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Equipment options to improve audio and lighting for your videos

John Crenshaw in Uncategorized

May 12

actually shot this video with my iPhone to show you the video equipment we have been using. I thought I was recording this with some of the fancy equipment I was showing off but it turns out the audio was coming from my phone. This proves that you could totally get away with using your phone to shoot videos for your business or personal channels and get a great result.

However, there are some simple and cheap upgrades you can make if you’re looking to enhance the quality of your videos for YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc. You can also spend more money on some fancier equipment if you want to go that route. In this video, I show you all the equipment we have purchased for our videos including a wide range of options from cheaper to more expensive.

Here are links to purchase some of the equipment I mentioned in the video:

‍Cheaper Lighting and Audio Equipment Options‍

‍Higher-end Lighting Options‍

‍Higher-end Audio Options‍

‍Higher-end Camera Options

Side note, here’s the best camp mattress ever by Exped that I mentioned at the beginning of the video: https://www.rei.com/product/113720/exped-megamat-duo-10-sleeping-pad.

Transcript

Alright, I was gonna talk about some of the stuff we’ve been working on and share… good grief so the Lord of the Flies up in here look at this. I mean we’re in quarantine and there’s still a sun… hold on. God that’s better. I woke up like that if you can believe that. Pretty soon  for my next video, I’m gonna be chewing on my couch for six hours.

So this is the office. This is my office. It’s a mess because we’ve got video equipment all over the place. I’ve also got a mattress in here because I’m sleeping in here because my mom is staying with me right now for quarantine.

And this is actually a pretty sick camp mattress. If you guys camp at all, it’s an Exped Megamat. They’re pretty expensive, but I have like a really nice latex mattress that I normally sleep on. And this thing is almost as comfortable as that. So if you camp, it’s definitely not backpacking material. It’s kinda heavy but that’s the thing to get.

So anyway now you’ve seen my bed, my temporary bed and what I look like when I wake up. So next, we have the office. Here’s all the gear so there’s some crap here like my kids socks, my socks… but we’ve got these are lights.

These are LED panel lights. They’re really cheap ones too. A couple of things that I’ve learned we’re slowly learning on video. You wouldn’t know it because our videos so far have been just surprisingly bad quality as we work out all the kinks.

Hopefully the audio on this one is gonna be much better because I’ve got a much better audio recorder now. I’m gonna walk through some of this stuff real quick. You guys can see what we’re using.

These are LED panel lights. You know these are super cheap on Amazon. I think I got like three of them for like 150 bucks. They are worth about that. Maybe even less than that. They’re terrible. They make like a splotchy sort of light.

I’ve learned if you wanna have like really good lighting, you really need to spend… this guy was about a thousand dollars, so he’s it’s an Aputure light or it’s an Aputure 120 D. The light’s in that guy and then this is a gigantic soft box, essentially an umbrella thing to soften the light make it look better. I mean, basically if you spend less than like 500 bucks on a light, it’s gonna be pretty crappy.

That’s not to say you can’t use cheaper stuff like I’m filming this literally on my iPhone right now. Although the audio is going into a really expensive recorder so you can get away with much cheaper stuff and it’ll probably look better than the stuff we’ve published up to this point because we’re working out all those kinks.. So don’t let that hold you up. If you’re thinking about doing this, you can literally just pull up a phone and start talking. But we’re trying to work out some quality and try to improve things and make the video look really good. So that’s why we’re spending all this time.

So we’ve got tripods here. That’s that. This is a wireless. Sennheiser Wireless lav mic system. This is a Zoom H5 recorder you can kinda see it’s a little audio recorder. It’s actually not that amazing. It’s kinda noisy. The noise floor, they call it, is pretty high. So it’s a lot of noise. Another LED panel light.

Here’s a boom with a mic attached. This is a shotgun. I think it’s an. Audio-Technica AT 875R. It’s a pretty good shotgun mic.

Let’s see what else we got here. Okay. So this is the MixPre-6. This is a audio recorder. This is what. I’m recording this on right now. We just picked this up yesterday. This should be much better quality audio. That’s a big thing. If you can get good audio in your videos, it’s gonna make a huge difference. Good audio and good lighting.

