How I Built My Video Podcasting Studio in 2022 (Complete Tour and Gear Walk-Through)

hey what's going on everybody it's tom here with the nova digital and today we're gonna go through how i built out this video podcasting studio in about 200 square feet so when i set out to build this space there are a couple of must have things that were going to be important for me so coming from the video background having it be a video podcasting studio was absolutely top priority right so i wanted to have at least three cameras that way i can get a wide shot of the room as well as a dedicated shot to either side of the table or to either party i wanted to have four microphones so that in case we wanted to have groups of four in here we could also wanted the space to be modular that if we didn't have four people and we just had two people or three people that the space could be uh adapted to kind of suit those needs another huge huge thing for me was that i wanted to have the ability to live cut each episode and so what i mean by that is typically when people would be doing stuff like this they would hit record on all three cameras and then take all that footage go into the editing room and change things and cut things that way and i knew pretty much immediately that i didn't want to do that because i have enough editing work as it is and i don't want the extra editing of doing every individual podcast i'll go into what that gear is and what specifically it is in a minute but as you can imagine that is from blackmagic and the atem mini series um and so that speeds the workflow up everything up entirely because everything gets live cut here um and so basically the editing is minimal you're adding a little bit of a header a footer some pop-up text and you're calling it a day in fact you could even program that sort of stuff into the atem software if you needed to do that another thing that was really important to me is i really wanted to have the space look professional and kind of cohesive without being overly cluttered or overly stylized the look of things fairly minimal and so far i feel like that has worked out well for me and i think that it does give off a good result that i was looking for and then finally as i've kind of alluded to i wanted everything to be as easy as possible so everything that is in this space is pretty much stuck here it stays here i don't move it around so when somebody comes in or wants to do a podcast we can just hit go pretty much there's very minimal setup and then by the time we hit done on the recording i basically can take that file upload it to dropbox for them and they can be on their way everything is very quick and easy and that just saves me a whole bunch of time and i assume it will for you too all right so let's dive into the gear a little bit more this is probably the boring section but let's just talk about furniture and things that i did to kind of fill out the space so first and foremost i needed a table i wanted one that was probably more news room style kind of like a half crescent shape thing but frankly it was really tough to find and doing a custom build desk just probably wasn't in the cards for me starting out and so i decided to go with this table it has a beautiful gray top it's thick sturdy wood and it can house four people and if not more and in fact there's even a nice cable pass through um throughout the table too which is super nice so this was kind of the main table i had four matching kind of office chairs there's nothing too special about these but felt nice comfortable looked good again kind of clean cut and professional maybe more so than stylized i've noticed that some people start giving it the the old wiggle and that is not as ideal but um that's more of a self-restraint thing than anything else aside from that there's a nice thick rug underneath us that hopefully absorbs some of the sound say the biggest thing aside from uh the table and the chairs i guess is this backdrop over here to my left and so that is pretty unique i've noticed that this sort of 3d wall panel thing is a little bit more trendy these days but i found ones that i haven't really found online as much they're two feet i think a little bit bigger than most other ones and they kind of give off it doesn't look like you can see where they start and end like most tiles so i really like that i think it looks good i probably have some footage of how i built this thing but i didn't want to glue them to the wall because uh gluing things to walls especially in a space that i just lease was not something that i had an interest in doing so i guess the only final thing is um to kind of seal this space off um i did put in two kind of big curtain systems which is one of them you see behind me and there's one on the other side there to kind of just basically kind of create a room kind of give off the illusion that there is a room here and that hopefully absorbs a little bit of sound it gives people clean backdrops behind them so you can't see the rest of the studio i think that it looks good and it works great and that's another thing that i didn't have to to drill into the walls so that's the furniture let's dive into audio so as you guys could probably tell i opted to go with the road caster and pod mic setup here so there are four pod mics i did a bunch of research on these and i feel like they kind of live up to the hype for the price they are extremely great quality sure i would have preferred to go with you know sm7bs or something like that but these are about a fourth of the price on first you know this being a new venture and something that i thought most people probably wouldn't have the ear to notice the difference with i decided to go