Home Studio Setup | Room Tour 2022

I'm going to tell you the stuff that I wish somebody told me when I first started making content. What cameras you should use, what lights you should use. Like, for example, here, come look at this. This is the dumbest thing ever. When you don't have somebody telling you what the hell to buy, you buy a light. Look at the percentage on this. We're literally using 4% of the power of this light. So did I really need to spend the money on an aperture 300D mark II? No, I absolutely did not need to do that. And so I'm going to tell you guys what lights you should use. And we're going to talk about setting up my wife's studio in another room. This room actually is downstairs in my main house. I say main house as if, like, I have more than one house that I live in. I don't live. I only live in one house, guys. We travel a lot, but so when you're downstairs in my house, I've got my movie theater room that we're converting to a big studio. And this will end up having a bunch of stuff. We'll do a whole another video about that as that progresses forward. But when you come down here, this is where I hang out. I probably spend a good 20 to 25 hours a week down in this room, and so does this girl right here. This is her little playground. Corbin. Say hi. So I spent a lot of time in this room, and this room makes me a lot of money. How does it make me a lot of money? Well, I talk to a lot of sellers in here. I raise capital in here. I teach people how to raise capital. We do deals together. I do company zooms in here. I do all my podcasts in here. And this is like my main hangout spot that I have silent treatment on the walls. So when you walk in here, you can feel how quiet it is. So what we want to do is we want to do the same thing for my wife's office. So let me show you what we're doing over here. One of the main reasons I bought this big of a house is because I legit didn't want. So when you're down there in the room and somebody knocks on the door, there's nothing worse than doing a podcast or a live. And then you hear dogs barking normally. This part of the downstairs, I have one, two guest bedrooms. We really don't use these that often because we have a guest house that has four beds and three baths. So we're going to keep this as a guest bedroom. So if you guys ever come over and you're one of my friends and my guest house is taken, here you go. This is where you'll end up staying. You'll have your own bedroom and bath. Boom, bada boom. Right here. However, this other room, it just seems like we're hardly ever using this space. And so my wife, currently, her office is upstairs so that she's by the kitchen. But she doesn't really have the ability to have her own quiet space. And so my wife comes down and whose studio do you think my wife uses? She uses my studio so she'll mess with my chair. So you guys can see I just bought my wife a brand new chair. Guys, this is the chair. You're not going to want to hear the price of this chair. It is worth every single penny. I spend 25 hours sitting in this chair in my studio. You can turn this around. It makes it so your legs never fall asleep. It's super comfortable. It doesn't have arms to rest your arms on, which I actually like. So it's easy to get in and out of. You've got your footrest, and it goes way up and way down. This is the chair that Joe Rogan uses. And I did a ton of research. I bought a bunch of chairs, had them all shipped, built them all out, and I chose about 15 chairs. This was the one that I ended up keeping. I took the other 14 back. So I bought this chair for Laura. What I'm thinking about doing is taking this wall and mounting a TV on this wall, and then having my wife's desk kind of like this, right? So she's looking this direction. She's got a desk, a camera around here. So it's a similar setup to mine. And then she's got this really deep corner that she can decorate and do stuff with. And then my wife can have some storage in that closet she can put her gear in. And this can be a cool little YouTube setup for her. So I'm going to tell you, going back into my studio, what I like and what I don't like. And I want to point out the things that, if I were you, what I would do. We'll come back in here for reference at the very end. And I don't care about the YouTube algorithm. I just want to give people the knowledge that I wish I got. I wish somebody just walked me through this and told me exactly what I should do and exactly how to set it up. So let's do it. A couple of things. Make sure you have a room that sounds better. Can you hear the difference when I'm in here? Yes. So if you guys can hear the difference, make a comment down below. So first and foremost, here's the lapel that we use when we're walking around the Sennheiser ABX2. Okay, so this is what we use. We've got two, maybe three sets of these. We use these all the time. It is absolutely the best lav mic that you can get for kind of our industry. I mean, for the TV show that we're on on A&E, the TV show wouldn't