 Tom here for more and systems is March of 2021. This is my updated studio And I say updated because well over the years we're always looking at different iterations and different changes and what changes need to be made and Tweaks here and there. So this is the current version the March 2021 version of the studio. I want to start out with when you're building this and especially people in the tech industry who think about creating content They sometimes go gear crazy and this is one of those don't go gear crazy Just because you can afford a lot of gear or something looks fancy doesn't mean it's necessarily aligned with your goal You do have to figure out your goal now that can be really hard Especially in beginning I did a lot of videos on different topics and it was kind of throwing a spaghetti at the wall So you figure out which topic I was really good at or what's my niche? It turns out. I really like doing firewall videos I really like talking about storage servers and teaching people about technology and that is a primary goal and focus My focus is not to create an absolute beautiful Cynographic experience like you would have in a movie or some creators who really do a beautiful job on YouTube of creating a Cinema-type experience to bring you into the story. I'm here to give you tutorials Why I'm saying all that because someone will point out and they can accurately point this out. That's not a critique It's a accurate statement that Tom. You don't spend a lot of time color grading Tom. You don't spend Enough time, you know making the colors pop and tuning it perfectly and your skin tone looks a little off You didn't hopefully you didn't come here for that because that's not something I plan on doing I focused on getting the videos out Therefore some of these tools and some of these methods are not going to make the absolute highest quality Highest bit rates of video It's going to be the adequate amount of video for me to convey the message to get the tutorial done and Allow for really fast editing like this. Now. That's not actually an edit And that's something I want to bring up right away I'm using a stream labs stream deck now stream labs also is the OBS tool I'm using there's a tool called OBS studio and then there's stream labs OBS studio I'm not gonna get into nuances of difference, but I use the stream labs version Which is enhanced to work with these devices this allows me to have a single stream So I'm taking the output of the studio camera and we'll get to all the gear here in a second And then it goes into the stream labs OBS studio running on windows people seem to be disappointed that I'm not running it on Linux It doesn't work well on Linux and it's not worth the headache to try to fight with it comes back to that efficiency I want to get videos out faster not spend a lot of time monkeying with why doesn't it work now? Windows is the best platform for the ingestion of all these different feeds Including the main camera and making the stream deck work now now We can actually talk a little bit about gear But the switching back and forth is facilitated by this and it makes it a lot easier Because now I can take each one of these feeds and to switch in real time and back to me not hiding the Cinemagraphic we're trying to create I should say a cinema version that to not make you aware of the tools being used I'm kind of indifferent on it because I don't think they make much of a difference If you see me press a button all right nicely pressed a button so it does that because by the way It also allows me to do things like this I have an overhead I look up because I have the camera right above my head and I can get things prepped So now I'm holding this little cool 3d printed articulated Yeah, face hugger anyways So I can hold something like this and have a product in my hand And then this is how you see it right here So being able to switch back and forth when you're doing your view very handy Back over to the gear because people want to know the list I will leave my link to the 2019 studio tour The structure is still the same We still have these black pipes that you see across the top here and those are the pipes that are went over to Lowes because it's behind my building no preference specifically to where you get them from but they're black Pipe that's made for gas lines. I believe I don't know. I just call it black pipe And we put some flange ends on it and ran it across that way everything can mount once you have these pipes Going across there. There's professional studio gear you can buy But this whole three set of pipes costs less than one piece of like the profession professional studio gear Which I forget what that stuff's called. It's like try bracket something someone who works in the industry would know exactly what I'm talking about It's the scaffolding type stuff that is normally used black pipe turns out works really well if you have some of these limo studio super clamps with standard stud That's what's clamping things together and then these impact to a section double arm You can find these on Amazon. You can also find these at B&H photo shop around for the best deal But yes, this is an affiliate link store. I have set up in kit. I will leave this link below The mounts for some of the cameras are on Joby mounts specifically the overhead camera because it makes it a nice quick release. I Have the aperture ale 528s those are what's in front of me and they don't come with the box So I put a light box on them to kind of diffuse it. So that's what that is there I still shoot with the Canon C 100 now the can and C 100 is the Canon studio camera a little bit of trivia I used to be a wedding photographer and a professional