$100 vs $3000 YouTube Setup - BROKE vs PRO
- Welcome to this episode of "BROKE vs PRO" at our fine sponsors, Micro Center. Today, Gerald Undone, the camera expert and YouTuber extraordinaire is going head to head with me to see who can build the best YouTuber setup. Is that gonna offend you if I get a ring light? - I mean, it'll make mine look better, so, go for it. (Austin laughing)
- So our challenge is very simple. Gerald is going to be building a high-end professional setup using the wide variety of items that we can select here at Micro Center from the creator aisle. I will be using that same aisle except with an eye for the less loved- - Value.
- Yeah, value, exactly. (Gerald chuckling) Let's go take a look. (chuckles) Welcome, my friend, to the creator aisle. - Okay. - So, if we were here a couple of years ago, this would've been, like, half an aisle, but they actually have, I would say, like, a pretty decent amount of stuff. You've got a bunch of higher end cameras up top here, you've got, well, you've got a camcor...
Joanna, did you bring a RED to Micro Center? - [Gerald] Oh, I didn't even notice that. - What's our RED doing here? - [Joanna] Micro Center sells REDs now. - That's not true, actually. - Yeah. - It doesn't have a tag. - Yeah, where's the sticker? (Gerald laughing) - There is, hang on. - Oh.
- You know what, if anyone in my audience is watching this, he'd be like, "Of course he gravitates to a Sony camera," (Austin laughing) I'm not paid by Sony or whatever, I just saw. Whenever you see the cardboard box. - Yeah? - It's the FX line, and I like the FX cameras for live streaming when I don't know what the setup is. - Yeah. - 'Cause they have a fan, - Yes. - And so that way, I'm like,
just go for as long as you want. - So I'm guessing you're gonna lock the FX30 in? - I mean, everything else is great, but if I get to spend however much I wanna spend, then I'll buy this one, (Austin laughing) you know? - Well, that's the thing. - You didn't give me any rules, so. (chuckles)
- I'll deal with Micro Center later. So if you're gonna go with an FX30, - Yes. - I'm gonna go with something a little bit more affordable. So the idea with these setups is that they need to be functional for streaming, but also to record if you're doing a normal YouTube video, right? So you want to have nice-looking A-roll, and you want to have at least 1080p, like, bare, bare minimum. Ideally 4K, but for me, I think I might, so I have two options here.
I'm trying to go as cheap as possible. There are a large number of webcams here. I mean, this webcam is literally $11, right? Like, I could just roll with this, or would I count the price of my phone in the equation? Because I feel like everyone already has a phone, right? You can just plug in. - Only if you have a premium, I think. If you have, like, an extreme phone, then maybe the premium on that phone? - I mean, does everyone not use an iPhone 15 Pro? Is that too expensive? - I think that has a premium on it. (laughs)
- Damn, all right, fine, I'll use a webcam. All right, all right, all right, all right. I feel like the C920s is the smart move, but that's a lot of money. I think I need to go cheaper. What if I make this a little bit more of a challenge? What if I legitimately go with the $12 webcam, and try to make this look as good as possible? - What is this thing? - 1080p for live broadcast.
- [Gerald] Well, that's what you're doing, right? - And video chat, it's two megapixels, and it's $12. So yours is $1,700, mine's $12. - Yeah, there's your title.
(both laughing) All right, I'm gonna lock in the $12 webcam. I'm gonna regret this later, but like, I think it'll be fine. So now, we've got this, should we look at lighting? - Sure. - So, I'm not super familiar with Nanlite. Is that a company that you know? - Yeah, they have a full range of products. I mean, they're gonna be even bigger stuff than you'll find at a Micro Center, because you can get, like, industry-level stuff, but you can see these big COBs? - [Austin] Oh, those all Nanlite? - Yeah.
- So- - I would say though, on average, probably higher budget than for the budget build. - Yeah. - Nanlite might. - So basically saying, I don't have money for a Nanlite, but you do. - Well, I don't know what your budget is, but you saved money on your webcam.
- I did save money on the webcam, but I think my budget's, like, 100 bucks? - 100 bucks on lights, or 100 bucks all in? - All in-ish. (both laughing) How about this, why don't you go first, and I'll just copy your notes? Go ahead, why don't you look at your lights, since now- - Yeah, so I, okay, so I'd want to, based on the setup that you showed me, I'd probably put a key on me. Normally, I would do some kind of fill light depending on the setup.
