I built the Dream Studio

The time has come to build the future of the MrWho'sTheBoss studio. We have one key goal with this. Something that's going to allow us to make more videos than we've ever made, and also better videos than we've ever made. So we've actually got two studios in this new house. We've got Studio A, which is what we're sitting in right now. I want this to be a really similar style of room to what we used to film in. You know, camera, then me at my desk, and then a really cool background, but just, you know, very much upgraded from what we had. And then Studio B, which is the outbuilding, that is where we can go absolutely crazy and just build the room of our fantasies. So let's talk cameras. Previously, we used to use a really high-end Sony FX6 camera for our main studio. But then any time that we film in any other room, which over time we have started to do a lot more of, we've been filming with one of these much smaller, much less good Sony A7S III cameras. So I think the goal here should be to film every single video taken in this entire home on an FX6, which means we are going to have to get three of them. One, two, three. Oh my god. I mean, I have already somewhat come to terms with the fact that we are investing a large part of what we've earned so far to make our videos better in the future. But still, seeing figures like this in your basket is, it's not an everyday occurrence. So then the microphone we've been using for a really long time, actually, is the Sennheiser MKH416. It's already a really good mic. And it's actually such a good mic that you probably have noticed the difference in past videos. Anytime I move from filming in the studio to filming out and about where I'm having to wear one of these little lav mics, those sound terrible compared to the main Sennheiser one. But the cool thing we can do here, because we're building this from the ground up, is A, get an even better mic, and then B, make sure that each of those mics is pre-rigged up to each of those Sony FX6 cameras that we're getting, which means that any video we film in this house, we can have prime audio quality. Okay, so let's see if there's anything better. There's the MKE600, the MKH418, MKH30. What is up with these names? Part of the reason that the microphone market is so convoluted is that sometimes there isn't just a better and a worse. Different microphones are designed with different pickup patterns. So some will collect all the sound in a 180 degree radius. Others will be super narrow and focused on exactly what's in front of them. And that's kind of what we want, because we want to be able to hear me really clearly and then nothing else. None of the planes, trains, cars that are happening around me. And this looks like the absolute highest tier implementation of that. Let's do it. Oh my God, we need to get three. Okay, this is where it gets fun. Now we get to decide what actually goes behind me when I'm filming videos. You know, like right now we have two TV screens and then one smaller screen in the middle, and we kind of put together these cool little backdrops themed based on the video we're filming. How can we take that to a whole other level? We could get like three massive TVs that span the wall, but then you'd kind of lose out on some ceiling height. But what's the biggest TV you can buy? So it seems like it's 98 inches. £34,000?! I mean, if this was our entire background, then fine. But even three of those isn't going to come close to covering this wall. Oh, this is interesting. Let's ignore the price for now. So this is a digital signage panel. It's like a TV, but it's more designed for advertising and billboards, I assume. Oh my God, wait. I'm just thinking to myself right now. Imagine if we're filming videos and the entire background behind me is screen, and we can just swap it out at any moment for anything. Is this such things like a video backdrop for filming virtual production? So essentially massive screens designed with exactly this in mind. I mean, this is the kind of thing that like TV shows use nowadays. You know, like the Mandalorian, that was filmed using a massive wraparound immersive display. There's one here called VU, your creative technology partner for next generation content. Oh my goodness. So they basically have a massive library of virtual environments that you choose from, customize yourself, and they appear across your entire wall. We might be able to do something here that no YouTuber has ever done before. We could film in all of these places. And because this isn't like a green screen where you use an editing program afterwards to cut the person out, this is going to look real. This is actually shot using a virtual production studio. The transitions, the transitions we can do. I don't think I've ever been as immediately sold on something as I am right now. I just, I see it. This is the obvious next step in the mysteries of our studio. Oh yeah, this is also where we can fully optimize all our other stuff. Like, like, you know, like tripods. We spend so much time fiddling with each individual leg of our tripod to make sure our camera is completely level before we shoot. Automated tripod. Oh my God. Wait, this is everything I've been looking for. It actually just does it on its own. So we could just pre-program a bunch of different heights that we tend to use and never ever touch the legs again. It even works on uneven ground. That is so ridiculously impressive. So let's get three. In terms of desks, we actually found some really good ones when we were shopping for the office video. The only thing I'm thinking is, you know, when we film, I put a lot of heavy objects on this table that could end up scratching or breaking it. Oh, they actually have an even