All The Gear & All The Ideas

I normally start my newsletters with a personal update but honestly, January was a knuckle-down and get on with it type of month.

From buying bits for the new house to make it feel like a home, to planning my business goals for the year ahead, a lot has been happening but nothing massively exciting.

That being said, in 3 weeks on Sunday (if you're reading this at the time of publishing, which you should be!) I will be running the Brighton Half Marathon for the 14th year in a row, and I'm aiming for my first half marathon PB since 2019!

I'm both excited and scared as it will be a HUGE challenge. But as with business, the best way to succeed is to set yourself ridiculous goals, make a plan to get you there and always stay consistent.

Don't worry, I'll let you know in next month's newsletter how I get on (hopefully with a few pics) but for now, let's crack on with this month's topic.

DIY business video-making essentials

When buying video-making gear, the budget can be pretty much endless. Before you take a sneak peek at your bank balance in despair, you've spent ￡2000 on a camera, the same again on some nice lenses, ￡500 on audio gear and ￡3000 on lights. But do you really need all that gear and do you need to pay so much money?

Let's break it down into the three main essentials, camera, lighting and audio.

Camera

I often get asked for camera recommendations because of the belief that a dedicated camera will give you far greater quality than filming on your phone.

This is true when getting into the realm of professional cameras like the Blackmagic URSA Mini 4.6k that I film on. But if you want to pay less than ￡2000 then you won't see a difference.

To add to this, a professional camera generally won't come with a lens. Expect to pay at least ￡500 to get something semi-decent.

Instead, I would use your phone and take the money you would have invested into a camera and use it to purchase better quality lights.

Lighting

Obviously, as with everything in life, you get what you pay for. This goes double when it comes to lighting. Any lights that you buy are going to be LED and the amount you pay will change the quality of light that's produced.

But what do I mean by quality of light?

There is a handy scale called the CRI, the closer the number is to 100, the better quality of light you will get.

If you buy cheap lights with a lower CRI score, you will get strange colour casts in your video. It could turn your skin a certain shade of green. But why?

Let's get nerdy for a second. Light is a spectrum of colours perfectly represented in a rainbow. When you are looking at an object, what you see is light bouncing off of that object and hitting your retinas which is then processed by your brain.

Daylight is the perfect form of light as it pumps out all of the colours in the spectrum. But if you buy a cheap light then it may be missing a certain band of colours, say pink, which means that when the light bounces off of the object and hits your eyes, it will be seen as more green.

Did that make sense?

Looking at the image below, on the left you have a ￡1500 professional light, in the middle is older version of the Aputure Amaran P60x (more on this below) and on the left is a cheap light from Amazon. In my opinion the image on the left has the nicest and most natural colours, the middle image is decent and the image on the right has a stange green hue, especially in the skin.

So you should pay a bit more for lighting, but how much? Well, by the power of the internet and a bit of personal testing myself, I would recommend the Aputure Amaran P60x, adding on a light stand comes to around ￡200 per light. Grab 2 of these and you are good to go for a basic setup.

Audio

The last piece in the puzzle is your audio. Your videos can look as good as the latest Mission Impossible but if your audio is terrible, that's straight scroll past territory.

Most people try to use the microphone on their phone, which on the face of it makes sense, but it leads to a sad state of sound. This is because your mouth is too far away from the microphone, meaning that it will also be picking up all the noise around you.

Think of your microphone like your headphones. If they are in your ears you can hear everything perfectly. Move the headphones to an inch away from your ears and you might still be able to hear something but it will probably be rubbish. Place your headphones on the other side of the room and unless you have hearing like Daredevil then you won't even know that there's something playing.

It's the same idea for your microphone.

To fix this, you are looking to get a wireless lav mic (or tie clip mic, or lavalier mic, whatever you want to call it). The brand I would recommend is Rode as again, I use these in my professional work. The Rode Wireless ME (￡100) is a great choice. You get a microphone and a receiver which plugs into your phone.

You might be able to get something cheaper, but you will take a dip in sound quality the cheaper you get.

So, to wrap it up, if you use your phone as your camera, you can get yourself a decent setup by buying two lights for ￡200 each and a good microphone for ￡100.

Why not go cheaper than this? Well your videos represent you company and if they look and sound rubbish, what does this tell your potential clients about your business?

So what are you waiting for? Get creating.

What Have I Been Filming?

I've literally just finished the final edits on a knitting tutorial! That's not something I ever thought I would write. While you wait with huge anticipation for it to be released, here's another video from the same client.

This time it's a case study showing how The Superior Healthcare Group can change people's lives.

On The Tube's

After telling you to get creating, I failed last month to get a YouTube video out ??. But, with a library of older content, I thought I would bring you one from the archive.

Have you ever wondered what it's like to work with me? Well, wonder no longer as you get to hear from Smart Marketing about how we helped them produce a range of videos for their clients.

Well, that was a lot, wasn't it? Next month's newsletter will be a little bit later as I will be enjoying a week off after running the Brighton Half Marathon on the 2nd of March.

Wish me luck and have a great February!