Video Podcast Setup Tour - Cameras, Lighting, Audio (2024)

Hey y'all, today we are at the Howdy Studio here in downtown Abilene, and I wanted to take a second and give you guys a tour, show you guys what we have going on, what it looks like, and how it works. Come on, let's, let's go inside. All right, so you open up the door, it's this 400 square foot loft in the upstairs of a building downtown here in Abilene. Let's go ahead and start over here with the non-interesting stuff. We got an espresso machine. We got all the amenities, water, snacks, everything there. We have this Yukon tool chest that holds all of our gear. Take a look inside, it's a little messy right now, but we have tons of lenses, tons of lens caps, cables, everything we could possibly need. Up here we have this IKEA shelf that we drilled in the wall. There's shelves and space and 30-minute toilet paper sign that we use for the podcast. Over here on this side, we have my personal desk setup and all of our gross, uh, pile of gear right there. Uh, we try to stay organized, but we're always on the move, so it gets a little crazy. Over here we have Mike's desk, or the production desk. Um, if you come over here, Mike, we'll kind of show them what we have going on. So this is where our switcher is, where we get to switch and do all of the live editing whenever we're recording podcasts. So we have 4 channels here. We just switch back and forth to each channel. You can see each one's a little different. So that's where we do that. That's how we man that. And I'll show you more, um, later in another video once we can kind of dive deep into that. So over here, first things first, we have these cameras here. We have a camera here, camera here, and a camera over here on this side. So 3 cameras overall that we're switching between that we can use in post to edit. We have 2 lights here, uh, they don't change colors, they're one temperature. They're the Amaran 100d S series, um, great lights, very bright. They're at like 1% right now and it's plenty. So yeah, we got that here. We have another Amaran over here with an Aputure lantern softbox. So that's our lighting we got going. We got some Amazon furniture so we can sit down. If you come over here, we have 4 Samson— not Samsung, Samson— Q9U microphones. So the good thing about these is they can go XLR or USB-C. So you can plug it directly into your camera, you can plug it directly into your computer. So it's good for Zooms, for webinars, podcasts online, whatever you want to do there. But yeah, so we have the 3 cameras here. Let's talk about the cameras just a little bit. So right here we're running a Sony a7III as our wide shot, and on the 2 side angles we have a Sony FX30. So if you're looking to start a podcast, if you're looking for the perfect camera, this is the one that I would recommend. I think they run new like about $1,800, $1,500 to $1,800. You can buy it, uh, used. So on this lens we have a Sigma 30mm f/1.4 lens. It is the best prime lens you could probably buy. They have like a 30, I think they have like a 56 and a 85 maybe. So these are great. We're using the 16mm currently that you're seeing, um, on that FX30. So yeah, we have this, we have the top handle unit which is also a Sony item, uh, you can plug directly in two XLR units What that does, it merges the video and audio into that signal and sends it via HDMI to the switcher, and that's how we get our signal there. So yeah, we record externally with an external SSD onto the switcher, and the switcher is an ATEM Mini Pro ISO. So ISO meaning it records every single channel individually. As well as a master channel of what cuts you made. So yeah, that's, that's the studio. The idea is basically to provide a space for creators, for business owners, for small business owners, uh, to come and film, whether it's YouTube videos, podcasts, um, short-form content for their business, to make their brand known online and to promote it there, and not only promote it online but make it look dang good at the same time. So we're a full-service multimedia company here in Abilene. So we'll record it, we will edit it, we'll produce it, we will distribute it. So YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, we'll put it up for you, we'll schedule it throughout the month. If you want us to take over your social media, we can do that too. Tons of things we can do to help you guys out because I know how hard it is to run a business and also do the marketing at the same time. So we're a resource if you have any questions or want to work with us, want to book a podcast. We'll put our contact info in the description below and we'll catch you later.