Build An Epic YouTube Studio In a Bedroom

I'm going to turn a regular bedroom that you see here into a completely finished YouTube studio

and I'm going to walk you through everything step by step from choosing paint all the way to voice

activation and soundproofing. The very first step is I typically like to choose a paint color

and I don't want to choose something completely white. I want something that's a little bit darker

to create a better contrast. So in this case, I'm going to choose gray. So we're going to go through

and obviously paint the whole room gray here. But you basically want something dark enough to create a contrast between you and the background

So you don't blend in with the background. Gray is usually a really good color

Next, I'm going to lay out the furniture the way I like it. I basically have a couple of different desks that I'm going to put right in the middle of the room actually

So I could put my cameras on lighting right on the outside. And then I'm going to put my bookshelf in the background because that is actually what my background is going to look like

and I'm going to have two options. This is going to be my primary background

I'm going to sit right here and I'm going to see the bookshelves in the background. So that is going to be what I call my A shot or my number one setup

And then I'm going to look on the other side, the other wall, and I could choose this as a secondary background

Sometimes you do want to mix it up and then you could actually have two different sets

or two different looks out of the same room. Now, once it's painted, I usually like to black out windows because I don't want

any daylight coming in so I could record whenever I want. I don't have to rely on sunlight

I'm going to basically create my own lighting anyway. So that's the next step is actually blocking

out any sunlight. Now in this case, I'm going to use a sound blanket. These are basically moving

blankets, but sometimes they're referred to as sound blankets when you're using them for this

purpose. But it's going to do two things here. It's going to cover the light coming in from the

outside, but it's also going to actually diffuse the sound a little bit. The next step after that

is I like to actually cover the floor with rugs or even carpet the floor if you have

hardwood floor because hardwood floor is really, really bad for echo. So if you want better

sound quality, you want to actually cover as much of the floor as possible. I don't want to

use carpeting here. And in this case, I'm going to actually buy some big area rugs here to

cover this entire room as much as possible. Now I've already set up my camera here, so I'm

going to roll that in, but I'll talk to you about camera. in a second right now I'm just gonna put the camera in place so I could walk through my shot

But don't worry about this big rig here that I got going on this is a teleprompter or more advanced camera

I'll show you some beginner friendly options when it comes to cameras that are used for my studios

Let me just talk you through kind of the cameras that I have set up here that I use these cameras are all made by Sony

all the cameras I have in all my studios are built by Sony and they range in price

So a beginner friendly price for these is typically around the $1,000 and then you want to actually buy the lens separately in some cases

but I'll go ahead and link some resources for beginner to advance in the description below

but typically the lenses are sold separately, and this is the camera body that you buy just like this

And then all you need then is a battery. They typically come with one, and then you need basic

memory cards This just shoots on regular SD memory cards They sort of looks like look like this Again depending on size they could range in price but I believe this one about or so and you just put that in and then you press record now it could get really advanced so this setup for example is far more

advanced than the basic camera body I use so this camera body for example is about

$3,500 and this lens right here is about $12 to $1,500 somewhere in that range so

this is again is far to advance for you what you need but that's just what I use

most of my sets for the overhead camera and the head-on camera

But there are versions of this like the A74 and a couple other lore model that I'll link below

in the sheet that will actually get you a good, really good quality, almost close to this quality

I'm also gonna use these power strips. One is a search protector. This is gonna help me if I basically lose power

my computer is gonna stay on. And the other one is solely designed for voice activation

This is really, really cool. I'll show you later. Basically, I plug everything into this

and then I use Alexa to voice activate every single plug that you see here

And my computer is going to go to the device that actually has search protection

If I get hit by a storm, for example, that's going to save me from losing my progress on the edit

Now, as far as the furniture in the room, I got a couple of different desks. I got this standing desk here that comes in really, really handy

And then I'm going to do some wire organization as well. I just have this little clips here that basically attach to my desk

And I also have this other desk here that's an L shape

So this basically allows me to look a couple of different ways to get a couple of different options for how my background looks

You obviously only need one desk. You don't need basically three different desks put together

Okay, now that I have my camera, my desks and basically my background picked out, the next thing is to light myself

And I'm going to use two primary lights. They're going to go to the left side and the right side of the camera

And again, all the resources that I'm mentioning here, I'll link below with a beginner-friendly option and a more advanced option

Typically, I use the more advanced option for my set, but I did start with a lot of the beginner-friendly options that I think are going to do the job for most people starting out

Usually with cinematography and my background, you usually want to use two lights, one on either side of the camera with slightly different intensities

And I plugged everything to my smart plug with the Alexa app so I could basically either use

the app or use the voice activation to turn on one or both of these lights

As far as lighting goes, for beginners I recommend this light. This is just called a GVM 800

And this basically is dimable and it also has different colors too. So you

could use it as background or you could light yourself with it. And it comes with the

soft box. So the soft box right here basically makes the light a lot softer than if you

didn't have this on. So it just snaps onto the back. But this is very beginner-friendly

It's not going to be as soft, it's not going to be as controllable as the aperture lights that I'm using

But I am using this for my background light as an example and I use it in some of my other studios where I don't want to spend a lot of money on the lighting setup

Next, I'm going to set up my microphone. This is basically a rig I have here and this is called a boom mic or a shotgun mic and it's going to go above my head

I like these type of mics because you don't see them in the shot. This is typically what we use in the world of video production And again this is a far more advanced mic than most people need So again I link to a beginner friendly one but this is as advanced as it gets This is called the mk50 It by a company called senheiser So you buy the mic you buy basically the hook

that holds that boom pole. And it's going to just sit right outside of the shot. You'll see what

it sounds like in a bit. Again, budget friendly all the way to advance is link in the list. And now that

