Equipment and Software You'll Need to Start a Vlog

what's up everyone I'm Ryan and I'm lazy and stupid but you know what so are you I'm here to make you less lazy and stupid each and every day by teaching you how to make the internet work for you and today we're going to talk about vlogging that's right video blogging I got to thinking usually if you're a content creator or you want to be a content creator you're probably most interested in creating the content that you most often consume that make sense so for example if you enjoy reading you might be interested in more in writing a blog if you listen to podcast you might want to start your own podcast if you're watching this video right now chances are you are most interested in consuming video content which means you might be most interested in starting a vlog so I wanted to take some time to kind of talk about what you need to get started with vlog more most specifically what kind of software and equipment you're going to be needing well the good news is I have some answers to that the bad news is I don't have all the answers to that because that is a super broad question honestly it's going to come down to what kind of content you're going to be producing you know if you're if you're going to be producing some sort of lifestyle blog where you just kind of film your daily activities and things like that I see people use something as simple as their cell phone camera I mean you're going to be giving up on some quality if you use your cell phone camera because you're you know the audio and the video footage is not going to be that great period but I have seen some people even successfully use their phone cameras to do that a step up from that would be to shell out 100 150 bucks and buy yourself a little point shoot like this one now this is a Canon ELPH a Canon ELPH 300 HS and that's ELPH shelf this one's a few years old though I've had this one for a little while but it's work it works great and actually I have another YouTube channel that I do with my wife called fantastic recipes if you watch like our first five or six or so episodes we film all of those using a poignant shoe now and it worked fine the only problem is the audio quality really isn't that great video quality is okay but especially with lighting you know like like tungsten lighting that stuff like that you're going to have some issues with with coloration sometimes going to look a little yellow might get brighter and darker depending on how you know how video is on the point shoot but for most instances a point-and-shoot works great let's say you enjoy extreme extreme sports maybe you're a skydiver or a skateboard or snowboard or something like that a point your chutes probably not going to work too well for you because it's kind of hard to hold a camera and skateboard and skydive and whatnot so in that case you need to use something more like a GoPro camera which you've probably seen those those those a lot of times will attach to helmets and things like that those cameras are made for that type of activity now for me see the setup that I have I can pretty much just pop the camera on a tripod and talk into it I want my videos to look really good though and I want the sound to be good as well so if you're really concerned about video and audio quality and you want to step it up a little bit it might be best to jump up to a DSLR camera of some kind for me personally I use a Canon t3i DSLR now it is one of the more entry-level DSLR cameras you can usually get the t3i with the lens kit the 18 to 55 millimeter lens kit for under 400 bucks or so and I'll put a link in the show notes so that if you want to check that out you can but it's a great camera there are a couple flaws to it for me it works perfectly like I said because I just I'm going to stay this far from the camera I'm not you know just has to be on a tripod I can just talk to it however you know if you're doing action shots at least with the t3i it doesn't have automatic zoom so for the t3i for me everything all the zoom and everything like that is manual so that's a little bit of a downfall also the the microphone the onboard mic for the Canon t3i not very good so if you notice in the picture that I showed a tough there is the rode videomic which is I believe about $250 somewhere in that range again I'll throw a link in the show notes and it greatly enhances the audio quality of the videos now I won't go into a ton of depth in terms of what kind of settings you should use on your camera and on your microphone and that type of thing because that's there's tons of tutorials out there for that and honestly this would be a pretty long video if I decided to to go that in-depth so you know kind of read up on it a little bit at the end of the day it's going to be your decision to determine what kind of equipment you're going to use this setup works perfectly for me you know the t3i I've never since I bought it I never was sad about that purchase decision no purse post-purchase cognitive dissonance there it's been a great camera I enjoy it all right so hopefully that kind of got you started and gave you some ideas in terms of what kind of equipment you're going to be using to start your vlog moving on once you've created the content once you've created the footage which you've got your video and everything like that afterwards you're probably going to want to put in some sort of attractive format you're gonna want to piece it together maybe throw in some titles and fades and things like that so for that you're going to need some kind of software now for me I have a PC so some of the information I'm going to give you here may not apply to you if you have a Mac but you know I'll at least give it