Equipment Growth
Hopefully you didn’t skip our last blog post about over thinking equipment. We felt the need here at Pro Media to give you a guide to build into, each of these steps are focused on self production and slowly growing the levels up to get you to that professional quality you want. This guide is set up to put you in control, if at any point it feels overwhelming or if it is something out of your wheelhouse, we are here to help.
NOTE: This is assuming you have a cell phone, and have downloaded a basic editing software like InShot or anything similar.
When I think of content creation on the personal scale the first questions you have to ask yourself is what is the purpose, YouTube you want to film horizontal, reels, tiktoks, ect. At the start it is easier to film vertical.
Enough of back story, lets get into how you build your content machine and what we here at Pro Media would recommend for your gear progression.
Tripod: Your first piece of equipment should be a tripod, this will help stabilize your video and ensure the microphones aren’t covered up. Oftentimes when you place the phone on a desk or something and prop it up, it covers partial microphone which can cause some audio issues, and when holding the phone there are noticeable shakes.
Microphone: A wireless microphone goes a long way, here at Pro Media we use a lot of different microphones, but Rhode always has a good bang for the buck. This will help to clear up your audio and give you more control over wind noise, background noises, as well as make your message more clear.
Ring lights, I would take two cheaper ring lights over one expensive ring light. The issues you will run into is making sure the ring light is the same brand, same model, sometimes the more affordable ring lights can have color hue issues, so by getting the same ones you can circumvent this. PRO TIP: Use the ring lights at 45 degree angles one on each side of the face to get a nice balanced lighting and avoid rings in the eyes.
At this point you will be able to create extremely high quality 1080p or even 4k depending on your phone content, that is portable, small and gets everything done. These next steps are to really take you to the professional level, but are absolutely not needed unless you are obsessed with content creation, like we are at Pro Media.
Pro Software, we use Davinchi Pro here in house for most of our editing flow. This is a free software that is used in Hollywood and all forms of high level production. You can start to learn colorization, building out the video, layering in custom audio and music.
Lighting, upgrading to a more professional lighting set up will be absolutely worth its weight in gold. Small Rig has some affordable light kits (under $300 per light), pair this with some soft boxes and your production quality just jumped up 10x.
Camera, finally, the thing people always want to upgrade first. This should be your last step in self production, once you have good ROI and can afford it, there are many good options on the market currently for a video focused camera. We mainly use Sony products, but there are several great contenders.
Lens, investing in a great lens can elevate your field of view, and help you capture everything you desire in your frame. It will also increase sharpness on your video production as well, not to mention you won’t be taking up memory in your phone anymore.
External Microphone, boom, you are here at the final step. Once you start to invest in a really high quality external microphone you can have creative control over every single sound bite going into the video and ensure it is of utmost quality.
We hope this list has helped you consider your path to scaling your media presence. Beyond this, everything else is just upgrading itself, more lights, better cameras, ect.
Get out there and create, we look forward to seeing what you do. Make sure to tag Pro Media Colorado in all your videos, we cannot wait to see where this journey takes you!