higher end one. The E7Q. Max load is 300 kilograms. I feel like this is the way to go. We'll get one of these for this Studio A. I feel like Studio B is going to need something even more extravagant. Oh, also for that office, we bought the steel case gesture chairs. They're actually awesome. I think we'll just get the same brand. Oh yeah, lighting. We used to have one light from this company Aputure and it is the biggest, best, brightest, softest light that I own. But then the problem was, the rest of our lights are all from different companies. Before we film each time, we'd be fiddling around with three or four different apps to tweak three or four different sets of lights that all don't quite match with each other. So I suppose the dream would be if we can get every single bit of our lighting from this one company and then just use this one app, the Sidus Link Pro, to control everything. So we need to get two of these, the main light sources. We should get the Light Dome 3 to fit on top. This is going to both soften the light but also allow you to direct it so it doesn't spill onto the background. The InfiniBar PB12. This is kind of amazing because we use tube lights like this all the time. One really annoying thing about them is when you put them down, they don't stay still. So something that's square actually makes a whole lot of sense. Oh, we should get these too for the smaller sections, like the hair light that comes directly above me. Okay, that's enough aperture lights. Now, Studio B is where we have some real fun. Now, I've been toying with a few different ideas about this. Originally, I thought, okay, it'd be cool to have something really homely and cozy, but then we've already got our actual house and we're also trying to make it really easy to film here. So why build two living rooms? So then I realized, if we already have the normal desk style studio and we already have the home, then this can actually just be the ultimate futuristic, Mr. Who's the Boss themed tech paradise that we can film all the other types of videos in. So there's gotta be a TV area in there. That's where we're gonna test the consoles, the controllers, the speakers. I want everything to feel futuristic. It'd be really cool if we can actually get a futuristic TV. Not that kind of future. I've tested it. It's not for me. Wait, what? Oh, this is kind of perfect. It's actually got the cabinet baked into the TV itself and it's so thin. Wait, wait, wait, wait. You pay $9,999 using the promo code. I don't have a lot of confidence this is gonna work. Oh my God. It actually did. Okay, fine. This is actually so exciting. You know, because before, we didn't have any dedicated spaces to film different products in. So anytime we test something that basically wasn't the phone, we would almost always have to specifically clean and relight an entire new room just for like a one minute section. But if we build this space with every single type of product in mind, then when we're testing those products, we can just slot them into the part of the setup that they're made for. Okay, so another product that I think we need to get is a central swivelable chair. But this is gonna be such a central piece in the room that we have to make sure it reinforces this whole futuristic design language. Wait, what? I mean, it just looks like a toilet. Oh my God. Wow. They look supremely comfortable. The only thing I'm thinking is this dude is doing quite a lot of wobbling. Oh, the other option is just that we go for something really, really comfy. Probably makes sense. Okay, what else do we need? Oh yeah, like a desk setup. This is the room in which I wanna make sure we're getting the absolute highest end stuff so that when we test other products, we know that there are no bottlenecks on our end. So there is of course the Apple Pro Display XDR. Here's a great display. It's just 5,000. To be honest, I think I just wanna swallow the bill and use the display that I already know is very, very good. And then the Razer Basilisk V3 Pro for the mouse, the Razer BlackWidow V4 Pro for the keyboard. This is gonna look so good in white. And obviously we're not gonna put the LEDs like this. We'll just make them all blue. It's actually kind of poetic that the first mechanical keyboard I ever bought was a Razer BlackWidow. So we've got the console area, we've got the PC area. I also think it'd be really cool to have a sofa area. Wow. Is this real? And what's the difference between white and ice? This is perfect. Every piece of this brand of furniture can come with LEDs inside. So what if we could match that to the lighting in the rest of the room? We also have individual chairs. This is too cool. Oh yes. So I feel like that's most of the loose products that are gonna go in the room. I feel like it'd be so cool if you had a massive Mr. Who's the Boss logo that you saw as soon as you walked in and like acoustic paneling all across the walls to keep the noise levels really low. And also if we can find a way to actually bake lighting into the room itself, the whole thing could be like one switch. But that's definitely gonna need to be a custom job. So let's make some calls. So we did. We made a lot of calls. These two studios have been by far the most complex, but easily also the most rewarding rooms to put together. We got the massive cinema quality wraparound screen setup in Studio A, which took many, many individual panels, each fitted one by one by hand. Then I broke some by falling into the thing. I was reviewing it. So we got it made again. And then as for the second studio, well, everything has changed. We created a brand new floor that allowed us to hide sockets everywhere. We created a new ceiling using this layer of tracking that allowed us to mount acoustic