Would you like to learn about the best hardware for filming YouTube videos because this will be useful if you are either a beginner or a more advanced YouTuber?
Best Hardware for Filming Videos on YouTube?
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Thank you very much for being here, I hope you love and enjoy this blog post and the video.
What hardware do you need to film videos for YouTube?
That depends on where you're at and what you want to do.
I suggest if you have less than maybe 10 videos on YouTube, especially if you don't have any videos, just start off with your phone. The video quality and the audio quality on phones today, especially the iPhone can be really good and there's no reason to wait and say, "I've got to buy a camera before I film videos."
If you want to see if you really do want to do YouTube, do a minimum viable video. Just get your phone out, film a video, upload it to YouTube and see if you enjoyed doing that.
That is one of the easiest ways to start off making videos, generally one of the least expensive and you can even scale it up.
You can get a little something like this, which is a little Bluetooth wireless device that can allow you to put the phone on a tripod and click on record where you don't have to actually touch the phone and with that kind of flexibility, plus something like a wireless microphone, you can download software to allow you to put a different microphone directly into the iPhone.
There's no reason you need to get fancier than that to begin with. Unless you want to film screen capture video tutorials.
What I do is make screen capture video tutorials and thus the equipment for that, the hardware required tends to be a bit more significant.
However, I didn't start out doing that. I started out with the built-in microphone and the built-in video on my laptop. I filmed my first 20 or 30 videos that way.
Then, I used a camera I already had laying around and that was frustrating, and the frustration and limitations of using my initial equipment validated by my use of it anyway, kept motivating me to buy better and better equipment.
For screen-capture video tutorials, it is essential to have some good equipment, especially if you have to render videos.
Thus, what we'll look at now, this is my choice if I had to start over and buy something new, I would get a MacBook Pro.
I would get a MacBook Pro because I've done my videos on both Windows and Mac, and I prefer doing my videos on Mac. It tends to just be more consistent and reliable, and work very quickly.
The MacBook Pro is the best option I see if you need a new computer and the computer you have is not good enough.
If you have a computer that's taking a lot of time to render your videos, this is a major limitation, especially if you want to get the most videos out there.
For example, when I started filming my YouTube videos, I was doing a five-minute video in Windows MovieMaker on my webcam with a cheap microphone and it was taking 30 or 40 minutes to render that video. It would take me an hour to put out a 5 or 10-minute video.
Today, with the setup I've got, I don't even have to render videos.
I use OBS on a Mac Pro, not a MacBook Pro, and it records everything instantly. I just hit "Record." Once it records, I hit "Record" again to stop and the video files are instantly ready. I don't even have to edit or render, which gives me a ridiculously fast filming process.
Thus, if you want that level of experience, I recommend start smaller first, and then upgrade the computer. One of the main limitations I see with entrepreneurs who are trying to film videos for YouTube and generally working on their businesses is using a computer that's slow, make sure you've got a computer that's fast.
My computer is lightning fast and the first major upgrade I made to my equipment was getting a faster computer.
The MacBook Pro is an outstanding computer.
Buying my Mac was a big leveling up for my video production. When I bought my iMac, which these MacBook Pros are about as powerful as an iMac, which helped me to film my videos a lot faster.
In the same time it used to take me to film one or two videos, I can now film five or six videos and that is a huge improvement, which means in one day you could film a week's worth of videos and that's what I was able to do.
In fact, I was filming 14 videos a week, enough to film an entire online course in a week or two.
What I use now is the Mac Pro, which costs $5,999 and this is an absolutely outstanding computer. It allows me to live stream, render videos, do a whole bunch of things at once.
I don't know if you need that level of a computer.
However, doing something with the long term in mind is ideal.
Then, for my microphone, I've got a RE-20.
You want a microphone that's really good. This is what I have. I've got the Electro Voice RE-20 for my microphone.
This is what makes it sound so nice, and then I also have a Scarlet 2i2 to put that microphone into my computer.
This Focusrite Scarlet 2i2 is what allows me to have a professional sounding microphone and that is critical for YouTube videos, but to begin with, you can just use your iPhone. You don't need professional sounding audio when you're making your first few videos.
However, one of the first things you want to upgrade in addition to getting hardware that will allow you to render your videos faster, is to get a microphone that sounds better because one of those subconscious often or even conscious signals of someone who is not a professional, who is a beginner, who doesn't have a very good setup, is the quality of the microphone.
These are the two audio equipment pieces I use that are key to giving me that professional voice sounding.
Now, you don't need to spend this much on a microphone. Blue Yeti also has a lot of good microphones you can use.
However, these need to be set up correctly and you need to read the instructions and actually point the microphone in the correct direction and use it with the right settings.
If you want a cheaper microphone, I started off, this was the first microphone I bought that actually left me sounding great and you don't need a USB interface with this one.
I recommend, if you want to level up and you are getting started, and you've got a computer that's rendering well, and you need a better microphone and you want one cheaper, the Blue Yeti USB Mic is a great microphone and it's a lot lower in cost versus the setup I've got.
I used this for my first 2,000 videos or so, once I upgraded my computer and then I wanted to have even better audio and the RE-20 is what I use today.
