How I Built My Video Podcasting Studio in 2022 | Innova Digital

all right so we have how I built my video podcasting studio in 2022 complete tour and gear walkthrough I just saw this video pop up recommended I have never seen it so we're just gonna hit play right off the bat I see a rode pod mic there so I'm guessing we're gonna use a few of those but let's check it out hey what's going on everybody it's Tom here with the Nova digital and today so we're gonna go through how I built out this video podcasting studio in about 200 cool so he's just gonna do a quick walk through here but right off the bat I see four rode pod mics on some just tabletop stands looks like a nice setup you can see over in the corner here it's pretty big Studio space and we just have some kind of basic curtains here nice lighting though so pretty cool I'm guessing there might be a few issues with some Echoes and audio just looking at this right off the bat but let's keep going and we'll uh dive into it 100 square feet

so when I set out to build this space there were a couple of must-have things that were going to be important for me so coming from the video background having it be a video podcasting Studio was uh absolutely top priority right so I wanted to have at least three cameras real quick it is a lot more work to do a video podcast versus just an audio only podcast because like you can see here you need multiple cameras if you really want to do it right um looks like we'll probably have a main wide angle camera and then some kind of zoom in cameras similar to The Joe Rogan podcast and you need to be able to either switch them live so you need another person for that or you need to edit it after the fact and that just takes a lot of time so um just a little heads up there that way

I can get a wide shot of the room as well as a dedicated shot to either side of the table or to either party I wanted to have four microphones so that in case we wanted to have groups of four in here we could also wanted the space to be modular that if we didn't have four people and we just had two people or three people so that's cool um would probably get into this later when it gets talks about the gear a little more but uh you can see the wires the cables are kind of in the way I guess you would say uh I personally would like to see more of a permanent solution here so you know you can install boom arms through the desk or through the table and then run the cables underneath so they just kind of get out of the way and that's a nice clean way you can easily take them out too if you only have two or three people you can remove them and all you have is just a little plate sticking in the desk um just one kind of minor Improvement I'd probably make but let's keep

watching well that the space could be uh adapted to kind of suit those needs another huge thing for me was that I wanted to have the ability to live cut each episode and so what I mean by that is typically when people would be doing stuff like this they would hit record on all three cameras and then take all that footage go into the editing room and change things and cut things that way and I knew pretty much immediately that I didn't want to do that because I have enough editing work as it is and I don't want the extra editing of doing every individual podcast I'll go into what that gear is yeah so if you have I think it looks like in his case he is recording a podcast and maybe he's doing the live switching on his own and so it's not necessarily his show it's other people other people's shows they're talking and that would work great if you are doing your own podcast you definitely need a second person to kind of run that in the background a producer or something so just a heads up there is

uh and what specifically it is in a minute but as you can imagine that is from Blackmagic and the A-10 mini series um and so that speeds the workflow of everything up entirely he actually looked into this myself and that's exactly the same device that I would probably get if I was looking to do a video podcast with a little bit of live um switching and recording ability that's a great choice and I think it's uh perfect for his setup

