What You Need To Know About How To Setup A Video Studio In Your

Transcript

€ £ What you need to know about how to setup a video studio in your home or business Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com Contents Introduction 3 The Room 5 Ceilings 7 Walls 8 Floors 9 Electrical Supply 10 Ventilation 12 Studio Stands 13 Studio Lights 14 The Camera 20 Camera Accessories 24 Studio Backgrounds 28 Microphones & Audio 31 Conclusion 37 Introduction Welcome to this guide about building your own home or small business video studio and using it to help make you more money from your video activities. My name is Paul Shillito, founder of videoalchemy.com and I have compiled this guide to help other home videographers, video marketers and anyone that is looking get in to making quality videos for clients, YouTube, Vimeo, hangouts etc. from their home or small business. So why would you or I make more money by having a home video studio, after all the very process of making your own home studio is going to cost you money to start off with. Well the simple answer to that is in the long run it will pay for itself many times over with the ability for you to make repeatable, high quality video at any time of the day or night. You will be in control of your video environment and not dictated to by your surroundings. You don’t need to worry about the where the sun is outside or if the room looks a mess behind you, the lighting is bad or the audio sounds crap. All these things can be a major distraction and fixing them not only makes for better looking videos but more importantly a more relaxed environment for you to work in which will show in a better performance when your making your marketing and sales video to your potential clients and in video training materials which you create. When I started my journey in to making videos back in 2005, I knew next to nothing about video making and I had the thought, “how hard could it be”. I soon found out that making videos was much more than just sitting in front of the cameras and showing the products. From the lighting issues of our meeting room, the sound quality of the camcorder microphones to the editing on PC’s which were not designed for the job, I found out almost everything the hard way by trail and error, and boy, did we make a lot of errors. At the time I was the co-owner of an online laptop retailing business, I was looking a better way to show laptop carry cases than the normal product photos. I started with two canon mini disc camcorders, one for wide angle and one for close up. Our studio was the meeting room of our business and apart from two tripods and a table that was it, no extra lights, mics or audio equipment. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 3 Introduction Cont…. After battling with these issues we did make our video's and they were successful. After we showed our videos to the manufacturers and they really liked them, we took the decision to make videos for other companies and a new business was born called iSiteTV Ltd which is still going strong today and makes 1000's videos for many of the top brands like Panasonic, LG, Samsung, Epson, Nikon, Casio, Dell and many more. Fast forward 10 years and I sold my part of the business and I'm working from home making video tutorials, I've come full circle back to the one man band doing everything both in front of and behind the camera. The big difference between then and now is the knowledge I built up over the previous years and with advances in technology, cameras, lighting etc,. I can now make with a home studio the results that can match our previous professional studio. However don’t think that you have to do everything I show this guide. Some things will apply to you, while others wont, it is just a guide to show you some of things you are likely to come across and that I did on my video journey to be able to make professional quality videos in your own home. Hopefully when you have gone through this guide, you will have a good idea as to what you need to do to get your home video studio up and running and a whole quicker at doing it than it took me to figure it out  Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 4 The Room Having a home studio you can use at any time is a major benefit if you getting in to making a regular run of videos for YouTube or even if you're doing live hangouts but you're going to have find the space either on a temporary or better still a semi-permanent basis. So what do you need?, Well obviously it depends on two things, how much free space you have in your house or business and secondly what you are going to be videoing. If your making product reviews for small objects or mostly talking heads then you can get away with a smallish space. If you're videoing larger objects or full length body shots then you'll need a larger space. Even for small objects you'll probably need a table or some other props to help your presenting. Don’t forget you'll need room for your lights, space away from the background if you use one and depending on your camera and type of shot you want you'll need space between you and the camera. As a rough guide you'll probably need at least 8' x 6' for a simple head and shoulders style video and then upwards from there as the requirements dictate. A garage can double up as a video studio If you have a garage that can be cleared, that can make a good basis for a studio. If you can put up some wallboard and paint it white that would give a smooth flat finish for use as a background. Garages in temperate climates can be cold in the winter and in tropical climates very hot almost all year around so you will need to look at heating or cooling too. Drapes or curtains can also be for a backgrounds and / or for partitioning off parts of the garage you may be using for storage or working area. That will help you concentrate without the possible distractions that may be stacked around you. