How to Start a Podcast 2020 - Equipment & Guide for Beginners

This, I think, was close to a hundred. Dude, this looks amazing. Are you kidding me? Yeah, I'm digging it. I mean, if you wanted to get really crazy... Yep, it's also missing a wheel. Now you tell me. What's up, Indie Mogul? My name is Ted, and today we're talking about podcasts. How to make one, what mics to choose, how to elevate your podcast if you already have one, and how to shoot one. How to make a shot that looks like this into this shot. And we're going to do it step by step so you can follow along the entire way. And to go over this today, I got my buddy Casey McBeth over here. Casey, tell them a little bit about some of the interview credits that you got. I work on a lot of different interviews for big corporate clients like HP, Lenovo, but I also work with the Oscars for their big campaigns. Casey has shot, seriously, some of the biggest interviews in the world. So we're going to be going through how to make any location on any budget with any amount of gear that you have look good no matter what. So, ready? Let's do it. Let's do this. Here we go. First off, Casey, when you normally shoot, what camera do you normally shoot with? Um, I mean... Cool, don't care. We're going to give you this camera real quick. It's your lucky day, Casey. We got two cameras for you here. The a6400 from Sony. Okay. This is a sub $1,000 camera. Normally, how much is the camera that you normally shoot with? A lot. Okay, cool. Sounds good. I mean, we've got matching cameras. We've got matching lens manufacturers. We have essentially matching focal lengths. I mean, this is like a great way to start to make sure you've got something that looks homogenous in the end. So, obviously, this will help production value. So, if you guys are shooting podcasts, you know, you can do one camera and you can set up in a way to make that work for multiple people. But I think a lot of times people are used to, like, bigger podcasts like the Joe Rogan Experience or some others where there's multiple cameras usually cutting back and forth between people. So, this will give you a way to add some energy into your edit, into your final video, and that'll keep people engaged a lot longer. And for this podcast today, I'm going to give you a specific example of what I want to make today. Two podcasts. One is I want to do a yoga podcast where we talk about, you know, all things well-being and health related. Okay. The second scenario that I want to do is competitive yo-yoing. The yoga and yo-yoing podcast, okay? If it's one look that's versatile for the two of them, fine. I think we might be able to do it. We're going to shoot this in the storage space and we have to turn this room into a podcast space. You know what? I honestly feel like anybody who's starting out at home, like in a bedroom, is in a better spot than we are. Yes. No complaints today. We're going to make this look good. I feel like the most distracting is usually really bright walls because those are hard to control. They're hard to make a bright wall dark, especially if you have limited budget for lighting. So, we went ahead and we already painted a section of the wall here for you. So, you have a starting ground here to work with. For people at home that have normal white walls in a living room or a bedroom or something like that, what would you recommend for them? There's lots of great options. You can get seamless paper rolls, which are fantastic. You can get them in thousands of colors. There's also vinyl, fabric, just have a background that's more interesting than drywall. When we come into a location like this, how do we start from scratch? Let's bring in a table and start eyeballing where we want to drop cameras. You want it a little off the wall, right? Anytime that you can separate the wall from the subject, either if it's furniture or if it's people, it just gives you, obviously, more room to work. It adds more depth. If you're going to move the camera, it allows you to have some form of parallax. This is our yoga and yo-yos podcast. This real quick is what the frame looks like for everyone that's wondering. Here we go. I'm sure a lot of you guys have probably set up a podcast already that looks like this. How do you take it to the next step? So, the first thing I'm seeing as I look at you is I'm seeing a gigantic wall that we don't want to see behind you. So, I already know the camera can't be here. You're talking this way. I'm going to want to keep you on the left side of the frame so you have more open space in front of you so you don't feel like all closed off against the edge of the frame. Let's set up that camera. What do we need to know about the camera setups for podcasts? I feel like you should try to make everything run on auto as much as possible. So, plug-in power. I feel