Build The Ultimate Editing Desk for $200! | Tomorrow's Filmmakers

[Music] [Music] hey guys my name is justice with tomorrow's filmmakers and 90dayfilmmaker.com and in today's episode i'm going to show you how i made the ultimate editing desk for under 200 bucks over the last 10 years i have been editing on so many different desks from office desks executive l-shaped standing desks small short tall any sort of desks you can think of and i keep going through these desks trying to find the perfect one for editing and the perfect one for my workstation but i notice a major problem in all of them they are not long enough they don't have enough room and they don't have a monitor shelf i run out of room so fast and i immediately feel cramped on this little itty bitty desk now about a year ago i went to a buddy of mine and he had this massive editing desk with this second shelf for his monitors and it was incredible i sat down and just loved it now he told me the brand of that desk which was mid-atlantic and i looked it up and wow there is no way i'm gonna be paying that for a desk i looked around for similar desks and i really couldn't find one for any less than about three grand so instead i used the same layout in the same dimensions as my friend's desk and made my own for less than 200 bucks what i love about it is that it is completely customizable to whatever you need do you need a piano shelf for creating music or a special shelf for you know certain monitors you go right ahead and put it on your desk but i want to show you exactly how i made a four thousand dollar editing desk for only 200 so you guys can do the same thing i'll also have a pdf in the description which you can download that has all the instructions and what you need so you don't have to keep referring back to this video whenever you're trying to build it now i knew i wanted my desk to be really large i was tired of having a small place to work and tired of having the monitor right in front of my face and the desk we're going to be building today is six and a half feet wide and three and a half feet deep and the monitor shelf on top is the same width of six and a half feet and one foot deep again you can make yours to whatever size you want but this is the size that i wanted and it's perfect for my workstation so the materials that you will need are nine two by six by eights and i got eight foot boards because i wanted my desk to be longer than six feet if you only want your desk to be six feet long then you can just get two by six by sixes would finish stain and you can choose any color depending on how dark or light you want your desk i decided to go with a little bit darker color so i chose honey crystal clear satin based polyurethane tight bond premium wood glue sandpaper and i would get multiple grades like 60 80 or 120 a pocket hole jig which is about 20 dollars at lowe's and is a necessity for this build craig screws of two and a half inches long and depending on the legs and the shelf support you might need a right angle attachment for your drill which again is only like 15 bucks at lowe's and you'll also need a foam brush angler pencils measuring tape an old washcloth and just normal everyday things like that and of course your legs and your monitor shelf support now of course this depends on what kind of legs you want and the look that you're going for we used black steel pipes and end caps for our legs but i'll show you guys a little bit about that in just a little bit but those are gonna be the basic things you need to create your ultimate editing desk and to give you guys just kind of a layout of how this is going to go we're going to be cutting out and laying our boards in the shape of the desk that we want gluing them and screwing them together with our pocket hole jig sanding it staining it putting the monitor shelf on it and that is the general idea of how this desk is going to come together so let's jump right into the build by determining how wide you want your desk to be now mine is six and a half feet across and three and a half feet deep and that requires seven of our two by six boards for the main deck first we cut our eight foot boards into the right dimensions and i would suggest cutting an inch off of the other side as well and that's because many times wood from places like lowe's and home depot they don't have a hundred percent perfectly clean cut edges sometimes and you don't want kind of a messed up edge on the end of your desk so instead of cutting two feet off of one end you cut one foot and 11 inches off of one end and then one inch off the other end just to guarantee that you have those perfectly symmetrical edges for your desk once you cut your pieces go ahead and lay them out on the ground or a table to determine which boards you want where now boards like this are always weird because some of them will fit together flush while others won't so if you press them together and there's a small gap in between them try to move them around until you have little to no gaps between the boards and if there's also a blemish on a piece of wood that you'd rather not hide or you'd like to show you can determine all that here flip the boards over move them around to get the best looking tabletop in the best looking workstation and now it's time to screw the boards together and this is where i completely messed up the first time and had to redo this whole thing you want to make sure that you put them on a completely flat level surface don't use a tabletop or anything like that if one part of the desk is slightly off it will be exaggerated as you add more boards to it and you will have a warped table by the end i used a table the first time and everything was warped when i was finished so take your boards and flip them upside down and place them on a flat surface like the floor of your garage