For lighting, you can use lighting hardware. I use paper lanterns in my studio.
These are paper lanterns.
Paper lanterns are really cheap on Amazon and the nice thing is you can just put them where you need them.
So if I look on Amazon for paper lanterns and search, you'll see something like this, little paper lanterns that you can hang up and position exactly where you want them.
They're super cheap, and then you just test out the lighting to see what looks good in different environments.
Now if you can buy, there are some of these lights that look really good. There are a lot of YouTubers that use this.
I don't use this equipment because I have all these monitors set up right in front of my studio.
If you want to use one of these ring lights, they are very popular with YouTube. You put it right around the camera and that can give you really good lighting.
I've got so many of these different monitors around my studio that if I do something like that, there's not room for the camera to shine through, but you can get one of these ring.
Also, they give you a nice even lighting to your face and you can just look through the reviews, and pick one out that you like and you'll probably be happy with it.
Therefore, for your equipment on YouTube, the key thing to do, the number one thing to do is just use whatever hardware is simple to begin with.
A lot of us have resistance in the form saying, "Oh, I need to spend money and have a great setup before I can put videos out there."
No, you put terrible low quality videos out there on your phone or just off your laptop, whatever you've got, prove that you really do want to do this and you'll do it even if you can't do it well.
I heard a saying, I think Zig Ziglar said, and he probably got it from somebody else, "Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly."
If you're not willing to do a sloppy halfway done job in your videos, then you don't need to buy the nice equipment and do that.
You work your way up to the nice equipment and I've given you an idea of what the nice equipment can look like,
As a bonus. If you want to do live videos and have these little control buttons, I've got an Elgato Stream Deck over here.
A lot of people ask about that and the Elgato Stream Deck is great if you're using OBS to go around and film your videos or do live streaming.
I've got the Elgato Stream Deck here with 15 buttons and this is nice because I can change scenes, I can move myself around dynamically on the camera, and this allows me to have my face move, and allows me to start and stop my videos without relying on the keyboard.
This is a very helpful piece of equipment.
I hope I've given you a good overview here of the hardware you can use for your videos on YouTube both something simple getting started like a phone and if you need to upgrade a little bit, you can get one of these remote controls for it, and then you can start getting into more serious equipment if you want to do screen-capture videos and do better quality videos.
I missed one element that's key, if you want to level up your camera, I use the Canon XA11, which is a beautiful camcorder.
This is what my video is actually on right now, the Canon Professional Camcorder.
Then, my other camera is a Logitech C930, which is better than the C920, and this one is the best I've found that's a lower cost webcam to give a beautiful picture for a bit more affordable price.
On the Logitech camera I do have the chroma key on, which impacts what I can do with the lighting, et cetera.
Thus, you can see both of these cameras in action.
You can notice that the Canon X11 has a lot better picture than the Logitech one. However, this is a great camera if you just want to level your studio up and have a better-looking picture, this is a great camera to use for that.
Thus, we've covered now lighting, we've covered the computers themselves.
You can just build your own Windows machine if you want to. The key thing you need to have to render videos fast.
You need to have preferably all your video files on SSD drives and not on the slower hard drives that can slow down your rendering for videos a lot.
That took me a while to learn and figure that out, and that's why I've bought the iMac with a hard drive on it that was fast and that allowed me to render my videos a lot faster.
We've talked hardware, we've talked cameras, microphones, we've talked lighting.
I think you've got a good picture of the hardware you can use to film your videos on YouTube.
Final Words
Yes!
You just watched all that free preview video from my YouTube course.
I'm thinking the odds of you liking my full YouTube course are really high because you've already spent this much time with me.
Will you let me tell you a little bit about what the course includes?
The beginning of the course has a section with all the newest videos, all the best of what I've learned. It's meant as an executive summary that you can watch the whole thing, the first section and get a lot of value out of the course.
Then, there's 10 plus hours of more detailed tutorials. I add 10 to 20 new videos every year to this course. I even give you private label rights when you buy it, which means you can upload, share and sell it yourself and not pay me anything.
Of course, there's the 30-day money back guarantee. If for any reason you don't like the course, I'll give you a full refund on it.
What you're going to love is when you buy this course, you'll get three weekly group-coaching calls with me included and a lifetime to my students group on Facebook where you can share your YouTube channel, ask questions, get help, get love, get all that support you need for being a YouTube creator from me and all of the community of students along with you.
When you're ready to purchase, will you smash that "Take this course" button to add it to cart, using that button, and then hit that "Proceed to checkout" or "Pay with PayPal" to complete your purchase.
I imagine once you complete the purchase, you'll be so excited to use the link to log in, use the link to view the course, use the link to apply to the Facebook group and be ready to take your YouTube channel to the next level.
Thank you very much for watching this video here with me.
You can continue learning with us in the full class today “The Complete YouTube Course — 0 to 288K Subscribers!” at https://jerrybanfield.com/courses/youtube/
I love you.
You're awesome.
I'm so excited to see you in my complete YouTube course.
Love,
Jerry Banfield with edits from video transcript by Michel Gerard.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://jerrybanfield.com/hardware-filming-videos-youtube/