DIY Overhead STUDIO RIG! Under $300, Hang Cameras, Lights & Cords from the ceiling of your studio

i am sick and tired of tripping over cords and light stands it's time to do something about this jeff janz here at janser studios so my studio is over my garage and it's not exactly tiny but it's not huge either so when we get a few people in here for a shoot it can be a little bit crowded with all the light stands so what i'd like to do is build an overhead rail system that i can mount all my lights to get all these light stands off the floor and then we can string up cords off the floor we'll have a little bit more space in here for our art on earth youtube channel by the way if you haven't checked that out make sure you check it out we explore why art is important on our planet but anyways we've been using overhead shots for some of the art projects that we do there and i've just been mounting the camera to the c-stand but you can see that it's a little bit wobbly and that's not exactly ideal for a shot that you want to be stable so i'm also counting on being able to mount cameras to this overhead system to make our overhead shots a lot more steady i started looking around online to see if there was something i could just buy and install that would suit my needs but the only thing i could find was over a thousand dollars and it really wasn't big enough so i started designing my own using just hardware and things for the most part that i could get from my local building supply store there are a couple things that i had to order online and i'll put a spreadsheet to show you all the materials that i used in a link below but the best part of this is i was able to come up with something for under 300 and it's going to be a lot better than what i would have been able to get on amazon or b h for over a thousand first let's take a look at the ingredients for this recipe i've got some nuts and bolts and just random hardware and then i'm going to use these clamps and rollers later in the project i've got these metal strips with holes and some three-quarter inch conduit and also this unistrut now the unistrut along with this nifty little roller here that's kind of the key to making this thing adjustable i thought that i'd be able to bolt this directly to my bracket [Music] but it turns out the head of the bolt is going to get in the way of the roller so i went online and found that they sell these special brackets specifically for mounting unistrut and the roller just slides right through i really love the high ceilings in my studio but they're sloped so that's going to create kind of a challenge trying to figure out how i can mount my rail system level in a place with ceilings that are not level if you have a level ceiling in your studio this whole project could be a little bit easier [Music] i need to make some custom mounting brackets but i'm going to have to figure out what they're going to look like now that i've got the paper all set up i can take it to the table and kind of lay things out a little bit the second set of brackets will be about six or seven feet over and because of the angle of the ceiling these brackets are going to have to be a lot bigger i was careful to write down all my measurements so i can remember where the bracket goes later now that i've got this all figured out i'm going to transfer these marks to a piece of the metal strip cut it and bend it on the vise [Music] okay so this is what the first set of brackets are going to look like [Music] a couple of quick little adjustments [Music] so basically i just got to do the same thing for the bigger brackets [Music] all right i think i'm ready to install this thing but i'm gonna need a little help on this one shout out to my buddy doug for coming over and giving me a hand so remember those measurements that i was keeping track of before this is where those are gonna come in handy so i can make sure that i get these brackets at least close to where they were on the wall before there'll be a little bit of wiggle room but they still got to be in about the right spot i want to make sure that we're drilling into some wood there there's going to be quite a bit of weight on this so i want to make sure it's going to hold the last thing i need is lights crashing down on someone's head during a shoot i'm using some pretty heavy duty lag bolts about three and a half inches long now we'll slide the unistrut in [Music] you may have noticed that the bolt holding the two brackets together is a little bit long that's so i can adjust from one end to the other to make it level [Music] and tighten it up and now the other side [Music] i'm going to use my laser level to level it from one side to the other i could just use a 2x4 with a level on it but since i have this i'm going to use it dude are you sure that's strong enough only one way to find out [Music] okay that'll work for your skin [Music] okay back to work one last little adjustment now we're gonna put in the cross beam and let's see how it fits [Music] oh man it's sticking a little bit oh yeah it's like dragging on just a little bit maybe we should re-engineer that now so the problem is that when we slide it through the conduit hangers are hitting the unistrut hanger just causing a little bit of friction there so i think we'll be able to solve that by adding this half inch aluminum bar stock [Music] we were also noticing that the tabs on the roller were bending a little bit as we were bolting on the conduit so adding this aluminum bar stock should help fix that problem too [Music] hmm sweet it slides right through now let's see that one more time [Music] in order to keep this thing from sliding right out of the end we're just gonna stick a fat little bolt in there [Music] it works [Music] and now for the fun part adding the lights some of the systems that they sell online have these really cool pantograph brackets but they're a little bit expensive so i found these wall camera boom mounts online and i gotta say i'm pretty impressed with the quality i would definitely recommend these to anybody i got three different types because i think i'll have some lights that need to be higher than others so i really wanted to experiment with some rollers because i thought it'd be really cool to be able to mount a camera to one of these and get some rolling shots without having to spend a bunch of money on a slider but it turns out this is a little bit noisy so it might work but probably not for a shot that includes audio [Music] but it's still kind of neat anyways and of course the simplest design turned out to be the best i just used these pvc conduit clamps they fit kind of loose which is nice because then it slides back and forth [Music] so i realized once i got this in place that i really needed to figure out a way to get some lights even higher so i found these online that just stick out a little bit and i made a really simple design for this and this one worked pretty well too [Music] another really simple way to mount a light is just by using these conduit clamps [Music] i'll be using the studio super clamp for mounting the camera i decided after getting all this up that i really wanted it to be even wider than 10 feet so i went to my local plumbing supply store and got some 14 foot black iron pipe and i made a third rail now i just gotta figure out what to do with these cords so i mounted my surge protectors to the ceiling and figured out some other creative ways to keep my cords organized including using shower curtain rings which ended up working really well to kind of take up some of the slack and keep things in place but still leave things a little bit flexible overall i'm really happy with how this turned out it's super versatile and really easy to adjust [Music] you see that nothing to trip on all right that about wraps it up so i hope that you found this video helpful or at the very least interesting and uh if you have any ideas on how to make this project better or if you have questions about how i did something please feel free to use the comments section and i hope to see you in the next video [Music]

Channel: Jantzer Studios

Views: 72,080

Keywords: soft box, studio lighting, DIY studio, Studio overhread lighting, lighting rig, overhread camera rig, how to studio lighting, custom studio lighting, budget studio lighting, professional studio lighting, studio Gaffer, no more light stands, no more cords in the studio, Unistrut studio rig, the best overhead camera setup, led photography lights, photography lighting, continuous lighting

Id: ODk5793aKno

Length: 11min 25sec (685 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 13 2021