like there's a lot of cameras nowadays that are able to take either wall power or USB power and continue to run. So, you don't want to worry about cameras turning off while you're shooting. You don't want to worry about trying to change batteries. So, what are you seeing here in this first frame? So, somewhere in here, we're going to find a frame. So, now... Just on the edge, we'll cut it off. Yeah. As far as we know, that wall just goes on forever. Yep. Let's get our next camera set up. It just needs to kind of match. So, I mean, we're looking for like similar size of people. You don't want one where their head's filling up half the frame. The other one, it's, you know, just like barely in there. We've got a frame set up now. What's next? Setting up some of our lighting first just so we can get a base so we can turn off these house lights. And then we can start set dressing and fine tuning everything from there. How many lights do we have? Two. I mean, there's more, but you're only allowed to use two. Okay, great. So, what did we just say? We need... Honey, are you sure you weren't mad? No, I'm not mad. I'm fine. There's nothing wrong. It's probably better to start off with the backlight just so that way that'll kind of work as a backlight for this camera, but be a key light for these side angle cameras. It really serves to draw the eye of the person. It keeps them cut off from the background. Well, if the light has to be behind them, but it also can't be in the frame, how do I do this? A lot of times what you'll see people do is try to figure out how to rig to the wall. But I mean, there's other tools that you can use. You can do a goalpost. So what you would do is you would grab two stands and something to bridge across them, a speed rail or steel pipe. One of the things that you can take advantage of is a pole cat or an auto pole. They are a collapsible pole, kind of like a tension rod, like a shower curtain. Like a big shower curtain. Yeah, and all you do is you can unlock them and spread them out and then relock them and they'll be under tension. So that way you can then rig lights to it. So this is what we actually use for our podcast. We have a super small room. There's no way in hell we're going to put two stands in there. So we have one of those here today. Okay. But there's no walls to rig it to. So. Okay. So if we were in a bedroom, we'd actually be better off again. I feel like we're going to keep coming back. Do you hear that? If we can cheat and use stands and use that pole cat auto pole as a goalpost and rig it up with stands, then we can make that work. Let's rig it there for now. Let's kill the house lights and let's see what we're working with. Especially for something like we're doing here where we're filming for a long time, the lighting that's going to come from windows and doors is going to change pretty dramatically. You want to be able to control the lighting as much as possible. Wow, that's intense. This is your doing, Casey. This is really rough. This feels like an interrogation scene. So let's fill it in. Let's bring in another light and let's start trying to balance that out to something that's more agreeable. We need something that's soft. Since we have access to lanterns and china balls, something like that could probably really help out in this case. With C stands, the way these knuckles work, if the knuckle is on the right side of the stand from the load, as the load continues to pull it down, it'll only be continuing to tighten it. Okay, so let's show everybody real quick what this new soft light looks like. Looking pretty okay. Way better than before. An improvement, for sure. Yeah, still a lot to be desired. But generally speaking, for treating the room, we've got our table, we've got our chairs, we've got our background, we've got two general lights set up and our camera set up. I think it's time now to talk about audio treatment in this room as well. Before we move on, I want to talk to you about our sponsor, Squarespace, who you may very well have to visit soon if you're going to launch that new podcast that you had in mind. Now, there's like a million podcasts out there, so cutting through the noise is going to be tough. Luckily, Squarespace makes it easy because they already have templates that are literally and specifically designed for podcasts. In fact, all you have to do is go to the templates tab on the top, click on the podcast section on the right, find the template that works for you, and then just start putting all your cover art on it. Then once you're ready to put your work out into the world, you have over 200 top level domains to choose from all within Squarespace. Literally, it would have been faster for you to make a solid website than for me to explain it to you. So, stop stressing about it. Head over to squarespace.com to start