I've got everything set up, let me actually jump into the cameras that are set up right now

I could show you a few of the shots that I got going so far and then we'll improve on them as we go

Okay, so let me show you the lighting right now. Ignore this light. This is just the office light just to have something before I turn on the main lights

I'm going to turn on the power strip here with my Alexa app. And these are the two lights right now that I have set up

And the lighting looks pretty moody because the background is really dark

And that's because I basically blocked all the daylight coming in from the sun

And I also painted the room pretty dark to create this nice contrast between me and the background

But now I need a third light to basically bring up the room. And I'm going to bounce that right into the ceiling because if I bounce it into the ceiling, the ceiling is white

It's going to basically create all kinds of light that is going to fill in the room

So this is the light now bouncing in the ceiling and it's doing a nice job and it's dimmable

So if I want less or more to fill in the background, I could do that

But I feel like this one shelf here is a bit dark special. when I put things in it. So I might add a third light or a fourth light here to bring that up

Okay, so the background light is set up and I just turned it to blue. That one could be any color

So it might just be white or I might leave it on a color after I set up the rest. Let me do one more thing

I think this corner is really dark. So I'm going to put just a practical light, just office light in there and see how that looks

I think that light's really nice. It's actually really warm. So every light in here is called daylight temperature, which is kind of cool

to that light that is really warm. So I think it creates a really nice contrast

for the background and that one is on a dimmer by default. So I'm going to leave that one

and use it for most of the shoots. And I think by the time these two bookshelves

get filled out with the different gadgets and different books, it's really gonna

bring it all together. And we still need to do something about the echo, the sound in

here. I'll show you that last. Here's a different YouTube studio that I've built from scratch and you could see these panels on the wall. These really help with sound

you could get them for the ceiling too. So I bought the really thick ones for the ceiling and I rig them up in the ceiling and if they're going to be in the shot, you could also buy these. So these look a lot better if you plan on using them in your background, which is the setup I have in the other studio. But right now for this set, I'm going to use the same blues that I have in my other studio. And here's three of them. That's all it really took to cover this wall with enough covers that I think that's going to really help. I also got these hue lights here. These are just Philip Hugh bars

and they're going to light up the background and these also could be any color

These come in a set of two. So I love these because if I use my background on this other angle

I could have a nice blue wall or whatever color I choose

Now before I show you the final setup, these are a couple of really advanced things that most people don't need

But I shoot overhead shots. So I have a camera rigged up overhead

I also have a switcher. So I could put four different cameras or three cameras and a computer into this device and switch between them This cuts down on my editing And I also have podcasting mics

So this could become my podcasting studio. The teleprompter helps with that

These type of mics help with that because they don't really pick up any echo or background noise

It's the exact same one I'm using right now. And everything is connected to Alexa here with this little device

And I could basically turn on and off the lights or the whole studio whenever I want

Okay. This is pretty much. the final results that I have, I still think I need something back here, but I don't have

anything picked out. So let's call this final for now. And I'll just kind of walk you through

what I have going on. Let me show you, I have everything voice activated. Alexa, turn off studio

Basically four or the four different lights I have here are all on voice control. And I have an

office light. Alexa, turn on office light. So this background light, I still don't have voice

activated, but this office light, this is just when I'm working and I don't need the studio to be on

I like to turn off office light and then the studio itself, I like to turn on studio. I think this kicks in three different lights

It's gonna kick in this main light here. This light here to fill in this side of my face and the background light that is doing that to the background

And I think that's the three different lights that I have going on. And I also have an overhead. Let me show you the overhead angle here and I've rigged that up to the switcher and basically

with the overhead, it's on a lens that I could zoom in. So a lot of times when I'm showing something

I could basically pick something up and show it like this. This makes it a really easy way to do that

And then let me go ahead and zoom out here just to show you basically the switcher. This is how I could switch

So if I press one, it's going to go to me and if I press two, it's going to go here

And if I press four, it's going to go to my computer. So this is a really nice way to kind of switch between the different angles that I have

and I'm gonna move this and everything's getting recorded on this hard drive

So I just unplug this take it to my computer again far to advance for most people and what they need to do here

But you get the idea you could really take this to the next level and the sound here

I still want to put some sound panels on the ceiling I think there's still a little bit of echo with these type of mics

But if I end up using a mic that basically sits right in front of me the echo is not that big of a deal

But right now I'm not using that mic I'm using this mic that's above me and it does

pick up a bit of echo. So I could use a little bit more paneling. Let me just show you on this side of the wall. I do have a few different panels with a little bit of lighting so I could set up another camera on this angle that I showed you before. Well other than that, it's pretty much all set to go. I have the carpet all set up. This is my main shot and I think the lighting here looks really good too at the same time. So I don't need any special lighting. The lights have set up from this direction and this direction do a really nice job since I do a lot of fun

phone overview and these type of overhead shots. So again, I've organized everything that I talked about here with diagrams linked

in the description. So you could actually check everything out for yourself and make the decision

how far you want to really take it. Again, you can make it very, very simple with a basic camera and couple of lights

and a microphone or you could really take it to the next level like I've set up

here with a teleprompter voice activated studio standing desk and everything else

But I'll leave all that to you. Again, I've been doing this for a long time. So I've evolved as I've actually set up the studio and other studios over time

So I hope you found this helpful and I'll see you on the next video