photographer for a number of years And I always was a big, you know fan of the Canon gear The problem is can and SLRs are not great for doing studio work. They kind of have left this market I don't think they're the best camera for that option until you go to their studio line Which are just this is an expensive camera, but I really like it It's made for I can leave it on for hours and hours and hours and record with no worry The other can and camera I had actually burned out in a 70d that I started with because I left it on too much This camera was designed to do this and has what they referred to as clean HDMI out that way when you're looking at it from this angle There's no extras on the screen. There's sometimes hacks You have to do to some other cameras to get clean HDMI out, which is why I chose that camera back down the gear list The hair light as it may be called is a light above in the back of my head out of view It's actually close to the ceiling which is this little aperture light. I have these GVM great video maker clever or let not so clever name But that's what's kind of doing the accent splashes on the back of color that you have there adjustable color lights are pretty cool The microphone I'm talking in right now is the as in smx 30. That is been a good microphone It supports both stereo and mono I thought I would use it more in stereo when I did group conversation stuff and works great and mono Just said a little further back from two people and it actually I've been really happy with it now the lens sigma 18 to 35 f 1.8 now this lens is nice. It's sharp It also allows me to have that really cool shallow depth of field that you're looking for It's actually set right now to f 2.0 It'll go down as it says all the way to f 1.8. Don't worry. I'm not gonna get too tech on that But if you want a lens that has that cool effect like that boy, is that is that kind of needed pairing that with this Canon camera. I just like how it looks It will hunt a little bit when it tries to back focus though So I got to be make sure I'm careful about how I focus or set it to manual focus But yeah, not too much not too hard to set up as you can see an autofocus and doing that Now the booms the pro master LS6 booms I use on occasion I used to use them a lot more to get things hung over me like cameras I still have it in the list because sometimes you have a need for a boom But since we put the bars across the top, it's less needed the field world t77 IPS 4k HDMI field monitor That's actually hanging Over here and I look at it. So when I have things set up and I'm gonna give a walk around here in a second You'll see that is so I can have a view from what's in that camera So when I switch between things, I know where to look and also TVs which I have a TV that's on the stand for displays TVs are very inaccurate I guess you could say and when they're inaccurate you end up with Weird colors and it's not sure if the colors are right Using a field monitor allows you to really determine if the colors are right and things are good It'll do this on my camera, but my camera is out of reach and hard to see but the yeah having that over there I can make sure the colors right and hence that no post processing color grading Yeah, I get everything set up. So I don't have to post process and color grade. I Don't use this lens too often, but if I need something ultra wide I still have the Sigma 10 to 20 millimeter in a Canon EOS mount and fit the Canon camera I've done a couple group interviews here back. We'll call that term BC and that is a you know before the events of 2020 and Audio Technica those are great to say it out. That's the reason I also have this Berenger in here We still have that and we'll line up microphones because the best audio is gonna come from having a microphone very close to someone and Putting those out on there. It's only when I do interviews or group interviews if you watch some of those type of videos I have now. I still have this Pro Master one this Cine tripod. It's a really nice solid tripod until I whacked into it really hard and cracked the little Things that hold it together. It actually still works but I wanted to pick up a little more portable try tripod and It held up to more than one of banging into I banged it pretty hard taking it somewhere to cause that problem It was a great studio one. It is still a great studio one if you don't run into things The Corsair Elgato stream deck as I mentioned now the inputs. These are really important Right now you're listening to and I say listening the audio input and the main camera input is off that Corsair Elgato cam link 4k That is coming in through here and it grabs the audio that comes from the ass and microphone goes into the Canon camera and goes into the Elgato cam link 4k I still have this is my overhead camera is the Avermeter Avermedia live gamer now one thing about the Avermedia live gamer is its USB 2 Therefore has a lot more compression. So you don't get quite the video quality out of it They do make updated models that are USB 3 by the way You will have more trouble because I have this that's USB 3 if you have a couple of USB 3 devices Trying to take in a full high res picture. They can conflict with each other and I've actually upgraded to which ones I have and I'll get a little further down and talk about those But those are still in use or just different spots This is the and you'll see it when I flip to the other side here in a minute on the Ankara mobile TV stand cart It's just an easy way to have a TV cart So we have a portable have a TV that can move around and like I said when I walk around I'll show that I Do use these these sermonix I use them on occasionally. It's a