Hi, It is amazing to see the recording set up of so many instructors. Absolutely love it! I am a Udemy instructor for almost 6 years now, however, I have invested in this setup recently. This has improved my videos and taken them to the next level.. With the income that I have earned from Udemy, I was able to retire at age 36 from my full-time job. I worked as a Vice President at the Bank of New York Mellon. I am a full-time Udemy instructor now. With these earnings, I was able to buy a row house in cash (no mortgage). And I have dedicated the top room of this house for building my personal studio. The benefit of having a personal studio: Earlier: I used to do all my shoots in my home office. It used to take 1.5 hours to set up the equipment and then 1.5 hours to dismantle it. Too much work - almost daily Now: Thanks to the always available personal studio, I take only 5 minutes to set up. This has saved a total of 3 hours per day. Total process improvement 🙂 Below are the details of my complete setup: The Lighting Setup Lighting is by far the most important of all the equipments. As you can see below, I have dedicated lighting as follows: Flood lights - 180 Watts LED (2) Flood lights - 100 Watts LED (2) Ring Light that focuses on my face (1) If you buy Godox or other professional lights, that would cost a fortune. I reached out to a local lighting company who provides industrial lighting, shared my requirement and he gave exactly what I needed. The ring light is bought from Amazon. In all, the lighting did not cost me more than $350 (including the umbrellas that soften the effect of the flood lights). You will also see that the stands are custom made. If I sit while shooting, I place those lights in the center of the stands. If I am standing, I place those lights on the top. The Lighting Setup Green Screen, Stands and Clips: I bought a really thick Green Screen cloth from Amazon. This is 12 feet by 8 feet. The Green Screen is clamped by big clips that easily fit on your light stand. Greenscreen Clips that hold the Greenscreen Table, Mic stand and a Bar Chair I use a custom made long table 6 feet by 4 feet. The mic stand can easily be placed anywhere around the table. I also use a bar chair. This chair stays hidden behind me and thus can be easily removed when I remove the green screen from my videos. Long Custom made 6X4 Feet Table Custom Made Curtains and Curtain Rods This particular studio room has a very high ceiling level (at least 20 feet tall). So it ends up echoing a lot (if the room is empty). So I had to take special care to use sound absorbing curtains. I was vary of using the sponge material that you can buy on Amazon. It is extremely costly. So, I custom made the curtains. These curtains are made of sofa covers. Sofa covers have a layer of soft cotton underneath it. And cotton is a great absorbent of sound. These curtains are thick (because it has at least 2 cm of cotton within it) and they are heavy. So, I had to also ensure that the curtain rods are custom made. They are not the typical aluminium rods. These are iron rods specially cut to fit the room dimensions. And you need an airconditioner because the room can get hot quickly when the lights are on. A split airconditioner also ensures it is absolutely quite in the room. The overall benefit of this set up is it absorbs any echo, vibrations, and other sounds completely. It also helps absorb sounds from outside sources. So I love it! (Total cost of curtains and iron rods - $150) Custom made curtains and curtain rods Camera, Microphone, and Teleprompter: Camera: Canon 750D (it is simply awesome). No compromises on the quality of video. Canon 750D doesn't dissapoint. I bought it during sale on Amazon. Microphone: 1) Rode Mic Pro+ (I use this when I do video recordings. It fits directly into the Canon camera). DSLR cameras have an inbuilt hissing sound. If you use a lapel mic, you can easily hear this sound. As there are no compromises on video quality, audio also has to be pitch perfect. Rode Mic Pro+ does an excellent job. 2) Snowball Ice (I use this when I do audio recordings. It is a USB microphone that goes directly into my computer). This also works excellent for audiobooks that I publish on Audible. Teleprompter: I use the worlds smallest teleprompter (Parrot Teleprompter 2). I always use scripts and a teleprompter helps me shoot in one take. You can get this on B&H at about $100. I am based in India. Here, this teleprompter was costing about $750. So, I imported it from NY by purchasing it on B&H for $100 and paid about $130 more for shipping and custom clearance. Saved over $500 🙂 Parrot Teleprompter Canon 750D DSLR Camera Rode Mic Pro+ Blue Snowball Ice Microphone Here is the output with Green Screen and Green Screen removed: Actual Shot with Greenscreen background Edited Shot with Greenscreen removed Post Production: This is my post-production setup. Basically, my small home office. The table is custom made 9 feet long table with a 12mm glass top One the left, the blue house-like structure is my 3 feet by 2 feet fish aquarium. I love having a bunch of gold fish in there. I have about 8 gold and 1 black gold pack. Three screen set up - I use an 34 inch ultrawide Samsung monitor kept at the center. It was newly launched when I bought it and was sold at double the rate on Amazon. I bought this brand new from Samsung directly at half the price that Amazon quoted. It works perfect for post production. On the left and right, I have dell 21.5 inch monitors each. This can be bought on Amazon. I took them during a season sale. One of them is used as a reference screen and the other as entertainment screen. These three monitors are connected to one keyboard and mouse using Dell's DisplayLink device. At the center, I have kept Zoook Rocker speaker - it has an amazing crystal clear sound output. On the extreme right I have self-assembled my monster CPU. It has Ryzen 7th generation 3700X processor, MSI Carbon Wifi Motherboard (Auros Engine), 64 GB RAM, 2 TB SSD, NVidia GeForce GTX Ti Video Card I have recently switched to the Redragon Mechanical Keyboard (from the dell keyboard as shown in this pic). A mechanical keyboard is a huge upgrade compared to regular keyboards. Because there is a lot of time spent on post-production activities, I use an optical G402 Logitech ergonomic wired mouse. I have kept an 18 inch ring light here that comes handy when I get on YouTube/Facebook live or video calls For production, I used to love Camtasia. Recently I switched to Premiere Pro and have forgotten Camtasia completely. Premiere Pro is outstanding! As you can see, I am a big superhero fan. So I have a number of Superhero figures and banners all around my office and studio setup. Watching the superhero movies and webseries on the ultrawide screen is like having my own personal movie theatre Since we always have a sedentary lifestyle, I use a Greensoul Large Gaming Chair. Earlier (with other chairs), long hours of sitting work resulted in backaches. The gaming chair is a boon. Irrespective of the number of hours you sit, it doesn't bother your back. My Home Office (Post-Production) Setup Hope you like this setup. Please share your comments. I will also be happy to answer any of your questions 🙂 P.S.: For the first five years of my career at Udemy, I did not invest in this setup. I used my office laptop, Snowball mic, ,slide presentation, and camtasia to create courses (nothing more). I invested all the money earned from Udemy to become debt free first. It was after that I invested in this setup. And I built this over a period of 1 complete year. Regards, Rahul Iyer.
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