You Ask, I Answer: Equipment to Video Record Speeches?

In today's episode, George asks, which equipment exactly do you use to videotape your speeches? I see you bring a tripod with both video and audio recorders. So I get asked this question a lot. Um and the equipment list does change over time. So this is the mid-2019 loadout.

If you are watching this and it is uh after, say like it's like 2020, uh, check my blog in case there's a newer list. Uh you can see that at Christopherspen.com. So today's loadout these days is focused on adaptability to many different venues and changing circumstances because you never know what you're gonna get. Um so to begin with, uh this is the ultra pod to tripod, and I like this tripod for a couple reasons. It's it's easy, it folds out, right?

It's a little tabletop tripod. But what's critical is this little Velcro strap and this leg. This means you can strap it to like a chair to a pylon, something like that, and just zip it on, tie it on to whatever if it's uh taller vertical surface. If you if you go to some venues and there's like a uh lighting stand, a lighting tree or a microphone uh speaker tree uh with permission from the A V guys, uh you can uh clip this right on. The other thing that's nice about this is this strap allows you to mount a power pack.

So one of the things that uh of course you should be carrying is uh these power packs. But what I like to do is attach these little smartphone holders, right? Um to the to the power pack, not to my phone, because this allows you to tuck this onto your belt and wear it as a portable power pack, or uh if you're using uh camera gear that requires a lot of power, feed the power pack right through this little strap on the tripod, and now you've got your power pack with your tripod, which is super handy for keeping things wired up. My camera of choice these days for recording talks is the DJI Osmo Pocket. This is a tiny little mechanically stabilized gimbal uh camera.

It records in 4K, 60 frames per second. If you want that high, that's a lot of disc space. You'll you'll lose disk space very quickly. There is, of course, a uh I carrier 64 gigabyte card. It has to be a class 10 micro SD card or faster.

Um, this camera chews up bandwidth like crazy, and a slower uh class 4 card, for example, will not keep up. The camera will actually error out. I like this camera for a couple reasons. It's motion stabilized. So if you look here, I'm gonna turn this on and bring this up close here.

I can move around, and you can see that the head is sort of tracking uh and staying in one place even as I move it. That's handy. But what's really nice about it is it's got face tracking built in. So, what I'll do is I'll set this up on a tripod and it will uh track my face, which when I'm speaking is exactly what I want. I want the camera to follow me while I'm on stage.

Now, in order to make uh this, which has no camera uh tripod mount work with this, you need to have uh the sky read tripod. The sky read tripod is nothing more than a metal and and uh oh, it's it is mostly metal uh clamp, right? It looks like this. There's the spot for the DJI Osmo here, and then there's a spot for the smartphone here. This has the quarter inch uh screws, screw it right into the bottom, and you're good.

And there's a cold shoe up top. The cold shoe allows you to mount additional accessories. What I like to do again for adaptability is um I have two of these mini ball head tripod mounts. These guys are uh I think like six bucks on Amazon for a pack of two. The mini ball head, one goes on the bottom, right?

So this goes right into the bottom of this this little guy, and this will allow you to have a lot of flexibility with mounting. So, one of the things that you'll run into uh when you're doing uh video on the road is you'll run into again rapidly changing circumstances. This I like to keep on here so that if I need to mount something at a very strange angle, like you know, if there's a I I've actually mounted on the side of a folding chair where the the this has been like this, and then with the ball head and this clip here, I can I can move this frame around very easily and keep it at the angle I want it. The second ball head goes with the s the cold shoe up top that goes onto here. This allows me to mount additional accessories right on top of the tripod, which is uh very very handy.

Uh, one of the accessories, uh one of the ones I think is probably most important, is you have uh an LED light. Um LED light can go either into the hot the cold shoe directly or through the tripod mount. Very handy. The other thing um I carry is the task cam uh DR05 audio recorder. This would not be my first choice if I bought this again.

Um, and the reason for it is there's no XLR. This is audio, this is uh uh 3.5 millimeter jack-in only. The missing XLR piece is critical. I've run into uh probably like half a dozen soundboards where they're like, yeah, got an XLR cable. I'm like, no.