because everything gets live cut here and so basically the editing is minimal you're adding a little bit of a header a footer some pop-up text and you're calling in a day in fact you could even program that sort of stuff into the atem software if you needed to do that another thing that was really important to me is I really wanted to have the space look professional and kind of cohesive without being overly cluttered or overly stylized the look of things fairly minimal and so far I feel like that has worked out well for me and I think that it does give off a good result that I was looking for and then we just saw the road Caster Pro there and you know now that we're into 2022 we have the road Caster Pro 2. so if you know if you were gonna choose one I would definitely get the newer one it might cost a little more I'm not sure on the price difference right now on those but I am currently recording through a road Caster Pro 2 and it is amazing has tons of features um and a lot of flexibility so whether you're doing going from a podcast to a stream to a you know a live presentation you can do anything with it it's pretty cool so I would just check out the new 2 model then finally as I've kind of alluded to I wanted everything to be as easy as possible so everything that is in this space is pretty much stuck here it stays here I don't move it around so when somebody comes in or wants to do a podcast we can just hit go pretty much there's very minimal setup and then by the time we hit done on the recording I basically can take that file upload it to Dropbox for them and they can be on their way everything is very quick and easy and that just saves me a whole bunch of time and I assume it will for you too all right so let's dive into the gear a little bit more this is probably the boring section but let's just talk about furniture and things that I did to kind of fill out the space so first and foremost I needed a table I wanted one that was probably more Newsroom style kind of like a half Crescent shape thing but frankly it was really tough to find and doing a custom build desk just probably wasn't in the cards for me starting out and so I decided to go with this table it has a beautiful gray top it's thick sturdy wood and it can house four people and if not more and in fact there's even a nice cable pass through throughout the table too which is super nice so this was kind of the main table I had four matching kind of office chairs there's nothing too special about these but felt nice comfortable looked uh you know you might not think too much about this but um you know the chairs look nice they're matching whatever that's comfortable enough for people sitting for you know an hour or more the table I think is nice because it's uh it doesn't stand out uh you know it's nice dark you really focus more on the people and microphones and stuff so I think that those are things to think about you know don't go too crazy unless for some reason you want your branding in it but you can always put that in the background or something else too it's good again kind of Clean Cut and professional maybe more so than stylized um I've noticed that some people start giving it the uh the old wiggle and that is not as ideal but um that's more of a self-restraint thing than anything else aside from that there's a nice thick rug underneath us that hopefully absorbs some of the sound say the biggest thing aside from uh the table and the chairs I guess is this backdrop over here to my left and so that is pretty unique I've known yeah this is pretty cool I don't know where he got it or if this was a custom built or whatever but definitely gives it a nice kind of I'm a techie Vibe so I don't I mean if you want to go for that that's cool I'm sure it absorbs some uh sound and that's part of the reason for it but it definitely gives it a feel that uh maybe podcasts may or may not want so I don't know if that is something you know in his case I think he is recording other people's shows uh not sure about that but just something to think about if you want to go kind of more um muted and be able to like hang stuff up that kind of fits people's shows or something might be another way

to go notice that this sort of 3D wall panel uh thing is a little bit more trendy these days but I found ones that I haven't really found online as much they're at two feet I think a little bit bigger than most other ones and they kind of give off it doesn't look like you can see where they start and end like most tiles so I really like that I think it looks good I probably have some footage of how I built this thing but I didn't want to glue them to the wall because uh going things to walls especially in a space that I just lease was not something that I had an interest in doing so I guess the only final thing is to kind of seal this space off I did put in two kind of big curtain systems which is one of them you see behind me and there's one on the other side there yeah so I touched on this we can see these curtains I pretty sure have the exact same curtains behind me and they're pretty thin they don't do great job of you know stopping sound and reflections and I can definitely tell that the space looks like a big studio so I'm sure that there's quite a bit of echo in here it would be my assumption I know there's big rugs and everything those definitely help but if you could surround the space more you can hang up uh some temporary um for film purposes they have these like mobile curtains basically and you can kind of surround the area with those that might be a good way to just keep the Echoes down you can see the back wall wasn't really covered with much another option too would be to hang some some panels from the ceiling just some acoustic panels and those would absorb sound as well so there's not any too many hard surfaces so let's keep watching kind of

just basically kind of create a room kind of give off the illusion that there is a room here um and that hopefully absorbs a little bit of sound it gives people clean backdrops behind them so you can't see the rest of the studio I think that it looks good and it works great and that's another thing that I didn't have to drill into the walls do so that's the furniture let's dive into audio so as you guys could probably tell I opted to go with the road caster and pod mic setup here so there are four pod mics I did a bunch of research on these and I feel like they kind of live up to the hype for the price they are extremely great quality sure I would have preferred to go with you know sm7bs or something like that but these are so you're looking at 100 a piece versus 400 a piece and you know if you're just starting out this is a great way to do it on a budget but still get excellent quality and 99 of the people won't notice the difference and maybe it's a stylistic decision but you can always put a foam cover over those so you don't have the silver standing out as much but um yeah it's definitely a good way to go and let's keep watching see what else he has to say is there about a fourth of the price on first you know this being a new Venture and something that I thought most people probably wouldn't have the ear to notice the difference with I decided to go with the Pod mics and so far they've been great I think they look great too which has actually been a huge thing I know that a lot of people opt to do windscreens over them or something like that but seeing as we're kind of a video first podcasting space as of now we're going to leave them like this I think they look really cool you also probably notice that that's not on a boom arm or um you know one of those I don't know um I have one of those at the house and it's great but uh I wanted people not to be fidgeting with it um I also felt like to get four of them was kind of uh so this little b-roll shot I don't know if he uses these kinds of Boom arms but they have the exposed Springs and they have these giant uh pop filters sticking out these probably are not what I would choose for video I would choose something a little more low profile they make some that come down and up to mine comes from Over the Top here but I could have it come low and up and then it would be sort of out of the shot for video purposes and people were less likely to mess with it so there are some ways to do it I would check out The Joe Rogan podcast for a great example on uh on Boom arms

