Here's a shot of me in my home studio.
I've been doing a fair number of video conferences and webinars lately, so I wanted to have a nice place to do it. I used some equipment that I had on hand, including:
- Sony Alpha a6400 camera, which can take unlimited duration videos. One really nice feature is the built-in viewscreen that can be flipped around to let me see the camera's image from where I am sitting
- A decent camera tripod I've had since the 1970's
- HP Spectre x360 laptop, which has a great processor and fast memory
- An old VGA display that was hanging around the house - second screen helps a lot
- Bose QC 20 earbuds - these allow me to have the sound in only one ear, which I prefer, and they happen to have a pretty good microphone to pick up my voice
There were a few things that I needed to order:
- HP Travel Dock for the laptop - has a 65W USB-C power input that in turn powers the PC and all of the attached peripherals
- Elgato Cam Link 4K - takes the HDMI output from the camera and converts it to USB so the laptop can see it as a webcam
- ESmart Softbox Lighting Kit - really helps illuminate the scene (I use the 2700K settings, so the light has a nice warm tone)
- A Power2000 Battery Eliminator AC-FW50 for the camera - allows the camera to run off of AC power, which makes long video shoots SO much easier
If you have seen me on Zoom recently, you would have seen me using this setup, and I'm in the process of recording a few webinars that should be published soon.
In my next blog post, I'll try to update you on the software that I have been using for all of this.