And um, I was not able to record off the board. That said, um, with the cold shoe, uh it is very handy. You can go right into the top of the the cold shoe on your on your tripod here, and then this because it does have a quarter inch mount on the bottom, you can go on top here, mount it on top of the cold shoe, and get you uh stereo audio from the room. That's not as good as the board. Right?

So if you can record straight off the board, you should. I always make sure I have a little bag connector here with as many possible connectors as I as I can stuff into the thing. Um, one that is uh useful is the ampage shotgun mic. If you if you are in a consistent place, you can actually mount the uh amperege on top of this guy and do a little shotgun like that. It's okay.

Again, still not as good as the board. The other thing I will do is I have a head worn uh microphone, a wireless headphone microphone from Chema Fun. Uh this is has the head piece here. And you actually saw me use this in a lot of my early US Guy Ansa videos. I stopped using this for daily videos because it's a lot of wiring just for uh one thing.

And you need to make sure that both of these parts are charged. When I use the uh the Yeti here uh at home, I don't have to worry about that. This end here has your standard 3.5mm jack. This can go um right into the task cam up top, and now you're recording. This can go on the podium when you're speaking.

Um it's got about, I would say uh a 10-foot range uh before you run into issues with interference. Uh it says 50 feet on Amazon, it's not 50 feet. Um the other thing is you can just tuck this whole thing in your pocket or a belt or bag or whatever on stage and be able to record locally. I am probably going to at some point upgrade to um a wired lavalier mic that would again go right to the top of this guy uh just for convenience because the head worn stuff is an awful lot. Um so we got the audio recorder, we've got the head worn mic, tripod mounts, ball adapters, power packs, tripod uh attachments, and things like that.

The last piece is this. This is the this is my little uh secret weapon here. This is a mic stand a tripod adapter. This goes from 5/8 inch uh microphones uh stands to quarter inch tripod. Almost every major venue you speak at, conference center, places like that, they got extra microphone stands, you know, good old-fashioned microphone stands.

Well, guess what? Take that this ball head off the bottom of your tabletop, right? This guy goes on here, and now you mount this on a microphone stand. The advantage of the microphone stand is you can move it around, position it, you know, put it next to an audience member, put it uh in I like to put it right in front of the mic uh for QA. If they have uh mics set up for QA in the aisles, you can put this right in front of that so that um it's not a fire hazard.

But that means you can use the venue's mic stand, and mic stands can extend up to like six and a half, seven feet tall, which gives you a much better shot with this than on a tabletop where you're shooting sort of you know up your nose. Uh this can give you eye level or possibly higher depending on the microphone stand. I was at um Make Con in Cleveland and they the audio video team had mic stands with boom arms, which is fantastic. I got like a 10-foot shot that looks great coming down onto the stage from this little magic adapter. So make sure that you have a couple of these in your bag as well.

So that's a lot. That's a lot of stuff to carry. Oddly no, uh other than this, I don't carry the light very often. Everything else will fit inside of a laptop bag, small backpack, stuff like that. Just make sure that you have like uh a little hard case.

The chemo fun mic actually comes with this nice little uh hard case, and everything should just go right into all the little pockets here. You want this because some of the things like the Tascam and like the Osmo, they shouldn't be just you know banging around in your laptop bag. You really want them in a in some kind of protected covering so they're not getting scratched up more than anything else. So that's the loadout. Uh links to everything are in the show notes.

You'll see them below in the if you're watching this on YouTube. You'll see it on my blog at ChristopherSPen.com. Full disclosure, they are all Amazon affiliate links. I'll just say it outright outright. But you'll find all the pieces that you need if you want to assemble this rig.

It's probably probably at $500 or so. These are pieces I've acquired over time. It's not something I went and bought immediately. If I if I had to say where to start, you start with the Osmo, which has a pretty good onboard microphone. You start with a tabletop tripod, and you start with a bracket holder to um to mount the Osmo on.

Those are the three pieces that you need to start with first, and everything else you can add to later on. So great question, of course. Uh leave your comments below in the comments box. Uh, and of course, subscribe to the YouTube channel and to the newsletter. I'll talk to you soon.

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