get caught dead using this. They think that this is total crap. But for us and like our line of work, this is about as high end as you can get. And it's expensive, but absolutely worth it. And we love this. So use that. If you guys are filming out in the field, definitely use that. By the way, do you think we have enough cords? Definitely do. So we're going to go through and we're going to kind of take inventory. Oh, yeah, look at that. Eric bumping his head. Here's what I got again. Here's that chair. Same chair as what I got my wife. I've had this chair now two years. I would have paid ten grand for that chair. I sit in this so much and what I love is I can go this route, right. If I'm on a long zoom and I want to just lean forward, do this kind of thing. I can sit sideways on it if I want. Right. And it's super comfortable. But this is how I primarily use leans back. It's super comfortable. This is absolutely the best chair. And it spins. It's great. So I've got that and then I've got this gorilla pad down here so I can move it around a little bit. I really like the rug in here. My wife has the same exact rug upstairs in her office. This is a. What's that place that girls like? Anthropologie. You knew I was going to say it at the exact same time when girls like it. Yeah, that's good. So let's go into mics. Okay. Mics. When we're out in the field and Eric's mobile, you want to use the Sennheiser lav. It's amazing. Also, Rode has the Rode Go mic set and it's really good. But I wouldn't say it's as good as the Sennheiser. And if we have to, it seems like Eric is always choosing the Sennheiser. You're always choosing the Sennheiser you just like it more. It's more reliable probably. Yeah, it seems more simple too. Less buttons. It's like turn it on and you're good to go. Higher quality for sure. Noticeable quality, I think when Eric's filming. So Sennheiser, for sure go with the lapel mic, but when you're doing your podcast, I've done the SM7B. In fact, I have multiple of these, like hanging around. Okay, so this is the Joe Rogan mic, right, the SM7B. And it's good and a lot of people love it. I use it as a backup mic. So if I end up having two people at my desk, which I'm going to tell you I hate about my desk, this is the 72 inch model. I would have gone for the 80 inch model. That extra 8 inches makes the biggest difference because when you have two people at this desk facing this camera, which I'll go through all this stuff, two people kind of feels cramped, right? I set this up as a one man studio. I love this studio and I'm giving away my secrets. I spent consulting money to people. They never showed up. I ended up having to just figure this out all on my own. So this stand comes with this. A lot of people like having the stand like this, but I'll tell you why I don't like it that way. And I'll tell you why. I have this really ugly contraption. Some people mess, like DM me and they go, man, you should get rid of that big freaking arm in front of you. I'm like, you know what? I'm so much cooler than you. It's functionality I care about. If I spend this much time down here, I want to be able to be like in my zone and feel good. So with this, look what I got here. It's like in the way of my keyboard. And my keyboard is what controls the main unit. So yeah, sometimes I work down here, but guys, I actually don't work on my business down here so much. This is where I create most of my content. I do my zoom meetings with my team. So yes, I work in the sense of like having meetings because it's nice and quiet and private. But I actually have an office upstairs that when I'm just by myself, I'm not creating content, I'm answering emails, answering Slack messages, those types of things. I do that upstairs when I'm on wholesale hotline, for example, I get to control not only what I see. See, this is what I like about this, is that I've got this Big screen up behind here that controls and I can see everything and my camera is right there. It took me a while to really figure out this flow and like what worked for me. Nobody else taught me this. So Here comes episode 130 of Wholesale Hotline. I'm going to enter the studio. I'm not going to press go live, obviously, but here we are. You got Eric up on the screen, as you guys can see. And I can see the comments right here. I can shrink this down. I can move it out of the way. I can screen share. I can run my whole live right here. Okay. This is important for me. So I need this on my desk. Nice little leather thing. I love this leather pad. This came from Amazon too. It's just a black leather, like really high quality piece of leather so it doesn't wear down. It's really nice. You can feel how premium it is. This wireless Apple keyboard makes my life easy. So I can have my laptop over there and it still all works. Same thing with this Logitech mouse. This is the mouse. The computer gods made this mouse. This mouse is absolutely amazing. I know this is the MX anywhere for the Mac. That's why it's white. The head unit that I have, the