The camera doesn’t have to be that great. You can fill it on an iPhone. But good lighting and good audio. It turns out like natural light is pretty damn good. So like I’m standing in front of a window right now. There’s my mic.. Hello. And it’s pretty good. I mean it’s actually hard to replicate natural light. So if you can just shoot in natural light, if it’s bright out, that’s usually a pretty good way to do it.

You don’t need an expensive camera. If you can get good audio that can make a huge difference.. Let’s see what are these are like we call this gels. They’re like for lighting you put them over top of… they’re like these colored sheets you put over top of the lights because especially for these crappy LED lights, the color temperature is different so like they might be too White or too reddish or too greenish or too magenta-y. These little sheets you can put over and sort of fix the tone of the light and get them to match each other. Some complex stuff.

This is a color meter or a light meter. You’ve probably seen these things on movies. It helps you get the right lighting.. We’ve got flash. We’ve got microphone. Here is just an absolute shit show of stuff. Tripods, lights… this is just stuff I’m sorting through right now. Here’s the Sennheiser, which. I’m using the wireless lav mic, which is what I’m using now.

There’s the MixPre6 recorder. And this is gonna sound… you’re gonna hear this. It’s gonna sound much much better on this recording. The noise floor. So I’ll stop talking for a second and you’ll see what I mean. It should be pretty quiet, we’re gonna find out. Watch it not be though.. Should be very quiet, not a lot of shhh. On really shitty audio equipment you’ll hear like a background shhh. That’s just way too loud. You can actually hear that in a lot of our other recordings because I recorded it with the mic going into the camera. And the camera has really terrible preamps and audio preamps, which adds a lot of noise.

I’ve learned this fairly recently so if you wanna get really good quality audio you don’t wanna route your mic into your DSLR camera. If you’ve got a really high end video camera that might be different but that’s why we’re using this separate audio recorder here which also routes into the computer so I can do like screencasts or you know, share my desktop and record that record my face at the same time. Here’s another wired mic..

So here’s what I would do if you were If you were gonna get started with this stuff and you wanted to go cheap as possible.. I would do this. I would buy this ring light. Let me show you what it looks like. It’s actually incredibly bright like really bright.

So I would buy this ring light and you can clip it onto your iPhone and see look there’s with ring light. Not a huge difference I’ve got overhead light on right now, which is probably throwing stuff off cause it’s kind of a different color light. There’s with ring light. There’s without.. I’ve got my windows open so I don’t know maybe you don’t even need a ring light. Maybe you can just use natural light.

So maybe scrap that just use natural light. Get one of these. Tascam. It’s a task a DR 10 L, and it’s a lav mic, but it’s not wireless. It’s wired and it just records into this little case. You put a little SD card in here and it records into this thing and then you pull the SD card out and plug it in your computer and then you can sync up the audio with the video that you recorded on your phone and then you can get much better audio quality if that’s what you’re going for.

And this little Tascam DR10-L was I think it was like 150 bucks maybe so that’s a hell of a lot cheaper than the MixPre-6, which is about $900. And a wireless system which is like another $500. So you can do this a hell of a lot cheaper.

If you wanna upgrade a little bit, we’ve got some, you can see, this is a Canon. What is this?. The 80D? This actually does pretty good video. It’s also got a little flip out screen, which is pretty useful if you’re trying to frame the shot and you’re shooting selfies. Basically, you’re shooting yourself and you wanna see how you look make sure you’re in the frame and all that.  That’s super handy.

This is a Sony A7R3 probably way more camera than we need. A whole bunch of lenses and stuff. Yeah, 99 percent of the stuff we don’t actually need and I’ll probably sell it at some point in time.

But yeah like I said if you’re looking to like start doing some videos for your business or whatever the cheapest, quickest way to do it just to try to get audio. Good solid audio is gonna make a massive difference. It’s not gonna add a ton of time and then use natural light. Try to get some good audio. This is a Tascam DR 10L. I think like I said, these are probably a 150 bucks. Maybe 180 bucks on Amazon and that’s pretty much all you need to really get going. You don’t need any of the other stuff that I bought so yeah.

That’s a little rundown of my office is gonna look a hell of cleaner pretty soon. But you know like I said, we’ve got a little Lord of the Flies situation here in quarantine. Hope you guys are hanging in there. See ya.

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