One of my favorite blogs on the planet is Wistia. I love their content, guides, and videos but what always intrigued me was their background style. In this video, I want to show you how to get the Wistia style effect in your own videos. It can be confusing trying to get a good look in your videos. I'm going to show you everything you need to create the Wistia style videos.
Gear You Need for this Setup
Impact Basic Varipole Support System – http://amzn.to/2lugpk2
Savage Grey Background Paper – http://amzn.to/2mqZgqz
LimoStudio Lights – http://amzn.to/2lQ9s8W
Any Camera would work but I love my Canon T6i 🙂 – http://amzn.to/2mtz7Ib
Transcript from the video:
Preston Miller: Hey everybody, what's going on? It's Preston Miller here, and in this video I just wanted to talk really quick about how I got this blurred background effect. I'm going to go ahead and zoom the camera here, and show you guys. I've basically used a Wistia set up here.
Chris: Hey, I'm Chris from Wistia, and this is the DIY lighting kit.
Preston Miller: Basically I've got this backdrop set up here, and I've got this light that I'm pushing in here. Whenever I zoom in and do this effect here … Let me just go ahead and tighten that up right there, yeah. Whenever I zoom in here, and you just see me, it's got this really cool blurred effect here. Now, I've got this idea … Let me go in a little bit more here. You can go in as tight or as wide as you want on this shot. This is the shot that I like to use, right here. I've seen people who do it a lot farther back, and that's okay too. Basically, I've got two lights, okay. I've got two lights here. Let me … There we go.
I've got two lights here, and I've got one behind me, here. What I've done with this set up is, just try to have nice natural lighting with this effect right here, with this little halo shooting up. It's pointing up on the background here. I think it looks very professional, and I think it looks a little bit artistic, too, versus just look at this. If I turn this light off, here, you'll see what it turns into. Look. It's a litter darker, it's not as warm, it doesn't feel as good. Versus here we go, let me turn that back on. There we go. It brightens it up, it gives it a little bit more of a flow, and it makes things seem better. Look at this, I mean, that looks professional. How could this guy not be an expert? Now, this set up behind me, it's kind of expensive to do this kind of a set up, guys.
This backdrop alone here, it's called a Varipole, and I got it on one of my favorite photo sites, it's called B&H. It was, I think it was about $300 or $400, somewhere in there. That did not include the paper roll. This grey paper roll was about $80. I also have a blue one, I don't really use that one as much. I thought it would look good, I saw … I think it's Cowboy Studio. It's actually, these lights, I've been running them … Excuse me, it's LimoStudio. Great set of lights. It's actually four lights, I'm not using the other one right now.
This is my current set up. I really like it, it's been great for me as far as cranking out videos, and getting things going. Sometime in the future, I might start using a more casual set up, but right now, this is fantastic. I like it. I'm using external audio on my camera, I've got a Lav mic hooked up here on my shirt. Let me zoom back out here, and you guys can see this here.
Look at this, I've got a Lav mic hooked up on my shirt right here, that's feeding into the camera. If you're going to get a camera, one of the things you have to make sure you get is one that has a microphone input.
This is very important, this is how you distinguish the cheaper, lower end cameras from the better, more expensive ones, is the one that has a mic input and then … Mine doesn't have this, but some of these higher end ones have headphone audio monitoring, where you can check the audio levels while you're recording. You can also do it in post, but it's really cool stuff. I just want to show you guys this is the backdrop that I'm using. I'll put more links in the description below.
This is how to get that cool, Wistia effect in your video. If you have any questions at all, please leave a comment below. I do monitor my YouTube channel comments, and I will respond to you. Be sure to subscribe and thank you so much for watching. I'll see you guys next time.
