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Lesson Info

Setup Stunner Gear

We're still on the go a lot and we travel to shoot for clients and it's hard to carry your gear like in big massive boxes. So we try not to, because we do a lot of vlogging for our clients. You guys got this, I'm just gonna put it right on the table so, there it is. This is just a Manfrotto, it's the Befree Live. It has a fluid head here, which is similar to what the guys are using but just it's smaller. It folds into itself. It's the same idea as what is on here, this ball head. It just moves. When you move it, it's very smooth. Instead of like photography cameras, when you do 'em, they'll kinda jitter a little bit when you're turning 'em. But it's just a very fluid, nice smooth motion. Let's talk about smoothness right, like this is a great, like again, if you have a little crew with you or maybe you have someone with you, you wanna do it that way or for yourself, this is great travel, on the go, this tripod. So we carry that with us pretty much everywhere. Yeah, and this. ...

And that, but we're, right now this is what we're using. I'm gonna put this down 'cuz I don't want it to be in the way. So we're using this right now, this is the Sony A7R two. Body, the body of the camera, and then of course there's a different lens here. This lens is the G Master 24-70 2.8. That's just a bunch of numbers that mean nothing to anybody. It basically just means it's a mid range. It's not gonna give you super telephoto and it's not gonna give me super wide. It's kind of right in the middle. So it's for most, kinda like, cinematography you'll see is shot 24 millimeter. Did anybody see the teaser slow-mo of Her? Oh yeah. So I shot that with this. So you saw how smooth, creamy, how beautiful that was. This was that camera. And I'll give you guys another, we'll do this again, because you felt that one. (audience laughs) Just like pass it down, just don't drop it. (audience chuckles) Do not, please don't drop it. Just feel the weight, it's a heavy camera, it's heavy. You wouldn't wanna vlog with this. No. No. On yourself. And most of the weight is in that glass in that lens. It's heavy, so as we've stepped up, we've gotten, we've gone from just this in my hand, right? And I can be anywhere, I'm in the airport, I'm traveling. I'm in my living room, and I'm doing this, to now I need a tripod or I need a human, right. (audience chuckles) Humans are good. To hold it and carry it around. With that, we also use, here you hold one piece, I hold the other, we hold the. We use the Sennheiser AVX, this is a Lavalier microphone. It's wireless Lavalier microphone. So again, these things that we're using or any sort of Lavalier. This is the remote pack, see, it needs one of these. That's what this is and this connects with the camera. So again, now it's you're adding more and these are not cheap. These are about 900 bucks each. Like I said and I'm just, this is for the sake of helping understand what you get into like the type of investment you're making in that. Adobe Premiere to edit this type of stuff is you know, what, these are monthly, you can buy Creative. You can get it for, I think you get, so basically Adobe they do subscription based now because everyone used to steal 'em (chuckles). You know, you would torrent the video or torrent the software, things like that and they finally figured out how to stop that. So they went to a subscription base where it is, I think it's 40, 50 bucks a month and you get the whole Suite is the thing. You can do After Effects which is graphics. You can do Graphic Design and Illustrator. You can do, what is it, they've got an audio software. They've got the video software, you get the whole package for like 50 bucks a month. That's again, if you're going to the deep side, if you're going on the creative side, I always recommend get the crowd, is it Cloud, cloud suite? Creative Cloud. Yeah. Creative Cloud. So you're spending 50 bucks on soft, a month, on software. You're spending, this is inexpensive. You can go into thousands of dollars on tripods, right? This is like 500, or 400 bucks. Then you've got 900 here, you've got 6000 in your hand there. Then you might want other lenses. Then you need all these batteries which are, you know, 60 bucks a piece. Then you've got cards that are 120 dollars a piece. There's probably ten grand sitting here and in your hand right now. Probably more. Half of it's in the audience. (laughs) But the point of it is, if you're holding that and you're like, oh my god, I could never imagine myself holding that, or holding this, or spending that kind of money, don't. I mean I hate to stress that in a huge segment, but, don't. And let me, just in terms of the wireless microphone, the Sennheiser I did, I went to YouTube camp a couple of summers ago, and that was part of the stipend that they gave us. I spent it on Sennheiser because the lens for my camera required the camera to be a little bit further away. So that's why it made sense for me to switch at that point to a wireless microphone. If you don't have to switch to a wireless microphone, it's one less thing for you to be prepping and doing. So keep that in mind as well, but that's definitely a great setup centerpiece for making sure you have that right audio. And it's cool, because we can attach this to Amy all day, and I can follow around and capture video. Again, he'll capture her with that, this will be on her all day. The battery lasts, actually a pretty long time, so that's nice right. But again, you're making an investment, a commitment to creating something, content. You're not gonna make a video a year after spending that, you're gonna be like, Okay, I'm already in it, you're probably, you've started