fabric on top to improve the sound. We added air conditioning in the middle of it and lighting. We spent four months rigging this room up with an industrial quality lighting setup, all finished off with translucent stone panels with, you guessed it, the Mr. Who's the Boss logo bang in the middle. So let's start with Studio A. Now this used to be the garage, which is about the worst room in the house that you could film in. Because right in front of us, we had this thin metal door that lets every bit of outside noise in and bounces every bit of inside noise back at you. So you get tons of echo. So we haven't actually removed it. We've just buried the thing with about 20 centimeters of rockwool, which is incredibly good for absorbing sound because it's really fibrous. There's a board on top of that and then even more acoustic paneling on top, as well as on every other inch of the room. The lighting is an even bigger upgrade though. Because we've now got about three times as much space compared to the old setup to work with, we've got two massive dome lights instead of the one that we used to have. These are way brighter than smaller lights, but it's not just about brightness. The other benefit of having larger light sources like this is that they spread the light so it looks softer on your face. And I actually look pretty for once, but it's all relative. We've got four light bars for side lighting compared to the one that we used to. You might've noticed on some old videos, this very subtle outline around me, that is from the side light. It's been really good for separating me from the background. So just as an example, if we turn all the room lights off now, so you see this light on my cheeks and on the side of my face, that's because of these guys. It creates so much more shape. There's a tiny little hair light up here. This is like the cream on the cake for lighting. It just means that you can see the entire outline of my face and the top half doesn't disappear into the background. And then it's all finished off with the dome lights, which are the cake itself. And then this is where we keep all of our spare tube lights. These are basically the easiest, quickest way to light up any room. So anytime that we're filming in a room that's not a studio, that already has all the lights kind of baked into it, we can take two tubes from here. We plop them in the room we're filming in and we are good to go. And then the second we're done, we put them back in this case and they are all automatically charging. Such a good system. The desk... Concrete floors. So this desk is the FlexiSpot E7Q and this thing has been an absolute godsend. The main difference from my old desk just being the fact that this is rock solid. Like I cannot actually move the thing an inch, which is so great compared to the like rickety piece of cardboard that we used to use to film our old videos on. Plus the fact that we've managed to go for a way bigger surface than before means that we no longer have to cram everything together when we're testing a bunch of products. We've got the same steel case gesture. Whoa. And I genuinely need like speed ramps around here. Stop me doing that, please. We've got the same steel case gesture chairs that we have in the office. But since this room is like the Mr. Who's the Boss command center, we got a custom Mr. Who's the Boss version of it. But let's not kid around. Just before we get to Studio B, this is really the hero feature of Studio A. This is the Vu One, which is a combination of a massive screen specifically designed for filming. So it's very bright, very customizable and absorbs pretty much all reflections with a powerful computer that sits in this rack here, which allows you to make the most of that screen. So this is the new studio. I'm of course kidding. This is the new studio. It's actually our old studio. That's actually so cool that we can perfectly recreate that here. And now I'm outside, which makes a change. I'm in someone else's house. We're in a desert. I can literally be anywhere. Is that an antelope? And this right here is an antelope in its natural habitat. Was that bad? I liked it. Okay, as long as she's happy. So at its base level, this is the Vu Studio software. It's a webpage, not an app, because they're changing things far too often for it to be worth getting approval from Apple every time they want to do something. So we scroll through the lists of probably tens of thousands of backgrounds. You pick one and that is displayed all across this display here. And unlike filming in front of, let's say a green screen, this is real. This is actually happening in the room that we're filming in. And that matters because let's say we change the scene to something with much more obvious pink sunset lighting. That light is actually bleeding onto me, the desk and everything on the desk, which wouldn't happen if the environment was just edited in afterwards. Plus things like the reflections on products or objects that have any kind of transparency. These are things that would previously kill the green screen illusion, but here they just further immerse you in it. It's kind of like if you ever watched Star Wars, The Force Awakens. Yes, not the best Star Wars movie, don't kill me. Even though the lightsabers in that film, obviously they weren't real. When they filmed that movie, the actors would actually hold prop sabers that still emitted that light because seeing that light bounce onto things is the best way to make your effect convincing. Plus something that you would very much struggle to do with a green screen, here you can get a second camera and actually get a real second angle of the same scene. And with every background, there's a whole load of settings, things like exposure, things