really inexpensive but reasonable quality I think 2.4 gigahertz wireless microphone set up for two people and it's one receiver to transmitter so you can mic up two people very quickly and Very painlessly. They're also USB see charging really easy to charge These two items are actually in my office, which will end over there But my office has these two DAS knee lights in there and the blue yeti I have a silver blue yeti. This is a black blue yeti, which I think looks cooler And just don't think I should change it out. I still like the blue yeti. It's part of the USB input It's how I do anything from my office. It's where I do my editing But I do some of my other interviews and sometimes when I talk to people it's just easy to do in there and occasionally some tutorials This Elgato 4k 60 is actually what's inputting from my laptop where we're seeing this right here on the Elgato 4k MK2 PCIe card is really nice I do have a little bit of a bug that I just haven't taken the time to solve but I know I'm sure it's a solvable problem I can't get audio out of it. It only likes video and doesn't grab an audio stream And I don't know why because at first I had the camera hooked up to it And I'm positive and if someone wants to send a link and leave it in the comments below That's fine, but yeah, I do have a problem getting audio out of it because a Few other people I noticed there's a YouTube video that says use this particular driver to fix that issue But like I said, haven't really figured that one out kind of odd that out of the box It doesn't work, but the solution is use the cam link 4k which works perfectly fine with audio The current tripod is this one right here. I guess it's the me photo globe trotter I really like this one. I picked it up on sale locally I found a really good deal on on it from pro cam, but I have a link It's actually now the same price on Amazon that I bought it when it had probably a long to times when it had first been released But yeah, that's definitely a nice features to have that because it's got Really small legs that fold up easy when you want to take it somewhere and not any plastic parts that when you're carrying around that Other pro master one that you will well drop and whack in the stuff and crack the little plastic holders that are now broken on it So this one. Yeah, no, they it's got the twist lock. So harder break Sony alpha 660 mirrorless premium. Now, let me explain how I use that. This is that overhead camera Now the Sony overhead camera next you let's look at the stream deck with it So we'll do this right here and now we're looking at the Sony camera and I'll line it up right here Come on focus. There's sometimes is that I will set the focus to manual frequently Compared to Canon Sony does focus a little bit slower, but Sony is definitely a Really nice high quality camera and I use this camera for a couple different purposes The purpose of it right now is as an overhead and this is on a little Joby so I can just spin it and quick release it I take it off this overhead It is now the camera in my office if I want to use it there Or if I want to walk around and do some video I can do that and pop an SD card in it pop a microphone on it and then wander around and do some Filming with it. It's actually very diverse camera. That's why I don't mind having it You know for an overhead it would be kind of overkill for an overheads I don't do a ton of product videos It's nice though because these Sony with the overhead it goes wide with the kit lens so now you're looking at a full overview of everything that's right here and I Can zoom it in so that's from just the zoom lens. I can do it Really wide or all the way in so I bought it just like that with the kit lens and Really happy with it. It's worked out really well. By the way charges over USB. I wish it was C It's unfortunately stupid micro USB, but charges over it So you I just have the cables up here ones plugged into a standard USB and the other ones a mini HDMI I wish it had like well micro HDMI I wish it had many or a full HDMI, but to keep the camera compact They put a tiny one on there. It just feels delicate. So I'm always very careful when plugging it in Last couple items on here I do have a cage because there's not much to mount on with the Sony and I wanted it in something really solid So I have this little small rig cage and finally something that I didn't think I'd ever want Was a glide gear Teleprompter now the teleprompter is a little bit strange and will show it in action I don't really script things But where the teleprompter is really handy is for two things one I want to start being able to do when I do, you know, some video conferencing You can use it to pop a laptop and including this one right here I can just lay it flat start the video conference on it or get a second monitor and use the main video conference here but be able to project something on there and look directly at the person as opposed to Kind of that off to the side you end up doing quite a bit the other thing I'm using it for and why I have this little tablet right here is the Part numbers can be difficult for me to say Accurately and especially when you're talking about two different models where I need some really detailed specs with a bunch of dates or Model and parts and just too much little stuff That'll be hard to memorize and will make me repeat myself many times and cut it until I get the number Right or if you're wrong and you're never as wrong as when you're wrong on the internet when you said something wrong And didn't realize it. It's just easier. Yeah, pop it on a tablet and throw it over here Now the one I chose this one is a bigger one than you should probably get I