your 14-day free trial. And if you put in the link squarespace.com slash IndyMogul, you're also going to get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And we'll put that in the link in the description down below. But thanks again, Squarespace. And now, back to the episode. For this, I think we need an audio expert, so we'll call one in. Andrew! Wait, I was taking this off. Okay, close this and get by the light. Everybody, this is Andrew from Deity Microphones. What's going on? Andrew's going to help us out with the audio for this podcast and everything we need to know about how to record it. So, first off, Andrew, this is our set here. How is this location for audio by itself? Naked, this is not ideal. It is echoey. It is a nightmare. I can hear myself twice. So the first thing I'm going to do, now that I'm here, is I want to hear for that slapback. How quick does it happen? What kind of frequencies am I getting back? I'm getting a lot of highs. We have a hard concrete floor. We have a hard metal ceiling. You got slapping walls back that are parallel to each other. You've really got something going here. But I think what we can do is break up that location with our sound blankets. Really shrink the size so the audio isn't traveling that far. So this is a furniture pad, Ted. Okay, we're all familiar with these, you, Hall. Yeah, sure. This is a sound blanket. Okay, what is the difference? Because they look exactly the same. This one's black. For everyone out there wondering, these cost about $7 a pop. $7 a pop. This, I think, was close to $100. So we're going to use both of these today, but just to realize that if you have a bad sound situation, there's no excuse. So what I'm going to do, we're actually going to make this a gigantic flat surface. I like to put the gobo head on the outside because then I could actually use the gobo head and use this kind of as like an extra clamp if I need to. Based on this frame, it's going to cut in pretty close. I think we can literally just cut this room like this and like this, like a giant A. You could even use like a comforter from your bed. Yeah. You know you're shooting this in your bedroom. It's there, pull it off, put it up. Yeah. Easy enough. So these right here, these sound blankets, we're going to lay it over any hard surfaces on the floor. Right. We're going to just lay this out as big as we can because we're trying to get rid of any vertical standing waves that we may still be running into. And now we are back. And... That's great. It's dead. Yeah, sounds good. The room now is just completely dead. The echo is completely gone inside our bar, little bubble that we're worried about. So when it comes to audio for podcasts, what are the main tools that we need? Well, you definitely need microphones and you definitely need a way of recording them So there's two types. I brought a couple. I brought a recorder and the Shure SM7Bs. These are like legendary podcast kind of microphones. They've got a history of being used in radio. You plug them into a recorder via XLR cable. They do require a lot of gain though. So the recorder you have to buy has to be a nicer, more premium recorder. Just so people are curious, if they want to be able to hear what this full setup sounds like, let's do a little test here. Ready? There we go. We are now recording with the setup. Okay. Now sounding out of this, we'll do a little test audio. Did we tell you by the way, what our podcast is about? Oh, what is it about? It's yoga and yo-yos. I love that. What you're hearing probably is a very full kind of rich proximity effect. You're not hearing too much of my sibilant S's. You're probably not hearing too much of my dry mouth clicks right now because my Diet Coke is really far away. What you're hearing though, is a nice deep kind of gut, kind of a guttural oomph to my voice. Now, I gave Casey a sub $1,000 camera in the beginning. So I'm gonna ask you to do the same thing. If people can't afford a mic setup here, that's $1,000 plus 600, we're looking at about close to two grand. What else can we look at? The S-Mic 2. Okay. Which is a traditional shotgun microphone. And while everyone out there goes, shotgun microphones are used mostly for like video, right? Except for they're also very popular amongst voiceover actors. We're also gonna use a special shock mount. Okay. That actually absorbs a lot of the vibrations. We're using radio arms so that we can isolate it from the table. Okay. Going into a simple Zoom H5. This is a classic handy kind of recorder. And what's great about it is, it's as simple as there's a knob, you hit record, not a lot to worry about. So if you feel kind of scared of audio, this is a great microphone recorder to get kind of into the space. Got it, sounds good. So what's the benefit of this kind of setup? The benefit is cost. Number