How to Set Up a YouTube Studio at home (Camera, Audio, Lighting & more!)

hi everyone kevin here today i want to show you how you can build your very own youtube studio we're going to cover all types of topics today we're going to talk about lighting cameras editing software rugs whoa hold up why are we going to talk about rugs well turns out rugs can greatly impact your sound quality we're going to cover lots of different topics today feel free to use the time stamps in the description to jump around this video otherwise let's jump right on into it the first item that i recommend for setting up your own youtube studio and this is going to be by far the most expensive item is having your own dedicated space for filming yes real estate prices in seattle are very expensive it doesn't have to be anything fancy you could just have a spare bedroom in your house that you use for filming some of the benefits well you could set up your camera you could set up your lights you could set up your microphone and then you could leave them where they are so when you go to film again there's as little friction as possible to pulling together content now in my specific case my room that i use for filming is in the basement of my house what i like about that is first off there aren't as many interruptions in the basement it's slightly below grade which cuts down on the outside noise that's coming in and also there's minimum outside and natural light coming in so i could control what the lighting looks like so all in all it's a pretty good setup and i'm really raving about this basement bedroom let's be honest though the real reason i have my studio down here is this was the one room in the house that my wife was willing to let me use the next item is your home office setup wait hold up we're talking about filming youtube videos what does your home office set up have to do well once you film your video you have to edit your video and making sure that you have an ergonomic setup where you're going to be able to sit down for a long time is extremely important in fact on my videos the filming is the shortest amount of time and pulling together the edit takes a lot longer so i want to make sure i'm comfortable and that's where the desk that you have and the chair that you have are extremely important now previously in my studio i had an ikea desk it was just a basic desk it didn't move it was just stationary and when i worked at microsoft i had a standing desk the beautiful thing about a standing desk especially when you're going to be sitting for a very long time being able to stand and work some and when you're tired of standing you sit again it really makes you more productive and it really just helps increase the ergonomics of your setup so i was in the market for a new standing desk and that's when flexispot reached out now this is one of the perks of being a youtuber you have companies reach out and offer you products so what do you think i said well of course i accepted the desk they sent out a new flexi spot vicki desk it's white looks beautiful i set it up in my home office took me about 10 to 15 minutes and now while editing my videos i could stand up and then i could sit down again this desk retails for about 300 and for 300 being able to stand up and break up the work especially while we're all working from home now i think it's well worth the investment next i want to talk about the chair that you use and this is a chair that i personally purchased from the company noel k-n-o-l-l and one thing that you might notice too especially now that so many people are working from home for such long periods of time when you sit down your booty starts to hurt now previously i had about 150 or 200 chair from staples it was a leather chair it looked pretty nice and when i occasionally sat on it during the weekends it did the job just fine but now that i'm working from home all the time i wanted to make sure i had an ergonomic and comfortable chair so i picked up this knoll generation share now these chairs are somewhat expensive now the desk was 300 the chair itself ranges anywhere from 600 to 1200 this specific chair that i got was 800 but it's designed for you to sit on it all day long and for video editing when you're going to be sitting a long time it's well worth investing in the chair now i don't know if i would have spent as much of the on the chair if i had the standing desk already because then i wouldn't need the chair as much but it's nice to have both the next item and perhaps the most important is making sure that your youtube video and your studio has excellent audio and sound quality i don't know about you but when i watch videos on youtube if there's a video with poor audio but maybe the filming and the video is very good i typically tune out if the audio is great but maybe the video is not quite as good i'll still stick around because as long as i can understand and hear what the person is saying clearly they've got my attention now i know i'm personally guilty of this when i first started my youtube channel guess what microphone i used i just picked up a brand new fitbit charge 2. i relied on the integrated microphone on the camera which is probably the worst microphone you can possibly use in fact my strategy for making sure you could hear my voice better using an integrated microphone was simply to speak even louder needless to say that technique did not work all that well and i had lots of people give me feedback telling me that my audio quality wasn't all that good so what did i do well i invested in a mid-tier microphone called the rode nt usb microphone i personally purchased this it retails for about 170 dollars and i personally think the sound quality is pretty good although you can judge that as the viewer of this video tell me what you think about the audio quality of this microphone with microphones they range in price anywhere between fifty dollars all the way up to well over a thousand dollars so you have lots of different price points for microphones with microphones from what i found is if you're investing 170 or even 200 dollars you're gonna get a massive increase in quality compared to what you might get