NEW SETUP!!!! (Blog)

Hi everyone!

"I'M NOT DEAD!"

Yeah... I realize it's been a long time since I've posted anything of substance in here.

While I've not been away all that much, as my last upload was only a couple of months ago... but the one before that was 4 months earlier, and before that another 6 months earlier...

So I do kind of feel like I've been away from all of this video production stuff a lot longer than I actually have

As you may have seen, has been fairly quite from me in the last 10 months or so, with only two uploads in that time and very minimal discussion from me in the server or via update posts...

I won't go into loads of detail... but I'll just say that shit happens.

That said... I have some news! GOOD NEWS, in fact!

Not only have I been working on a video, but I ended up delaying that video, with good reason... because...

I HAVE A NEW CAMERA!

Getting this camera has been a decision almost a year in the making... but the sheer amount of different cameras, models and manufacturers out there made the entire process of making a final decision way too difficult for me, especially as I've been dealing with other things.

But... thanks to some advice and recommendations from a couple YouTube friends of mine (the excellent Square Eyed Jak & Nitro Rad) I've settled on a Panasonic Lumix GH4-R.

This model isn't the most recent model in the Lumix GH range, and I did buy it used but... whoever owned this must have barely used it, and it came with everything I need to et started! The camera body, a lens, the charger and two batteries!

(also the most recent model in this line... if I were to buy it brand new would have been WELL OVER £1000 more than what I paid for this one... which I didn't feel was justified seeing as this is my first DSLR...)

As far as features are concerned, this this is leaps and bounds better than my previous camera and has already allowed me to get into trying things like macro-photography and better utilizing a shallower depth of field...

Which I intend to use for close-up shots of controllers, games and the like... as well as having the background of my room be just that little bit out of focus to help me stand out against it a little more!

ALSO... LIGHTS!

Yeah so another thing I've recently got my hands on (yesterday as of making this post) is some proper lighting. This is another thing I've had in mind for quite some time but always put off doing because I didn't feel it was fully necessary.

Well, with the significantly better camera I very quickly came to the decision that some lighting was also needed!

These are a 3-pack set of Neewer 210 LED light wands, complete with stands. I've also opted to buy a couple of batteries, allowing me to only need one of these plugged into the mains at any given time.

I ended up getting these for a great price too, as they were an Amazon Warehouse deal, which only meant the box was a bit battered, but everything inside works just fine and I ended up paying almost a third of the price for them!

This has all lead to some new scenarios for me to experiment with... firstly being that I'm not longer strictly tied to filming these segments in and around 11am-2pm when the light is coming through my window...

And secondly, a new angle to film from!

Prior to this I would NEVER have picked this angle to film from as I'd be facing away from any and all light sources in this room, from both the window and the overhead room lights...

Now... that isn't an issue! (see below)

This shot was entirely lit with the 3 filming lights at around 9pm at night! No need for the window, and no room lights to make everything end up with a yellow tint! (unless of course... I choose to do that!)

These lights all have the option of changing the temperate of the light in terms of the colour shade, the actual brightness of that light and I also have a red, blue and yellow filter each, for all 3 of them.

In this picture above I used a white light for my front and side, but used a blue filter on the one in the background. I think I need to play around with this more in future as I went a little overboard with blue here... but as a quick test I think this is pretty damn close to what I had in mind, and much better than before I'd say!

Here you can see one of my camera shots from my most recently published video, compared to this test shot I did last night!

Ideally I can maybe change the colour of the background light to fit in with whatever I'm talking about... perhaps purple for Spyro... Orange for Crash... Green for Xbox games and so on! I will experiment with this a lot!

So yeah, with the new camera able to do some nicer depth of field effects, I thought I'd try and make better use of that by re-positioning my usual on-camera location to here as seen above!

You can see the shelving on the right where I used to stand, so I haven't gone very far at all but I plan to dress the shelving up a little bit behind me to better represent what I do on the channel, with more of my platformer character figurines on show, as well as maybe a few stand-out or relevant games on display!

I've also found one of those RGB colour strip LED things in my cupboard, which I've never used... which I may end up somewhere in the background too, as some extra light for beneath the shelves or something like that... but I'll see how things go!

HOW THIS WAS FUNDED:

While I'm not here to necessarily advertise them on here... I did start doing some freelance commission work for the custom logos I make a while back... and I can say that almost half of the cost for the items I've mentioned above were covered by those commissions!

(If you take a look at the new picture of me again you'll also notice I got some new glasses, as I needed them!)

COMING SOON:

So yeah, while I've kind of been away for a while and kept fairly quite on the couple of times this year I actually have uploaded anything... hopefully this post shows that I'm still happy enough with making videos to invent a bit of my own money into better gear for them.

I had to do a bit of shuffling around in the real-world, with that new full-time job I started doing not really working out for me... but It helped me realize that I DO enjoy doing this sort of stuff when I have time to do it... and right now, I do have time for it so I may as well make them look good!

I won't outright say what it is, but the game I'm covering in this new video will be the first video I've ever done where the game has been fully de-listed... and I've managed to get some information from a member of the development team to clear up some questions I had surrounded that!

I'm aiming for perhaps a few more weeks for this next video of mine, with a brief early access period of it here on Patreon for you all once it's ready!

Thanks very much for sticking with me. It means a lot!

- Pete