main thing I have is the MacBook Pro with the M1 chip. This thing is fast as lightning and it's amazing. So when I'm listening to streamyard or I'm on a Zoom or I'm on whatever, people always ask me like, where are your headset? Because you'll see Joe Rogan wear a headset, you'll see other really popular podcasters wear a headset. And those people are dumb. This mic, in my opinion, is better than the SM7B. The SM7B is kind of the go to. It's like 300 or $400. This is a hundred and twenty five dollars. And I think this is a better mic. I had to test mics. This is literally like one of 15, 20 mics. This is number one by a long shot. But then nothing else is even remotely close as the SM7B. This. I understand why everybody uses it. It's amazing. But for me, I love this mic so much. It's so strong. It's so robust. This thing is the. It's like I feel like this weighs like 5 pounds. Why am I telling you all this? Some of you guys are like, get to the creed of finance. Pace, dance, dance, dance. Creative finance guy. Well, what I've learned right now, everybody's trying to create their own brand, right? They're all their own studio. This mic is absolutely the number one stunner. It's the Rode procaster. Rode Procaster. Guys, if you guys are using a USB mic, I can tell you you're missing audio. You're missing quality audio. So you need to get this mic then. This is a Frameworks Gator arm. I like this. It's super heavy. It's super robust. And the main reason why I like this is because my hands are now free. Nothing's in my way. I can operate. Boom. Nothing's in my. I can literally just be kind of like crazy dude, and I never run into any issues. In fact, I barely will ever bump into this. It seems really big, but the way you set it up, it's perfect. Now, the other reason why I have this and why I need free space is because I spent a lot of time right here on my iPad. So if you guys look at the screen, my iPad pro, we'll put a link to the version that I have. And the keyboard. You need the keyboard and you absolutely need the pencil. The application that I use is notability, called note. Ability. Note. I'm talking in this mic like you're listening to me. Notability. This is the key component right here. Okay? Boom. So this little dongle allows you to have your HDMI come into your iPad, your charger, charge the iPad, so it's constantly fed. And then the HDMI goes into feed number two, as you guys can see. So if I press one, goes back press two, and then I can go back to my little switcherooski. However I want to do that. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. So you've got some really big components here that make the quality of the sound is procaster. This gives another element that most people don't even realize how powerful and special this is. And then you've got the ATEM Mini Extreme ISO. That thing is like eleven hundred dollars. And I would have paid ten grand for it because of how important it is. It will switch to this camera angle, that camera angle. It will do all of the switcherooskis. It helps out with the audio, it helps out with everything. And then on top of it, whenever I want to self film something and I don't want to stream it, I can just plug in a little hard drive into this and press record right here. Boom. And it will record to a hard Drive in 4K. It's amazing. So I love all of this. I love this setup. Here's what I don't love about my setup. This is absolutely epic. But this is is also $600. You don't need all of this. This is amazing. The quality of the audio is amazing. So if you don't ever want to worry about the quality of your audio, then for sure go with the Rodecaster Pro. They even have a new version of this, so we'll put a link down below. It's like the all, like, digital version. It's way cooler than this. I actually have three of these. But if you look at the back of this, how many XLRs do I have set up? I have one mic in here. And then also you see all these little buttons right here? These are for sound effects, which nobody uses. They seem really cool, but nobody ever uses these. You can pre program all these things in, and it seems cool when you buy it. It's definitely a cool feature, but nobody ever uses it. I also can play my phone through here. So if I'm making phone calls to sellers, my students can hear the seller. But what I found is it's too cumbersome to set up the Bluetooth and all that kind of stuff. And then if somebody calls me, it interrupts and you can hear it on the zoom. So I just usually put my phone on speakerphone right here, and it's easier that way. Now, I think for Laura's desk, I should find a more simple, smaller audio interface. Not the Rode Procaster or. Sorry, I like Procaster and the Rodecaster Pro. They have to screw you up. Rodecaster Pro, Procaster. I shouldn't have spent money on this, but I didn't know. Nobody told me. So what we're going to do is we're going to find a smaller version of this. Takes up less desk space for Laura so she can have more places for curling irons or whatever it