like color saturation, blur, which is particularly handy because let's say I want to make this background seem like it's further away from me than it actually is, done. I can scale up and down the background. I can rotate. Oh my goodness, that looks terrible. Welcome to the new studio guys. This is where it all comes together. So this is pretty cool, right? Nice little fire in the background, but it's not as convincing as it could be because if there was a fire that big, that close to me, then you would expect there to be not just a little bit of flicker on the table over here, but the entire scene would be flickering, right? So one tap on here and those are now orange. So they're bleeding that fire's color onto my sides. Another tap and the hair light will now match that same orange hue. But even these massive domes, each one can display every single color so I can even have it on my face. And it's not even just flat colors. There are literally programmable special effects with this lighting. For example, this is a fire mode and I mean, it's just concerningly good really, isn't it? Vootiful, some may say. There's one more thing, one little sprinkle of magic. So if I click here, this is Vue's AI. And the idea is that you can use this AI to do everything you could want to on this screen. Let me upload the original Windows XP wallpaper and then let's just ask it to turn it into a seamlessly looping video. So this isn't something we're gonna get right on first go. There's a lot to learn. That's a pretty damn good start. I'm so excited. And then the thing shooting all of this content is one of the FX6 cameras that we bought. Now you might be wondering at this point, why did we buy three of them? Well, one is here. The second is over here. This is the rig that we're planning on shooting just about every video around the house with. And I won't lie to you, this is one of my proudest achievements. This one rig is everything that you need to shoot a YouTube video, all stuck together into one contraption. So it's this very high-end cinema camera, which we have made wireless, thanks to this chunk of a battery on the back, which gives the whole system three and a half hours of runtime. And notably charges with USB-C. That's the best microphone that we could find, permanently connected to the rig and always powered on by it. And this is a special kind of awesome because we've pre-decided what is the optimal distance for me to stand from this camera based on the lens that we're using. And this mic is set up so that it will sound its best when I'm standing in that optimal position. We've got cushioned wheels, which means it's not just easy to move around, but you can also film while moving it around to get these beautiful cinematic sweeping style shots. And then the whole thing is carried by this self-leveling tripod that we bought, which fixes pretty much the final remaining issue of, well, messing around with tripod legs. If you've been there, you'll know. You just set it to the height you want and then it will correct its own angle and it's not been wrong once. And then the third FX6 camera is sitting in Studio B. And it's finally time to go see it. So the reason that we even have two studios at all is that while Studio A is insanely cool and it's going to make our videos easier and better, that studio is specifically designed for presenting. But there are also plenty of times when we're filming when you want to plug something into a computer, test something on a TV, or just run around generally and interact with products and be dumb. And that is the essence of Studio B. Come on in. So there are three things that make this room particularly special to film videos in. One is the lighting. So on first glance, you might look around this room and think, oh, cool. You went and bought some Philips Hue lights. Nuh-uh. Don't get me wrong, Philips Hue is fantastic for adding some ambience to your living room. But to actually create a next generation professional studio, we've decided to go for something called DMX lighting. It has meant that the lighting we've been able to put into this room is the same lighting that you see across like the biggest buildings in the world, exhibitions, and concert stadiums. Because the first problem it solves is brightness. Can you hear me? Side note, Philip. How have we ended up in a situation where we have more cable than light strip? Anyway, let's plug you into there. The point I wanted to make is a Philips Hue light strip will emit about 500 lumens of light per meter. A cheap light strip that you get on Amazon, probably closer to 300. The light strips that we fitted into this room emit 1,100 lumens. And there are 180 of them. Before we put these stone panels on top, we had to make absolutely sure that the lighting behind the stone was bright enough that you could still see it even through it. But also even enough that you can't see the individual LEDs when you're looking at the panel. This is really cool. We actually tested this using a miniaturized version of this full wall, which even has the exact same kinds of cutouts on the back to make these waved shape parts brighter than the rest of the wall. And long story short, we figured out that 180 strips allowed us to have that perfect final result. There's another benefit though. With a typical household lighting solution like Philips Hue, you'll also reach a limit in terms of the number of different lights you can add. Something between 30 to 50 and above and problems will ensue. But here, every single one of those 180 light strips and the 20 lamps in the ceiling and the furniture, all of these things are based on the DMX protocol, which means each of them is individually addressable. Every single one can be its own different