We have had our studio up for about two months now, and during our live shows people have asked us about our setup.

What equipment do we use? How long did it take? How much did it cost?

The planning for the studio took about a week for us to put together a list of everything we would need or want. Ordered it all. Got it delivered. And we built it in a day.

All in all, we figure we spent somewhere about $1,500 on everything in our studio.

Here’s a quick list of the products we bought with links so you can see them, as well as a little bit of information to go along with the products and why we chose these particular products:

Our Video Camera:  Canon Vixia HG21

We went digital on our camera. We debated between tape and hard drive and finally chose the hard drive-only for the sake of speed in getting it in Final Cut Express.

I had always used tape cameras and was therefore familiar with the workings of a tape camera and wanted the control I had using a professional grade camera.  I like having manual exposure, zoom, focus, etc. And most digital cameras that we found didn’t offer all of those options.

This camera did and that was a big winning point for it.

To capture video, I use the Log and Transfer in Final Cut Express 4. The camera comes with the necessary connection. It still takes a little bit of time to transfer the video files into FCE, but still much faster than if we had done tape and had to capture in real time.

We’ve been pretty pleased with how the camera has performed overall! And getting it for the price we did was a steal. The camera is listed at about $1200, but we got a bargain sale on it for only $700 which allowed us to get a few more other pieces without feeling over-budget.

Getting Better Output on the Live Stream: Canopus ADVC 110

This is what we use to stream live from our nice, digital video camera. One thing we didn’t account for when we bought the Canon was live streaming. So when we got the idea to do live shows we realized that our camera didn’t allow for streaming. Bummer! It has all the bells and whistles I wanted, but we didn’t think about streaming.

We temporarily used the in-sight camera on one of our Mac laptops, but we weren’t totally pleased with that solution. For one thing the quality of the computer cameras are pretty low, and for two (which is related to number one) we’d bought this nice $700 camera and now couldn’t use it to do live streaming!

Well, as Cory was helping our church to do live streaming of their annual Winter Bible Study, he found a potential solution for that. They have very, very nice cameras. In order to stream with their professional-grade cameras they used this cool thing called “Canopus.” They just hooked it all up and viola! Cory took some pics with his phone to show me the setup. (We were pumped!)

Turns out the Canopus was extremely affordable! Only cost us $200 from Amazon. The Canopus basically just allows us to hook up our camera to the computer and have the computer recognize it as a video/audio input option (DV video & DV audio on uStream). The Canon came with the first cable we needed which was an RCA connector from the camera to the Canopus. The Canopus came with the necessary firewire cable (6 pin) that you plug from the Canopus into your laptop. And just like that we were streaming with our Canon. It was so easy to setup and pretty much worked after turning it on.

Note: On our Mac laptop, we found that if we plugged the firewire in from the Canopus, then opened uStream that it would crash the browser. The fix? We fire up uStream first, THEN we plug in the firewire port. That’s on a Mac. Also, sometimes you won’t get sound but you’ll get video … switch the settings back to the laptop, see if you get audio, then back to DV Audio and DV Video and see if that fixes it.

Our Lighting: Westcott unite 2-Light Digital Photo Lighting Kit

If you’re doing professional video, you want good lighting. In my opinion, there is no point in buying a nice camera if you don’t want to also help the video look nice. And one of those things that helps it look nice is lighting.

This kit comes with 2 lights, 2 soft boxes, 2 stands, and a green screen.

There are lots of options when you shop for lighting, and your camera needs to be able to white balance.

We went with the soft boxes because they don’t require much work or precision. Other lights you have to set up just so to get the lighting. Soft boxes are so big and so bright you just point them in the general direction of the area you want lit, and it’s probably going to look fine.

We noticed these lights were actually super bright and sometimes we wish we could dim them a bit, but it hasn’t caused any major issues for us. If you find your lights are too bright, just back them farther away from the subject until it’s better.

And of course, we found an unusual use for our green screen if you’ve ever watched iThemes.tv for our live show. It makes a very nice sofa cover.

Our Microphones: MXL Lavalier Interview Microphones

We went with two lavalier microphones that can clip onto your shirt for our professional videos and interviews. For our off-the-cuff kind of videos we just use the mic that’s on the camera. But for really nice audio, mics are recommended.

Matt, one of our developers, has a very musical background and he owned a audio mixer board and a few XLR cables. So we were fortunate to save money there as he brought them up from his home for us to use.

Like lighting, there are lots of microphones out there and various audio setups you can do.

We edit our audio in a free online software called Audacity. We record our audio on those program and then do our audio sweetening in Audacity before exporting to use with our video.

Other things:

There are a few other items that are not listed here, but are not as crucial. Things like our cloth background (bolts of fabric from craft store), the couch (from a local furntiure megastore), and the tripod are not listed.

We built our own sound-proofing based on materials we bought from Home Depot and Guitar Center.

Pretty much we tried to get the best deal for the best quality on everything.

If you would like to know anything about our studio, please leave a comment to ask or share your own DIY studio ideas!

Here is a video we shot this morning after we got a new toy in for our studio.

People have asked us about our setup and what equipment we use. Well, Cory did a network worthy interview of myself answering those questions.

I’ll be posting a list later of the names and links to the actual equipment we use, but we mention them here in the video.

It’s a little silly and quite raw… but we hope you enjoy it!