they're expensive and I think that they are just really ugly to have on camera I thought that just doing a straight tabletop Mount was going to be the way to go on these it does come with the downside of if people are smacking the table you might get a little bit of uh noise off of that which I know is not quite as great but uh quick clarification there so that's a maybe a misconception but a tabletop stand or a boom arm that's attached to the table will both transfer the sound because it literally goes through the arm into the microphone and I guess that's one downside with the Pod mics is they don't have an external shock mount and that is what will stop that sound if you tap the table or something so the Pod mic actually has it built in you see it's on a kind of a little U there that suspends it and then it has some internal stuff but you'd have quite a bit better results with a separate shock mount I don't know if you can see this one but it looks like a little spider thing you can see this literally rattles around in there and that prevents a lot of the tapping sound from traveling into the mic

mic um I think that this setup just looks clean and it's still able to be modular enough that again if we don't have four people on the show we can just rip two of them basically put them on the floor or something like that quickly move them I'm gonna have to unscrew uh the arms so basically these run XLR into the road Caster system which again tons of other reviews I won't talk about the road Caster system but I think it's kind of industry standard for people that are wanting to do a podcast no complaints with the road Caster system the headphones in case people do want to listen so I actually have them below the table here they are Mackie mc100s and so I bought four of them they sit below the table here and frankly I usually tell people that unless you really want to hear yourself you don't need to because it's pretty much a thing that it's not going to matter to you I monitor the audio on my end there's nothing you can really do with the hearing of things so um and I don't think it also leaves a little bit of a distraction or something to deal with so there are headphones if people would like to use them but not something that I put a lot of thought into yeah so this can be kind of a tricky one because when people first listen to uh microphone monitored through headphones it can kind of sound weird because it happens immediately and it's almost like uh I don't know an old telephone you hear your voice where now people aren't as used to that so it's just kind of a weird feeling it can throw people off and in his case he's monitoring it so that's fine one uh maybe recommendation I would have is have a one of the people or like the main host of the show wear headphones if possible so they can help Monitor and just direct people to get closer to the microphone if for whatever reason they get off a little bit and the sound isn't getting picked up so that's just one kind of caveat of people not wearing headphones is they won't and if they're not used to talking on a microphone being you know within a few inches you'll find that people will start getting far away and you'll uh you'll lose some of the audio so it's uh some plus and minuses there but for the most part I agree it it's not needed for the majority of the people it's definitely good for someone to be monitoring though so they can uh guide people back to the mics if needed

so on the video front again I said I wanted three cameras right so we have a little bit of a hodgepodge set up but it was just kind of stuff that I had laying around and stuff that I felt like was going to be probably good enough for what I needed to do right so the center camera is actually what we're shooting on now which is the A7 III um there's a

samyang like 18 millimeter wide angle lens on there and then the two side cameras there's an a6000 and a6300 a6000 a6300 are basically just running the kit lenses uh the a6000 won't do 4K like the 6300 will but the A10 actually can't take in anything past 1080 so everything it just gets so this is where the cost definitely adds up but it sounds like you probably already had the main camera and maybe the other ones too um if it's a permanent set up and you know you only use those cameras for the show you definitely can get costly but if you have you know you're using them for other video projects and you just have maybe the stands already set up pop them in and plug them in and start recording that's a great way to go and like you can see here there's three different cameras they don't have to all match that can definitely help with editing and looks and everything but it's definitely not needed and if you're trying to do it on a budget just use whatever you have even an iPhone I don't know how well that would connect to some of this other equipment but definitely use it

