One of the most confusing and vexing areas for any company starting up an internal creative team is knowing what equipment to purchase. There are thousands of pieces of equipment and hundreds of recommendations on ‘what you need to buy.’
While every situation is different, here’s a basic primer on the types of equipment and how much you might spend to set up a basic two-person internal team. If you have specific questions about your situation, feel free to write me via the Contact page and I’ll be glad to offer some of my thoughts for your needs.
And please share your thoughts and comments, I’d love to hear what you all think is the minimum you need to consider for setting up a creative infrastructure.
Full Transcript. Apologies for any typos:
0:00 Building out an internal creative team just makes sense today. I mean, the tools are very reasonably priced what used to cost millions of dollars to get the right equipment and the right people now costs thousands of dollars. So we're seeing a real trend for companies large and small to bring creative teams inside, so you can knock out more content. Now in another video, I did talk about how you should at least start with two people. But from an infrastructure side, what are you getting yourself into? I mean, how cameras and lights and audio and editing what all am I getting myself into?
0:37 Well, let's start with the computers. Your team is going to need some computers, and they're not just your cheap go down to Best Buy and just get the cheapest laptop or the cheapest computer you can find. No, they're going to need something that's a little bit better. Because they're processing video, they're creating animation. They're doing graphics, they're processing, high-end photography and if you get the cheaper computers it slows down that entire process.
1:02 So can a cheap computer edit video and do graphics and do animations. Yeah, but it might take it two or three hours to process something. Whereas if you go ahead and buy the high-end laptop or computer, it takes 10 minutes, and that means you're getting your content out faster. So, my rule of thumb, if you're going to buy a laptop by the top of the line MacBook Pro, or say something like a Dell, Alienware top of the line laptop with as much RAM as you can put in that thing. For a desktop computer, you can get an iMac with maximum RAM, get the maximum processor, maximum RAM, if you can. You get an HP desktop, the HP Z series is amazing. So they're going to need a computer to edit with and to process photos and things like that.
1:46 They're also going to need some hard drives. These things are called RAIDs and I'm not even going to go into it here because there are so many different variations but my rule of thumb especially today with the pricing is to get no less than an eight terabyte media drive for them to work on to edit their video to hold photos to hold everything. You're going to need to get that.
2:06 Now when it comes to cameras, well you know there are so many options. And some of you may not even really need a camera you might just want to get you know the latest iPhone or the latest Samsung or the latest Google Pixel because the video shoots so well. But even if you do that, you still want to get yourself a nice high-quality microphone, whether it's you know, something like this or a shotgun that sits on the camera. The audio is very, very important because without good audio, it's sometimes it's hard to watch the video. It's just very distracting.
2:38 Now if you are going to invest in cameras, I mean you have GoPros you have mirrorless you have DSLR and then, of course, you have the big you know cinema cameras, and those are priced anywhere from say $1,000 to $20,000 each. And depending on what your needs are and what you're going to create. The sky's the limit as what you can do, but I would say a good ballpark is expect to spend anywhere from $1000 to $2500 for a single-camera setup, and that means the camera, the lands, all the gear, you know, little tripods, things like that, that go with it.
3:13 To give you an idea, the camera I'm using right now is a Fuji XT3 and it's about $2500 between the camera body and the camera lens, actually it's probably more like $3,000 just for that. But that's all I use these days, that one setup, and I'll be able to use this camera for many years to come. So depending on what you need, expect to spend, you know somewhere in that $2500 range, maybe $3500 range for a camera.
3:39 And then there's lighting, and then there's tripods and bits and pieces and stands and just depend on how big you're going to get. Digital audio recorders. I would say if you're going to hire a creative team and you're going to supply them with gear, you need to figure you know $15,000 - $20,000 somewhere in there. If you don't have at least $15,000 to spend on equipment, that includes computers and cameras, audio, everything, just keep using an outside firm. Because until you can commit to spending 15 and I would say 20 is even better. If you have $20,000 that you can go ahead and outfit your team. Then you're ready to go ahead and move forward.