Pro Home Studio Setup: Starting at $936
INTRODUCTION
Are you hoping to set up a home studio for video calls and recordings? Let's talk about three different levels of setups. Good, better, and best. The gear I use to make the videos on our YouTube channel comes from the best category.
Overview
The leftmost column of this chart is the categories of gear followed by each budget: Good, better, and best. Moving to the right. Everything is color coordinated for visual clarity and is listed in the highest priority at the top, so the lowest priority at the bottom. Now I know what you're probably thinking, why do we have internet at the very top and camera towards the bottom? Well, it's because a lot of people put a lot of emphasis on cameras where the reality is, if you have bad internet and you're trying to live stream, it's really gonna not work out very well for you. That's why we try to prioritize internet and try to reshape the way we think about gear because cameras tend to be the pretty one that gets all the attention. There's still a lot of other siblings, so to speak, that are important to think about too. All right, so let's talk about the sheet. We'll kind of go through and talk about one section at a time.
Internet
So the first one, of course, is internet. Using a hardwired internet connection is the best way to accomplish your live stream. Even if you're recording from home, having it plugged in will make a big difference to the speed and the reliability of your internet connection. I know Wi-Fi does a lot of good things nowadays, but trust me, if you do any sort of streaming, it's much better if you plug in your computer. I've linked an ethernet capable of Cat6 and an adapter in case your computer doesn't have ethernet port built into it for whatever reason.
Audio
All right, for audio, we have good, better, best. Now starting with the good category, we have a Samson Q2U, which is a pretty good starter microphone and some headphones, which are $30, both linked on this sheet. Moving up to the better, we have Elgato Wave 3 and some better headphones linked as well. And then, of course, our best is the podcast standard. It's an SM7B. It's actually the same mic I'm using today.
The microphone quality, frankly, is mostly dependent on physics. And what do I mean? Well, the distance between your mouth, which is the thing that produces the sound, and the microphone, the thing that's capturing the sound, exponentially falls off the further away the source is from the microphone. So if you have a microphone that's, say, $3,000 and you have it at 15ft. away from your sound source, it's not going to sound as good as a $10 mic right next to the source. That's because exponentially it gets worse for the sound quality as the microphone gets pushed away from their subject. Why is that? Well, because the source of the sound gets produced and it bounces off all the objects around it. And so now that microphone is competing with all of these other reflections to try to add clarity. So long story short, get that mic as close as you can to your source. You'll thank me for it later.
Now there is one really great trick that I like to use, and that is a MixPre-3 II. This is a high, high quality recorder and it has a little feature called noise assist. This will allow you to take out some of the background hums, maybe a washer and dryer, maybe an AC unit that you might hear in the background of some videos. It is a $300 plugin, so it is a little bit expensive. But hey, we're talking about the best setup that you can have here.
Lighting
So next is lighting. If you watch the videos on our YouTube channel, we have the subject, in this case it's me, we have a key light, a fill light and a back light. So those are kind of the three main components that make up your lighting. Now I also added a fourth lighting element, which is my background light. And that's the colorful lights that you see behind me that add a little bit of flavor or interest to the visual storytelling of what I'm doing here. So depending on your setup, you might need some desktop mounts and you may not.
You might be wondering why would I want to spend more money on certain lights and less on others. The short there is that the technology is not equal. The cheaper stuff tends to be made out of plastic and has a lower CRI(Color Rendering Index) value. Now CRI basically allows light to replicate colors more accurately. So my skin might change slightly if it's a lower CRI value compared to a higher one. There's other metrics for measurement that we talk about in our Stream Basics series about lighting, which you can go check out. But for this one, we're trying to keep it simple. Basically the cheaper lights will do the trick, but they might sacrifice a little bit of accuracy and may not make your image look as pleasing compared to the high end lights, which are a little bit more expensive, but better replicate colors.
Camera
All right, moving through to cameras. Good, better, best here as well. On our good setup, we have an Insta360 Link. This is a $250 camera. It's a good entry level camera and it can also do some cool tracking and features like that.
Moving up to the next level, we have a 4K pocket camera from Blackmagic. This has a separate lens, so you have to buy it separately. So we have a 16mm lens listed here. Now the focal length or the lens that we use is going to depend on how far your subject is away from the camera. My room that I'm in right now is about a 10x10 sqft. and the distance between me and the camera is just over three feet. That's important to note because if you have a bigger room and a little bit more space, you might be able to separate the subject from the camera. That would allow you to have a higher focal length, right? Maybe a 50mm and that would also help separate me from the background by blurring the background a little bit more.
The other way we can do that, like you see on our videos how I'm in focus and the background is out of focus is to buy a more expensive lens that has a higher F-stop. F-stop allows us to get shallower depth of field, which means that there's less things in focus, which naturally draws your eye to the subject, which is me. Another thing that I list on here is an ATEM Pro ISO. This allows me to connect my camera to the computer and live stream or record directly to the ATEM. So this is an extra tool that you can use, especially if you have more than one camera, you can switch between camera angles or do a top down view all with the ATEM Pro ISO.
