Jeff Geronimo walks through the gear you need to start a YouTube channel or podcast: cameras, microphones, lights, and computer specs. He covers what to buy first and when it makes sense to upgrade.
If content is king, why do we need to have this awesome gear? Does your current gear still inspire you? Hey guys, what's up? This is Geoff Eronimo and thank you for watching this video. First of all, thank you Avi for inviting me here to share with you fellow Internet moguls my insight about the must have gear for YouTube content creation. So for this video we will talk about roles of gear in our content creation. What camera suits you? What are the audio equipment you need? What lighting equipment you should invest in? What computer minimum requirement you should have. I'll also share with you my ideas on when is the time for you to consider upgrading your gear. Certainly content is king when it comes to content creation. No matter how good your production is, as long as your content is not improving, your audience will not be interested or or get what you want to convey to them. Having a good framework and organized presentation of your thoughts in video form will benefit you in the long run. If content is king, why do we need to have this awesome gear? Right. Well, as I mentioned earlier, you need to present well your great content idea to your audience with the help of our gear. It makes it easy for them to understand what we want to convey. For example, even if you have something good to say, but your audio is not audible or not clear, they will eventually click other videos on YouTube. Another example is you're creating a travel video, but all of your footage is shaky, grainy or out of focus. Well, even us will not watch that video, right? So gear helps us to present our content in an organized manner and enjoyable to watch. The more they enjoy watching our videos, the more they will come again when we publish another one. It is true that we need to maximize what we have right now and continue creating content, but never close our doors in upgrading our gear as soon as possible to provide a better watching experience for our audience. Yes, it is self fulfilling to have a new gear, but we're doing this to provide a better watching experience to our audience. Having said that, let's go to the next one. Camera. What camera suits your content? Do we really need to shoot? 4k, 8k or 1080p is enough? Do we need to have faster autofocus? Do we need to have a longer battery lifespan? It all boils down to the content we're doing. Let's have my content as an example. So most of the time I shoot my content here inside my home office and barely go out to shoot videos. What I need is a camera that has better autofocus since I only shoot myself here and the camera is out of my reach when I start recording, so I need to rely on a camera that has better autofocus. I'm using my EOS R right now with with my RF 50mm f1.8 lens I only shoot 1080p full HD even though I can shoot 4k. Why? Because if I shoot 4k I do need to have a better editing workhorse or else my workflow will suffer and I will end up not uploading any videos. As Tony Robin says, complexity is the enemy of execution. The more complex our workflow is, the more reason we might end up not shooting our next videos. Trust me, this is true to my experience. This is the reason why I made my workflow in a way that it reads all unnecessary things and just focus on shooting my content. I do also consider my battery. Having a longer battery runtime prevents me from changing it frequently, again, getting rid of unnecessary things and making my workflow much easier. Do I need to have a camera that performs better in low light? As I have said earlier, I shoot inside my home office and make sure that I have plenty of light available for me to get the clearest footage that I can get. I usually use the lowest ISO in my camera because the lower your ISO is, the better image quality you can get. If your content is more of moving and traveling, you might want to consider getting a lighter and compact camera. From my experience, a bulky camera discourages me to shoot, especially if our schedule is too tight and requires us to move fast. Half of your video content is your audio. No matter how good your video shoots are, if you have a bad audio or almost not audible, they will leave. Investing in good audio equipment is a must, especially if you're vlogging, podcasting or live streaming. There are several types of mics out there. Some mics need to have an audio interface and preamp for you to be able to use it in your live stream. This kind of mics are somehow pricey, but their audio quality is so good. Sure, SM7B is one of those popular mics out there. Promise you'll love it. While other mics out there are plug and play already, meaning they're being run by plugging it in your USB input. With that being said, what's more important is that you get the most out of your chosen mic. They are not made equal. Some are mid hump mics, some are punchy and some are crispy. You need to choose what fits your voice. Do