one, cost. In the sense of this whole setup is less than $1,000. Can I go back to beautiful audio land now? Yeah. All right, here we go. I'll do the ASMR right into your ear. Not that, I don't want that. I do want to have a normal conversation while I put these headphones on. So if I get right up on that microphone and play with some of that proximity, you can actually get that AM audio feel the closer you get to this microphone. Okay, sounds good. So I can hear it on the right and the left. It's kind of alternating between the two. That's normal, right? That's normal because I've got your microphone going to one ear, my microphone going to another. So you can kind of individually listen to what's going on right there. Got it. And this way in post, if you want to, you have someone that talks a lot louder than the other person, you can bring them down, which is a problem that I face a lot, of course. What's critical in this kind of recorder when you're using condensers is you need to have phantom power turned on. A lot of people, they plug in and they go, why isn't it working? It's the microphone, it's plugged in, right? Well, there's certain settings you need to make sure are on. And one of them is phantom. Okay, so other than that, is there anything else we have to do before we're ready to hit the record button? Nothing, you're ready to go. Okay, sounds good. So we are sounding good. Audio is all good to go and we're all done. Yeah. Okay. All right, now get out of here, Andrew. Goodbye. Come on, hurry up. Oh, here we go. Back in our set. Here we go. Where we are right now, we're pretty much ready to record if we want to do an audio only podcast, but I'm not going for basic here. We're going for a beautiful looking frame, a beautiful looking podcast. So Casey, what else do we need to do to make this ready to go? I think we need to continue working on our set dressing, maybe pull in some practicals. I'm going to turn the house lights on real quick for a second. Boom. Okay, cool. Here we go. So let's go shopping around here real quick. Plants are always great. That's very like life, earth, like just natural looking stuff. We can make this work. I mean, we could definitely use this for sure. That is a old office conference TV. I mean, if it works. All right, you want to try to use this thing? Yeah, I'd try it. This big one's from Ikea and I think it's $10. Nice. And these are $1.50 succulents from Amazon. Wow. This looks pretty yoga-y. We'll get this in here. This is also an Ikea lamp. It's a lot better than it was before for sure. Yeah, no, it's pretty interesting. We're really just dark on the left side of the frame, so it could really benefit from some pop like we're getting over here with this practical. So we do have some hanging lights here. Okay, so how are these being hung up? So we're just plugging them back here. We've got one of those hand squeezers from before. We're going to use a hand dimmer, which is like six bucks at Home Depot to drop the levels of these a little bit more. Okay, nice. That looks pretty good. So that's max power. Yeah, and then bring that down. That's much more manageable. That's good. So what are we seeing in this frame that we can do to splice this up a little bit more? Well, the thing that I really love is how the highlights here in his hair are getting nice and orange from these practicals, but it's a little distracting because the glow that we have on the table, the backlight on his head and his hand, it's this odd white light that doesn't seem to be coming from anywhere. So I think if we gel the backlight, it'll feel like it's coming from those practicals and it'll help motivate that lighting so it feels a little bit more homogenous and hopefully a little less lit. Okay, so this right here is actually a quarter straw gel. We're going to slip this into our soft box back here. Nice. Yeah, that's not bad. It's still a bit kind of like black or orange right now. I would say if we can do anything to put some light and interest in the sides here, our closer shots probably need some more kind of background and separation for these guys. It'd be nice to do something where we can either use some gelled light or some colored light just because you've got that blue wall there. Let's do it. Okay, so let's find something else that we can add there to add a little bit of color. So the goal here is to add a little bit of splash of color here on the wall. Yeah, I mean, a little bit of light, a little bit of color, anything to kind of help break this area up. I mean, I would say even something as simple as just throwing this on the stand, letting it play on the wall. Oh, that looks awesome. Yeah, so I mean, right now, that plant that you just put in there, it's helping to silhouette that, really break it up. Man, I love it. The only thing that I see that I want to change