running 1080. um and so that was another reason I was like you might as well just keep things pretty cheap and from as far as I can tell with a little bit of like color balancing and such like that I've been able to get all three cameras to look pretty cohesive together and not feel like there's like a drastic quality loss or a cheaper camera in the mix those are built into what I just kind of call the commands Command Center desk and basically those are pitched in the corners the main camera is suspended off of what I do for and that's pretty cool that where he's has the main camera is right off of the stand that holds the light so that saves a ton of room you don't have an extra tripod with legs sticking out blocking the way I really like that got set up and now you might actually look into something similar so pretty cool for um

lighting there's just a big c stand in the middle of it and so this was a great setup where again I didn't want tripods and things that you could be tripping over or having to set up camera especially so they're just kind of bolted into the table and you know I luckily had thought it out enough and figured that um with the setup like this basically you can get the right angle that I was looking for without having to do something crazy with the cameras so I'm really happy with how those are looking and so far everything has been great on that front so let's

talk about the lighting setup and how that looks right so the main light here this is what I'm using now is a newer dish and I'm not quite sure the size but I'd say it's a fairly good size I had originally purchased a lantern style thing that I thought would fill out the space a little bit more but I was unable to get the kind of the skirt that goes around it connect to kind of control the light a little bit more and luckily this thing has been great so this gets boomed in just off of a c-stand and there is an sl60w a godox sl60w I actually have two of these same lights they're awesome they're pretty quiet you can adjust how bright they go and I think mine came with some big uh whatever soft boxes two if there's one right behind me here so um yeah no they're awesome I guess they would be the budget option but they're not probably not the cheapest but they're not the uh the aperture I don't know 700 light or whatever however much those are this is a great way to go that is the

key light and that basically just is boomed in straight over top of the poor people um so it's a pretty even light that gets sprayed across I think it probably bounces off the table a little bit uh and so far I haven't had any issues with that the hair light are basically these small LED bi-color probably newer light panels as well I'm sure I was just thinking I probably need to look into some better lighting for me because I have these lights behind me but I think I need to get a few more stands or something to get them on my face so I don't look so red but that that'll be for the next video maybe or next couple sure just

about anything would do pretty well here but these are fixed to um the ceiling basically along with the curtains and kind of give me that hair light that you hopefully can see here and that just kind of helps separate people from the background because the curtains are Maybe two and a half feet um behind people talking here so those are the two main lights I usually leave those on a nice warm orange and this is um obviously a more Pure White Light I'm not quite sure you want to say like 5600 or something like that um I do custom white bounces on all the cameras to kind of dial things in a little bit more but between those things I think things look pretty good I guess the only other lighting contribution is the the wall panel and that there is that LED strip that you can kind of change around there which again I think gives it a little bit of color Vibrance and a little bit of differentiation between different shows and a way to kind of customize your experience with everything so bringing

Everything full circle here is kind of the workflow on how things work from an audio video perspective so audio captured from the rode mics xlr'd into the um Road Caster Pro System I record internally on the rode Caster Pro system so people do have an instant audio file only of the performance so the road Caster pro has a SD card slot and you can record directly to it and that's a great way to just make sure you have a good audio Source it's Direct in there um it's always good to have kind of redundancies anyway so let's keep watching but what I do is I take one of

the outputs from the road caster and I plug that into the atem mini pro ISO which is my live switcher for the camera so those two pieces of gear are the biggest powerhouses of this whole thing I haven't had any issues with any sort of delay I noticed that some people probably have but I've noticed that running audio directly out from the road Caster Pro into the A10 mini ISO Works flawlessly that's no that's good to hear um I know the road Caster Pro 2 has an even crazier processor it's a lot faster and more cores and all that stuff so uh if for whatever reason you need more power the road Caster Pro 2 has more than it could ever use and just uh you know extra security plus there's also a delay function so you can delay the audio on purpose if for whatever reason you need to sync things up so uh a few more features that are available if you get the newer one and

great to be honest the reason that I went with the A10 mini pro ISO was a couple of reasons if you want to have any sort of live viewing like a live monitor out which I have on a just a you know everyday kind of computer screen here that I can see what's happening and live cut it you need to upgrade to the pro from the A10 mini and then what you get with the iso is you basically get the ability to record all of the camera inputs individually so how this works is you're basically taking so it sounds like he chose the exact model that you would need I know there's sounds like um you know you get the pro to make sure you have an extra output ISO for the uh individual camera angles definitely the way I would go um you want to have those separately whether you wanna edit later or um just to make have redundancies things like that so seems like a good choice taking the clean HDMI out from each of these cameras that go into the A10 mini and recording off of that you don't need to have uh SD cards in the cameras to be recording there is no every camera is going to get individually recorded unless I turn on the iso mode which again creates massive files but if you did want to have that flexibility of being able to go back and individually cut things or handle the editing a little bit more specifically in post I thought that would be a useful thing to have and worthwhile doing so that's why I went with the iso but to bring it back