you want to sound punchy? Do you want to sound crystal clear and crispy. For example, I have here my $20 lavalier mic which I find too mid focus. So for me to be able to maximize this microphone, I need to tweak it a little bit inside my editing software using a graphic equalizer. Just a disclaimer. I'm not that too knowledgeable in terms of audio mixing, but I got a fair experience in producing song covers and even my own music. So I reduce the mids of this mic and give a little boost on the bass because I prefer my voice to sound punchy in my videos. So the real question here is how do you like your voice to sound like on your videos or social media content? Then start from there. Since audio is out of the way, let's talk about lighting. Let's quickly talk about the three types of lighting that you can use when you're creating your content. Just to remind you, one light source might be enough. First is key light. Key light is your main source of light and stronger than the other light source that you have. Key light on the other hand supports your key light. It softens the shadows in your subject for you to get a flatter lighting. Lastly is practical lights. This light source gives you an interesting look to your frame like what you're seeing right now. So if you want to have that creative lighting inside your shot, use practical lights in your background. Too much is not good. Just a reminder with that let's go to the lights that I'm using right now. I have this 150 watt LED light from Yake photo with a 120cm Godox Octobox. I can buy a lower power light source, but I chose to use 150 watts because for me it's better to lower it down when I need it than being limited to a lower light source in the first place. The Octobox makes my light source softer when it hits my subject so it prevents hard shadows in my face which I don't prefer. In this kind of content that I'm making. For my fill light, I'm just using a reflector just to soften the shadows in my face even more. For my practical lights, I have these smart hue bulbs from Philips to spice up my frame a little bit. Now that we have covered the production side of things, let's go to the equipment that we need in our post production. A computer. So you need to consider the footage that you will be editing now and in the future. If you see that you will edit 4k later on or even 8k, then you need to bump up the editing workforce that you will use. Right now I use a MacBook Pro 15 inches with 16 gigabytes RAM, 2.6 GHz 6 Core, Intel Core i7 and Radeon Pro 560 x 4 gigabytes. What's that? Sometimes it's getting slower when I edit 4K footages with with this kind of specs on Adobe Premiere Pro but not in Final Cut Pro. What I want to say is that if you will be editing on Adobe Premiere Pro most of the time, getting a bigger ram like 32 gigabytes, better processor like the M1s and stronger GPUs will help you along the way. Right now I'm using a color accurate monitor From ASUS, the PA27AC, but since I started creating content I'm just using my laptop monitor and it works just fine. This monitor is nice to have, but not as important as upgrading your computer's internal hardware. So if you're planning of upgrading your arsenal this coming days, here are few tips that I would like to share with you before we end when workflow doesn't seem right, if you're experiencing hiccups in your editing or your camera's not focusing on you, then you really need to upgrade your gear. I would like to repeat what I said earlier, quoting Tony Robbins. Complexity is the enemy of execution. What we want to achieve when upgrading is making our workflow much easier. When we put this as our mindset, we can sometimes eliminate our gear acquisition syndrome or gas. Ask yourself does my gear still inspire me to create content? Sometimes were just being hyped up on social media. Believe me, better gear will never end. It's up to you if you will buy that top of the line. But before doing such things, ask yourself first, does your current gear still inspire you? If the answer is yes, then don't upgrade. Because upgrading means you're trading your equipment, your current equipment for better gear. With cash or add ons you will flush out cash, meaning it's an expense if you really don't need it. For now, save your money and wait till your gear doesn't fit your workflow anymore. There you go guys. I hope these things help you in deciding what gear you should buy. And next. I hope this video help you in creating more content in the future. And yes, that's it for today. Thank you for watching guys. And thank you Abby again for inviting me here to talk about this must have gear for YouTube content creation. Please guys, if you do like this kind of video, don't forget to visit my channel later. On after this workshop or webinar do just type on YouTube jeffheronimo and you can find my YouTube channel. If you want to learn more about photography, videography, editing or vlogging, consider clicking the subscribe button. Once again, this is jefferonimo. Thank you for watching this video. See you on my next one. Bye. Peace. Sam.