or something like that if you don't do this step and you don't find a flat surface your desk will be ruined next we're going to take our pocket hole jig and put screws in each of the wood going in both directions now you can add as many screws to these boards as you want but i added seven screws to each piece of wood with three screws going in one direction and four screws will be going in the other direction you will do this on every board so we can screw them all together first we make our marks on all the boards and then we use our pocket hole jig to make the holes and if you've never used a pocket hole jig before first you take your measuring tool that they give you with the pocket hole jig you measure the wood and as you can see this is one and a half inches you then set the drill that comes with the pocket hole jig to that length which is one and a half inches and then you set the base of the pocket hole jig to that same length you are then able to put the brace on the wood and drill a hole into the wood with the perfect measurements for the drill to stop right at the end of the wood without going through to the other end this will allow you to drill a screw into the other piece of the wood without breaking through the other side an incredible little tool that's around 20 bucks at lowe's and is a necessity for this build so using a flat surface we place our jig on the marks that we made and we drill all the holes into the wood with four holes going one direction and three holes going in the other direction and you really need to make sure that the pocket jig doesn't move so you can either use a clamp or you can do like i did and literally just stand on it you just don't want it to move around whenever you're trying to make those holes and once you have done that you should have a bunch of holes throughout all the wood in your desk now we want to have a little bit extra sturdiness to the desk and just make sure it doesn't go anywhere so before we screw them together we add the tight bond glue to the edge of the wood and then place them together and then screw them together and if the wood oozes out a little bit that's all right because we're going to be sanding this thing like crazy so we add the glue we start screwing the boards together with our two and a half inch craig screws four going in one direction and then three going in the other direction then we just keep adding boards to it we add the glue we place the boards we add more screws we add boards we do the glue we do more screws and we just keep doing that until you have all of your boards screwed together properly you also want to do this exact same thing with the two boards that you have for the top monitor shelf and there you go you have your desk put together and it's starting to look great now before we add the monitor shelf to it we are first going to sand this thing like crazy and if you think you've sanded enough sand some more all right i'm not even joking your your arms are going to be sitting on this desk all the time and if there is any roughness whatsoever it's going to irritate your skin and you're going to hate your desk so you want it to be literally as smooth as ice even though we're going to be putting a clear coat on the desk at the end that won't help with rough surfaces so you need to make sure that it is completely smooth and sanded so much so do the top of the desk and also all of the edges and corners so it's really nice and smooth now it's entirely up to you if you wanted to sand the corners of the desk and make them actually rounded so there's no points i personally wanted there to be a point at the end so it looked more rustic and looked more like wood but of course if you want to sand it to make it round you can do that but at least still sand all of the edges just so that there's no roughness once we have sanded our desk it's time to add your stain now make sure that all of the saw dust is off of the desk i would use a leaf blower or something to really get all of it off and even get a damp rag and just run it over a few times you don't want to get the desk wet but you want to remove all sawdust from the desk or else the stain won't stick to it now remember stain is not like paint you don't want to paint it on there and then let it dry you have to wipe it off with a rag or it will become really sticky and ruin your desk now depending on the color that you want for the desk if you want a darker color you would leave the stain on there longer before wiping it off and if you wanted a lighter color you would leave the stain on there not nearly as long before you wipe it off and if you'd like you could practice with some extra wood that you had lying around after you cut the desk to measurement just to get the kind of color that you would like but for me i really liked the color of just about a minute after leaving the stain on there before i wiped it off now i didn't do the underside of the desk because nobody will ever see it but if you want to do that you could do the underside as well and also make sure that you do the edges and the monitor shelf as well and once you are happy with the color allow it to dry and then we can add our clear coat now a clear coat is actually more like paint and you just want to add a clear coat of paint to your entire desk with a brush now be sure to spread it all out evenly because if clear coat starts to kind of glob up in certain areas it will start to actually look white and not look clear so spread it out evenly over the entire desk and the entire monitor shelf and congratulations you guys you have finished the most difficult part of the desk and it's finally time to put it together first is the legs you have many different options for desk legs if you have another desk that you just want to put this thing on top of you can easily do that you can