before we get something on the TV is that lamp right there. The light that's coming out of the top of it looks pretty hot. I am going to just take this lens cap in my pocket and I'm going to put this on top of the light bulb real quick. Casey, tell me if that makes a difference. How's that? Oh, it's huge. You like it? Yo, yeah. Oh, wow. All right, sounds good. What a good frame. Dude, this looks amazing. Are you kidding me? Yeah, I'm digging it. It's surprising how fast it turned around. Let's see exactly what it looks like when we shoot it and we actually record audio for this. Now, I know for a lot of you guys out there, there's two ways to record this. One, you either do the audio yourself, you have your headphones, actually do the mixing while you're doing it, or you ask your audio friend, Andrew, tell us when you're ready and we're good to go. Silent speech. Yo, what is going on, guys? Welcome to Yo-Yo Master with my host, Yo-Yo Man, Casey Macbeth. How you doing? Dude, Ted, I'm doing great. How are you doing? Doing good. Welcome to the Yo-Yo Podcast, man. All the Yo-Yoers out there have been waiting for you to come on this show. Casey, when's the first time you started getting into Yo-Yos? You know, I feel like a lot of people, I got into it back in elementary school. They come to your show, they come to your school, they put on a show, you get excited, you get pumped. I picked up myself a Duncan Red Butterfly immediately. Dude. But, you know, I just, I want to offer something to all the guys watching out there. I wasn't great right away. It literally took me about four years of trying that Yo-Yo every Wednesday for years, four years. And then finally, one day it clicked. I went from being able to do nothing to within 15 minutes, I could do a regular up and down. I could shoot the moon. I could walk the dog. It all just finally clicked. So, I mean, definitely don't give up on your hopes and dreams. If you want a Yo-Yo, don't give up. You can do it. As long as you have hands and fingers, you can make it work. Everybody stay out there. Stay yelling. We'll see you there. Thanks so much. We'll catch you in the next one. How'd it go? How'd it go, Andrew? Any tips? Yeah, pretty good. All right. Sounds good. And just to show real quick that this look is more versatile than you might expect, what about my yoga podcast? Great. Hi, everybody. Welcome to Blissful Heaven, the yoga podcast that comes to tune every one day at 6 p.m. Today, I'm here with guru and yoga master, Casey Macbeth. Casey, it's nice to have you on the show. Thank you for being with us. No, thank you for having me here. It's wonderful to talk with other highly attuned and authentic people like yourself. Thank you. I appreciate that. One of the things that we're working on today is how to be a little bit more present in our day-to-day life. And to start off before we do that, I want to thank our sponsors, BOOCH, BOOCHA, the BOOCH company that really has been supporting us since day one. So BOOCH, BOOCHA, if you're listening out there, thank you so much for being a part of the show. Please consider BOOCH, BOOCH. They support us, so please go support them as well. Absolutely. Great for gut health, Ayurvedic medicine. I mean, definitely try to start at a very homeopathic place. Absolutely. So today I'd like to talk a little bit about the emphasis on the Emperor Penguins dance. Okay, I'm good. So, Indy Mogul, there is your episode on how to make a podcast from scratch. Again, seriously, you have no excuse out there. If we can make this ugly, horrible warehouse work for both audio and video, you can too. If you have any questions, you can leave them in the comments down below. But also, Casey, where can they find you? Best place is Instagram. Hit me up, mcbrough underscore FTW. Right on. Andrew, get over here too. Andrew, if people have audio questions, where can they find you as well? They can find me on Instagram, andrewfromdeity. Right on, sounds good. Also, don't forget, Indy Mogul, we also have the Indy Mogul podcast as well, which is our podcast where we actually interview filmmakers, cinematographers, all different types of artists that come onto the show every single week. You can find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, wherever you're listening to podcasts, you can find us there as well. Again, thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this video. Start broadcasting to the world by going over to squarespace.com slash Indy Mogul for a 14-day free trial and 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. But that's it for me. I'm Ted, this is Indy Mogul, and thank you so much for watching. For all of you people out there wondering, can you find a budget sound blanket online? Yes. What's the answer to that? Buy that. Yep. Go buy black fabric. Yep. That was it. That was the list.