for say thirty or forty dollars and even compared to your integrated microphone but once you start moving up to let's say a thousand dollars yeah you'll get a slight improvement over what you would get for say a hundred seventy dollar microphone like what i have but you get diminishing returns where the increase in price at least to me didn't justify the increase in quality and when you're spending around say a hundred to two hundred dollars you're already going to have a massive step up in the quality of the sound for your videos when i got my new microphone i thought i had my sound quality completely worked out and i was good to go unfortunately that wasn't so when i first set up this studio in my house i started recording videos using this microphone hi everyone my name is kevin today we are going to look at a new i started getting lots of feedback from people telling me wow there's a lot of echo in your video or there's a lot of reverb in your audio you should really work on that and i was thinking i have a good microphone why why is there a lot of echo it turns out that the room greatly impacts your audio quality in fact i'm in a small basement bedroom in my house and when you're in a small room that leads to lots of echo and lots of reverb so i didn't notice it initially but when i went back and watched my videos i noticed all of this echo to take care of the echo i made a few different investments i purchased acoustic panels for the walls if you've ever been to say a sports hall a restaurant a movie theater you've probably noticed these panels on the wall those are acoustic panels and they help improve the audio quality by eliminating echoes in fact if you're building a home theater at home one of the best investments that you can make to improve your sound quality is to get acoustic panels to improve my sound quality i purchased the prime acoustics london 12 sound panel kit it came with a bunch of sound panels that i could hook up to the wall i went to the prime acoustics website i entered in the dimensions of the room and then it recommended this kit as a good solution this kit ran for about seven hundred dollars for the sound panels and i also added some corner traps in the room as well apparently it turns out that the most reverb and echo happens in the corner of rooms and so these traps help capture a lot of that echo and it results in just cleaner audio along with getting acoustic panels for the room my room has concrete floor and you probably guessed it now concrete floor is terrible and notorious for causing reverb you're on your voice just bounces off that floor and it goes up into the microphone a few seconds later a few milliseconds later causing that echo so what i did is i invested in a high ply rug for my studio and what this helps do is it helps absorb some of that sound as well also helping reduce that echo the next most important item is your lighting oh this lighting looks bad this is just my room lighting and yeah you don't want to use your room lighting because look at this this lighting doesn't look good at all and now this is what i look like when i have all of my lights turned on it looks a lot better than the overhead light that you're going to get in a room if you're just starting out with your youtube studio you can use natural light from the window it's going to look very nice and it's going to do a good job illuminating your face but let's say you're in a basement room like me you're going to want to set up artificial lighting now i think lighting is even more important than the actual camera you use in fact here i am on my old iphone 6 plus this is an old camera but with the right lighting i think the video quality on this actually looks pretty good so i don't think the camera matters as much the lighting is really what makes the picture look good the first light in my four-point lighting system is the aputure 120 d2 this is my key light the full setup including the light the diffuser the stand all that cost a little over a thousand dollars so it's a pretty expensive light but the really nice thing about it is that it produces really natural looking light now what do i mean by natural light well it's 5500 kelvin and that's very close to replicating what daylight looks like the reason it looks so natural is well us as humans when we go outside and we see others and we see other people's faces it's usually illuminated by sunlight and this comes very close to replicating what sunlight looks like another added bonus is you also get a remote so i could turn the light off and then i could turn it back on and i could switch through i could set the brightness directly from my remote so i could look at my camera see what it looks like and i make it some fine adjustments on here to get the lighting exactly how i want it to look i have it sitting at a 45 degree angle to my head so it illuminates this part of my face now you see that this part of my face is nicely illuminated what about the other side i seem to have a lot of shadows and darkness over there well that's where we have a fill light and earlier i mentioned that i have a four point lighting system what that means is i have four lights that make up the lighting for this scene i have my key light and now i have my fill light let's turn that on to see what it looks like check that out it just filled in all these shadows on my face for my fill light i use a gvm led light gvm stands for great video maker gvm was nice enough to send me a lighting kit for free for use with my youtube channel the thing i really like about these gvm lights is i can control what the color looks like so not only is it a bi-color light here i could adjust it so it's a little warmer or it can make it a little colder right now i'm going to set it so it matches this light i could also choose different colors so say for instance i want to have let's say a yellow backdrop or maybe i want to go with a blue backdrop through the app on my phone i can control what the lighting looks like and that's something that i love about these gvm lights i could go on my computer i could compose the shot and if i made it if i need to make some tweaks to my lighting i could simply