is that women put on their podcast studio desks. Okay, let's see, what else do we got? Okay, this Little Phil World 4K display lets me know what is being shown on the screen, and it lets me see what my audience is seeing. So this is really important. This also, this stand. If you're gonna get the atem, make sure you get this stand. It is epic even. Somebody came in yesterday for a consult. We were talking about how to solve this problem that I'm about to tell you about that we have. They looked at this stand that I bought for 35 bucks, and they were like, oh, my gosh, that stands. So dope. So this stands. Great. We'll give you guys a link to that. And I think that's primarily it for the desk, except for these lights. I overspent so much effing money on these lights. These lights are the Aputure 120D Mark II. These things are the shit. People use these in like high grade production. Yo, dude, I'm just trying to buy some houses, you know, I'm saying, like I don't need to have this quality of a light. The light. What percentage are we at? Let's see. This is at 40% of its power. We don't need that. Now the desk I have is an uplift desk, but there's a bunch of these on Amazon. We'll give you guys a couple of links to these or maybe we'll give you the link to the uplift thing. I bought this desk. It was probably 1500 dollars desk. It's a very expensive desk because it will allow me to write on the white top. And the coolest part about this is this little basket it has back here, the little satchel. It has all my wires in it. So if I decide I want to move my desk around, I literally just move my desk around. Everything is attached and encompass on this desk. So you can see, like I don't have wires running everywhere. I have literally two wires coming from this desk to here. I have the HDMI coming from my main camera and then I have the HDMI coming from my computer to the TV screen. That's it. So I can move this anywhere I want. But I wish I got smaller lights. That's one thing I wish I got. The 120DS are really, really good for a lot of things. But you don't need them. You can spend money on less now because I had the money. Am I glad I spent the money? Yes. I'm glad that I have these lights because there are times where we'll turn these lights around and in those few moments that we've needed the full capacity of these lights, I'm like, thank goodness I spent the money on these. But right now I'm saying don't spend the money. But I would spend the money again. Okay, so that's what we use for the lights. Now I have switched my main head unit. I'll show you guys the older main camera you used to use. I switched to a Blackmagic 6K pocket cinema camera. I love it. I've got a Sigma 18-35 millimeter. I like this as well. It's a really great lens. It creates a ton of creaminess. Okay, I'm crispy, but then my background is really blurry and that's what you want, you want that little bokeh bokeh, bokeh bokeh, whatever they call it. This camera is the bomb. It's so easy to use. It's got a massive touch screen on the back. This is absolutely the best way to go. Is this camera for your main head unit. I'll tell you the cameras we used to use in just a little bit. This stand, Amazon, this is a 4k monitor. Sony, it was like 300 bucks. We'll get. I'll give you the screen that I'm going to buy for Laura. Not the screen I currently have now because this is now a two year old screen and there's better versions of it. That's my main setup. But what I don't like about it is that when I'm. It's a really stupid thing, but to me it's a big deal. So if I'm looking at the lens, I obviously look like I'm looking at you. But if I look up at my screen behind me, it's obvious that I'm looking at my screen. And that's not that big of a deal. But to me, because I spend so much time in here, I really don't like that. And the way to solve that is with a teleprompter. And so Eric is working on a solution for that in the teleprompter. By the way, this is money because I get to hold my pens and all that kind of stuff in here and then I write here, I take notes. Boom, boom, boom. Cool. Couple of things. We used to use the A7SII. Don't do that. Don't try and save money. Just buy the best you can get. Okay? This camera has had so many problems and I bought two of them and I have double all the problems. Okay, Got all the problems with these cameras. The glass that we use, we only use G Master glass. Really for all of our stuff. I think we have a couple of Sigmas like I pointed out, but it's like the best of the best Sigma lens. You don't want to go cheap on your glass. Like spend the money on the lenses. The lenses are the glass. Spend the money on the glass. Don't be the person that buys a cheap ass camera if you can afford to do it. In the beginning, a lot of people would just use their iPhone. But for me, like when you're setting up a studio and you're going to spend a lot of time and energy doing this, just do it the right way. Now here's a couple of things. I really love these little arms right here. These