to all the gear
and everything that I talk about down in the description
so you can check it out for yourself if you're interested.
Okay, let's get into it.
(upbeat musical theme)
First of all, taking a look at the room itself,
excluding the cutout for the door as well as the closet,
this is basically a nine-by-nine foot room,
but luckily I have nice tall ceilings,
which are so nice
for getting lights and mics up out of the way.
The other very important thing that I've done in here
is blacked out the window using some magnets
and a large piece of paper backdrop,
because the sun is my enemy.
It never stays still, sometimes it hides behind clouds,
it comes and goes every day as it pleases,
and it seems to think that it's the one that's in charge.
For sound treatment,
I've got some custom made sound panels that I had done up
by a local company, but if you want to make some yourself,
look up Owens Corning 703 sound panel DIY plans.
It's pretty accessible, it's just kinda messy
and it takes a lot of time.
I've also got some sound blankets
that I got from Producer's Choice
hung in the corner covering the closet.
When I first got these,
I would actually get them hung up on a C stand boom arm
and get it nice and close to where I was recording,
but lately I've been a little bit lazy
and they just stay over in the corner,
and they definitely still help.
These ones are really nice
because they have white on one side and black on the other
so I can use them as either balance or negative fill.
And I opted for versions that had grommets and Velcro,
so I have lots of ways to hang them.
And of course this room is carpeted
so I don't have to worry
about too many audio reflections coming off the floor.
As far as lighting goes,
I have two main lights to light me
and then a bunch of extras to spice up the background.
My main key light for quite a while now
has been the Aperture 300D Mark II with the Light Dome SE.
When lighting me,
this thing barely ever goes above 20% power.
Right now it's at 9%.
Since I bought this Light Aperture,
as well as a handful of other companies
have put out more affordable alternatives
that would work great in its place,
but I already have this so I might as well use it.
I'll leave some alternatives in the description.
And as for why I use the light dome SE
instead of the full Light Dome Mark II,
which I also have here somewhere,
the SE is a little bit smaller
and I leave it up 100% of the time,
so I don't need the quick setup ability
like you have in the Light Dome Mark II.
I used to try to place my key light a more to the side
and get that moody cinematic vibe
where I kind of had a shadowy side of my face,
but more recently I've realized
that for this specific type of video and this shot,
I actually like a bit more of an even lighting.
So the softbox ends up being barely off
to one side of the camera,
and more up above it than anything.
I find that this gives me enough dimension on my face
and it helps a bit with lighting the background as well,
and makes it look kind of inviting and happy,
if that makes sense.
Up above and behind me,
I have an Aperture 120D Mark II with the Light Dome Mini
on a wall-mounted arm
that I can move and extend as I need.
In my main talking headshot,
this acts as a bit of a background light
as well as gives me some rim light
to separate me from the background.
But because it's mounted on this arm,
it's also quite handy for being able to reposition
if I want to set up a table to shoot B roll on,
or if I change filming positions at all.
And I've clamped the controller to my shelf,
but I generally use the little Aperture remote
to turn it on and off or change intensity.
On either side of my shelving unit,
I've got friction arms attached to a pair
of Nanlite PavoTube 30Cs.
And I use these to give some color to my backdrop.
Generally, I'll set one to a kind of orangy red
and the other one to kind of greeny blue
so that I've got some complimentary colors in the back.
I try to face them mostly towards the wall
to get as little spill as possible,
but I also kind of just like a little bit of color
to catch on my outline as well.
Every once in a while though,
I like to switch up how I color my background, just for fun.
For example, the Tamron 35 to 150 video that I made,
I used an Aperture P60C on a C stand with a boom arm
up over my head to add blue green into the middle,
and then the Pavotubes on the side had orange,
just to switch it up a little bit.
Then finally, I have three Nanlite Pavotube 6Cs
that are magnetized to the shelf.
Two of them are just attached to the metal shelf itself,
and then the middle one is on some adhesive metal plates
that I picked up.
This really just illuminates anything
on the second from the top shelf,
since the top shelf blocks the light from the 120D up top.