We could also just do, like, a bounce with, like, a reflector or something, and then I even sometimes like a little hair light action, - Oh yeah, hair light. - Like some kind of, like, little rim, you know? And then something for accent, which we could do with like, a tube or something like that. So I think the biggest thing I've seen here is to have the 150, which, - [Austin] This big guy up here? - Is this one, yeah. - [Austin] So I will say that for a big light like this, 260 bucks is actually not bad. - It's not bad, yeah. - And then another, what, $100 for the softbox or something like that? - Yeah.
- So, I found a $20 ring light, um... (Gerald laughing) You know what, I could go with the Influencer light. It is gonna help me get more subscribers. Oh, it's color adjustable! I can go between 3100 and 5500. See, that's basically the same - There you go.
- Thing that you've got. - Yeah, you've pretty much locked in. - I'm gonna Influence myself by buying this, (box thumping) but you know what? (Gerald laughing) I'm encouraged by your capabilities. I'm gonna get two lights instead of one. Oh wait, what if I actually do get a ring light? And what if instead of using it as, like, a normal light to, like, light me from the front, what if I put it off to the side? 'Cause that should be like a decent amount of power, and it's got its own little stand and everything. So, if this is my lighting setup, I feel good about that.
Now, the question's going to be audio, 'cause this is where I'm not playing. I've got 40, 50, 60... Oh wait, I'm out of money already.
Wait, hold on, huh, what? How much was this, $40? It's 40, 50, 60, it's good. I got, like, $30 for my audio. (both laughing nervously) - You might run into trouble there.
- Why don't you go first with the audio this time, and see what you could do? - So when we walked by, you said Shure SM7B and MV7 and stuff like that, I think? - [Austin] Yeah, on the top shelf, if you wanna be a pro. (Gerald laughing) - I have been kind of going overkill on everything so far. The MV7, there's gonna be some audio snobs that argue with me here, but you can get probably, like, 85, 90% of the way and save some money, so I'll go a little easier on your wallet, Austin, and we can get an MV7, - Thank you. but maybe we'll get the MV7+? It just sounds better, you know, for somebody? - [Austin] Oh, does it got RGB on it? (Gerald laughing) Yeah. Okay, so that's great. (Gerald chuckling)
You've got yourself a real nice mic. So now, with $30, my choices are still, actually, I have some choices. Wait, wait, wait, wait.
No, I'm gonna save some money. I'm gonna not Influence myself. I'm gonna un-Influence myself. I'm gonna get two.
What if I get two ring lights? So if I do two, I've saved some money, so that's 40. I'm only at $50, so now, I've got $50 for my mic, which is a much better, yeah. Okay, I'm feeling, okay, yeah, $50 for mic. Now, what can I find that's $50? Um...
(palms clapping) Mm. This HyperX is on sale for $40. I don't know if it sounds good.
It is high res, which is better than low res. It's tap to mute. - How does it connect though? - USB, it is USB. - Okay.
- I'm gonna lock in the SoloCast, which gives me a total for two lights, a webcam, and a mic of $90. I'm feeling good. I feel like mine's gonna be just as good as yours.
No one's gonna be able to tell a difference at all. - You're probably right. (Austin laughing) That'd be kind of sad. (Gerald laughing) So now that we've got our creator setups mostly sorted, the next task is to get ourselves a gaming PC.
Now, I say gaming, but even though we can game on it, it's actually more so closer to, like, a streaming PC, I would say. - Here's the sweet thing about gaming PCs, - Yeah. - Austin, is you can buy, as somebody who's a video editor, wink, (Austin chuckling) and a YouTuber, gaming hardware allows me to do those things. - Of course, you're buying an RTX 4090 to- - Exactly, for video editing. - For video editing, what? - For video, yeah. - You can't game on a 4090. (Gerald laughing)
That's crazy. So the goal here is we're gonna work together on the PC. So I think once we build our setup, we'll each have, like, half of the desk, but we'll put the PC in the middle, we'll route all of our stuff into it via OBS, - Love it.
- So that way, we can share and collaborate, and I don't have any more money left, so. (cackles) - Wait, am I buying the PC parts? - Yeah, it's all you, let's go. (Gerald laughing) All right, now, we did exercise some restraint with the PC, choosing an RTX 4060 instead of a 4090, and an Intel Core i5-14600K as opposed to something higher end, largely because these have the latest generation of Quick Sync and NVENC to make sure that our video encoding will be as smooth as possible. So let's go ahead and round up the last of our components, and let's get this PC and YouTuber set up on the road.