are the greatest invention ever. So definitely get these for your cameras, get these for your lights. This is how we attach them to the desk. Again, the desk that I have is an uplift desk. So many people have already logged out of this video. But I think that this is good for a lot of people. This is a good arm, too, but it's clunky for the lights back here. Here's something else that we're doing in here. This light should be on the ceiling. Like, you see how dangerous this is. I got this precious little Snickers bar back here that shouldn't be, like, in trouble's way. And this is good. It's sturdy. It's not gonna fall on her. But if she bumps into it and knocks it over this light, which is our backlight, this is a really nice light. This is the light storm something. The aputure light storm LS1C. At what percent do you think we're using of this? 15%. Look how much brighter this gets, guys. Like, these powerful lights are really nice, but you don't necessarily need them. But it is nice to spend money to know that you couldn't get anything better. Like, you literally have the best of the best. This light is here. We have the same exact light right here. And it just barely touches the light on my favorite painting of all time. Then to add a little pop of color, we have the nanlite pavotube. These things are very expensive, but very worth it. I hate cords. And so this is recent change or recent setup. So if you guys look at this, this is the longest part of the room, right? And so the longest part of the room is where you should have your camera angle so that you can create the creaminess of your background. So it kind of blends in and gets really blurry back here. And so we used to. When I first moved in this house a little over a year ago, the camera was directly in front of that door, and it shot this way. And Big boy and Andre were directly behind me. And we switched that up. Just recently, Ryan Badass video editor on our team, Badass video editor, and Eric came in here and really changed the composition of this room. I still feel like we have. We need a little bit more je ne sais quoi or a little bit more in the background. I am thinking about putting a whiteboard or maybe a vibe board in here so that a camera angle can shoot this way off the desk. But this room needs just a little bit more decoration. It needs to be personalized just a little bit more. And we will work on that over time. But as you can tell, like, it's really clean in here. I don't have a lot just flowing around. My daughter can hang out in here with me a ton. And that's nice. Also, when that camera angle is shooting, I will typically put something on this screen that is maybe our YouTube channel so that people can see it in the background. It's like little subliminal stuff trying to get people to see our stuff. I want to do the same setup with Laura, so we'll go out and build those. But let's. Let me show you a couple of things out here of things that I wish we would have used instead. Here we go. The Amaran. This is also the same brand as the light in there, but this is so much smaller and more compact. Same quality of light, but it's way less expensive. And this is still only at. Holy crap. Are you kidding me? It's only at 2%. Is that right? That's crazy. So you don't need to spend a ton of money on these for like really powerful lights. This light here. I am happy that we spent money on this now that we have it. But this is another. Okay, great. This is the 120D. So we have. This is our third 120D. The other two 120Ds are in my studio. And this is really good for like a big light. But then I stupidly bought two of these 300Ds where we are literally using 1 or 2%. This is currently at 7%. Like this light will freaking give you a sunburn, dude. No joke. This thing is so bright, you don't need it. It's a waste of money. Do not buy the 300D unless you're doing maybe outside work. Okay. If you do outside work and you're filming a commercial or something, this is a really good one to do. This is my favorite camera. Do not buy this, okay? This is not worth the money unless you have the money. It's worth the money. This is a seven or eight thousand dollar camera. We love it. It's really cool. It is probably. Would you. This. You'd say this is the highest quality camera we have. Like, it shoots the best quality, it looks the best. There's nothing that compares to this camera. In fact, it makes me want to go back to this camera as my main. Should we. I should make this my main podcast camera in there. Yeah. I mean, I use it the most. Why Wouldn't I just do it? The problem is you want to use out in the field. So that's the problem is that this is such a great camera. It does show up. You can see the difference of this camera. And then the videographers on our team all want to use it. They love this camera. So we'll probably start using it a lot more out in the field. So I won't switch this out. So this camera is dope, cinema quality. Like you can make movies with this. The guys on A and E are all jealous