Since the top two shelves are all that show up in my shot,
the bottom two shelves are mostly for storage, organization
and somewhere to put everything that I want to hide
from the shot.
So we've got shelf lights, background colors,
backlight and a key light.
Now my main key light is on a C stand
right beside my tripod,
but the stand also acts as a holder for my boom arm
for my microphone as well.
Just beneath the soft box, there's a Manfrotto SuperClamp
attached to the C stand with the eye footage
spider crab attached to it.
Now the eye footage spider crabs are something
that I haven't had a chance to talk about on my channel yet,
but they are awesome.
And this super long one specifically has been so good
for my setup.
It allows me to extend and position my microphone so easily.
And it's perfect for this type of shot.
At the end of the arm,
I Frankensteined a road boom arm shock mount handle thing
to hold the Sennheiser MKH-416,
which has quickly become one of my favorite mics.
Again, not cheap, but fantastic.
Before this, I was using the road NTG5, which is great too
and a bit cheaper.
Because both of those microphones are XLR microphones,
I run an XLR cable from the mic
to the top handle audio interface on my FX three camera.
And before I had the FX three,
I was using the Saramonic SR-PAX1 pre-amp
to get the XLR microphone into cameras
that don't have built-in XLR capability.
I have a couple of different tripods that I use
mostly depending on which one just happens to be the closest
to me at the time, but I really love the three legged
thing punks Brian, and they just came out with version two,
so I've been using that one a lot lately,
but also off in the corner is my other main studio tripod,
the I Footage Gazelle TC6S.
I've actually got two of these,
one would generally just say set up for A role
and another one that, as you can see,
holds my rhino slider and rhino arc two,
and it's always ready to shoot some sexy B roll.
I cannot overstate how awesome the rhino slider
and arc two have been for B roll.
I had been contemplating it for a long time
and it's a bit on the expensive side, so I had held off.
But now that I bought it,
I wish I would have picked it up years ago.
It's just so good.
As for the camera and lens, I've got the Sony FX three.
And my main lens that I use in this situation
is the Sony 35 millimeter F 1.8.
I like the compression that I get with that focal length
so I don't feel that strange distortion that you get
with an ultra wide lens,
but it also just happens to be the perfect field of view
to get the shelf in while hiding the lights on either side.
I pretty much shoot everything these days to the in-camera
SD card using the X a V C S I codec,
which is the largest file size,
but the easiest on the computer.
I shoot 10 bit 4:2:2, 24 frames per second 4k,
and pretty much everything in S log three
S gamut three Cine to give me the most options
when it comes to post-processing.
And again, we'll talk about that in a bit.
On the front of the lens,
I'll sometimes use a teleprompter.
I've tried a couple now,
but I keep going back to the pad caster parrot.
There's an app and a remote, and I just load a script in
and generally keep the remote in one hand as I talk
so I can start it and stop it as I need to.
I sometimes use the Atomos ninja five for monitoring,
because it's nice to be able to throw on a lut
and see what my shot will look like in the end.
But lately I've been using an app on my iPad
called monitor plus, and it's awesome.
Unfortunately, it's limited to only certain Sony cameras,
but my experience with it has been really great.
It's got pretty much everything that a pro monitor has,
including the ability to load custom Luts onto it.
In general, I just created a conversion lut
that encourages exposing to the right and having this lut
just makes setting my exposure super easy.
I do still keep the flip out screen visible
on my FX three as well.
And I have zebras enabled at 93 plus
so that I can make sure I'm not clipping anything.
And then once all of that is set up and ready to go,
I shoot myself talking just like this.
And then I pull the footage into DaVinci resolve.
I'm not gonna do a full desk and computer setup tour
right now, but if that's something that you'd like to see,
let me know down in the comments.
Okay, so first things first in the realm of post-production,
color grading.
At this point, I have a power grade made
that works really well for this situation,
so I basically just apply it, maybe make a couple of tweaks,
and then I'm good to go.
But let me break down what's going on here for you.
On my first node,
that's where I do my color space transform.
I use Cinematch, I select my input camera.
They don't have the FX three right now,
so I use the A seven S three,
which should be pretty much exactly the same.