a few helpful resources that you can refer to here I use a program called CyberLink PowerDirector now they have different different levels of packages everything from sort of an entry-level basic video editing package all the way up to directors edition whatever you want to call it I have pretty much the mid-range it's PowerDirector ultra and currently I have power director 11 I guess now they currently have power director 12 and the software ranges anywhere from 52 dollars all the way up to about $200 at least currently and those look like sale prices I think it can go up to about $350 so if you're not looking for anything too crazy if you don't you know if you're not going to do too much high level editing one of the lower versions probably going to work just fine for you some of the features that I enjoy about the power director it creates shadow files for you what that is is basically and this may be the same for most quality video editing software I'm not sure but if you're using large video footage for example like video that's that's created from the t3i usually creates very high def video footage for you editing is not so easy because you know it's it's trying to process those videos very quickly as they're playing it back so the power director will create shadow files which are basically just smaller versions of those huge high-definition video files so that play that I can preview while you're editing the video is much more seamless um there's tons of different rendering options so you can render an avi mp4 wmv you can even render just the audio from a video clip if you want maybe if you want to do a vlog and a podcast combination some people do that there's also a bunch of other features like fades and and titles and text options and things like that you can refer to even if you want if you've got an awesome webcam that you can use you can even capture directly into PowerDirector from your webcam which is another option so something to consider if you are using a Mac chances are and I have when I was at one of my previous jobs I did have a Mac for a while I made a couple videos using iMovie and I never really had any issues with that it's not going to be as full featured as this but it does work also another option for Mac and also PC is Adobe Premiere Pro that's the program that most video editors that I talked to recommend the only problem with now that they've gone cloud-based or whatever they call it it's $20 a month you can't just outright pay for Adobe Premiere Pro you have to pay 20 bucks a month and I don't know about you but I don't want to do that so I'm gonna go ahead and stick with the PowerDirector now one piece of software that I am still looking for I'm still kind of doing some research is for desktop recording software so if you have any examples or if you have any suggestions please let me know I've in desktop is just basically recording your screen as you're as you're using it I've tried a couple of them a lot of them don't typically do what I want them to do the one that I'm currently looking at right now is bandicam BA in di CA em and it seems like it's going to be a good option the only problem with it is it's not free it is 39 for the license so I'm still trying to decide there are free options out there one I used was working just fine and then all of a sudden it stopped working and I couldn't figure out why so not sure if you have any suggestions out there free or not let me know because I do plan on doing some more in depth you know video tutorials kind of showing you more exactly what I'm doing on the Internet I am the last software resource I will share with you today is called audacity now this is not actually related directly to video this is actually a free open-source audio editor for you so let's see if you're if you're doing some screencast recording some desktop recordings and maybe your desktop recording software doesn't come with an audio recording option or if you just want to kind of improve the audio sound or even if you record record video and you just want your the audio in your video to sound a little bit better download audacity and it's a pretty full-featured audio editor kind of surprising how how well it works and how good it is for being for being free software but definitely something to check out again that is an option that's only for Windows I imagine if you use Mac you can probably just use the use GarageBand that'll probably just do just as well for you well I think that just about does it for the first episode of lazy and stupid I hope I was able to answer some questions you have about getting started with vlogging although I'm sure I probably opened up a whole lot more so if you do have any more specific questions please feel free to let me know with a comment below you can also connect with me on Twitter and Facebook on Twitter I'm at Ryan hey fee on Facebook I'm at facebook.com slash lazy in stupid a letter in they didn't have facebook.com/ slash lazy and stupid but in the meantime thanks for watching now get up and go do something awesome goodbye

Channel: Lazy and Stupid

Views: 33,577

Rating: 4.8431373 out of 5

Keywords: lazy and stupid, funny, online marketing, internet marketing, social media, blogging, vlogging, youtube, tips and tricks, how to, Video Blog (Industry), getting started, camera for vlogging, video editing software, canon, cyberlink powerdirector, rode videomic, audacity

Id: 0T3qMXG0dpY

Length: 11min 5sec (665 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 27 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/KIllTheNiggerUrgent]

I would start with proper spelling.

[u/riphtCoC]

Lol a 500 dollar camera? all you need is a cheap webcam and that will do the trick..