of this camera. It's the FX6 from Sony I bought. It's backwards. You can't, you can't get it right now. Like no one can get it really. It's popular demand. I'm cool, I got something cool, I got something cool. But this, honestly for the dollars, this I feel like is the best camera. Okay, so like if you're gonna buy your main camera, bang for your buck, ease of use, the fact that you can like have this little pop out screen, it's really easy to use and switch between menus and all that kind of stuff. It takes Canon glass and Sigma glass. It's E frame I think is what it is, right? E.F. mount. Get the Blackmagic. If you're gonna have the Blackmagic atem the little switcher. Getting this Blackmagic camera is the way to go. It's the best way to go. We use the Sigma lens. This thing is so big, but it's a big room. Right? And so this makes sense now with Laura and me. What I'm going to do is go back to what we originally are talking about is have a screen that feeds the zoom. So when you're talking to your audience, you're talking directly into the screen. So Eric will put the teleprompter in here. This is the kind of the bigger boy. It's a 15 inch big boy. You don't need this size necessarily. While this thing is waking up, you can see that this Atem switcher is in both studios. It's in that studio and the other studio. These things are incredibly important. Like so, so, so important. We have this in every single room. So for like a little mini studio, the Atem switchers are gangster. The main unit we are using in the big studio, which we're just starting in here is the Studio by Mac. And this thing's like blazing fast. And don't buy the Mac Pro, buy the Mac Studio. That thing's better. So for your fill light, so you've Got. Here's what you got. You got three lights. Anytime you're doing a setup, you want to have three lights. You want to have your main light. Okay. Your key light. You want to have your fill light that's really soft and subtle against your head. And then you want to have a backlight. And the one we are using is the Amaran 100X. And this thing's perfect, right? This one was a couple hundred bucks, too. So here, let's go in there for. To wrap this up. If you guys have questions, please make a comment down below, because I know a lot of people are constantly. Now more and more people are trying to build studios. So this is the before. Okay, we'll do a part two where I'll. I'll snap my fingers, and all of a sudden, we'll be in part two of this bed will be out of here. Laura will probably put something over top of this window. You may or may not be able to even tell there's a window here. But this will be Laura's studio here. In probably the next two to three weeks, this thing will be set up cranking and looking really, really good. Oh, I wonder if we. What do you think? Do you think we put her. Her right here, and then she shoots back that way and she has that weird wall as, like, the backdrop, and you put, like, a logo or, like, family picture up there, or do you think it's better to have it here and you have a really deep room? There's no right answer, is what I'm saying. Guys, you basically have to screw around with this stuff, and you have to try it, and it sucks. It's like, my wife and I will be down here for probably two or three weeks really trying to tweak it, and she won't like it. And then we'll have to tweak it, and she won't like it. She have to tweak it. She won't like it. A couple of things that was really smart when I bought the house is I went through the whole house, and I hardwired all the Internet. So every freaking room has multiple Internet outlets. This room specifically. I wonder if there's an Internet outlet on this side. There is right here. I spent the money. It was smart to spend the money. So I'll put the Internet right here so she'll be hardwired, and then I'll get her all set up. It'll be freaking amazing. So, guys, if you have a question about the studio, please make a comment. My team is going to put the entire list of everything that we're using, all the things. And I'm telling you, I've done this for a couple of years. I know. And when other YouTubers, even people with larger followers and way more subscribers, they're like, telling their audience, oh, yeah, use this and use that. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh. Don't use those. They're trash. My YouTube channel, I think we're probably around 100,000 subscribers now. Yay. But my YouTube channel is a niche of a niche of a niche. It's a very small group of people that really are interested in creative finance. And so these other big youtubers should have bigger followers than me. But I'm telling you, they know less about this technology, camera, lighting, audio than we do. We know way more because we've spent the time, the energy, and we've tested out everything. So the equipment list is down below. If you guys have questions, please make a comment and we'll follow up in part two of this. Hopefully, you guys will get some value and set up your own studios.