color, but also every single one can sync together for room wide animations, which is gonna make for some amazing backgrounds for B-roll shots. And we've hidden away controllers and drivers, which is the stuff that takes in what we're asking this thing to do and converts it into the results that are very high end. So that the lighting responds immediately to what you do and animates in a way that is more fluid and dynamic than I think I've ever seen before. Oh, it's just surreal, isn't it? But the biggest reason that a lot of industry chooses to use DMX is that you can do absolutely anything with it. The interface is not as pretty as you, but let's say for one video, we wanted to make it look like it's blue and icy on this side of the room and it's red and fiery and there's a real flickering flame racing towards the ice and eating it up. During the video, we could do that. There's one more finishing touch we can add to the lighting. It's Lepro, our sponsor. And the crazy thing about these things is that they have an AI lighting design assistant and you just basically tell it what you want. Red and green, for some reason. And then look, instantly, every single one of these lights will change at once to mimic those colours. And if you look at this, you can even choose how they display those colours. But because this is AI, you don't have to be as rigid with your commands. So, Christmas party. And look at that. It's got the green, it's got the white, it's got the yellow, the red. That is exactly what I associate with Christmas. But the single coolest thing for me has to be the music syncing. So, you can get music syncing on basically all smart lights, but they all work in the same way. They use their microphone to basically just reflect the intensity of the music. Whereas these use Lepro's Lightbeats technology to simulate human hearing and actually make them dance the way that you think they should. Link in the description below. Now, the second key pillar of this room is sound. We want it to feel like you're walking into a bubble when you come in here. This separate world where all we need to think about is filming. Doesn't matter if the neighbors are gardening, doesn't matter if there are planes flying over. In our old place, we would have to stop filming probably on average once every 20 minutes because of something or another. And I was very aware when planning out this room that this was our one chance to make sure that doesn't happen again. So, we've got blackout blinds over here, which is useful both to give us full control over lighting, but also these things have an extra layer of material inside of them to cut the sound traveling through them by about 50%. The entire ceiling is fitted with sound absorbing fabric. We've got fabric on the walls with actually some pretty dense sound absorbing foam directly behind that fabric. And then finally, this long runner rug, which just helps to take out a little bit of that echo in the space. And that leads me to the final pillar of the room, the gear itself. And while we're on the subject of audio, we finally have a way to test audio. This right here is a very high-end binaural microphone designed to mimic how sound is picked up by the human ear. So, you know all those times where I've tested audio products in the past and I can hear them perfectly because I'm with them, but it's been really hard for you to appreciate them on your end. Well, this, or should I say this, is going to go a long way towards fixing that. I'm really sorry if I freaked you out with that. The camera in this room is identical to the second rig you saw, which is perfect for this space because this is the room where we don't want any trailing wires because all we want to do is grab the camera, wheel it into the position we want and hit record. And that is also why I wanted to make absolute sure that the central chair can also swivel because just moving this camera around this room, following this chair, that alone will give us like 20 different filming angles. This LG TV is definitely the largest, highest picture quality TV that I have ever owned. And the benefit to that is, let's say we're testing a new games console. If there's any imperfections, then with a screen like this, we're going to be able to see them. So it makes this a really good reference area specifically for testing. But also, I really appreciate how instead of having a wire dangling out the back of the TV, the TV plugs into its stand first, which then plugs into the mains, which allows you to make every cable disappear. This is good product design. Then we've got the desk setup. So any keyboards, mice, computer accessories, all of that kind of stuff we can test here. And powering this setup is something actually kind of bonkers. So this is from PC Specialist. It's actually a one-to-one mirror of the PC that we have in the cinema room in terms of specs. So 24 core up to six gigahertz i9 processor, RTX 1490 graphics, and eight terabytes of M.2 SSD storage. But the PC case is completely different. When I found this one online, my first thought, well, my first thought was actually, why is it called Jon, Jon, Jon, Jon's Bow? It's like the least cool name for the coolest PC case ever. But I also knew that we needed this thing here. So yeah, these guys killed it. They even managed to get LED cabling into it, which just looks so epic. So this is definitely one of those rooms that's going to evolve over time. We're going to move stuff. We might decide that these shelves are actually the perfect place to have a little hall of fame where only the best products get to stay on them. Whatever happens, a lot of good memories are going to happen here. So this is the end of the Dreamhouse series. And I guess, welcome to chapter two.