with the the pod mics and so so far they've been great i think they look great too which has actually been a huge thing i know that a lot of people opted to do wind screens over them or something like that but seeing as we're kind of a video first podcasting space um as of now we're gonna leave them like this i think they look really cool you also probably noticed that that's not on a boom arm or um you know one of those i don't know um i have one of those at the house and it's great but i wanted people not to be fidgeting with it um i also felt like to get four of them was kind of expensive and i think that they are just really ugly to have on camera i thought that just doing a straight tabletop mount was going to be the way to go on these it does come with the downside of if people are smacking the table you might get a little bit of noise off of that which i know is not quite as great but i think that this setup just looks clean and it's still able to be modular enough that again if we don't have four people on the show we can just rip two of them basically put them on the floor or something like that quickly move them we'll have to unscrew uh the the arms so basically these run xlr into uh the road caster system which again tons of other reviews i won't talk about the road caster system but i think it's kind of industry standard for people that are wanting to do a podcast no complaints with the road caster system the headphones in case people do want to listen so i actually have them below the table here they are mackie mc100s and so i bought four of them they sit below the table here and frankly i usually tell people that unless you really want to hear yourself you don't need to because it's pretty much a thing that it's not going to matter to you i monitor the audio on my end there's nothing you can really do with the hearing of things so um and i think it also leaves a little bit of a distraction or something to deal with so there are headphones that people would like to use them but not something that i put a lot of thought into so on the video front again i said i wanted three cameras right so we have a little bit of a hash patch set up but it was just kind of stuff that i had laying around and stuff that i felt like was gonna be probably good enough for what i needed to do right so the center camera is actually what we're shooting on now which is the a7 iii um there's a samyang like 18 millimeter wide angle lens on there and then the two side cameras there's an a6000 and a 6300 a6000 a6300 are basically just running the kit lenses the a6000 won't do 4k like the 6300 will but the atem actually can't take in anything past 1080 so everything just gets run in 1080. 1080 and so that was another reason i was like you might as well just keep things pretty cheap and from as far as i can tell with a little bit of like color balancing and such like that i've been able to get um all three cameras to look pretty cohesive together and not feel like there's like a drastic quality loss or a cheaper camera in the mix those are built into what i just kind of call the commands command center desk and basically those are hitched in the corners the main camera is suspended off of what i do for um lighting there's just a big c-stand in the middle of it um and so this was a great setup where again i didn't want tripods and things that you could be tripping over or having to set up camera especially so they're just kind of bolted into the table and you know i luckily had thought it out enough and figured that um with the setup like this i basically can get the right angle that i was looking for without having to do something something crazy with the cameras so i'm really happy with how those are looking um and so far everything has been uh great on that front so let's talk about the lighting setup and how that looks right so the main light here is what i'm using now is a newer dish and i'm not quite sure the size but i'd say it's a fairly good size i had i originally purchased a lantern style thing that i thought would fill out this base a little bit more but i was unable to get the kind of the skirt that goes around it connect to kind of control the light a little bit more and luckily this thing has been great so this gets boomed in just off of a c stand there is an sl 60w a godox sl60w that is the key light and that basically just is boomed in straight over top of the four people so it's a pretty even light that gets sprayed across i think it probably bounces off the table a little bit and so far i haven't had any issues with that the hair light are basically these small led bi-color probably newer light panels as well i'm sure just about anything would do pretty well here but these are fixed to the ceiling basically along with the curtains and kind of giving me that hair light that you hopefully can see here and that just kind of helps separate people from the background because the curtains are maybe two and a half feet behind people talking here so those are the two main lights i usually leave those on a nice warm orange and this is [Music] obviously a more pure white light i'm not quite sure i want to say like 5600 or something like that i do custom white balances on all the cameras to kind of dial things in a little bit more but between those things i think things look pretty good i guess the only other lighting contribution is the the wall panel and that there is that led strip that you can kind of change around there um which again i think gives it a little bit of color a little bit of vibrance and a little bit of differentiation between different shows and a way to kind of customize your experience with everything so bringing everything full circle here