with this. You've worked your way up. I would not recommend anyone to just jump into something like that, or even this. Start small, just create the content. We've got a drone here, we've got the Mavic. This is the Mavic Pro. Again, we travel a lot. We've got a couple bigger drones too, they just don't travel well. But again, here's a point, right. This drone will, it will fold into itself. This drone will fold into itself, right, so I can travel with it. This is the point I'm making, is that I can go, I always fold it the wrong way, sorry. I can travel with this drone, and there it is, so I can throw this in my bag, and that's it, this is the gear I have. This is it. The bigger stuff that costs more money, you're not gonna travel with it. You're not just gonna throw it, just walk onto American Airlines and be like, hey guys, I'm carrying on all this gear on with me. They're gonna say, okay, that's gonna cost a lot of money to ship it. And obviously there's a lot of investigating you have to do as a drone pilot, just to make sure that you know exactly how to do it properly and where it's okay to do it. I think we're always looking at what the updates are for restricted areas for flying and things like that. So keep that in mind as well, but it's so nice for setting your storytelling stage, As you get more in depth with the things you want, you can set up, if you're a travel vlogger. I don't know, is anyone, do travel vlogging at all around here? Okay, so Savannah, you guys are doing some travel vlogging. These are great to have. There's even a smaller drone now that DGI makes, the Spark, which fits in the palm of your hand. That's a great device. It's significantly cheaper. It's got like jedi mind trick, like you can move it with your hand and all this cool stuff. But again, you're gonna use it, right? You want to use it. And that's what's important, is that you're going to use it. I was doing photography years ago, and the photographer that I was learning under, he was saying to me, the best camera you have is the one that's in your pocket. And that goes with video as well. The best one you have, because, people always ask. What kind of camera is that? What's the best camera? It's like, whatever one you're gonna use, whatever one you're gonna pull out, Or the one you know how to use. So yeah, and that's the other thing, the learning curve is significantly higher for something like that. You can probably shoot with that camera, if someone doesn't even know, I mean there's probably a ringer in the audience that knows how to use it and prove me wrong, but, let's say you have no idea what that camera does. You'll shoot something with that and it'll look like absolute garbage. But then you'll pick up this and you'll be like, oh this is amazing. So there's a lot of trade offs. It's all tools to help, you know, going back to what Jason was doing earlier, to tell you a better story. Everyone's starting to do aerial stuff, so you get to see the location that you're at, and it brings your audience, like oh wow, they're in San Francisco. I'm seeing the city. When I jump to a shot of me, they already know in their mind, wow, I'm watching him in San Francisco. Things like that, it's just a better story of transitions and segues. And you wanna go get that camera? Did we have any, I trust you guys. Bring it back. I think we should, like, Yeah if you guys any more questions, just about any of the gear that we talked about, but anything professional, or whoever has the mic, ready? Okay, so this is more of a tripod question. I come from a community of people who do facing down videos, tutorials where your hands. And it is a pain to try and figure out how to get your camera facing down without the tripod legs. I'm using a microphone stand with a boom arm right now to try and get my camera, Flat lay you said, the flat lay? Yeah, like you're working with your hands, writing or doing whatever. I don't have it off the top of my hand. Arkon Mounts makes a really good flat lay tripod. It stands, it acts just all that, everything you said but it's built into itself. It's funny because they actually created it for baking purposes, people that were showing what they're making. I bought it for unboxing purposes, just to give you that bird's-eye view. It's like a flat lay, it gives you a nice, It's not big either, it's great. Do you have to put it like here and flip the video around, so like if you're, do you see what, like if the tripod is in front of me and it's facing down, it's upside down. No, you can move it. Yeah, you should be able to spin it however, You can flip it. Okay, that's the thing of interest. And if that doesn't work, get some duct tape, a pole, and two chairs, and point it right down. Honestly, MacGyver a little bit if you need to. Use what you have, yes. You might get to this later, but I wanted to mention it just in case we don't. So you said earlier that you've shot nine hours of video, I've shot more than that, Well more than that, but around about the nine hours. When you get down to those four minutes, where do you put all the rest, like I have so much footage that's unused, and I feel really guilty getting rid of it. We didn't bring drives up here because it's just more intimidating, and it's more stuff that's like this size, or this size, the travel ones are this big, but they're external hard drives, and he was talking about them earlier. You can get smaller ones, when she said SSD I don't know if everyone understands that, but it's just a small hard drive, or it's a hard drive in general, but those are good for traveling, because they don't have moving parts inside. Right, they're not a hard drive, they're, They're a hard drive. Well, but they're like, there's something about them