Then I usually choose for it to output to an Arri alexa look
because it makes me feel fancy.
I click the rec 7 0 9 transform
and it starts to look a bit more like normal.
At this point,
I can mess with my exposure and my white balance.
I like to use this skin tone false color button
to dial in my skin tone exposure.
And then I generally just eyeball any small changes
to white balance that I feel like are needed.
The next step and next node
are my primary contrast adjustments.
Usually this means using curves
to add a bit of a contrast curve using editable splines.
And if I need to, I'll play with the primary wheels a bit.
The next node I use are my color adjustments.
And I like to use the color warper
to shift some hues around a bit,
maybe make my reds and my yellows a bit more orange
and my blues a bit more green.
Sometimes at this point,
I'll use a vector scope and a mask
to make sure that my skin tones aren't too messed up.
If I feel like anything is too much,
I'll pull back some saturation on here as well.
And I like to use the saturation versus saturation curve
to pull down on the top end,
just to make sure that if anything is really saturated,
it'll tone it down a little bit.
The next bit is kind of an optional part
that I don't always do,
but I will create a layer to node with a layer mixer.
Anything on the bottom node overrides the top one.
I'll use a qualifier and a shape mask
to isolate my skin tones and then just not touch them.
And then on the top node,
I can add a little bit of a blue to everything
without having it affect my skin tones.
This just draws the viewer's eye to my face a bit more
because now it stands out
a little bit against everything else.
Next I add a node for a little bit of sharpness,
nothing too crazy.
And then finally, if I want to,
I can add a little bit of a film look or a grain,
but lately it's just a bit of a finisher node
just in case there were any global adjustments
that I want to make, maybe a little bit of a fake film fade
using the low soft slider or something like that.
(upbeat music)
Now, as far as processing audio, a quick disclaimer,
I've been a professional audio engineer and music producer
for the past 15 years or so.
So I use a whole bunch of fancy plugins
that I have from that life.
However,
the first thing that I do is get rid of background noise
using Accusonus ERA 6 noise remover.
And if you have no idea about audio and audio processing,
the Accusonus ERA 6 bundle is one of the best ways
to get great audio without having to learn
about all the ins and outs of what everything does.
I've talked about them in other videos,
and I highly recommend them
for especially new video creators.
So I add the noise remover to get rid of a little bit
of the room noise that inevitably makes its way
into the microphone.
And then I add an EQ plugin.
This is the fab filter pro Q2,
and I do a custom EQ for the mic and the room
and the placement too, cause every time that you change
rooms or change mics or even change
where you are within a room,
it might need a different EQ to filter out
some of the frequencies that aren't sounding so great.
So I go through and I do whatever EQ I need to,
and then I will add a fab filter pro DS.
This is a de-esser, so it gets rid of any of the Ss
in my voice, if they're feeling a bit harsh.
And then I dial that in using custom settings as well.
After this,
I use something called fresh air from slate digital
that adds some brightness to my voice after the de-esser.
Next,
I have a fab filter pro C compressor to compress my voice
a bit and level things out.
Again, this is a custom setup because every time I speak,
I might speak louder or quieter
or things might be slightly different.
And then I have a fab filter pro L limiter that I use
to get my voice nice and loud without distorting it.
At some point in the future,
I definitely want to do a more in-depth tutorial
on what all of these different tools do,
but it would definitely take a while,
and we're probably pretty deep into this video already.
If that's something you want to see,
leave a comment down below and let me know.
Again, I want to reiterate that a lot of what I'm doing
in the audio department is a holdover
from 15 years of experience and collecting plugins
as a professional audio engineer.
And it's going to be total overkill for most people,
unless you really know what you're doing
with those plug-ins.
In fact,
most of what I do here is probably overkill
because I'm just a huge nerd and I love it.
So don't at me, but if you do have any questions
about my setup or my process,
please do leave them down in the comment section
and on your way down there, make sure to hit that like
and subscribe and the bell notification button
so you don't miss out on future reviews and tutorials.
Thank you so much for watching
and being a part of this channel.
I'll see you next time.
(upbeat music)