Moving to the best setup, it is a 6k pocket camera. This has a much larger sensor than the two mentioned before. Now, the bigger the sensor, the better the image quality is going to be. This is also related to your lenses because generally speaking, the lenses are developed around the sensor size. So they match APS-C lenses to APS-C sensors or full frame lenses to full frame sensors. The bottom line here is if you follow my guide and just purchase what's on the list, we'll already have the matched up for you. And I went ahead and upgraded to the ATEM Extreme ISO. This will allow you to have an extra output in case you want some monitor stuff. In my case, I'm using a teleprompter, which allows me to see my scripts or notes or even a zoom call where I can see somebody else. We'll talk about prompters more in a minute, but first we got to talk about the grip equipment that helps support your camera equipment.
Grip equipment
In the good category, we have a camera stand, which will allow your camera to be on the floor. I would highly encourage you to separate your main desk where you're putting your arms and your body on from your camera because all of those little bumps will cause shakes. So if you can separate your camera stand or your tripod from your desk, that would be super helpful. If you can't for some reason, we also have another mount for mounting your camera directly to your desk as a link as well. Now, sometimes you'll need an extra mini ball head and a thread adapter to help connect all these things together. And that's why they're all listed there under the good category.
For the better category, we have a low profile arm, which will allow you to move your microphone around with ease. That way you don't have to worry about having it take up desk space and you can swing it out of the way when you're not using it. We have a mini ball head, which we'll be using in just a moment. And then we have a more heavy duty tripod, which is the HD300 from prompter people.
So moving to the best setup for grip, we have a higher quality low profile arm from Elgato, the same mini ball head and tripod. Now, the mini ball head is going to be used with your teleprompter to help elevate your camera and allow you to have separate tilt and panning functionality, which we'll talk about here in a minute.
Teleprompter
So speaking of teleprompters, that's one of our secret weapons that we love to use for video calls and live streams. Most people know teleprompters for text scrolling on a screen, so that you can look into the camera and still see your script and not have to memorize pages and pages of content.
Well, the other trick that you can do with a teleprompter is put video into the teleprompter. This video could be a live feed from another presenter. That way you can make eye contact with that person or can just be a video call like between you and somebody else. And then in the recording, it also looks like you're looking into the camera.
So starting with our teleprompter, we have an iPad version of the teleprompter, which is $170. This assumes that you already have your own iPad or you purchase that separately from this list, but it is a good starter and will get you going. It's especially useful if you can cast from a Mac onto your iPad or use that as a secondary screen. That way you don't have to connect wires to get it all hooked up. Now, iPads aren't always available.
So in our next category, we have our better setup, which is a roughly $700 12 inch teleprompter from prompter people. This desktop prompter will still allow you to make eye contact, but it has a separate screen that's dedicated just for that teleprompter.
And then of course, in our best category, we have our 24 inch teleprompter from prompter people. This is currently the prompter that I am using to record most of the videos that you see on the Corporate Streams YouTube channel.
Other Accessories
So the accessories are going to be for each category. Good, better, best. And the first is cable ties. It's one of my pet peeves to try to keep cables as neat as possible. So I use cable ties on almost every single cable that I own. It's a very inexpensive way to keep things organized. Another great trick I love to do is to have Amazon Echo devices and smart switches. This will allow you to turn on your background lights or your main lights, camera, those kind of things, all with a voice command, which will help speed up your workflow and make things a little bit faster.
Moving up to the better and the best setup. We keep all those things, but we add a few things like 1TB SSD for your ATEM Mini Pro. And I've also added some links to extra cables that you might need to connect your camera to the ATEM.
Conclusion
The main note I want to mention is the differences between the good, better, and best categories. Each step of the way, we increase the equipment and make it a little bit better, a little bit higher quality. But the main difference that you're going to see is in the camera. Of course, you have a half inch sensor for the good. You have a micro four thirds sensor for the better. And then for the best, we have a full frame sensor. Generally speaking, the larger the sensor, the better the quality of the image will be. But of course, things like lighting, lenses and the composition of your image will make up the image quality.
Price
So what's the bottom line here? Well, in the good category, it's about $936 for the setup. In the better category, you're looking at $4,649. And for the best category, it's around $10,543. I know that sounds expensive, but this is ultimately an investment in your gear and can make a world of a difference in impressing clients or the people that you work with on a regular basis.
And that's it for the list. We hope you find it useful. If you have any further questions, you can find out more information and a Q&A on our blog at corporatestreams.com. Check out our live stream basics playlist on YouTube. If you'd like to learn more about live streaming, I've got a wealth of live streaming knowledge that I like to share with the world. And my dream is to teach 1 million people about live streaming.