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 5 The Room continued… A room in the house such as a spare bedroom can also make a useful studio area. Again if you can set aside an area with wall background big enough to video against you can have a simple studio. The room I use is the upstairs lounge of our house but because we already had a similar room down stairs it could be used to setup a semipermanent studio. The size was also good at 25' x 20', I use about half of it for which makes 12' x 20' studio. The lounge of our house used as a video studio In my case I have a 12' wide patio window, in front of which I have black out curtains to block out the day light. This has a dual purpose of firstly blocking nearly all the light from the window and second giving me a black background to video on if required. This is something you will need to look at to if you have big windows and you want to have a consistent levels of light independent of whether its day or night outside. If you have normal curtains you will probably find they are too thin to block out enough light especially in the summer or when the sun is low in the sky. You can get blackout liners which hang behind your normal curtains to block out nearly all of the daylight which allows you to control the lighting much better. If you have a business you may be in a better position. When I started making videos for the first time I used our meeting room as a studio. I used cardboard boxes which had been flattened to block out the daylight from the small windows which were all around the top of the room. This was fine until we needed more space and again more reliable, better quality lighting, so we then made a dedicated studio out of part of a warehouse area which we had. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 6 Ceilings One of the biggest problems of having a home based studio is that the rooms in most houses are about 8' high. In most video studios the height of the ceiling or roof is 12' - 15' or higher, this allows lights to be placed out of the way and preferably on a lighting grid. A lighting grid is something that is attached to the ceiling and then the lights are fixed to that. The advantage of this is that all lights and wiring is out of the way. This also allows lights to shine down on the talent in a more natural way like the sun does during most of the day. A low ceiling limits how you place your lights and if you are using hot tungsten lights there could be a fire risk if they are too close to the ceiling. Other issues are that the lights may only be just a little bit higher than the presenters. This means that the light will be pointing at the talent from the front or side which can cause shadows to be cast on their bodies from their arms and hands. It also means that’s they can shine in to their eyes and dazzle them making it difficult to reading things like cue cards. If this is the case then a diffuser gel is advised as it will give a much softer lights with much less shadows and reduce the dazzle. Other things to be aware of with low ceilings is when moving props around as they easily hit the ceiling when moved. I've lost count of the number of time I have hit the ceiling when moving lighting stands around. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 7 Walls Something which a lot of people don’t think about when setting up a studio is the walls and the effect it has on the sound. Nice smooth walls may be great for the visuals but they cause a lot of sound reverberation. A quick test is to stand in the middle of your studio space and click your fingers and listen to the results. If you hear a pronounced reverb or even an echoy sound then the same will happen to your voice and depending on the position of your mic, it could make you sound like you talking in a toilet. This is caused by the sound bouncing from one wall to the other until it dies away, the harder and smoother walls are the more the effect will be. A simple way to way reduce the echoy sound is to hang thick blankets on the walls or something that will absorb or disperse the sound as it bounces from wall to wall. You can buy egg carton shaped sound deadening foam panels to stick on the walls which are not used for filming against but this can be expensive if you have a larger room. Don’t forget that the same effect happens from the floor to the ceiling, so some old carpet will help reduce it, if you're not already in a carpeted room. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 8 Floors One of the best types of floor for your studio is concrete and if you using a garage then you probably already have that. A smooth firm floor will makes moving camera dolly and props around easy and is a great support for tripods & lighting stands A good quality matt concrete floor paint in grey will stop unwanted coloured refection's being cast up from the floor too. Concrete floor However, in many houses there will be a carpeted floor, often with underlay and while this will be a great help with the above mentioned sound reverb issues, carpets cause other problems. One of the biggest is that camera tripods and lighting stands tend to rock around much more on the soft carpet than they would on a solid surface and the thicker the carpet the worse the problem. This is particularly apparent when operating the camera. Even with a solid sturdy tripod, small operations like operating the zoom or focus, pressing buttons etc can cause a very wobbly shot. One way to get around this is to put a large piece of 1/2" to 3/4" thick chipboard or plywood about 4' x 4' in size on the carpet and then put the tripod on that. This will give you a more stable platform but it will still move a bit if you stand on it or rest your foot on it. Carpets can also be a fire hazard if you are using hot lighting which could be near the floor or if it falls over. LED and fluorescents don't get hot and would more suitable for carpeted home studios. Don’t forget that you could also be using to tape to mark out where to place the camera, lights or where the presenter will be standing. When used on carpet the tape will tend to unstick itself much easier than on a hard surface when people are walking over it. If you are on a nice expensive wooden floor in your house then you need to be aware of spikes that could be on the feet of some tripods and lighting stands. These could easily mark or scratch the wooden surface and even wheels on tripods will leave track marks on the flooring. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 9 Electricity Something that you're always going to need is electrical power outlets, usually a lot more than you think. It's amazing just how quickly the need for electrical sockets builds up. A lot of the small devices need AC adapters, like cameras, computers, monitors, radio mics, audio equipment. This is also not to mention the big power eaters which will mainly be the lights. Luckily we are now in an era of cheap low cost LED lights, its only a few years ago since you would probably have been using tungsten lighting which even for a small studio can easily reach 5-10kW. LED lights can now provide that same level of light output for less than 1/10th of the power. Now most video professionals will tell you to never use extension leads but unless you want to rewire your room or your house, you may have very little alternative. Extension leads are normally available in 4, 8 or 12 gang connectors. You want to make sure that if you do go down this route you buy top quality ones which are individually switched so you don’t have to keep pulling plugs in and out. The main thing with extension leads is to make sure that you don’t over load sockets. Just because an extension lead has 8 plug points does not mean that it will take 8 full loads, which in the UK is 13 amps or approximately 3kW. The whole extension lead and the connectors cannot deliver more than the one plug point that it is connected to. If your using the extension leads on a roll and you using it up to the maximum working load you want to make sure that it is fully extended or unrolled because they can get very hot if they are left coiled up. For safety purposes you should also look at getting leads which have RCD breakers built in to them, just in case you get any mains leakage they will trip out, saving your equipment and most importantly you. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 10 Electricity continued… There is also the issue of the ring main that is wired in to the room itself. In the UK, these are rated at 30A or about 7.2kW. Other countries will have differing standards but where ever you are you can't exceed the total rating for the whole ring main. It's unlikely that you’re going to be using big (2kW) tungsten lights in a house but you could easily in a proper studio. If your building a dedicated studio then you need to factor in what the maximum load that could be and fit a ring main that can supply that plus probably 50% more as a safety margin. As with anything electrical if you are in doubt always consult a qualified electrician. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 11 Ventilation Even small home studio's with fluorescent or LED lights can warm up quickly and if you're working in the heat of summer or in a tropical climate it can be just too hot to work in. This not only affects the people but also the equipment. Many DSLR camera's will shut down if they get to hot to save their sensors and in a hot room this may mean you can only video for minutes at a time before they overheat. The solution is to provide some form of ventilation or cooling, ideally air-conditioning. If you have windows you can open them or if your in a garage you could open the door but this will also let in sounds from outside which could ruin your audio, not to mention the extra light. If you going to have air-conditioning fitted, you want to make sure that it is as quite as possible so that your not making noise that will be picked up by your microphones. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 12 Studio Stands It is unlikely that most home and small business based will be able to go for a lighting grid because of the price and also the need for higher ceilings required to fit it. The next and but far the most popular option to hold you light will be lighting stands. These come in a variety of sizes and prices, from the very cheap at about £10 ($15) each up to over £100 ($150) each. The difference is not only in the quality but also the carrying capacity. Stands are not only used for lights but also for holding up things like backgrounds and boom poles for microphones. Most people will get their stands as part of a lighting kit, often from Ebay or Amazon and whilst there are good ones around the vast bulk of the cheap ones are just that "Cheap". If you upgrade your lights at some point to something bigger and heavier, then the cheap light stands just won't be up to the job. They tend to be very flimsy and will just about hold the lights which they are sold with which are normally lightweight photo lighting with the coiled tube fluorescent heads. Putting heavier lights on cheap light stands and then having them at full extension is normally is a recipe for disaster and lights falling over. A quality C-Stand A good stand will have a bigger foot print and be able to hold 10kg +. They will have springs built inside to the telescopic tubes so that if they are let down accidentally then they shouldn't crash down and possibly damage the light unit. The problem with the slide down and out leg type tripod variety is that they only work well on flat ground. The top of the line stands are known as C-Stands. These have angled legs which rotate around the central shaft and normally one which can move up and down to allow them to be used on stairs or uneven ground. They are the most expensive type but also the most sturdy and are the industry standard you will find in all the pro studios. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 13 Studio Lights Lights are the most important item you will have in your studio after your camera and there are three main types you can use. Tungsten Lights These have been used in the video and film business since its very beginnings and up until a few years ago they would have been your default type of light. They come in a large range of options from the DIY building halogens all the way up to the professional lights from companies like Arri and Laniro. They have an yellow/orange colour light of around 3200k, you change the colouring but only with gels which will knock down the light output. Because they have been around the longest the professional versions have a huge range of things called "modifiers" which are available control the shape of the light or its intensity with things like dimmers, barn doors, scrims, snoots & gobos. They are known as a hard light source which means that they cast very hard edged shadows unless you put a diffusion gel in front of them. An Arri 2kW tungsten open light AKA a “Blonde” For the home and small business studio they range in power from around 650W to 2kW. The 2kW ones would be the upper limit due the amount of power they draw and they could easily overload your electrical wiring if you had 3 or more of them on a normal ring main. A couple 1kW ones would be a good size for a small studio, the 2kW are very bright and very hot to work under and will certainly be too big for most home studios. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 14 There are two main types of tungsten lights, open face and fresnel. Open faced are the simplest with just a lamp body with a reflector and a wire guard in front of the bulb which in the better models can be focused from a spot to a flood light. Fresnel's have a Fresnel lens in front of the bulb and again in most models they have a focusing mechanism. The Fresnel's tend to have a more uniform light coverage due to the lens but the open face ones are the brightest light output of the two for the same given lamp wattage. Tungsten lamps are often known as Redheads and Blondes. Redheads were open faced lights made by Laniro and are usually 1000W but are now made by many companies. They get the nickname of Redheads because of the red casing they had. Blondes are 2kW open faced lamps and often have a blue casing. Arri 650w tungsten fresnel light For a home studio the DIY halogen work lights are cheap and simple way to go but they have very limited control and mounting options. If you want the get the best out of Tungsten's then you need to go for a professional light. The pro's about these is they have good control over the focusing of the light beam and they have a good throw and by that I mean their ability to project light over longer distances without too much diffusion, they also have a lot of options to control the lights colour, intensity and shape. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 15 The cons however out weigh the pros when they are used in a small home or business studio. They are inefficient and use a lot of power, most of which is emitted as heat so they get very hot very quickly and can be fire hazard if they are near flammable materials or ceilings. They will also heat up your studio very quickly as it's like have a couple of kW of heating on when they are running. The bulbs are very fragile and have short lifespans that last at best few hundred hours but I have known brand new ones blow within minutes. They do not like being moved when they are running and a sudden shock or bang to the case or light stand will often case them to pop. It's always best to use them a dimmer and switch them on at zero power and then turn up the power slowly to reduce the thermal shock which is one of the biggest killers of the lamps. Fluorescent Lights Over the last 10 years or so, Fluorescent lighting has become much more common due to advances in tube technology with things like CFL coiled tubes which fit in to a standard fitting and flicker free operation. They are also available in different colour outputs from 3200k which matches tungsten up to 5600k and above which matches natural day light. They come in many different shapes and sizes and can be quite low cost to buy. They also have long life spans that can run in to 1000's of hours and are much more efficient using a faction of the power of a tungsten light. Because they don’t get hot like tungsten's they are much safer near flammable materials and they won't heat up the studio anywhere near as much. They are still quite fragile though and can be easily damaged if they are handled roughly or shocked. The coiled screw in variety will break very easily if you screw them in or out with the coiled tube rather than holding the base of the lamp. They are considered soft light sources which give a very diffused output and because of this they have a poor throw as the light is not focused like the tungsten's. They cast soft shadows which makes them good for lighting people as the soft light reduces the look of lines and wrinkles and generally makes people look younger. Low cost CFL video light Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 16 Fluorescent Lights In the more expensive studio fluorescent lights like Kino-Flo’s have dimmer controls and an electronic ballast which runs at a very high frequency so there is no flicker or hum bars when videoing. If you using very cheap models then a lot of them do not have electronic ballasts and will flicker at the main frequency and although you might not see it, the camera will and it can cause rolling hum bars on your footage which you cannot get rid of in post-production. Because of the large size of some fluorescent tubes they make ideal lighting for backgrounds giving an even output and less likely to have light hotspots that you can get with small lights. This make It easy to make your own fluorescent lighting like I did with 5' ceiling lights mounted vertically on light stands, which I made specifically for lighting green screen background but it works very well for others like a white screen. If you do try to make your own lighting then make sure you use the electronic ballasts for a flicker free operation and daylight balanced tubes. As always if you are unsure about anything to do with the electrical wiring then call an qualified electrician. Large Kino-Flo Fluorescent video light Photon Beard professional video lights Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 17 LED Lights LED lighting has been around for a while but it's only in the last couple of years, due mostly to the drive for more energy efficient lighting it has really taken off. Low cost high power LED's are now much cheaper and this has filtered down in to studio lighting. Their main attraction is the very low power they use. I have a studio panel which has approximately the same light output of a 500W halogen lamp but it draws just 38W on full power, they also run cool so you're not heating up the room like a tungsten. Most are dimmable and don’t have any flickering issues like you can get with fluorescents and because they use very little power many can be run on batteries. The type of light they produce is a sort cross between hard light and soft light. Each LED is like a tiny spot light so it creates a hard light shadow pattern due to the very small focused light source. However when you have panel with maybe up to 1000 of them they start to act a bit like a soft light because the light is now spread across maybe a square foot or more but to get a true soft light you will still need a diffusor which many are supplied with. 500 LED lamp video light They also have an unusual side effect called micro shadows. If you hold your hand in front of an LED panel and cast a shadow on to a wall for something similar you will see that instead of one solid hard shadow, it will actually made up of many tiny shadows that surround the subject in all directions. Each one of these shadows is cast from each of the LED's in the panel and the because they are all in different places across the panel it makes for hundreds of tiny shadows. If you use just one LED panel to light your subject you can end up with a halo shadow around on the background behind them caused by these micro shadows. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 18 If you want something more like the tungsten lighting then there are large scale single LED lamps available which have one LED which is about an inch or more across and very bright. They are available in professional studio lights but you can also get them in outdoor security lights for about £30 ($50), though you will have to find a way to mount them and they don’t have dimmers built in. These cast single solid shadows like tungsten's but use a fraction of the power. Small camera mounted light panels also make very secondary lighting such as for use as backlights or highlights and because of their light weight, small size and battery power they can be mounted on boom poles in low ceiling rooms. Portable LED video light Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 19 The Camera The camera is where most people start when thinking about setting up their studio but actually its only part of the overall system and today there are a lot of options depending up to your budget and what you want to do, from iPhones and tablets to 4K DSLR's cameras like the Panasonic GH4 and Sony A7s. You can also go up to the semi-pro models like the canon C100, C300 & C500 but with the advances in the upper end consumer models there is now much less of a need for the home & small business studio owner to go semi-pro unless there is a specific requirement that only these cameras can give. Now you don’t have to start out with a top of the range camera. Today, almost any full HD camcorder can produce a good quality video. With good lighting even an iPhone can give a very good quality output, there are many people which use them exclusively to make even professional videos. Panasonic SD900 1080p HD camcorder The next step up from the smart phones will be the traditional camcorder, these have come a long way now they are all full HD 1080p devices. The advantage you get over the mobiles is mostly in the lens and better usability. They are can go up to a 20x optical zoom plus then the digital zoom. The optical zoom will give you full quality even at maximum zoom where as a digital zoom will get more and more bitty and lower quality the higher the zoom. On the more expensive camcorders they have O.I.S or Optical Image Stabilisation which works in the lens of the camera and tends to be smoother and better than the electronic only ones. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 20 Even in a small studio a zoom lens can be a very useful tool not just for framing shots of people but if you are showing products or small items, the ability to zoom in without moving the camera will be essential. There are some really good camcorders around now and they are quite low cost items, you could buy 2 or 3 for the price of a iPhone or DLSR and have a multi-camera setup to give a professional multi angle look to your videos. However the difference between these and the DSLR's or mirror less camera’s which are now pretty much the default high quality video cameras is the ability of DSLR's to create a more filmic look with things like shallow depth of field and a wider dynamic range. This means that they can record more of the extremes from very bright to very dark in the same shot without losing details. And of course some of the higher end models will also record in 4K resolution. If you not worried about making your videos "look" like film then or manipulating the footage for colour or special effects like green screen afterwards or hi-res 4K video then a standard run of the mill 1080p camcorder will probably suite you just fine. Panasonic GH4 4K Mirror less camera The lens of a camera can ultimately make or break the quality of the image which the camera captures and this is where DSLR's come in to their own. DSLR's were originally photographic cameras until the manufacturers started to use their big high quality sensors for video use as well. They offer much more in the way of manual control, have much image larger sensors and changeable lenses which means that you can go from extreme wide angle to extreme zooms just by changing the lens. You can have very fast lenses which let in much more light than normal kit ones, macro lenses, specialist lenses, the list goes on. However this also means higher cost, a top quality lens can cost many times more than the camera but there are many 3rd party ones which can offer almost as good a quality for sometimes much less. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 21 DSLR's will often be able to film in lower light and produce higher quality video than many camcorders or portable devices. This is because they have larger image sensors which are more sensitive to light. The new Sony A7s is currently one of the best low light cameras being able to film in moon light only and still produce video which looks almost as good as it would in daylight. Blackmagic Cinema Camera and the Sony A7s 4K capable mirror less camera Specialist cameras like the Blackmagic Cinema range record in high quality professional formats using codecs like Apple ProRes and CinemaDNG RAW, which records the output with little or no compression and allows you manipulate the footage much more without degrading the quality in a similar way to the professionals do. Codecs like Apple ProRes are called intermediate codecs and they are designed to keep the quality as much a possible and are much better for editing with. Because they a quality based rather than making the files as small as possible like H.264 which nearly all consumer and some semi-pro cameras use to record with, this creates footage which takes up much more space and therefore needs larger disk drive storage whilst your editing. Although you can now record in 4K, you may not be able to view 4K footage directly on your monitor or TV in full resolution yet unless of course you are an early adopter of 4K tech. However, its usefulness in the editing and capture of fine details cannot be under estimated even though the final results may only be viewed in 1080p on YouTube. The finer details of 4K do make lower resolution 1080p HD look better when it is scaled down in the editing and the ability to digitally zoom in up to 200% with no loss of detail. This gives you much more freedom in the edit without having to have multiple takes or having multiple camera setups at shot at different zooms. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 22 The Camera continued… Combining 4K with professional recording formats like Apple ProRes, the sort of thing you can get with a Blackmagic 4K production camera or a combination of a Panasonic GH4 / Sony A7s and an Atomos Shogun video recorder/monitor, you can create the quality of footage that only professionals would have had just a couple of years ago. If you are going to be doing lots of green screen work then this type of 4K setup is something you should really be looking into as it will give you much better results than you would get with even the best HD cameras. In the end you don’t have to go this far to produce really good usable footage for online videos but if you looking to upgrade, then this is the type of camera you should now be looking at and you'll find that they are at similar prices as you would have paid for a top end HD video camera only a year so ago. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 23 Camera Accessories Unless you wanting to give all your videos a real "gorilla filming" look then the second thing you will need after your camera is a tripod. Tripods are available from about £10 ($15) up to thousands of pounds or dollars. There are two main types, ones made for photography and then ones made for video. The difference between them boils down the fact that photography tripods are not designed to move much when you taking your photos. Video tripods on the other hand are used not only for fixed or "locked down" shots but also for panning left and right up and down whilst videoing and getting the smoothest possible shot. Most photo tripods have heads which are not only integral to the tripod and cannot be changed but also they are not designed to pan smoothly in any direction for a length of time. A basic Photo tripod This is something you do between photo's but not during the shot like you do with video. Of course if you not planning on doing pan shots then a photo tripod will probably do fine. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 24 Video tripods tend to be of a much more robust construction with changeable video heads. This is needed because when you start to pan and tilt on a cheap flimsy tripod it will be difficult to get a steady shot. A strong sturdy tripod will not flex or move when your handling the camera during shooting. This also means that the price of a video tripod is usually quite a bit more than a photo one. The video head is normal where the money is with the professional ones costing upwards of £1000 ($1500). These have adjustable dampening which allows you to get very smooth panning without jittering or jumping. They also can carry heavier fully loaded cameras with lots of extras, all of which start to get heavy and can overload a basic tripod. If you using a smartphone or tablet then you will need an adaptor or clamp to hold it as these devices as they do not have any mounting holes or points that you would normally use on a standard tripod. A Sachtler professional tripod and video head Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 25 If you looking to use a DLSR and get some of those rather nice looking focus pull shots then you going to need what is normally called a "Camera Rig". This is a frame which is normally held on the shoulder with handles to hold and move it around or they can be tripod mounted. The camera is placed in it and the things like a focus pull wheel can be attached which then allows you to control the focus ring on your lens with a dial. This allows you to set start and end points on it so you can focus one part of the scene and then move or "pull" focus to another with repeatable accuracy every time, something that is very difficult to do when controlling the focus ring on the lens by hand only. A fully loaded DSLR camera rig with pull focus, monitor, battery pack and matte box Camera rigs can also hold a lot of the other kit required like external battery packs, microphones, video and audio recorders, monitors and portable lighting to effectively make the same as you would get with a big pro camera. The complete rig is something that most people build up over a period of time so don’t worry about having it all when you're starting out. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 26 If your using a high end DLSR or camcorder then the chances are that it may send a high quality uncompressed output via the HDMI port even if it only records a lower quality compressed footage to it’s own SD card. Atomos Shogun 4K recorder and monitor on a Panasonic GH4 If this is the case then you could benefit from a an external recorder like the Atomos Ninja for up to 1080p and the Atomos Shogun if your camera is 4K compatible like the GH4 and A7s. These allow you to record the uncompressed output usually in The Apple ProRes format and give you cleaner footage without compression artefacts that the camera adds if you use the H.264 footage from the SD card. They record the footage on the 2-1/2 HHD or better on to SSD drives. The Atomos shogun also has a professional quality 1920 x 1200 monitor that gives you lots of options and extras like waveform meters, focus assist, Zebra bars, audio monitoring and more that help you get the best quality footage from your camera and in a format which is going to be better in your editing software. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 27 Studio Backgrounds Although you can use a wall of your house or building as a background, the chance are that you would be better off with a proper background. There are a few different ways to create a good background but one of the simplest and cheapest is the popup photography ones. These are basically a sprung steel hoop with material attached to it. They can be folded up for easy storage and then just popped open and leant or hung on a wall or frame. They are often available in two colours with one colour on one side and the other on the reverse so you can have a white back drop or a black one if you flip it over. The sprung steel loop also pulls the material flat with few if any creases once it is open. Pop up backdrop open above and folded up at the left These are good for doing head and shoulder shots where you don’t move around, so you do have to stand in one place and not wave your arms around much. If you find that you will be going out of shot quite a lot, then you can turn the backdrop sideways, or landscape style instead of portrait. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 28 If you require more room to move around in then a larger background will be required. This is usually based around two stands and a telescopic crossbeam which holds a roll of paper or vinyl which is pulled down to create the background. The total width just depends on how wide the crossbeam will go but normally it's up to about 12'. White studio backdrop on stands and cross bar pulled out to form an infinity curve If you have the ability to fix things to the wall, then you can either buy or make a rack that can hold up to 3 or 4 rolls of material on aluminium tubes. This allows you to then just pull down the desired background without having to mount and unmount them on to stands, it also takes up less room as you don't have the stands taking up floor space. The paper rolls are normally around 8' to 9' wide and 36' or 50' in length and come in a large range of colours and patterns or scenes. They have been used by photographers for doing portraits for decades. They are wider than the popup ones so you can stand further away from them without the risk of going out of shot. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 29 Paper is good and gives a clean smooth background but it can crease and tear easily, if this does happen the just cut off the damaged part and pull down some more. If you intend to walk on the material, like when you're doing a full body shot then you might consider vinyl as the material. This is stronger and can be wiped clean if it gets dirty so you won't be cutting lots of it off unless it’s get really bad. Paper or vinyl backgrounds are also great for creating an infinity background. This is where the you pull the paper or vinyl out a long away and create a gentle curve as it goes down to the floor. When it's lit correctly it looks like there is no edge between the background and the floor, giving an endless white background look when you're doing full body shots. You can also do this on a smaller scale with a narrower roll and bring it down on to a table for the same with smaller products. Paper rolls come a wide variety of colours If you working in a home studio with carpet then you can't really use vinyl and certainly not paper to walk on as both will sink in to the carpet and/or puncture when its walked on. One method you could use is to lay down some large wooden boards on top of the carpet and then lay the background material on that if there is no other way to get a hard surface which is what you would normally use. The larger stands and crossbeams are great for green screen or Chroma key work to as you can use either a fabric, paper or even coloured plastic sheets as the background and again the this means you can get a full body shots or move around more than you could with a smaller background. If your promoting your company then you could use a similar method as you see on sports TV channels with sponsors names repeated across the background but instead use your company name or logo. You can get roll of vinyl with graphics printed on them quite cheaply, you just need to fix the to a board or similar hard surface and then place them behind you to create the background. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 30 Microphones & Audio The audio part of your videos is at least as important as the visual content but a lot of people treat if it is something secondary, this is a big mistake because if you have bad quality audio then people are much more likely to switch off or move on the next video than if you have good quality audio. We have seen in a previous section that the walls, floor and ceiling will all affect the quality of the sound but the positioning of the mic will make much more of a difference to the quality. When at all possible you should NOT use the microphone that is built in to the camera, you should use either a boom mic or if you're doing talking head videos then a lapel or lavaliere microphone. The reason is not because the built in mics are bad, in fact they can be very good mics, it's because they are where the camera is and they should be as close to the person speaking as possible. The further away the mic is from the subject the more of the room sound will be picked up and less of the person speaking. This makes the audio sound very hollow and echoy and if you have hard surfaces and walls around you it will be even worse. In cases like this, if you use a lapel mic then it will be picking up mostly your voice with a bit of the room sound, which might not sound perfect but it will sound much much better than it would from the mic in your camera. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 31 A lapel mic is a very small microphone that attaches to your clothes, normally the lapel of a suit and hence the name They should be positioned about 6" to 8" away from your mouth, with the open end facing down. They have a small clip which allows them to be fixed to almost any type of clothing. They are available as either wired or wireless. The wired ones have a long lead that will connects to your camera or an audio recorder. A lapel or lavaliere microphone You see these on almost every TV news and studio based program. A wireless one has a shorter lead to a wireless body pack which is worn normally around the back with the lead to the mic running under your clothes. This transmits to a receiver which then feeds in to the audio input of your recording equipment. There are two types of wireless systems available, the low cost VHF ones and the more expensive UHF ones. VHF is more susceptible the interference which because of the longer wavelength can travel farther and though walls and other obstacle’s that would block UHF interference. UHF is better but due to the higher quality of components required for UHF systems the price can be quite a lot more than for VHF. You should look at getting a well known make such as Sennheiser or Shure as their technologies tend to be better and make more use of special techniques like automatic band switching to get the best signal. The wired ones are a lot cheaper but you are then tethered by the connecting lead and they can be easy to trip over or pull over cameras and other equipment if your are not careful. A good wireless one will be more expensive but will leave to free to move around without fear of tripping over any leads which even in a small studio, you will find that very useful. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 32 As mentioned before you can also use a boom or shotgun microphone, so called because they look like the barrel of a shotgun. These mics are very directional and pick up most of the sound from the direction that they are pointed in. They still have limits though and for the best quality they should be about 1' to 2' away from the subject, normally held on the end of a pole called a boom pole just out of shot. Boom mics will pick up more of the room sound so when you need a nice natural sound then these would be the mic to use. They also don’t need to be wired up to the person like a lapel mic does. Both lapel and boom mics are available as "powered" which need a battery or external power supply or self-powered which draw their power from the device they are plugged in to. Because of this you need to know what sort of mic you can plug in to your camera or recorder for it to work properly. Boom Microphone on a boom pole Another important thing to note is that there are two main types of connectors, the 3.5mm jack plug which is fitted to all the consumer range equipment including smart phones, tablets, camcorders & DSLR's. The other type is the XLR connector, these are much larger and stronger with a 3 pin connector. XLR connectors 3.5mm Jack Plugs Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 33 XLR connectors are fitted to professional equipment like Pro and semi pro cameras, mixers, and many audio recorders. There are portable conversion units available that mount to your cameras hot shoe to allow the higher quality professional XLR mics to be used with cameras and equipment which only have the 3.5mm connectors. The difference between the two is more than just the size of the connectors. The XLR connector mics are a balanced audio system and can have much longer leads which can be 10's of meters long with no loss of quality and they are much more immune to electrical noise. The 3.5mm jack plug microphones have shielded cables but they are an unbalanced system which means they are more susceptible to picking up electrical noise and should really be used with lead lengths of about 10m or less. There are also adapter cables which go from XLR to 3.5mm but they do not give the balanced audio advantages that a full XLR system will do. If you want to record from two or more microphones at once then you will need an audio mixer, a small one of these starts at around £50 ($75). These allow the combined output from many sources to be mixed and together with the correct levels and then fed in to your camera or audio recorder. 4 Channel audio mixer Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 34 Sometimes the camera you have may not be very good at recording the audio. It might simpler to get an audio recorder than it is to replace your camera. There are lots of audio recorders around from digital dictation machines to using your laptop as the recorder. However a dedicated piece of kit like a Zoom H4n is probably a better way to go. They are battery operated and also have a very good built in stereo mic. They also have 2 XLR inputs as well as 3.5mm connectors. They record to an SD which can be up to 32Gb. They have a USB connection so you can use them as a USB audio interface with your computer too. Zoom H4n Audio recorder To use a separate audio recorder doesn't mean that you don’t record the sound in your camera, on the contrary you will still need to record audio in the camera. However instead of connecting your main mic to your camera, you connect it to your audio recorder, you then just let your camera record from it's built in mic. Once you have made your recording on both devices you then synchronise the audio from the camera and recorder in your editing software and turn off or delete the cameras audio track leaving just the audio from the recorder. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 35 The last but a very important thing you should have is a pair of headphones for monitoring the audio as it is being recorded. Most cameras and audio recorders have a phones socket. This is normally configured or can be setup in the device itself to output the sound that is being picked up from the mic input. You should use closed back headphones so that you block out the room noise and just hear the sound from the headphones themselves. Sennheiser closed back headphones This will allow you to hear what it will sound as it is being recorded and avoid finding out afterwards that the audio was a poor quality and potentially ruining the whole shoot. Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 36 Conclusion Hopefully this will have given you a good idea of the sort of things that you need to consider when you setting up a home or small business video studio. What I have concentrated on is the basics of what you will probably need based upon my own experience’s and what I have seen others using as well. There is no absolutely right way to do these because each person own will have their own circumstances so don’t worry that yours looks different or you don’t have exactly the same equipment. As long as your videos come out looking the way you want them, then you can consider that a success. Once you have something set up you’ll find that it will adapt it to your needs over time as you develop your techniques and become at ease with the equipment you use. Of course there are a lot of other things which I haven’t covered like the computer, the editing software, storage of footage and the processes involved in getting from an idea to a finished video such as planning, scripting, story boarding etc., etc. If there is one thing to take away from this is that you should have fun making your videos  Yours Paul Shillito Video Studio Set Up Guide For Home & Small Business © Video-Alchemy.com 37