(screen whooshing) So we have ourselves about three and a half hours to build this entire setup, so why don't we do this? I'll start building the PC, why don't you start building your half of the setup? And then it will take me three seconds to set up my two ring lights at the end, and we'll call it a day. (upbeat music) So my setup is actually gonna be relatively simple. Certainly when it comes to the PC, it's not actually enormously complicated.
So we do have ourselves a 650 watt Gold PowerSpec, so this is the fully modular variant. This system's gonna probably pull close to, like, I don't know, like, 400 watts tops? So it's not really gonna be too demanding. One of the things I wanna make sure that we're doing is designing this with the idea that there's a lot of flexibility involved, because while for gaming, you're gonna wanna upgrade your setup every few years.
When it comes to editing, you may have to upgrade your setup more often, 'cause like, who knows if you wanna buy some new Blackmagic camera that shoots in 36K? I mean- - Austin? - Yeah, yeah, hi. - We're running into a height issue in this studio you guys set up here. - Oh. Is it because the studio's not designed for tall people like you? - We might have to sit. - Let's sit. - Okay, I'm gonna go for sitting height. - Well, I mean, - You'll be the sit- - Austin's probably fine.
- Ooh! (Alex laughing) - [Joanna] Can you get off your apple box, please? - You know, Joanna, I regret asking you to please put on a mic today. (Joanna chuckling) really, you can just take that right back off now. (Gerald chuckling) - Look, Austin's coming into my shot. (everyone laughing) - You know, you've been here for 10 minutes, and disrespects immediately. (Joanna and Gerald laughing) Obviously, right now, we're using all of our very lovely, soft studio lights, but when we actually do this for real, we're killing all of these guys, so it is just gonna be purely down to our artistic endeavors, and how dim I can set my ring lights. (Gerald laughing)
(Joanna chuckling) - Okay, so, I finally locked in this crazy rig setup, going for a seated position, so we brought everything down, got the parabolic softbox set up here, and I turned it up too much. You could see that I'm all blown out on the monitor here, too bright, but we can also talk about the advantage of a grid, which a lot of times, they come with. This grid, I think, is actually slightly too, I think this might have been for the 90 centimeter softbox, which they also offer, but we can still kinda give a rough example with this one on.
I don't think I'm gonna use it for this setup anyway, but so with this like this, not only am I less bright now, because there's less, like, overall light with the grid, but it just kind of, as you can see, it makes it so the angles are coming more straight out, because the grid is like small, little fences all the way, so the light just kinda hits me, and it'd be more directional. In this shot though, it makes almost no difference, again, because the wall is so far away, and because the house lights are lighting up the wall. And then if you don't want it, (Velcro ripping) you just... So now, I just need to dial in the intensities that I want. I'm making sure I'm happy with this one, and making sure I'm happy with the exposure, and we're getting there. How are you doing, Austin, with your computer build? - I'm not gonna lie, I feel like I underestimated Gerald on this one, because I went into it going, "Ha-ha-ha, I have, like, a super low budget webcam, ha-ha," and I'm seeing the level of, like, craftsmanship that you're going through with your lighting, and I'm a little bit concerned that mine may in fact not be up to scratch, (screwdriver clicking) but you know what, the PC's gonna be great.
The PC's gonna be just ripping once I get the AIO on. - I think maybe I'll go help Austin, 'cause I... - Are you done? - (laughs) Yeah. (crew laughing) - Really? - Yeah. - I don't even have my system posted yet, much less my setup built. (rhythmic music) And now, let's install our 4K60 Pro.
Now, this is an HDMI capture card. Now, this is not, strictly speaking, necessary, so there are other ways to get video in. Now, for my setup, I'm not gonna be using this at all, because I'm literally just plugging in a webcam.
Now, for the FX30, I know that there are multiple ways to connect it, including you can just use, like, a USB capture card, which is pretty easy, but this is gonna give you much higher quality. (screen whooshing) Honestly, I think we're ready to actually fire this thing up. This actually looks really, really clean. Now, we still obviously have a lot of other stuff to do, like I had not even begun building my setup.
We have the Stream Deck, my mic, all that stuff, but we're not gonna worry about that. We're just gonna do a test boot of the system. Oh, you, yep, we're in, hey! Z790 motherboard, Core i5-14600K. We've got ourselves 32 gigs of RAM.
All right, cool, and we do have our PCI Gen 5 SSD, so we'll go ahead and XMP it, and I think we're good. Let's just plug in our Windows install USB, and we'll get this thing going. I think we might be okay here.
