Okay, Miles, what is the best snack you have in your house right now? If I said, run to your pantry, grab something and do a show and tell. What would it be? The best snack is probably my two year old snacks, either the Annie's cheddar bunnies that I steal or these Trader Joe's fruit strips that I also steal.
So I don't tell anyone, but I eat his snacks a lot. So I'd have to do one of those. Welcome back to second growth snacks. I'm Steph Crenola and I'm here with Miles Campbell, brand development manager at Refine Labs.
We're talking about content and video strategy. Miles, let's get techy. So we are going behind the scenes today. You've got your content idea, you've got your outline, you're ready to go.
Where do people start with equipment? What do you need to record a video or a podcast? How do you balance budget and experience level to make the best product with what you have? That's a great question.
I think it's one people really get hung up on. They really obsess over quality of the video rather than the substance, which I think is a little bit mismatched. You can start with just your iPhone, right? Grab your phone.
It's got a great camera, a great audio. I think you might want to do a proof of concept before you start buying some crazy equipment. So I'll suggest honestly, if you really need to, your phone, your laptop screen, I'll over it. You can use programs like Riverside is a great recording quality.
Zoom does a good enough job and then you can use your webcam to get going. I would also suggest dual recording sometimes. So we have Zoom recording right now. You can record audio on your phone at the same time.
That way you've got a couple of different options. Then your next level up would be some $100 to $200 webcam off Amazon. Check out the reviews. And then your video is a little bit more, 1080 HD.
It catches the light a little bit more. It doesn't look as fuzzy. I know that laptop cameras tend to, it's called ISO, especially artificial light that they put in to boost the light when you're on a webcam, but really dimensions of quality in return. So I would suggest that.
And then of course, always, like I just said, lighting is huge by a $50 ring light. Put it right next to your camera and that'll make a world of difference. You wouldn't even realize how important lighting is until you, you know, obviously shut off all your lights, looks like crap. And now, so it's right there.
Camera, lighting, audio, your big three. What's your setup like, Steph? Your quality is always great. Thank you.
Yeah. So I've got a mirrorless DSLR camera. I actually have a couple of different LED lights set up around me with one in the back that gives me colors that I can change at will just for fun. Kind of sets me up like a green screen in the back.
Lighting is so important. And I think that people forget that they can achieve these things without spending a lot of money. What you said earlier, using your phone to start. Okay.
I think we forget that we've got a $1,500 piece of equipment in our pockets every day. And the video and the audio quality in these phones is really excellent or a kitchen lamp with a piece of parchment paper across the front of it to diffuse the light a little bit. Things like that that you can find around your house that step up your game. You don't have to have professional equipment, but you do want to make sure that you're setting your shot up in a way that that looks professional, that looks clean and looks clear because you mentioned content is more important than quality.
But if it's unlistenable or you can't see anything on it, that is going to turn people off pretty quickly. Totally. And not only the amount of lighting, but also the color of lighting is under-talked about. I have these yellowish lights and you can kind of see it's kind of yellow in the room.
And ideally, I would have shut them off and have a studio light off camera right here. But I've got at least a nice natural light, but I think you can even see that it's much more white and clean on this side and much more yellow on this side. So just be careful if you're just using your overhead lights in your rooms. They tend to be a little bit warmer, more yellow, but it looks not so great on camera compared to obviously natural light or an LED whitish cooler temperature like that.
Now, when you said you record in a couple of different places, I thought that was really good advice. Being able to record into your, especially if you're wearing headphones, record into your iPhone voice memo app just to get a cleaner cut of that audio quality. What do you do for video? If you're on Zoom, how do you do a record, something like that?
Do you set up a second camera? Yeah, if you have a camera set up in the Zoom recording, you can always record the Zoom, but you can also use QuickTime, which is on every Mac too, to do a second recording. And then you can record HD 1080p on the QuickTime as well. So you have a full frame of just you for the QuickTime rather than sometimes the Zoom split screen, the Zoom you get the little name at the bottom, you got to cut out sometimes rather than bouncing back and forth between the two gallery view speaker view.
You just have one full shot of yourself or whoever the speaker is on the QuickTime. So QuickTime is a little trick that I think is underutilized that people should definitely be doing. So you have two different copies of the video. Yeah, especially because of Zoom, just record speaker view or just gallery view, you're trying to blow up that tiny little square.
Right. Yeah, you never know what the settings Zoom is. So tricky sometimes, some settings turn off. All of a sudden you have this big gallery view recording or a screen share sometimes will mess that up too.
So yeah, definitely the dual recording helps a lot on the post production. Yeah. So we've talked a little bit about video tiers. You've got your phone camera, you've got a webcam, you've got a DSLR, you've got a multi-cam setup for audio starting with your iPhone voice memos.
How do you build up from there to get better vocal quality, better audio quality? Well, I would like to ask the podcast producer who's been producing podcasts for decades now. I'll flip this back to you, but I definitely think your surroundings are the phone is much more sensitive than your ears. So if you're in your office, you're like, oh, I'm in an office, it's fine.
It's a small room, it's quiet. You'll be surprised how much your voice is bouncing off the walls, your monitor and back and forth. It just sounds a little bit more not echoey, but a little less clear in that deep clean audio you're not really getting. So I've recorded in a closet before the close, pick up the sound waves, nice and muted, but that doesn't really comply with if you're trying to record video at the same time.
So you have to find that bounce. Yeah, I'd bounce this back to you because you're the podcast producer extraordinaire. I guess we're not your guy. Yeah.
So you're to tear that up kind of like you did for cameras. You again, your phone is great. Then you can get a USB plug in microphone. So a blue Yeti is a good, really base, pretty inexpensive option.
And there are a couple other better USB options as well that are a little more expensive. Looking through road is a really great anything road is going to give you high quality. But then the next step from there is going to be an XLR microphone through an interface. So you'll have to, you can't just plug and play in your computer.
You'll have to get an audio mixer of some sort to get that into your computer. I mean, I use just a regular SM58. It's just like if you're going to a rock show, just a standard microphone. But it gives really good audio quality because of the mixer on the processing that it goes through.
And you've got your pop filter on. If you're again in a room where it's really big, getting a shield right in front of you. So they sell just standalone recording booth shields that have that foam in them. So you can put it right behind the camera and your voice is bouncing off something soft, hanging pictures in your room really helps having carpet or a rug, just something that softens the walls, put a blanket up in front of you.
And all of this again gives that same kind of closet effect without ruining your background because yeah, you don't want all of your laundry in the background of your professional content videos. But if you put the clothes in front or a blanket or anything like that, it'll help dampen the sound to give you better quality. That's great. And I already apologize for my audio quality because I'm not following any of those rules right now.
So we'll work on it for next time. Awesome. So we've covered tech. I feel like everyone watching should be ready to go and jump into their own podcast and video recording now.
Next time we're going to talk about what to actually do with that content once you have it. So we'll see you all then. Bye.