Being a budget-minded person, when it came to choosing a camera to start my new YouTube channel, I chose to spend zero money and start shooting with my iPhone SE. A lot of people don’t know the SE – it’s basically an iPhone 6, but in a smaller form factor. It’s the same size as the iPhone 5. Speaking of which, I’ll sometimes be using my old iPhone 5 for some recording – it isn’t as good as the slightly less older SE, but it’s good enough for 1080p, which is what my YouTube channel content will be.
I’ve discovered something else, too – my assortment of older Macs all have built-in 720p cameras, none of which are good enough to use.
Doing a lot of research, which I’ve learned is that your lights are more important than your camera. Which is great, because you can do lights fairly cheaply.
Part of the whole video recording thing is sound – in my case, the sound is probably more important than the video. Most channels record their sound on a separate device and then they sync it up in something like Final Cut Pro. That’s what I’ll be doing, also. When I am recording on my SE, I’ll be also recording the audio in Logic on my 2016 MacBook Pro.
I’m thinking of putting my lapel mic (or a room mic) into one channel and my SM57 on my speaker cab in channel two. And then I’m out of channels (I have a Focusrite 2i2.) So if I want to talk and record my Floor Pod Plus in stereo (or the Pod Go I’m planning on getting,) I’m going to need to be able to record more than 2 tracks at a time. Either that, or just mix the stuff live and record in stereo, which is what I’ll do for now. But it’s becoming obvious to me that I’ll need 4 simultaneous inputs. More would be better, but I like budget gear.
So I’m going to do some sound recording tests – lapel mic vs using an AGK 214 from about 4 feet away. I wonder which method will work better.