bring that up because I bought this larger c100 camera there for This right here was a better fit to get the camera and the stuff on there and I said, hey, why not? It's only 199 for the base model But I wanted one of the bigger models a 16 inch one like I said probably a little overkill but wow is it great because then I had to buy a 10 inch tablet and Right now I'm using this little Lenovo duet, which is a Chromebook that also turns into a tablet And I'll show you how that works for it because having a 10 inch tablet means I can put really big words lots of words and still Stare right at the camera Unflinching and have money. There's nothing on it right now. I'll show you though how that works one last thing before We switch the other way is This is a chrome cast behind my head and the chrome cast is great And I'm just gonna cast it from the tablet right here But I like being able to throw something up there You'll see a logo or something put on the back nothing special just the old I think there's probably an original version chrome cast behind me and That's all I have to do is pick a source I actually picked a web page with the word chrome cast on it But yeah, that's it That's all nothing nothing complicated for the back because it's kind of blurred out It's just to add some ambience to the back actually. I love when it's on the Grew chrome cast how they have these, you know rolling different artworks that come across I don't like that But if I want to switch to something that's all I'm doing is grabbing a logo Casting that particular tab and away it goes Now I was gonna switch this Sony, but I think it's just quicker if I do it over here on my phone so we'll just Wipe off the lens so we get the best picture and we're gonna show you how I use the teleprompter probably to start with and Just give you an idea of how it looks and switch over to doing the video from here So I can walk around and kind of give you the little bit of walk around how this looks Now the app I use is actually called parrot teleprompter and all as it does is reverse things. I'm gonna then set it up over here and Slide this in and we can hit play Come on. All right, it's doing its thing. Well kind of I hit it wrong But you get the idea you can actually see things really well from here and that's the TV I'm talking about So this which I did not hit play on come on. There we go Maybe it yeah, you can see it like Star Wars man The words flow across and you're steering right into it now Let's go ahead and walk around while that's playing and give you the better idea what's going on here Complete separate video for this little messy rack over here, which is always where products are being tested and you know Things for the studio. It's not actually anything Production for the company. There's that TV from there There's that little light. I talked about from the top those bars that go across nothing real special little clamps I try to keep the wires as neat as possible as reasonable up there. There's that camera So you can see how the Sony cameras mounted right here little Joby mount now. I'm I guess I could do it carefully I don't know. This is a bad idea. Okay. Good. I look loose enough so I can adjust it This gives me a lot of angle options for this and the Joby mounts are solid so then they can just better done with two hands, but Stiffen it up a little bit and these are on quick releases Which I will not release right now because that would just make the camera flop There's this HDMI cable goes all the way around things come around here and Then I label them so they come down From the ceiling and just for clarity I label things like this because I know this one's going to Elgato That one goes to the live gamer. This allows me if I need to unplug something I can just move it around plug it in differently if I have to take an output from a computer and feed it in there I know where it's being fed This is that right here. So when I'm doing that now one of the things you'll notice That's how it looks on the TV And it may not come through on this camera, but you're getting a different color perspective from the TV The red may show up a lot different. So if I take something The TV looks kind of like glowy cartoon red to me This one doesn't and it also will tell me by blinking on the parts that are blown out So this you know much better color adjustment. All right, let's swing around this way here and look at the microphone mount I guess it's worth mentioning. It's just one of those little flexible Bars to keep it in place But it does come in handy to have it like that. So it's nice and isolated, but still has the flexible bars Now these ones I can give it a twist. I love how these work So this is how it's like this if I needed the light to be like that and this works for any of these These twist locks are great. They got little teeth in them and Swing it like that Twist it right back into place This is kind of a look at the glide gear The tablet we put this on here and I need something that doesn't bow as much but this to keep the any reflectiveness off of the lens make it as easy to see as possible and don't distract me because I am easily distracted and Because I knew someone would ask I wrote down what the settings were on here's are hard to read But this is the f2 I saw 1000 current settings, which actually settings there most of the time I will change the depth of field a little bit if need be to you know make it a little bit sharper because I have a few more products and Yes, there's a little bit of rigging going on here to create This input right here, which by the way, this is how we switch inputs Everything's routed back up here, but and then it just comes down into