Entry #8: Lighting, mics, cameras … what I use to shoot and edit video
By: Isaac Rudansky
Tags: Lighting, Home Studio, Editing, Video Production, Podcast

This is the eighth post in a series. The first post can be found here.

Progress made today

I finished editing my promo video for the webinar that will (hopefully) sell my landing page design course.

The final cute ended up being 13 minutes long, which is a lot longer than I originally thought it would be. I don’t mind that it’s 13 minutes long. In fact, that might be better.

Remember, I’m trying to sell a high ticket course. Only people very interested in that will ever buy it, and those are likely the same people interested in enough to hear my out as I introduce the webinar, what we’ll cover in it, and the free resources they’ll get access to on the next page after registering.

You can see the entire video here.

I put in an order on Rev.com for captions. $14 seems like a steal, and their interface is awesome. I haven’t used them before, but a few readers recommended them. I wish there was an option to pay a little extra for faster delivery (didn’t see that option anywhere).

I used Final Cut Pro X for the editing of the raw footage. It’s a great software with a relatively low learning curve.

I get asked a lot about the specific equipment I’ve used over the years, so I figured being that the progress I made today was all about video shooting, production and editing, I’d use this post to put together a list of all my favorite equipment.

Lighting

Lighting is very, very important. Good lighting makes the difference between a terrible video and a great video. It’s more important than your camera, by far.

The promo video linked to above used just one soft box light, but for my courses I’ve typically used 2–4 soft boxes.

This is the kit I have:

StudioPro Lighting Kit

You’ll have everything you need with regards to lighting with that kit.

If you want something more compact and more customizable in terms of light temperature, go with this:

LED Lighting Panels

Be careful not to angle the lights too much off to the side of you (the subject), which will result in part of your face being in shadow (unless you’re using two lights).

Microphone

Mics are important and worth the hassle. Don’t use the audio recorded from your camera, no matter how good your camera is, the mic won’t ever be good.

If you want to really do things right, you should also record your audio into a separate external recorder, instead of recording into your camera directly from the mic.

There’s an endless amount of mic choices, but I’ll just link to what I’ve actually used.

For my first course (it was 20+ hours long and no one has ever complained about the audio), I recorded from a lavalier (lav) mic into my iPhone. A lav is the small mic that clips to your shirt.

Rode SmartLav+

It works well. No complaints.

When I’m recording podcasts and lectures at my desk, I use this excellent mic:

Rode USB Mic

The major advantage to this mic is that it plugs directly into a USB port (unlike most high quality mics). That means no audio interfaces, external recorders or adapter cables. The sound quality is really great, and it’s hard to tell the difference between that mic and some of the other XLR mics I have.

Here’s my go to mic I use 90% of the time:

Audio Technica AT899

This is a professional grade lav mic. It comes with a lot of accessories, a case and mini XLR to XLR adapter. The sound quality is awesome. The above video was recorded with that mic, so you can judge the sound quality for yourself (listen with headphones to get the best sense of sound quality).

In order to record with that mic, you need to plug the mic into a recorder.

This is what I use:

Zoom H4N

I have an older model, and it doesn’t seem to be available on Prime anymore. The H4N is a recording industry workhorse. I record the audio onto an SD card, and match up the audio with the audio recorded from the camera (using Final Cut).

Recording audio separately is really annoying, and it adds an additional step to the process. But I think it’s really worth it.

Here’s another mic I own and like:

Rode NTG-2

This is another workhorse mic that’s used in a lot of professional studios. It’s a condenser mic that captures sound that’s coming from directly in front of it, and blocks out ambient noise well.

Sound quality is great. It’s also an XLR mic so you’ll need an adapter or audio interface like the Zoom H4N.

Headphones

These are great all around headphones. Very good build quality, excellent sound. Used in studios everywhere.

Audio-Technica ATH-M50x

Not crazy expensive and definitely not a necessary purchase.

Swivel Arm

This is the best swivel arm I’ve found:

Rode Swivel Arm

Camera

You can really use any decent camera, and I’m not just saying that. The setting, composition and lighting are much more important. I’ve made quality videos on an iPhone.

Here’s the camera I currently use:

Fuji Xt-2

You can find in depth reviews of it online. It’s actually not even a great camera for video (it’s an amazing camera for photography), but it definitely does the trick for video as well.

I use a Manfrotto tripod similar to this one.

What I’m thinking about

I’d like to run the live webinar beginning of next week, giving myself time to prepare and generate a good audience.

I also think that I’ll want to try a shorter version of the webinar promo video (1–3 minutes), and maybe use that as an A/B test. I think it would be a really cool A/B test which would test my theory about the benefits of longer copy / more information in these instances.

Hope this helps, at least in a practical way.

Onwards … enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Keep on truckin’

The next post can be found here.