Cappuccino Chat - Episode 21 - Lighting!

welcome back to another episode of cappuccino chat this time we're talking lighting this time we're talking lighting this is part four of our series on video marketing and as you can see my set looks a little bit brighter uh in looking at my camera settings to be fair it wasn't a complete lighting issue that i had um i had some settings i needed to make on my camera so left over from last video make sure all your settings are set correctly to get the proper exposure and things of that nature on your camera when you are doing this so as you can see my site my set looks a little brighter and a little different now to be fair on lighting i don't like what i went with i wish i would have made some other choices i was doing some research looking at some different stuff led is definitely the way to go or um but it's different so i went with these i'll try to put a picture of them up on the video here while we're talking but i went with some led panels now these are great came with stands i can move them around so when i was initially doing some like interviews when uh some of the earlier videos you see me talking to the guys here in the office and we're talking about technology they were great because i could position them all and move them around and do different stuff since then as i showed in a previous video i've kind of mounted them to my desk and in mounting them to my desk i noticed the brightness just wasn't where i wanted it with the background kind of set up nice now in all fairness now that could have been a setting on my camera that i did just find so i may find that this is actually better uh now that i'm doing it this way with my lighting but one thing i did do was i made one of my lighting sources bigger the bigger the light source you can have uh kind of the softer the light will be so you want kind of a soft light hitting you you don't want a big harsh light like when you're out in sunlight and that kind of stuff so bigger the light the better you also want to make sure you have enough light because you want you don't want those dark shadows on one side unless that's kind of what you're going for and some of those uh mood movies if you will you'll kind of see that light coming in on one side and the other side of their face is all dark um that is a if that's the look you're going for uh that's fine so what i ended up doing is i got a um larger piece to put up on my one of my lights there to basically make the light bigger so i've also positioned some of my um color leds differently i've got a color led strip down here picked up from home depot really easy throw kind of bright throws off some good uh lighting in the background i kind of like that look now in the back and then um i've got these aputure um mcs these are um don't want to do too bright battery powered and you can contra control the color that you put on each of them so each of them can be controlled with a different rgb color spectrum so you can and then it's got this little soft box on it so again you can adjust those colors as you need kind of nice thing it's got magnets so you can kind of stick them up and things i know uh caleb pike from dslr video shooters when i see it he likes to sit him up inside um like um lamps like desk lamps to kind of give it kind of give it a fake glow so you set that up in there with no light bulb in it and this becomes your light bulb kind of a neat idea so you can really play with these and throw these all over your office to make those give your background or your office just a little bit different of a glow and a little bit different of a look so lighting is one of the other more important pieces to what you're doing here so you want to make sure that you've got good lighting you don't want to use your fluorescent tubes uh if you can't if you're near a window in an open office and you can get some good sunlight that's awesome if you can do that the only thing you got to be worried about is depending on how long you're recording for you know you know the sun may is going to shift so you'll start to get shadows or the sun will go down or you know sunrise those kinds of things so um typically you want to either use if you can take advantage of that make sure you get your hours right when you're doing your video recording or supplement that with some of the video lights so um you can i've got to set the 5600 uh kelvin it's kind of more of that soft light so you want to get adjustable lights now there's a couple of lights now out that um i wish i would have been out when i did this or i would have made some different choices so the first one is by elgato they have some key lights they come with stands that you can kind of mount to your desk or put on a hard base that you can again set on your desk and they go up and down they're controllable be a an app on your phone so it makes it real nice i'll put a link and a screenshot on those onto this video as well for you those would be a good option now i gotta warn you lighting can be kind of expensive i also with these led panels that i went with i got a good deal on amazon um i got three of them and i want to say with the stands and everything i probably didn't sp i probably spent 350 bucks on them so that's really low for lighting um some of the other ones are by a company called godox now they're making more and more lightweight large um lights and what i mean by large is the softbox that you put on it so you don't get that bright light it does give you that big dispersion of light another trick a lot of people have used is actually putting up um bed sheets so you know those big white bed sheets that you've got you can actually throw those up and then you put a bright light behind the bed sheet if you can and depending on how you're set up in where you're filming if you can do that put a bunch of bright light behind there in that bed sheet it will actually disperse and give you that nice soft glow light so that's another thing to give a try so there's some lights from godox i'll put that up on this video as well with a link to their website in the body of the description of the video here i'll see if i can put it up on the screen during this video for you they make a couple of really nice ones and that soft box that you get which is this uh attachment to the light the bigger you can get the softer uh the light will seem so again depend upon in your office or where you're filming again if you can set up and you have room for these lights you'll see professionals using these bigger lights it doesn't mean they're getting brighter light it just means they're getting softer uh more appropriate lighting for the shot they're taking so lighting is very important i wanted to make sure again it was something with my desk that goes up and down i could mount it to my desk those godox lights before they had bigger lights from different people it was just too big to have on my desk now with godox making some smaller and lighter more importantly lighter uh lights you can do the same thing on the poles like i have on my desk which we'll get into again in another uh video here when we talk about setting some stuff up but you'll be able to mount those up and not have it be too heavy and you know the light flopping all over the place for you that would be bad so again the bigger the light the better and i will show a picture of my desk setup here just so you guys can see what i had to do in order to get this softer light going uh for the video so use a bigger light source you're going to want to use lights kind of at a 45 up and away from you i've got glasses so a lot of times people use like ring lights you'll see those around the lens of your camera so you'll actually stick the lens through the ring light the problem with that is is it gives a glare off of glasses so if you're wearing glasses guys you're gonna have to put a light kind of up and so you'll see the glare as i look up you see the light that's coming through now you can kind of see that and if you look over here there's my other one so i've got a brighter light here that's my key light and then i've got a fill light over here at a lower setting it's another thing i wish i would have been able to do is just adjust those a little bit more finely i can only go by 10 increments on the ones that i have so anything you can adjust in one percent increment you'll be amazed makes a huge difference in your lighting a lot of people use a hair light to kind of offset you from the background i'm using again the leds in the background rgb lights different colors those are nice again you can change the color depending on what you're doing i can move them around i can attach them to things that are magnetic it was kind of nice but lighting kind of take some time with your lighting setting things up doing some different fill lights make your background interesting not don't want it too overpowering and just make sure you got some good lighting so hopefully you guys liked the new look uh i kind of disappointed myself i didn't find that setting in the camera sooner but this is going to be my new look to the camera so i'm not so dark and faded that look on my camera was meant for me to do more color grading on it in post-production which i am not doing yet at this point so i want to get the best look i can right out of it again as always please reach out to me if you've got any questions at any part of this series so far