these XLR inputs the microphone itself is not XLR someone will complain about it But I think the audio quality is adequate from it even without that I do have a ring late over here. I don't use very often, but sometimes I do if I I think I can add that to the kit In the list this was just again from Lowe's and just where all the extra gear is and this TV here It is pretty cool because it's on the stand It's kind of like the AV room that you had maybe back all the way in school And but it's kind of neat the up ahead these clip into the tracks And make the wire that's just an HDMI and power and by the way The power and HDMI can be disconnected right here an HDMI splitter here and the reason for that is if I want this to be disconnected and even rolled into another room Or when we roll things out of the way because we do like cleaning a lot and vacuuming we can easily roll this somewhere else so not everything's in a fixed position and Because our kitchen is over here in the office We can actually take the TV and Do this and whoops drop things off of it and yeah The TV flips around completely if I wanted it flipped around so we can spin that back the other way Now a quick closer look just like I'd said these is just just black pipe piece of the Plastic decking I guess you'd call it. I don't know what it's actually called I didn't put it up one of my staff did but yeah Then the black pipe and then there's those clamps and those those GVM lights that I have back there So I should give you an idea of like all the pieces and all the moving parts are in the studio and Last little piece I want to do is take you into my office To kind of get you an idea of the workflow at the end and what happens from there And we'll start right here with a quick picture of my office It is six foot in depth and in length nine foot. It is actually rather small So yes, it is pretty much I'm standing in the doorway to get this picture people think that I Should have an office that where people can sit down with me No My office is my space where I close the door and have more sound deadening than needed to do videos because I really like it quiet I prefer not to hear anything. I'm easily distracted as I said earlier So closing the door having this little setup and I have you can find tours of my office But there's nearly not much to it I will leave a link to the system I use because people ask like how do you edit I do run Linux I run pop OS and it is an AMD Ryzen system with like I said a link to the actual video for that now for the editing itself Let's talk about that and I'll switch to this view because this is how I see the triple monitors Now you notice those lights they were off for the photo the DAS knee lights But they're on now has a cool little remote. That's where those live. They're nice flat panel displays I can adjust the brightness and get things tuned in when I do want to do a video in here But then I'm going to be using the Caden live software. So let me switch to that And this is how I edit All the video data is synced so as it created that file as soon as I'm done with the recording It is synced over to my true nasty system, which is how I do all of the editing I use sync thing for that. I've done videos on sync thing before it actually works great for Instantly pulling all that footage and having a copy of it now What you actually see is I've edited quite a bit of this and this is my Time stamps over here the project over here and because everything just comes in as one video All I do is drag this one video in if nothing needs to be cut out Nothing needs to be cut out until I switch to my phone So there's the phone part of this video that you already watched and now this part's gonna get Inserted right here at the end and then it'll be processed and uploaded and it's as simple as that I mean you some separate videos if there's interest in me talking more about Caden live I have some older videos, but they've really done a great job of revamping Caden live and improving it It's not the crash monster. It used to be it actually is extremely stable It has no problem handling and swinging the footage around provided you have fast enough computer So I can scrub through stuff find things really easy and now support some of the templating that I do for like the video This is a chroma key template right here. So if we were to Take this out. It would turn bright green over here But yeah, it's actually got a lot of features that are good So maybe I'll do some separate videos on that if there's enough interest and curiosity But there's a couple people doing Caden live videos right now that I've been learning from it's kind of in a slow Interative process alright as I said I'll leave links down below to you know the gear I use and everything that I talked about the kit link I will answer any questions that you know come up on this if I missed something skipped over something Let me know if you're curious about it if you're thinking about content creation and you know, hopefully this helps you out and get you some ideas But don't be afraid to do any of the things I did I don't look at it as copying for those wondering so my friend Jay from learn Linux TV We actually have collaborated back and forth together He started out using my studio and someone said Tommy stole your idea and I'm like no no I shared my idea just like I'm sharing with all of you with Jay And he uses a lot of the same tools for his studio and you can check out his channel Which is learn linux.tv or search it for it on YouTube alright and thanks And thank you for making it to the end of this video if you enjoyed this content Please give it a thumbs up. 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