do so through the app along with changing the color i could also change the brightness so here i'm going to go super bright on the fill light so i could even use this as a key light as well to illuminate my face the great thing about these lights as well is they come with diffusers that i could put over the led lights if i want the light to be a little bit softer i simply attach those to the front of the led lights and if i simply want the full power of the light i could take the diffuser off since i'm using this light as a fill i'm simply going to set the brightness to about 10 or so just to remove the shadows on this side of my face the nice thing about these lights is they also come with barn doors so those surround the led lights and that way i can eliminate any other spill throughout my studio so the light is truly just hitting me and it's not going off and lighting the wall or lighting the background because i want to apply different lighting to different areas of the room so these barn doors really help focus the light these two gvm lights that i have i have one as my fill light i also have one as my hair light or my back light the two light kit runs for 400 you could also buy an individual light or you could even get three lights depending on what type of lighting setup you want to do so far since i've been using these lights they've become a core part of my lighting system and i would recommend them for four hundred dollars it's a pretty good price for getting some very nice lights that you can control with your phone the third light in my four point lighting system is my backlight or my hair light this light helps separate me from the background and once again this is another gvm light it's the same as the last one that we just looked at when i turn this on you can see now that there's some light on my shoulder there's a little bit of a halo appearing around me this really helps separate me from the background just like the previous light that we looked at i can adjust the brightness here depending on how strong or weak i want that back effect to look the fourth and final light of my four-point lighting system is the aputure mc let's switch this on and look at that i have a nice blue color in back of me i use this light in all of my tutorial videos to match the product brand color with my light color in back of me i recently did a top 16 tips and tricks in microsoft onenote the brand color is a nice purple color so i threw a purple color up behind me i think it adds a pretty cool effect the aputure mc runs for about 90 dollars it's a pretty small form factor it has a metallic background so you can basically stick it wherever you want now one of the beautiful things about this light is i can choose a color and it'll match that color here for example i have the aperture app and i'm going to choose a color here on my screen and let's go apply it now to my background check that out this is a color i got from my screen and now the background matches that how cool is that so what do you think the lighting setup in my opinion looks pretty good and i'm pretty satisfied with it now once again you don't have to spend a lot of money to get good lighting you can simply use natural light from your window or you could pick up some cheaper led lights and still get a very nice effect using the four point lighting concept now all together the lights that i'm using in my studio they cost about fifteen hundred dollars so it's a little pricier but i think the output and the result looks pretty good once again i've included links in the description if you're interested in checking any of them out next i have a dell ultra sharp 34 inch monitor it has a resolution of 3440 by 1440. this thing is beautiful when you're editing videos you have a ton of real estate to see your video timeline you could also put two windows side by side when let's say you're working on say uploading your description and you also want to see the video on the other side this thing is a workhorse now it runs for about seven hundred dollars i personally purchased this i had the same monitor when i worked at microsoft and i liked it so much that i picked it up for my home use as well next i want to talk about my computer i have a dell xps 8930 i bought it about three years ago so it's a little bit older and it cost me about fifteen hundred dollars this thing has a lot of ram i have 32 gigabytes of ram i have an i7 processor and it also has a gtx 1070 graphics card which was top of the line a few years ago now you have a new set of computers out you have a new rtx graphics card so i'll likely look at upgrading sometime soon the thing i love about this computer though is it handles video editing very nicely whatever 4k video i throw at it it renders it very quickly and i could play the video back without any issues so in terms of video editing this computer works extremely well now i went with a desktop computer instead of a laptop the reason i like a desktop is you get lots of performance for a very good price if you're going to get a laptop for a similar amount of performance you're going to end up spending a lot more money next i want to show you some of the software i use to pull together these videos here i am on my desktop and i use obs as my screen recorder and i also use it to capture my video here you can see me in the video right here i could shift between my video i could also jump and show my desktop and here you see what it looks like this is an extremely powerful screen recorder i use it for all of my recordings on this channel i've done some dedicated videos on obs if you're interested in learning more about how to use this software the next item that i use extensively in my youtube studio is my cursor highlighter and i've did a video exclusively on this on how to get the cursor highlighter luke boivere pulled together this tool that you can download entirely for free i've included a link to his website in the description if you want to get this i've also included a link to my original video that shows you how to get this cursor highlighter if you've ever done tutorial videos before you know that helping people follow where you're pointing is