I actually am feeling relatively confident. Well, Mr. Professional over here might have thousands of dollars of high-end equipment, I have an $11 webcam, so I'm a little bit afraid to see what this looks like, 'cause it's not gonna be- - I can't wait. And that's gorgeous.
You get all the pixel. - It's not very good. You know what, it's fine. (Gerald chuckling) It's fine. I love the fact that it's, like, seven frame per, you know, maybe 15 frames per second.
So we're gonna have to dial in some real corrections. Do you see how far behind it is, the audio and the video sync? Like, it's like, a solid half second off, so I'm gonna have to fix that later. - [Gerald] Oh, there you go, there's your 1080p.
- 1080p, okay. Oh! - Oh! (Gerald laughing) - You really are a wizard at this, thank you. And now, it's time for my setup, starting with my beautiful ring lights. Okay, so this is our base, all right? And then we lock that down, something like this, and then does that go...
- [Gerald] You need some kind of little adapter or something. Where'd you get that from? What's that in your hand? - I don't know. (chuckles) Well, I don't know where anything is. - 'Cause that's 1/4-20. Oh, it's a ball and socket - Oh my god.
- Kind of thing. - You do the whole socket, yeah. Let there be light.
(light clicking) Ow! Let there be less light. (Gerald chuckling) There we go. - It's actually pretty gradual. - I'm gonna get to tweaking my setup here. I'm gonna dial it in real, real good.
Don't worry, it's gonna be just the crispiest of crisp. - [Joanna] With your one other light? - I gotta get one more other light, and change the webcam, the shutter speed and stuff, and I'm sure it'll be great. Hello, my friends, and welcome to Austin's high quality setup. I've got my $12 webcam, my beautiful ring lights that are ringing me with beautiful light, and I've also got myself a microphone, which hopefully sounds pretty decent. Now, I have not had a ton of time to iron this setup out. My biggest question is I'm not entirely sure where my levels are.
I just turned 'em down a little bit. They seem like they're fine. We'll see how this actually sounds, but this is a little look at what my beautiful setup is like. Now, if I had a little bit more money, upgrading my webcam would actually make quite a big difference, because it's a little dark and a little blurry, but this is what my setup looks like. You wanna hop in and see? Look, see? (Gerald laughing) Isn't this great? What's so funny? - You know, for $100, that's what it is.
(both chuckling) - Thank you, I appreciate that. Okay, fine. - I have a sneaking suspicion that this is your best item, and that, like, your $40, or whatever this money you spent in - Yeah. - That's actually gonna pay dividends, and it's, like, the audio's gonna be significantly better than your video, I suspect. - I can't hear anything, but you, dear viewers, are listening to this microphone right now, so does it sound great? Is it amazing, or did I not configure it right, and it sounds like a bunch of garbled nonsense? Well, I'm sure it's gonna sound just as good as your setup. - I actually want you to jump in the setup, and I'll switch it on OBS.
- I feel like you're trying to trick me. No, wait. - No, no, no, it's good. - You want me to? - I want you to go over there. - Okay, you sit in
this setup then. - Yeah, yeah. Okay, sure. - Okay, so, we'll trade, okay. Okay, tell me when. - Okay, three, two, one. - Hello, it's me at Gerald height.
(Gerald laughing) I can't see what's going on. Tell me, what does the setup look like? - [Gerald] You look fantastic. - Yeah? - It looks really sharp, doesn't it? - It does, yeah. (Austin and crew laughing) - I'm sure the viewers are seeing it.
- It's probably the same. I mean, is there actually (Joanna chuckling) a difference at all? I don't think, it's probably looks exactly the same, right? - I can count your eyebrow hairs, like, - Oh. - (laughs) I can see - Uh... - The details there. - Okay, why don't we swap, why don't we swap? - Okay, sure. - You walk everyone
through this setup up. - Okay, so we talked about we got an FX30. - Yep. - Right? I threw on a Sony lens that I had in my bag, because I forgot to get one at Micro Center. That is a 16 to 25, and I think we are probably just a little bit tighter than 16, but we're definitely on the wide side.
