On this week’s episode of Local Search Tuesdays, we’re giving you a little peek behind the scenes as we answer one of the most common questions we hear about this show: “What equipment do you use?”.

We always get questions about our weekly videos and how we shoot them, but there were significantly more people asking over the last 3 or 4 months. So to kick off 2023’s episodes, we thought we’d show you!

Obviously, we shoot in front of a green screen. Instead of shooting in an actual spot in the office, we just shoot in front of the green screen so we can edit in any background we want to use. You can buy special green screen paint, but we chose to go with a portable green screen background made out of cloth.

We’ve got lights set up as well, since the green screen has to be evenly lit so it’s easy to pull out in the editing process. You don’t have to go crazy here – we spent maybe $300 bucks on Amazon for our lights.

The video camera is a Sony HDR-CX455, and it’s on a good-quality tripod. We use a handy little iPad teleprompter for each video. It makes it a thousand times easier for our editor to lay in these captions since Greg reads from a script. Otherwise, we’d have to use a transcription service or have our editor work through slowly so he could type them in.

For the handheld stuff we just did, and any videos we shoot at events, we use a nifty little DJI Osmo Pocket camera. The triple gimbal keeps everything super smooth and professional looking.

For microphones, we’ve got wireless lavalier mics, and we use these bluetooth mics from Rode when we shoot footage at events. You don’t have to get two sets, we just opted for the Rode mics since they’re a bit more compact, so it’s less to carry to conferences.

Once we’ve got everything shot, we drop the footage on a Google Drive and our editor gets to work. He uses the Adobe Creative Suite, typically doing most editing in Premier and effects work in After Effects.

If you’d like to shoot your own videos, you could get a similar setup for under a grand:
The Osmo Pocket camera is about $200
You can buy a portable green screen with lights for about $215
The Rode Wireless Go microphone will cost you about $200
And you can get an iPad teleprompter for around $100