extremely important and luke's tool does an awesome job at highlighting your mouse cursor next i want to talk about the video editing software that i use in my youtube studio and i personally use cyberlink powerdirector they provided it to me for free about a year ago to review and i reviewed it and then i started using it beyond them because i liked it so much the really fantastic thing about powerdirector is the performance when you render videos it goes extremely fast when i drop 4k videos into powerdirector it plays them without any issues at all it's just flawless powerdirector has a pretty typical editing software layout here i see all of my media content here's a video that i recently pulled together on how to convert a pdf to word i pull in all my video files any images that i want to include as part of the video and then i can simply drag and drop them down on the timeline down below down on the timeline is where i make all my cuts and where i make all my edits to make sure that the storyline flows up here in the top right hand corner i can see the final output or i see a preview of my video once i'm ready to render it i simply click on produce and then i'll be able to output my video once again it works very well and i've been very satisfied with this software powerdirector retails for about a hundred to a hundred twenty dollars they also have a subscription plan which costs less i believe it's around fifty dollars or so per year and that gives you access to continuous updates over time the next piece of software that i use extensively in my youtube studio is microsoft onenote i use this to keep track of all of my video ideas this is where i brainstorm videos this is where i put down videos that are in progress and i also keep all of my scripts for my videos in microsoft onenote the thing that i love about onenote is when i enter my notes on my pc it synchronizes with my phone so then i can refer to my phone as i'm filming a video to refer back to my notes the great thing about onenote is it's entirely free to use finally i want to talk about the camera and you might be wondering why did we wait until the very end to talk about the camera especially when we're talking about setting up a youtube studio the reason i saved the camera until the very end is i think there are more important things than the camera i think the audio is extremely important and i think with lighting you can make even an old camera look fantastic now i personally use a sony a6500 the full camera the body the lenses it ran for about two thousand dollars the great thing about the sony a6500 is the autofocus is phenomenal if i move towards the camera and then i move away again you'll see that it very quickly focuses on my face i have an f 1.8 and a 35 millimeter lens on this camera and with that i get a very nice depth of field so you see in back of me the background's nice and blurry while my face is nice and crisp so i get that through this lens along with the camera itself i also have it hooked up to my computer using an elgato camlink 4k that runs for about hundred fifty hundred sixty dollars and that allows me to take the footage from my camera and send it directly into my computer in the past i would record directly on my camera onto an sd card once i was done recording i would have to take out the sd card plug it into my computer or transfer the video onto my computer so it was a few steps and it was a lot of friction to getting the video onto my computer now i've eliminated all that by plugging my camera directly into my computer the very last item of today that i use in my youtube studio is a massive green screen a green screen is very nice when i'm pulling together my thumbnails i simply stand in front of the green screen and i could remove the background and then that's how i create my thumbnails i can also use it in my videos if i want myself to sit in front of the video footage a green screen is a nice thing to have and you can do a lot with it and they only run for about 50 to 60 dollars to pick up a fairly large green screen alright well we covered a lot of content today in this video to recap what i think is most important i think first off the space that you're using making sure you're comfortable and making sure that you have space where you're not going to be interrupted so your desk your chair having a dedicated space for your youtube video the second item that is very important is making sure your sound quality is very good invest in a good microphone if you need to and if you're open to it get acoustic panels you can also pick up cheaper ones online that'll go a long way towards improving your video quality and lastly the lighting makes a huge difference towards the quality of your video even if your camera's not that good your lighting will make it look phenomenal you can take an old camera and make it look better than most output that you'll see from other people using a better camera because they didn't light the scene that well alright well those are all my steps to creating your very own youtube studio if you found this video helpful and you learned some new things please give this video a thumbs up if you want to see more videos like this in the future make sure to hit that subscribe button that way you'll get a notification anytime new content like this comes out and lastly if you want to see me cover any other topics in the future leave a note down below and i'll add it to my list of videos to create all right well that's all i have for you today i hope you enjoyed and i hope to see you next time bye

Channel: Kevin Stratvert

Views: 53,307

Keywords: kevin stratvert, flexispot, youtube, you tube, studio, knoll, rode, microphone, light, lighting, primacoustics, aputure, 120dii, 120d, gvm, great video maker, dell, ultrasharp, xps, elgato, camlink, cam link, cyberlink, powerdirector, power director, one note, onenote, obs, open broadcaster software, sony, a6500, green screen, film, build, build youtube studio, desk, chair, mic, audio, sound, primacoustic, capture card, ssd, standing desk, room, space, filming

Id: w10VrtEJ8ts

Length: 23min 50sec (1430 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2020