buy table legs at home depot for around fifty dollars for a set of four of them and these table legs will hold the weight of this desk we actually bought some and we tried it and they work perfectly fine i have an electric standing desk and i actually removed the legs from that and added it to this build so now i have a standing desk but before i ever did that i actually went to lowe's and bought four black 30 inch steel pipes i first bought 36 inch pipes but i realized that they were way too long so i went back later and bought the 30 inch pipes but i bought four pipes and two end caps for each of the pipes i love the look of these because not only does it support the desk really well but it looks really industrial and just fits so well with the look of this desk first i screwed in the end caps for the pipes on the bottom of the desk with one and a quarter inch wood screws then all i had to do was screw in the steel pipes and they were done now instead of going with the typical like just square legs set up we decided to do it a little bit different to give myself a little bit more room and also give a lot of support to the desk i decided to have the two back legs about a foot and a half inward and between the two back boards because this was going to be holding up the most weight which would be all of my monitors i didn't want it to be in the center of only one board because that would put a lot of pressure on that board to hold up the monitor shelf so i put them in between the two back boards the front two legs i ended up only having about eight inches inward and on the second board now this gives me a lot more leg room and also allows the desk to have the support that it needed i screwed the end caps into the desk then all i had to do was screw those legs into the end caps with the monitor shelf we pretty much did the exact same thing i purchased four one and a half inch black steel pipes with two end caps for those pipes as well these were the exact same pipes i used for the legs just shorter ones to use for the monitor shelf and of course depending on how tall you want the monitor shelf to be you can buy pipes at any size that you want to be honest i actually tried three different sizes before i found the perfect monitor height now with the shelf screwing in the bases was a very similar setup i placed the two back bases about two feet inward and the front two bases were only about six inches inward i wanted to have support on the end of the shelf but i also wanted to have lots of space underneath to be able to store things if i had both of the bases close to the center it wouldn't give any support to the edge of the monitor shelf and it would also not give me any space underneath i screwed the end caps into the shelf and then i just screwed the black steel pipes into those bases and we were ready to put it on the desk now the only problem was i also needed to screw this onto the desk but i didn't have any room because of the giant monitor shelf so i found this incredible little tool at lowe's for about 15 dollars and it's a dewalt right angle for your drill you place it on your drill and it allows you to drill at a 90 degree angle using that i screwed in the monitor shelf to the top of the desk and boom you now have a four thousand dollar editing desk for less than two hundred dollars and you can customize this to anything that you want i actually glued a card reader to the underside of the desk to get it out of the way a usb docking station to the underside of the shelf i added cord organizers to the back of the desk along with led strips to give it some nice ambience and i also screwed in two surge protectors to the underside of the desk whatever you want to do you have the ability to do it and whatever you want to customize it to make it the most efficient editing desk for you i've spent countless hours at this desk editing and creating content and i absolutely love it and again we have the pdf down below to show you the exact items that we purchased and how much everything was and if you want you can create the exact same desk that we did so i hope this video has really helped you guys out and encourage you to create your own editing workstation unfortunately editing desks are crazy expensive when in reality they are a large piece of wood with a smaller piece of wood for your monitors and we created one ourselves which in my opinion actually looks better than the five thousand dollar editing desk that you can buy and now that you have a place to edit it's time to learn how to edit and inside tomorrow's filmmakers we have over a thousand training videos and over a hundred hours of content on every filmmaking subject you can imagine and we also teach how to edit in all four major editors so whatever editor you have you can learn you can check all of that out in the notes below and also be sure to check out our free one hour filmmaking webinar where i share with you the 10 filmmaking secrets that nobody is telling you you can find all those links in the notes below but i hope that you guys really enjoyed this video and build your own editing workstations if you do build your desks post a picture of it and tag us on instagram at tomorrowsfilmmakers and of course if you have any questions please email us at justice tomorrowsfilmmakers.com thanks again for watching another episode of tomorrow's filmmakers where we give you all the skills that you need to succeed

Channel: Tomorrows Filmmakers

Views: 79,484

Keywords: editing, desk, workstation, windows, apple, adobe, finalcutpro, finalcut, resolve, davinci, fulltime filmmaker, parker walbeck, 14 day filmmaker, edit, video editing, desk build, edit desk, editing desk, editing workspace, editing workstation, editing table

Id: EXJlpbWe1Hg

Length: 16min 16sec (976 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 17 2021