is kind of the workflow on how things work from an audio video perspective so audio captured from the rode mics xlr'd into the road caster pro system i record internally on the rode caster pro system so people do have an instant audio file only of the performance but what i do is i take one of the outputs from the road caster and i plug that into the atem mini pro iso which is my life switcher for the cameras so those two pieces of gear are the biggest powerhouses of this whole thing i haven't had any issues with any sort of delay i noticed that some people probably have but i've noticed that running audio directly out from the road caster pro into the a10 mini iso works flawlessly and great to be honest the reason that i went with the a10 mini pro iso was a couple of reasons um if you want to have any sort of live viewing um like a live monitor out which i have on a just a you know everyday kind of computer screen here that i can see what's happening in live cut it you need to upgrade to the the pro from the a10 mini um and then what you get with the iso is you basically get the ability to record all of the camera inputs individually so how this works is you're basically taking the clean hdmi out from each of these cameras that go into the a10 mini and recording off of that you don't need to have uh sd cards in the cameras to be recording there is no every camera is going to get individually recorded unless i turn on the iso mode which again creates massive files but if you did want to have that flexibility i've been able to go back and individually cut things or handle the editing a little bit more specifically in post i thought that that would be [Music] a useful thing to have and worthwhile doing so that's why i went with the iso but to bring it back the three cameras feed into the a10 mini pro iso and then basically that is recorded live live switched by me to a samsung t5 ssd hard drive um i have heard and i've done enough research and i've talked a blackmagic support about this and then they said that you should definitely get a t5 uh ssd and i didn't have any trouble with that so formatted that everything runs into there the beauty of this whole thing is that once i name what the project or the file is going to be i plug in the hard drive i hit go the audio is synced up everything is clean coming from the coming from the road caster pro runs into the atem the cameras are already all set white balanced everything the angles look great you live switch that and by the time you hit end it'll spit out a finished file um finished and that sets a finished file that you're ready to pretty much go and use you don't have to go through and kind of just re-cut all the cameras and stuff like that which is saving me and everyone else a huge chunk of time so if you're a solo man operation this whole setup might not be as ideal for you because you would still need to switch things yourself which i see people do but i assume that i will be or someone else be running the podcast from the other side of this table here for the majority of the work um and so that kind of just keeps everything super easy so when clients come in they have the ability to pretty much leave shortly after i'll just upload something to dropbox immediately and they can see what they recorded for that day which is a huge a huge plus one thing i didn't talk about much was the acoustic side of thing and frankly this is the thing that probably needs the most improvement here as of now there are some things happening behind the scenes to get this better i think it would be would have been better if we had a dedicated room to this but the space that i'm in just didn't have that as an option so we kind of had to make do so there are a series of acoustic panels on the back wall there we will be putting in sound blankets that are going to be bolted to the ceiling to hopefully help some of the reverb there there's a whole bunch of extra space on that side of the studio that i think a lot of the sound echoes off of and so we're having a couple of additional sound blankets and curtains put in over there and i think between those changes as well as the you know fairly thick carpet that's beneath us and the just great technology for the noise canceling that's built into these mics and on the road caster i think will be pretty much set to a point especially where people will not notice and or complain and i think that that's to me good enough i'm sure there are some audiophiles that would uh not be happy to hear that but for my purposes and i think for 99 of everyone else's this has been great all right and i think that that about wraps it up so that is how i built out my video podcasting studio hopefully you found some stuff useful that you can apply to your own space i plan on doing a part two to this on how i'm taking this space and kind of building a little bit more of a business out of it and i'll probably do that in a separate video but for people that are just interested in the gear and how i put it all together i thought that this would be um a good walk through on how i did that and if you guys have any questions concerns comments whatever you want to say put it down in the comment section and i will get back to you um and as i think you're supposed to say on youtube like comment subscribe and stuff so yeah we'll see you on the next one [Music] you

Channel: Innova Digital

Views: 178,553

Keywords: Video Podcast Studio, podcast studio, video studio, chicago podcast studio, innova digitall, how i built this, Podcasting, video podcasting, vidcasting, Podcast studio idea, podcast studio business

Id: LyvQjq0VVlM

Length: 16min 13sec (973 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 20 2022