Home Video Studio

If you are producing instructional videos, how to videos or a video blog then you will need to have a small home studio for shooting. Lots of us are not fortunate to have spare rooms or space in the house or garage so it is imperative to have a compact studio.

It is surprising to see how little space you actually need to set up a compact studio in a corner of your room or even built around your computer desk. As it is unlikely that your backdrop will be over looking the Pacific Ocean or the Sahara then the first item that you will probably need will be a green chroma-key screen and possibly a portable one for ease of use and moving it when not in use.

There are several on the market and can be had on eBay for $65. If you are handy then you can buy the fabric and make your own frame out of 3/4″ plastic pipe for less. You will only need a small screen if you are just recording yourself from the waist up. Once this is set up you will easily be able to change your back drop during video editing.

Mount your camcorder on a tripod looking at you over your monitor with the green screen behind you, if it can be arranged that way. You can even have your webcam set up beside the camcorder so that you can see on your monitor more or less what your camcorder is recording or have your camcorder screen reversed 180 deg.

You can use two arrays of pole lamps with three fluorescent lamps on each pole to light yourself and the green screen. Not as good as you would use in a studio but adequate for your compact studio. A little bit of trial and error might be required prior to shooting but you should be able to record some good videos for your visitors and for submitting on YouTube or similar [tag-tec]video sharing websites[/tag-tec].

Take a look at this video to see how it can be done.