the three cameras feed into the A10 mini pro ISO and then basically that is recorded live switched by me to a Samsung T5 SSD hard drive I have heard and I've done enough research and I've talked to a Blackmagic support about this and then they said that you should definitely get a T5 SSD and I didn't have any trouble with that so formatted that everything runs into there the beauty of this whole thing is that once I name what the project or the file is going to be I plug in the hard drive I hit go the audio is synced up everything is clean coming from the eight uh coming from the road Caster Pro runs into the atem the cameras are already all set white balanced everything the angles look great you live switch that and by the time you hit end it'll spit out a finished file um finished in that sense a finished file that you're ready to pretty much go and use just it's so nice to be able to have everything set up and just have minimal input to start recording it makes creating so much faster you're more likely to kind of focus on the product the creation and or the story whatever it is and you don't have to worry about you know spending time setting up equipment saves ton of time so it's awesome when you're able to do that and even little things like if you're not creating a video podcast but you just have a normal audio podcast something like a boom arm so you can just pull your microphone down you're ready to go and when you're done slide it away and you can continue working so little things to make your workflow your time easier and your desk cleaner uh definitely helpful so you

don't have to go through and kind of just recut all the cameras and stuff like that which is saving me and everyone else a huge chunk of time so if you're a solo man operation this whole setup might not be as ideal for you because you would still need to switch things yourself which I see people do but I assume that I will be or someone else be running the podcast from the other side of this table here for the majority of the work and so that kind of just keeps everything super easy so when clients come in they have the ability to pretty much leave shortly after I'll just upload something to Dropbox immediately and they can see what they recorded for that day which is a huge plus one thing I didn't talk about much was the acoustic side of thing and frankly this is the thing that probably needs the most Improvement here as of now there are some things happening behind the scenes to get this better I think it would be would have been better if we had a dedicated room to this but the space that I'm in just didn't have that as an option so we kind of had to make do so there are a series of acoustic panels on the back wall there we will be putting in sound blankets that are going to be bolted to the ceiling to hopefully help some of the Reverb there there's a whole bunch of extra space on that side of the studio that I think a lot of these sound Echoes off of and so we're having a couple of additional sound blankets and curtains put in over there and I think between those changes as well as the you know fairly thick carpet that's beneath us and the just great technology for the noise canceling that's built into these mics and in the road Caster I think will be pretty much set to a point especially where people will not notice and or complain and I think that that's to me good enough yeah sounds like he's got the right idea um making the right improvements it looked like those sound panels I mean that definitely helped but um still quite a bit of space in between them you can really fill that in if you especially in a big space where sound is going to bounce off everywhere um but it sounds like he's doing the right things and those will definitely help doing the stuff from the ceiling and kind of surrounding the space a little more uh that'll improve the kind of the Reverb and Echo by 10 times I'm sure

there are some audio files that would uh not be happy to hear that but for my purposes and I think for 99 of everyone else's this has been great all right and I think that about wraps it up so that all right so that's it this is an awesome um I would say kind of budget to mid-range video podcasting setup you know you didn't spend the most on the stands or the microphones uh headphones are basic but good enough and if you're not going to use them anyway why spend a ton so you can always upgrade stuff later um one thing I I'd probably change the boom arms sooner than later or you know change the stands into kind of a built-in boom arm type setup but it works fine and you know they're low profile they don't get in the way so looks good you know he's working on the audio quality stuff so or the Acoustics of the room which you know you kind of you work with what you have I sort of have a similar issue where I have a room here but then behind me is a giant sort of storage slash garage area and I really need to get a thicker curtain in order to really separate the space but you know you kind of do these things incrementally as you go but I have panels on the ceiling and all the way around me here and I covered the windows with some acoustic stuff so just over time slowly made improvements as I uh kind of decided I need them so that is how I built my video podcasting studio in 2022 uh thanks for watching and thanks for the video and Nova digital