We're all the way open at 2.8, which does help give a little bit of separation - Yeah. - From the background. It's nice and sharp on us whenever we were in it, and then pretty blurry back there. The light here is 150 watt COB - Whoa. - Behind a 60 centimeter
parabolic softbox. - It's so soft, it really looks nice. - It is, yeah, honestly, we have space to go bigger. Like, we probably could have fit a bigger one, but it's doing a nice enough job, I think, at 60. - Yeah. - And then of course, a little bit of production design. Luckily, I didn't have to do a lot here, because we're in a YouTube studio, so a lot of it was set up, but all I did was we got some tube lights, and what I like to do is I like look at the main shot, and then if I see something that looks weird, so the couch was looking dark, so we put a tube light and kind of lit along the couch just to bring it up a little bit so you could get some detail of what it was, some color accents.
I like to do a purple and orange theme, so I put those in the back wall, and just looking for pockets where I thought it could use a little bit of extra attention. All this one's doing is there's a small, little 60 watt up there with a hyper reflector on it, so it's a hard light coming across. You can see, without it, the contrast ratio on my face is really, really stark, like, it's almost black over here. And I'm also starting to just kind of disappear into the background, but if we turn it on, then not only is it going to line my shoulders, (light clicking) which gives me some, you know, 3D effect, it's also filling in that side of my face, and I'm getting a little specular, which is a nice, it's the opposite of that contrast, where it's almost like white, black, gray in terms of the luminance. - But where's your ring light? - I do not have a ring light. - Well, this is a round light.
- It's true. - It's ring-like. - And then for audio, we talked about we have an MV7. We're just running the USB. We didn't really tweak it at all.
- Yeah. - Just plugged it in, and dial it in, you should dial it. I'm not saying don't, but I'm saying, look, - Yeah. - This is what it sounds like. - It's plug and play. - Yeah.
- Because there's an actual Shure app I think you can download - Right - That can actually, like, help to customize some stuff. You can get into the Windows settings, but again, we just plugged all this stuff in, we're running it straight to OBS, so. - We have a computer running literally, I mean, you can see it in that camera, it's this close, and shh. - I will actually give us a little bit of props on the actual computer. (Gerald chuckling) We are obviously utilizing a bunch of the actual Fractal fans.
- Yeah. - This thing is dead silent. It is recording right now. Now, mind you, most - It is. - Of the work is being done through the GPU, through NVENC, but like, the PC is not breaking a sweat, and, I mean, I can hear when I put my ear here. As soon as I move a few inches away, it's like, dead silent. - I doubt that a dynamic mic like this (bell dinging) close mic'd, that's not gonna be a factor at all.
- Yeah. I'll give you, this a pretty good setup, but I mean, if we come back over to clearly the superior setup, and I just switched back (clears throat) from that looking angle to this, you can see that we're pretty much exactly the same. I mean, can you tell that maybe you've got a couple extra pixels, and, I mean, I think it's the same. I mean, we're just doing a little A/B, so this is Austin's angle, $100, and then this is Gerald's angle. Oh wow, It's like I'm living in real life.
(both laughing) It is really sharp, is it not? - That's a little, well, no, but, you know, but come back to me. This is also sharp. (everyone laughing) (palms clapping) Okay, you know what? Maybe what we've learned here is that you should spend slightly more than $100 building your setup, or you should give your buddy, Gerald, a call, and he'll help you build something that's (clears throat) goes from this to this. That's...
I hate that that looks so good. That looks absurd. (Gerald laughing) - I was surprised by the disparity, to be honest with you. Like, I'm not trying to advocate for, you know, spend so much money all the time. I usually try to actually find a value choice, but I do think there must be, like, there's gotta be a minimum threshold where at least the camera has to be good enough that it can utilize the other aspects, and then that's when you should dump your money into lighting, and production design, and stuff once the camera's at a minimum. And I feel like that minimum might actually be a callback to us talking about phones.
I think if you have - Ooh. - A decent phone, then the phone can appreciate good lighting, you know? - Let us know who won in the comments below, and if you'd like, definitely be sure to go check out Gerald's channel. I dunno why I'm still recording to the webcam, but you know what, I'm just gonna commit to the bit now. - I will not allow a plug - Okay, you know what, sorry. - On that camera. (everyone laughing) - I'll come back, I'll come back.
Make sure to check out Gerald's channel (Gerald laughing) where he's done an entire studio tour of our studio that was not lit with a $20 ring light and everything else. Thank you very much, my friend, for coming out. - It's a pleasure. Thank you. - I appreciate it. And of course, our friends over at Micro Center had some big news. They have a brand new store opening in Miami very shortly, so definitely be sure to keep an eye on their socials to find out more, as well as keep an eye out for their new tech deals for back to school.
As always, everything we talked about in this video that you can find at Micro Center will be linked in the description.
2024-07-17 19:59