where they don't have as many moving parts as a normal hard drive. So a normal hard drive, it's like a circular disk that's spinning and reading inside there. These are not like that. They're solid, they do not spin, there's nothing like that inside there, so if you hit 'em while you're on the road, or trying to edit, it won't bounce off and corrupt or anything like that. It goes with your travel, basically. If you're not gonna travel, you can get any external hard drive. And how do I know when it's okay, is it ever okay to get rid of video? Like if it's just complete crap, Oh I feel your pain, oh my gosh, And I'm afraid of getting rid of it, and I don't want to fill it up. I personally, just archive everything. So basically, personally, what I do, you don't have to do this. Basically, what I do, is I've got a PO box, or like a box somewhere else, and I keep all my footage outside of my house, away from whatever, so it's not destroyed in case there's a fire. And on big corporate things that we do, basically we'll have four drives that we buy for it, and I'll give him one in Columbus, I'll take one to Nashville with me. Then we'll put one in a PO box. And we've got iCloud, so we're always saving it. One, you never know, but if it's for your own personal vlogs, this is a great question, it's your own personal vlogs. But I know you do stuff more for business too, so I know that question. If it is for your personal vlogs, I would say save it as long as you can. Or as long as you can afford. Because if you're like, ahh, I just can't afford to buy another drive, or you don't want to buy another drive, sure, you can get rid of older stuff. If you've made the video, and you, I mean, I wouldn't, he wouldn't, we wouldn't. Look at it as like you're travel pictures, honestly, that's how we look at it. You'll find a nugget later on, and be like oh my god, that was so cool. Yeah, I oftentimes find myself remembering something that happened in a former YouTube video, and I'll want to find the full res version of that to pull into a newer one to reference back, so that's why I try to keep as much as I can. The reason I mention the SSD for the people that are thinking about editing professionally on the go, I like to keep all the files on the SSD because it's fast enough to edit with. So I won't have to drag files back and forth. Now that being said, I have a much cheaper, much larger, eight terabyte hard drive that's slow, but if you're just putting files on it, then it can just be slow wherever it is in your storage unit or whatever. But I have my SSDs because I don't like to have all the files living on my computer at once, because I want the computer to operate as fast as possible. And terabytes are cheap now, again. They've gotten significantly cheaper. Also, protip. Just a quick little anecdote. If you're editing, keep all of your footage and stuff on your computer while you're editing, and then transfer everything to your hard drive. Try not to work off a hard drive while you're editing, I do, sorry. She does, yes, but it can get ripped out, corrupt all footage, anything can happen like that so it's best, and it's usually faster, to just keep everything on your hard drive. If you're working with 30 gigs worth of your daily vlog, whatever, it's easy to keep it on there. As soon as you're done that night, just transfer everything over. It's just an easier process for you without losing footage just in case, if a dog walks by and rips it out, anything like that, you never know. He's just saying that because Final Cut saves a lot faster than Adobe does. That's not true, but, Okay. A lot of people want to know, Cara had posted this originally, what percentage of your shooting do you do on your own, Amy, versus having a crew, for people out there who may be intimidated, they're doing a lot on their own. I'm doing, I'm still doing a lot on my own. When we're doing stuff that's more stand in front of the bookshelf, get everything set up, Vin helps me with a bunch of stuff, Yeah, but she's still recording it by herself. I'm filming as much with just myself as possible. And I struggle with this still. I'm not extroverted, I wasn't a born personality. When I'm talking to the camera I'm talking to a person, so even this is a little bit more intimidating, a little bit, it's a lot more intimidating, right. But at home, I really like to have it just be me, or if I'm in the airport it's just me in Charlotte, and I'm talking to the camera, so. I prefer not to do a lot, but Blake, it's a different dynamic. He's documenting what might be happening at a moment where I am not able to have a conversation with Charlotte, but I do want to show her something later. So when we have the ability to link up, like right now when we're traveling together, he'll document some moments for me. But I still try to have that time with her directly, rather than just, grab this, get that, stitch it all together and cut it. That's not preferred, so. It's two different styles. Like today, I think you ran into somebody in the hotel lobby, and I was able to capture it on footage, just so we have that if we want to use it, things like that. It's two different worlds, pretty much, so. Mhm, different perspectives. I know that we can talk all day about gear, and there are lots of questions here. We do want to keep things moving quick, but you also have put together a gear guide for people. Yes! If they do want to get any more details, do you wanna tell people about that? Yes, so we go over all of the SmartyPants, the On the GoPro and the Setup Stone are all available on my gear guide which is at SavvySexySocial.com/GearGuide. So you can go download that for free, I would love it if you could check it out. It sums up all of this really nicely.